54 Magna Cum Laude

November 2066

Los Angeles

As I just continued relaxing in a comfortable chair in England, I was still working in Los Angeles. I was tired all over, though, so I was doing some low-intensity managerial work, the kind I usually hated to do, but it was mostly mindless.

However, I was frowning at the data I was reading off a few spreadsheets and a couple of graphs. When I created my factory, I included some automated systems that tracked the efficiency and speed of my manufacturing workers. I didn't have a traditional assembly line; it was more like many cubicle-like stations where workers would perform an operation and then move on. For simplicity's sake and for covering shifts when I had call-outs, all workers were trained on all stages of the assembly, even if they didn't often work every station.

Simple commercial machine-learning systems attached to cameras in the factory could track how long it took for each worker to perform each operation. I had been auditing some business classes on the net, which I found incredibly boring, but in the classes, these metrics were called KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators.

It was basically a way to find slackers and weed them out over time. They used a lot of different and more fancy words to describe it, but that's what the crux of the matter was. This was data that the workers' direct supervisors mainly used, as I didn't generally involve myself in managing any employees except my direct reports, which I kept to an absolute minimum.

However, what I was looking at wasn't individual performance like my supervisors concerned themselves with, but trends of everyone together. Regardless of the individual, performance started to go down the longer the shift lasted. I mean, that made sense, especially if you stretched it out to the absurd. Someone's productivity would be zero or negative if you made them work fifty hours in a row, for example. That was obvious, but what wasn't obvious was how quickly this started happening.

My workers worked, on average, five days a week on a ten-hour shift, not including a thirty-five-minute lunch. I had picked that as from what I had researched, it was pretty standard, but performance started going down non-linearly after five hours to the point where it wasn't even that useful to have them working the last hour of their shift.

Humming, I opened up a scratch pad and did some calculations. It would be about the same amount of productivity if I changed the shift schedule to ten hours a day in total. The workday would comprise two four-hour shifts, separated by one hour of paid free time, wherein I would encourage the employees to use one of the sleep inducers in our break room and a forty-five-minute unpaid lunch.

My factory had two shifts a day, so this would shift production from two ten-hour shifts to four four-hour shifts. Assuming the workers came back at about the same level as they started after their break, this would break even. But even if they weren't quite as refreshed, the costs should still be in the nominal range while the improvement to the worker quality of life should be high.

The only issue was our break room needed to be bigger. I sighed and called the general contractors again. I still had plenty of free room in the factory building. I would just build a large open room with many comfortable chairs for "naps." If, instead of napping as I intended, they wanted to watch BDs or something, that was fine as long as they returned refreshed for the second half of their work day.

Perhaps a worker canteen might be in order, too. But I didn't want to use too much space in that one building. I was still slowly expanding, and I'd rather maximise the productive areas. For now, I would offer a catering service. At cost, an employee could order food from a few different places if they didn't bring in their own lunch, and I would soak the delivery fees since I could make the order in bulk. I only ran two shifts a day, so we would just shut down for lunch on both shifts. That wasn't ideal, but it would work for the moment.

To be honest, I still felt a bit bad for accidentally Greyboying my original QA team. At least they only had to relive the same five minutes from one of my corny BDs, though, and not being tortured repeatedly.

It was hard to quantify quality-of-life improvements on a job without a consultant doing a full dive into my entire operations, so I wouldn't experience any backlash from this, aside from my employees saying I was a good company to work for. Most of my manufacturing jobs were temporary anyway. I already had the funds, if I wanted to, to build a second, much more automated production line, but the ROI break-even point was like four to five years, so I was hesitating.

It would be nice to introduce my implant versions soon, but manufacturing cybernetics, like many medical products, was complicated and much more expensive. I would need to invest heavily in one hundred per cent sterile clean-room manufacturing processes, which was very expensive. In these cases, automation was ideal because it kept human contact with the product to a minimum, which minimised the chances that sterility could be broken. So I was considering keeping my current laborious manufacturing process for the wreaths while investing in automation for cybernetics.

Still, my power seemed eager to help me design a clean-room factory, seeing the entire thing as either a medical device itself or a device to manufacture medical devices, so perhaps I wouldn't need to buy highly expensive off-the-shelf designs. After all, who knew more about infectious diseases and contaminants than I did?

---xxxxxx---

I had the idea to visit a gun shop in London, maybe some fancy one, but ultimately decided not to bother. It was true that I felt better armed, but this wasn't America, where I could buy a submachine pistol out of a vending machine. I thought it was better to try to blend in in this foreign nation. Besides, I didn't have very much time. I doubted that gun stores here were open twenty-four-seven, and I had to be at the John Radcliffe Hospital tomorrow morning.

Exploring the house, I didn't uncover any secret bunker or scandalous secrets. It was clean and contained nothing except extra linens in some of the closets. I did notice that they were super high thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets on all of the beds, though. It was nice enough that I might actually use the bed instead of just sitting in a comfortable chair with my sleep inducer on.

The nicest part of the master bedroom was the attached bathroom, which had a giant jacuzzi-style bathtub that I immediately filled to the brim with hot, bubbly water and soaked in for a good hour and a half while I relaxed, reading the debut novel of an AI author who went by the nom de plume Virginia Granchester. The novel was Requiem for a Samurai, and I sighed with emotion as I reached the denouement.

I wanted to dislike this novel but couldn't. While it wasn't quite a masterpiece, it was a surprisingly approachable tale of a Samurai after the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century. It was, of course, a tragedy, as how could it not be? But, what was surprising was how relatable the AI had made the story to even European and American audiences like myself, as the novel had been translated into seventy different languages at launch while still maintaining it as a compelling story, even if you had no Japanese cultural referents.

Glancing down at my fingers and toes, I sighed. I was all pruned up. I sat in the tub until all the water drained out and then dried myself with a towel before padding over to the large King-sized bed in the next room and climbing into the sheets. My sleep inducer was on the nightstand already, but I had the desire to replace it with an implanted version as soon as possible.

The main reason I didn't use beds was that I liked putting a pillow over my head while I slept, and this tended to knock the wreath off my head, but if I could have a bed and sheets this nice, then it was worth it to accelerate my plans for, at least, a sleep inducer that I could plug into one of my cyber brain's expansion slots.

I wasn't ready to sleep, as I was still busy getting training in space. I had finished their "newbie course" and actually found gainful employment, so now I was getting training on how to be an actual zero-gee construction worker. They called this "Working the High Iron," from the days when all such work was done in low-earth orbit.

Amusingly, the group I got hired onto were building small cylinders that they intended to use to cultivate a brand-new type of algae that they imported from the Earth's surface. At first, I was a little surprised because I felt that this would be much too carbon and oxygen expensive a proposition to make their own fuels in orbit, but then I realised they didn't intend to use them for fuels, just drinking!

That made a lot more sense because all of the habitats up there had very sophisticated recycling systems for human solid and liquid waste. None of the carbon, or hardly any, would be lost.

Still, I decided to try an experiment and tried to have my body in England relax as much as possible. I had never had one body fall asleep naturally because I thought it would be a bad experience.

And I was right. Not only did it take an exceptionally long time for that brain to fall asleep, linked as it was with my other two, but as soon as it did, things got kind of psychedelic. That brain wasn't in the dream phase of sleep yet, and I didn't want to wait to see what would happen if that happened. Instead, I just shook myself and "woke up." It wasn't as bad as losing synchronicity had been, but it kind of felt like I had drunk three or four beers.

I'd just lay in bed watching videos until I got off shift in space, and then I could take a nap. Two of my bodies were back in the same time zone, even if one of them was in a wildly different inertial and temporal reference frame. The fact that Hana was so far away from the gravity well meant that my bodies were slowly, very slowly, becoming temporarily out-of-synch due to general and special relativity.

It wasn't a lot, something akin to seven to eight thousand picoseconds a year, so I could do nothing for many, many decades before I had to take countermeasures. This did mean that if I ever wanted to travel interstellar distances, though, and at interstellar speeds, it would be better to have all bodies go on the trip together. It would be possible to adjust the way my Kerenzikovs worked so that, even at somewhat high fractions of c, I experienced things the same way, but that would be very sub-optimal.

I honestly wasn't sure how the Haywire FTL comms system would impact this. Theoretically, I should be able to use it to keep my brains more in sync without me actually doing anything, but from what I understood, doing so would break causality, as travelling faster than light or even just sending information, should be indistinguishable from travelling through time, no matter the mechanism for how you did it. Still, I wasn't a physicist, and these things obviously worked, so it may be just as simple as that our present understanding of relativity was flawed.

There were tons of parahuman powers that could travel or send information faster than light, after all. A lot of teleporters could, although some were limited in how many jumps or hops they could make; even Legend was supposed to be, in theory, able to travel faster than light even if, in practice, he could not do so.

Or, maybe, I should look at what I would be tested over in the morning. It couldn't all be medical related, and I might actually need to review some things if they were testing English composition or history. Nodding, I set to it.

---xxxxxx---

It took me a few moments to decide which outfit to wear. The second dress wasn't suitable, as it was in the realm of "little black dresses" and I wouldn't wear a cocktail dress to an important meeting at a College. The only things I wanted to be assessed today were my medical skills and knowledge, after all. I only let Evelyn buy that dress for me in case I actually had a party to attend, although I very much hoped I never received an invitation.

I settled on a skirt-suit in charcoal grey but with dark stockings. Stockings weren't really in fashion these days, and we had to go to three stores before there were acceptable ones to buy, but I preferred stockings or pantyhose to the alternative of displaying my bare thighs to the world. Plus, I liked the way they looked anyway. That was the most important part.

The best part of having my techhair was that I didn't need to style or comb it, even after sleeping with a pillow under and above my head all night, just after getting out of the tub. I just mentally triggered it to refresh my pre-selected style, and it all untangled itself and settled down into my pre-programmed style. The processor in the system analysed each style and provided a name for them, and I was a bit offended that it called mine "curlygeddon."

Oxford wasn't a large city, so the drive to the hospital didn't take that long on the A40. Finding the correct place after I parked was a little more challenging, but that was why I left so early. After seeing it, I realised I still had an hour before the appointed time and decided to backtrack to a couple of restaurants that served breakfast, catering mainly to hospital workers.

A croissant breakfast sandwich and coffee sounded excellent, and although they weren't the best I ever had, they were serviceable, and it was a good start to my day. I had no idea how they were going to assess me, but if it was going to take ten days, then it was likely something that would be wearying. Perhaps exams on every course I would have taken? The idea of testing out of classes existed back in Brockton Bay, but here it was very anachronistic.

After making sure my clothes didn't have any grease or croissant bits on them, I made my way back to the library. I was still about twenty minutes early, but that was fine. I glanced around, not entirely sure where I should go inside the library, so I ended up checking in with someone behind a desk, "Excuse me. My name is Taylor Hebert and the Dean instructed me to meet someone here."

At first, the man looked a little sceptical, but after a moment, he nodded, "Yes, you're supposed to be in conference room C-5." I thanked him for his time and went to find it. Rather than listed as a conference room, per se, it was on the map as a group study room. That was fine, I supposed.

I was the first one there, so I took a seat at the table and waited. Two people arrived five minutes or so before the appointed time, and I rose to greet them. It was a man and a woman, both in their thirties. "Miss Hebert?" the man asked, and I inclined my head.

They introduced themselves. The man was an assistant to the Dean, while the woman was Dr Grace Turner, who was the Regius Professor of Medicine, whatever that meant. It was some title that some king gave in the 16th century or something. Apparently, it meant she was somewhat high in the hierarchy in the medical school and would be the one in charge of assessing me.

"Thank you for taking time out of your week to assist me, Dr Turner," I told her and inclined my head, "So, what are the first steps?"

She told me, and it was pretty much what I thought. I'd be taking four or five tests a day, about two hours long apiece. I frowned when I added them all up together, "That seems like it will eat up the entire ten days that I was told by the Dean to free up for this assessment. What about the practical skills portion?"

The Professor frowned and said, "We will partly do that through virtual-reality braindances, but also partly in real life. You'll need to schedule another two weeks for it."

I sighed, rubbing the back of my neck. "I suppose it goes without saying that if I fail these academic exams, there would have been no need to proceed with the practical skills assessment, yes?" That caused her to nod. The Dean had been a dick, but I think I underestimated how much of a dick he actually was.

"Well, very well... where will the exams be taken? Will you be proctoring them?" I asked, finally.

She shook her head, "Not personally. They'll be proctored by AI in a specially prepared and shielded room here in the Cairns. That is to prevent you from any Net-access that might be used for cheating, as many of the exams are more on the nature of testing knowledge retention."

I started to nod, understanding, but the Dean's assistant coughed to bring our attention to him and said, "About that... Due to the unprecedented nature of this accommodation that we are granting you, we will need you to give us super-user access to your operating system to verify that you are not consulting any reference materials during the exams."

I stared at him like he was insane. Even the Regius Professor looked shocked. I pursed my lips in a thin line, saying simply, "No."

This seemed to cause the man to smirk slightly, "It isn't optional, ma'am."

I rolled my eyes, sighed and stood up, "Of course it is. The very idea of what you're asking is preposterous. Given the background of many of Oxford's students, I am absolutely certain you would never ask this of one of your other students. I really would have appreciated being told this... requirement prior to flying out here. I detest people wasting my time."

Dr Turner held out her hand and said, "Wait, maybe there is—"

However, she was interrupted by the other man who shook his head, "This is absolutely non-negotiable."

He had that fucking right. What a waste of time. I smiled at Dr Turner, "Apologies for wasting your time." Then I stared emotionlessly at the other man, who was kind of blocking my way out of the small conference room, "Sir, remove yourself from my path, and kindly go short to your own ground." I tested out a spacer insult that Hana learned, which had the same meaning as 'go fuck yourself.' I decided I quite liked it.

He sputtered a bit, but perhaps something about the way I was staring him down made him wise enough not to push the matter, and he stepped back two steps. As I left, I heard the barest beginnings of a conversation through the door. It was Dr Turner, saying, "Are you a fucking—"

I didn't stick around to eavesdrop because I was quite annoyed. Had this entire trip been a waste of time, then? Gram's secretary had asked me to inform them of how long I would need the house, so I sent her a quick text message stating that I would not need it anymore, at least after this morning.

I hadn't made it to my car before Gram's secretary called me, and I answered. He seemed concerned, "Miss Hebert. Was there something wrong with the house?"

I made a 'Tsk' noise and said, "No, there wasn't anything wrong with it. It's perfect. There's just something wrong with Oxford, though, and it seems like it won't work out." I then explained in simple terms what happened. He remained silent for a while, and I could hear the literal click-clacks of an actual mechanical keyboard, something I hadn't heard since Brockton Bay.

"Are you still in town?" he asked, and I indicated that I was, "Let me see if I can solve this issue. Sir Stewart perhaps didn't understand the request or your precise status. If all else fails, we can definitely arrange a similar degree-by-exam at Trinity College here in Dublin very rapidly," he said, sounding a little weary in the way that people often got weary at the world and at people who increased their workload. I didn't take it personally, though, and it seemed he was annoyed at the Dean, not me.

"Okay... that would be nice, too," I said, feeling a little better about the situation. Then, I had to ask, "Is that an actual mechanical keyboard I hear?"

His tone brightened, and he started talking with the zeal of a religious fanatic, "Oh! I knew there was something cultured about you!" He then went on for a good five to ten minutes about mechanical keyboards, the best kinds, which was a trick question because, apparently, the best kind was the kind you had to build for yourself. He took my recognition as interest and not amazement at hearing something I hadn't heard since 2011 or even earlier. Apparently, there was a sizable mechanical keyboard community on the net, and he forwarded me a few sites, which I saved.

Well, the clicky-clacks did sound nice, I supposed, and I remembered a satisfying clicking feeling to my fingers from computer class. However, with a high-end operating system, you could type as fast as you could think, which was quite hard to beat. This guy sounded like he just liked something because it was anachronistic, like a 20th-century version of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Keyboards instead of halberds.

I decided not to even keep walking to my car, and instead just turned around and returned to the Cairns library and decided to just look around. Although the entire John Radcliffe Hospital had been rebuilt in the wake of the Data Krash after a "rebellion" of automated surgical bots resulted in the buildings being mostly demolished, almost all of the books were preserved. I didn't have the authority to check anything out, but I could still look through some of the reference books here, which were kind of interesting.

I was in Oxford, so I had to read at least a few entries from the "Oxford English Dictionary" after all. By the time I got a call, I had moved on to the older chemistry reference books and was looking at the SI units of magnetic properties. The call came from the Dean again. Grinning a little, I answered the call before my Agent could screen it, but I answered it slightly brusquely, with a simple, "Hebert."

"Ah, Miss Hebert... this is John Stewart. I want to apologise on behalf of myself and my assistant earlier today. I'd be lying if I said this request hadn't irritated me, but I assure you we did not intend to drive you away through overly-onerous requirements... my man just could tell I was a bit irritated and decided on some initiative."

I raised a single eyebrow, which was a hard gesture to do and it had taken me a lot of practice over the years I had been in Night City to perfect it, "Like... 'Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

That caused a genuine chuckle to come from the older man who nodded, "Yes, precisely!"

I grinned, "Thomas Becket was canonised if I recall. What compensation could I expect?"

This caused the man to cough, "Ah, yes... well, you see, we haven't had the best relationship with the Holy See since the Reformation, you see, so I don't think I can guarantee you canonisation. Plus, you'd definitely have to die." He was razzing me now but seemed a lot more friendly than the last time I had spoken with him.

I decided to play along, "Well, I don't like that part, at all. I suppose there's nothing to do about it."

"That's probably for the best. However, if you're still in town, you can start your assessment today. While my assistant's demand was a bit much, there will need to be some way to verify that you aren't consulting any reference materials you have saved in your implants," he sounded slightly apologetic about it.

I tilted my head to the side, about to take offense again but stopped. Really, his request wasn't that out of the ordinary. While I was sure that regular students didn't have such stringent requirements, they also had five or six years for professors to individually gauge their progress. Personally, I thought that it was a bit old-fashioned to even proscribe the use of reference materials for an exam, but this was an old-fashioned place.

I sighed and thought about this for a good fourteen hundred milliseconds of objective time before I offered, "I can scroll a virtu of myself taking the exams. That would include, obviously, my HUD, and it would be possible to verify that I wasn't pulling up any saved reference materials. But I would not agree to scroll the thought track." A BD's "thought track" didn't really correlate entirely with a person's inner monologue, so you couldn't actually "hear" someone's thoughts precisely, but it wasn't that far off, either. You'd experience their emotions, and you could, with practice, kind of intuit what they were thinking about, so I considered it confidential.

Plus, I had already tested only recording one-third of my "thoughts", and I would have come across as very flightly, almost ditzy. It would appear kind of like someone with really bad ADHD, thinking of very random things. The Dean considered this for a moment before nodding, "Yes, that would definitely be sufficient. Dr Turner is still in the Cairns library if you're able to return today."

"I'm here, as well. I figured that if I am in Oxford, then I had to at least read a few entries from the Oxford English Dictionary," I said amusedly.

He tilted his head to the side and said, "If you pass all of the tests, I'd be willing to show you one of the first editions, the first fascicle printed. I believe it took them five years to write from A to Ant."

That would be very interesting, so I inclined my head. I had thought this man would be an enemy, but it turned out that he was just an overworked asshole. That was fine, there were plenty of people like him, and I would just have to demonstrate that I wasn't actually wasting his time. I thanked him and disconnected before retracing my steps and finding the same study room.

I did notice that it was just the Professor this time, and the Dean's assistant was nowhere to be seen. Although he had been incredibly irritating, I hoped he didn't have to flee the country like the knights who had ridden King Henry of his turbulent priest. The Regius Professor smiled at me as I approached and said, "Ah, I just spoke with the Dean. If you like, you can begin your exams immediately."

So we were just ignoring the previous unpleasantness. Yes, I could do that. I walked with her to a room further into the library. It was quite small, and I immediately recognised that I was in a Faraday cage as soon as I entered it. She said, "Please take a seat, and you can select whichever exam you want to pursue first. There's no particular order you have to proceed through."

She then tilted her head to the side, "If you'll wait a moment, though." After a few more minutes, someone entered the room and connected something small to one of the hardwired data connections directly behind me. I coughed and said, "Do you mind connecting that device to that jack?" I pointed to the one that was ninety degrees to my left rather than directly behind me.

The tech looked surprised and then glanced at where I was pointing before shrugging and nodding, unplugging it and plugging it into the jack I suggested.

Dr Turner looked like she wanted to ask why I made that request, but I was thankful that she did not. I assumed that this device was some kind of proxy that I would be scrolling my BD into, but the nondescript box was large enough to house a small-shaped charge in it as well. I didn't think it had one, but if it did, the hypothetical jet of molten metal would have been pointed directly at my back. Now it was set to destroy the data terminal I was about to use to take these tests, not my back. I might be burned a bit, but nothing too serious.

When everything was set up, Dr Turner said, "Well, I'll be leaving now. Feel free to take as many exams as you like, but we ask that you not leave this room in the middle of an exam. Feel free to take breaks in between them, though, as much as you like."

I nodded, "Thank you again for your assistant, Doctor." I then configured and started my BD scrolling, aiming it at the proxy that the tech had installed. I was told that an AI would be administering the exam, and it would likely be the same one that reviewed my BD.

I tapped on the data terminal, and it was already logged in and had an extensive list of exam choices. Each exam had a time limit, but there was apparently no time limit on how long I could take to complete the whole battery of tests, merely how much I could stand to do a day.

Well, I had to do all of them, so I might as well get the easy ones out of the way first. Rather than the test called 'Introduction to Human Body', which sounded dreadfully boring and was likely the first class all medical school students took, I selected Advanced Genetics, Cell Structure and Function from the list of tests and started the exam. The exam was interesting. It wasn't multi-choice at all like I was expecting. I could answer verbally or write my answer in the text box with the data terminal, and I assumed the AI was grading each answer personally. Nice. I didn't have to be brief, then.

---xxxxxx---

When Grace had heard about the Dean setting up someone to test out of the entirety of the MBBS curriculum, she had been interested. She didn't know who this very young-looking girl was, but she knew the kind of horsepower one had to have to force Sir Stewart to budge on something like this, so she was shocked when that idiot personal assistant gave the girl the bum rush out of the library.

Who would ever agree to give anyone super-user access to their OS? Grace certainly wouldn't have. She wasn't surprised when she got a call shortly after that from the Dean and was just pleased that none of that splashed on her. Less than an hour later, the girl had already started on her exams, but to Grace's surprise, she didn't decide to take any of the common pre-reqs first, like higher maths or English composition; she jumped straight into the Phase IV electives and was taking tests out of order, taking the much harder higher level courses first and then working down the pre-reqs.

And she was burning through them rapidly! She had already taken three elective courses, each spending only about thirty minutes on each, when the time limit for each test was three hours. Gaping, Grace triggered an observe mode onto the BD that the girl was scrolling to see if maybe she was cheating somehow.

No, the only things she had open was a note-taking application which was blank and a small calculator app which she didn't appear to need to use. The AI was pretty insistent that there was almost zero chance she was cheating and that she was not switching into different styles of presentation or prose when answering questions. Everything was answered in "her" style.

How about that? Was this girl some sort of practising doctor that Special Branch was giving a new identity to? Some sort of spy? Fanciful tales of some doctor in North America who was also a sleeper agent, whose cover was now blown and was getting a new identity went through her head.

Wait... this girl was taking ALL of the electives? Didn't Grace explain to her that she only had to take a couple of them? Each Phase IV elective was supposed to be a mini-semester of about twelve weeks between Phase III and IV, and you only took two of them. This Taylor girl was taking exams for all of them, seeming to work through the most difficult and then proceeding to the easier classes over time.

Well... whatever.

---xxxxxx---

I managed to clear through ten of the easy but still interesting classes on the first day, but after that, it was much more of a slog. I was keeping all of the tough classes, like Philosophy, Composition, History and Ethics, until the end and was just working through the more boring but easy medical ones.

Four days later, I had exhausted all of the easy classes and had to start taking the harder ones. The math classes were pretty simple, although I had the idea that I wouldn't have thought so before I had three brains to think about it. The chemistry classes were pretty simple because they all seemed focused on organic chem, which my power helped me with.

I actually had to cheat in the History class, though. I used Dr Hasumi's implants to pull up some of the answers because I hadn't actually studied too much English history. It made me blush that their concerns about cheating were warranted, while their precautions were not good enough, but I wasn't about to fail this exam and then be told I had to take a semester or two of History classes. How stupid would that be?

The practical skills tests were mostly in virtual-reality braindances that had a very high fidelity with reality as far as medicine was concerned, which made perfect sense. These I breezed through, and I only spent about five days working shifts in the John Radcliffe hospital, overseen by one of their more senior doctors. They didn't call them "Attendings" like I was used to in the United States, though.

I intended to specialise in surgery, of course, but it wasn't like brand-new baby doctors in the UK did this, so most of the procedures I performed were minor—things like sutures, and the like that I had been doing even as a paramedic.

After the last day, I met both the Regius Professor of Medicine as well as the Dean in person. The Dean seemed a little surprised. He coughed and said, "Honestly, I did not expect this outcome. But you've definitely met and exceeded all of the requirements for the MBBS degree. Do you plan to stay here for further training? You suggested an interest in cyber-surgery."

He went from discounting me to basically offering me a job as an intern doctor, which I thought was nice. But I shook my head, "No, I'm going to head back to Night City and seek residency at one of the trauma centres, I believe."

He shrugged, "Well, fair enough. The degree should more or less be taken at face value for an American license to practice medicine. At least, I've never heard of anyone having any difficulties applying for and getting one, but who would want to go to America, anyway?" He said the last with a purse of his lips, disapproving of my choices.

There wasn't any kind of large ceremony, and I would be added to the list of this semester's graduates, as Oxford didn't want to advertise that they provided degrees by simply testing out of them. I didn't want any special attention either, so I appreciated that. The diploma itself was quite fancy, though, and written on something like synthetic vellum and bound in a leather portfolio. It took it with a handshake and departed in peace.

It was already getting close to dinner time, so I should probably—

I tripped, catching myself in time, frowned, and sat down at the nearest chair. I had hired Militech as protection whenever I drove somewhere in Los Angeles, and someone had just attacked the small convoy, using rocket-propelled grenades to disable the lead vehicle before firing at the trailing vehicle. It was an early-morning ambush, but they weren't, seemingly, trying to kill me, clearly, so I just triggered my Platinum Trauma Team subscription and put my little sports car into high gear and burned out, accelerating out of the kill box.

When I started to do that, they directed some fire into my precious car, but it wasn't enough to immediately disable the vehicle. Less than a kilometre down the road, though, my little Shion sputtered to a stop.

Fuck, they must have hit something important in the engine compartment.

I leapt out of the car, grabbing my submachine gun. Should I continue running? No. The Trauma Team was close by now. I took cover behind my car, aiming back the way I came and observed the running gun battle between my Militech defenders and the unknown attacking forces. The attackers hadn't gotten the clean kill on each vehicle that they had hoped for, and I felt that they were going to be lucky to get away alive, much less pursue me any further.

The AV-4 landed behind me, and I felt nostalgia as the security and medical specialists hopped out and approached me, "Dr Hasumi? Are you too injured to move?"

I carefully pointed my gun's barrel down at the ground before turning, which I could tell the Security Specialists appreciated. It was really a lot of paperwork if you shot a client, especially a Platinum client like myself. "I don't believe so. I don't think I'm injured at all, but someone attacked my convoy, and I managed to get free."

Thinking about it, I handed the SMG to the Assistant Med Techie, asking, "Would you mind carrying this? I'd like to have it back later."

"Uhh.. ma'am, you've been shot," the senior med techie reported, and I blinked. I muted all notifications as soon as the ambush happened. I glanced down and saw the injury and diagnosed it at the same time I got the report from the biomonitor. Serious penetrating trauma of the lower left quadrant. It must have been a rifle round or armour piercing or something.

I started feeling a little light-headed. It might sound ridiculous for someone who routinely conducted surgery on myself, but I liked all of my blood to stay inside my body.

In either case, it wasn't an immediately fatal wound, though. My nanites might even repair the perforated and ruptured spleen, but it was probably best not to rely on it. I sighed, "So I am."

I suppose I should let them treat me as a patient instead of as a rescue. How embarrassing.

Fuck. My Militech premiums were going to go through the roof. It was like insurance, and they charged by the risk profile.