Victor Vektor's checkup on me was him calling me well after his scheduled appointment and said he was too busy to come in person, just like I was too busy to come and visit him. He gave me a once over with his eyes and declared me healthy, which made me laugh. I told him to call a friend of mine if he needed help and gave him the deets to contact Atlas. He thanked me and ended the call. Since it was morning already, I got up, showered, and dressed for school.

The next two days passed by quickly, with each of them being a normal day and nothing significant happening. Friday on the other hand, was almost charged with energy. Everyone I met seemed a little jittery and felt anticipation, especially the students. The double lunch we had was full of their plans and what they were going to do. I received quite a few interested looks, too.

Just before the second period of lunch ended and we had to return to class, Kei asked me to call in my favor on Sunday night. We all knew what she really meant by that, because Carrie looked away and didn't say anything as the other girls whispered their praise to Kei for being so bold. I thought about refusing, then decided to turn things around a little.

“I look forward to meeting your family and cooking a meal with them.” I said and all of the girls made surprised sounds. “Yes, that's the favor I'm calling in. I'll even bring the ingredients.”

Carrie let out a sigh and hung her head after hearing that.

“Veder...” Kei said with a blush. “That wasn't... I... well, I really wanted...”

“I know.” I said and leaned over and kissed her cheek.

The bell rang and we all went back to class. It was another study period, which was technically free time, so I entered the Green Room and brought up the design specs for the company's standard handgun. It was fully tested and reliable; but, it barely had any stopping power. All it could do to any armored metal was dent it, including chrome.

Since I couldn't change the standard ammunition, I would need to alter the gun's internal design to add more oomph to how it ejected the bullets. I had the brilliant idea to make the inside of the gun barrel into a mini-railgun and added a slim battery to the underside of the gun barrel. It was already over-engineered and sturdy, so the thick-body look it already had didn't change much.

It did compromise the structural integrity slightly, so I replaced certain parts of it with titanium. Since it still used the same construction process, just replacing the materials didn't add any significant time in making the thing. The railgun part inside the barrel was easily added to the gun barrel's forging process, which was done separately anyways, and the assembly of the full gun stayed the same.

I saved the modified design and submitted the patent changes to the Logistics Division of the Arasaka Corporation. I could have patented it myself; but, it was well known it was an Arasaka corpo's weapon. Trying to make one identical to it and trying to sell it or making it public, would only make me a target for 'stealing' company secrets.

Ha, if only they knew. I thought and closed the design program and dismissed the workstation.

Again, I was pretty much the center of attention after doing that and I walked over to the girls relaxing on the grass.

“What else are you going to do to impress us?” Evelyn asked me.

I thought about dismissing my avatar's coat and shirt and flexing my muscles for them, and let out a soft chuckle instead. “I've helped a ripperdoc friend of mine create custom cyberware and programming, so unofficially, I could share all of those mods with you.”

“What about officially?” Carrie asked.

I gave her a look and her face went slightly red and she didn't look away. I sighed and couldn't keep punishing her for her mistakes. It felt like I was slapping a puppy for peeing on the carpet and it didn't know why I was hurting it.

“Trying to break into the protein production market is a colossal mistake. The initial investment alone would bankrupt the project before it produced the first crop yield. Your mother doesn't have access to enough lands, the already perfected process, or anything else necessary for it to be viable.”

Carrie looked embarrassed on her mother's behalf.

“Then what would you do?” Evelyn asked and took Carrie's hand to give her support.

“Why start over the whole thing when you already have access to a massive protein producer already? It's much cheaper to buy from a company that already produces thousands of tons of the stuff.” I answered and saw the next question on their faces, so I answered it. “Buy the protein in bulk for an even cheaper price and then produce a niche market item that will sell out before it's even on the market.”

“What item?” Carrie asked, her curiosity piqued.

I raised a single eyebrow at her and then glanced around at all of the other students in the classroom and back to her.

“R-right, not here.” Carrie said and took a breath. “I'll talk to my mother to arrange a meeting.”

“I work on the weekends from 6 A.M. until 4 P.M..” I reminded her, just in case her hours were different from mine. “This Saturday is claimed and I'll be at Kei's at 6 on Sunday.”

“A limited time, then. Sunday between 4 and 5.” Carrie said with a bit more confidence. “I'll make it work.”

I nodded and the slightly tense atmosphere disappeared when Kei started to talk about what kind of ingredients I was going to bring and started asking what exactly I had access to. Instead of giving her a list of what I could make, which was pretty much everything, I sent her the promo material Atlas had made for Atlas Incorporated.

Kei gasped and shared it with the girls in a group chat, making them all gasp as well. They quickly went through it all and everything Atlas Inc. offered for sale, especially food at a reasonable price. Why no one had tried to buy anything food related was a concern; but, it wasn't a huge one. No one was buying materials by the ton, either.

I made a mental note for Atlas to look into that. The various companies he owned had been operating for nearly a week and the only sales he had were from the walk-in cyberware sales and related plastic surgery. Now that I was thinking about it, that was starting to look odd. A good portion of the city had seen and messaged the cargo hauler, so why were none of them buying anything?

*

Atlas stared at the search results he found on his cyberdeck after checking on what Veder wanted him to. He was surprised that he found several active campaigns of disinformation had been formed against Atlas Incorporated and were being widely spread across the city.

There were claims of unverified contaminated foodstocks, substandard compositions on the bulk material for sale, unregistered cargo vessels that didn't pass Night City Transportation standards, unlicensed ripperdoc surgeries, untested and unverified cyberware being used, and several other things.

One of the biggest complaints was being a danger to the surrounding businesses downtown because of the gang attack on the office. That one was kind of valid, since his new business had attracted one of the worst gangs in the city to target him for his high-end cyberware. Anything that made them better and stronger was going to draw them in like bees to honey.

He had dealt with them, though. Who could be behind this near blanket smear campaign if it wasn't them? He closed the office temporarily and locked up, then went in the back to do a deep VR dive to see who or what was behind it.

It only took a few moments to choose one of the cyberware complaints and he found the digital signature. He searched through the net for it and he eventually traced it back to a Tyger Claw netrunner that was behind a strong ICE firewall. Atlas marked it and flew away, picked a complaint about the contaminated food and followed the digital signature to a dead end.

A quick search around found that the man had been a police officer and had been murdered in a drive-by shooting. No witnesses. How did they know it was a drive-by if there were no witnesses? Wouldn't it have just been a cop shot dead on the side of the street? Something was fishy here.

Atlas flew back out into the general net and chose one of the complaints about the unregistered vehicle and it not passing inspection. He followed that one right to City Hall and it was a secondary account for a secretary in the Department of Transportation. He already had all the data registered; but, passing inspection was something he couldn't do, since it would reveal too much of his advanced technology.

The note on his file about the large expected bribe to clear up the problem, made Atlas laugh. He was never going to pay them for slandering him. In fact, he did something better. He checked all of the registered vehicles for everyone that worked in City Hall and followed them back to their accounts and copied his violation and added the notation to them, then sent it back to the main server.

Since it was all automated, every single person in the building received the same warning and were expected to provide a hefty bribe to clear up the problem, even the mayor. If they had multiple vehicles, each of them were given the warning and bribe notification.

Atlas left the main server and went back out into the net. He tracked down several more complaints, with the results being cut-outs for various companies. Even with that, he followed other links and connections back to the real culprit.

Biotechnica had been the leader in smearing his food production, since no one could produce so much 'real' food while also collecting garbage, which was highly suspicious to them, so they claimed it was being transported by the only cargo hauler Atlas Incorporated had.

As for the cyberware complaints, they were spread out through several corporations. Atlas had apparently stepped on many toes with his business model of producing affordable cyberware that covered a wide range of options.

Kiroshi Optics slandered his cybernetic eyes for how cheap they were. Dynalar Technologies slammed him for his muscle enhancers and replacement parts. The last and biggest was Zetatech, which was a massive corporation that produced cyberware operating systems, neural processors and memory chips, and netrunning gear. They had so many helpers that trying to counter them was already a lost proposition.

Atlas retreated from the main net and felt someone poke him in the digital back. He didn't sense any danger, so he turned around and it was only a text inquiry that was looking for information on Atlas, so he flew to where it came from. To his surprise, it was a detective from the police precinct he had dropped off the victims he found.

A quick check showed she had been looking for him for a while and had been mired down by all the misinformation on the net that related to him. Just to give her a little thrill, and probably a scare, he took her inquiry and deleted it in real time, one letter at a time, then he typed in his name and his address.

He added that he didn't realize she was looking for him and should have just messaged him to save her so much work. He was free to meet her tomorrow afternoon when she was also free and she could stop by. He even agreed to clear everything up for her, including all the false claims against him and his corporation.

With that invitation delivered, Atlas left the police server and flew back to his own at the office and logged back out. He went to the front door and opened up again. For the rest of the day, only one person entered and it was a friend of the two women he had overhauled a few days ago. Their cybernetic arm was twitching randomly and she wondered if I would look at it.

Atlas spent the next 20 minutes troubleshooting her arm. It was a combination of internal wire damage and a software update that conflicted with the short the bare wire caused when it rubbed across the elbow joint when she moved her middle finger.

“It gets a lot of use, does it?” Atlas asked with a chuckle after he explained what the damage was.

The woman with a blue mohawk smirked and tried to give him the finger, only it stopped halfway and her opened up elbow let out a snap sound and they both smelled burnt plastic.

“I'll take that as a yes.” Atlas said and went to work to fix the problem. He only charger her 50 eddies for the wire replacement and fixed the software for free. He also healed her diseases without telling her and fixed the small burr on her cybernetic knee joint that would wear the part out several years early.

After she left, and Atlas had admired her leather-clad ass as she strutted away, he was only slightly surprised the Police Commissioner of Night City, Jerry Fawlter himself, sent him a message that cancelled the unofficial police escort he had been getting during the night's trash run.

They also wouldn't be joining him when he went out to Rocky Ridge to clean up his private property. It wasn't the police's job to be lackeys that jumped at his command and Atlas would no longer have their support.

“Well, fuck you too, commissioner.” Atlas said and saved the message, copied it, and then sent it to every single officer that had ever rotated through the patrols and did the night shifts with him on the trash runs. He also warned them that the commissioner might claim their earned bounties or would dock their pay for it, because the wording of the message was pretty clear.

Little did he realize his warning would cause a huge walk-out that evening when the commissioner did send a missive out to every department to either confiscate what he deemed were illegal funds or to dock their pay until the same total was in the hands of the police department.

Instead of getting all that money added to the budget, or saving that much money in the budget for that fiscal quarter, he lost several departments worth of police officers, spread all across the city, that wouldn't show up for work because they weren't getting paid, as per their contracts.

Even the two MaxTac teams and the AV crews walked out, because as the main heavy combat force, they had earned the biggest share of the bounties. They would have to work for free for the next few weeks to make up the difference and only an idiot would agree to that.

What came as a shock to them all, and to the captains of the precincts they worked for, all of the officers that refused to show up for work had received termination notices and were fired.

When the day shift of the police ended their patrols at 6 P.M., the city became unusually quiet. Why? Because none of the night shift officers had their jobs anymore. No police vehicles left the parking garages or parking lots. No armored AVs lifted off or patrolled the air through the downtown area. No officers walked their patrol route along the pedestrian walkways or monitored public transportation.

It was kind of eerie that one single decision of greed had pretty much emptied the streets of the police presence that was usually prevalent all over the main parts of the city. They usually didn't go near the slums and more rundown areas, so the people there didn't notice the change. Everywhere else? It was noticed almost immediately.

They all thought it was a trick, though. No one did anything even remotely illegal or bad for several hours as the atmosphere seemed to thicken with a tense alertness. It made everyone extremely nervous and more than a few were jittery and walked quickly to wherever they were going. Most of them acted like strung out druggies looking for their next fix as they glanced around at everything, because they fully expected to be attacked.

It was a street kid that was the first to do anything. He was bold and more than a little stupid, because he chose to spray paint his future gang-tag right on the biggest PetroChem logo on a billboard that was located right next to the dried up Coronado Dam, which itself was clogged up with junk and garbage from the nearby landfill maintained by PetroChem.

The teen spent a good 30 minutes under the security camera's watchful eye as he perfected his work, which was a bunch of stick figures in poses spelling out his name, and then he tossed the can into the dam and ran for it, only for nothing to happen. There were no sirens, no signs of a police car, and no response other than complete and utter silence.

More than a few people had watched the scene from afar, just for their own amusement to see how rough the police would be with a stick-thin street kid. Then nothing happened. The kid got away clean, despite the obvious evidence and being caught on camera.

That revelation seemed to ripple across the city as messages were sent, some discreet and others obvious, and then a few were smart enough to put it together and sent out their own messages to their friends and a few others. The quiet wasn't a trick. For some reason, there were no police out and about and now nearly everyone on or near the streets knew it.