"Enny for your thoughts."
Startled out of those thoughts, V turned her head to see Van by her side, looking down at her.
It was chilly in their chosen rendezvous spot. The pier rising high above them blocked off the warmth of the hazy spring sun, and the cool ocean breeze was channeled by buildings and air-curtains into a cutting wind battering the small cove with swirling gusts.
V shoved her hands deeper under her arms, ever so grateful for the rare couple days they'd been able to take it relatively easy. The Oda meeting had gone without a hitch, and even the bag job for Nestor had felt like a walk in the park in realspace after her dive into cyberspace — deep, but brief enough that it had not strained her much.
Even so, she'd almost managed to bonk herself by being stupid about nutrition. It was a simple enough to avoid in the future… but it was one more thing for her to add to an ever-growing list of shit she needed to worry about the further they were getting into Serious Biz.
She used to think the real big-time Solos and crews thought they were too good to hang out or party with the smaller fish. That they'd let the eddies and flash get into their heads.
And, yeah, maybe a few had. But they didn't stay in the game. The more she'd started seeing of that very top — and she knew the crew was starting to break, even if they weren't exactly the Angels yet — the more she was starting to see just how professional it was. The highest-stake professional sport there was, and the whole world spectated without even knowing it.
No matter how much care she took to keep her body as close to peak performance as she could given all the abuse she put it through and the distinct lack of eddies to be able to afford the very best care, there was a deep-seated tiredness that emerged whenever her meager downtime got extended to a couple days. There was no amount of drugs and hormones that could really get rid of that fatigue.
But they could push it back for another day, another gig, another couple eddies to survive.
Last couple days the most stress she'd put her body through had been keeping up with Judy… and that was the good kind of stress, she thought with a small smile. Somewhere deep down, her body had to know the difference too, because these sleepless nights and… other strains were so unlike anything else. She ached, and she was restored, all at once.
Which was nice, because hunching her shoulders against the wind sent a twinge down the trapezius that she could really have lived without.
And might not live with. She couldn't afford to falter, not now, not with everything at stake. She pushed through a small dose of her recovery cocktail to help the pain editor out. Just a little bit, a quarter dose to top herself off, pain regulators and immune system boosters with a touch of dorph. And to make sure it didn't blur her out, she chased it with some Laser — her own admixture of Synth, Bluebird, Browsie, Retro and a mix of plain generic brain boosters… plus a trace amount of SNDT from the small, prized stash she's been able to scrounge up from Scavs mostly.
Maintaining equilibrium between every kind of enhancement you needed — the Balance, she and Van called it — was as much art as it was skill. A good Ripperdoc like Vik or Doc Vex could get you about three-quarters way there, maybe close to ninety percent if you had the perfect profile. That, already, was way beyond most of the solos and boosters running around with completely fucked up dosing and interactions — but the rest, that last ten–twenty percent of performance you could squeeze out of a body? That could be life or death. That could be the one percent difference against others at the top of the game. It was science, and it was art. The Ripperdocs could do the science. You had to know how it all worked for you, any given day, any given second.
She felt the pain dull away — still there, making sure she didn't forget about it unless she had to, but not getting in the way.
Van's eyes lingered on her for a bit longer, the inquisitive furrow of his brow deepening until he seemed reassured enough that he had her attention and she hadn't forgotten about him but was still processing something — a look he must've seen a thousand times.
She watched him turn and weigh in his hand a stone as he stared at the stretch of ocean opening in an unobstructed sliver between the pier and the Marina buildings reaching up to the skies that columns of fire from the OASC pierced one after another before wind could blow away the dying exhaust tail of yet another shuttle escaping the clutches of the city — the clutches of Earth itself.
A fainter plume of a mass driver launch rose regally in the distance as he threw the stone to a perfect wave-crest skip, a good two dozen hops before it went down somewhere beyond her un-zoomed vision.
Vision that was much clearer now, the waves turning into a fluid dynamics simulation she could follow as far as her eyes could see.
She smiled to herself, and turned back to look at the other shore she'd been staring at. The abandoned vacation paradise of Pacifica rose in smoldering columns of towering hotels and apartment buildings stretching out block after block out from the coast toward the solar arrays a good fifteen clicks further into the badlands.
Half a million people? A million? Nobody knew, exactly, how many still lived in the only remaining active combat zone in the city. She sure didn't.
Neither did she know exactly how it had become the place to seal Evelyn's fate, and maybe her fate, too.
Everybody 'knew' about the shady shit the Voodoo Boys were doing in the Net — even in the Deep, supposedly. Everybody 'knew' about the Shamans, knew somebody who'd seen them emerging from the Blackwall to roam the Net like gods to advance their mysterious plans… and nobody actually knew shit.
But she'd find out.
"How many times have you been there since you've been back?" she asked absently when she felt Van walk back up next to her. Since the war.
"Twice, three times, maybe," he said, a curious lilt to his tone when he followed her gaze past the breaker and over the yachts to figure out what she meant — and easily followed her line of thinking. "Couldn't say I learned much, except to stay the fuck away if I can avoid it."
"Used to love summers."
"Yeah," Van said, smiling at her, and then at the burning ruins.
The summers they'd spent in what had been an absolute wonderland… sun and fun and Playland rides in their younger years, and first real dabbles in less childish fun later on. Until Van had gotten sent away.
The memories from that last summer she'd spent there, the one without Van, felt as sour now as the days had felt all those years ago.
"You ever hear anything about Mirlande?" she asked, the ever-present knowledge that it was as likely as not that somebody from your past was dead woven into the phrasing.
He hadn't thought about her in a while, at least, it seemed to her when she watched memories rise to soften up his smile and bring him to a rare, self-conscious chuckle — and the awkward little rub at his neck, the same gesture she knew she was prone to unconsciously make herself.
"Here and there, you know how it is, international. Last I heard she was some kind of a coordinator for the Euro relief mission. Splitting her time between Haiti and Brussels."
V nodded — Nestor was only a couple hundred miles away, still in the greater NUSA-sphere, and they could barely get a hold of him most of the time. Mirlande had jumped over the Euro firewall soon after Van's dispatch to Militech had meant breaking up — and because by that time it had become plenty obvious that none of the Americas were too interested in helping the islands get back back on their feet, and Mirlande had always been a believer.
Frankly, V was astonished he'd managed to track her down at all, let alone try to keep in touch.
But of course the gonk would've.
She reached up to lightly squeeze his shoulder. "Sounds like she's doing well for herself. Y'know, things work out, maybe we'll be able to afford to go over sometime."
"Better not let Madame Hilaire hear about that plan, or she'll be a more formidable foe than Arasaka and all the gangs put together."
V laughed, the mere mention of Mirlande's mother conjuring in her mind the tiny but utterly formidable woman as if she was standing right there. "Think she still hates you?"
"Oh, I know she does. Hear almost more often from her than Mom. Curses me out every time I send a holiday note. Lately only in Creole, though, I think she's really coming around."
Of course he would, V thought, and wrapped her arm around his waist to lean into a side hug, still laughing. "Oh yeah, it's only been, what, fifteen years? She'll come around any day now."
"Either that, or I learn Creole," he said and tossed her one of the stones he'd been playing with. "Distance or skips?"
"Skips," V said, snatching the smooth little discus midair as easily as she slipped into the old game they'd played since those long-ago summers. "Max or target?"
"Target," Van said, ducking to pluck up a couple more stones as they turned around to walk back across to the open little cove. "Seven or closest, distance for tiebreaker."
She grinned at him, and gave him a playful little shove as though to get him out of the way.
"Can't believe I'm saying this, but even given how crazy Goro's plan is, I'm not sure I like the idea of messing with the Voodoo Boys any more," he said, quietly and casually not to disturb her aiming too much. "Let alone… whatever the hell this Alt persona is, now. It sounds sketch as fuck. Could end really badly."
"Not disagreeing. Johnny does, thanks Johnny," she quipped before quieting to line up her shot — and to think. It takes a few seconds to see the right wavelength emerging and wind dying before she lets it loose.
"I'd call that six and a half, but I'll give it to you," Van said with a small smile as he measured her attempt by eye. He picked out a stone for himself, and tossed it in his hand to get a good feel for it. "You really gonna trust some AI?"
"Ain't just some AI," Johnny said, with V translating for Van, too. The rockerboy looked worse for the wear, somehow, sitting in the sand in the hazy daylight. "Talked to me… after, y'know. I know it's not her, like I'm not me. But she didn't just pop out some virtual vagina after a little twinkle in daddy's mainframe, either."
Van couldn't quite keep a straight face for his throw, or a straight throw for that matter — he missed it by two, but he was never as good at targets as she was, and he still loved playing against her. "That was sixty years ago, man. I've got no reason to question you back then, but sixty years is a long time for an AI. Shit, it's a long time for a human."
"It's a long time for a machine, lots of nanoseconds," V corrected him, gently, though he had a point that she realized she hadn't maybe fully considered. One she'd have to spend some of her slow human time on puzzling out. "It'd be a long time for me to be in deep. A couple weeks would probably feel like an eternity."
She kneeled by their pile of rocks, and weighed a couple promising-looking ones against one another. "But I've got no idea what it'd be like for an AI," she said, half thinking out loud. "Possible time loses all meaning, and Alt could've spent the last sixty years just reencoding herself, for all we know."
"We do know she wrote this fucking program, and nobody still understands it better than she does."
"Fair enough," Van said, to Johnny, before turning more clearly to V. "So we got two Plan B's."
"Basically," V said with a grin, "but two shitty options is still better than no options at all. Distance."
Van nodded. "Target. Three skips minimum, the O of the red tag," he said, pointing at a graffiti on the concrete base of the breaker. "I guess the fixer's our only way in with the Voodoo Boys?"
"The only way that doesn't give the game away," V said, jerking her thumb at Johnny before realizing that Van still didn't actually see him — but he did seem to get her meaning even so. "If I talk to anybody but Maman Brigitte, it's all but certain the info's gonna get out somehow. Can't take that risk, unless there's no other option. Way I see it, we got enough cred that we could land some of the gigs the Voodoo Boys use outsiders for."
Another nod from Van. "You sure they don't already know?"
V shrugged. "Pretty sure. They've got a shit ton of good 'runners, but I haven't seen anything to suggest they have any idea what they're looking for. My best guess from what me and Beebs have been able to put together from their comms is that they think Aras—"
She tossed the stone back down and swung around to face the maintenance staircase they'd taken down from the walkway above. "She's here."
CW: dissociation, drug use
With thanks to a great Cyberpunk2077 RP original character, included here with permission as Doc Vex, and her wonderfully supportive writer.