It wasn't until Jun had left with his new "firewall" that Motoko noticed she had missed a notification.
*10000 Technical Ability XP Gained*
She didn't know what exactly this meant, but she could already tell it was going to be a headache.
Jun didn't know how Motoko had worked her netrunner magic, but his new headpiece was already working like a charm. Wanting to put it to the test, he had ridden the NCART through Sixth Street territory. No less than four picksockets had tried to ply their trade on him so far, and every one of them had left in tears as their own shards went flying into the crowd.
Feeling brave, Jun got off the NCART at the next stop and called his bike to his current location. A quick ride to central Pacifica later and he was jacking his personal link into a public Dataterm. Immediately the screen flashed with dozens of notifications of file transfers, all of which vanished as the remote ends timed out. Jun nodded to himself, he was going to have to do something nice for Motoko. Maybe he could find a flavor of Burrito XXL she actually liked? That should reduce her stress levels significantly (and maybe get her to stop with all that "exercise" talk).
There was one last thing Jun felt the need to try. Still connected to the Dataterm, he navigated to a search engine and asked it for a site that offered free movie downloads. Choosing the skeeviest looking from the top ten results, Jun then queued up downloads of all ten Bushidō movies. Every download failed at 98%, but a quick look at the files showed that he had ten complete movies. Playing his favorite, Bushidō 7: Revenge Never Sleeps, worked like a charm with zero unclosable ad popups filling his field of view.
This was going to save so much money. Protecting himself from picksockets was one thing, but being able to download shady soft from the net without all the viruses would really impress Fujimura. Good runners aren't cheap, after all. Now all he had to do was figure out how to get Motoko to be willing to sell firewalls to the Claws. Hmm…
Motoko was just wrapping up a jam session when Hiromi called. Shutting down her music box, she answered the phone. "Motoko, Jun just called me and said that you were ignoring a huge business opportunity! He says you made him a perfect firewall, and that Fujimura has already authorized the purchase of a thousand units at 500,000 eddies each. As your fixer, it would be irresponsible of me to let you ignore such a lucrative arrangement."
Motoko groaned as Hiromi continued to berate her business sense with the same tone she used to discuss Malcolm's bargaining skills. She had the feeling that this wasn't going to end anytime soon. Well, there's the headache, Motoko thought to herself.