Base visit

As I ran on the treadmill, I started letting my mind wander. I had switched to a workout routine that combined fast-paced anaerobic sprints with slower-paced endurance running, it was a training regimen that I read about online, and it was supposed to have good results. I had finally bit the bullet and performed the first surgery on myself, removing my liver entirely and installing the replacement. It was locked into liver-only mode right now, as I would have to graft either synthetic polymer-based or donor arteries to connect it into my cardiovascular system in such a way as to support the high-flow operations a heart would need.

I was kind of kicking myself for not ripping some of that borg's polymer arteries out when I had the chance, my other option was letting my power help me individualise a set of donor arteries, but I would need to thoroughly dissect a donor body for that to be possible. We didn't really have too much time when we came across people we could swipe cybernetics from. Certainly not enough time to do a thorough, full pathological dissection.

I could buy either a set of polymer arteries or even a cloned and individualised set of arteries specific to me, but since I wasn't a doctor, it would be kind of weird for me to do so. It didn't matter too much; I would find something eventually. It will probably be pretty soon, too.

I still wasn't including any weight training, per se, but since I was so much stronger than Gloria, I did most of the lifting while working, so I counted that as a stand-in. She was interested in the same muscle and bone lace treatment I got until I told her the cost.

The application process to Trauma Team was supposed to take a fair bit of time, so it wasn't weird that I had recently applied fully three months before I would have the experience necessary to qualify. I sent my application using my internal Militech's dependent net address, and there was some back and forth. Trauma Team was still split into regional sub-corporations since the last Corporate War when they had to ultimately deny service to both Arasaka and Militech; they hadn't quite reorganised into one global corporation yet, but there were signs that they were in the process of doing so. I was applying to Trauma Team Night City, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Trauma Team North America. All training was standardised and performed by the Trauma Team North America headquarters in Seattle, for example.

Eventually, I received a number of what I considered application filters. Normally, my application would have been rejected out of hand because I didn't meet the three years in critical care experience requirements, but there was a notation that this was waived by the hiring manager in Night City. It was nice to see that he still remembered me.

I wondered how the friends I made in the class were doing; Fiona and Antonio were the only two that were destined to be working in Night City that I was really close with. Xiao Li was probably working for some Kang Tao-owned American subsidiary somewhere in the states. Otherwise, he wouldn't have needed to pass the American National Registry Paramedic examination, but I didn't know precisely where he was working.

The first filter was a net-based knowledge test and a simulated patient encounter. The latter was open-form, where it asked me what I would do, and I answered in natural language, and I was pretty sure I was partly graded by AIs and possibly reviewed by humans for edge cases.

After that came an interview with what was basically an AI chatbot, asking me about my background and family and getting permission from me to get my records both from my school and my current employer, permission for them to run a background investigation on me, of any scope that they liked, and a number of other things. The security questionnaire portion of the interview was comprehensive, invasive and very personal; for example, they knew that I was not yet sexually active at the end of it. It kind of reminded me of what I thought it might be like to get a James Bond-style Top Secret security clearance back in Earth Bet.

I figured honestly was the best policy here, at least for the most part, as I was definitely prepared to lie when and if the bot asked me if I was involved in any criminal activities. However, it only asked if I was ever charged or convicted of criminal activities. I felt the nuance was important, although the worst thing I had done was probably more along the lines of a tort.

Infringing on intellectual property was a criminal offence here, not just a civil tort like in Earth Bet, but technically that only applied to patent-protected IP. Biotechnica had never patented the stimulant I had inadvertently manufactured and was selling. I had thought they had at first, and the net searches on it were ambiguous and seemed to imply that they had, but the truth was they kept the entire process a trade secret, so I was actually totally in the clear criminally. The only other criminal thing I had done was stealing from dead gang members, and nobody cared about that. In fact, Trauma Team did it themselves when they flatlined people that were in the way of their clients, time permitting. They'd probably give me a thumbs-up on that.

Not that my technical innocence would matter, as solving problems with extrajudicial applications of violence was practically a prerequisite if you wanted to consider your organisation a corporation. Anyone could start a company, but you weren't really considered a corporation until you had a minimum amount of military force and people knew you would use it.

Forty years ago, a lot of people considered Biotechnica a "good" corporation, but they still manufactured and sold bioweapons to the highest bidder in the last Corporate War, to both sides as far as I could tell, and they hadn't really gotten better since then, so it was best if I could stay off their radar.

However, I had been wargaming, trying to sell them both samples of and the synthesis procedures for the super antibiotic that I had made. I had a lot of it remaining, stored in a cool, dry place, and I knew two ways to synthesise it, one of which would be suitable for industrial production.

I had discovered through messages sent through my dead drops to Gloria's fixer, Diego Delgado, that Biotechnica itself had approached him. At first, I was scared shitless! But, apparently, they were approaching him to sell him product directly when I ran out, and he wanted to know how much more I could sell him so he could plan the transition and if I would be willing to sell my pill press machine when it happened. That didn't make sense at all, and I was very confused until I realised that Biotechnica was playing the Filmshop marketing model.

In Earth Bet, there was a piece of professional photo manipulation software called Filmshop. It has existed since the early 1990s and was one of the most popular and widely used programs for artistically creative people and companies around. It was also one of the most widely pirated pieces of software in the world, and the company did not really seem to mind too much.

I had it explained to me by Mrs Knott in my computer class -- by allowing their software to be pirated by people who didn't have enough money to buy it in the first place, they weren't losing any money but were gaining familiarity and market share instead. That familiarity would later then be transmuted into money when those same people, later in their life and career, went to work for an actual company that would, in fact, pay the licensing fees.

The employees who had been using pirated copies of Filmshop their entire lives would demand to use this same software that they were familiar with, and therefore they got sales. Market share was almost as significant as profitability, Alt-Taylor's memories told me and could be more significant for some products. Nobody thought the disgusting company Buck-A-Slice actually made any money on their eurodollar slices of pizza, but it was the extras you got when you went in for a slice that made them profitable.

Biotechnica was having its flagship stimulant be priced for a certain high-end demographic, complete with numerous anti-counterfeiting measures, and then the same stimulant sans those measures creating market share in the grey market. But it was doing it one better by actually profiting off the grey market sales directly in many cases. I got the impression that they weren't presently interested in me at all, but I bet that would change rapidly if I sold more than the half kilo or so of product that I had left.

But this gave me the idea to sell the antibiotic and its synthesis steps to them. I couldn't do it myself, not directly... the risk was too great, but perhaps six months or a year or so after our existing business arrangement was concluded, I could approach Diego again, in a new anonymous identity, and offer to sell that through him to Biotechnica.

At one point, I thought the antibiotic might exist and just be proprietary and secret, but I didn't think that anymore. It was so potent and had so many side effects that I thought there would definitely be signs, even obvious to everyday pre-hospital clinicians, that such a treatment was available, even if it was only kept for the very wealthy.

As such, I could offer it to them for a million eurodollars and have my money problems solved! It was a lot of money, but to them, it wasn't much at all for what they were getting. I'd have to give them samples up front for them to take my claims of the medicine's efficacy seriously. They'd have to test it themselves, and that meant that they'd put them under a mass spectrometer for sure and get the complete chemical composition. That meant that they would eventually be able to reproduce it, probably. They were a pharmaceutical company, after all. However, the synthesis wasn't obvious.

It wasn't just a slightly different synthetic antibiotic that they could draw decades of experience in synthesising similar compounds, and it might take a research laboratory multiple years to get an industrially useful synthesis method for it. So they would be spending a million dollars on getting several years early at introducing the product, which I thought they would go for.

They would also try to offer me a job I couldn't refuse, too. So I would have to make sure that the trade was conducted anonymously, somehow. And I would have to make sure that they knew I had contingencies in place to release the drug to its competitors if I were to vanish, as killing me to recover the one million dollars would be quite tempting too. Probably not to the real executives who would greenlight such a deal who shat larger dollar amounts on a weekly basis, but my memories from Alt-Taylor told me it was exactly what a mid-level ops manager in their Intel department might do. Possibly so he or she could pocket the money themselves, or if that wasn't feasible, then to look a little better on their quarterly evaluations.

It would be extremely risky, and I hadn't settled on dealing with this Diego gentleman again even if I did take up the idea, which I very well might not. It might be better for me to have a clean break with him, and then I could approach one of the better-known Fixers in the city to run as a middle-man to the deal. There were ones that were famous for sticking to their agreements, and it would be much less likely I would be stabbed in the back by one of them than by a small-time name. I might have to approach these people in person, though, for them to give me the time of day, so there were drawbacks with that as well.

I wasn't in a rush, and I would be sure to wait as long as I needed for my brief stint as a drug seller to be completely forgotten as I didn't want to connect any lines to any people, even if those people were fictional personas I only used to sell drugs for nine months or so.

Selling him the pill press would make sense and be one way to further disconnect me from that business, as I doubt he is crediting some random anonymous person selling him product in the first place. The machine was heavily Tinkerised, but I thought I could get it into shape so that it worked at least for a few months, maybe even longer. After that, I wouldn't care, anyway, and he would have no way to contact me to complain!

Let him hire a Techie and watch him be perplexed at how the machine worked at all in the first place. It was a shame I couldn't see the look on the techie's face when he inspected it. I didn't build it out of bubblegum and shoestrings, it looked properly industrial, but I was pretty sure some of its operation principles didn't line up with reality, especially with how quickly it solidified the candy coating on the pills.

It wasn't like pill press machines were rare or hard to find, even ones similar to mine that put on a "candy shell" were available for purchase, and I figured he just wanted to keep a single brand in his product going forward, which might be possible if he cannibalised my die into a commercially available press.

I would have to weigh my options carefully. I would make a bit over sixty-five thousand eurodollars, altogether, on selling these tic-tacs, but I was pretty sure I would be tracked down if I continued that business much further into the future. If I were to start a new, similar business selling some other chemical with an existing market, it would pose similar risks, too. Or greater. The stimulant I made wasn't strictly speaking a recreational substance, so it was on a weird place where the market in it was a lot gentler than if it was a quasi-legal or outright illegal substance.

I definitely didn't want to start competing with the Tyger Claws in one of their core competencies and money-making industries, which was illegal drugs, either. Not just because I lived in their building but I found the illegal drug trade in Night City to be very despicable. I had managed to study some of the drugs the Tyger Claws sold, and most of them caused rapid addiction and very serious medical complications, as a matter of course, almost as though they were designed to do so.

If some shadowy force was intentionally spreading highly addictive and dangerous drugs for some unknown purpose, then I certainly didn't want to pop my head up and offer less addictive and safer alternatives. I mean, ideally, that would be great, but I wanted to stay alive.

I could continue as I was, finding random ways to make money over time, but each scheme wasn't that much less of a risk than trying to sell my IP. It was just dealing with smaller amounts of money; therefore, I thought it was less likely to be noticed, but that was just chance, really.

One of the fast sprint segments caused me to stop thinking entirely, and I could only run and pant until it was over, and I jogged slowly in the cool-down segment until my workout was complete.

Nodding at the machine after I wiped it off, I headed back to my apartment to hit the showers. I still didn't quite trust getting naked around other people. It took me a week of living in this world to stop taking a pistol into the bathroom when I took a shower in my own apartment.

It wasn't like anybody would be interested to see my body, anyway.

---xxxxxx---

I survived two rounds of in-person interviews. Rather than be conducted at Trauma Team tower as I thought, they were conducted off-premises in a nearby hotel's conference room, both times, including a very strenuous and highly technical one conducted by one of Trauma Team's local medical directors, which was a doctor.

Today I was returning there for what was called a "base visit." Trauma Team had a similar schedule as NC Med Ambulance, twenty-four hours on if you were a clinician. I understood the pilots worked shorter hours daily but ended up working more days a week to make up for it, and frankly, I approved of that arrangement. I didn't want the pilot flying an AV I was in to be fatigued, even if stims and much better ones than MC Med Ambulance used were available.

Trauma Team had a pretty good corporate culture as corporations in this dystopia went, which meant that they at least pretended to care about their employees. All employees got a Trauma Team subscription, and the fees they responded to you were said to be billed at cost. And I'm sure they'd be more than happy to set up some kind of payment plan arrangement where they would take a little out of your check every week if you weren't able to pay upfront.

As such, a base visit was from what I could tell about online at forums for people who had or wanted to work there was an "asshole test." As in, could you be around three other people for a whole day without them wanting to shoot you?

This was especially important because six out of the twenty-four hours of your working day were on a "ready 5" status, as in you were loaded up in the AV and waiting. Apparently, the Trauma Team's armoured helmets included a built-in BD wreath, and Trauma Team would pay a monthly subscription for every pilot and clinician to an interactive BD MMO game of their choice.

I had never actually played one, but there was one that was set in the early 2000s where all the players had superpowers, and you had to pick whether or not you wanted to be a hero or villain; that looked very amusing to me. It was famous for having an artificial intelligence examine your playstyle and disposition in the introduction and selecting a superpower for you; you couldn't pick yourself on the first character you made, although they definitely offered that service for a fee, of course.

The security for the Trauma Team tower was the strictest I have ever seen thus far in the world, although a fair bit of it was unobtrusive. There was a small antechamber when you entered that I thought looked old-fashioned until I realised it was full of scanning devices when two security guards in full combat armour and automatic weapon met me at the end.

I introduced myself, "Hello. I'm Taylor Hebert; I'm a prospective new hire here for a base visit."

One of the guards looked at the other one, who glanced down at a tablet and said, his voice slightly distorted by his helmet's speakers, "E-mag pistol, knife, kerenzikov, cyberdeck and monowire on the left side."

The first guard seemed surprised if I was reading his emotions through his armour correctly but nodded and said, "Ma'am, you'll have to leave your pistol and knife with us down here."

I had expected that, and I complied but what surprised me was when the guard said, "If you'd roll up your sleeve on your left hand, ma'am?" I blinked and did so, and he placed a small bracelet right over my monowire's output slot. It kind of reminded me of one of those slap bracelets Emma and I used to play with back in the mid to late 1990s, except this one looked much more substantial now that it was deployed on my wrist. I touched it testingly, and it refused to budge from its location, and I got a light static shock, which jolted me, almost causing me to jump into the air.

I got the impression the guards were both amused at my antics, "Accessing the private subnet on the premesis is prohibited. Also, do not attempt to take that bracelet off while in the building; it has countermeasures which range from painful to lethal." I gawked at him, my concern obvious as it had been set off by me barely touching it. A soft, muted chuckle from him, and he continued, "Don't worry; everyone always tries fucking with it, so the first time, it is really easy to set off. It won't shock you again unless you really try to take it off. You could do full contact sparring wearing it."

That was unusually specific. Did prospective new hires often do full contact sparring, I wondered? They gave me a visitor's pass and told me that I was only cleared to go up to one place, one of the bases near the middle of the building with an attached helipad, and any divergences would be investigated. I was honestly surprised I wasn't met down here and escorted up, but perhaps that was a sort of a test in itself.

I thanked them and started to walk away, overhearing, "...don't often see a girl that young with a monowire... say nothing about the booster, some kind of child ninja program ya think?"

Followed by a slightly distorted "...pah, you never know what age someone is these days. She might be a baba, older than both of us..."

Baba?! I knew enough Japanese from living in my building to know that meant old hag or something like that. Whatever it meant, it definitely wasn't complimentary. Eyes narrowing, I ignored what I overheard and continued on the bank of elevators. Entering one, I glanced around, not seeing buttons.

I tried the obvious solution, "Floor 32, please." That caused the elevator to start moving, and I nodded, pleased with myself. As it got off, I consulted the floor map next to the bank of elevators and made a soft humming sound, considering which direction I should go. It looked like this floor had mainly six quick-reaction bases in it, along with some administrative offices. We were about halfway up the side of the building, with the Trauma Team tower reaching 70 stories, and I did notice on the drive here that there were helipads on the side of the building about halfway up.

I was visiting base Bravo today, and I tested the unfamiliar phonetic on my tongue briefly, "Brah-voh." Although I had a fair number of memories from Alt-Taylor, and this phonetic alphabet wasn't completely unfamiliar, especially after working over ten months in a ground ambulance where it was occasionally used on the radio, I still had to curtail my first reaction to say Bet.

Glancing around, I found the correct path to take and moseyed my way over to the entrance of the base; the door had a giant B on it, and someone had taped a small piece of paper under the letter that said, "At least we're better than fucking Delta."

Amused, I checked the time. I was instructed to get here at the shift change time, but I was quite a bit early. There was a doorbell, but having worked in EMS for close to a year now, I wouldn't particularly want to be woken up if I had managed to get some sleep, so I was cautious about pressing it. They might all still be asleep. When I was working, I would only set the alarm to wake me fifteen minutes before shift change, and it was still forty-five minutes till right now.

I decided to just put my visitor's pass over the electronic lock's sensor, testingly. A brief green light and a clunking sound indicated it allowed me entry. Smiling, I stepped in without announcing myself. I had some idea of how the base was going to be set up from what I looked at online, and the first room was set up in a sort of living room style.

Each base was set up as a small house with five bedrooms, a kitchen, two bathrooms, a supply room, an armoury, a small conference room and a living room. The living room was sort of big with multiple couches and chairs, and at the far end, I could see a tunnel leading past a glass set of sliding doors to a helipad where an AV was sitting. How cool! I wanted to go inspect it, but I highly doubted my visitor's pass would let me onto what was probably a more highly secured area, namely their air operations area.

These off-going workers weren't really even supposed to deal with me, I was supposed to meet and greet with the people starting work today, so I just sat in one of the cushy chairs in the living room, out of the way, and waited.

About twenty minutes later, activity began to happen in the base. Two people arrived simultaneously; they looked like pilots and didn't pay me any mind, and they went together into the small conference room. They were joined by the two pilots that were still on duty, and I eavesdropped on their conversation, very interested.

One of them began speaking, "We only had three calls last shift; the AV is flying well, no squawks at all, except the co-pilot's side attitude indicator that you told me about last night. That's still MEL'd, but the techs tell me they will swap it out this morning..."

"Good... fuel and ammo status?" asked one of the oncoming ones.

The second of the off-coming pilots speaks up, "You got seven-seven-five kilos on the fuel and four-zero-zero each on AP and FMJ on the Goncz. Not sure what the door gunners are at. And, of course, we haven't used an AGM in weeks, sadly, so your heavy ordinance is just how you left it yesterday."

The oncoming pilot nodded and said, "Nice. That's the ground pounders job to keep the SAWs loaded. But I'll check when they come in, anyway."

I was interrupted in my droppings of eaves by a man looking quizzically at me; he was in pyjamas of all things, "...wait... who are you?"

I pop to my feet and smile, "Hi! I'm Taylor Hebert. I'm here for a base visit. I got here a little early, so I decided to just sit and wait until the oncoming crew came to relieve you, out of the way here."

He gaped, shocked, "You mean... you didn't ring that ghastly doorbell and wake us all up?! Hahaha... preem, you must be a paramedic." He stepped forward and offered his hand to shake.

I shook his hand in a friendly manner and nodded, "That I am. How'd you guess?"

"Because every pilot and grunt always rings the bell on their base visits. Only people who have suffered the slings and arrows of emergency medicine know not to disturb the poor fools if they might be asleep. You get my vote just on that basis alone," he said, but then he glanced at me up and down. "You look a bit young, though."

"I'll have been working 911 calls here in lovely Night City for a year now in a couple of months. The hiring manager was impressed with my grades and test scores in the Paramedic program at the NCU Health Science Centre," I told him, but letting him assume what he wanted about my age. I wasn't even seventeen yet. The hiring managers didn't seem to care about my age at all, but it was a bit of a tender spot for me. Was I too young to be doing all this? Maybe, if I didn't have superpowers.

He nodded, "That's my alma mater, as well. I got my medical degree there." Ah, so he must be one of the Senior Med-Techs. They weren't always full doctors, but it wasn't that uncommon, either. The assistants were universally paramedics.

I asked him, curious, "Did the company pay for your tuition?"

He nodded, "Yeah. Worked here for two years, and then they offered. Had to sign a twenty-year contract, though, but it's not that bad. Definitely worth it. My pay is way more than double, and I can always pick up shifts in any hospital in town as a contractor on my days off, five hundred eddies a day doing that, minimum. Sometimes double that if they're really hard up."

I wasn't sure why I was so opposed to that, although twenty years was a lot better than Kang Tao's offer of thirty. It was an option, though, and probably the safest of all of the options. I would keep it in mind.

He motioned to me, "Come stand by me; when the two come in to relieve us, I'll introduce you. I'll also get your paperwork for the liability waiver and see if there's a spare MCU in your size you can use today."

Huh? What? "Liability waiver, for what? And what's an MCU?" I asked him, curious.

"It basically says that if you die today it ain't the company's fault, even if it really is the company's fault. Anyone that isn't a patient that flies on one of our AVs has to sign one," he said simply, "And MCU is a Medical Combat Uniform... I'm sure you've seen us responding to calls if you worked 911; it's the armoured flight suit us Med Techs wear. Completely different from the ACU!" The last had the feeling of an inside joke.

Wait, what? "I thought that was just supposed to be a 'base visit'," I told him, using air quotes, "It didn't specify anything more than that."

He laughed, "Yeah, that figures. I mean, that's true... but we provide you the opportunity to shadow a crew for a full twenty-four shift. If you want to." he emphasised that last point, almost blatantly indicating that it would be a good idea to do so.

I nodded, not just because it seemed like the correct thing to get hired, but because it sounded fucking nova.

"Preem. One of the oncoming pilots will do a quick fam with you on the airframe. You'll be solely an observer, mind you," he warns. That was obvious; they hadn't even hired me yet.

I was a bit curious, though, "Will the company issue me a firearm? I know you guys go to some pretty sketchy places."

He scrunched up his face and shook his head, "Nah. Hide behind the grunts if things get hairy. But they won't issue or allow you to carry weapons until you're both hired and have been qualified. Maybe they'll give you a pocket knife." That was a long shot, so I wasn't really surprised. I nodded. He glanced at me and said, "We're not supposed to say this, but they only invite people to base visits they're pretty sure they want to hire, so as long as you're not a total asshole, you pretty much got the job."

That made me feel a lot better, and it made sense, but at the same time, I didn't let it make me feel complacent. At that, people rapidly arrived in the room. I could easily tell the security guys from the medics as they looked like soldiers. Well, to be honest, all of the medics had a little bit of that look too, but nothing like the professional hard men that I had become familiar with working for my Alt-Dad.

After introductions, I sat aside as they conducted their morning briefing. They had a similar drug stocking machine as we did in NC Med Ambulance, but they didn't have to share it with twenty trucks. I watched them check in, then check back out their narcotics, do their daily cycle count, and talk a little bit about the patients they had the previous day.

The senior clinician on the oncoming crew was named Hideaki Anno, and seemed to be the clinical base lead. That made sense to schedule me on the day the line supervisor was working. He told me that I could call him Dr Anno, Hideaki, or Hey You but definitely nothing else. That must mean he had some sort of nickname that he didn't like.

He already had an MCU uniform for me, showed me how to get in it and recommended that I partially keep it on at least today whenever the light in the base indicated we were next up for a call because it took some practice to learn how to jump in it quickly, and they wouldn't wait on me if they got a call. When in the base, they were on ready-fifteen, which means they had to be wheels up within fifteen minutes, but their target was usually closer to seven.

Depending on the service level of the client, either the ready-five or ready-fifteen bird would launch, but even on the ready-fifteen calls, they averaged getting on the scene in ten minutes or less. If the ready-five bird was dispatched, the base next up to a call shifted to ready-five until they got back.

I thought the uniform was cool and was curious how they got my measurements until I remembered how many sensors I walked through downstairs. He told me not to worry about getting changed right now, that they were fifth up, so they probably wouldn't get a call for an hour or two. Apparently, there was something of an art to knowing how far away you could be from the AV based on what priority you were, as there were some facilities on our floor, like a workout room, that were available.

I sat with the two other Med Techs in the conference room, apparently, the first thing in the morning was a briefing from the day pilot, and then we would go check the supplies and equipment in the AV and test everything like I was familiar with from working in a ground ambulance.

"Yo, Savior. Whose the little girl?" asked one particularly bulky security man.

Anno growled, "I told you, I don't like that name." Oh, so that was his nickname. That would be a bit of a hard thing to live up to, but he must have done something pretty cool to get up to it. Anno glanced at me, "The pilots and security guys often give nicknames to everyone, the grunts especially. This is Mercy." He pointed to the biggest of the security guys, who didn't look like he had a merciful bone in his body.

"I-is that name... ironic?" I asked Mr Mercy, which got a huge grin and a nod. I thought so.

"Mercy, this is Taylor Hebert. She's a prospective new hire that'll be third riding with us today," Anno told him.

He gawked, "Her? I thought it was take your daughter to work day, but she doesn't look like a Jap, so I was curious." He reached out to... I'm not sure, grab my shoulder or something, but I simply reached up and grabbed his wrist, moving at about half speed.

The other security guy laughed, and Mr Mercy gawked, testing my grip before easily breaking it, and then he stared at my wrist. "Hey! Bandbox! She's got a bracelet!"

That caused the other security guy, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed adonis of a man that looked vaguely familiar, to blink, "Really? Mantis blades or the big gauge? I bet five eddies it's the big gauge. You know what they say, bitches love cannons." Well, that was true, but... "She looked a little... fast just now, you know, too."

The huge guy nodded thoughtfully and said, "Nah, hand's strong but 'ganic. Has to be a wire. I'll add the debt to your tab, choom." Then he stared down at me, "You know how to use that, girly?"

I coughed and said, "It would be pretty stupid to have it on my wrist if I didn't. I think we've all seen that clip from America's Most Violent Home Videos. I don't want to make anyone a bunch of money by being their next submission." The video in question was perhaps one of the most famous videos from that particular entertainment program, and I had seen the clip online of a supposed street samurai yanking out a monowire, throwing out some cool-looking moves and then decapitating himself instantly. It was set to a laugh track.

It was... very gross but very illuminating too. I redoubled my training with the wire software after seeing that. He nodded slowly at me and didn't say anything else because the two pilots walked in.

The pilots gave a pretty comprehensive briefing, from the AV status, any maintenance that was due today, in this case, a replacement attitude indicator was going to be installed, the weather and how that would impact any flights, ammo status, and then mentioned me. I waved to everyone.

After the briefing, the pilot walked me through both where I would be sitting in the AV, all of the emergency features and exits, how to talk on the intercom and radio (and, more importantly, how not to talk when I didn't want to) and then pronounced me good enough. I had to sign a piece of paper confirming I got the initial emergency training on the AV-4, another piece of training waiving any liability if I was injured or died pretty much under any circumstances, and a final one which was an NDA about any patient I saw, with pretty stiff looking penalties.

Curiously, I asked him, "How much fuel does this thing burn?"

That got a wide grin and said, "It burns a very economical one litre per fifteen seconds, on average." Holy shit, with the price of CHOO2, that was astronomical.

That must have shown on my face because he laughed and said, "That really is quite an economic burn. Forty years ago, this same AV-4 model with the older turbofans would burn twice that, at least."

He led me back into the base, and after that... we waited.