Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 2.8

2.8

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The rest of the afternoon passed quietly, with nothing much of interest really happening. The only thing worth commenting on was someone who came into the Bodega at five, stayed for half an hour trying very hard to look like they were browsing the merchandise, only to leave after buying a single lollipop.

Just the average weirdo, on a first glance. Less obvious was the air tanks he’d had under his clothes, sucking in the atmosphere of the Bodega slowly and carefully. My systems noted the depletion, and compensated automatically. As for my response to this?

Nothing. I could not give any less of a fuck. I’m sure that some other places in the city would be real mad about having ‘pure and clean air’ stolen from them, but not me. To me it was just... moderately weird.

If it somehow managed to become a problem, I’ll deal with it then.

Anyway, night eventually rolled around, and seeing that nobody was going to want my attention, I closed the clinic for the day and went to check on my garden.

Naturally, it was still going well. Their accelerated growth hadn’t left them any worse for the wear, and since they came out of that perfectly fine, it was unlikely that I would need to be concerned about anything else. Aside from the normal plants, the central tree was also doing well, its vital energies continuing to strengthen as they were tested by the adverse environment.

When that was done, I went downstairs, made myself dinner, and then got back to working on the amethyst crystal.

There were still a few more concepts that I needed to infuse into the thing. ‘Purity’ joined the rest, and I made sure to tie it closely to Storage. ‘Filter’, on the other hand, was tied to Focus, the former threaded in several distinct stages through the latter. ‘Control’ was added to Binding, after that, and strictly speaking, all of that was all that I actually needed for what I intended to do.

It was a perfectly functional tool, for the sufficiently skilled.

Of course, this was basically the same as saying that a stick was a perfectly functional tool for the sufficiently skilled. Yes, it may have been true, but you could do a lot of things with that stick to make it much more useful in ways that were much more easily exploited.

If the amethyst itself was my only limit, I might have rushed, but it wasn’t. I had a time frame of roughly two months before every factor of this was ready, so I was going to work in some extra concepts to make things easier for myself later on. The existing concepts would also appreciate some extra changes, mostly for ease of use.

But all of that was for later. I finished things up by strengthening what I’d built with most of the spare energy that I had, and after putting it away, I took a brief breather before working on the more conventional technological projects.

For the moment, that consisted mostly of working the flaws out of the training bot. In the immediate term, there was no way that I was going to be able to build a machine that could handle the physical demands I could put on it, so I instead went in the other direction of handling the issue that was the lack of skill. At first, it was simple machine learning algorithms, but it quickly evolved from there. The end goal was to bring it up to something that could pose a level of challenge useful enough to practice, but considering what it was up against... It was going to take some time.

Finally, it reached ten, and I put it all away before heading off to sleep.

The next day started exactly like the previous one. Wake, snack, gym, shower, breakfast, checking on how things went.

I was pleased to see that, evidently, word about the Bodega was spreading. The last twenty four hours since I checked showed a marked increase in the number of customers, most of them coming for, primarily, food. There were some who were after various other little knick-knacks, but it was fairly obvious what the most famous product I had on hand was.

That was fine by me.

As for the Clinic, nobody had reached out. That was fine. The three people that I had come in yesterday was already a bit out of the norm considering how new I was, and it was going to take a bit before I had regular business.

One final glance at the shape of events today, though, told me that I was going to have a few little skulkers lingering around a bit later on.

I could look at them in a bit more detail if I wanted to, but I didn’t really feel like it. I could see from their pallid shade that they weren’t going to be particularly big, and they most certainly weren’t going to be dangerous. It was likely that they were just going to be gangers scoping the place out, or perhaps Corporate patsies doing the same. It would be a prelude to something bigger later on, if I let it go on its own.

I could sense an opportunity there. My Chozo half was so familiar with the way that these things went that I didn’t even need the Sight for it. If I played my cards right, there might be some good opportunities to cause some trouble for people who would cause me trouble.

Whether or not I’d bother... Well, that depends on who ends up skulking around.

Ah well. I’d find out when the time came.

I went upstairs at seven thirty, and settled in for another long session of reading.

It took two hours for something to happen, and even then, nothing actually happened here. I noticed only because I could sense the attention that fell on the area, and to be honest, the intensity of the scrutiny caught my attention more than anything else.

I flicked the recordings of courtroom encounters away, and manually took control of a drone tending to the garden upstairs. I had it shifted its viewpoint around, keeping to the same patrol it had been doing before, but checking out the surroundings.

It took me a moment to find the source. They were a few hundred metres away, perched on the top of another building and wearing clothes that blended into the surroundings. Well hidden and nearly impossible to spot under mundane circumstances, against anybody other than me they would have gone completely unnoticed more than likely.

The camera zoomed in, and I beheld a woman with cat ears.

My left eyebrow raised.

Most of her face was hidden behind a pair of what looked like rather advanced binoculars, and most of her body was hidden behind by the edge of the rooftop, but neither were able to cover up the additions on her head.

Small little fuzzy triangular ears, sticking up out from the top of her head.

Mmm. Hmmmmmmmm.

Catgirl. Advanced tech. Rapid scouting, and from what I could sense, a rather thorough ability at it. Conclusion?

Danger Gal.

Well, that’s a bit of attention that I hadn’t been expecting so soon, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

Danger Gal... The pet project and corporation of Michiko Sanderson, née Arasaka. A publicity stunt on the face of things, but when you dug in, they turned out to be an actually quite capable group of operatives.

They’d started out as a private investigation firm. Time had since added ‘security specialist’ and ‘intelligence operations’ to the list of things that they were particularly famous for. Less publicly, they existed because Michiko, then a teenager, basically pleaded to the president of the NUSA to be able to stay in the country that she’d been born and raised in, and President Kress had allowed it under the terms that Michiko do her best to kick out any remaining instances of Arasaka influence, which Michiko had agreed to.

Twenty-odd years later, here Danger Gal was: respected among its clients, famous for its habit of combining cute things with real results, and very, very interested in keeping an eye on the going-ons of Night City.

I had to wonder what it looked like, to them. If Danger Gal was interested in me, they were one of the few groups that had the means to cross-check and find out that I really had come out of nowhere. Seeing all that I had already accomplished, though, there’s no way that they wouldn’t believe that there was something behind me.

The sheer speed at which I’d transformed this building alone practically demanded it. That it had all happened under a tarp, with no direct observation on the building and no sensor data reporting on the scale of the construction work that would normally be necessary for all of this...

Well. Danger Gal wasn’t a megacorporation like Militech or Arasaka, but they were still a corporation. They had their biases. The most obvious solution was that something powerful had turned its eye towards Night City.

Ah, to be a fly on the wall for that conversation... I might enjoy seeing all the rampant speculation.

Well, regardless of that... They could observe me all that they wanted, but there really wasn’t a whole lot for them to learn at the moment. The outside of the building wasn’t a secret, though, judging by the angle of the binoculars, they were probably most interested in the drones taking care of the garden. If they were trying to find vulnerabilities, they were going to be sorely disappointed.

Though, I suppose that’s an answer in its own right.

And if they cared to see what my drones were doing, then they weren’t going to find much of interest unless they cared about plants.

Still.

I dismissed the camera view, and opened up the code of my security system.

Chances were that, in the future, other people would end up doing something similar, and they would probably be a bit less tolerable than Danger Gal. Incorporating some long-ranged visual monitoring of my own wouldn’t be a bad idea.

There were enough drones floating around upstairs that there were nearly always two or three looking in any given direction. I had plenty of processing power to spare to make sure that they were checking every direction they could see, so all I really needed to do was make sure that they were. If one of them found something, then more could be subtly redirected to examine whatever that something was in order to make sure that it wasn’t something problematic.

Observers, or people just looking at the building, could get rated lowly. People who were pointing weapons, or something similar, would obviously rate a bit higher. No action would be taken if they didn’t do anything, though.

It... really wasn’t that thorough, though. There were plenty of buildings with SmartGlass windows that had a direct line of sight towards mine. It was easy for them to be able to act as one-way glass, and that was usually their default setting, too.

Ah well. It would handle enough.

I saved the code, looked for problems, found none, ran the update, spent five minutes confirming that there really weren’t any problems, and then swapped back to what I’d been doing in the first place.

I was almost done reading everything. Right now, I was just checking precedent, which, of course, invariably favoured the Corporations exclusively. This was, technically, survivourship bias, because usually when the Corporations were in danger of looking bad legally, they just killed the problem, and so the only cases that made it to the courts were just for show.

What was somewhat more interesting was that you could track how and when the hierarchy of corporations shifted over time as they gained and lost power by how often they were winning the cases they had against each other. A surprisingly useful bit of information, though not immediately relevant to me.

I did wish it was a bit less dry, but I was nearly done anyway. When I was...

Well, I’d have to find another way to entertain myself.