Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 1.25

1.25

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“Drich?” The man asked, seeking my attention, and I noted how quickly they’d already gotten word around. Unlike Theresa, there was not even the slightest hitch as he referred to me. Considering that this one didn’t have most of his body being puppeted by Cyberware, that meant that he’d likely had some practice.

Why he bothered asking when I’d already been looking directly at him, though... Evidently, they had not been as prepared as they should have been in order to adapt their script.

It took only a brief, uncomfortable pause and a very slightly raised eyebrow for him to continue. “This way, please.”

He turned around, and walked away. I followed, taking short, slow steps that nevertheless kept up with his slightly-faster-than-normal walking speed.

“Are you aware of all the details of the examination?” The man asked. “The appointment has a sufficient amount of slack available if you wish to go over them again.”

“Unnecessary.” I said.

His gait shifted only slightly. “Well then, that’s rather excellent.” He took a moment to breathe in. “The examination will start with a theory section, before moving to a practical demonstration-”

I only barely paid attention to him as he continued speaking, and only just enough to know that he was just slightly rephrasing the information that had already been available online. It was a spectacularly uninspired attempt to engage with me, and I gave it the complete lack of response that it deserved.

In the meantime, he led me to a large, open room that had more than likely been repurposed specifically for me. The table was custom, as was the chair, both of them relatively simple but quite a bit larger than normal. Suited for me, at least.

The computer, however, was much more normal. The keyboard was a bit larger than normal, but definitely not sized purely for me. Still, that they had tried at all...

Truly, it had been a galaxy brain idea to do this whole eccentric rich thing.

“- and that’s all. Will these accommodations be sufficient?” He finally said something useful.

“Yes.” He still got the same amount of energy, though.

Regardless of that, he nodded, and gestured to the table. “Whenever you’re ready, then.”

I moved over, and took my seat. “Begin.”

He nodded, and a moment later, the monitor flashed green as it unlocked.

Their test of knowledge came in the form of a questionnaire, which, aside from the first three questions being multiple choice, were all open ended, and encouraged to provide details. I quickly tabbed through them, and equally quickly noted that they became more complex the further into it got. It was a scattershot of subjects, but most of them held immediate medical relevance... Though, that relevance was tinged by this day and age.

Cyberware was so prevalent that you basically couldn’t be a doctor without having some experience in it. Most people only had the basic stuff, but that still meant that most people had it. The number of people who had absolutely nothing was low indeed, and Night City was lethal enough that they typically didn’t live long enough to receive medical attention if they needed it in the first place.

None of the questions were outside of my ability, however.

It took me all of half an hour to get through them, my fingers tapping at the keyboard rapidly and constantly, without any breaks or pauses. One by one, I struck each question down, and the only ones which were even interesting enough for me to be worth remembering were a pair of trick questions.

One of them presented a falsity in its question, naming a chemical compound that, while similar in name to another, didn’t actually do the same thing, before going on to request how to determine an appropriate dosage based on body weight and other relevant factors. The point of this question was to see how much attention we were paying, but I had too much pride in my work not to include an analysis of both.

The second one gave a logistical impossibility, dictating a number of Cyberware subsystems that were simply not possible to fit into the parent limb at the same time. While it was theoretically possible volumetrically, it would be the kind of volume that could only be demonstrated by spherical cow abstractions, or a person who was twice as tall as the average Fullborg.

There were hidden cameras watching me the entire time, and through them, I sensed that many people were... particularly surprised by how quickly I had finished it.

It was the kind of work that would be difficult even for people with Kerenzikovs, after all. Yet, I had once before demonstrated physical speed that surpassed even this, inside of the bank lobby, and that was enough to make people wonder...

It didn’t take the man long to get here when I summoned him. His behaviour betrayed none of his nervousness.

“That was an extraordinarily fast completion time!” He complimented, smiling. The cocktail of hormones and relaxants drifting through his blood is what allowed it.

I didn’t respond. I just stared, and waited for him to get on with it.

He got on with it. “The next part is practical demonstration, of course, and-”

And it was one of the most shameless rorts that I’d ever heard of.

On the surface, it seemed simple, and almost reasonable. The short version is that they would have the prospective licensee operate inside of a local, attached clinic on the campus for a couple hours. This was, theoretically, ‘to test their skills in action’.

In practice, it was free labour. Candidates would be operating without compensation, without preparation, and under a great deal of stress, all of which was already a recipe for disaster just by itself, without even considering the test that would have been taken right before the whole thing.

Oh, and of course, you had to bring your own tools. Some basic stuff was offered, but anything that would allow people to do the job with actual efficiency had to be brought in.

All of that paled in comparison to the real trick.

So long as the prospective licensee was successful, then Night Corp would add their successes to their own. After all, all of it took place in Night Corp’s approved clinics, by Night Corp’s approved physicians. By any stretch, they were Night Corp’s successes. This, naturally, inflated Night Corp’s success rate, and they were perfectly happy to tout about it when they were providing statistics.

If you failed, on the other hand, then they didn’t. Because you weren’t an approved physician, and so you would nicely fall in another category entirely. More than that, the cost and the liability would also fall on you, and so they made money all the same. It was a neat little system they created, either they win or they don’t lose.

The customers put up with it because they got a slight discount. And a slightly bigger discount, if the event in question happened to fail.

There were so many psychological incidents on this campus that were simply and quietly not addressed whatsoever that it almost beggared belief. Almost.

We soon arrived at the on-campus clinic, the man having talked about the process the entire way over. Just like the rest of the campus, it was scaled up larger than it needed to be in order to demonstrate its importance... Or, somewhat more accurately, to brag about how rich the campus was. This left the building quite large, and I didn’t even have to bend down that much in order to fit inside.

The interior of the first floor was wide and open, and I immediately saw multiple sets of stairs leading upwards. As for the first floor, though, there were a dozen rooms were one-way-glass walls showing to the rest of the floor. There were several people in most of them, older practioners overseeing nervous trainees who were practicing simple things. I saw one stripping down a pile of Cyberware, cleaning them manually. I saw another in the middle of a surgery. A third was installing Subdermal Armour.

“Are you ready to begin?” The man asked, as we stopped in front of an open room.

I reached into my robes, and I pulled a pair of devices. The man’s eyes flicked to them, and then widened slightly as they opened up and I slipped them around my hands. “Yes.” I said, as the Exogloves deployed.

The door flashed green, opening, and I didn’t hesitate to walk in.

The first person that they sent in was a man with a broken arm. A few questions established that he was a student here, had broken that arm less than an hour ago, and hadn’t received any treatment beyond nerveblockers, bloodclotting medicine, and a sling. It was not, unfortunately for him, a simple fix. The bone had received a comminuted fracture, and that was never something that surgeons liked.

He had a Pain Editor, and so elected to not receive anaesthesia while I operated, claiming it would be too costly. I hated that he was probably correct.

It took me all of ten minutes to recover every fragment of the bone and bioglue it back into place. Sealing up and cleaning the cuts that I’d made took even less time, and I finished it all up with biodegradable sutures. A final injection of nanosurgeons would see the limb completely fixed by the end of the week.

If he’d taken more damage, it might have been cheaper and faster to just replace the limb entirely with a cloned one. Alas, here he was.

He was on his way out twenty minutes after he’d walked in, with strict instructions to not use that arm for at least three days. I expected he would be ignoring that, but if he did... Well, it was on him.

I then had twenty minutes of free time while my examiners scrambled to get more people in, so they briefly sent me to go assist with the person who was stripping down Cyberware.

“Observe here.” I said, pointing towards a specific spot on the Biomonitor that she’d been working on when I’d walked in. “See this crack? The former owner of this Cyberware was shot, and the bullet clipped the Biomonitor.”

She leaned in, optics shifting in focus as they magnified. “I see it. Is that why it doesn’t work?”

“Almost.” I said, before opening the entire thing up in a single, simple motion. “As you can clearly see-” I pointed to a specific section. “The only problem with it is that the hydrostatic shock loosened a cable. The original manufactures clearly did not utilize the amount of adhesive that they should have.”

She nodded, intrigued.

They pulled me in for an examination next, and this time it was actually sort of interesting. Somebody was coming in with a complaint that their Cyberarm “wasn’t fitting right”.

‘Whoever installed this should be shot.’ Was my diagnosis. It was just... absolutely fucked up.

I spent the next hour effectively re-doing the installation of the Cyberarm, properly realigning the connections with the rest of the body. This only fixed a small amount of problems, and while it was better, I had too much pride in my work to leave it there.

“Arms back. Stretch. Flex.” I said, looking over a readout as the man did as I requested. On the opposite side of the window, invisible to us, a small crowd was watching me work. “Repeat.”

The neural net shifted, lighting up as he moved. I adjusted the weighting, again, and the man stumbled, letting out a sudden gasp. “Whoa!” He said, and then started going through the motions once more. “Wow! That’s so much better. It almost feels like my ‘ganic arm!”

“It could be better.” I said, before closing the readout. “But anything more than that will require customisation to make sure it fits you.”

“That’s possible?” He asked.

“It is not easy.” I answered, humming. “But it can be done. Not here, not in the time remaining, but soon... Perhaps. Shall I note down your number?”

The man grinned.

More people came. Then they ran out of people. I spent my last remaining two hours wandering between each room at random, dispensing advice, giving lessons, and performing difficult tasks with impossible ease and confidence.

At the end of my allotted time, the supervisor took me out of there, all wide smiles and bright eyes. Fake, of course. “Well, that seems like a ringing endorsement of your skills!”

I stared. After several hours of interacting with people relatively normally, he’d apparently forgotten that I hadn’t treated him like that.

“We will of course do our best to deliver the results with the appropriate speed.” He recovered quickly, at least. “Is there anything else we can do for you?”

“No.”

“Of course.” He smiled. “If you are ever in need, we are here.”

I walked out of there, clad in the knowledge that I would do everything in my power to never come here again.

It would be too soon.