"Welcome home, sempai!"
I set down the package I was carrying and straightened up. "Mitsuyo, you're meant to use the traditional greeting when a family member comes home. You're supposed to wait until I've announced myself, too."
"Sorry, sempai! Adjusting parameters." There was a faint hum from Mitsuyo's speakers as she waited for me expectantly. I shrugged and stretched my arms outwards, smiling a little. "Tadaima!"
"Welcome home, sempai!"
I groaned. "Close enough. Any calls while I was out?"
"Yes! You have two missed calls!" Mitsuyo chirped.
"Why didn't you forward them to me?" I asked, frowning. As useful as she was, there was no denying my house Personality was a bit of a ditz. I had nobody to blame but myself for that one...
"Sorry, sempai! Both times I attempted to forward the calls, however I could not resolve your host address," Mitsuyo explained. I frowned again, rubbing my temple. "That's odd, you have my commlink's identification and address information don't you?"
"Yes! Your current System Identification Number and commlink MAC address are listed in my directories. However several factors may have impeded establishing an active connection, such as wireless interference and Matrix dead zones."
I slapped my forehead. Rase's clinic was probably inside a Faraday cage for the added security. It would explain why she hadn't been able to reach me; as far as the wireless world would have been concerned I may as well have encased myself in concrete. "Fair enough," I replied, picking up the cylindrical package I'd brought with me and heading into the lounge room. "Who were the calls from?"
"Information redacted," Mitsuyo said cheerfully.
Before I could give an exasperated response, my AR overlay pinged and an icon of a child's hair ribbon appeared in the corner of my vision for a moment before Hanako appeared, standing in front of me with her hands behind her back and a happy smile. "Okaeri! Mitsu-chan was unable to reach you, so I amended the call logs like you asked! The calls were from Kuro-kun and Ryuko-chan; do you want me to call them back?"
I beamed despite myself and gave the clever little Agent a quick AR-assisted hug. "Kurosawa first. He should be home and in his VR rig, so we'll place a VR call. How did you amend Mitsuyo's call logs, Hanako?"
" The call logs weren't where her operating system specified, so I searched her entire file registry. You moved the Matrix logon and telephony records into her antivirus directory and encrypted everything. It was tricky to find!"
I laughed. I had deliberately moved them to see if Hanako could locate and decrypt them, but I hadn't anticipated she would find them so easily. It was an impressive feat for her; but then again I was the one who built her. "Well done, sweetheart," I said, smiling.
Hanako giggled and clapped her hands before vanishing. A split-second later I could hear the archaic sound of a century-old telephone ringing, the sound seemingly coming from all directions. I crossed the lounge room and sat down on my sofa before slipping into VR.
I looked around the open, storm-caressed park and pathway for a moment; enjoying the simulated wind and scent of fresh, acid-free rain. To my right was a fork in the path that wasn't there before - a representation of the secure network connection between my commlink and my house's Nexus. It had been an expensive purchase but a worthwhile one considering it had tripled my processing and VR capability at home.
I took several strides along the new path, and instantly the world changed. The dim light of the computer-generated storm overhead was instantly replaced with the soft orange glow that filled my apartment. I was standing in the middle of my lounge room; now clean and free from the tools and materials that Beckett's renovation crew had left behind. I grinned and headed over to the Nexus' main directory, which I had made to resemble my refridgerator and auto-cook before opening the door and pulling out a file folder shaped like a plain white box. Examining it for a moment, I went back into the lounge room and sat on the sofa; triggering a brief moment of déjà-vu as I took in that I was sitting on my sofa in my house, immersed in a VR landscape that was a replica of my house and sitting on a replica of the same sofa, and I laughed at the convenient absurdity of it before holding the box out in front of me and watching it float into the air.
Presently there was a chime and I was suddenly aware of someone else in my virtual living space; standing in the hallway and looking around. "What the... what am I looking at, exactly?" called out a low, rich voice.
I laughed. "Nice to see you too, Kuro-kun," I said as a jet-black cat walked around the corner and stared at me. "I actually wasn't sure if you'd be at home yet. How's things?"
"Not bad," the cat replied, stretching its front paws out and arching its back in a massive yawn before jumping onto the couch and sitting next to me, upright and alert. "Just finished putting the finishing touches into our new programming suite, it'll be released for final testing tomorrow and if all goes well, onto the shelves in a week. C'el's pretty pleased."
I flinched at the sound of the name, grateful that the involuntary twitch didn't translate to my virtual avatar. "I bet he is, that little bit of kit is going to carve out quite a profit margin. So, are you going to have a well-deserved vacation afterwards?"
"I figured I may as well," Kurosawa replied. "Karen's been working pretty hard in the labs for the last month, so I thought I'd take her on holiday to somewhere exotic. You've been to all sorts of places, is there anywhere you'd recommend? Somewhere that isn't a VR parlour?" he teased, the cat's face splitting into a toothy cartoonish grin.
"Lagos isn't too bad as long as you stick to the tourist part of town and keep a close eye on your cred," I replied, pointedly ignoring his dig. "There's a luxury hotel there that takes their security pretty seriously. There's also a nice bistro and bar on the other side of town you'd like, it's called The Three Friends. Just don't ask them for the house special."
"I'll make a point of ordering it just because you told me not to," Kurosawa laughed. "And how about you? How's your work going?"
"Pretty straightforward, actually. I just finished up with a client, her commission took a bit more than expected but ended well overall. Another satisfied customer, although I'll be glad if I don't hear from her again for a while."
"You know, sometimes I wonder if you do more than you let on," the cat said playfully. "You certainly seem to leave behind a lot of very happy people..."
I snorted. "Kuro-kun, I'm a cybertechnician like you; just because I don't work for a corporation doesn't mean I'm whoring myself out, so stop projecting your fantasies onto me okay? It's not healthy."
The black cat looked down for a moment and puffed its cheeks out, giving the impression that it was holding back a grin. "Alright, I guess I was asking for that one huh?" he said, before jumping off the couch and walking into the middle of the room. "Anyway, what is this? Is this your comm node?"
"Nope. I had enough nuyen stored to invest in a small hardware addition."
The cat sat down abruptly. "Wait, this is a Nexus?" He whistled; briefly making me wonder how a cat could do such a thing before reality reminded me that Matrix interactions could be pretty much anything. "Not bad, not bad at all. The good ones tend to be pretty expensive, I had to wait three weeks for the higher-ups to greenlight one for my laboratory. What model am I standing in?"
I gestured in the air, materializing a couple of bizarre-looking tools. "Nothing too special, this is an MCT Sentinel," I replied, taking one of the tools and carefully dragging it along the side of the plain box I'd retrieved.
"A Sentinel? Damn, that's one hell of an investment for someone without corporate backing! What are you doing, building an AI?"
"Nope, just an Agent," I said cheerfully as the tool I was holding made a clicking noise. I pulled it away, carrying a translucent copy of the file box. "Hanako, say hello to Kuro-kun."
Hanako suddenly appeared standing directly in front of Kurosawa; startling him into arching his back and yowling. She had a friendly smile as she scooped the cat avatar up and held him up at arm's length to look into his face. "Hi, Kuro-kun! Master used the boost in processing power provided by this Nexus to compile me approximately five days ago. This Nexus serves as Master's home node; with the apartment's inbuilt house node slaved to it as a secondary processor. This Nexus is incapable of supporting artificial life as it lacks several components, most notably a quantum drive." She put the cat down and clapped her hands happily before abruptly disappearing.
"Do you know how creepy it is that your Agent looks and sounds like a little girl?" Kurosawa asked, his cat avatar swishing its tail lightly.
"If you think that's bad I probably shouldn't tell you about the personality I coded for my apartment node. Or maybe I should, you did love playing the upperclassman in school didn't you?" I smirked, giving him a mischievous thumbs-up.
"Oh shut up, you're just jealous you didn't get nearly as many girls as I did. Speaking of girls, what are the specifications on that one, anyway?"
I smiled brightly at Kurosawa, proud of my work. "Hanako? She's a rating-six Agent, built from scratch by yours truly." The cat's eyes went wide for a moment. I made a show of brushing my avatar's fingernails on his sleeve. "Yup, and I coded her over the course of only two days. There was about a month in-between where I was out of town, mind."
Kurosawa whistled again. "Incredible. Guess I shouldn't have expected anything less of you, hey? But why does it have to be a little girl?"
"Aw, is she making you uncomfortable Kuro-kun? Well, it's because... nobody ever suspects the little girl, do they?"
"Hah! And you claim your work is on the level. Tell you what, I won't ask any more about the Agent, I don't really want to know what you built her for."
I snorted loudly as I touched the glowing translucent box in front of me and began modifying some of its data. "If you must know Kuro, most of the time she rides shotgun with me. And before you say anything perverted," I cut in over him as he opened his mouth, "her main function is to run programs in the background when I'm stress-testing something." It was almost a bare-faced lie but I couldn't exactly tell Kurosawa that she was built to kill people who were hacking into things I didn't want them to.
The cat harrumphed softly. "That's a good use for an Agent," he said. "But why does it have to be a little girl?"
I groaned, leaning back in the sofa as the new translucent box began to hum and spin slowly on one corner. "Don't you consider each thing you code to be a perfect little miracle, like your own flesh and blood?"
"Who, me? No way, I couldn't be that arrogant."
"I can," I grinned broadly; eliciting a groan from Kurosawa as he walked around my simulated lounge room, inspecting the furniture and walls. He pressed one paw against a wall and looked up at me. "Hey, this is pretty well-crafted. Looks and feels like the real thing."
"Arigato, Kuro-kun," I replied, tipping my head forward a little. "It took a while to reproduce accurately; the visual texture was easy to do but the tactile feedback took much longer. I'm especially proud of the coarse marble bench in the kitchen though, I did that without reference."
The cat came back towards me and daintily stepped onto the sofa, returning to its original seat and curling up. "You're an incredible programmer. I could really use you in my laboratory, you know. It'd be easy, one phone call to C'el and I could arrange-"
"That's not going to happen and you know it, Kuro-kun. I'm perfectly happy with contract work; and I've already told you I want nothing to do with, with that elf." I nearly spat the word like a racial slur. Technically it was, with the context my tone of voice had provided; but no matter.
Kurosawa sighed. "I know you haven't forgiven him for what happened, sempai. You need to let it go, really. I know how sorry he is, it'd be all over the moment you walked in the door."
You have no idea how right you are, I thought sourly. Kurosawa's impression of the executive was painfully lacking in several dangerous areas. "Look Kuro," I said, dropping the honorific, "I've discussed this with you at least a dozen times since I established myself here and contacted you. I'm not coming back, I'm not dealing with that weed-eating prick and I'm certainly not going to work for a megacorp; Horizon least of all. That is my decision, and I am not changing it."
"Suit yourself," the cat replied, poking a tiny pink tongue out at me. "I still say you're missing out."
"How?" I asked, offering a grin; glad to not be talking about my former boss. "I already help you out when you've coded your way into a corner; isn't that what I'd be doing anyway?"
"Yes, but you'd be paid and credited for it," Kurosawa said, shaking his head. "Considering how much money I've earned on programs and cyberware you've optimized, I think you're crazy to keep turning me down."
"Hey, there's a fine line between genius and madness Kuro-kun," I said, smirking.
"Heh, guess you are pretty arrogant sempai."
"Handsome, too," I added as the data box finally stopped turning. I picked it out of the air and willed my Edit suite online. It took me a just a few moments to find the metadata of the files inside and even less to access it. "Hey Kuro-kun, you haven't changed your address have you?"
"Are you kidding? Why would I move out of my apartment?"
"That's what I thought." I quickly added several lines of information and made sure each file matched up before saving the changes I'd made. The white cube turned green briefly to show that my modifications had been successful; and I put it in front of the black cat. "Here, happy unbirthday."
The cat sniffed at the white box for a moment. "Music? Hey, this is Mana's new album. How did you know?" He placed his front paws on top of it, the box vanishing in a brief, brilliant flash as he transferred it to his own node. I shrugged. "I just figured you'd like it, since I did. Incidentally that's legitimate; purchased by you about three hours ago from your home node. I matched it to your SIN and everything."
Kurosawa nodded, grinning a little. "Hah, you pirate. Would it kill you to actually buy something?"
"Hey, I bought it," I protested. "I just happened to make a duplicate of it and change its registration info. You're welcome, by the way."
"Arigato, sempai. You're not bad for a hobby hacker."
Yeeaaaaah... hobby. We'll go with that, I thought. My avatar gave an embarrassed grin; one I was pretty certain my real body was showing. "It was nothing," I said with a polite shake of my head. "Anyway, before I forget myself any further, you tried to call me earlier?"
The cat stretched and yawned languidly. "Yeah I did. I needed to check a coding issue with you, but I figured it out myself so no matter."
"Must have been a bad one if you decided to call me in on it," I grinned.
Kurosawa raised one paw to his mouth and coughed; an oddly-human gesture coming from a cat avatar. "Nothing you need to worry about, I caught it before it could break anything. Mostly I just wanted to say hi, anyway." He paused for a moment. "Karen's messaged me asking to come to dinner, so I should go."
"Probably a good idea Kuro-kun, you know the old joke - hell hath no fury-"
"-like a woman whose husband went straight to his gaming chair right after a breakthrough at work. Believe me, I know that one." He flicked his tail this way and that for a moment. "Let me in on something though, what's this VR environment of yours supposed to be? Aside from oddly comfortable."
I shrugged. "That's easy, Kuro-kun - it's a replica of my actual apartment."
Kurosawa snorted. "Pfeh, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. You could have made anything you wanted into an avatar and instead you just modeled it after yourself... you have no imagination, do you realize that?" he teased. I smothered a grin. "I have my reasons; mainly that clients never expect me to look just as good as my avatar when I meet them in person."
"You narcissist," the cat jibed.
"And damned well proud of it," I replied. "See you later Kuro-kun; say hi to Karen for me."
"I will, bye!" The cat cheerfully waved one paw at me, not unlike the good-luck charm on the counter of the convenience store down the street before disappearing.