Justin was, understandably, not quite a happy camper. By his own accords, the pain was tolerable but he was angry at himself because he had been taken out.

Personally, I was unable to see anything he could have done better, but for some reason, he felt he was at fault. Still, he was healing, and his new kidney was baking, so he would be back to full in a couple of months.

Christine on the other hand was visibly relieved that he was back. It was a bit disconcerting watching her in mother hen mode but cute in its own way.

I was just glad that it ended so well. It could have been much worse.

Mark on the other hand seemed to be downright giddy about getting a cybernetic arm. I was more and more convinced that he would be the first to go the full upgrade route. Otherwise, he was doing well. The stump was healing just fine. There was nothing to do for me here either.

I somehow, and with much help from the others, managed to get Kate into the scanner, to look her shoulder over. There were no surprises here either, but I strongly preferred to err on the side of caution here.

With that done I looked into my immediate to-do list. It was moot to work on cyberware until I had proven the applicator. The renovations of the house were ongoing. I had managed to get Mr. Walker out of here alive, and now it was on Doc Schaeffer to bring him all the way.

Essentially, there was nothing urgent for me to do. Thinking about my talk with the Doc, I decided to work on the medical VI for a bit.

Just after I started the construction of another auto-surgeon for the Doc.

I had worked on the VI on and off for some time now. Even for somebody like me, it was a daunting task.

Were normal VIs were tricky to create safely and needed attention to detail, a medical VI… let’s say there were a couple of reasons why they did not exist yet.

Sure, the most important reason was called Panacea. The megacorp had cornered healthcare and medical technology, and they viewed a medical VI as a threat to their earnings.

Rightfully so, I have to say. Panacea had long known that it is more profitable to treat than to cure. But a fully functioning VI would not care in the slightest about the profit for Panacea. It would heal where it could, period.

Also, a working medical VI would make it possible for mercenary groups to start a competition for PEES. And the Panacea Emergency Extraction Service was the sledgehammer Panacea used to keep the other big corps somewhat civil. No corp wanted to risk losing access to PEES for its execs.

That alone placed Panacea into an abnormal position.

Of course, Panacea was not the only corp with the ability to create a medical VI. I knew that Kawamoto, Xiao Ping, Burgmeister, and Dalgon had the technical wherewithal to build one. I was less sure about others. What no one else than Panacea could do was build one profitably.

Everybody knew that the moment somebody brought a medical VI to the market, Panacea would build one. And Panacea had the whole healthcare network. They had the best medical researchers. They had the best, and most expensive, cloning rigs, they produced roughly 80% of all medical drugs.

Nobody could compete with Panacea in the healthcare sector. So they did not even try.

That did not mean that nobody tried. I am not sure if it were seven or eight publicly funded projects to create one. But every single time somebody tried, unexplained difficulties hit the project. Like, for example, the lead researcher's house exploding from a gas leak, his all-electric house, by the way, killing him and his family. Or the facility where they were working on it getting hit by lightning, on a clear day.

Needless to say, nobody touched this kind of research anymore.

So why did the less-than-legal elements not work in the shadows creating it?

One has to remember that the hidden side of humanity has much less access to the kind of talent that is necessary to build a medical VI.

I guessed that there were less than a dozen, probably way less, who could build one, with enough time and effort. And sadly, most of us were equally profit-driven as the corporations.

There simply was no money in it.

Especially if one considered the pure amount of work it was. I know, it sounds so easy. Just make a VI with the objective to heal.

That easy, right? Wrong. Alone the part about consent is incredible.

What if it is an old man, who with the treatment, will spend the remaining five years of his life on ventilation, unable to talk, unable to eat solid food, unable to leave the bed? Do we have the right to refuse his wish to die in dignity? So we have the VI take the consent of the patient into account.

Easy peasy, problem solved. Ehm, no. what about the teen with an unbalanced brain chemistry. It is an easy fix to rebalance the chemistry, but at the moment, he just wants to die. Because the cruel world is so bleak. It would be a simple fix for the VI to get the teen happy again, but naturally, he won’t give consent.

Do we let the VI let him die? No, of course not. But for that, we have to make the VI able to ascertain the mental state of the patient and decide on its own if he can give consent or not. It is by far not impossible, but it is also an incredible amount of rule lawyering.

How about the merc who wants cyberware? In most cases, cyberware is, at least from a biological point of view, unhealthy. From the perspective of the VI, it won’t accept that the patient wants it. Unless the programmer considered that very possibility from the beginning.

Then there is resource management. The VI can’t simply blow the whole budget of the year on one patient. So it has to be trained to decide what it can use per patient. Considering that that amount changes from year to year, sometimes month to month, situation to situation, and location to location it is a very complicated objective to program.

Not to talk about disaster mode. If there is a glut of patients it must accept that it can only do so much before it has to work on the next patient.

And all that with the usual constraints that VIs have. To sum it up, creating a medical VI is an unholy pain in the behind.

So why did I even consider doing it? After all, there was no profit in it for me, and it would be comparable to creating CRS-free cyberware in scope.

I honestly wish I could say that I did it for the common good. Seriously, I wish I was so good a person.

But I wasn’t. My reason to do it was the same reason why nobody had done it yet. Panacea.

Creating a medical VI would seriously mess with their operation. Especially if I, as I planned, made it freeware. In one swoop I would cut out much of Panacea’s power.

And that was more than enough for me to do it. It was another big step towards the total destruction of Panacea. I knew that it was pretty unlikely that I would achieve that goal, but just cutting them down to size was better than doing nothing.

That did not mean that I was pouring all my energy and effort into creating it. For the time being, in an emergency, the auto-surgeon was good enough, as long as somebody with medical training was in reach.

Sure, it was not even approaching intelligence. Early experiments had shown that machine learning had its limits to what medical software could do.

Yes, in 90% of all cases, what it learned was fine and working well. But in medicine, a 10% failure rate was considered not good.

Over the years, an insanely complicated decision tree had emerged. It was mostly free to get. I suspected that Panacea had its own, refined version, but the public one was working. If, for a computer program, at a snail’s pace.

Auto surgeons differed in how well they could use that decision tree, and I managed to create a better algorithm for searching the tree, making my new auto-surgeon a tad better than most out there.

But that was still way below even an expert system and was the reason I checked on the auto surgeon when it worked on Justin. After I was sure it was doing the right thing I let it do its job, but that was the important thing.

After a few days, of cyber time naturally, I was bored and fed up with the objectives again. Nothing unexpected, or even new. Writing the intricate IF-THEN-ELSE statements for the objectives was exhausting. Mentally more than physical.

So I spent the rest of the next few real-time days, at a much lower compression, learning gravitics.

I just needed to get a bit of distance from the VI.

I was appropriately surprised when I got the message that Doc Schaeffer would wake up Mr. Walker on the morning of Monday the 25th.

I knew that it was way too short a rest for a man like Walker. He needed more time to recuperate, and I honestly could not see any reason to wake him up already.

But Doctor Schaeffer was the one in charge, and it was his decision. In the end, I decided to be there when he was woken up.

I had Ryan fly me to the clinic, and we were guided to Walker’s room.

Even before we reached the door, we heard an irate:

“… and then he threw even more money into her maw. The goddamn overpriced nano fab was not enough for him.”

I could not hear the answer, and then I had reached the door, which was opened by one of the guards, grinning with all his face.

“… anywhere for that price. Of course, I accepted.”

Apparently what happened was that good old Dylan had complained about Doc Schaeffer had bought something, and considering the topic during the operation, I had a good guess what it was Dylan resented buying.

Then I entered the room. Walker was awake but looked weak, Dylan had the red in the face I learned to expect from him, while the Doc looked flustered and insulted.

When Dylan opened his mouth, I interjected.

“Does this have to happen right now? Your boss has just awoken from more than a week of medical-induced coma. Give him a few days to get going again, ok?”

And as if by magic, Dylan’s mouth closed with an audible clack, while his gaze turned to me.

“You! What are you doing here?”

I sighed but managed somehow to remain calm.

“Yes, me. While I am not Mr. Walker’s primary physician, I am his implant surgeon in this case.”

Doc Schaeffer was visibly more delighted to see me.

“Oh, hello my dear. And I agree, now is not the best time to argue.”

Walker lifted his hand.

“I think we need to clear this. Richard, did you really buy an auto-surgeon from Kitten?”

Schaeffer sighed.

“Yes, Ben I did. It was just too good to not get.”

Walker frowned.

“How did you pay for it? As far as I know, you do not have a couple of millions lying around.”

“That is the whole point. It was not a couple of million or even 100k. We got a brand new, very good auto-surgeon for less than it costs us to repair the old one each year. It did cost us $70000.”

You could practically see how Walker’s brain was working on that.

“70k? Seriously? Who sells an auto-surgeon, a new one, for 70k?”

And that was my cue.

“That was a friendship price. I plan to sell these things for around 500k.”

He nodded slowly.

“Ok, that is closer to a normal price. Is it any good?”

I shrugged.

“I, personally, think it is the best auto-surgeon in existence, but I have built the thing, so you can’t really trust my opinion here.”

Schaeffer cleared his throat.

“If I may, I worked with the one we used to operate on you. Yes, it was limited one-time use, but it was leagues above what we have now. I can’t compare it to the high-priced models, but yes, it was very good.”

Slowly Walker nodded again.

“So you got a new auto-surgeon that you like for less than what you pay every year to keep the old one running. If it works, then I see no problem with that.”

Dylan somehow managed to get even redder.

“You just let that sail through? After all the money you spent to get this clinic a nano fab?”

Walker on the other hand closed his eyes and shook his head.

“Dylan, before you had to take me out, we already had more than half of that money back from selling nanobots. That was a couple of weeks. You have to ask Paul how much it brought in now. But in half a year, the nano fab will have brought us ten times what it did cost us.”

Dylan opened and closed his mouth several times.

“What… how? How is that possible?”

“Because other than Kitten we are the only ones being able to build 12th gen nanites in the US, especially the seed stock. Somebody mailed open source 6th gen fab plans to nearly every workshop around. Including an open-source 10th gen library. We are the absolute cheapest source for the seed stock people can find. And needing seed stock it. Nano fabs are all the rage nowadays.

Yes, we only take $10k for the 10th gen seed stock, but it costs us only around 10 bucks.

Now, I think the topic is finished. I get that you don’t like Kitten. But she’s done us no wrong. I am definitely alive, so she kept her promise to give me a chance. The tech she sold us was at extremely good prices. That is all.”

Dylan grumbled something and then stomped out of the room. Walker meanwhile turned his attention to Doctor Schaeffer.

“Now, Rick, how am I doing?”

Schaeffer looked at the tablet in his hands.

“Well, Ben, you could do with a few more days of rest, and I strongly implore you to stay at home and recuperate, but all in all, you are doing fine.”

I tilted my head at that.

“Say, Doc, I agree with the need for rest, so why did you wake him up now? Wouldn’t it have been better to keep him sleeping until the damage is mostly gone?”

Schaeffer just shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes, you are right. But I decided to let Ben go home at Christmas.”

“Oh, Christmas, right. That was sometime in December. Is it tomorrow? The day after?”

Both men looked at me as if I had grown another head.

“Veronica, Christmas is today!” Schaeffer sounded completely astonished.

I on the other hand could only shrug.

“It is? Nice. Then, happy Christmas, was it? Or is it another blessing?”

Walker shook his head.

“It is ‘Merry Christmas’. And how come you don’t know that?”

I frowned.

“Why should I know that? I am a Pure. Christmas is a Christian ritual, and after the civil war, the commonwealth got rid of all religious trappings. We don’t celebrate any of the other holy days, regardless of religion.”

Now Schaeffer looked sad and massaged his temple.

“That is… well, I am sad for your upbringing. I can understand that some holy days are not important, but Christmas? But you obviously do not know what you are missing.”