Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 1.12

1.12

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From my first examination, it was easy to see that most of the equipment here was well-used.

It was a rather eclectic array of parts and products, sourced from a number of corporations, both local and not. The biovat, for example, came from Biotechnica, and judging by the serial numbers, had been produced locally within the last year. The autosurgeons, breaking my expectations, came from Militech, and were just three years old.

The diagnostic machines, on the other hand, came from everywhere, but more than a few of them were Arasaka’s make- and that was unusual, because Arasaka had been kicked out of the city twenty five years ago.

They’d been kicked out of the city in the aftermath of the nuke that had destroyed the City Center, blamed for it and the Time Of The Red that had followed by the USA and Militech. It had only been seven years ago that the truth had gotten out, that it had been Militech’s bomb that had gone off, which had resulted in opinions on the subject dividing.

The ban on Arasaka remained, however. The diagnostic machines had therefore had to have been smuggled in, because they’re also quite new, only two years old.

The implications were simple. This group had some outside support, and a decent amount of it. I had no doubt that I was sitting on top of a conspiracy that probably involved several different nations, but to be completely honest, I didn’t care about that at the moment.

I had tools, now.

Figuring out how to use it all was the next step, obviously.

I started at the diagnostic machines. Some were simple, mere preliminary examinations. Others were so complex that they could be used to detect nanofractures on Cyberware still inside the body. Each individual machine was a neat unit, but many of them came from different manufacturers, each of whom had built them in their aesthetic styles. Together, they seemed mismatched and messy.

It was obvious that they’d been used, and were intended for future use, as well. All of it was still set up and ready, and I simply followed the cabling to the computers and the rest of the machines in order to figure out how it all connected.

The computer was relatively standard, but the software loaded onto it was specialty, clearly not something publicly available and definitely not something that anybody who wasn’t a certified medical technician should ever be looking at. Alas, here I was, and my Chozo Bullshit was more than eager to pick it apart.

The computer, in turn, led to the autosurgeons and the biovat. There were two variants of the former, one for smaller work, fitting precision modifications, and the other for much larger work, intended to install Cyberlimbs, Cyberorgans, or Cyberspines.

The computer configured both, using data from the scanners to plug into and modify the autosurgeons. Some of this was configuring for simple body shape differences, but the much more important one was configuring nanotech for each individual that would be having Cyberware installed.

This was how Cyberware was integrated into the body. An infusion of nanomachines for each and every single piece.

Needless to say, this was incredibly valuable. Here, I had nanotech that was expecting configuration, designed to be able to handle a variety of different nanoscopic structures, which was open to manipulation. If I could jailbreak the instructions for the nanotech, I would have very nearly no limits on what I would be able to throw together.

This value was eclipsed only by the biovat. Why?

Because the biovat did the exact same thing, but even more freely. Tissue cloning in this day and age was so easy that random mall clinics could do it. Even five years ago when the city didn’t even have datalinks between districts, it only cost fifty Eddies to have one custom grown and cryofrozen for later use.

Organ harvesting was now so unprofitable that people were worth more alive than dead.

And how was it accomplished so easily?

General purpose nanites, assembling body pieces from a nutrient slurry in a vat. No need to change type, they could handle everything from bone to cartilage to muscle to tendon to flesh. Every organ, nerves, or even just fat.

My attention had locked on to the vat the moment I realized that. That was exactly what I needed, and my Supernatural Bullshit was in agreement. This is what I needed to get started.

And so, I dragged a box over in front of the computer desk and got started.

Hours vanished in the blink of an eye, it felt like. I began with the basics, looking through their setup and doing my best to understand their options and workflow. Once I was confident that I wouldn’t break anything just poking around, I went looking for documentation.

That turned out to be almost a waste of time. I found some things, but all of it was dense, corporate jargon that explained remarkably little, and made constant references to other documents that were not currently present. Several times, I found recommendations for courses of action that, on the surface, seemed reasonable, but which definitely were not.

At least one would have broken a machine outright, and voided any warranty or support in doing so.

It ended up telling me what not to do, which, yes, was useful, but it wasn’t the best option.

The more information I gathered, however, the more I had to chew on. With a Chozo brain and Supernatural Bullshit on top of that, that was more than enough. The programs began to unfold before me, their aspects starting to align in my mind.

It was noon when I started my first experiment. A skin sample from one of the Scavs provided the base, letting me understand how the program entered and processed DNA. It did so in a way that could be more efficient, but which wasn’t inherently bad. I tested that understanding by setting the program to produce a patch of skin.

It functioned as intended, and soon I had a small patch forming in the vat. Barely a minute of examination later, and the designed graft was there, waiting.

I had the nanites recycle it, and started on the next.

Cosmetic alteration was a subject that seemed simple, and there was a program that could translate basic edits into actual function. The second test made use of the program, which worked as intended, while the third didn’t use the program.

Instead, I inputted manual designations, creating spots of higher eumelanin and pheomelanin concentration. That test, too, came out correctly, and produced a sample with multiple distinct colours in neat, orderly stripes.

It didn’t let me do what I wanted, however, and so I soon found myself shifting tracks.

There were, among all the boxes filled with Cyberware here, several Cyberdecks present. On them, naturally, were the tools to interact with programs and systems more directly than most designers intended, and certainly much more than any corporation would be happy with.

Another few hours vanished into the pit of time as I started exploring those options, too. There was a laptop present, which I used as a sacrificial lamb for the Cyberdecks just in case they had daemons or viruses loaded. If they did, they had evidently already been cleaned out by the Scavengers, and so I had the perfect chance to open up those programs inside of the interface.

As it turns out, most programs that had been made in the last fifteen years now made use of a new language that had been developed to deal with the aftermath of the DataKrash. It was called META, which I was certain had come out of a corporate think-tank somewhere.

A brief glance through the Agent on the subject told me it was being marketed as “A patch language, much like LINUX”, which only made me absolutely certain that whoever had thrown that out had definitely been in marketing, because they clearly didn’t understand the differences between programming languages and operating systems.

A deeper look revealed that this was definitely true. The initial developers had marketed it as a replacement for the old languages that would nearly inevitably face issues for the DataKrash, and, surprisingly, it turned out to be somewhat true. This had attracted Netwatch’s attention, who had promptly absorbed it for their own purposes. Now it was everywhere, a bad replacement for the old Ihara-Grubb protocols, but functional, which was more than what many could otherwise ask for after Bartmoss did his thing.

As a result, the Cyberdecks’ programs had the same languages as the new machines, and had been built to take advantage of them.

All the tools that I needed to decompile programs had already been assembled for me.

I copied the computer’s main program onto the laptop, and then got digging.

After spending another hour digging through a frightful but not actually surprising amount of corporate bloating, spyware, and obfuscation, going over the entire program line by line with all the alacrity that my brain and body were capable of, I was finally able to extract the core functions of the programs onto their own, isolated environments. From there, it was a matter of study and testing, making slight changes and letting things run, seeing how the program handled everything.

It was clear to me that a lot of work had gone into this. Both expertise and time, and I didn’t need any of my Chozo aspects to see it. Even just the Human part of me had delved deep enough to see their effort. But, the Chozo part of me... It was clear to that side of me that this was quite good. Mathematical descriptions of biology, transformations and checks described in a massive matrix of parameters. Incomplete, but the potential was there.

It made it nearly a shame to discard most of it. What I needed was beyond these definitions, intended for Human and Human-adjacent biology. I needed freedom, utterly and completely.

And so, I found myself dedicating the time to the matter of rebuilding that interface entirely, allowing myself more freedom even as I ensured the actual end result was still compatible with the nanites, still something that they could handle.

The sun had set completely by the time I was satisfied with my work, and my next test was simply to see if it did actually work at all.

I spent ten minutes inputting equations, describing an arrangement of carbon atoms. What I’d rebuilt took those equations, ran them, and then generated an instruction set from it. Swapping from the computer to the laptop was simple, just a cable change, and the test itself started with a click of a button.

The Chozo part of me was confident, and while my Human part was used to things never working on the first time ever, it turned out to be the former that won that particular standoff.

The nanites got to work, and I soon had a carbon lattice on my hands, long thin strands connecting in hexagonal arrangements, forming a consistent pattern that ended just before it could become an infinite fractal.

It made me very happy to see it, but I knew that this would be only the first step of the process to achieve what I desired.

The next step was to take things quite a bit further. By far the longest part of any of this was going to be transcribing the things that my brain could come up with into the machines that I had set up. I could take some shortcuts with math, but I was, fundamentally, building a blueprint of what I wanted the nanites to build, that blueprint was very detailed indeed.

Doing it with a keyboard, a mouse, and screen? It was possible, yes, but it certainly wasn’t fast.

If I wanted to get anywhere anytime soon, that had to change. My mind worked faster than any keyboard could, and so I needed a true interface to achieve true potential.

It was incredibly ironic, because I was surrounded by mind-machine interfaces, and I just couldn’t use any of them. It wasn’t even a matter of installation, all these Neural Links and Cyberdecks were configured for a Human brain, and I definitely didn’t have one of those outdated things anymore.

Still, I knew what to do, and all I had to do was do it.

If all goes well, after all, the first time will be the only time I have to do it.

How lovely that would be.