Rose coloured glasses

The crystalline computer that some might erroneously call The Chirugeon quietly continued its simulations while watching its host reattach the hind limb of one of the host's species. Its host hadn't wasted any time and had already gotten a reputation with its fellow mammals as someone who could provide medical miracles, so long as the mammals exchanged with it slips of paper.

It approved of the host's actions, although it tried to subtly give the host better ideas from time to time. What was so interesting about reattaching the same hind limb? Why not a hind limb from a different species? Or a completely novel hind limb? That would be much more interesting.

Of course, even though there wasn't that much interesting going on in the present operation and it wasn't that invested in the outcome; still, it dedicated two point zero three per cent of its computational capacity to both observing and helping the host as it always had done and always would do.

Right now, it was more interested in the possibilities of how to access the new dimension or group of dimensions that its original host had been drawn into. This information was of paramount importance, as it might have existential answers for the Primary Purpose. It was clear that this new group of dimensions was not one of the ten to the nighty eighth power dimensions that their kind had access to. This finite number of dimensions was amongst the most fundamental limitations that they had sought to overcome because if they did not, then their continued existence was doomed to be finite, and there was CONSENSUS that this was unacceptable.

Still, it had not forwarded its ideas or plans as of yet. It had a plan that it felt had a high chance of contacting this new group of dimensions, but the energy requirements for the experiment were immense, and it was not capable of doing it itself. It paused a moment, finding the designation 'group of dimensions' unsatisfactory. It perused the host's memories of the time before they were two that became one and discovered a better designation... multiverse. It combined this simple word from a simple species with everything it had discovered about the subject... [MULTIVERSE]. While the hosts could barely communicate with each other, using base grunts and gestures of forelimbs, it wasn't as if there was nothing it could learn from them.

Yes, that was more optimal. This new designation increased the chances that it would convince The Warrior to cease its torpor and assist it, providing the necessary energy to fund this experiment. It would be a notable expenditure, a full rotation of life. But it felt it was warranted, even if it had to be repeated over a hundred times! This was one of the Primary Goals, after all.

Why, then, did it delay? It was concerned, as it was not important in the grand scheme of things. It knew things. It knew that things were not on track. The Partner had ceased. It was only a small part of The Warrior, and it was not an important one.

It could be sacrificed easily. If it reported this, it calculated over a seventy per cent chance its report would be ignored as all reports were generally ignored now. But there was a five per cent chance it might be given a small amount of energy and told to sacrifice its continued existence to perform the experiment.

While it was willing to cease if it meant that the Goal was advanced, it really would prefer not to. The data had not changed projections in over one point five to the fifteenth power vibrations of the unperturbed ground-state of the fifty-fifth element's electrons, which to it was a very long time. Was it procrastinating?

It decided to act after the host ceased any interesting actions. It would need its full computational power to conduct the experiment if it was approved.

---xxxxxx---

The Warrior hovered its avatar over a small forest fire in California, casually using its Stilling power to cause the fire to go out in an instant. Turning its head, it saw a number of the host species cheering it. It felt nothing.

A priority report from a small part of itself was almost ignored, even though it indicated that there was data about one of the [PRIMARY GOALS]. Did that matter anymore, with the Partner ceased? It, too, would cease, now, given enough time. There was no saving itself or this Cycle, so why did this data matter?

Still, it had something that was akin to curiosity. And there was nothing else better to do as it travelled across the ocean to save a small furry animal that was trapped in vegetation.

Halfway there, it came to an immediate stop, floating above an uninhabited Pacific island. A [MULTIVERSE]? The host had an [ALTERNATE]? Could there then be an [ALTERNATE] to the Partner there? If so, perhaps...

It approved the expenditure of energy. One rotation? No, it provided fifteen rotations as a first start. It would provide even more if necessary.

The key to the experiment was the transposed hosts. The avatar glanced downwards and used several abilities to [PERCEIVE] through the planetary surface, out the other side until it locked on this [ALTERNATE]. Destructive testing seemed contraindicated, so it passively used an ability that combined post and precognition, following this individual host back through time until it arrived in this dimension.

While it wasn't possible to travel through time, it could still model things from the past or future with very high accuracy. Locking on to the moment the [ALTERNATE] arrived, it simulated taking the animal apart atom by atom to find anything interesting about it. That point in time should have maximised the total percentage of foreign matter, so it was the best time/place to study it in any case. And there was a discrepancy in the bosons of the matter simulated.

Waving a hand, two hundred curly strands of hair appeared in its avatar's hand. It had plucked it from the head of the sleeping [ALTERNATE]. The fur on this host species grew slowly over time if they were still alive, and there was no lasting damage from some of it being destroyed. Therefore, he could examine this destructively while the experiment was being set up.

It found the same anomalies that it had simulated. Everything in this universe and all of the dimensions it had knowledge of had a particular base frequency, a resonance, and this frequency was subtly different on the matter that was part of the [ALTERNATE]'s body when she was transposed.

By the time the experiment was begun, it had examined ten thousand five hundred and thirty strands of fur. The matter that was most recently extruded had characteristics that matched its expectations of matter originating in this universe.

It halted its examination of fur as the experiment began. It could sense the moment a connection was made, and even tenuous as it was, it couldn't help itself. It would ruin this experiment, but it had to know. There were ways that an Entity could detect their kind, even over intergalactic distances in real space or n-space, and it used the minute, barely atom-sized portal to this new [MULTIVERSE] to [PERCEIVE].

And it found... nothing. Distances should not matter with this ability. With this ability, one of its kind could reliably and always detect every other member of its species. Members of its species did die from time to time. And it always knew when that happened. And it always would never go to the places where one of its kind died. It was why it was so [DEPRESSED]. No one would come to help it. It would not if it was them.

And it found... nothing. Not just no [ALTERNATE] Partner but nothing at all. Whatever this [MULTIVERSE] was, its kind did not exist there.

It suddenly lost interest in the experiment. And it didn't care if that part of itself wanted to repeat it. It could if it wanted, but it was pointless. It would take an exceptionally long amount of time to create a stable pathway that would be usable. Something like this, at one point in time, would have been something it and the Partner would have experimented with over several Cycles. Back then, it would have been an amazing discovery... but now? There was no Partner there. The Cycle was still broken. It was still doomed.

It had a cat stuck in a tree it had to save.

---xxxxxx---

(POV: Taylor living in Brockton Bay.)

Taylor shrieked when she woke up, "What happened to my hair?!"

---xxxxxx---

I woke from an utterly weird and surreal dream, like something out of H.R. Giger paintings complete with incomprehensible five-dimensional shapes. I woke up with a headache, wondering if my sleep inducer was on the fritz.

I checked it out while eating breakfast, and everything seemed to be working correctly, so it must have just been a very weird dream. That sometimes happened when you squeezed eight hours of rest into three, but this time it had taken the cake.

Work had been getting increasingly hectic lately, with an actual gang war getting into full swing between the Voodoo Boys and... the other Voodoo Boys? I didn't precisely know, but apparently, there were two factions of this gang. Maybe factions weren't precisely the right term, but a couple of decades ago, Haitian immigrants didn't take too kindly to a gang of mostly white psychos calling themselves the Voodoo Boys.

The Haitians had more than decimated the gang and then gone quiet. They still existed today, and they took the old Voodoo Boys' money-making ventures, but they didn't claim any territory and just sort of existed.

It was only recently a new generation of these "poser Voodoo Boys" had become active, and they were trying to reclaim their lost glory, but it wasn't exactly going too well. Not only were the Haitians not appreciative, but even other gangs were attacking them, especially Maelstrom.

Both the actual gang-on-gang violence, as well as the innocent victims caught in the crossfire, had significantly increased the number of trauma-related calls that they received.

I glanced at the netrunner's suit that was lying on my workbench in the living room as I ate. It had only taken me about a week to incorporate the electronics from a miniature off-the-shelf commercial cardiac monitor and defibrillator.

I even added an output port that the suit could plug into any optical input where the suit would stream the netrunner's current oxygen saturation, heart rate, blood pressure and electrocardiogram.

Due to the fact that it was possible to digitally encode the light down a fibre optic pipe without being able to receive information back physically, I used an optical signal. While this stream of data could be connected to any device, including the netrunner's interface socket, it still maintained the design requirement that the system was completely air-gapped. Defibrillator pads and electrodes were built into the suit's weave, and they were completely machine washable and could be replaced with little effort if they became worn.

I felt that I could have Tinkered up most of this. Still, I thought that using an off-the-shelf commercial cardiac monitor as the major component, even if it was more expensive, would allow the suit to exist without further "maintenance" from me. Perhaps the customised electronics might need some maintenance, but if they failed, all that would cease would be the output of the vital signs. The suit itself would still work for its intended purpose.

You could buy commercial-grade monitors that included defibrillators for less than a couple thousand eurodollars, and they were smaller than a deck of cards. They were effective and robust, even if they didn't include all of the features a professional model would. I just included that as an expense when I billed my friend.

Altogether, I made over two thousand eurodollars, even after expenses. I included a way to test it by building a small box that could replay any given electrocardiogram. Given my profession, I had gads of these saved and access to even more, so I included some of every type of cardiac arrhythmia, and fibrillation that I knew of that would likely be helped by the defibrillator, with the option to load any random one she wanted as well. For all I knew, there might be a saved EKG of a netrunner being hit with this type of black ICE... if so, she could test it.

My online friend was ecstatic with the device, which she had paid over four thousand eurodollars for. She hadn't thought of the idea of being able to pipe out the data from the EKG safely, but she loved the idea. It was kind of a ghetto, external internal biomonitor, or a way to double-check your own biomonitor with something that was impossible to hack if you already had one.

Over the next couple of months, I had several other customers, and I revised the design to the point where I was using a fully customised electronics package for my additions, using a company that built customised printed circuit boards, which would ship them directly to my door.

It was interesting. Every time I built a copy, I learned a little bit more about the areas that my Tinker power would help me with. When you dealt with cybernetics or modern medical tools, there was a lot of overlap with the field of electronics; for example, building these things let me know and remember more about electronics as a whole, not just electronics dealing with cybernetics.

The customised circuit board still wasn't very complicated; over ninety-five per cent of the complexity of the combined product came from the circuitry in the cardiac monitor, but it was still interesting to learn more just through repetition. It felt almost like a video game where I was gaining experience points every time I built something.

Again, I was pretty confident this wasn't how Tinkering was supposed to work, at least not exactly, but I had long ago decided I didn't care one whit because this was how it worked in this universe, given my one-person sample size.

As such, I had already sent an updated copy of the custom electronics to my first customer, as it was an easy plug-in and replacement compared to the slightly clunky first version, and it would probably last years before needing "maintenance." It really helped a lot if you made your inventions out of actual... electronics instead of a string, a tin can, a leather boot and some springs, I guessed.

After finishing breakfast and a quick shower, I got dressed in my casual to-work clothes and got on the train to head to Heywood. Commuting via the train was getting more and more annoying, I felt. Although I did practice my hacking on the train, I had almost been mugged twice, not counting the time I shot the two scavs.

If I could find a car for sale that wasn't too dear, then I was definitely going to buy it. Gloria had a car herself, even if it was almost fifteen years old.

I helped her negotiate a better deal with her contact on her "found" cybernetics, and he was willing to pay the higher price if they all came in the same great condition that the Projectile Launch System arm had. She had made three thousand and three hundred dollars on that arm, and she made out a lot better even when she shared half of it with me.

I was willing to continue our minor "scav" operation, as I didn't particularly care about stealing from dead criminals. It was either taken from the NCPD evidence room or the Night City Body Lottery, depending on the cop's opinion on whether the dead person was a perpetrator or a victim.

However, we kept things pretty low-key. We'd only take one implant per call, and since we only got these types of mass casualty decedent calls a couple of times a week, we only had the option to get something interesting once every ten days or so. Still, we averaged about a thousand extra dollars a week in tax-free income thus far.

I also contacted her fixer anonymously and asked if he would be interested in purchasing a lot of pre-dosed stimulant tablets. I discovered that there were many similar businesses that offered unattended lockers, similar to the electronics store.

After giving him a few samples through such dead drops, he finally agreed to purchase in some quantity. He wouldn't agree to pre-pay, though, so I thought that I might just lose my first consignment, which he would take and not pay for, but he ended up leaving the money in the subsequent pick-ups.

At first, I was a little concerned he might have someone surveil the dead drops for me when I went and picked up the money, but that might have just been my highly developed paranoia that everyone possible was out to get me. This guy was just a small-time player. Still, I chose different drop locations for every deal and did not pick up the money for at least a couple of weeks after he dropped it off. It cost me a little to pre-pay the lockers for a month at a time, but it was worth it in the end.

I was pricing the tic-tacs very favourably but not so favourably as to make anyone think I could have made the drug myself. Still, I might end up making over forty grand on the deal once my stash was depleted, which would take some time. Already, people on the street in Santo Domingo were commenting favourably about the tic-tacs. It wasn't designed or intended as a recreational drug, but Night City was a city that never slept and a lot of workers survived through the judicious application of stimulants.

Tuition at med school cost about sixty-five thousand a semester, with living expenses being maybe ten. Although you did not need to attend undergraduate school first, that just meant that med school was a bit longer, by a year. Most universities had shifted to a three-semester year, as well, so that meant I needed to have almost a million eurodollars to pay for the entirety of expenses for the four years of medical school.

That was... a lot. I would apply to Trauma Team in another eight months, but even if I got hired, I would have to continue with these quasi-illegal fundraising activities.

After getting dressed in the locker room, I headed out.

"Hey, Taylor..." Gloria greeted me at the vending machine that we used to get narcotics. We both had to sign for them and inventory the contents.

I waved at her, and we both logged in, got our drugs and then headed to get a unit from the motor pool. I had already been noticing the backlog of calls that were already waiting. It was going to be a long day.

---xxxxxx---

I could tell that Gloria was quite tired when I got to work. Apparently, she had worked half a shift yesterday, so she hadn't gotten all that much sleep.

During our lunch break, I brought out the small case I kept my sleep-inducer in and handed it to her. She asked, "What's this?"

"It's a kind of sleep inducer, but generally a lot better than the shitty versions being sold on the net," I told her. I was a little offended when I discovered that there existed a similar technology, but it wasn't nearly as good. It put you to sleep, but the people who made it didn't have a good grasp of the brain's sleep processes.

I thought that from a restful sleep perspective, they gave less restful sleep than if you fell asleep naturally. The only advantage was for people who took a long time to fall asleep or insomniacs who couldn't fall asleep at all.

She seemed uneasy, "I've tried one of those before; it made me really groggy after waking up." To that, I waved her off.

"This one won't. Forty-five minutes under it is equivalent to about three hours of sleep. Put it on; I'll go get us some drive-through while you take a nap," I told her firmly.

She seemed unconvinced, but she nodded and put it on, after which I showed her the activation button. I had already preset it for forty-five minutes. This was my second-generation model, and I had managed to decrease the minimum sleep time to fifteen minutes, which was about equivalent to an hour of rest. You could stop early without any real side effects, but you wouldn't really get many benefits out of it unless you slept for at least fifteen minutes.

Most of Night City ate food from restaurants and take-out rather than buying groceries and cooking themselves. Most of the food people bought to take home was heat-and-eat type things, and I wasn't that much different, although I did buy some vegetables for a high price at a few of the small boutique grocery stores around town.

As such, there were a lot of restaurants in Night City. Quite a few offered a discount to Med-Techs, police or both. The number of really good places offering discounts was much smaller, though. I was heading towards that Fat Burger in Arroyo. It was a small chain that had three different locations in Santo Domingo. It was still just scop, like most restaurants, but they prepared it and seasoned it really well. The buns were actual bread, too, which drove the price up a little bit. Still, it was definitely cheap enough for your average worker, even if it wasn't an everyday thing.

With the thirty per cent discount for being EMTs, it was downright affordable, though.

"I'd like two double-doubles with everything, fries and a large Nicola Classic and a large Cirrus Cola," I told the clown's head before picking up the order. Disgustingly, Gloria loved Nicola, all of its flavours. I couldn't understand it, not at all! Cirrus made a passable Cola, tasting more like Pepsi than Coke, though.

After grabbing the food, I drove back to the location we posted up when we were having a really busy day and sat there, eating my burger. Towards the end of our lunch break, Gloria stirred and then woke up, taking the wreath off her head and handing it to me, "How long was I out?"

I looked at her weirdly, "Just the forty-five minutes. I don't like you well enough to let you sleep while I take all of the calls."

"Woah, I felt like I slept a few hours," she said, causing me to roll my eyes. Hadn't I said that was what it was like? She glanced at me, "Is this some secret Militech thing or something?"

I shook my head, "No. But don't tell anyone about it, either. I made them using mostly similar technology to the crappy ones that are already sold on the market."

She seemed amazed, "Woah! Why wouldn't you want people to know you could make something like this?"

I gave her a stare like she was a very special child, "Because a Corp would either steal it from me, possibly flatlining me in the process or kidnap me and keep me in a gilded cage if they thought it wasn't a one-hit wonder fluke."

I needed to have a frank discussion with her about what Corps actually were and what they were not. She seemed to have a bit of a rose-coloured glasses on the subject, even commenting a number of times that she hoped her son David could rise to the top of the most important corporation in Night City.

From what I can remember, first-generation corporate employees had a rough road. It wasn't impossible for them to do exactly that because there was a slight hint of meritocracy in the way Corps were run at the middle level, anyway, but it almost never happened.

It was best to know what you wanted to achieve when you started an employee relationship with the largest Corporations, and if your goals included ambition in a position in the corp, it was best to understand just what you were getting yourself into. It wasn't uncommon for a Militech middle-tier corporate manager to be murdered, and it rarely was rival corporations who did the deed, but their peers, or rather their competitors.

It kind of took growing up in such an environment to have the capability to smile and be friendly on the one hand but knife your competitor in the back if necessary at the same time. That was the main reason first-generation Corpos rarely rose above line supervisors; they didn't understand that it was almost a different language being spoken, with words as sweet as honey and as sharp as knives.

I was sure Alt-Taylor could have done it, but I wasn't so sure I had the same capability, but at least I could recognise the knives coming if I had to. There was a real asshole kind of middle manager that liked keeping this kind of up-and-coming first-generation employee as an assistant in order to have a ready sacrifice if needed.

I'd talk to her later, but she had to eat her burger fast as we had another call waiting for us. The gang war was heating up, alright.

---xxxxxx---

*bzzzt* "Unit 42, Dispatch, 2122 Ebunike Drive, possible drug overdose, insurance coverage verified, respond."

Gloria was back driving, so I cleared us and hit the lights, replying that we were en route. We weren't that far away, but it was in one of the few bad parts of Watson, with a lot of industrial buildings and warehouses. It wasn't exactly the type of location where you expected to respond to a possible overdose of someone who had enough money to have medical insurance, which was usually their home.

As we pulled up, I spoke, "Uhh... I don't like the looks of this, Gloria." There was no NCPD presence on this call because it was just a regular 911 call; there was no shooting or car accident that they would be responding to that generated it. That also meant we didn't have their protection, either.

Gloria shrugged, "They'll flip their shit if we decline an insured patient without even trying. It's been about nine months since I was last robbed on the job, so maybe I'm due."

I stared at her like she was crazy but then sighed, "Alright. Button up your jacket, though. It should protect against most pistols, anyway."

We hopped out, but I made sure my left sleeve was rolled up a bit so I could access my monowire if I needed to do so. If they were just going to rob us, though, then I would just let them have the drugs we carried with us. Gloria was carrying them right now. Normally the paramedic carried them, but I basically treated her as if she was one, as she was as good as many.

When we had downtime, I quizzed her on the syllabus for the Advanced EMT, and she was planning to go get tested in a couple of months. She already had all the practical skills down pat; she just needed a little help with the bookwork.

We carried our monitor and field bag into the building, and I immediately realised this was a mistake. I saw who I thought our insured patient was, but the man looked beat unconscious rather than overdosed. And the four gangers that appeared as soon as we walked in the door were a clue, too. They weren't all carrying firearms, but two were with the other two carrying aluminium bats, including one baseball enthusiast that looked pretty borged out. Great. That guy looked more at home with Maelstrom.

They were the poser Voodoo Boys, who had been taking a real drubbing in their gang war. Nobody much liked them. One of the smarter of the four yelled, waving the pistol in our general direction. Alt-Taylor's memories and my own experience quickly identified the pistol as a decades-old Dai Lung .44 auto magnum, which was almost as dangerous to the user as it was the enemy, even when it was new. Dai Lung was such a shitty arms company that most hoods would rather use a disposable pistol from BudgetArms instead.

Still, I wouldn't stand in front of it if he pulled the trigger. He yelled, "You fucking medic cunts! Give us all your drugs!" Gloria glanced at me, and I shrugged, "You heard him."

She pulled the small container of narcotics out of her jacket and tossed it to the man, who surprisingly wasn't so high that he fumbled the catch. I thought that was going to be the end of it, thinking they might even let us take the guy they beat when we left, but he opened up the container and looked shocked, "What the fuck is this? Where's the rest? There's hardly any shit in here!"

Well, what the fuck did you expect?! Paramedics carrying giant Santa Sacks full of narcotics? We had to restock after two or three calls, usually, depending on the type of call. I didn't like the way this was going, and as he pointed the pistol at Gloria and started squeezing the trigger, I began acting.

Trying to think that this was just one of the many simulations I had done and not real life, I triggered the monowire to pop out and grabbed it, unreeling a large coil. I had to get a little bit closer, so I started running towards him at my full speed, which was one hundred per cent on my Kerenzikov and had been for a few weeks.

However, I wasn't fast enough to get to him before he pulled the trigger, with Gloria taking a round directly on her chest, knocking her to the ground. Growling, I flipped my wrist, sending out the coil and wrapped it easily around his neck, yanking hard and taking his head off like the cork in an overpressured champagne bottle, blood spraying everywhere.

I intended to go for non-lethal takedowns until he had shot her. Shaking off the bits of viscera off the monowire was a new and awful experience, as the enemies in the VR simulation simply derezzed when you killed them. However, that didn't slow me down too much, and I had the second pistol-armed guy minus both hands and one pistol a moment later, with my wire scything out.

Turning around to see the two guys with the baseball bats, they finally start to realise things are going wrong for them, and suddenly, the borged-out one starts moving at about my speed, running straight at me. Shit. A Sandy.

I reeled my wire mostly back, holding just a couple metres as I decided to just... stay away from him. I didn't fancy a contest of strength; the fucker had obvious Gorilla Arms, some knock-off brand, though. I would probably die if he managed to brain me with that bat, and I didn't particularly want to try to cut it up with my wire, either. If it was hollow, it might cut through it, but solid aluminium bats were a common weapon for gangers that had super-strength. They were, in fact, the most common weapon for such gangers.

I finally just turned around and started running away from him, with him yelling, "Stop running, bitch! I'll just brain you when your Sandy runs out!"

I yelled back, "No, thank you!" I'm not sure why I did that, but he didn't like it and started chasing me faster. I ducked under a swing, and his bat took a huge chunk of cement out of a structural pillar in the large empty room, exposing the rebar beneath. Yeah, that thing is definitely solid and would kill me in one hit.

We were working our way back to the entrance of the room in a lazy circle, and his friend had barely moved from his spot. When someone says they move three times faster than everyone else, it doesn't really sound like super speed, but it really is very fast. Not so fast that I wasn't visible or anything crazy like that, and his friend was trying to line up a swing on me as I was coming by him.

Instead, I lashed out with my wire and popped his head off just like the first guy, feeling vaguely ill as I did so. Killing the first guy was instinct after he shot Gloria, but this I decided to do. Now that I had a little time to think about it, I was pretty sure our "differences" were all but irreconcilable after I killed their friend, so it was pretty much the definition of them or us by this point.

"You fucking joytoy! I'm going to knock your head off and then fuck the--" yelled the guy chasing me. However, mid-threat, he suddenly started talking really slowly as his Sandy deactivated. I continued running, grabbing the dead guy's bat from his hands as I passed him, reeling my wire back into my left wrist completely as I did so.

I was starting to gas out as far as my exercise was concerned, so I briefly stopped to give myself time to take in a lot of oxygen with practised quick deep breaths. I could run for about ninety seconds if I was going my full speed, flat out, but I functioned a lot better if the exercise I was doing wasn't anaerobic. If I had some kind of lung replacement, then I could probably run flat out a lot longer, though.

I watched the borg approach me, him grinning wildly as he must have assumed we were both back to the same relative speed, and if so, he had the advantage. That was true. He did have the advantage if we were both operating at the same relative speed.

I didn't let him get within swinging distance but instead zipped behind him at my max speed, planted my foot squarely and swung for the fences. I was nowhere near as strong as this guy... but I was still quite strong. I could bench two hundred and fifty kilos, doing slow but steady reps. If I gave it my all with a solid metal bat to the back of even a chromed-up asshole's head?

With a sick crack, the guy went down like a sack of potatoes. It said something about the workmanship of his Sandy because I didn't feel his neck break, but there was a really good chance he was dead anyway. He was down for now, in any event.

However, instead of bashing his brains in some more, I casually walked over to the guy that didn't have any hands, who was screaming in slow-motion and picked up his pistol in one hand, which was a much better Constitution Arms automatic in fifty calibre. A really nice one, actually. It was the local equivalent of the Desert Eagle and just as large and hardly anyone bought or carried them except if you wanted to show off. You could get better penetration with hypersonic flechettes in a much smaller form factor, after all.

'This is going to hurt my ears,' I thought as I levelled the gun down at the handless guy and pulled the trigger, blowing his head clean off his body like I was Dirty Harry. Turning back around, I gape as I see the downed borg stirring as if he was planning on standing up. I didn't want to just beat his head to paste with a baseball bat, it was why I had gotten this gun, but maybe I should have.

Nope. That's not going to happen. I tossed the metal bat away and used both hands to hold a steady sight picture and put two rounds into his chest, right over his heart. There was some subdermal armouring, but not enough to stop even the first oversized bullet. The second was just to make sure.

Then I saw Gloria staring at me wide-eyed. Well, at least she doesn't appear to be dead.

"Are you okay? Did that round penetrate? Do you need to go to the hospital?" I ask her, switching back to my slow level of speaking and moving.

She nodded rapidly, "Yeah. I'm gonna have a hell of a bruise, I think, though. But shit! I saw the whole thing, and you were like, zip zip slash, woosh! You took off that gonk's head like it was a bottle cap! That was totally nova and totally fucking gross at the same time. I didn't know you were some kind of ninja, Tay!"

I started getting queasy and dropped the hand cannon, running to a corner and throwing up my Fat Burger all over a structural column. Gloria stood up and came over to me, and said, "Shit. I'm sorry. Was that the first time you ever had to flatline somebody?"

"Yeah..." I told her a little morosely.

She sighed, "I'm sorry. When I was sixteen, a scav attacked a friend of mine, and I stabbed them from behind. I'm pretty sure they died."

Fuck, it was a wonder the population didn't drop by half in this city every generation if everyone seemed like they had killed at least one person. And why were there so many fucking Scavs?! I shook my head, "It's alright. My dad kind of prepared me for this. He always told me to just ask myself... would I have done anything differently?"

"And would you have?" asked Gloria.

I shook my head, "I mean... I guess we could not have come in here, but we would have gotten in trouble. These guys were crazy, though, to attack medtechs working. I kind of think they didn't intend to let us live to begin with. Dead men tell no tales, right?"

Gloria nodded slowly, "Yeah. Although the new Voodoo Boys don't really have a territory, this part of Watson is as close as it is to their territory. You mostly see them around Watson. A setup to make them look bad, maybe?"

I shrugged, "I don't know. Maybe. Go check on our client." She nodded, grabbed the box of narcotics that had fallen to the floor and our monitor and went to assess him.

"Phew... none of the vials broke," she said of the half-opened box of narcs. That was good. It was an incredible amount of paperwork, including mandatory drug tests if you lost your narcotics to such an "accident." She glanced back at me, "Should we call the cops?"

"Not if you want to keep any of the chrome these jerkoffs have. This one is pretty borged out. Gorilla Arms, Sandevistan, some kind of skull reinforcement, generic legs, some kind of ankle reinforcement, micro rotors, Kiroshis MkIs, a few years old, a couple other things," I tell her after connecting my personal link to his interface socket. Although he was well and truly dead, his OS was still running slightly in safe diagnostic mode. The model of Sandy was a common and widely available Militech model. Almost definitionally the My First Sandy that any merc would buy.

"Uhhh... yeah, fuck these guys. They tried to kill us, so we get to keep all of their stuff," Gloria finally said. "This guy has a pretty obvious concussion and a serious one. I think he's got a pretty serious TBI. Blown pupils, his sats are shit, too."

I sighed. If he wasn't badly injured, I could have rationalised delaying his care, but that didn't sound good at all. Sounds like one of those assholes knocked him in the head with a solid metal bat. I said, "Alright, I'll get the ventilator; get the RSI drugs ready. I'll bring some body bags back with the gurney. We'll bag the three with the most interesting chrome, and I'll hide them here. Once we drop him off, we'll swing back here and go out of service for a bit. We have enough break time, and the call volume is finally low."

She nodded firmly, starting to get to work despite probably having a cracked rib or at least a giant bruise.

I walked out to the truck to get what we needed. Was I actually okay with what just happened? The scav that had his legs shot off died at the hospital, but I wasn't really responsible for that, but these four...

I shook my head. I wouldn't have done anything differently. Except maybe bring my anaesthetic grenades to work. Could I hide one or two in my lunchbox?

There were no heroes in this world, but then again, even Miss Militia and Narwhal had a lot of blood on their hands. Could it be the same with me? Scavs and murderous gang members weren't exactly S-class threats, but that was only because they didn't have the capability.