510 Planning Plans

Gloria was at the apartment door to leave, right at the stroke of four P.M., and gave me a look that held more emotions than she would ever be comfortable expressing. Instead of commenting about that, or what had happened today, I said something she didn't expect.

“Do you want your pay after every shift or at the end of the week?” I asked her.

“Shift!” Gloria gasped and looked embarrassed.

I chuckled and pretended to use the clicker and mentally transferred her pay to her account using the cyberdeck in the bedroom. “You got it, choombatta! See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, mijo. I'll be here.” Gloria said and confirmed the transfer with a nod. She gave me a little wave of her hand before she hefted her backpack over her shoulder and left.

I now had four hours to wait for Syn to show up for her shift and I hoped that she didn't let the long day drag her down. If she was smart, and I was pretty sure she was, she would figure out there was no one here for the supper meal and she would need to feed me like she did last night. Just the promise of better food should have kept her in a good mood.

I didn't try to do anything besides sort through the free stuff I downloaded from the local net. There were a lot of designs and things I could easily improve and I would have to do some research on releasing improved design patents or selling them back to the company that owned them.

There was no way they would let me make anything on my own that was 'theirs' without hampering me legally or sending an assassin, or a team of assassins after me. It was something to be concerned about, especially in Night City. Some of the more prolific gangs that controlled territory were actually corporate sponsored, secretly of course, to harass and manipulate their competition.

I thought about looking deeper into the hover technology they used to keep vehicles safe and easy to handle. The basic stuff was available online and it worked, the problem was it was decades out of date. I was sure the copros had made plenty of updates with them and either patented them as new tech or under their company's umbrella.

Along the same vein, I could easily reproduce a hoverpad from the Matrix universe and revolutionize the entire automotive industry. There was a robust 3d printing technology that existed here to explain my ability to make so many of them. A quick check made me almost choke on my own saliva at the stupidly expensive cost for the fully enclosed and portable printer with a pack of basic materials to print with.

That explained why there wasn't new custom made stuff being produced all the time by everyone on the street. It was cheaper to buy the finished product than it was to buy the materials to print it yourself. Even if you sucked up the cost to make it yourself, it took time and effort to produce it and assemble it. It was a lot of work to make something you could buy right now.

Do I or don't I?I asked myself and sighed and closed the purchase order.

I switched back to the virtual browser and ignored the search results for personal printers and inquired about larger ones, including industrial sized ones. Of course, the cost rose significantly for the much larger printers; but, the cost for materials changed to become much cheaper to buy by the ton instead of by the kilogram.

That's how they can get away with it.I thought and silently cursed the corpo's successful lock on the market. Mass production dropped the costs to almost nothing and any sales they made past the cost of the industrial printer, which would have been achieved years ago, was almost pure profit.

If you were already printing parts and things for your own company employees, the cost of extra materials to double the print run was almost negligible. Even if they didn't sell well and just sat in a warehouse or storage facility, that was a huge resource that could be tapped later for replacement parts or for recycling materials. There was almost no downside once you had the thing up and running and the logistics in place.

I just had to decide if I was going to sink the majority of my fortune into buying one, the advanced cyberdeck needed to run it and the design software, a warehouse in a good area to put it in, and the first initial delivery of materials. It would almost completely clean me out of the funds I had paid for when creating this scenario, though.

Then again, I didn't have to make that decision right away. I had a week to go over my options and to decide if staying at Arasaka Academy for the full school term to finish my degree was what I needed to do to establish myself as a licensed manufacturer. It would change a lot of what I could do in this world if I had a legitimate degree and paid for a real license instead of hacking the details into the system.

That meant I had to wait to go to school and log in to check on the options, since it was a closed system inside the Arasaka Tower downtown. Students could only access the internal network from inside the company's ICE protective shell and never through it. Legally, anyway.

So, I pulled myself back from the search and left the information I had dredged up on the active cyberdeck in the bedroom. There was no visual monitor for the thing, since it was only used in VR. What would a physical screen do? Use up a lot of unnecessary power and probably burn a static background image into the screen.

It was getting late, so I also shut down the slightly hacked design software I had and closed the attempted redesign of a hoverpad. It technically shouldn't be able to be reduced in size, since its size was what made the thing so prolific in its lifting capacity. Only two pads needed for a functioning hoverbike and four for a full size luxury car? It was unheard of with this worlds technology.

If I made the thing smaller and added many more of them, spread them out over the frame of the vehicle, it could make a normal vehicle into a hover one pretty easily. The conversion wouldn't even affect the standard chooh-002 engine it had for normal driving. Hell, removing that would severely reduce the weight and made the thing even easier to convert into a pure hover vehicle.

They did have full hover vehicles on the market for the insanely rich, though. The damn things were huge with nearly three quarters of the mass being taken up by the hover tech and the power requirements. The size of the vehicle increased with the space needed for passengers and transporting goods.

The best example of that was the Trauma Team flight ambulances. They had room inside for carrying multiple stretchers, armed and armored EMT troopers, and a nearly top of the line and fully stocked emergency room in the back that could keep you alive until they brought you to a hospital.

They were complete assholes to you if you weren't a contracted client; but, they had style and the means to not face the consequences of being assholes. That put them right up there with corpo execs and the top tier members of the various gangs across the city. Money begets money, after all.

The apartment door opened and Syn walked in. “Hey, choom! Did you eat yet? I'll grab us something!”

I held in my laugh as she practically skipped into the kitchen and looked at the vending machine. She chose a better meal than hamburgers, since neither of us had supper, and she brought the loaded tray into the living room. I was not surprised to see another bottle of the expensive liquor on the tray and she gave me a knowing look as she set it aside.

“She had to leave you hanging?” Syn asked as she nodded at the towel covering me.

“Yeah, I'm feeling better and not so out of it.” I answered. “Guess what happened when she tried to hook the hose to it?”

Syn laughed and lightly swatted my toes, since those and my fingers were the only not-bandaged things on me. “There's no way you did that again!”

“Ha ha, naw. I just sprung up like a gonk seeing his first joytoy on the street.” I admitted and she laughed. “Had a normal one after two coffees and a NiCola.”

Syn nodded and fed me my meal, then she ate her own. She opened the liquor bottle and gave me a questioning look. I shook my head and wiggled my fingers to point at myself. She understood what I meant and poured herself a generous glass and moved to where Gloria had sat earlier.

“Do you mind if I watch my show?” Syn asked. “The newsies are usually boring this late with nearly everyone gonked out.”

I did not point out that she was literally drinking high proof alcohol and would end up the same way if she wasn't careful. “You can change the channel?”

Syn looked surprised and then laughed again. “Damn, choom. I forgot you can't get a direct connection anymore.”

The television changed to a show that was a futuristic version of a soap opera. It was about a corpo exec that falls for his joytoy and marries her, only for that to cause all sorts of problems in both of their social circles. It had his corporate associates riled up because you never lower yourself like that, and her prostitute friends were up in arms over her trying to leave them behind to join the upper class.

Of course, considering the subject matter, it was full of blatant nudity, nearly endless cursing, sexual acts of all kinds, and scenes that should only have been hinted at and were shown in their entirety. The funny part was that it was surprisingly entertaining. Whoever was behind their creation had a knack for storytelling and drama that sucked you right into the story.

“You... have to let me... keep coming over... to watch the full unedited version.” Syn whispered between panting breaths.

I took my eyes off of the screen to glance at her and was surprised to see that she had her top off and was mauling one breast with her cybernetic hand and her normal hand pinched her other nipple hard.

Why didn't she want me to tease her about shortening her name to Syn again?I asked myself.From what I could see, it was a pretty accurate nickname.

According to her thoughts, she was only able to see the normal version where she lived and the scene she was watching now would have been a five minute commercial break.

“Look at that custom tattoo covering his back.” Syn whispered with a moan and then gasped and trembled as she came.

No thanks.I thought and closed my eyes.If I pretend to be asleep, maybe she'll ignore me.

Thankfully, she was invested into the story a lot more than she usually was and did end up ignoring me for the rest of the show. She also made it halfway through the bottle of alcohol before the show ended and she passed out as the credits rolled.

I wasn't sure if she intentionally timed it that way or not and her mind was a little too addled to give me more than an impression of satisfaction. As far as she was concerned, it was a happy coincidence and worked out in the best way.

Instead of trying to wake her when her shift was over, I let her sleep and would wake her in the morning with plenty of time to go home and get ready for work at the hospital. I did check her cybernetic implants to make sure that the alcohol wasn't going to adversely affect her in the morning. Well, more than it was actually going to, anyway. She would have quite the hangover when she woke up.

I decided to get some sleep as well, just because I didn't really have anything better to do. I also used telekinesis to move her head in front of the security camera and manipulated her hands to make it look like she was tucking me back into the bandages and wrappings under the towel, then I had her sit back and pull the towel off of me to show I was decent.

I did it like that, just so when Syn checked the camera feed in the morning, or much later in the day when she remembered to, she would see what she did while drunk and it wasn't anything for her to be worried about. I fell asleep and left Syn slumped down and unconscious at the end of the couch.

*

Syn woke up when her alarm clock went off in her head. She groaned at the pain it caused as her brain throbbed from the 'loud' noise, since it wasn't an actual noise at all and just an electrical impulse sent into her brain... which did not like being directly stimulated like that.

She turned the alarm off and slid off of the comfy couch and onto the floor on her knees. She sighed and rubbed her face with a hand and stayed there for a moment, then she slowly opened her eyes. The slight blurriness corrected itself, thanks to the program monitoring her eyesight, and she noticed the half-empty bottle of preem smash.

“I'm such a gonk.” Syn admonished herself and stood. She winced slightly at her wrinkled uniform and how a few things had dug their way into her skin in certain places. She tried picking those out with her fingers and sighed when it didn't work.

With a grumble, she gave up and walked to her bathroom to strip. She had her uniform off and reached for her bra before she realized something. Something she hadn't noticed until that very moment. It was something very important.

She wasn't in her apartment.

In fact, she was in a closet and had no idea how she got there. Syn hooked her bra back on, picked up her rumpled uniform, and walked back out of the closet. It took her a moment or two to remember where the hell she was and she also checked her autologs to see if she was mistaken. Nope, she wasn't. She had gotten drunk at a rich client's apartment and stayed the night. She had apparently played with herself a lot and got off a whole heck of a lot, which the huge and dried stains on her underwear told her. She just had to figure out if she had done more than that to the teenager she was supposed to be taking care of.

Instead of dressing again, she went to the actual bathroom and ignored the huge tub she wanted to play in. She dropped her clothes into the cleaning machine, with her bra and panties, and stepped into the shower. Actual hot water greeted her and she moaned with pleasure. Without thinking, she used the soap and the shampoo, brands she couldn't afford on a good day, and had the best time.

When she stepped out of the shower, Syn was surprised that her hangover wasn't as bad as she thought it was going to be. There was pain from a headache, yes. She did pickle her brain fairly quickly, after all. What she wasn't getting was sick or woozy from drinking so much of it straight. A bottle like that usually lasted her a week, when she could get one, and she drank half of the damn thing in one night.

The cleaner dinged and she pulled out her clean but still rumpled uniform and thought about putting it on like it was, then her eyes caught sight of the clothes prepper. Syn let out a little laugh at having access to something she never had before and opened it.

An Arasaka Academy uniform was inside and she very carefully took it out and replaced it with her own uniform, then arranged the pieces inside it to have it properly pressed. She closed the machine and hit the button. Barely a minute later it was done and also toasty warm.

Syn slipped everything on and almost purred at how great it felt as she dressed in what looked like a brand new nurse's uniform. She felt pampered in a way she never expected and looked in the mirror. She didn't even have to comb her hair after letting it air dry, thanks to the shampoo being highly rated to remove tangles and split ends.

“I wonder if he'll let me move in?” Syn asked her reflection and then let out a little laugh.

The alarm clock in her head showed her the time again when her preset warning to leave for work appeared. Since she was in a better part of town, the ride to work wasn't going to take nearly as long and she stepped out of the bathroom to go to the living room to thank Veder for not waking her up last night when her shift was over and kicking her out.

The peaceful look on his face stopped her from waking him up, though. Her eyes dropped to his waist and she saw he was no longer covered by the towel. She also felt a little disappointment that he was also completely tucked away. Did that mean they didn't get it on and she was worried about nothing? All the stains were hers?

Her alarm warning popped up again and Syn held in her sigh at having to leave without thanking him. She composed a quick message to flash to him, only to stop when she remembered he didn't have a receptor to receive it.

A quick command from her changed the television channel to show the apartment's cyberdeck notifications and messages, thanks to her medical access, and she sent the message there and left it open on the screen. He'd see it when he woke up or when his day nurse came in.

With her apology and thanks technically delivered, Syn picked up the bottle of booze and left the apartment. She had a long shift at work to get to and a few friends to call and brag about the latest episode of her favorite show. She had it saved to her storage and couldn't wait to watch it again.