Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 1.26

1.26

+++

I got back to base just as the sun began to set. The smell, by then, had only just started to fade, the ocean breeze providing some minor relief, and so I wasted no time ducking back into my sealed room where I wouldn’t have to deal with it any longer.

It was done. The university would be sending me the records soon, and then I would have everything that I needed.

And that meant that I wouldn’t need to leave the building until the week was up, and the tarp was finally taken away.

I strolled over to my recliner, and settled myself into it.

So long as I could fit it in the remaining time, I could do whatever I pleased with the building. I knew, already, what I wanted to do, but there was still plenty of time to shift the details around a bit.

There was a lot of unused space, after all, and I could still benefit from a few things.

I flicked my hand, summoning a holographic screen. A notification in the corner told me that I had a new email, and so I opened it up to check.

Aside from the spam folder, which proudly declared that it had several dozen catches already, my main inbox had a letter from Night City Utilities. They had finally gotten around to sending a technician, who had checked the water and electrical connections to the property. It had been certified that there was no issue on their end, and they weren’t even lying.

They were now waiting for the go-ahead to reactivate their side of things, so all I needed to do there was send them that message and the building would, officially, be reconnected to the city’s grids and sewers.

I would be doing that later, not right now. The remodelling was still in progress, after all.

I shifted, and the recliner slowly spun around.

The area was a hive of motion. Nanomachines were flowing across the floor, the walls, and the ceiling. A bunch of giant metal blocks, the converted remains of the trucks that had come back last night, were in neat rows through the centre of the room. The front left had been expanded, the underside of the office already halfway through being dug out. It stuck out rather obviously against the rest of the room, not just because of the break in the rectangular shape, but also because of the fact that it was the only part of the room that didn’t look like it was made of concrete slabs mashed together.

That little section, the parts of it that were complete anyway, currently looked like a snapshot of the future of this level. Metal panelling made up the floor and walls, divided into sections and split up by diffuse, translucent hardened crystalline structure shaped like complex, geometric patterns that most closely resembled circuits.

The crystalline structure could be energized, at which point it would perform one of the most efficient transformations of energy into photons in existence, shining a bright white. An additional layer of liquid crystals on top of that allowed it to change colours at will. That would be my lighting down here, eschewing bulbs entirely. It was bright, omnipresent, simple, yet versatile.

I could RGB the entire place if I wanted to. I wouldn’t, because it was an overrated gimmick, but I could, because ironically, this actually was the easiest and least intensive lighting solution that met all of my requirements.

It would be a day or two before I hit that point, though. First, the rest of the excavation would be taking place, and then all of this boring concrete on the rest of this level would be getting replaced.

As for my living area... Well, I had the strictly necessary stuff by now, but that was basically bed, food, and bath. I could do with a gym down here, because I definitely wasn’t going to find one that would actually be able to give me enough of a challenge that would make a workout actually useful.

It had been such a long time since I’d gone through real exercise.

I’d probably make the area under the road to the left of the main room the gym room, honestly. It would have quite a bit of space... even if it was a bit small for a Chozo’s level of physical activity. I’d need some machines, heavy duty ones, there.

My workshop, because I was obviously going to keep busy in that particular area, would be in the back right. That left the front right, and... I still didn’t have a plan for it. Recreation? A visitors area for if I ever actually got a guest?

No idea, but it was something that I could decide later.

Anyway, aside from that...

With my licenses on the way, my plans now had the complete go-ahead.

I had two big ones. Two ways of generating a consistent cash flow that would keep the city from annoying me.

Having gone through the effort of acquiring a medical license, it was a no-brainer to open a clinic. With my skills, I could make absolutely certain that anybody who came in would leave better than they’d ever been, and that guarantee alone would be worth quite the pretty eddie in this city. I would almost certainly be able to sustain myself entirely on that, but why would I stop there when I have all this space free?

Fun fact: Bodegas in this city were... really easy to set up. There were basically no laws against them whatsoever. There also wasn’t much in terms of laws for them, either, and so if something happened to them... well, too bad.

It was understood by people in this city to mean that so long as the big Corps weren’t bothered, they wouldn’t care.

In terms of things that a Bodega could sell, basically the only limit was that they weren’t allowed to trade in combat Cyberware. This was perfectly fine to me, because there were so many other options that I would have a hard time finding something that I wouldn’t be able to sell.

By far the easiest, though?

Well, they’re soon to give me a license to clone and sell organics. I had a library of a lot of different types of food. The math is so simple a child could do it.

So long as I made sure that my products were better, they would sell. I just had to make sure that people knew what I had.

Of course, I didn’t want to plaster the city with even more advertisements, and so I had another plan for that. An advertisement that would be better than any number of neon, algorithmically generated corporate poison capsules.

The roof of this building would be my advertisement, and what better way to show off than to keep a garden?

And, if the point was showing off, then why not show off?

I had a lot of space up there, horizontally and vertically. It was all wide and flat around my little base. What was something that could only be found inside of corporate and government areas, and nearly unseen out here in Santo Domingo?

Trees.

I could fit a tree up there, easily. It’d look great if it was big and central... Vertical garden walls surrounding it all across the roof. It would be eye-catching, the only spot of green life amid the concrete, steel, and dirt that surrounded everything else. There were limits on how tall it could be, unfortunately, and the tarp that currently surrounded the building was only one of them.

But that left the option of wide.

I hummed, considering the thought.

Not too wide, but it didn’t need to be that large in order to have a nice effect. The vertical garden walls could handle the rest of the colour... But that was getting ahead of myself. It didn’t have to be fully grown immediately.

Mmm. The tree would have to come a bit later. I could get it partially done before the tarp was taken away, and then grow it to a proper size at a somewhat more reasonable, if still accelerated, pace afterwards.

Continental Brands would be trying to burn this place down in seconds after it was revealed. They hated competition, and I fully intended to be it. They would do their absolute best to strange me in the crib the moment that they realised what I was doing, but... well, quite frankly, I needed something to stop me from getting bored, and ripping off the fingers of a Corporation whenever they started meandering in my direction sounded like exactly the thing that would work.

Well, if they hoped that their hit squads were going to be enough to do the job, they were going to find themselves sorely disappointed. I’d barely even begun thinking about security measures, and I still had plenty of time to make sure that any would-be saboteurs would find their lives absolutely miserable.

It probably wouldn’t be just Continental Brands, though. Food wasn’t going to be the only thing that I would be selling, and I had no doubt that some of the other goods and services that I had in mind would be stepping on more than a few toes here and there.

Corporate ones, specifically. My location didn’t really interfere with any civilian enterprises. The remaining types, though...

Well, I’m sure that the Scavengers will show up eventually. It’s what they do, cockroaches that they are. I would inevitably also draw Mercenary and gang attention, but the latter can be dealt with in a very straightforward manner, and the former is usually dissuaded when the reward doesn’t match the effort or the consequences.

That left the more common criminals.

For the Bodega side of things, though, I couldn’t be running it directly myself. The clinic required much more time and skill, and it was logistically impossible to do both at once effectively, and so the clinic is where I would be directing the vast majority of my efforts. I needed something to take my place, and make sure that things stayed on the up and up with any prospective customers.

Fortunately, there was an easy solution there. Robotics were a solved issue in this world, after all, so I had plenty of options.

However, I definitely wasn’t going to re-use anything made by a corporation, and that meant that I was looking at several days of designing, coding, testing, and refining ahead of me.

This wasn’t a problem at all, I loved doing that. Both parts of me were perfectly alright with that. No bullshit, just steady, consistent progress towards doing something that I wanted to do? Sounds great to me.

My only restrictions were that whatever I created couldn’t be too intelligent, or, perhaps more accurately, to obvious in its intelligence. Netwatch did currently exist after all, but the Blackwall was still being prepared for deployment. They were understandably very twitchy about AIs and things that looked like AIs.

Still, I had no more intention to connect things to the Net now than I did before, so... Yeah. About 99% of their normal methods would just straight up not work in the first place. The actual worst thing they could do to me would be to get an official investigation going, but they didn’t have so many resources free that they could afford to spend them like that, not without evidence. Suspicions alone wouldn’t be enough for them to bother when there are other, very real threats out to cause problems.

That was... pretty much everything, honestly. The entirety of my immediate future was planned out, I had things to do, and I wasn’t going to leave this building until it was done and ready. Eventually, I would get around to actually going out and meeting people, but right now?

I leaned back, waved my hand, and summoned a screen.

Right now, it was time to get to work.