Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 1.24

1.24

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I opened another holoscreen, accessing the Net. Quickly, I opened Night Corp’s main link, and then started going through the subdirectories.

I owned property, now. Property that was quite large, well within the city, and soon to not be in disrepair.

If I wanted to keep it, and, obviously, I did, then I was going to need to pay the city’s taxes, lest they end up bothering me about it. Since I didn’t particularly feel like spending the amount of time it would take to win a war against the city, taxes it was.

In turn, I would need a source of Eddies. A nice, good, continuous stream of money.

I had some plans for that, and those plans were born from the immensely shitty state of the city.

Hell, more than that.

This entire world is a pile of garbage being consumed by internecine parasites, but that wasn’t all that there was to it. There were still plenty of normal people in the world, even the definition of ‘normal’ had been skewed a bit on account of the circumstances.

For all that I bitched about it, there was still something in this world that was worth reaching out for.

Was I going to get bitten? Sure. Would people be hesitant to trust me? Absolutely. Would some try to take advantage of me? Of course. Would the Corporations eventually come around to try and destroy what I intended to build? Obviously.

But none of that was a reason to not try in the first place.

I just had to start small, plant the seeds and let them grow from there.

I was most of the way to getting started already, but there were just a few more things that needed to be done before I could truly hit the ground running. Waiting for my building to finish reconstruction was only one of those things.

The most important thing, and the thing that I needed to send a message for, was, funnily enough, a license. Not for the building, those had already been squared away when I’d done the acquisition in the first place. No, this one was for me.

Deep in Night City’s Byzantine bureaucracy, I had found no shortage of random, incomprehensible, and outright insane provisions and catches. While it was very blatantly obvious that most of them had been put there on purpose by the direct efforts of a great deal many different Corporations over the years, a decent chunk of them also originated from Richard Night’s original designs for the city-state’s laws, and he had built the entire city from the ground up in order to maximise the ability of businesses to do business... at the expense of most everything else.

Fun facts: Medical licenses in Night City had gone through so many changes over the years that they were basically unrecognisable from their original form. Yes, it was dramatically stupid. However, it was useful to me.

They came in three broad categories. There was a ‘pharmaceutical’ license, a ‘general’ license, and ‘specialist’ licenses. The pharmaceutical license was self-explanatory in a way that was reasonably accurate, but the other two were giant fucking liars.

They had originally started out somewhat more reasonably, but after decades of Biotechnica and other such corporations fucking around alongside the advancement of technology, the general license was incredibly broad, and the specialist licenses were quite specific. A general license was all that you needed to perform surgeries, administer drugs, install cyberware, ‘develop medical technologies’, and all sorts of other stuff..

Meanwhile, specialist licenses were things like “You need me in order to legally stick someone inside of a cryopump or cryotank.”.

Given the expensive and often finicky nature of such things, it made sense. The thing is, a lot of what would otherwise constitute specialty licenses... weren’t, anymore. Specialty licenses were expansive, but that also made them expensive. Corporations had instead shifted so many allowances into the general license by now because that was simply cheaper for them. This was important, because one of the allowances that had been shifted was the procurement, production, usage, and sale of cloned organic materials.

Getting that license was basically a blank white paper with the words “I can do whatever I want” written on it.

How, then, did one acquire a general license?

Well, there was the obvious answer of ‘money’, which remained absolutely true every single time. Aside from that, it was possible to get accredited at Night City’s University, which offered a medical course that, from my brief look into it, was practically designed to dump you directly into a Corporation.

Considering the amount of immigrants that came to this city, however, there were other options. The city was willing to hand the licenses out to people who were being sponsored by Corporations for a decent fee, but for people who didn’t have that sponsorship, there was another option that didn’t involve spending an excessive amount of money.

You just had to be willing to prove that you were truly capable of what you claimed to be able to do.

All you needed was a few thousand eddies, and Night City’s University would happily arrange for you to be tested on your claims. They’d throw you into the gauntlet and judge how you did, and if you succeeded, you’d be walking away with a license and the certifications.

If you failed, that was that. It was done forever, no retries... at least, not without much more money than what it had originally required.

Fucking Night City...

Still, I didn’t have the time for anything longer term and I didn’t want to spend the money on the more expensive options. As for my ability to complete the tests...

Well... Chozo.

I would be teaching them.

I finally found the subdirectory for Night City University, and promptly flashbanged myself by opening it up. Its page was... genuinely horrific, somehow so utterly dated that it wrapped all the way back around into seeming almost new. It was like seeing a 2006 Myspace page created by someone with too much time on their hands and too little sense to know that it was necessary to have every single part of the page be its own custom design, up to and including the font and cursor.

I did my level best to ignore it, and went to the services button, which, of course, had its own unique font and colour, and happened to be shaped like a puzzle piece that fit in with the rest of the bar.

The page it loaded was only slightly more tolerable, but it didn’t take me very long to find what I was looking for.

The application that I needed to send was to the university, of course. There were plenty of times to do it, but right now was, in fact, the best time for it.

In this city, nothing corporate ever truly slept. Operations for a day might slow down, but there were always people present.

Night City University was a subsidiary of Night Corp. The same applied to it.

And, so long as the right person saw it, I could get a few things expedited.

Filling in the application barely took a minute. I waited an additional two before my Farsight aligned my actions with the future I wanted, and then I hit send.

Off it went, through the barely-repaired networks of the city, across half a dozen different servers haphazardly connected together, before arriving at its destination. System subroutines checked it, and flagged it immediately after the ID listed on the card matched with a suspected EVC. It was immediately escalated to the attention of somebody who could deal with it.

Not even ten minutes later, an email arrived in my inbox.

Most of the contents of that email were pointless jargon, and the rest was a ‘thanks for choosing us’, then a ‘we would love to help’, and lastly ‘what time will be suitable for you?’

My answer took only two minutes to get back, and contained the exact same blunt directness that I had used with every single interaction with a Corpo so far. ‘As early as possible’ was what it boiled down to, and the actual message was only slightly longer than that.

It took seven minutes and one more email from the both of us to get a time confirmed, and that time was tomorrow morning at nine.

This was perfectly fine to me, and so I shortly went to sleep again.

I dreamt of alien skies, and the battles that one half of me had fought in them.

I woke up the next day at half past seven. I took half an hour to clean up, get food and drink, and prepare everything I’d need. I left the building at exactly eight, and then quickly got walking.

The morning after the rain left the city smelling quite terrible. The chemicals of the acidic rain had had time to dry out, and the scent it left behind was a mix of half a dozen foul chemicals. To top it off, there was a light smog and chemical haze, which was actually quite dangerous to unaugmented Humans.

Most people out on the streets had Nasal Filters Cyberware, or were wearing masks. I quickly found myself wishing I’d done the same, and so I made a mental note to make something that would do the job, but better.

Nevertheless, I ignored it, and simply walked a steady pace through the city.

The route that I took was nearly exactly the same as last time, save for cutting out the visit to the docks office. Instead, I went straight to the San Morro Bridge, and unhesitatingly crossed it. The NCPD officers were still there, though I noted that all of them had been replaced with an entirely new set of people by now. Evidently, it was a rotating duty.

Much like the previous group, they clutched their weapons and tensed up when I passed through, but they didn’t actually stop me, so I didn’t really care.

Little China and Old Japantown were exactly the same as they had been before, though the rain had stripped paint from the walls, leaving smears where the gang signs and street art had been. I couldn’t say that I noticed much of a difference going through the Old Combat Zone, but everything here was already so decayed that the damage from the rain just added to the rest of it.

This time, at least, I wasn’t bothered by random people who really should have known better.

I made it into the Glen without any issues, passing the next set of NCPD barricades and checkpoints easily. Here came the next deviation in the route that I’d taken before: Rather than taking a right and heading to the bank, I kept going straight along the Skyline.

Its path continued through South Night City, briefly intersected with the Reclamation Zone and the Port Of Night City as the road curved north to form into Skyline West, and continued all the way upwards into the University District, which was my actual destination.

I took a left at the perhaps appropriately-named Education Drive, and then a right three streets down, which took me directly to the main campus of Night City University.

It was, like a lot of buildings in this area, more vertical than horizontal. There were several buildings, most of them dedicated to one or two subjects, tall enough to host the entire student body. A nearby Cube Hotel held more than ninety percent of the non-Corpo students, and I could tell exactly which one it was by the abject misery that surged through that single building. It was stained black with death and despair.

I had seen emotivorous extradimensional parasites that created more pleasant conditions. If this Earth was even slightly more magically active, it would have metastatized a very long time ago.

I tried my best to ignore it.

Instead, I went towards the main lobby of the campus, which was filled mostly with the much more tolerable academic envy.

The lobby was tall and open, clearly having been made to show off, but I elected to ignore that since it meant that I didn’t need to bend down in order to fit inside.

My eyes drifted right, and found a man approaching me. They had seen me coming through the cameras, and this was their play.

Well, that’s perfectly fine.

Hopefully I wouldn’t be here for too long.