I had now to decide what to do today. Sure, the first thing to do was to inspect the work on the NADA, which should be finished. But until the resources arrived I could not do much with it yet.

It would not help that over the next few days the new fusactors would be installed. Don’t get me wrong, naturally I integrated a separate UPS into the system that should be able to power it through the power fluctuations, but I was not all too happy about using it for the very first time under complicated circumstances, but when I wanted the auto-surgeon up and running there was not much I could do.

I was less sure about what to do after that though. I had the comparison to control, and if my suspicion was right quite a few combat dives to do, but equally important was it to start Mia on disassembling the Pulse III that should begin coming in today. Then I had to finish the design of the auto-surgeon even though it could wait another day or two. And of course, I wanted to supervise the installation of the fusactors and the fabber. Sadly it seemed that I had to trust the others for that.

I pulled up my checklist to make an update.

Benefactor: Mr. Walker fulfilled the role quite handily. Provided I could keep him alive of course. Biosheath a functioning cyberheart. Have Mia successfully disassemble the hearts to get at least one functional example. After running the parts through the bioreactor reassemble the heart. Build and/or buy the necessary tools to implant the cyberheart. Finnish the design for the auto-surgeon. Build the auto-surgeon. Buy a scanner. Buy at least 3 biobeds. Implant the cyberheart. Lodgings: The fortress here needed a bit of polish but was better than anything I had expected. Contacts: I made a good start but I had quite a way to go here. Workplace: As with point 2, the fortress was tailor-made for my needs. Reputation: Again, a good start but a long way to go. Find out who is behind the murder complot. Examine the result of the comparison of the presumably frame up to the real Giorgio Berardino. Advise Mr. Walker of the result. Depending on the reaction investigate the other potential victims of the attack, as I did not believe that it stopped with Mr. Walker, especially as other crime lords were mentioned in the presumably faked orders. Replace the rest of Mr. Walker's cyberware with biosheated versions. Build a full-sized bioreactor. Work with Mr. Walker to design his cyberware. Help the rest of Mr. Walker's people afflicted with CRS. Establish myself as a broker for Spectre again. Offer my CRS-free cyberware in the Darkweb. Build up the fortress as much as possible. Replace the fusactors (in progress). Replace the algae tank (in progress). Install an industrial fabber (in progress). Renew the diamond coating. Remove the junk (in progress). Repair the furniture. Replace the obsolete computer systems and upgrade the computer security. Update the defense system. Deal with the new slaves a.k.a. former slavers Sell the majority of them to the highest bidder Offer the tech-head to Mr. Walker. Play with Frankel, give him a dose of his own medicine, before selling him. Solve the conundrum with Yokata Sayomi.

For a moment I was a bit put off seeing the sheer number of things to do. But in the end, there was nothing really new. Well, except points 7 and 8. Everything else would have had to happen either way. Unfortunately, the list failed to make my choice easier.

Finally, I decided to prepare the disassembly guide for the Pulse III including AR help.

Unfortunately, my fabber here was insufficient to make diadems, and even using the industrial fabber would be way too expensive for that.

So I ordered a dozen of the things, while I loaded a cheap smart glasses template. I then queried the security system about Mia’s whereabouts.

To my disappointment she was not in the building, necessitating a call. Just in time for the first delivery of the day.

Two of the Pulse III came at the same time. While I moved into the lab and placed the hearts on the table, I had one of the bots deliver the smart glasses and synced them with the main computer, loading the disassembly guide. I followed that by hunting for the necessary tools for disassembly. When I returned with the tools I found Mia at the table examining the cyberhearts.

“Hey. Good that you are here. The glasses on the table are for you. They have the step-by-step guide already on them. And here are the tools.”

I had myself wheeled beside her.

“Now I have ordered several Pulse III, in case you damage a part during disassembling, but I won’t be disappointed if you don’t use them all.”

She laid the heart she examined back onto the table.

“Well, it can’t be too hard. Let’s begin with it.”

“Don’t underestimate the difficulty. A few of the parts are quite finicky and are not designed to be taken apart. So please be careful.”

Her expression became serious. “Ok, I get it. So, where do I begin?”

“By using the glasses. The guide is fully AR. Give it a moment to inspect the tools and then follow the instructions.

And despite what I said, don’t despair if you ruin a part or two. I would have ordered at least three parts if I had to do the disassembly myself.

It would be a miracle if you make it through without breaking something. Just don’t break the same part on all the hearts. That would be fatal.”

“Three? You have just two here. How should I make it with just two if you would need three?”

I shook my head.

“You got that wrong. First, in all likelihood, I would get it done without breaking anything. At least I have done it already without failure.

The other two would be insurance. But more importantly, the two before you are only the first of five that I ordered. Hopefully, five will be enough, otherwise, it becomes a bit harder to get replacements. I cleaned out the readily available stock.”

After that I watched her as she first unsealed the casing, using the sonic cutter to dissolve the glue holding it together. Her hands were relatively steady, and so far everything went fine.

That was the easy part though. I activated the magnification of my eyes to follow her next steps. She successfully disconnected the synthetic cardiac plexus from the vagus connector, followed by unclipping the connector completely.

That netted us the first critical part intact. Sadly, that was where our luck left us. When she unclipped the plexus from the right atrium control link she slipped and trashed the link and nicked one of the papillary muscles, ruining it.

“Damn. That is really harder than it looks. This stuff is really slippery.” She began to put the heart aside, but I stopped her.

“Keep going. Every functional part of this heart you can get out intact helps us. And so far you only damaged a control link and one artificial muscle. If that is all you do then you can celebrate.”

She looked at me for a few moments before she nodded and continued. In the end, she lost 3 muscles, one control node, and damaged the left ventricle during the two hours of disassembly of the first heart.

“Take a break. Clear your head and eat something. You are doing fine. You got 80% of the parts out in working order. That is pretty impressive.”

She looked at me with some exhaustion before agreeing. I then had myself wheeled back from the table.

“I think you can do the next heart alone. Just take your time. Better to take a few hours longer than to ruin everything and having to procure another heart running against the clock. I have other things that need my attention.”

Silently I ordered a bot to bring the tray with the parts to the corner where I had placed the bioreactor and another with the DNA of Walker to my nano fab while moving there myself.

It was relatively simple to create a batch of the filter nanites, so it took nearly no time until I began the process of sheathing the parts. Unfortunately, the bioreactor was relatively small, experimental design that it was, and so I would have to sheath the parts separately.

That I had to create the biosheathing by brute force with nanites did not help either. Each sheathing process would take nearly 12 hours. Not really so much, but the size of the reactor dictated more than 80 parts, so the total time was a bit less than 6 weeks.

Fortunately, this was an easy to automate process. I simply ordered one of the androids to switch the parts in the reactor, add the appropriate amount of nanobots, and run the program for the new part. Then I initiated the reactor with Walker's DNA, loaded the sheathing program for the Pulse III, glad that I already had tested the reactor on this model and did not need to create a new program, and pressed start.

When I turned back to the table and found that Mia was still sitting there.

“Oh, I nearly forgot, when you have the remaining parts place them simply on the tray. The Android will do the rest.

If you have any questions about this come to me. I may be diving into the matrix. If that is the case send me a message and I come to you as soon as I can.

If you have questions about the course load I have given you, we can speak about it daily. I have ordered a few diadems, and you can use one for this if you want.”

Again she nodded, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath.

“Ok. I just hope this becomes a bit easier. I wouldn’t have believed you if you told me that it is so straining.”

“Yeah, it gets easier. For one, a large part of the strain is the unfamiliar work. When you do this more often it becomes routine and you don’t have to concentrate that hard. Another part is that you only have smart glasses. With implants in your eyes, you can use magnification and work much easier. And unlike me, you can increase your dexterity and hand-eye coordination with cybernetic hands. That will make it much easier to do the delicate work.

And lastly, as soon as I finished the actual production bioreactor the parts don’t need to be quite this small. If the reactor was big enough we could do a Pulse III in three parts. Not to mention many other implants. If we were not in such time constraints you would not have to do this.”

With a small salute, I left the room, to move to the NADA. As soon as the doors opened I realized the pretty good sound isolation of the lab. The whole building reverberated with heavy building sounds. Apparently, some of the ordered heavy technology was being installed.

Following the cacophony, I quickly found myself in the door to the shop beside the garage, where some workers were installing several heavy machines. At first glance, I could identify the carbon extruder, the wiring unit and what the men were just now working on was seemingly the chip fabricator.

What I couldn’t see was the most important part, the molecular foundry. It alone was nearly worth the cost of the whole fabber.

Sure, it would only provide one or two tons of material per day, compared to the output of a proper industrial foundry of several thousand tons, but it would enable us to recycle whatever we threw in there and get materials exactly as we needed them.

It would not make us fully independent of external resources but we could buy relatively simple materials and do the rest ourselves. It had of course a horrendous energy cost, but our new fusactors would have no trouble feeding it.

I haven’t been in the garage for more than a couple of minutes when one of the workers came toward me.

“Hey little missy, that is no place for kids here. You should keep away until we are finished.”

It took me a moment to parse his sentence and realize that he meant it well, but that did hardly lessen the anger I felt rising up. I took some deep breaths nonetheless, trying to remain calm before I answered.

“Contrary to what it may look like, I am not a kid, I am aware of the intrinsic dangers of an active construction site in general and one with heavy high-tech machinery like the one found here in particular, and most importantly, I am your customer.

So please remain courteous. I won’t enter the building area and I won’t be in the way, but considering that I just paid more than 12 megabucks for this installation I think it is understandable that I am a bit curious.”

He opened his mouth only to quickly close it all the while looking somewhat baffled. Then he turned around to the rest of the workers and loudly called:

“Boss, I think that is more of your problem than mine.” Another of the workers, apparently the foreman came to us.

“What is the problem? You only have to shoo the kid away. Can’t be that hard.”

“The problem is that I am no kid, but instead I am your customer.

Also, I don’t need any shooing as I don’t intend to come any closer. I was just observing your installation of my new industrial fabber.

Did anybody give you the layout or did you plan it yourself? And why were you not announced? I expected you tomorrow at the soonest so I haven’t prepared the plan yet.”

His face took a distinctively unpleasant expression. “Well, Missy, if you don’t want to have these things then say so and we pack up and leave.”

It seemed to be the day of deep breaths for me, and I silently counted to ten.

“Why are you so belligerent? You are not the one who is constantly called a child.

And my question was why nobody asked me how I want the machines arranged, considering that I am the person who bought them and will be the primary user.

I don’t want to rearrange everything just because you were too stubborn to ask the customer about her preferences.”

“Listen, girly, I know what I am doing. This is not my first tango. I looked at the room and planned the layout. So are you finished and we can continue or will you waste our time even longer?”

I lifted an eyebrow.

“I think I will waste our time even longer. Please show me your layout so that I can either correct or accept it.”

“God damn, I don’t have time for that shit. Listen, kid, I know what I’m doing, and that daddy gave you his credit card to buy this stuff does not make you knowledgeable about it.

I have done stuff like this for a couple of dozen years, and no snot-nosed little girl will tell me what to do.

So you want to play industrialist and somehow managed to get daddy to spring for a few million dollars, so what? I have a job to do and you are wasting my time. So go, play with your dolls or whatever but get out of my hair.”

“Considering that I pay you several million dollars you should probably be a bit more courteous, don’t you think? For your information despite my looks I know what I am doing, I know what I need and I am capable to decide for myself how I want to have my machinery arranged.

So would you kindly show your plans to the fully qualified nano engineer or do I have to call your superior?”

He grumbled a bit, but then took his tablet in his hands, tapping a bit on it. “All right, but don’t blame me if we are late.”

With that, he gave the tablet to me. I took a minute to study the plans, noting that they were mostly adequate, but two problems were apparent quickly.

“Generally not a bad layout, but switch the chip fabber and the CNC.

I will use this fabber primarily to build tailored cybernetics, and will mostly use carbon for the skeleton parts, so the chips are of a much higher priority for me.

And second, I can’t see the molecular forge on these plans. Is there a problem with that?”

“Molecular forge? You haven’t ordered the packet with the forge. And ok, the switch is done easily.”

I raised my right eyebrow. “What do you mean no forge? I am pretty certain that I ordered the forge too.”

He took the tablet back, tapped a few more times, and gave it back to me.

“See! No forge here.” Indeed he had given me the order list, and the absence of the forge was obvious, as was the price for the whole fabber. The total cost was given as roughly $5.5 million.

“There seems to be a bit of a miscommunication here. I ordered the fabber including the forge for a bit over $12 million. Somewhere in the process that must have been lost. Can you add a forge to the order? I will of course pay, but I think I will do it directly instead of using a middle man for that.”

Of course, I was sure I ordered the forge too. And had paid for it.

But I did not order it directly from the vendor.

It seemed as if somebody decided to abscond with a good chunk of my money. Not that this would discomfort me.

Much.

I had more than enough funds to buy 100 fabbers if need be, but I hated it that somebody stole from me.

The foreman took off his helmet and rubbed his hand over his hair.

“Hm, I have to ask for that. I will tell you after I called the home office. That will take a minute or two.”

He moved a bit away, pulled an honest to god smartphone out of his pocket, and began talking into it. Wow, talk about old school here.

These things were obsolete since shortly after the second civil war when wearables gained more and more ground. Well, everybody has his own quirks. During my silent musing, he finished the conversation and came back to me.

“All right, we can add a forge. It will cost you $8137312 including taxes. Is that acceptable?”

Ouch, an increase of 32 percent over the $6122507 that I originally bought the forge for. But beggars can’t be choosers. The forge was actually the only part of the whole fabber that I intended to use regularly so I had to have one.

“Yes, that is acceptable. Can I inquire about the price increase?”

“Sure. The other price was a set price for a special customer. You have bought the rest of the fabber as a set via a special customer. If you had bought the complete set by yourself you would have to pay a bit over $13 million, but now the forge is a separate order and that takes the full price.”

Of course, I was not happy about that, but I had no other choice.

“All right, then please include the forge into the plan and give me your account numbers so I can pay. And I would prefer the forge in a position where I can easily use it. It is one of the more important pieces for me. Thank you.”

He tapped a bit on his phone and an NFC request scrawled over my HUD. Upon my acceptance, I received the invoice with the account information and my order number. It took me only seconds to authorize the payment.

“Done. You should have the confirmation at any moment. If you excuse me now, I have a few other things to do. Among them is a call to request why my order did not include the forge originally.”

I ordered the Android to bring me to the NADA, where my board still was. When he turned me around the foreman interceded.

“Hey, how about you pay for the forge now so that I can include it into the setup?”

“I use implants. So the payment is already on the way and should arrive at your accounts any moment now.” While the android wheeled me out I heard him mumble something but I could not quite understand him.

When we reached the NADA I turned to Mr. O’Donnel. “As I explained yesterday to Mr. Wallace, I will likely be unresponsive for a while. At least after I make my call. That is nothing alarming. I will dive into cyberspace to resolve some issues. So I hope you have something to read with you.”

He nodded and sat down on the same chair Wallace used the day before.

Then the fun finally began. I called Maximillian Vasilienkov, the fixer that mediated the sale of the industrial fabber.

“Ah, Miss Sinclair, I did not expect your call before tomorrow. It seems that Brian had a crew ready earlier than I hoped.”

“So it was no accident that the most important, and most expensive part of the fabber was not included in the order. You know of course that I will not leave a good rating for your service.”

“Oh, and why not? After all, I provided you with a priceless service. I made it clear to you that you can trust nobody in this business.” The slimy bastard had the gall to smile at that.

“So I can’t expect you to pay me back what you took too much from me, am I right?”

“So bright of you. You know that it was simply too tempting. An absolute nobody, a vast amount of money, and the only backer you can list will be dead in a couple of weeks. Of course, I took advantage. And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.”

“I understand.”

“Isn’t it nice to work with professionals?” He laughed again and hung up. Well, he really provided me with a priceless service, but it was a different one than he thought.

“Ok, I will be in the matrix for a while. If something needs my attention press the blue button on the top right corner of my board. Don’t touch anything else.”

I fumbled again to get the cable into the jack and then started the dive.

Again I was greeted by my mindscape, but this time I wasted no time playing.

It took me no effort to localize Mr. Vasilienkov’s business in the matrix. It took me a bit longer to scan the immediate surroundings for unwanted attention, fortunately with negative results.

Then I activated my stealth mode and began to probe his computer system. In the first seconds, it became clear that this would be harder than my leisure strolls yesterday.

Much harder in fact.

That of course did not mean it was impossible. The viron here was set up as an ancient office, complete with office workers, old-fashioned telephones, typewriters, and many, very many filing cabinets.

Several watchdogs patrolled through the system, literally and figuratively.

The majority of the ICE was in the form of one of these old European guard dogs augmented by armed security guards.

The whole style of it had a touch of comics.

A small handful of sprites used over and over again, a bit of lack of dimensionality, a lack of realism. But it still was a viron, so superior to what Walker had. I had a distinct feeling of knowing this style, but I could not place my finger on it.

My careful probe into the office unveiled a rather sneaky tripwire. The ceiling fans generated a regular tracking pulse. Sneaky as I said, and somebody hasty would trigger an alarm.

No King or Joker would manage to infiltrate these systems, that was for sure.

But the pulses brought it back to me where I knew the style. ArgoNaughty! Lo and behold, Vasi had hired not simply a jack to design his system, he moved to the top 100.

Sure, at #67 Argo was not the highest on the list, but he delivered solid work.

Unfortunately for him, and Vasi, he was not the best programmer among the hacker elite. In truth, while he was pretty good at using it, most of his software was bought from various sources.

And the kicker here, among those sources, was none other than me.

Argo was one of the hackers who bought my firewall framework. And no, I did not bury a backdoor deep in the code. While Argo would have likely missed it, others were much more proficient in ferreting out such easter eggs.

No, I build my reputation on delivering exactly what I promised, nothing more, nothing less.

That still provided me with a downright indecent wealth of advantages. I knew exactly how these pulses worked. I knew exactly how the security tokens were generated.

And most important, I knew where the backdoor Argo had left behind had to be, as there was only one place in the framework.

Oh, and that I knew how the password encryption scheme of the firewall worked was just a bonus.

While I thoroughly analyzed the pulses to get the salt and hash algorithm for the token I adapted my chameleon utility.

Unlike the stealth mode, the chameleon did not even try to mask my presence. Instead, it made it seem as if I were an authorized part of the system.

With an actual valid security token, the chameleon would allow me to wreak havoc in this system. That was exactly what I wanted to do. Assuming the form of one of the office workers I simply walked into the system.

The watchdogs registered my presence, sampled the token, represented by sniffing, and ignored me then. Without their alarm, the more powerful ICE remained peaceful.

It took me a moment to translate the viron into what I knew the framework was like, before I walked calmly to one of the cabinets, rummaged in it, and produced a single file.

My board translated that automatically into login credentials. Then I moved to the fuse box, to enter the login, and presto, I had absolute admin control over the security system.

I upgraded my security token accordingly, and in the eye of the firewall I was not only authorized, I was the alpha and the omega. Additionally, I set the system so that any other person in the system would not notice my presence.

Then I began to spin off several data utilities, each similarly protected by the security system as I, to begin copying the contents of all the cabinets over to my cluster.

Then I made my way over to the office that represented Vasilienkovs private computer.

How thoughtful of him to have it running, so I did not have to try a silent boot, always a risky approach.

I took my time going through the whole office. Having one of my porters copy everything after I read it.

Argo was especially naughty here, as I found not only a backdoor, reacting to the same credentials that unlocked the firewall, but a keylogger as well. It seemed that Vasi had upgraded his system six months ago. So I only had six months of activity in front of me.

But that provided me more than enough data to get every single of Vasi’s passwords. It also logged every biometric authentification as well.

The other rooms in the system provided similar dividends. All in all, I stole whatever secrets Vasi had.

Then I began programming my little present.

Nothing new of course. I adapted one of my destructive frameworks to the system here.

All this activity took me four hours, virtual hours at that though. So I was not even five minutes in Vasi’s system at the time I activated my little toy.

Immediately the cluster logged into every bank account Vasilienkov had, and transferred the balance to one of my throwaway accounts.

From there the money took several steps through a handful of countries that took it not so seriously with banking laws and others that took it very seriously with banking secrets to end up in one of my accounts.

He stole eight million bucks from me. I was of the opinion that the $62 million he had would be a – barely – adequate repayment for that.

The virus I started first infected the firmware of the backup drives that would activate the writing laser instead of the reading one after the number of crystals was read. That would ruin the crystal. All the while the system would simulate a readout of the backups.

After all crystals of a set were ruined it would issue an error message that the medium was corrupted. Of course it was. Now.

I would have to come back in a few days and research how many backups they ruined that way.

Then I triggered a system-wide wipe. No speck of data remained.

After that, I set the cluster to decrypt the data. With the keys that Argo provided me with that was no problem. That was a task for a later time though

Finally, I started the timer for the alarm. It was time to make Vasilienkov aware that he had poked the Stomper and had been mauled in the process.

I was mildly interested if he would recover, but in the end, it was not important enough. Much more important though was it to actually extract the service Vasilienkov provided for me.

For that, I had to surface from the dive. With the usual pang of regret, I disconnected from Precious and took a few moments to regain my bearings. Then I redialed the previous number. Vasilienkov seemed a bit surprised to see me again.

“What? You don’t have enough?” He took a deep breath and changed his tone to something lecturing.

“Okay, again. You fucked up, I took advantage of that and there is nothing you can do about it. Anything from here out only serves to humiliate you further. So what do you want?”

This time it was for me to smile smugly. “I wanted to thank you for the service you provided to me.”

His expression became a bit confused before he caught himself again. When he started to answer I continued: “Of course, it is not the service you believe you did for me.

Instead, you will serve as a prime example of why not to fuck with me. My response should hit you in 3… 2… 1…!” Right on time, I heard several alerts going off in the background of the call.

“You see, that is the reason why one is professional if one works with professionals. Cheerio!” With that, I hung up.