Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 1.5

1.5

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Checking out the bodies only took me a few minutes each, and I had to say... I was terribly disappointed.

Three dead Scavs, and none of them had a single Eurodollar note in their pockets. Absurd! Who doesn’t keep even a little bit of cash on hand?

Well, as it turns out, the answer was... a concerningly large amount of people in Night City, actually.

At some point in the mid-2030s, Night City’s council had made a concentrated effort towards moving people to digital currency. The reasons given were many, but they all had the distinct taste of lies to them. The truth, in the end, was about control.

Digital transactions were easier to monitor. To track. Even with the DataKrash having made a fine mess of things, this remained true. After the CitiNet had been deployed by Ziggurat, and the Datapools started coming into existence, there’d been a major push to get things ‘back on track’. Part of it was propaganda, claiming that the previous absolute mess that they, everyone, had all been dealing with was soon to be over, but that wasn’t all of it of course.

Still, it worked as a justification, and that was all that some people needed. Night City’s council had passed a few resolutions, and all of a sudden, physical cash was discouraged and electronic cash was now the best thing since sliced bread.

How had they done this?

A few simple steps, of course. First, physical currency now had a universal ‘Cash Tax’, because people who paid in cash were ‘making things unnecessarily difficult for those who had properly stepped into the future’. Buy something with E-money? Fine. Buy something with physical money?

That’ll be an extra ten percent. Plus five percent for worker costs, plus five percent for inconvenience, plus whatever other bullshit whoever you were paying could justify that you just didn’t have the energy to fight.

Now, surely that was the end of it? Greed couldn’t possibly extend further than that, right?

Pfftthahahaha!

No. We’re in the ultra-capitalist hellhole, and we’re going to steal every single dime from your wallet and make you pay for the privilege.

It was still possible to acquire physical currency, but Night City itself claimed an inconvenience tax. You did not ‘exchange’ one form of currency with the other. To physical currency, you ‘buy’ it... And no, a hundred Eddie note did not cost one hundred eddies.

The actual exchange rate hovered in the vicinity of an extra twenty percent over the value of what you were trying to acquire, which was a level of swindling that was almost, almost, impressive... were it not for the boiling rage it inspired instead.

If ever I see opportunities to make a Megacorporation’s day worse, I will be taking them. Right now, though...

I sighed.

Now I needed to resort to another option in order to get some starting cash.

There was a ton of Cyberware downstairs, but even ignoring the ghoulish implications of trying to sell them, I didn’t have any contacts to sell them to. Even if I did find someone to pass it off too, there was the minor detail that I didn’t have a bank account, and that meant that I would be relying on the buyer to hand over cash.

The paradox was obvious, and infuriating.

...

I sighed.

Still, maybe selling the Cyberware wasn’t my only choice.

I felt for the possibility, and Time told me that it existed. Following the guidance of my Supernatural Bullshit, I stood up, and promptly made my way back downstairs.

I went straight into the Cyberware storage room, still feeling for the things which had potential. My eyes were drawn to a few boxes in particular, none of them looking any different to the rest of them, but I took them regardless, piling each box on top of each other before using a single hand to take the entire stack back upstairs, balancing the bottom on the curves of my talons.

Opening the first box hit me with a wave of rancid air, which I valiantly ignored as best as I could.

The first few items on top were of little interest to me. A Cyberarm, because of course, which I ignored, and then what looked like several oddly shaped sheets that were, in fact, Skinweave, which I put to the side because I vaguely remembered that Skinweave was meant to have nanomachines that ran repairs, and then what looked vaguely like a liver, and then...

My eyebrow raised. Carefully, I reached into the box, and pulled out a small, rectangular shape from it. It was thin, translucent, and looked like a smartphone.

An Agent...

This wasn’t even Cyberware. And yet they had still put it in the box with all the other disgusting blood and bodily pieces.

Ugh.

Still, that was useful, and it was waterproof, so it wouldn’t be too hard to clean.

The box contained nothing else of interest, so I put the Cyberlimb and Cyberliver back inside of it before closing it up.

The Skinweave might be useful later, but the Agent...

Well, first things first, it had to be cleaned.

I picked up the Agent, and went over to the sink, grabbing a small cloth as I did. The tap handle had red and blue marks, and I tipped it all the way into the red before pulling it back.

The water came out ice cold, and it didn’t get any hotter.

I sighed, and shut it off before eyeing up the nearby cabinet. A quick check revealed a metal pot, covered in dust like it had never been used.

I ran it under the sink for a few minutes, washing all the dust away, before filling it with water and bringing it over to the stove. The stove was electric, so I just flicked it on and waited.

The water shortly started boiling, and I promptly dunked the cloth inside, wringing it a bit as I did my best to clean it out with a lack of soap on hand.

An unaugmented Human would be screaming with third degree burns, but against my skin, the literally scalding water wasn’t even unpleasant.

When it was finally clean enough, I tipped the water out and replaced it with a new supply, letting that one boil.

Then I got to work cleaning the Agent.

It took more time than I’d have liked. The blood and gore was truly caked on, leaving the Agent’s every crevice filled up with gunk, and getting it all out took some effort. Still, about twenty minutes of work later, and constantly replacing the boiling water, I got it done.

Underneath the viscera, the Agent had clearly seen better days. Its casing, intended as completely black, was scuffed and scratched, worn by time and use.

I pressed a button on the side, and nothing happened.

Of course.

I turned it sideways, looking at it carefully. I spotted a faint seam, and brought my talon up, before pushing the very tip against the seam and then twisting my finger.

The casing popped open. The inside was notably more clean, effectively sealed from the gore that it had been stored in. That gave me a nice, clean view of its internals, and I had to say...

Kind of a mess.

This had been a somewhat older model, clearly. The way that the circuits were laid out spoke of a lack of refinement that had been born from a lack of knowledge as opposed to a lack of care. The logic was clear, but untested. I could easily see several spots that would end up much hotter than they should be because of overlapping circuits and not enough heat transference.

Nothing seemed damaged, though.

The battery, then?

I’d seen some tech in the third room downstairs, so that was probably my best bet.

I left the Agent there, and went to go check.

A short trip later, and I opened the door to the other room. I ignored the corpse as I took a look around, before my eyes settled on a big, cardboard box sitting on top of a desk.

I hummed, walking over and opening it up. Inside was a bunch of things, loose cables, screwdrivers, a bundle of batteries, more wires than I knew what to do with, what looked like old circuit boards, interfaces, and... yes. Charger packs.

I took the entire box with me back upstairs, and left it on the table.

The Agent’s port was proprietary, because of fucking course it was, so I had to do a bit of quick searching in order to find some matching branding among the packs, but fortunately for me, I found several. First was a few adapters bearing the logo and the right port, but the second was the charger pack itself. Untangling it from the rest of the box was an annoyance, but nothing more.

I plugged the charger pack into the wall, and the cord into the Agent. After a few seconds, it lit up, displaying a logo for ten seconds before finally moving on.

“Welcome back, Master.” A sultry feminine tone echoed from its tinny speakers, a stylized image of a Human face appearing on the screen, already smiling. That smile turned into a frown a few seconds later. “Warning: service is currently unavailable. Please move to a more open area.”

This would be the SAAI, then. That it had been customised into this did say a few things about the former owner... But I didn’t really care, to be honest.

The face vanished, and it went to the main screen.

Directly to the main screen. No lockscreen whatsoever.

In this particular moment, I did have to appreciate the lack of security, but the cybersecurity analyst within me wept, truly.

Still.

I picked up the phon- Agent, briefly brushing the curve of my talon against the screen.

It responded, so that was a good start.

Alright. First things first, I navigated into the settings.

There was... quite a bit of nearly useless crap in the settings. Most of it was useless, or overly dense with utterly pointless information. Each App had its own setting page, and the vast majority of them did not actually contain much of use.

Still, there was a bunch of information to be acquired. First, I poked into the SAAI’s settings, and promptly turned it to as close to ‘off’ as the algorithm could get. It would still listen to literally everything, but it wouldn’t respond or talk unless it was directly asked. I had no intention of talking to an algorithm, so... that was that.

Personal details netted me some info about the former owner. It gave me a name, a face, and a living location. I made a mental note to eventually return the Agent to that location in the future, after I had no need for it.

There was an option for bank accounts underneath an App called BangMe!, and the details for the victim were all there. Using the victim’s account, however, would have been utterly ghoulish.

Then I found what I hoped to find. ‘Pairing Mode’.

I pressed that button, and the screen shifted. A new list appeared, with a spinning icon showing it attempting to populate, but there was also a button for ‘wired connections’, and that was much more interesting. I pressed it, and the screen came up.

I left the Agent on the table for a moment, and looked at the adapter. One side was the proprietary port, but the other was a universal one.

I hummed, and then looked back at the body.

I walked over, grabbing the arm -Oh, hey, rigor mortis was beginning to set in-, and then twisted it until the wrist was easily accessed.

There, on the inside, was exactly what I was looking for. I grabbed the Interface Plug and pulled, dragging the wire out as far as it would go.

The ports matched.

I dragged the body back over, checked the battery percentage, and then rapidly swapped the charger for the adapter. The screen lit up, the words ‘pairing in progress’ appearing, not even asking for confirmation.

I was beginning to understand why everything in this world was so vulnerable to hacking.

It took only a few seconds, but then a new option appeared.

‘Import information?’ It asked.

I hummed, and pressed yes.

The screen flashed. A loading bar appeared, with a flashing text box underneath it. Contacts, then Messages, then Accounts, then Miscellaneous.

Finally, a green checkmark sent me back to the main screen. I went back to the settings first, opening the BangMe! App settings.

A new account was present. I tapped it, and everything was already present.

Poor cybersecurity... but, well, I wasn’t going to complain about this particular bit.

I have now acquired money.

Now comes everything else.