Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 2.6

2.6

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The next day began what would soon become my new routine.

I woke up at six in the morning, fully rested and fully recovered from my magical exertions last night. I took five minutes to grab a drink, and a small selection of currently-cloned fruits, and then made my way to the gym.

The entire underground section had come out pretty well, honestly. Bright, well lit, and well-prepared for most anything that I could throw at it.

Here’s the thing. When you have the kind of physical capabilities that I do, it is really difficult to properly push yourself.

I chose to start today off with a bit of strength workouts, and so I first made my way over to what amounted to a futuristic version of a hydraulic press.

I started at a low level of a quarter of a ton, and then worked my way up from there. I stopped only when the bench I’d been sitting on started to make protesting noises at the abuse I was putting it through, and made a reminder to replace it with something better for next time.

After that, I went to the most advanced treadmill on the planet, and went for a sprint. Fifteen minutes of moving at my maximum purely physical speed later proved to me that I’d at least done the treadmill right, and so I started adding weights onto my body while I kept it up. Eventually, my heart sped up to a good level, and I felt properly invigorated, so I moved on.

Wings came next, and it was here that the first limitations of my space came into play. I had eight metres of height from floor to ceiling, and that meant that I basically couldn’t do very much for that particular matter at the moment. Once the particle bombarder provided me with a sufficiently large supply of exotic materials, I would be converting a section of the gym’s length into a horizontal gravity chamber, but until then all that I had access to for properly exercising my wings was an elastic leash that became progressively stronger as I stretched it.

It was barely enough, but it worked.

Did all of this training get me something?

Eh. No, not really. I was nearly at the peak of my physical ability, and no amount of mere exercise was going to increase that limit any further. If I wanted more, then I would be looking at some form of augmentation, and considering how optimised I already was, that wouldn’t be easy. Continuing to strengthen my Lifeforce was about the only option that wouldn’t have a negative side effect somewhere.

What it did do, however, was let me refamiliarise myself with my body. My Human half had to get used to it entirely, but my Chozo half had spent so long just being old that youth and being in one’s physical prime had nearly faded from memory.

This is where the last stage of my exercise comes in.

I stepped over to the back half of the gym, though it was in fact located closer to the front of the building. The ground dipped a little, here, a square pit about fifteen metres wide.

There was a robot, currently inactive, on the other side of the pit. It was two and a half metres tall, humanoid in shape, and made out of a similar blend of materials as the Autonnels. Unlike the Autonnels, however, this robot was not designed to look inoffensive. Instead, its sleek form was lethal and dangerous, bundles of artificial musculature packed tightly and efficiently underneath composite material plating that would compare favourably to anything else of its size that existed on this planet.

Alas, it was only physical properties that supplied it durability, and... Well. There were some materials that were impressive, but these basic elements certainly weren’t that. Without any form of energy shielding, it was a fancy paperweight before any proper weapon.

Still, it would suffice.

Next to the pit were a series of lockers against the wall, which opened as I approached them to reveal an entire hoard of melee weapons. There were blades of all shapes and sizes, along with staves, hammers, maces, and more. Each of them was something that my Chozo half had learned how to wield, and the only thing on that list that wasn’t represented here were the Chozo Warglaives, by far the favourite weapon of that half of me, and so something I couldn’t bear to wield in such a reduced form.

The double-bladed staves favoured by most Chozo Warriors were here, though, and so I grabbed a pair of them before stepping into the pit.

A mental command activated the robot, its lights flickering into a passive yellow. I tossed one staff at it, sending it spinning through the air, and the robot caught it with a single, efficient movement.

The battle that followed was short, rapid, and not nearly as entertaining as I was hoping it would be. Which, if I was being completely honest, was exactly what I had expected. I’d thrown that machine together over the course of a few hours, and it took much, much longer than that to program something that could match literal centuries of combat experience.

Even if that half of me was a little rusty.

I was going to be tweaking it a lot, but that was something for later. I sent a command to have the machine go through a maintenance cycle, and then left the gym.

I took a short shower next, though that description was somewhat misleading compared to reality. Rather than a simple shower, I basically stood underneath a water cannon for thirty or seconds while it blasted me with enough force that an unaugmented Human would have found themselves needing a hospital visit. To me, it was vaguely pleasant, and the subsequent air cannon rapidly drying me was equally so.

After redressing, I then went and made myself a proper breakfast, rather than the little snack I’d had before I started it all. I chose a bit of sausage and bacon, alongside a few fruits and vegetables.

While I was eating, I got started on checking out the reports of what happened while I was sleeping, a single Autgent projecting the screen over the table for me to look at. I was pleased to see that there were no more shenanigans involving thieves, and I was moderately surprised to see that, at about three in the morning, I’d had a few customers come in and buy a few things. Food, mostly, but a few things aside from that.

The Bodega would come into its own soon enough, but it wasn’t the only thing going on. A bunch of people had accessed the Net pages I’d put up, and a few of them had put down requests for the clinic. I only recognised a single name, and even then I only recognised the latter half of it.

Janet ‘Legstrong’.

Buck’s last name had been Legstrong.

I refrained from Looking as I marked an approval on all three requests. I would find out whether or not it was a coincidence later on, if the topic came up.

Aside from that, I noted that nearly eighty percent of the activity came after nine at night. A quick check through the collation algorithms I had keeping an eye out on things relating to me and my business on the Net showed my why.

I’d been correct when I’d thought that Buck was a Media. I hadn’t actually checked, after all.

He had his own little blog on Ziggurat’s second most popular App, which was no surprise because pretty much every Media did by this point. He’d released a piece last night, talking about his encounter with me, gushing over his newly upgraded arm, laughing at the criminal who had failed so spectacularly to rob me, and finishing it all off with an attempt at cooking using the recipe book and ingredients he’d bought.

The attempt could have gone better for him, but he still went ahead and marked it as ‘some real gourmet shit’, and, naturally, that little bit of honest enthusiasm was more effective than any invasive advertising could be.

End result: New people interested.

I chuckled, and waved the screen away before finishing off the last of my food.

I went upstairs at seven thirty, took my seat in the clinic chair, and then spent the next two and a half hours continuing my way through the legal code of Night City.

I was, by this point, browsing through sections that had clearly been outdated and forgotten about. It was, for example, illegal to ride a horse through the streets of Night City, unless it was on a dedicated horse path, which... Well, I could probably find an example of that somewhere in this city, but it wouldn’t be a trivial endeavour.

Not that it mattered. Horses these days were nearly extinct and the only place that they could be found were dedicated ranches owned by the ultra-rich. If, somehow, somebody rode a horse through the city, then they were either rich enough that the law wouldn’t matter, or the horse had been stolen, and it wouldn’t matter for entirely different reasons.

An alert broke me out of my reading at ten in the morning, and the screen shifted in front of me to display the message that I’d received.

My first appointment was here, and she’d just sent a message to tell me exactly that. Another display flicked open as I accessed the cameras, ans sure enough, she was just getting out of her car right now.

I sent a message back, telling her that I was available, and to come in as she pleased. It didn’t take very long before she walked in through the door.

The first thing that stuck out about her was the eye-searingly bright blue her hair was coloured. The second thing was her height, which was quite short even in spite of the fact that I could see the signs of biosculpting to make her a bit taller. In spite of both, she seemed steady, neither seeking attention nor shying from it.

“Good morning, Alice.” I said, waving my screens away. “Your report stated that were having problems with your hand?”

She did, but not for the reasons that she thought, as I quickly learned. Her third and fourth fingers demonstrated notable lag compared to her thumb, first, and second fingers. She thought that there was an error in the motors, or the circuits, somewhere in her hand.

“I’ve been to three different clinics, but no fix ever lasts more than a month!” She complained.

The reason for that, as it turned out, was that there wasn’t actually anything wrong with her hand. The errors came further upstream, in her Neural Link itself.

“See here?” I explained, pointing at a hologram displaying a section of her neck. It zoomed in, and then highlighted in red and yellow precisely where the issue was. “Cross-contamination in signalling. The shielding has broken down, and now the wires are transmitting to each other, causing the adaptation algorithms to fail over time as they’re fed incorrect information.”

It was a fairly simple fix, but the fact that it hadn’t been found beforehand was concerning in a different way. Any diagnostics should have noted the existence of that failure. Neural Links were one of the most foundational pieces of Cyberware that existed. It hooked up to pretty much every other piece of Cyberware, after all.

Her diagnostics came up clean, even when I was literally pointing at the problem. That meant that I ended up doing a deep-dive into her system, which was where I found that she had clearly fallen afoul of a neurovirus at some point or another and had just... not noticed.

One would think that the diagnostics showing up as “Everything is alright bro” every single time would give the game away a bit, but apparently not.

Regardless, that was quickly fixed, and updating the firmware afterwards would likely fix that since she hadn’t had an update in more than six months.

It took barely twenty minutes, and she walked away a satisfied customer.

My second and third scheduled meetings weren’t for several more hours yet, so I settled in to keep reading.

And, of course, it only took ten minutes before somebody tried to bother me.