Chapter One Hundred and Thirty - Deep Diving

  The next loop was spent doing research in PJs at home. Mister Couchtop came over and installed himself across my lap, a warm, fat pillow that I idly scratched while awkwardly using my off-hand to poke at my keyboard.

  Since the gala hadn't happened yet, and wouldn't for another... two or so hours, I spent the early evening looking up the cyberware I was planning on buying from Orchid Lux.

  There was no worry that this timeline would lead to anything traceable, so I just poked around and read reviews, with the occasional watch-through of some videos online.

  The first thing I looked into was the Eidolon.

  VaxOptic was a pretty decent brand. It was a military contractor, but a lot of that was for the country's military, as opposed to PMCs and portal-divers like Luna Corp. So, the gear they made had to pass a lot more standards and such than normal semi-civilian grade stuff.

  As much as military-grade had a reputation, when it came to cyberware it was pretty good. There was an expectation that anyone who served would get to keep their gear post-service. That meant that the Veteran's Affairs got their nose into things and they had started to insist, a few years back, that post-service cyberware continue to have long term support.

  That was a pretty normal thing to be worried about, honestly.

  No one wanted to wake up one day only to discover that their eyes were no longer supported, or that the software on their artificial heart was no longer going to receive security updates.

  Anyway, VaxOptic seemed like a decent choice as far as that kind of thing went. Their solution was mostly to have it so that most of their cyberware could function entirely disconnected. It was even a positive when it came to more... secretive operations.

  The one moderate issue was that they suggested using an 'eye lubricant' with their cyberware every day.

  A lot of users said that was bullshit, and it was just the company trying to sell a subscription on their anti-dry-eye droplets. Over the counter stuff worked just as well, and dry-eye wasn't that frequent of an issue.

  The other two pieces of cyberware I looked into had more reviews. A lot more. There were also a lot more influencer reviews and product placement stuff and so on. Orchid Lux might have been good about privacy, but they had a marketing arm bigger than some entire corporations.

  The Lilt Bio-Aural Enhancer was semi-popular with B-list musicians. It wasn't what the lead singers used, but it was what the others in popular bands had, and it was considered a good choice by producers and the like. Audiophiles liked it as a good stepping-stone piece of cyberware before reaching the real peak stuff.

  That peak stuff cost an added zero on top of the normal price tag and usually required a lot of added maintenance. Honestly? Not worth it for any normal use. I didn't need gold-plated wiring in my head.

  I did find a few reviews of people in louder careers, and it seemed like it did what I needed it to--blocking super-loud noises and preventing anything like tinnitus from forming.

  Good enough. Plus as an Orchid product, it had great interconnectivity.

  The Orchid Lu Pulselet was one of their more popular products. The one I was aiming for was on the higher end of the product's line, and it was new as well.

  The pulselet line was a fairly common item and it had been one of the first things Orchid Lux started producing like, twenty years ago when they went hard into cyberware. The oldest models still worked, which was a good sign.

  There were probably a few thousand people walking around Fortress ENE, credit debt up to their eyeballs, who had sacrificed a lot to have that Orchid Lux logo planted over their wrists.

  The models ranged from discreet to shiny to the point of gaudiness.

  I think it was one of those fancy-purse situations, where people bought the versions with the biggest logos to show off how rich they were, while those who were actually rich had smaller, more discreet versions of the same.

  What I was aiming for was a thinner, less obvious item. It would look like a small tab on the inside of my wrist with a thin metal plate that served as a small monitor. That could display the time, connect to a smart phone, and most importantly, the higher end models had magic energy readers. The real bulk of the cyberware would be screwed into my radius and wrapped around some of the veins in my arm.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Nice and subtle.

  I'd have to put in the order once I was in a 'real' loop.

  In the meantime... evening rolled around, and I opened four news sites and started to refresh. It wasn't too long before one of them had a story, though I doubted the veracity of it since it didn't quite match up to what I saw.

  Still, it was something.

  I spent the next three hours reading posts and comments and refreshing the news to get more out of it. I even subscribed to like, five sites to get stuff without ads.

  I really didn't learn that much, though.

  No one had a good idea of why Weiss attacked the Seraph gala.

  The results of the attack were mixed. Nine dead according to one report. Another said twenty-plus, but that sounded like too much. I think they might have confused 'casualties' with 'dead' or something.

  Lots of gangsters were jailed, and as far as I could tell, no one from Seraph died, though there were a few injuries reported.

  People online were of two minds:

  The first camp came out and said that Seraph had done well, had saved the day, and were cheering on seeing some gangsters put in their place. They were hollering for blood. That crowd had a few people in it that just felt like Fortress ENE wasn't safe enough. Some said that the gang was all immigrants. Some said that they were happy to see the corp finally acting to put the gangs down.

  The second camp wasn't as vocal, but it was still loud enough. They suggested that maybe there was a reason for two dozen gangsters to take such huge risks.

  The more paranoid and conspiracy-prone pointed out that it was weird that a gang would just... do that, and that there was definitely something more going on.

  Knowing what I did, I kind of felt like the conspiracy-prone might be onto something, but they were also the most insane of the bunch and it was hard to read the shit they came up with. Morons never heard of Occam's Razor.

  I waited until late in the evening before making a call to Fran. She was fine. The incident hadn't even cancelled the gala, though it did make it weird and a lot of people had left, so the evening was a bit of a waste. Though being there was good for her presence or something. I didn't know how that worked, so I just agreed with her and then wished her a good night.

  Then I took a nap, woke up on Saturday morning, and looked at the news again to see if anything new came up, but it looked like there really wasn't much, and it had turned into an 'investigation' which meant that no one would ever find out the truth.

  Oh well.

  I Reloaded. No point in wasting the entire evening.

  Since it was the end of the week, more or less, I was probably gonna get a week of nothing soon, and... yeah, that'd be nice.

  Before that, though, I did have one option for something. I knew about a small E-rank portal that was coming up, and I knew two girls that might not mind going through it with me.

  An E-rank portal would mean... not much, in terms of growth. If I solo'd it, then I'd get a small boost, and that was it. It wasn't so much that I'd mind splitting it two or three ways.

  Urgh, I was doing it again, obsessing with hitting up the next portal. I was growing fast already, wasn't I?

  At the rate I was going I'd be a C-ranker by the time the Breach happened.

  Obviously, that meant keeping up the pace I was on, which would become increasingly tricky. Eventually, E-rank portals wouldn't boost me nearly as much. I'd have to start looking for more D-rank portals, and maybe sneak through a few C-rank portals as well, though I wasn't sure how I'd manage to do something like that yet. Not solo, at least.

  But with a few friends that I trusted and had practiced combat with? Yeah, that was just plausible enough.

  Plus it'd be a good excuse to hang out with cute girls!

  ***