Progressing from Arasaka

As an Arasaka executive, she certainly could not cooperate with subsidiaries of Militech or Kang Tao.

And so, relying on Michiko Arasaka's authority, Dangerous Girl had practically received a green light for every order it took from Arasaka. It had tried nearly every line of business it could open. Whether it was thriving was another matter, but while the company might be small, it had all the vital organs.

It catered to every need of corporate dogs.

Dangerous Girl's rehabilitation and recuperation business was one such example. It was not exactly flourishing—at best, it was barely alive.

Tasteless to keep, regrettable to discard.

That was until Vera graduated from Arasaka Tower Academy, emerged into view, and established contact.

A wild genius without formal training, she had not given up her hobby even while bravely shouldering her parents' expectations. She had actually managed to tinker something into existence during her spare time!

Clap clap.

Vera worked with remarkable efficiency. Once she understood Dangerous Girl's business needs, she cross-referenced the progress of her Old Net restoration work, spent twenty minutes selectively calculating the medical product technologies of the Umbrella Group that she innately knew, marked out her train of thought, and then used Arasaka equipment to construct the model architecture.

Regenerate

A skin-care product registered under the Umbrella Corporation, it was a byproduct of T-Virus research. Through a certain technology, it activated dead cells and made users appear younger.

It was a high-end skincare and recuperation product, along with its accompanying services.

It truly had noticeable effects in making skin healthier, relaxing muscles, treating strain injuries, and leaving people refreshed.

The Umbrella Corporation's medical standards were genuinely high. Aside from being expensive, its claim of being fifty years ahead of the world was no exaggeration.

In the world of Cyberpunk, do not be fooled by the fact that those at the bottom were all covered in cyberware. The middle class, and even more so those with power and money, hoped to preserve more of their original body parts while installing only the necessary cyberware. That created a demand for maintenance.

It was a symbol of wealth. That was the kind of thing they wanted.

And cyberware, the more advanced it was, the better it fit the human body and the less rejection it caused. Fine-tuned through other methods, it also had a certain maintenance effect.

In short, make money from the rich.

There was also Adravil:

An Umbrella Corporation product based on ibuprofen, continuously improved into a more potent painkiller.

Aqua Cure:

The Umbrella Corporation's best-selling external product, suitable for open wounds and genuinely capable of saving lives. It was an ointment manufactured to exceptionally high standards, with both civilian and military grades.

The former was Vera's reasonable, legitimate, and compliant means of making extra money through cooperation with Dangerous Girl.

The latter was Vera's "personal research result" submitted to Arasaka.

Once the raw-material order was placed, the laboratory system would automatically issue the order, and a dedicated aircraft would deliver it. After taking stock of everything she had, Vera stood up, entered the inner section of her personal lab, changed into specialized cleanroom clothing, passed through an ultraviolet sterilization corridor, and then controlled the workbench's mechanical arms from behind glass to improve the products.

Beep beep—

Vera watched the "improved result" on the workbench gradually take shape after countless precise procedures—raw-material inspection, pretreatment, adjustment, refinement, drying...—and felt a faint sense of a bandit's guilt.

But relying on the accumulated achievements of countless researchers from another world felt so damn good.

Umbrella research improving products was equivalent to Vera Adelheid Russell of Arasaka researching and improving products.

And she always left herself room, never improving them all the way to the newest model.

I don't produce "results." I'm merely a porter of "results."

Subtly, she wanted it~~(°ー°〃)

Vera Was an All-Rounder?

Only when dusk completely shrouded the city and dazzling neon lights replaced the warm sunlight did the exhausted Vera finally raise her head inside the personal laboratory codenamed "Umbrella." She rubbed her temples and stopped writing the workbench's formulation program.

In the world of Cyberpunk, even by 2074, nearly all electronic equipment had hacker interfaces.

Programmable, connectable, controllable...

With brain-machine synchronization, even for technical research topics, most researchers now conducted computational simulations in segmented cybernetworks. They generated results on built-in virtual screen grids, connected them to real-world terminals, used weak AI for assisted calculations, then transmitted and generated, adjusted, experimented, and adjusted again...

Regenerate (Third Adjustment, First Improvement Experiment)

Type: Rehabilitation and recuperation health maintenance product

Product improvement unit: Umbrella Personal Lab (Arasaka)

Remarks: The latest model, adjusted and programmatically improved in a timely manner based on data collection and feedback from Dangerous Girl's rehabilitation and recuperation business. Preliminary testing showed that compared with Regenerate-B4 currently circulating on the market, the C1 experimental model improved maintenance effects on natural and artificial skin by approximately 6%–9%.

2074/5/27, 22:14.

After nearly half a day of calculations, Vera ultimately kept the drug-effect iteration within a relatively reasonable range.

With Umbrella from another world behind her, Vera had also put considerable effort into biotechnology knowledge.

Perhaps she could not compare with people like Dr. Marcus or Dr. William Birkin, but her level was not low either. At the very least, she could understand the material and reproduce it when the documentation was complete and T-Virus was not required.

Especially after receiving personnel and technical support from William Birkin's Raccoon City base, Vera had accessed the full set of materials as a company executive. It was simple. What she wanted was not top-secret projects like B.O.W.s, T, or G, but ordinary medical products sold by Umbrella, the kind meant to open up the Asia-Pacific civilian market and make real money.

With Arasaka as her backing as well, even though Arasaka was not a biotechnology giant, its research department had deep pockets. As long as the materials were not T-Virus-related, it could obtain them. That made Vera's path toward reproduction far easier.

"Let's leave it at that for now..."

The production data from the experimental workbench was fully displayed through Vera's optical implant. She only needed to issue a command through her cerebral cortex to review it.

6%–9%.

A faint red glow flickered in Vera's indigo eyes.

That was enough.

She could not update and iterate straight to the latest model in one go. She had to improve it gradually, showing that she had not abandoned her "hobby."

After sending the supporting Regenerate—C1 materials, improvement data, and elemental migration chemical model to Dangerous Girl's business department, Vera stretched comfortably.

The laboratory was small, but it had everything it needed.

Only here could Vera reproduce "Umbrella"-based biotechnology through methods that were reasonable and had explainable origins.

Making the most of her status, the biotechnology courses she had selected as electives at Arasaka Tower Academy had been the first step. Then there was the interest in the Old Net and the extremely cautious salvage and restoration work she had displayed after joining the company...

As time passed, the persona Vera had fabricated had basically taken shape, and the gaps that needed patching grew fewer and fewer.

Reasonable, yet barely believable in the way that geniuses sometimes were.

Work was done.

After disinfecting herself and changing out of the rather bulky protective clothing, Vera left the inner room, pressed the safety switch, and passed identity verification. The lab slowly ceased operations in compliance with safety regulations.

Once the materials were sent out, the matter temporarily had nothing to do with Vera.

The more detailed testing and clinical trials that followed were Dangerous Girl's responsibility. She only wanted the money.

As for Adravil hemostatic agents and Aqua Cure emergency trauma ointment, there was no rush. Improving one product in a day could be called genius and explained as prior preparation, but improving three in one day would be...

Vera had no desire to be completely transferred into the Biotechnology Research Department just because her talent was too obvious, even if it meant a three-rank promotion!

Over the following period, Vera visited the soldiers' barracks on the floors occupied by the Security Department.

After meeting with the subordinates of her Special Rapid Response Unit, chatting briefly, announcing Team 6's bonuses, and encouraging the other teams, she was surrounded and escorted to the shooting range for routine practice to maintain her feel.

Arasaka's JKE-X2 Kenshin, HJKE-11 Yukimura, Incense LX, Shigure, TKI-20 Shingen, HJSH-18 Masamune, Nowaki... Tsunami Defense's Nekomata, Militech assault rifles, Kang Tao smart weapons—Vera rapidly and accurately fired several magazines from nearly every one of the most widely circulated weapons on the market.

Sparks flew from the targets.

Prepare for a rainy day. There would always come a time when they might be useful.

"Seven seconds faster. Chief, if anyone ever applied their standard procedures for dealing with office personnel targets to you during an external operation, I think they would definitely regret it... You're simply an all-rounder. Uh, are you doing simulated CQB too?"

Vera's confidant, Team 6's deputy captain Jimmy, was a 1.95-meter-tall white man. Fully armed but without a helmet, he stared at the timer and sighed. Since he had always followed Vera, he could be said to have witnessed her growth in full over the years.

Although Vera rarely exchanged fire with enemies directly on the front line, that did not mean she was a weak commander incapable of defending herself.

"If anyone manages to break through to me, that means you either died or slacked off."

She did not respond to her subordinate's flattery. Vera merely turned sideways and cast a slanted glance at her adjutant.

At that moment, she held a Sadala Electromagnetic Shotgun in one hand.

Her slender, fair fingers, their cybernetic modifications concealed and the faint contours of their bodily seams barely visible, formed a striking contrast with the heavy, thick firearm, as if its enormous recoil would snap them apart the next second.

She pulled the trigger.

The intelligent-link coprocessor embedded beneath the skin of her palm synchronized with the electromagnetic shotgun. It directly fed the target's coordinates and magnified image into her built-in visual implant, aimed, automatically compensated for ballistic deviation, and fired.

Accompanied by an electric whine, electromagnetically accelerated sharp steel spikes exploded against the target fifty meters away, throwing out huge sparks and even causing a melting reaction.

Once she confirmed the projectile had been fired, Vera tossed the Sadala Electromagnetic Shotgun in her hand toward her adjutant Jimmy. "We'll skip the simulated combat today. I spent too long in the biotech department."

With her back turned stylishly, Vera raised a finger and lightly waved it as she left the barracks.

2074/5/27, 22:44.

The internal network security section attached to the Security Department.

The automatic door opened. "Director Vera." The Arasaka Hackers who saw Vera bowed in greeting.

"Mm. Security relay." Vera nodded, then found herself a seat with practiced ease and beckoned.

The employee, an Arasaka Hackers administrative worker who was not wearing hacker gear or lying in a data pod, gave a bitter smile. "Director, you... Sigh, take it easy." As he spoke, he handed Vera a relay device resembling a tablet computer.

This thing was equivalent to a layer of protection. Compared with plugging in a personal link cable directly, even if a hacker traced the connection back to your location and uploaded a daemon attack virus in retaliation, what got burned would only be the relay rather than the user's brain.

Arasaka had shoes on its feet, so naturally it had such things.

Vera was not about to directly connect her brain-machine interface to external objects like some reckless fool.

The bodily seams appeared across her fair skin. Vera withdrew her personal link cable from the end of her palm, connected it to the security relay, lay back against the sofa, and closed her eyes.

"Connect to the Old Net. Wake me up exactly at midnight."

"Yes."

After spreading darkness, a faint glow appeared in Vera's field of vision. White points of light floated through the dim space, arranged into neat matrices that vaguely formed a straight road ahead.

In the endless distance lay a chaotic realm flickering with ghostly light.

There—

Was Cyberspace.

"Then, let's begin the 'workout.'"

Thank you once again for everyone's support and votes φ(゜▽゜*)?

Cyberspace and Vera-Style "Workouts"

Cyberspace.

Simply put, it could be regarded as the once open-source internet.

Why "once"? Because someone blew it up.

That was also why Cyberspace was known as the Old Net.

Countless green, blue-white, and dark-red gradients of 1s and 0s formed a place that resembled visible space, serving as footholds for digitized consciousness. Vera watched the faintly glowing data world beyond Arasaka's security network programs.

It was tangled and disorderly, malformed and chaotic.

Here, Vera could even see the boundaries separating the major network domains: the corporate LAN firewalls of Arasaka, Militech, and Kang Tao, as well as... the wall that isolated the Old Net.

A red-black high wall constructed from astronomical quantities of fixed information density, security defense programs, and Intrusion Countermeasure Units.

The "Black Wall" established by Network Surveillance.