44 Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave a Tyger forty whacks

The biggest issue I had in staying in character as Dr Hasumi had been, lately, dealing with matters of face. I had reached what I considered a détente with the Lotus Tong. They finally agreed that I didn't have to pay them the five per cent cut as long as I did not publicise it. So long as I publicly pretended to still be paying their fees and privately continued to provide some "Ripperdoc" style work for them, they'd call it square.

They'd lose face, though, as the hegemons of Chinatown if it became public knowledge that I wasn't paying protection fees like most everyone else was. It didn't really matter that they weren't, actually, the unopposed hegemons, either.

In many ways, they were treating me like a small gang in my own right. If not a gang, then at least someone they didn't think it was profitable to needlessly antagonise. When my edge of Chinatown settled down, the smaller gangs in the area started operating more. I hadn't really targeted them, mainly just the unorganised anarchistic elements.

In Night City, they'd have been called Scavs, but that word was a little passé in Hollywood, and instead, they were called wreckers here. I presumed like in the old Soviet etymology of the word.

This was kind of amusing because despite being sourced from a Russian word, most of the wreckers weren't Slavic immigrants like they were in Night City, but just a normal distribution of the demographics of Los Angeles County as a whole. It made me curious why Night City was different that way. Of course, it might just be because Night City had a larger immigrant population to begin with. After all, they didn't follow any of the NUSA immigration laws or most of any of the others, either.

In the past ten years, a number of federal agencies created offices in Night City, but invariably, they suffered some kind of freak fire or similar natural disaster in their offices, and it got to the point that no landlord would rent to them at all, despite how many threats they made.

In any case, once the area around my clinic became more stable, gangs started attempting to move in, and now I was dealing with the Lotus Tong, who was acting as a mediator between one of these groups and me after some unpleasantness occurred. My issue with face was such that I couldn't even say the things I wanted to say to the other party, so it wasn't a meeting where we sat down and hashed things out so much as each of us meeting in private with the Lotus Tong, who operated as a go-between.

We were meeting at one of the Lotus Tong's few clubs in the back during the day. I was dressed in a Dr Hasumi equivalent of a corpo outfit, which was a skirt-suit in a striking red colour, which I personally didn't care too much for. I brought Kiwi and one of her team, who I had bought nice outfits for the other day. I was trying to give the impression that they were a company SecTeam, at least a part-time one.

I ground my teeth together and said in Mandarin, "With all due respect, if someone says they're going to burn my clinic to the ground, I am allowed to believe them and take appropriate actions. Hypothetically, I mean." I said hypothetically because the leader of this small fifty-person gang had just vanished without a trace, and nobody could prove that I had anything to do with it.

The Lotus Tong lieutenant's smile was forced. Apparently, what I also didn't precisely understand was the street criminal corollary to face where I was supposed to allow people a certain amount of posturing for their "boys."

This man was the Lotus Tong Red Pole or leader of their enforcers. He was, generally speaking, the only one in their organisation I dealt with at all, except the one time that I had to pay my respects to the Mountain Master.

The Lotus Tong were very street-oriented, even more so than the Tyger Claws were, so there was very little overlap as far as anyone that had the sophistication to be an interlocutor with me, so it fell on this man, Chang Jung, to do so. He was a rather intellectual sort and fell into the role of liaison with some of the legitimate private businesses in Chinatown, despite his responsibilities as one of the Tong's military commanders.

They didn't have very many Tong-owned legitimate businesses, nor did they have very many classy forms of income. They robbed, they sold drugs, they extorted people, and that was about it. Still, they were one of the least offensive gangs in the city, even with all that.

I was glad that Sarah hadn't actually been forming a brand new bloodthirsty elvish poser gang as I had thought. Although, that would have been kind of funny to see, especially if someone would then form a Dwarvish or Orcish gang in response.

We talked a bit more, but the fundamental thing was I wasn't in any trouble, and in fact, the new head of the small gang was a bit pleased with me as he had been looking to move on up in the first place. The deputy, now head of this gang, was also looking to be absorbed by the Lotus, from what I could tell.

Then he'd shift from the leader of a small-time gang to the Captain in a large one. I could see the benefits, but I had the sudden feeling from the affable but cunning eyes of the Lotus Tong Red Pole that I had been taken advantage of somehow.

---xxxxxx---

The cyber-surgical residents had a meeting with their attendings every day where the attendings would relay information they received and divvy out pre-planned surgeries. Although surgeries could and often did pop up as emergencies, the truth was that most emergency cybernetics implantations could be put off for a day or two and were, once, a patient was stabilised. Those that couldn't wait would be handled on the rule of first-come-first-served by whoever was providing the consult to the Emergency Department unless the patient was important enough to warrant special treatment.

"Okay, mostly everything is pretty normal today. We have the usual number of livers, hearts and spines. One cyberdeck implantation and I'll take that with Dr Tanner," my attending said, glancing at one of my peers. I was already considered one of the senior residents, despite this being my first year. It was solely by my very high level of competence. A normal surgical residency in this world was four to five years long, but I would probably be done in a year and a half at most.

I was especially known for how well I handled neurosurgeries, so I was a little surprised I wouldn't be assisting with the cyberdeck installation or even doing it myself. I had two such surgeries where I was the first surgeon under my belt, and they both went well.

My attending, Dr Berg, turned his gaze to me in sympathy, "We also have a special."

That got everyone's interest. A special meant a special project; it was usually something along the lines of implanting an experimental piece of hardware for a research project, a very important person as a patient, or something else very out of the ordinary. We all quite liked them, because usually, they paid a lot more. Although we were on a salary, it was somewhat minimal, and surgeons, even residents, were mainly compensated for the surgery performed. This caused some surgeons to hyper-specialise in only one particular surgery, which they could knock out maybe five to ten procedures a day.

There was one surgeon that came to the hospital to use our OR that specialised only in Midnight Lady accessories, and he drove a ridiculously expensive luxury car with the vanity license plate "THEPDOC." What the P stood for was, in my opinion, as obvious as it was crude. I didn't consider these sorts of surgeons actual doctors, though; they were just technicians that had, through rote memorisation, mastered one or two procedures. Still, some were quite rich.

"Sakura, you're going to be taking this. Sorry, it's a multi-day shit show. It's an experimental neural implant from our friends in Cupertino. I'm sending you the deets over intraoffice mail," he said. Ah, that explained why he wasn't doing it himself. Zetatech, the technology company based in Cupertino, California was a big investor in the Cedar-Sinai Medical Centre, so they pretty much got whatever they wanted when they wanted it, and without paying the extra money for extra compensation to us mere spear carriers.

Dr Berg, who was still one of my part-time locums at my clinic, also knew I was more, compared to the others, wealthy and that I didn't really care so much about making as much as possible while a resident, but what I wanted was interesting and varied surgeries. Plus, I was probably the only one of the residents that could handle a complicated neural surgery if it was something novel. All of them could follow the steps to put in a normal operating system, or optics, of course, but if I didn't take it, he would have to, and that would mean he would lose out on a lot of money, and I would lose out on an exciting surgery, so I heartily approved of his win-win decision.

Although, I honestly didn't like him calling me by my first name. It was a bit too familiar. I frowned. Or rather, I felt that Dr Hasumi wouldn't like it. If I was Taylor, I would have preferred it, though. Sometimes it was annoying to keep track of those sorts of things. I nodded at him, and he continued, "You can pick anyone but Tanner or Chang as your assistant, though." I glanced around, and people were quickly trying to avoid making eye contact with me. They didn't want to lose money for several days or a week.

I felt that the one who would mind the least was, "Dr Iverson," I said. The tall dark-complexioned man smiled ruefully and nodded. I liked him. He had an agreeable, serene temperament and hadn't asked me out on a date like most of the male residents under Dr Berg. Even one of the female doctors even asked me out, too!! That was a little outside my expectations, but I guessed lurid office romances when you were a medical resident were a rite-of-passage of this profession, but I definitely wasn't interested in any of that.

Plus, romance with co-workers didn't seem like a good idea to me. However, my memories from NC-Taylor seemed to suggest that this was incorrect, though if you ever worked for a large Corporation. Romance outside of the Corporate family would be heavily scrutinised and distrusted by your peers and bosses, depending on your job.

After the meeting broke up, I told Dr Iverson that I would review everything privately first and we should sync up before lunch to plan our next steps. The files sent by Dr Berg included an already-scheduled consult in a couple of hours, except it wasn't with the patient; it was with the Zetatech rep. I sighed; it was going to be one of those, was it? I would refuse this surgery if the patient didn't want to do it or if Zetatech wanted me to conceal the risk or consequences in proceeding forward. Hopefully, that wouldn't be the case.

As a lowly resident, I didn't have an office, but there were communal private ones, more little cubbies, that anyone could borrow, and I sat in one as I pulled up my recent e-mails.

There was a new e-mail from someone I didn't recognise, sent to everyone who worked in the Emergency Department, even rarely like myself. It was a demand, although it read more like a plea, for people in the overnight shift to please stop using the physical therapy room to have sex. I snorted and deleted the message.

The data packet from Dr Berg was encrypted at the highest level that we used at this hospital, which caused me to raise my eyebrows. I glanced around the little cubby I was in, frowning. Where was the stupid thing?

Ah, it was in the back of the drawer. I pulled out a small box and used my implants to pair with the device after I dusted it off. These things were pretty old, and there were a lot of ways you could bypass a physical biometric like a handprint, but it was only used when combining your system login credentials, so I'd rate the security as "so-so." A DNA taster would be far better, but that would also be a lot more expensive to roll out for thousands of employees.

After I paired with the device, I placed my palm on the scanner plate of the device and held it there until it lit up green. Instantly, the cubby's door behind me locked with a mechanical thud sound, while at the same time, a local wireless jammer activated. In theory, this meant that I couldn't leave nor contact outside parties while I reviewed this confidential file. In truth, the security was mostly theatre. While I couldn't transfer the file from the company's intranet, only view it, I could take screenshots of each page or even scroll my own BD of me reviewing it. In fact, that sounded like a good idea.

After the files were decrypted and pulled up on my screen, I sat there in my allegedly secure cubby and reviewed them. My patient… wait, patients were a pair of identical twins. Brothers that were in their mid-twenties. I skimmed their medical records before switching to look at the proposed procedure.

"Neural oscillation synchronisers?" I asked rhetorically, testing the words. I frowned and then quietly read the attached whitepaper that Zetatech had included; although it was excessively long, it had large parts of it that were redacted. Reading between the lines in the whitepaper, I deduced that these were for a military project, with the idea that an entire squad of soldiers could be synchronised together as, in effect, a gestalt. Such a squad would offer unparalleled combat effectiveness, teamwork, and coordination. It would be a true force multiplier for elite small-unit forces. According to the white paper, anyway.

That was an absolutely terrible idea, and it was no wonder there was page after page of redacted text that was probably talking about how they had driven some people insane attempting it anyway. Rather than totally cancelling the project, though, they decided that they were just perhaps a little too ambitious with testing at first, and now they were testing with volunteer monozygotic twin sets in an attempt to reduce the variables. Would they move to triplets and quintuplets next?

The paper had redacted most of the discussion about the technical aspects and the theory about how the system functioned, but it had to leave enough data for a surgeon to know how to install it, so it was pretty easy for me to infer the broad strokes, especially since I was working on similar research myself.

This system was designed to create a new personality based on all of the inputs into the network and on the fly too. The intelligence of one of the members could be combined with the fearlessness of another, while the inventiveness of a third would be used as well. Negative traits such as cowardliness, flightiness or disobedience from an individual could be bypassed by and not included in the networked gestalt.

The base tech was somewhat similar to Project Synchronicity but completely different in execution. There was a continuous brain link but no linked memories, short or long-term, so if a synchronisation discontinuity occurred and one member dropped from the network, they might find themselves rather disoriented for some time.

I didn't think it sounded very promising from a military perspective considering the link used jammable short-range high-bandwidth radio-frequency links to create the ad-hoc mesh network, but perhaps they had some sort of jam-resistant link technology that they wasn't included in this research model.

I frowned. Was this too much of a coincidence? No, it was impossible. I hadn't gotten beyond the design stage for Project Synchronicity. Nothing was built. I firmly believed that if I was so compromised that people were reading my private files that existed only in my implants, I would not be sitting here right now. The working instantaneous communication system would be enough to kill or sequester me. Or both.

Plus, it wasn't like this sort of research was unique. It had been tried back before the DataKrash. It failed terribly back then, too, but it did become the basis for some ad-hoc mesh network design in low-level robots, some of which were still used today.

Yeah, this wasn't even that weird as the research went on this world. It was just quite a coincidence that it was fairly similar to my own plans. This neural oscillation synchroniser system took n number of individuals and produced one distinct output entity, at least while they were all connected anyway.

Project Synchronicity would take one unique individual and create n number of duplicates which were all linked in every way in real-time. One of the individuals in the network would only diverge if it were disconnected for a long period of time. So it was basically the exact opposite.

So long as I had a single stream of consciousness, even if it were over multiple bodies, then even if one of the bodies was destroyed, while it would diminish me temporarily, it would not kill me, even if the destroyed body was my original (*gulp*.) That was the somewhat scary idea that I had been turning over and over in my head since I realised the possibilities of the Haywire comm, anyway.

It was a superior form of "immortality" than simply having a backup clone, as I would become a distributed attack surface. Want to kill me? That would require killing all of the members of the network before any single node could clone a replacement body and add it to the network.

So long as I had a single stream of consciousness and wasn't a network of individuals linked together, then if one body was destroyed and replaced, it became a Ship of Theseus situation rather than a replaced by a clone situation. At least, that was my opinion, although I would definitely try to avoid dying anyway.

There was just the issue that the human brain was definitely not designed for sensory multiplexing. I had tons of ideas on how to create a brain that did support that feature, but the issue was it wouldn't be my brain. It was much harder to add these types of features to a brain that already existed compared to designing them in vitro. Consciousness was an emergent property, even for me, and without a lot of testing, it would be quite dangerous.

These neural oscillation synchronisers, however, seemed to use a cybernetic mechanical solution to this problem while I had been thinking of how to safely deploy a biological one. They claimed that they linked the large-scale brain networks together fairly seamlessly.

It was wrong to think of the brain as a monolith in the first place. It was wrong to even think of individual brain regions as a monolith. My consciousness was comprised of a series of functional connectivity networks in the first place, so it should be possible to add more without losing the spark that was me.

How interesting. I shifted back to the patient records and looked at the proposed treatment plan provided by Zetatech and sucked my teeth in disappointment, "Tsk... this is going to have to be all changed. Why are they trying to do it on the cheap?"

I shook my head and lifted my hand off the biometric scanning plate, which caused the open file to close and the room to unlock. I triggered deep dive mode on my deck but just sat in my inner bastion node and rezzed in some virtual paper to write notes. I didn't bring any physical paper into this room with me, which was an oversight, and sometimes I preferred to write things down the old-fashioned way.

The augmented reality mode of modern cyberdecks was quite slick, but it still wasn't in the realm of rendering full-sense interactive virtual objects and pasting them into your sensorium yet.

"Hoot," my ICON said, and I frowned, waving a wing and talon. I had never actually updated my ICON to something different. That was bad, but I hadn't actually had much time to dive into the net since I had been in LA.

---xxxxxx---

I asked Dr Iverson to come along when I met with the Zetatech tech rep. I could immediately tell it wasn't the person who invented this technology but possibly one of their minions, or research assistants, rather.

I wanted to interrupt him, but Dr Hasumi was too polite to do so, so instead, I waited until he finished his presentation. When he asked if we had any questions or concerns, I nodded, "Yes. The two patients are monozygotic twins, clones from a genetic perspective. That's good. However, they've diverged significantly since then. Look, each twin has a different model of operating system and different optics. Then there are various other factors, like a poorly healed meniscus injury on patient A, and patient B has two missing molars. These factors need to be normalised."

He frowned and said, "What do you mean?"

"Remove and replace all of their implants with identical models. Neither of their OSes was designed for the high-speed neural architecture your widget uses, anyway. Repair and regenerate patient A's meniscus, regenerate patient B's molars, et cetera," I said simply.

The guy shook his head, "None of that is in the research budget; we can't--"

This time I did interrupt him, but as politely as I could by raising my hand until he stopped speaking himself. I leaned forward, "Please stop trying to spend an eddie to save an ennie. You're going to implicate your research results if you don't correct for every factor you can on the front end, and worse, you're going to implicate them in a false negative. And worst of all, this is all cheap!"

Also, with identical everything, it would reduce the amount of mental instability this procedure would cause them. Plus, from my perspective, it would give me more data if I could observe them when they were as close to identical as possible. I was sure that Zetatech didn't care about their research subject's stability, but in this case, they should because it would impact their data from the experiment. I continued, "Plus, you produce all of this stuff yourself, except for optics which are cheap anyway. Why would you even entertain the idea of not changing everything to your company standard? Are you going to rely on the word of their current OS manufacturers, BioDyne and Meditech, that they implemented the common high-speed data bus and followed the entire standard correctly? If you have issues in the future, how will you isolate for this and debug it? You could be chasing your tail for months before you realise some issue you notice in these subjects is not even your problem."

He opened his mouth, then closed it. Then he was silent for a good minute before saying, "That is a good point. I'm going to have to call Dr Reynolds. If you'll excuse me for a moment."

When he left, Dr Iverson nodded at me appreciatively and said, "You vaporised him, Dr Hasumi. Preem. I hadn't even looked at the specifics of each patient yet; I was focusing on how we will connect the device so thoroughly." He held his hand out for a fist bump, which I obliged.

"So, today we'll R&R everything on A and B, give them the rest of the day to acclimate to the new Zetatech systems, then tomorrow do the procedure?" he asked, testing the idea.

"Yup," I said in a somewhat un-Hasumi way, emphasising the "p" sound of the word excessively, "Draw up orders now to admit them both, too. They can spend the night in medsurge; otherwise, one of them will get hit by a bus on the way home or some other complication, and then we'll be back at square one tomorrow."

---xxxxxx---

I did see the patients, a set of brothers by the name of Paul and Will Ochoki. Personally, I did think they were on the borderline of being crazy. They clearly had some attachment and abandonment issues, having survived both their parents dying when they were five years old. They only had each other to rely upon since then.

That said, they were definitely willing participants, and even more, they thought it was great, amazing even. I couldn't deny them medical agency simply because they were a few french fries short of a little clown meal. Otherwise, hardly anyone in Los Angeles or the world would qualify to make their own decisions.

They knew the risks, and they were willing... no, eager participants. That was good enough for my morals.

The surgeries over the next two days went off without a hitch, and the delay of twenty-four hours not only gave the twins a chance to acclimate to their replaced cybersystems but it also gave me a chance to, in the middle of the night, very carefully examine and partially disassemble one of the neural synchroniser systems.

"Okay, I'm going to activate the system," I told the twins, with the Zetatech rep sitting in a corner, trying to avoid looking excited. I mentally flipped a switch, and both brothers froze for a moment before glancing around and then at me.

"This is..." body A said, "...quite unusual," finished body B.

Dr Iverson, next to me, was reading scrolling text from his optics and said, "Intra and interneural transmissions are in the green; data link at sixty-one per cent of max throughput, SNR nominal, high-speed data bus nominal, everything is to spec."

The Zetatech rep had us run battery after battery of tests, but I cut Dr Iverson loose before lunch, which he seemed very thankful for. I stuck around mainly because it was expected I help the suit with reasonable requests, but more importantly, I was quite invested in how this was working.

It certainly appeared to create a new personality that was different from both patient A and B, and I was privately calling him Ab as a combination of the two. But at the same time, they scored somewhat similar on some personality matrices, too.

The Zetatech guy seemed excited, though just from the fact that they seemed mentally stable, which left me wondering just how terribly their initial tests of this system had gone.

At the end of the day, I gave Ab one of my business cards for my clinic. I'd be interested in following up with him. The deal with Zetatech meant that he was keeping the implants after they were done with repeated tests over a period of months, and I'd like to examine them at that time.

These neural synchronisers were completely and utterly useless to me, and in fact, the exact opposite of what I wanted, but they went about it in an interesting way that I could and already had learned something from.

---xxxxxx---

Everyone had certain things that they were sensitive to, and I heard one of my personal peccadillos later that evening when I overheard David talking to Gloria about bullies. I perked up, setting aside the chopsticks. Gloria seemed to be trying to suggest that he should be trying to get along with them and makeup with the boy that was bullying him, which caused my blood pressure to rise twenty millimetres instantly.

"No, no. That won't work," I said to both of them intensely, "You can't let assholes get away with being assholes."

She looked at me and sighed, saying, "Tay, the world is full of assholes; you do realise that?"

I nodded and said, "Yes, and do you know why?"

She went along with my obvious question and asked, "Why?"

"Because people let them get away with it," I said with intense emotion and meaning. I sighed and said, "Besides, he's in a Corpo school now. Corpo children are designed to detect and seek out weakness almost from when they can walk. You didn't grow up like this, but I did. If you want David to succeed on this path, then he needs to listen to my advice right now. He's already on the back foot from being an independent enrollee. The most anti-social of the little shi--" I stopped myself in mid-swear, "little brats probably smell blood in the water, just from that alone. If he were a real Corporate enrollee, he would have the built-in support network of the other kids from his same Corp to assist and shield him."

David just nodded rapidly, twice. Gloria thought about it for a moment before nodding. I waved David over to me and said, "Okay, first steps. Repeat after me: Identify the enemy and establish numbers."

He repeated that but looked a little confused. "I already know who he is, though."

"You know his name, sure. But do you know him? What Corp does his parents work at, what jobs do they do at that Corp, what are his weaknesses, and what are his strengths? Does he have other enemies? What are the consequences and costs if you were to just walk up and punch him in the nose? If his parents are janitors, probably nothing, but if his parents are Senior Vice Presidents, you'd be expelled for sure. As for numbers, you need to understand his resources. In grade school, this mainly means his friends. Does he have any? If so, are they just the same kids at the same Corp, or does he have a clique of eclectic cross-Corp friends? What is their status? Now repeat what I said before," I said.

His eyes got wide, and he nodded, "Identify the enemy and establish numbers."

"Correct. Tomorrow at school, you will work on gathering this information. Remember, most bullies are weaklings. Someone who is truly confident in their own self, body, and capabilities would generally not need to put someone else down. The truly exceptional don't even think about people beneath them, much less seek to torment them," I told him before rubbing my chin in thought, "Another possibility is that he is using you as a sacrifice to create an esprit de corps of his friend group. By othering you into the out-group, he is trying to collectively bond his friend-group tighter through your suffering," I said, but instantly realised that I would have to break what I was saying and dumb it down to a first-grade level as he was not quite understanding.

Looking back on my own experiences with the Trio, I felt that they each had some combination of both of those possibilities, with the exception of Sophia Hess, who I thought was just a psychopath, but I hardly knew anything about the now-dead girl. I had practised the strategy that Gloria had been advocating, one of avoidance, and it just didn't work.

I spent the next fifteen minutes repeating what I had said in various ways before he eventually widened his eyes in comprehension and nodded rapidly. I was about to discuss with him ways he could gather the information he needed to make plans next, but I got interrupted by a call. In order to actually disturb me at dinner, this call had to be either from someone in a priority group or the person had to have said a number of keywords to my simple AI-based call screening service.

I twitched when I saw the caller ID, "Moshi-moshi, Hasumi-desu," I said after answering the vidcall. I double-checked that the encryption was active.

"Hasumi-sensei, how ya doin'?" he asked in an affable Kansai dialect, which made my eyebrows twitch. I had never actually heard him speak Japanese very much before I got the language chips I was using now. There was no one-to-one comparison between accents, of course, but it was close enough to the Japanese equivalent of the "Aw, shucks" Southern American accent that I had to try to avoid snickering at his face. It suited him.

I wasn't going to talk with him over the phone, though, even encrypted, "Are you in town?"

"Ayup," he said with a grin.

I nodded, "Come to my clinic. I'll let you in. If you hurry, you can still have some stir fry." Then I hung up.

When I let him into the living room, David's eyes lit up. "Johnny!" he yelled and ran over to say hello.

"'Ello, little pardner. You been keepin' out of trouble?" Johnny asked, after lifting and tossing the kid into the air, which David still obviously enjoyed despite protesting to me that "it was for babies" when I did it to him.

"Go ahead and make yourself a plate, then you can tell me what the f... what you are doing here," I told Johnny, who nodded, removed his ridiculous white cowboy hat and sat it on a table before serving himself some of the stir-fry and rice.

As he ate, I asked him conversationally, "So, how's things in Night City?"

He winced, "Ahh... not too good. There's been some bloodshed." Then he told me about how a couple of the Tyger Claws' stupider members had murdered a prostitute. In response, the owner of the club this prostitute worked at had killed both of them with an axe in front of God and everyone.

I winced. Personally, I agreed with her decision. However, it was a bit of a short-sighted one from what I had learned about the psychology of street gangs. If she had just made the offending Tyger Claws disappear, never to be seen again, she might have even gotten a private thank you from some inside the gang. But killing them openly? It rubbed the gang's nose in it and impacted their face.

"Wait, her name's Elizabeth Borden?" I blinked. Was that a coincidence? I recited in a sing-song voice, "Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave a Claw forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave the other forty-one."

He blinked, "That's quite good, but I reckon it'd be rather self-defeatin' of me to overly praise somethin' that invites anyone to whack me with an axe, ma'am."

Were there no Lizzie Borden murders in this world? I didn't believe that, but it was possible they had left the popular culture due to time and the Data Krash. Maybe this new Lizzie Borden found a reference somewhere and used it and an axe as the image of her persona.

Not surprisingly, a group of the Claws had murdered her. What was surprising, though, was how much of a mistake that was. There were riots, city-wide, with the up unto now more or less passive joy-toy demographic taking up arms and shooting anyone they thought was oppressing them, but especially the Tyger Claws, which had casualties in the low hundreds.

"It woulda been a lot worse, but Mr Jin had a pretty good relationship with the joytoys around Japantown. After all, the dolls in Clouds are in some ways, the pinnacle of the profession, I guess, and they've been well-treated and well-compensated. Anyway, he managed to have a sit down with the main lady of industry that the more militant of the joytoys were coalescin' behind," he said, shrugging, "Things might have gotten straight up out of hand if not for that. I reckon he's in pretty good odour with the bosses right now."

After dinner, I talked with him privately. It turned out he was here to cash in on one of Wakako's DNA adjustment favours. Not for himself but for someone he was escorting. He handed me a package that contained both the current scans and genome of my "patient" as well as the scans and a genetic sample of who they were expected to be transformed into.

"It'll take me a couple of days to get ready, so just sit on them in whatever safehouse you're in for now," I told Johnny, who nodded. "When I'm ready, I'll give you a drug that will knock them out, and you can bring them by here unconscious. They'll stay sedated for the entire program, and then I'll return them to you the same way."

"I reckon that sounds like a good way to protect your identity, Hasumi-sensei," he said with a grin. He then asked, "After this, I'd like to come back and take you up on that offer for some chrome before I head back to NC." He shook his head, "Almost got flatlined myself, and it didn't sit too well with me that I had to blast some young lady who was thinkin' she was doing the right thing before she could throw a grenade at me." He shook his head, "If I was faster, better... I'd maybe been able to stop her some other way."

I raised an eyebrow but nodded. I had a few Sandy's in stock. Zetatech branded ones were very easy to acquire here in LA, and I had bought a number from people second-hand and sold some to the Lotus Tong, as well.

I had been trying to get another Type K-02 Kerenzikov from Kang Tao but to no avail. I needed at least one more, along with a duplicate of all of my other cybernetics, to proceed through to the first stages of Project Synchronicity.

"Sure," I told him with a nod. Johnny may have been a bit of a clown and a bit of an idiot, but I felt that he was actually kind of a good guy, which made him a committed and lifelong member of the Claws all the more tragic.

After Johnny left, I went into my lab to start crafting the virus, as well as to make sure all of my algae experiments were under wraps. I was done, anyway. The algae was ready to deploy, and I was just waiting to plan an operation with Kiwi.

Although I had wanted to perform tests, perhaps in a saltwater lake or an uninhabited island, the truth was that I couldn't take the personal risk.

It would already be dangerous enough to deploy once. Doing so another time would add another datum that could possibly be correlated to me. I was sure that the Powers That Be wouldn't really care about a saltwater lake or small island being infested with algae temporarily, but it would be noticed by Earth-observing satellites and noted. Then once my algae bloom was deployed for real? They'd definitely look back retrospectively.

I was very confident in its safety and safeguards, though. Plus, I had one method to kill it all on a global scale anyway if it got out of hand. I accepted that it was going to be somewhat damaging to the continental shelf biomes, but not as much as one would think. It would definitely out-compete all other algae within five kilometres of shore, but the life cycle of my algae was unique.

To really impact Biotechnica's sales quickly, then it had to be vastly superior to its wheat product. So, my algae collected carbon, both from the atmosphere and the ocean and converted it directly into ethanol. There was no need to harvest the algae and then use bioreactors to convert it to a hydrocarbon.

While it was trapped in the algae, it wasn't a flammability hazard either, but it was somewhat toxic to marine life if ingested, plus it could get them drunk, so the algae was designed to be brightly coloured and taste terrible and cause rapid mild but mostly harmless sickness at low dosages.

An enterprising person could collect the algae from the coastal areas and extract the fuel by the simple expedient of crushing it like you were making orange juice. Bam, free fuel. One square kilometre could yield over six hundred litres of fuel a day with the rate the algae grew.

If it wasn't harvested, and not all of it would ever be, even if they had boats trawling the coasts every single day, the algae entered its final life cycle where it converted the ethanol into edible sugars and died, sinking to the bottom of the water. This both would feed numerous animals when they discovered the bounty, but it would also act as a carbon sink.

The entire system was a carbon sink, actually, but if you extracted the methanol and burned it again, you would, of course, release much of the carbon back into the atmosphere as methanol burned into carbon dioxide and water. But not all of it, as there was a fair bit of carbon in the structure of the algae itself.

It was also toxin resistant, but this variant didn't yet have the capability to sequester or purify toxins, but it was going to be pulling many, many tons of CO2, CO, methane and other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere every year. By the end of the century, the air might be at the level it was at the turn of the millennium. Which still wasn't great, but it was a lot better, and as a first step, it was awesome.

While at the same time providing a sustainable and renewable direct chemical energy source.

It wasn't all because I hated Biotechnica. If people didn't have to grow fuel, then they could start growing food again. The population of the planet had hovered at around two billion for a long time, and the bottleneck was food production. When food competed with energy production that those in power needed for material consumption, the poor always lost out.

I knew doing this was, in some ways, just like squeezing a balloon -- the air just gets moved around. Sure, Biotechnica might lose a bit, but that would just mean that other Corps, especially Petrochem and the like, would gain. That was just something I had to accept would happen. I didn't have the capability to change the way the whole world thought; all I could do was just hopefully make it a little better, a little bit at a time.

Hoping for trickle-down prosperity kind of irritated me, but refusing to act just because it would benefit those in power was naive. The world was set up so that everything benefited these people.

Tapping the algae limpet mines, I said, "Soon, my pretties."