34 The meeting of two great entrepreneurs

Opening my eyes from a bizarre dream, I stood up and stretched. Now that I was feeling much more rested, it occurred to me that the man whom I had floating in a hatbox might be in some distress, mentally. Immediately after cleaning up and setting his body aside, I sat back down and resumed my sleep cycle. I didn't even take off my clothes or change back into my pyjamas.

Placing the sleep inducer back into its protective case, I walked into my shop area while considering it, coming to the unusual conclusion that I didn't precisely know. There had been some research into sensory deprivation, of course, in this world. As I assumed, there had been in my last one, but not as much as I would have thought here, considering how easy it would be to reliably induce it in test subjects with modern cybernetics. Doing a few absent net searches, I found that there were a few experiments conducted to see if therapeutic sensory deprivation could be used on cyberpsychosis exemplars, but it invariably made their psychosis worse.

Sensory deprivation had been reported to be relaxing but also to cause hallucinations and even psychedelic-type experiences, but these were all in subjects that knew what to expect. I drew on some of my psychological knowledge and combined that with the knowledge of the events that had occurred and winced a little, stepping a little quicker to walk over to the hatbox that was plugged into mains power, lifting the top and peering down at the liquid bubbling like it was a Beta's fish tank.

From his perspective, he was being tortured and lost consciousness and possibly woke up to nothing, no sensory inputs, no pain, just his own thoughts. Even a rational person, which I didn't really consider this man to be, would not really be faulted if they jumped to the conclusion that they had died and now were trapped in some sort of purgatory-like afterlife.

It would be quite difficult to have a good grasp of how much time had passed even now, and he might be wondering if his personal hell was just unending solitude forever.

Rubbing my face, I sighed. I might have, on accident or rather through negligence, tortured this man more effectively than the Tyger Claws had. Popping open the lid, I gathered some tools, including some sterile electrodes. I wanted to test his brain's activity to see if he was awake. Unfortunately, I couldn't perform an fMRI while he was in the hatbox, as the magnetic fields would wreck the hatbox and the little helmet-based military-surplus MRI machine I had, and while the man's data storage implant was still installed and it had brain imaging systems built in, it only scanned for physical changes and not ongoing electrical activity.

Humming, I looked at the current oxygen-usage rate of the hatbox and felt that, indeed, his brain was using enough oxygen to plausibly have higher-order brain functions being active. Then I dipped two of the sterile electrodes into the liquid, directly touching different parts of his brain with them briefly. The electrodes were thin and long, with a small electrical conductor tab on the end, and kind of looked like a dentist's mirror.

Glancing at the map of electrical activity I had built through this method on my deck, I sighed, "My bad." Backtracking the oxygen usage rate, I came to the conclusion that he was probably only conscious for a little over an hour. That's not too bad as these things go. In fact, perhaps he thought it was restful after his ordeal. I didn't believe that, though.

I had two basic options, I could try to render him unconscious while I put him into storage, for now, or I could kill him. I wanted his neural tissue as, essentially, a biological computer. I had ideas for using parts of his brain for different things, for example, the spider robot I had sketched out, and I also had ideas for using the entire thing for a robotic surgical assistant, which is what I thought I might proceed with for this first brain.

It was true that I had been itching to build a couple of the spider bots for ages, but this would help me more. But, for sure, the second brain I acquired would be destined for some cute arachnid robots.

The surgical assistant, however, would be installed in an overhead robotic assembly, with sensors and mechanical surgical tools looking down at my biobed, rather than in any kind of mobile robotiform. My idea was something like a cross between that bright light dentists use combined with an overhead pot rack that hung above an island in a kitchen, except instead of pots, it would be a half dozen small flexible armatures with surgical tools.

Now, there was no way I was going to place a psychopathic murderer's brain in charge of surgical tools that would be so near my head or be used to operate on myself, no matter how many novel mechanical overrides I could think of installed in it that would prevent it from hurting my patients or me.

And I had ideas for a lot of those! But that would be even worse than this. Trapping someone inside their mind, fully conscious, while they could see but not act so that I could use their brain as a squishy computer was not something that good girls did.

So this guy was going to die. Consciousness was an emergent property, and I might not be up to creating new conscious life (yet), but I certainly could end consciousness very easily while maintaining the vast majority of the brain still useful for my purposes.

However, I kind of wanted to figure out a way to rig this guy's brain into my brain imaging helmet, or rather to the guts inside the helmet. Rather than use the contact transdermal electrodes, I could directly connect electrodes used in deep brain stimulation directly to the computer of the device. I wanted to do this both because I was curious if it was possible and also because I thought he might have interesting information.

I had briefly reviewed the same data that the Tyger Claw netrunner had taken, but only for about ten minutes of objective time. Even in his secure storage, a lot of things were referenced by codes that I assumed he knew, and there were a number of numbered bank accounts listed, as well as addresses that I assumed were safe houses, although I didn't know. I presumed all of those addresses would have been hit by angry Yakuza by now, so they were useless.

Most of the bank account numbers were useless, too, as I was sure the Tyger Claws would hoover them up, but there were a couple that were of a type that required an additional passphrase to access to make any transactions, which was missing. Maybe his personal accounts, and he had the code memorised? These I could probably take if I could figure out his passcode.

Also, when I was sawing the top of his skull off, I had noticed that he had a seriously reinforced skull. This was considered a radical alteration, but by testing it for electrical conductance during the operation, I found that it would have been a remarkably effective defence against this type of brain imager. And it was a lot more effective than my insulative layer of skin and a lot less complicated than the one I had come up with before, using complicated neural-network-based software.

I was pretty sure my "solution" would work reasonably well, but compared to the simple elegance of a heavily armoured skull, it reminded me of a Rube Goldberg machine. The armoured skull obviously wouldn't stop someone from doing exactly what I had done and saw his skull off, but the number of people willing, capable and having the expertise to do that merely for interrogation was... limited.

There were plenty of other reasons someone might want to reinforce their skull, but combining this alteration with his brain drive and pain editor for torture resistance made me think the three implants were related. That meant he obviously knew interesting things that I could know them too if I was patient. I didn't expect a fortune or any shocking revelations, but every little bit helped, plus it was kind of interesting, like solving a puzzle.

So, he would "live", for some definitions of the word, for now. I knew a lot of ways to render someone reliably unconscious, and I would be utilising three of them as I carefully made alterations to my hatbox while it was in operation. I could briefly turn it off for a few minutes at a time with no ill effects, but not much longer than that.

The first change was electronics to induce a sleep-like state. It did the same thing as my sleep inducers but operated on a wildly different principle since this one worked via direct electrical stimulation and was a lot simpler to build. The second was a way to, without causing hypoxia-related brain injuries, limit the amount of oxygen the brain was consuming.

Obviously, if a brain didn't get enough oxygen, it would die, but it could receive enough oxygen to prevent cell death, but not really enough to fuel the energy that a fully active brain required. That would limit consciousness because there wouldn't be enough energy to run the energy-intensive high-computational areas of the brain that thought deep thoughts like, "Am I a brain in a jar? I don't like this! HELP!"

Lastly, I installed a metred drug dispenser in the oxygen-bubbler, stocking it with the special Tinkertech chemical I produced in the past that caused anterograde amnesia. Instead of guessing at the dosage, I just ended up using the standard correction factor for full-borgs for psychoactive chemicals, and it was stark -- you barely needed any. The same amount of the chemical that I used on that mercenary leader for an afternoon would last Mr Jar for two weeks.

That made sense since he didn't have a complete metabolism anymore, only a simplified oxygen-glucose brain economy, and the only real losses were when some of it got filtered in the suspension fluid.

At the same time that I pulled out the same contact electrodes and started carefully placing them against several parts of his brain inside the hatbox, I called one of the little kids that lived in my Megabuilding. He was an entrepreneur of sorts and, for a small fee, would go, buy and deliver me meals if I didn't want to leave my apartment. Since I was mostly a homebody, and he charged fairly inexpensive rates I often had made use of his services. I believe he had a bunch of minions about his own age that also helped him with this business. He didn't only did food, either, as I had met him for the first time when he kept coming into my clinic to buy a variety of prescription drugs.

He even had different rates for how far away he had to travel and everything, although he would only deliver to Japantown. For a twelve-year-old, he was rather precocious, and I understood the irony of myself calling someone that.

I was ordering an omelette and French toast, and he confirmed my order before telling me it'd probably be about forty-five minutes since Hotcake Heaven was in the downtown area.

Glancing down at my modified hatbox, I nodded happily. "Sweet dreams, then," I told the brain inside before closing the top up again and carefully putting it on the bottom of one of my shelves in my shop, hiding it in plain sight. His brain activity was minimal now, similar to what one would see while a patient was in an induced coma. I could morally forget about him now until I was ready to start building something using his neural tissue. I'd need to order a bunch of things like heavy-duty servos and stepper motors first, anyway, as well as settle on the design of the flexible armatures.

There was a lot that was terrible about the world, but one of the cool things about it was you could easily make three-dimensional shapes on your computer and pay a small fee to have someone make plastic or metal objects that were to your specification really cheaply, shipped straight to your door. You could even buy your own "3d printer" and do it yourself, although those could be pricey, especially if they were built to fabricate metals.

I intended to purchase one of these systems eventually because customising the shape of many pieces of cybernetics, especially second-hand prosthetic limbs, to the body size and shape of a patient often necessitated the use of such technology.

Otherwise, you had just to have a bunch of different sizes and pick one that worked "well enough," and there was no way I would be satisfied with that level of mediocrity if I opened up my own practice years down the line.

Of course, most new cybernetics came with some proprietary, usually single-use, way to adjust things perfectly within a set range, or you ordered it from the manufacturer with the end-user in mind, and it came customised, but even high-end cybernetics clinics also had a pretty lively trade in used cybersystems, either stock they kept themselves or cybernetics a customer brought in to them, to say nothing of the necessity to repair cybernetics. For many people, a "Ripperdoc" was their primary care physician as well as their surgeon.

Only the most low-tier of Ripperdocs didn't have any capability for metal-shaping, even if it was an old school machine-shop that was attached to their clinic like I assumed some Scav doctors utilised, by way of seeing some of the ridiculously retro implants they had in some runs at work.

I took a quick shower, carefully setting the clothes I had been wearing on the bed I hardly used so I could put them back on, standing under the hot shower a lot longer than I normally did. That was another nicer thing about this world, but it probably was only a function of living in a large Megabuilding, but there was as much hot water as you could afford. The hot water at my house in Brockton Bay would run out after ten minutes, and it took forever to fill back the ancient and barely operating hot water heater in the basement. Like the broken step on our front porch, it was just another reminder that my dad had stopped caring about everything after mom died.

Then, I spent a little time putting the man's body in a body bag and hid it in a corner behind a table. I intended to take a few more things out of it before I dumped it as medical waste, but I didn't want the delivery boy to see a dead body minus a quarter of his head when he delivered my French toast. I had already cleaned up and disinfected my work area before I went to sleep last night, so there were no unsightly blood stains on my biobed or the smooth floor beneath it. For people in the healthcare sector, assuming you weren't a Scav or in Maelstrom, cleanliness was close to godliness.

I was in a much better mood by the time my doorbell rang. I had added additional cameras in addition to the normal door cam on the outside of my front door. The door cam only had a very narrow field of vision, and if you were about to be home-invaded the nar-do-wells could stand thirty degrees off to either side, waiting to rush in as soon as you opened the door. I didn't think that was particularly likely in this building, but I added two cameras that watched each end of the hallway.

The building management didn't mention it, despite the fact that it was a clear violation of my lease agreement. However, Mr Jin had asked me to make sure that neither camera could directly observe anyone walking into Clouds for their client's privacy, which I felt was a very reasonable request.

I buzzed the kid in but did a double-take when I saw him. He had new chrome, specifically some cybernetic optics, as well as a basic operating system. That was pretty normal. Kids were about twelve when most of them got their first set of optics. Any younger and you'd have to constantly be replacing the optics as the child's ocular cavity grew. Twelve was a pretty good age, so they could use a single "child size" set of optics, and then when they got too small, upgrade into adult sizes a few years later.

It did mean that, usually, child-sized optics were utter shit quality, though. I recognised the ones he was wearing as a BioDyne model called the FunColor™, using my own Kiroshis at max-zoom to inspect them briefly. They weren't the worst on the market and had all the base features that parents looked for in optics, such as automatic subtitles, speech-to-text transcription, the ability to pair with a phone and optical character recognition.

Plus, they also featured "cool" features that kids would like, such as the ability to change the iris patterns and colours, and Hiro had his set on the golden slit-eye of a cat. Although exotics weren't that common anymore, there were still some people who liked to use radical biosculpt to resemble anthropomorphised animals.

It was kind of like the opposite of what the boostergang the Animals did. They were more about turning their personalities (although they'd say spirit) into a primal, almost shamanistic totem caricature of an animal rather than putting cat or dog ears and a tail on their body, and as such, the Animals usually beat the crap out of exotics when they saw them.

Still, there was a small number around Japantown as it was a subculture that seemed to be a little bit more popular in the Japanese and Chinese areas. Surely, not little Hiro, though?

I asked him sweetly, "Hiro-chan, why are your eyes' iris pattern set on 'furry'?"

This caused him to scowl and swear up and down, "Fucking gonk Ripper; I told kaa-san we shouldn't have gone there. Not only does looking at things close up make my head feel bangin', but the fucking software on these things is all fucked up! I can't answer my phone as I should, and I can't change the iris patterns; that was the only cool part about these stupid eyes. When I try, the whole system freezes and reboots."

I took in everything he said and asked for clarification, "Clarification. Bangin' means bad, right?" Because I was pretty sure I had heard the term also refer to things in a positive way in different contexts.

"Yeah, bitch! I mean, yes, Miss Taylor, sorry my head hurts," he said, then quickly changed his tune at the narrowing of my eyes.

I sighed and took my breakfast from him, setting the meal on my worktable for a moment and slapped the seat of my biobed, which was currently in its normal "chair" mode, "Hop up, let's take a look, then."

I glanced at my food wistfully, but I had a number of ironclad rules when it came to my workroom and among the most important was "Eat elsewhere." I often did some chemistry out here, and I felt that any chemist that didn't have that rule for their laboratory didn't have a long life ahead of them.

I had come a long way from the girl who had made her first batch of drugs in the kitchen inside the same pot Alt-Taylor used to make Mac and Cheese. I had purified and filtered the end product several different ways since then, but I was curious if Biotechnica would be able to detect the essence of cheese sauce in the sample I gave them and, if so, what they would think.

He waffled a moment in what I thought was either some kind of misplaced male ego thing or fear, saying, "It's not a big deal; it doesn't hurt that much."

I slapped the seat of the chair harder this time and said simply, "Chronic headaches post-ocular implantation could be a symptom of brain damage." That was true if you considered, as I did, that the optical nerves were just a functional extension of the brain. In either case, it could cause permanent damage that was very expensive to fix.

That caused him to gape, and he finally nodded and hopped up onto the chair. I put on some disposable nitrile gloves and plugged a diagnostic cable into the interface socket at the base of his skull, frowning at the inflamed, red skin in and around the newly installed cybernetic system.

Rolling back in my little stool chair, I glanced at the readouts on the Meditech displays, frowning again, "You have a fever and a surgical site infection. Considering this surgery was a transcranial procedure, and both your operating system and optics have direct access to your brain, this is bad." He might have gotten better on all his own, but then again, he might not have and eventually have been rushed to the ER. Still, I had caught it soon enough that it could easily be treated with conventional antibiotics, which I had a number of. I wouldn't have to break out my special sauce version.

He blanched and was suddenly a lot more cooperative. "Stick your arm out; you are also quite dehydrated. I'm going to start an IV, and you're going to sit here while I get some fluids into you. Also, I want to head inside and eat my breakfast real quick. You don't have anywhere to be for the next half-hour, do you?"

He shook his head rapidly, which caused me to raise my eyebrow, "I'd figured you'd have a lot of deliveries to make."

He snorted and said as I quickly started an IV and connected a bag of saline, "I have people for that, Miss Taylor. I still do your deliveries personally most times because you're an important client. But it wasn't like I walked to Hotcake Heaven; I had one of my people do that and just did the drop-off. For important clients, it is important to maintain

face-to-face relationships." He said the last bit as though he was quoting someone, and I had to stop from giggling at him, as he was cute as a button. In fact, I nodded at him, lips twitching and turned around, walking over to my medicine cabinet, so he couldn't see me fight it off.

I'd seen his "people"; they weren't any older than he was. Turning around, I carefully compounded some antibiotics, dissolving some sterile powder into saline and then using a disposable syringe to add it to the bag that was running on the boy. I'd send him home with some oral antibiotics as well. I tapped a few keys on the Meditech hardware and triggered a full-systems diagnostic, which would force the entirety of the cyberware installed on the boy to do self-tests and diagnostics, which might take a few minutes. Nodding to him, "Alright, just sit there; I'll be back in a few minutes."

He dug out his phone from his pocket and asked, "You got wireless here?" Sighing, I gave him the password to the public network I had set up for patients before I grabbed my breakfast and took it into the apartment area. Glancing at the food, I nodded at finding the order correct. Sitting down, I destroyed it rapidly, savouring the combination of savoury omelette and sweet syrupy French-toast flavour.

Glancing at the time, I coughed a little at how little time I had spent eating. I was quite hungry. Cleaning up the trash and washing my hands again, I re-entered the front area in time to hear the conclusion of some phone conversation Hiro had.

"..alright, I'll have one on the way, probably not more than an hour from now," he said in his business-tone before disconnecting. Glancing at me, he asked, "Miss Taylor, do you know where I could buy a gun this early in the morning?"

I blinked at him, deducing that someone had called him for a delivery job. I asked him as I put my Ripperdoc-style glove on, tone still slightly aghast, "You're a gun runner, too?"

"No, Miss Taylor... I really just walk; it's better not to stand out to everyone on the street when you're carrying things like that," he said earnestly, educating me like I was stupid. I stared at him for a good ten seconds, trying to see if he was taking the piss with me, but realised the term "gun runner" was very archaic in a city where BudgetArms had gun vending machines.

"I take it you mean an actual, good gun, then, if you're not running to the BudgetArms vending machine?" There was one of those on this floor, too. It was right next to the Nicola vending machine. He didn't even dignify that with a verbal response, only a scoff and nod.

I frowned. Most gun shops didn't open till ten or eleven. I was sure there were some twenty-four-hour places in this town, Night City being what it was, but I certainly didn't know any. However, I had been accumulating guns like nobody's business. I had brought about a dozen home with me from that Wraith encampment, for example, and left even more than that because they were crap or in bad condition. They had a fully-stocked armoury. I asked him, as I popped one of his eyes out of his skull, "What kind does your client want?"

"He just said a good pistol that had select fire," the kid said. That was simple enough, I supposed. I had about ten full-sized Lexingtons from all the ones I picked up, plus Danny's collection. All the full-sized Lexingtons had either a single-shot or fully automatic fire mode, although I honestly didn't think much of that mode unless you had augmented strength and could use muscle to keep the weapon on target. I was strong enough to just barely keep an adequete grouping on the range, so I honestly preferred the three-round burst that the smaller Lexingtons had.

Was it ethical to sell a twelve-year-old boy a gun, I wondered? In this world, it probably was. Plus, I could see the kid was packing already, which I wasn't going to give him shit over. I wouldn't deliver things to people's homes without a gun in this city, even if he screened his clients well and presumably had the protection of the Tyger Claws. I assume he kicked them up a percentage of his take, as I did.

Finally, shrugging, I asked him, "I could sell you a Militech Lexington in 9mm, single-shot or fully automatic, for six hundred eddies." A brand new Lexington had an MSRP of about a thousand, so six hundred eurodollars was a pretty good price for something I got for free. It was probably cheaper than what he could get from a gun store, too.

He stared at me with his one eye, suddenly all business, "It's in good shape? I take my reputation seriously." I strained hard not to roll my eyes at the boy, which would probably have offended him because I understood what he was saying.

"I wouldn't sell it to you if it was in bad shape. It's barely been fired, and I cleaned it myself, oiled and everything. It's almost like new," I assured him truthfully.

He nodded seriously as I took the eye to bits on my workbench, carefully but quickly refurbishing it. The lens was fine, but the aperture was in bad shape, so I wasn't surprised that he was getting headaches when he tried to focus on things close up, assuming those headaches hadn't been mostly caused by his untreated incipient bacterial infection.

I bet his vision was blurry, too, but perhaps he didn't notice if he had naturally had myopia before he got these installed. I think he tried to use the fact that I was preoccupied with repairing his eyes to haggle with me, as he said, "Five hundred, and you include an extra magazine and a holster."

I snorted and riposted with, "Five hundred, but only one magazine and no holster. Five fifty if you want the extra mag and holster." I did have a bunch of holsters, too, and magazines of this type were a dime a dozen.

He said, "Lemme see if my guy wants to pay extra," and started texting on his phone quickly, and after a moment, nodded, "Deal, but the extra mag has to be the 30-round extended version."

This little shit. I did have some of those, and I had little to no use for them as they made carrying the weapon very uncomfortable and impossible to conceal. Still, they were interchangeable with some Militech submachine guns, though, like the Saratoga, which I had a few of as well. Still, I liked the kid's moxie, so I said, "Fine. I'll bring it out when we're done."

Finishing up with this eye, I repeated the procedure on his other, which was in a little better shape, before downloading and reflashing both the optics firmware and the operating system with the latest versions, doing a complete format of his storage as well, after he assured me that he didn't have anything on it worth saving. Both of the implants were second-hand, I was sure, and not only was their software out of date but who knew what the last person left on there.

Glancing at the empty bag of saline, I nodded and sat three pill bottles, one of which was a lot larger, on the little table next to him, "We're about done. How's your vision now?"

"It's great!" he said, which caused me to smile a little.

I nodded, "Good. These first pills are antibiotics. It is important, very important, that you take them as directed. Once every eight hours. So three times a day for five days, OK?" He glanced at me and nodded, seeming to take my statement seriously.

"Next is just some naproxen. It's an anti-inflammatory, standard over-the-counter stuff for fever and pain. Lastly, however, are nanomeds for the shitty installation of your chrome. Every day for sixty days..." I paused, "However... the antibiotics, naproxen and the checkup, I can give you on the house because I like you, but these are kind of expensive. For sixty days, this will cost you about twelve hundred eddies, but I assure you that it is vital that you take them. How do you want to pay?"

This infuriated him, with him cursing at the shitty Ripperdoc that put his implants in again for a moment. Then he sighed and said, "They're really important?"

I nodded.

"I'll give you a two hundred eddie bonus if you accept payment in 'store-credit'," he offered, but I noticed he did use his phone briefly. I assumed he did a net search on the nanomed name, as he even looked in the bottle to make sure they looked like a legitimate product. The fact that he didn't trust anyone made him seem cuter, and I wanted to pinch his cheek.

I considered that. Both the food and his delivery fees had cost me about seventy-five dollars for breakfast, and I did use his services fairly often. I'd probably run out of credit before he ran out of nanomeds. Finally, I nodded and held my hand out to him to shake, "Deal."

He grinned and shook my hand, and I stood up, taking off the Ripperdoc glove and setting it on my workbench for the moment. "I'll go get the pistol. It'll just be a second," I told him and went into my apartment to grab one, an extended mag and a holster. I threw in a small reusable bag that I used for groceries, so he wouldn't have to walk around with a bare pistol. Rather than free plastic bags that you would throw away, most places offered heavier-duty plastic or fabric bags that you could reuse for a eurodollar. A few upper-scale stores had started doing that in Brockton Bay as an environmental measure, but here I felt it was just because petroleum and other plastic feedstocks were scarce.

Handing him the bag, he glanced inside and nodded, sending me the money, using his optics to do so, grinning, "Sweet, they pair fine with my phone now." I noticed his eyes had shifted to a bright blue, which wasn't his natural colour, but they looked nice. He waved and left in a hurry, and I sat there wondering. Already, a lot of people just came in to buy drugs from me to the extent I expanded the products I bought wholesale to things like toothpaste, soaps and other toiletries that people often forget when they're at the store. They were all on one shelf by the entryway.

Could I expand into guns? I definitely had enough initial stock, and I no longer felt that they were an immoral product to sell to the average person. I've had a few people try to offer payment in guns, but offering me a gun was like trying to sell ice to an Inuit person in Alaska.

Before I could decide one way or another, the doorbell rang. I assumed it was Hiro and that he had forgotten something, but it turned out to be Mr Jin and a young girl. Was this the girl that was kidnapped? No, looking closer, I saw that it was his daughter. If it was his daughter kidnapped, he would have told me. I let them in.

"Taylor, it's nice to see you. I, and my daughter, wanted to thank you for your help last night. We were able to rescue the girl, along with about a half dozen other young girls and boys. Those, we just dropped off at the NCPD," he told me.

Then he nudged his daughter a little, who took a step forward and bowed, saying in Japanese, "Thank you very much! Yui is my best friend!"

I felt much better about reciprocating the gesture with her, compared to the Tyger Claw goons last night, and said, "Oh, I'm very glad she was rescued then." And I was; it made me feel a lot better, that what I had done was not only necessary but came to a good conclusion.

Mr Jin shooed his daughter off, who left after giving me another large smile. I supposed he wanted to talk business. He said, "I can't thank you enough. They have been friends since she was a toddler. What can I do to repay you?"

In a different person, I would have felt that was a semi-rhetorical question, but I thought he was being very literal. I had already thought about this, I didn't need just money, and honestly, I didn't really need anything right now. Not in a pressing way, so instead I asked, "If you don't mind, how about a favour in the future?"

He scrunched his face up in consideration, but it didn't take him long to nod, "I can't say that whatever you ask for will be fulfilled, but I will do my best to see that it is. Is that good enough?"

"Of course, I won't ask for the world, but I can't help but think that a favour from your organisation might be worth a lot more than just some extra money," I told him, honestly.

He chuckled, "I agree. You'll probably have her father come around to thank you himself, as well. Maybe not today, but this week sometime. He is something of a peer to me, and he manages a couple of hundred people in... well, I guess you would say more traditional activities." Traditional gang activities? Probably street-level Tyger Claws, then.

We spoke a little more before he apologised about having pressing issues to attend to and excused himself.

I was interested in this girl's father owing me a favour. I'd know who to call if I ever needed someone rubbed out, then!

Oh, who was I kidding? If I wanted someone killed, I'd probably be invested in doing it myself.