15 Stop! Not like that!

I decided to get the nanosurgeon treatment at the same I bought the Self-ICE system. Dr Taylor strongly recommended I not get any further augmentations, bioware or cyberware, for at least a year if I wanted to stay off the city's radar, so I figured that my time visiting his clinic was probably over, at least for a while. Unfortunately, as the nanosurgeons cost eleven thousand eurodollars, my bank balance was just less than eighty now, so it was getting to the point where I couldn't afford to go back in the first place.

He did say that I didn't seem to have any issues that he considered symptoms of even incipient cybernetics correlated mental instability, but remarked that the city was remarkably paranoid and that once you got on their radar, it was kind of challenging to get off of it.

My current augmentations were split between bioware and cyberware. On the bioware front, I had the ballistic skin weave, the muscle and bone lace and the nanosurgeons.

On the cybernetic side, I had my Biotech Sigma Mk1 cyberdeck, which was on the low-end of mid-grade models, my Kiroshi Mk3s, which were state-of-the-art, a cognitive memory boost co-processor, a top-of-the-line internal bio-monitor, my Zetatech Self-ICE system, my Kang Tao-derived Kerenzikov and my basic operating system, including interface sockets and data shard ports. Soon, I'd have the monowire as well, and I felt alright leaving things as they were on that basis, although I had the idea to build a replacement for my liver that would also function as a secondary heart in a pinch. Not only was it a much better liver, but it would be much smaller and armoured, as well isolated from all of my other cybernetics.

There were a number of liver replacements, but none that did double duty as a secondary heart, at least as far as I knew. It wouldn't necessarily save me in the event someone shot me in the heart because the haemorrhage would likely kill me before my nanosurgeons could fix it. However, from what I learned from friends online, I thought it was likely that a number of the "black ICE" on the Net functioned in a way that caused either an unstable arrhythmia or immediate cardiac arrest in the netrunner. And it might save me in that situation if I ever encountered it.

I had begun dipping my foot into what was considered the "Dark Net", but it was really just unpublicized, private net sites that you generally needed invites to read or contribute to.

I had gotten an invite to about three such sites, mainly on my advanced knowledge of medicine and cybernetics rather than any "31337 hax0r" knowledge, and in fact, was considered barely better than a "newb" as far as my actual knowledge of computers was concerned. I was very careful to only post things that were legal on any of these private sites, as I had the feeling that at least one of them was probably run or at least monitored by the authorities as a kind of honey trap. I stayed anonymous, but most of the posters assumed I was a Ripperdoc, as my breadth of knowledge about the subject and of medicine, in general, came through in most of my posts.

I didn't think NetWatch itself would bother with such things, but NCPD NetSec might. Although, then again, from everything I knew about how Corps operated, I could see an ambitious NetWatch agent setting up such a site in order to keep his or her case numbers up. It just kind of depended on how slow their year was.

I had thought my series of VPNs and proxies was pretty good, but it turned out that I barely managed to avoid being directly identified immediately upon beginning posting there, and mostly by accident. I lived so close to Clouds that Jin allowed me to use Clouds' much much faster Net connection. They had a pipe going out that was bigger than some data centres and barely used their full capacity except for burst situations where data was backed up in remote locations and only occasionally.

I suspected they kept encrypted and complete backups of all of the client's interpersonal ideals in a remote, safe location in the case of data failure at Clouds. Some of their clients had been having years-long relationships with their dolls, and it would crush business if they were lost. Jin obviously wouldn't let me access the Clouds private subnet at all, but he allowed me parallel access to their external net connection, similar to what was offered to their guests while they were inside their premises, which I only used after piping it through about a half dozen proxies and VPNs.

It wasn't enough! Apparently, on one of the dark sites I had started posting on, it was kind of a hazing ritual to try to dox any new members, and a number of people started trying to trace my connection. A few of them traced it as far back as Clouds, and the guesses were that I was either a doll myself, one of their techs working there, or, more likely, I had somehow used a non-traceable relay, for example, placing a directional radio link relay on the outside of the twelfth-floor building. As such, I got a semi-passing grade of "better than a newb," but only barely. The truth was, though, that they had traced me completely.

In any case, one of the large names on that site, which I used more than the other two, started privately asking me if it was possible to incorporate a defibrillator system into a netrunner suit, explaining the simple and cheapest type of "black ICE" just stopped your heart. Only the really high-end ones broiled your brain or similar terrible fates.

I hadn't even really known what a "netrunner suit" was, but it was generally an armoured form-fitting one-piece that included things such as powered internal cooling systems, which were useful when runners did actual deep dives, especially if they were doing so somewhere other than their home. It was most commonly used by either corporate netrunners or edgerunners when they attacked private, air-gapped subnets. There were a lot fewer of those these days, but twenty years ago, that would have been the norm rather than the exception it was today.

Looking up a few pictures of people wearing them, I wondered if I would ever use one. I couldn't see myself doing it. They were so form-fitting that they left very little to the imagination, after all. Maybe if I put on something over it!

That started my first paid collaboration online, as I felt it was a very easy problem. Defibrillation was a very old and mature technology. Old and mature enough that I first suggested she just get an internal biomonitor and simple defibrillation implant, the kind that a cardiac patient might get. They were cheap and simple. However, she nixed that idea completely and insisted that any solution had to be completely air-gapped from her personal operating system, as people had tried that before and still got flatlined. She didn't have samples of the black ICE source code, but it was clear to her that part of the payload included first temporarily disabling an afflicted person's implants, the same way that my Disable Cyberware quickhack functioned.

She had left me one of her netrunner suits in a boutique electronics store in the nicer part of Heywood, which I suspected probably sold other things as well, and I had waited for lunch before driving over to pick it up with Gloria.

The shop had a lot of interesting things in it, and I had to be buzzed in through a little antechamber, which I suspected had a number of sensors to detect weapons. This was the good part of Heywood, but Heywood still had more population than any other part of Night City, and therefore just by numbers, had more crime, too.

"I'm here to pick up a package," I told the man working behind the counter.

He glanced at me, giving me the elevator-eyes treatment, curious. Although my ZetaTech Self-ICE didn't have any customized ICE installed yet, featuring only the default systems, it still had its built-in adaptive, intelligent firewall, which was enough to shut down the ham-handed port scanning attempt the man was giving me. It was the kind of port scan that I would have tried when I was just starting out, just using the network map utility with the default options, which was about as subtle as a right hook.

How annoying. That showed him I was, potentially, more than just a simple courier. Normally, I would respond in kind, and I had learned how to be at least a little subtle. I rarely port-scanned people directly these days, as people were almost always connected to public devices around the subnet, and if given a little time, I would attempt a breach protocol attack involving some innocuous item, for example, a vending machine or net-connected lightswitch and then use that as a proxy to scan the target. A lot of people, even sophisticated and security-conscious people, would end up whitelisting such devices if they were around them every day on their internal firewalls. It was stupid, but it saved some time, so it was very common.

Now though I was just playing the part of a slightly more than a simple courier, I frowned at him and said, "I'd appreciate it if you stopped that immediately."

He held his hands up, placatingly, with a vaguely German accent, "Sorry, choomba. It was clear this was your first time here, ja?" He motioned to one side, to a series of lockers in the back of the shop that I hadn't seen when I came in, "Packages are left or picked up in those automated, unattended lockers. If you have the correct passphrase, that is."

I nodded at him and told him before I turned to walk to the back of the store, "Thank you." I heard him say something a little less than complimentary; even living here for over half a year, I still hadn't gotten used to the fact that what I considered normal politeness seemed almost anachronistic and almost offensive to some people.

I walked up to the lockers, and there was a simple LCD display and a computer with a sign that declared it was air-gapped, not networked to anything, nor capable of being networked at all. The directions for use indicated that you should pay at the counter if you wanted to leave something here and that all consignments would be seized after the time period elapsed. You could rent a locker by the day, month or even year.

There was a card slot, so I suspected the clerk had some way to program a simple magnetic card with a cryptographically signed token that included the rental period. I nodded; it was a simple, effective and hack-proof system. At least on its surface. The keyboard was included in the kiosk and was both old-fashioned and looked bulletproof. I carefully selected the option for retrieval and typed in the password I was given, and pressed enter.

One of the lockers clicked open, and I glanced inside to see a small, nondescript box. It was sized enough for clothing, but before I took it out, I took a small plastic wand from my pocket and waved it around the box. The wand wasn't something I had built but bought. In fact, I saw similar models in this store while walking through it. It was a broad-spectrum electromagnetic frequency receiver combined with a simple chemical sniffer; it would detect outgassing from most kinds of chemical explosives, although the very newest types that featured metallic explosives couldn't be reliably detected. Thankfully, those types of explosives were hard to get, even for most corporations.

The box was neither emitting any kind of radiofrequency radiation that I could detect, nor was it likely that it was a bomb, so I nodded, replaced the wand inside my jacket and grabbed the box, and closed the locker door. The clerk was smiling as I started walking to the front of the store, saying, "You know, we inspect all packages left ourselves. There are chem sniffers built into each locker. I mean, we don't want to store bombs, either."

I snorted at him, "And if you were me, with a job to pick up a package, would you trust the professionalism of a store you've never been to?"

"Well… when you put it that way," the man said, shrugging, "No, I wouldn't."

I nodded at him, "Thanks. By the way, do you sell all manners of software here?" I wasn't sure I would trust any potentially illegal software I bought at a random store, but I could always slowly examine it for malware.

Now it was his turn to snort, "And if you were me, with a job as a clerk at a regular everyday electronics store, would you trust that some gonk you just met isn't a netpig?"

"Well… when you put it that way," I told him, grinning, "No, I wouldn't."

He laughed and said, "So, we only sell the absolute most legal of software here! Maybe come around more often…" he shrugged.

I nodded. I didn't think he was any kind of netrunner, I was better myself unless he was posing as a no-nothing, which was possible, but even if he wasn't, he probably, by virtue of operating a semi-legal electronics store, was probably a lot more "in" with the community than I was. I'd return to this store, it was interesting, and I saw a number of items that I might be able to use either in whole or in parts. It was kind of like a small boutique radio shack.

When I got back to the truck, I hopped in next to Gloria, who drove most of the time. Theoretically, she should drive all of the time that we had a patient in the back, but she was a good clinician, and I didn't want her to get rusty as a simple bus driver, so whenever she wanted to, and the acuity of the patient wasn't too serious I let her provide patient care while I drove us to the hospital.

"What's that?" she asked me, glancing at the box while eating a burrito.

I hummed and opened it, "It should be a netrunner's suit," I told her, not bothering to lie. It wasn't illegal, and if I didn't answer her, she would just get more and more curious and have more implausible guesses if my read on her personality was right. If I didn't show it to her, by the time our shift ended, she would be sure it was Johnny Silverhand's actual silver hand.

Or a consignment of illegal drugs, which she would be upset that I hadn't brought her in on my smuggling side hustle. She had a baby boy who just turned three and no father in sight, or "mainline output" as the popular vernacular went, although I thought those terms seemed a bit vulgar.

I opened the box and fished out a netrunner's suit in dark grey. It was clearly for a woman, but one a little bit more petite than I was. Gloria's eyes got wide, "Woah, nova. You're a netrunner, Taylor?"

I held out the suit next to my body. My online friend must barely be five foot three or four at the most. Besides, it had a lot more room in the chest than would be necessary for me. If these things were bespoke items, it was obviously not modelled after my body. I gave her a side-eye, "You think this would fit me?"

She glanced at it and said, "I guess not. Why do you have a netrunner suit, then?"

I shrugged at her, not bothering to prevaricate but not elaborating either, "I'm pretty handy, and one of my online friends asked me to help customize this thing for her." I then carefully folded the suit and placed it back into the box, leaving the box on the floor. I glanced at the flashing but muted alerts on my company-provided software. We were technically on our lunch break and, therefore, out-of-service, but there were a number of pending calls.

I asked her, "Want to get back to it? I'll drive, and you can finish your burrito. Looks like a bit of the old ultraviolence has been occurring." Nobody got my dated literature references these days; my mom would have been so upset at the lack of culture in this world.

She shrugged and said, "Yeah, sure. Let's change spots." We hopped out and swapped seats, and I perused over the potential calls we could select. They were sorted by potential profitability primarily and patient acuity secondarily, and although we could technically select anyone we wanted in this type of situation when we were coming back in service — if we regularly picked calls, the company wouldn't be well compensated for, we'd have some "splaining" to do.

"Looks like a shoot-out with some Voodoo Boys and unknown parties; you were just talking about wanting something interesting. The trauma gods were listening," I told her, amused, as I pulled the ambulance into the street. The Voodoo Boys were a gang of mostly white males that made most of their money by selling a large variety of drugs to the middle class, mostly college students and similar. That said, they were still very violent. But compared to some of the borged-out gangs like Maelstrom, they were peanuts.

She grinned and nodded. I liked Gloria a lot; she was a fairly good person and a good medic. She also enjoyed doing the medically difficult calls almost as much as I did. She was already scanning the nearby cars in preparation for us going code 3 while I called Dispatch.

—-xxxxxx—-

The equipment I had gotten from the late Doktor was in fairly good condition. I had set everything up in what I was considering the "public" area of my apartment; it was where I saw people who came by for my illegal medical advice or treatment.

The ubiquitous "Ripperdoc chair" that everyone associated with back alley cybernetics installation was also convertible into a full-featured biobed featuring medical scanners and advanced life support systems and was built by Meditech. The bed was over a decade out of date, but the medical modules installed were replaced and actually somewhat new, being made in 2058. Everything was still in good condition and well cared for.

The specific cybernetics installation and adjustment equipment was also made by Meditech, and it included both surgical assistants as well as semi-autonomous nanomedical administration systems. I didn't think too much about the glove multi-tool that he had, though, and I already had that disassembled on my workbench.

That was exactly the kind of thing that my power got interested in disassembling and then improving, although it kind of wanted to incorporate the tools into my actual hand, either with cybernetic augmentations or even biological ones. I didn't want sharp bone blades to deploy out of my fingers like that Earth-Aleph comic book hero Wolverine; besides sounding painful, it also sounded creepy.

I had the reassembled monowire installed in pieces in the surgical assistant, ready to go. I also had already carefully created the monoresistant ceramic plating, according to the manufacturer's guidelines, although I had managed to turn it transparent and included a coating of variable SmartPaint underneath it. I would be able to control the exact colour electrically and had already included hooks into the modified firmware I had created for the device.

I'd have to do this one hand at a time. When you still had completely organic hands, installing the ceramics was a lot more involved, and even more so when I had a skin weave biosculpt treatment. It was a complete skin replacement, so I had to excise the old skin without damaging the nerves, install the ceramic components and use nanomachines to ensure that the "ceramic skin" both fully integrated with the surrounding skin tissue without rejection or inflammation but that they also had to integrate with the nervous system, so I still had a sense of touch. That was the hardest part and required yet more nanomachines.

I kind of suspected that back alley rippers might skip this step or half-ass it, leaning on some of the automation provided by their surgical assistants, but since the composite was on three fingers of each hand, it would reduce the manual dexterity of the patient significantly, at least until the person adapted to their disability. I certainly wouldn't have installed this implant if it came with a loss of sensation in my hands. My hands were very important!

Placing my left hand in the correct position above the surgical assistant, I administered a local anaesthetic to the nerve well above my wrist. I didn't want to feel any of this, that was sure.

—-xxxxxx—-

Flexing my fingers, everything seemed normal. You couldn't even tell that there was anything odd about my hand. The flexible ceramic in my fingers wasn't one hundred per cent transparent, so I had to fiddle around with the colour a bit, setting a slightly lighter shade than my skin so that it looked correct.

If you inspected my hands very closely, you would notice the discrepancy, or if I shook hands with someone, they likely would too, but there were multiple reasons one might replace the skin of one's fingers with a flexible ceramic compound. This particular formulation, which was resistant to monomolecular edges, was only used for this application, but a lot of electricians coated parts of their hands with insulative compounds, for example.

The feeling was a little bit different than what I was expecting. The tiny microprocessors embedded in the ceramic translated tactile sensations pretty well, but much less so for heat, cold or pain. I could hold a piece of ice in my fingers and detect that it was cold, but it just vaguely felt cool without the same resolution as my natural skin could detect. Still, it was pretty good.

I was standing in the largest clear area I had, which was the main room in the private area of my apartment. I had a small kitchen stool set up a couple of metres away from me, with a small empty soda can sitting on the top. While Nicola Classic was disgusting and tasted like carbonated Robitussin, there were a number of competing brands, a few of which tasted somewhat like what I remembered and were palatable.

I had modified the wire slot to resemble a normal personal link slot, so I didn't have the obvious cyberware that screamed integrated monowire if people saw my hands and wrists. It wasn't a particularly hard modification, either. I increased the percentage of the implant that was inside my wrist, and as such, I had to incorporate it and bond it more to my ulna, but that wasn't hard at all and the advantage to being able to surprise someone with it was immense. I wondered why Kendachi never attempted it.

Nodding slowly, I held my arms out and then triggered the monowire to pop out of the slot. You could do this two ways, you could grab it out of the slot and pull it out, or you could use a mental command to make it pop out, unreeling a little over a foot of wire at the same time. I did this second manoeuvre; it was a bit more dangerous, but it reduced the time necessary to deploy the weapon by at least a second, and it had been the way I had been practising using the weapon in the VR system for some time.

Grabbing the end of the wire with my right hand, I reeled a significant portion of the wire out of my wrist and carefully flicked a loop of it towards the empty can while holding the end of the wire between my fingers. I wasn't going to try anything crazy or any fancy tricks like trying to lasso the can or anything. I'd have to work up to that. However, I had so many hours with this thing, and it had been over a hundred hours of subjective time since I injured myself even slightly.

Monowire relied on a continuous and special electrical field propagating along the length of the wire to give it its durability. It was possible to lift three tons with the normal Kendachi monowire before the wire failed and snapped. However, this was only if the special field provided by the electronics in the implant were active. If not, not only would the wire snap if it lifted more than thirty kilos, but just bending it past ninety degrees would snap it. The actual wire itself was very fragile when the implant wasn't in operation, according to all the documentation I've read.

As such, the wire wasn't entirely invisible like you'd expect it to be, but it had a vague red outline to it, which honestly was probably a very good thing from a user operator's perspective if you didn't have a compatible set of cybernetic eyes that could pair with the system. That said, it was still quite hard to see, but as the operator, it integrated with my Kiroshis to accentuate this effect, so while to everyone else, it might seem like a vaguely red blur, to me, it looked like a solid red line.

The solid red line of my monowire sliced the tin can in two almost exactly at the point I had targeted and did so without wrapping around or damaging my stool. The stool was steel, so the monowire wasn't a great matchup for it. Monowires could cut organic matter and plastics like they were nothing but steel? You'd have to saw it back and forth for quite some time to get through it. A thin aluminium can was no problem, though.

Katana-wielding mooks were a common training partner in the VR system, as they could, in some ways, counter the monowire, but honestly, it was really easy to either target their hands and extremities or even throw the wire, so it wrapped around their sword and yank it right out of their hands. I accidentally impaled myself with a thrown katana like that when I started getting complacent with that enemy type, though, but nobody would ever find out about that.

The hardest enemy type in the simulation was full-conversion cyborg types; they had a number of generic full conversions modelled but none that were obviously militarised like the Dragoon I had in my storage unit. On those, it was important to attack their joints. I thought the best solution was not to ever fight one, actually, but if you had to, then attacking their knees or necks where the construction had to be much more flexible was a good option. I usually just ran away when they showed up on the VR training program, though.

I sliced layers off the rest of the can a few more times before I felt that I had done enough. I was trying to gauge the accuracy level of the VR simulation and thought it was pretty good. Keeping hold of the wire in my right hand, I had the implant carefully spool up the wire back into my left wrist until I was, once again, empty-handed.

"Nova," I said out loud, grinning like an idiot.

—-xxxxxx—-

I had accepted Gloria's invitation to go visit her apartment a couple of days later and found myself in a Megabuilding in Arroyo that was a bit more run-down than mine was. I was wearing my most casual of clothes, but I still stuck out like a sore thumb, but I was wearing a firearm openly today.

I had just purchased it, too. It was Militech's latest, actually not technically coming out until Q4 of this year, but employees and their dependents could purchase it ahead of time, and I still technically qualified. It was the M-76e Omaha. This pistol didn't come in a compact form factor yet, but it was an honest-to-goodness railgun, in a pistol's form factor! The ammo was a bit annoying to get, as I had to buy it straight from Militech right now, but I had no doubt that soon it would be manufactured by every munitions company there was, as it was deadly simple — just steel slugs!

You had to recharge or replace the batteries after about sixty shots, but the ammunition was just carried in a simple cassette-style magazine. I had been practising with it when I went to the pistol range in my Megabuilding and had gotten a lot of people interested in it. Just because there was no explosion involved didn't make it quiet, either, as it accelerated the steel slugs it used as ammo several times the speed of sound. Still, the sound was distinctive and definitely not the sound of a traditional firearm, so every time I went to shoot I gathered a number of people watching me.

Since I couldn't realistically conceal a full-sized pistol frame on my lanky body, I decided to just wear a tactical thigh holster. My dad had like six of them, several of which fit even me.

I got a few stares that I didn't feel were too friendly, but I wasn't really wearing very nice clothes, just clean and somewhat new ones in dark colours, and I was visibly armed, so nobody really tried to hassle me.

I verified I was at the right door and then rang her doorbell, and she came to answer it pretty quickly, ushering me inside warmly. However, then she looked askance and asked, "You carry a gun around everywhere?"

I blinked at her uncomprehendingly, "You… do know what city we live in, right?" How could she be at all naive about the level of violence in the city? In her job? She saw it all!

"Yes, but I never felt very comfortable doing that," she said, unsure. "Who taught you how to use one and how to be safe with one?"

I chuckled, "Well, my dad and mom, mostly. But I told you I was a Corpo brat, right? I didn't really tell you which Corp my parents worked for; well, it was Militech. I think the first time I shot a gun was when I was six." At least, she didn't have any memories of Alt-Taylor doing it before then, but it might be possible.

That caused her to chuckle and then laugh, "I guess it would be hard to grow up in Militech and not be around guns all the time."

I nodded to her, "Would you like me to teach you? It really isn't that complicated, and honestly, I would feel a lot better about your safety if you weren't just… "I struggled to find an appropriate word, "helpless."

She rubbed the back of her neck, "Yeah, maybe. I didn't know anyone who I could ask to do that. First though, lunch! Let me wake David up from his nap, and we can all eat together."

After a moment, she came back into the large living room, which also had a kitchen in one corner, trailing a very small boy. He was hiding behind his mom, peeking out at me, which I found really cute and couldn't help but grin. Gloria introduced us, and little David did an admirable job at attempting to pronounce a new, unfamiliar name, but it came out more like "Tayr." Still, if you were as cute as he was, you could call me anything you liked!

David really liked chicken nuggets, and although I didn't actually think any chickens were involved, they didn't taste too bad. He got incensed when I stole one of his nuggets until I gave him some compensation with the cheese out of half of my sandwich. The bribe settled him down, and I asked, curious, "Who watches little David here when you work?"

"Partly my mom, and partly a group of four moms that live near us. We each are supposed to take a turn watching the other rugrats for a day while the rest are at work; we've scheduled our days off to be staggered for the most part. My twenty-four-hour shift is kind of a pain, but they don't particularly mind watching him on the days my mom can't," she said, shrugging. "I rarely can take a shift watching their kids, but in exchange, I pay them in cash, so they like it."

A kind of coop daycare, I supposed. I wasn't surprised things like that existed. How else would a single mother that had to work actually survive?

By the time I had left, the little gremlin had softened on me, despite me stealing his nugget, as I sat with him while he watched some inane children's show while I worked on my deck. As I left Gloria's apartment, he waved and said, "Bai bai Tayr!"

Cute.

—-xxxxxx—-

We didn't get called solely to living patients. We were the responders when people were already dead, too. The city paid a flat mortuary rate for these trips, and not surprisingly, these calls were much more sedate. We could even bodybag multiple "patients" and toss them in the back of the ambulance stacked like cordwood, leaving our gurney at home if it was a mass casualty incident.

A couple of days after visiting Gloria at her home, we were responding to a… well, it wasn't quite a cyberpsycho incident as it was closer to a gang ware, but there were multiple DoAs, and the police were just keeping the looky-loos away at this point.

We had three to pick up today, and we decided to each go get one. I found both of my customers pretty quickly and bagged the first. Humming and easily carrying the hundred-kilo weight of the dead Voodoo Boy gang member back to the truck, I carefully deposited him in the back before getting a second body bag and returning for the second guy. The cops had already left, merely placing one patrol car at the entrance to this warehouse to wait for us.

I found the other Voodoo Boy and bagged him, and carried him back to the ambulance, princess-style and then started back to see if Gloria needed some help with hers.

I was thinking to myself about the automatic defibrillator and EKG system I was incorporating into that netrunner suit as I passed Gloria and then blinked, coming to a stop. What was she…? She appeared to be removing an old and clunky-looking cybernetic arm from the single Maelstrom casualty. It was a very old Militech-branded PLS system circa the late 2030s. I frowned and took a few steps forward to stop her.

"Stop!" I told her from behind, causing her to be startled and almost jump off the ground. She glanced back at me with an extremely guilty expression on her face. "Taylor… uhh…"

"If you extract it like that, you will damage the neural interface, where the nerves in the shoulder interface with the unit, and it will become mostly worthless without a rebuild," I told her mildly.

I knelt down and showed her. This Maelstrom guy wasn't completely borged, but he was close. He still had a torso, anyway, "See, it may be a bit grosser, but it is better to take a little of the flesh with you if you don't have time to run through the normal disassembly steps on these old arms. There's no standardized interface that snaps in and snaps off with these old models."

I stood back up and said, "Finish that, bag your guy, and I'll meet you back at the truck."

I walked back alone, thinking about what I had just saw and why I had helped. I would ask her about it, but I was pretty sure I already knew the answer as to why she was doing what she was doing. Raising a kid when their dad skipped town was hard, and although Gloria had a pretty good job, it would even be hard on what Taylor made, and she made over thirty per cent more than Gloria did.

On the drive back, there was an awkward silence, "So, why did we just rob the dead Maelstrom guy?" I asked curiously.

She sighed, "I don't make enough money, Taylor. You're not going to report me, are you? I really do need this job."

I shook my head, "No. I'll even help you, so long as it is only these types of people we do it to. Dead criminals, or dead people who we have reason to believe, have absolutely no next of kin. Probably best to keep it to the criminals, though."

I thought about it for a while, "They don't even autopsy these guys in gang violence situations like these, you know? We take them straight to the crematorium, for the most part. I imagine if anyone is pissed, it is the mortuary techs who probably steal all of this stuff anyway instead of sending it over to the NCPD as evidence like they're supposed to."

She chuckled, then shook her head, "I'd never take the chrome off some innocent victim or someone who had family that might need the money from selling mom or dad's second-hand cybernetics might bring."

I nodded, "Good. Who do you sell it to? I'm just curious."

She shrugged, "I have a contact with a local small-time fixer; I think he takes it from me and then sells it to a number of Ripperdocs in Santo Domingo."

I hummed, "How much do you think he'd give you for that arm?"

She sighed, "Not a whole lot, but still about one thousand eddies. We should go halves since you helped me from ruining it."

I raised an eyebrow. It was an old system, but it was still a very dependable and widely used system and worth more than that on the secondary market, especially if I could clean it up and fix it. It wasn't broken precisely, but I could tell it hadn't seen a service interval since George Washington was a private. It was worth more, too, since it was a restricted item. "In its condition, a retail price for that arm would be about eight thousand, maybe more like ten or twelve if I could run it through some maintenance and get it purring like a kitten."

She looked shocked, "Really? You know how to fix cybernetics?" To which I made a waffling gesture. If I let my power go wild, I could fix any piece of cybernetics there was. I was pretty confident about that, but then it would require periodic maintenance from me to continue to function. Still, I was sure I could fix simple mechanical, electrical and electronic problems in most cybernetic limbs.

"Huh… so, what are you saying? That we should try to sell it directly to a Ripperdoc?" she asked, unsure. She paused and said, "I kind of like this guy; he's been on the level with me."

I shook my head, "No, it's probably not a good idea to cut a fixer like that out completely, at least so suddenly. But, if I refurbish this baby, we could renegotiate at least double or triple what you'd normally get paid, and he'd still have a lot of profit left over." Plus, on interesting and unusual items, I would get a chance to inspect them and potentially buy them myself for my collection, although I couldn't really afford to do that too often, even if I only paid her half.

At that, she grinned.