We both sat there looking at each other for a few moments as her cig silently smoked away in the stand.
“I’m sorry Anna. I’ve been considering you a threat rather than an ally. You told me before about being more fluid with my expectations of people and I’m still too young to really understand what that means. I keep thinking I’ve been coping with Sam and the job and now this situation, but maybe I’ve been locking up. Tensing against more trouble before it comes.” I said from my slump in the chair.
I was really tired now, but I needed to get this conversation done with.
“Right now I’m your boss and that means I need to give you guidance for the results I want and trust you to handle the situations using the guidance. I’d like to consider us a bit closer than that after the years that have gone by but it’s only in the last few months that we’ve had any real time together outside of the odd meeting for a job, and only since Sam have we found ourselves at odds. In the future we could be even more at odds, but you’ve done what I asked of you so I’ll pay my debt. What would you ask of me?” Marchand said after a moment.
“Honestly? I don’t know. I need arms but you said that was already factored in, I assume face repair would be included with normal medical costs. Outside of that I don’t need a lot to keep me going. I just need the time to work on my netrunning scripts and get more practice in at fighting and shooting so I can do better than this time.” I said tiredly.
“Hm. I have an idea, but I’ll need to talk to someone to make sure of any existing plans. Outside of that I’ll have Stefen or one of my other staff come and find you when you’re repaired for some hand related business. I’ll talk to your mother as well.” Marchand said as she brought her hand to her chin.
“Talk to my mom? Why?” I asked confused.
“That’ll be something to discuss with her later. In any case good job so far, not optimal but it’s early days. I’ll have some space made for your training proper going forward along with staff allocations. I know your next question was going to be Lla related so I’ll just explain it now quickly, she’s secure in one of the basement safe houses on the street. Actually one of my personal ones, so it’s very livable. I’ll hold her there until you say otherwise. I’d simply throw her to you to handle as your own personal project but I think I agree with you a little that I overstepped a little here, so we’ll call that a gesture of peace on that. You can visit or message her from the street IR grid, but not outside.” Marchand said, speeding up and slowing down in her response as it looked like I’d butt into her speech. Clearly she wanted to get out what I’d need to know.
“So that’s it then? Things are handled? We’re squared away, Lla is safe for now and I’m your hand now. No baggage or whatever?” I asked with a frown. Not that I had much of a face. So really it was just me looking at her.
“That’s about it. I still have some outstanding debt with you but that’s underway. You just need to focus on recovering and repair so you can get back to training and work. At least from my perspective. I am a bit curious what you plan for Lla but that’s not my situation to handle.”
“I don’t really know. To start with I was planning on just covering her from casual corpo agent kidnapping. They’d swing by her house and see she’s not there a few times and hopefully write her off as too much trouble. Then she turned into kind of a choom of mine, quite quickly. I figured with you showing interest in her and me needing a support team I could recruit her as a face. Then this all went down and I don’t even know how she’s feeling about any of it. I don’t even know if her brother is alive still.” I answered honestly, no point hiding any of it from Marchand when a lot of it was on her home turf.
“Trying to steal my fresh talents away from me before I sign them on Mal? No. It’s a good idea. You didn’t have a lot of actual capital to work with a few days ago in regards to paying potential staff and signing her would have put a major stress element onto your work schedule just to keep the whole thing rolling. But with you being my hand that opens more options for you, you could pay her with your alloted wages. Yes, actual corpo style hourly wages. You could also hire her directly to me as your boss as one of my staff and then assigned to you as a support agent in the face role.”
“I’ll talk to her about this first, then I’ll come back and discuss it with you before I make any decisions or offers. Best to know what everyone wants and then work out the way forward with what I can even offer.” I said while trying to wave my hand in disagreement only to realize I didn’t have a hand.
We both sat there for a few seconds in silence and I started to drift off.
“We’ll talk more another time Mal. Something tells me that you perhaps pushed yourself to sit before me before your recovery had reached a point that would allow you to. Come and find me when you want, I’ll be waiting. I’ll have someone carry you down.” Marchand said with a little smile before I passed out. The last thing I saw was her leaning back a bit and cocking her head to the side.
-
I awoke back in the recovery room but a quick bit of movement told me that I was loosely bound to the bed. A bit of a extreme response to a patient taking a small walk. I opened my interface and connected to the cluster in the ceiling to check my message app.
I had some spam but more importantly I had some messages from mom, mostly get better soon and such. I had some others from Noe and Lla which were longer, a message from Noe saying that I was a gonk and that she’d never make guns for me against if I tried to fight a borg unarmed ever again and that she was going to beat me up. Lla left a few smaller messages before leaving a long message thanking me for my hospitality and for stepping into the situation with the corp but also a strong assurance that she would pay me back but that she was her own person and wouldn’t allow me to run over her decision again, also that she was leaving as soon as Marchand let her out. Then another message asking me to tell Marchand to let her out. Then an apology for the previous tone of her bigger message but reiteration that she was leaving.
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There was even a small message from Ears asking how I was doing. He’d heard some chatter about something going on in Marchand’s street and guessed that I likely did something. I wasn’t the only operator living here Ears, sure it was me this time but it’s not a sure thing every time. I sent him a quick message telling him I was fine, the situation was handled and I’d get back to him when I had arms again. He’d find that funny even if it was confusing.
I sent a quick message to the clinic address I had to let the doctors know I was awake. Didn’t know how long it would take for them to notice but was glad to see Dr Wood poke her head into the recovery suite after only a few seconds had passed.
“You know you’ve got a attention buzzer by your foot right?” Dr Wood asked as she entered into the recovery room fixing her long blonde hair back into a ponytail and fixing the tools on her big apron thing.
“I do? Okay, I didn’t know. Sorry.” I said as I shuffled my foot a little and found what I thought was a wrinkled sheet or something but was actually the wire to a small plastic square that seemed to be made of four buttons made to beep when kicked. Likely beeping in the office room as well as here.
“We likely forgot to tell you with all the panic of your arrival here, then you were asleep, then you were off wandering the streets for some reason despite being critical, then asleep again. You shouldn’t have left your bed, really you shouldn’t been able to leave your bed at all. Your body is still trying to clear out what was left of the dead flesh without letting your healing slow too much. We’re supporting you with medication as much as we can but you need to rest.” Dr Wood said as she walked around the bed and sat in the comfy visitor chair next to the bed.
“Am I healed enough to get my cyberware repaired? At least my face, I want my mom to be able to come in and chat without mentally scarring her. You know?” I asked.
“Your arms aren’t ready, the supporting structures that they’d attach to and move around are still healing and your overall health is stable but too weak for extended surgery. For your face that would be almost entirely synthetic repair with some minor brain surgery to check and replace any damaged translation modules or their nerve wires. You’ll likely need to be out for most of the surgery because it’s the face and we’ll need to go through a lot of nervous simulation that’d likely feel awful for you, but we can’t do them without letting your brain process them. But yeah, we can get you your new face put on today. We’re free this afternoon after old Tablechair get’s finished.” Dr Wood said.
“That’s great, mom can come down to visit and… What? Tablechair?” I asked with a missing incredulous expression.
“Oh, it’s a resident. Ex-operator that did a lot of work with Marchand in the old days, moved away a long time and now he’s been back a year or so. Doesn’t even go on jobs, all he does is drink with Marchand and get his cyberware fixed when he breaks it messing with it. His name is Tabounaire but everyone calls him old Tablechair. I’d like to say he’s an amazing cybernetics expert but he’s really more of a very old tinkerer who’s really good at breaking everything he’s allowed to touch.” Dr Wood said with a smile at the start but a frown by the end.
“Sounds like an interesting guy, I don’t really know what to picture when you lay it out like that though. I haven’t heard of him before?” I asked curiously.
“Oh, you won’t picture him right. You just won’t. But yeah he’s mostly a recluse. He’s either home, Marchand’s bar or here when he’s broken something.” Wood said as she got a little pencil torch out and started looking at some of the parts at the top of my head.
“A bar? There’s a bar on the street? I haven’t heard of that and it’s been weeks. I’ve been coming here for almost two years!” I said, surprised.
“It’s just for Marchand and her friends. And you’re ten. You shouldn’t be at bars anyway, you don’t need social lubrication to do stupid stuff. You handle that just fine on your own at your age.” She said as she rolled my head around to look at the exposed servos in my forehead.
“I’ve drank. It was rough and I was sick but I had some tequila and some beer in the past. I can drink.” I said defensively.
“Ooh. Big drinker here. Gonna save you money on cyberware when you’ve already got a lead belly. No Mal, you should not be drinking alcohol in general as it’s just drinking poison and hoping it kills you just enough to be silly and not enough to get to the nasty almost dying part, or just moving past to the dying part. At your age the drinking danger limit should be like a fifth of a sip or whatever for you’re bodyweight and metabolism, you’d be drunk on an idle glance at the bottle. Just leave the stuff alone.” She said as she pulled my eyelid wires taut and let them go repeatedly. Fortunately I didn’t have any lids to actually slide up and down and be annoying.
“Lots of people drink, most people. Can’t be that bad.” I said, defeated.
“It’s not the worst thing to make your brain go weird in potentially useful ways, but you shouldn’t be drinking until at least puberty has stopped messing up your brain chemistry on it’s own alright Mal?”
“I’m not even going through puberty.” I mumbled.
“No. But it won’t be long and stupid teenager operators getting into mischief isn’t a new story on this street with Marchand’s hiring policies. Just keep yourself as sober as you can please. I don’t want to see you turn up at the clinic with a traffic barrier welded to the side of your head as a prank or something. If you pull something like that I will be forced to declare the traffic barrier removal a danger to life and put it down in the paperwork as a medical necessity.” She said as she pulled my head to look at her as she shone the light into my eyes again, back and forth.
“What do you think I’m going to do? I like a simple job to job focused life with a good training routine. I don’t spend time at bars anyway. I don’t see that changing.”
“Mal. You melted your arm off, had the other turned into paste covered bone shrapnel and took a machete to the head that left you looking like a kebab. I haven’t even known you very long.”
“I’ll admit my control of most situations has been a bit off the last few months. But apart from those times I was mostly just chilling out at home or at the gym when I wasn’t the a job.”
“Didn’t you say you fist fought a borg in total darkness with no way to see?”
“That was on the job, it doesn’t count. Danger is normal with that.”
“Danger seems pretty normal for you otherwise as well. Maybe it’s a good thing you’re stuck in recovery for the next little while. Not much happens here that could cause you to lose what’s left of your flesh no matter how hard you could try.”