One last call. One holocall that had startled her awake in the middle of the night and then — nothing. Dead silence. For a day, she kept telling herself not to worry, that whatever the insane plan V had cooked up, it would succeed — if not spectacularly, then at least to a point — and then they would be in contact again. Today, she could barely keep deceiving herself.
Judy threw another coffee tin into the growing pile. Her hands clasped shakily and teeth bit into her lip as she once again set the convo to replay.
"Hey, Judy," V had said. It had begun innocently enough. Judy had been a little dizzy from the evening before and barely awake when the call had come. Only after repeat listen did Judy hear that V's voice from the very onset had been quiet and distant, like the last of a dream falling away.
"Oh, hey, V." Judy had said joyfully, despite the time. She was always glad to hear this caller. "What's crackin'?"
"Time we, uh, went swimmin'..."
"Hm? Lotta fun, wasn't it?" There was absolutely no denying that. That day had altered the course of her life, had returned a measure of hope to Judy's wavering world. Had stopped her escape dead in the tracks.
"What you said then... 'bout what you sensed in me."
Judy's eyes had then shot open from the bitter memory. "Death," she had said in a small voice.
"Wish it'd had been anything else. Something nice." By then V had almost been pleading. Now every replay Judy only wished to be transported to there and then, to be able to softly touch and console her.
"Hey, not like it was your fault..." she had frantically tried to say something positive.
"Here's hopin' it comes out better next time."
"Listen, whatever it is you're gonna try..." Judy had desperately searched for words. "Are you sure I can't help, 'least in some small way?" Judy saw now how it had been a futile offer. Just as she would give anything to help V, her sweet and vehement V would take any steps to protect her. Even those that hurt.
"Judy, I... Can't let this harm you, of all people."
"...Just promise to be careful, OK? I'm here waitin'."
Judy hit 'stop' a moment before V once again spoke her parting words. She had this stupid notion that an unfinished convo eventually invited a conclusion. She slapped the coffee table.
"What's next, do I pray to gods?" she whispered dejectedly.
In the background, the TV screen was alight with a thousand angles on a skyscraper engulfed in flame and a news anchor kept babbling on about the dire consequences of the greatest attack on the city's corporate property in decades.
With what detes Judy knew, even the dullest gonk could deduce that V and the burning Arasaka building were connected. During a heist gone awry, to preserve a unique Arasaka-made biochip, V had inserted it into one of her neural sockets. The chip happened to hold a personality construct of Johnny Silverhand, a rocker turned terrorist from the twenties, way before her time. While the chip's nanite tech possessed frankly amazing properties — V wore the bullet that had hit her in the head as a necklace charm — it turned out the chip's safe extraction was extremely complicated and with every moment the device was gradually accomplishing its intended goal: establishing the construct as the sole host of V's body, lab-stage immortality tech turned killer. Either the means for restoring her mind or information on the process was located inside the corp's headquarters — V must have been certain of it, or she would have never went ahead with her plan. Now, what could one do with such hot info?
Judy walked up to the open window she used to watch the city in moments of contemplation. An expansive skyline occupied the entire view under the morning sun: the rest of Watson on the right, Japantown on the left, and across a long stretch of water the Downtown district's tallest towers projected their holo ads high into the atmosphere, to be seen from as far as the SoCal border. To an outside observer, Night City was a dazzling jungle of neon, glass and chrome, soaring above the harbor. Inside its workings, as everyone learned given time, it was as dark, clammy and hopeless as the polluted waters from which it rose. Judy exhaled shakily and crossed her arms, staring into the distance, as if trying to see the yesterday's billowing smoke over the black monolith of Arasaka Tower and a dozen AVs circling it like a wake of vultures.
She shook her head. She couldn't hope to do this alone. Her virtu scrolling skills were dead useless, as well as her tinkering expertise. A missing person with an entire corp on her tail required a professional approach. The Moxes would be of no use either: the problem was way outside the gang's league. Yet hiring a capable merc didn't come cheap. She would know, for V had shared some of the finer points of fixer negotiation as they gabbled for hours during their increasingly frequent dates...
She became aware of herself hurrying into the study as the beaded curtains jingled softly when they parted. Judy froze, blinked once, twice. If she rushed this, it could easily come out much worse, like the ill-fated Clouds dollhouse revolution. Like the whole damn biochip affair. Like Evelyn. No matter how much it hurt to bide her time, unknowing of V's fate, her actions had to be planned. She had to be able to formulate the task exactly before contacting a fixer, so that most of her eddies would go towards achieving her actual goal. How much did she have? About five hundred in small change and phys notes — plus her secure deposit. Gotta check that.
Judy fell into her chair and rolled up to her work rig, a full stack of screens and pads shimmering with data. Even now a braindance was compiling in the depths of her comp. She reached to swap the process to secondary array in order to establish a separate line to the net — and hesitated. The BD being assembled was experimental, her utmost accomplishment and something never done correctly before. The recorded experiences of two people falling in love, linked via a continuous neural connection. V and Judy Alvarez, on the day they went diving to the ruins of her long-sunken hometown.
She sniffed, inputting the command. Her face must have been a hot mess. Good thing her study didn't have any mirrors. She didn't avoid them as actively as V, though — something about a possible glitch or conflict in her heavily modded lenses. To think about it, couldn't get much weirder than dating a netrunner. Perhaps, an AI? Somewhere someone must have already tried that. Judy tapped her index finger on the board impatiently.
The datastream finally shifted off the main display, which instead showed the banking op's entry. Judy swiftly jacked into the machine to authorize access. Inside the secure stash was an amount of eddies she had been saving up. Her account read: E$12800 (immediately retrievable: E$12199). She had once made a promise to herself: when the retrievable topped the lucky thirteen keys, she would grab it all and leave Night City for good. Of course, that was before she had gotten entangled with V and had dipped into the reserve to gift her a preem diving suit.
Retrieve—Yes—Maximum allowed—Confirm.
Now she could pay a trusted someone with a wave of her hand — or lose it all in an attack. Putting her entire budget on short call was risky but likely necessary to deal with a competent fixer, who would require most if not full sum to be transferred in advance.
What else could she do? To increase the total sum a bit, there were some small debts to call in, but that would be far from instant — and so many would have to be forfeit altogether, unless she elected to beat the crap out of people she knew for a meager sum of extra eddies.
Judy shook her head, "Not that desperate yet."
She had to make the most of what she already possessed.
Throwing her limited funds at a fixer was also not the first logical thing to try. After all, being a somewhat skilled (she liked to think) BD tech, she'd gathered a long list of contacts, many of whom knew V as well, if not in person, then at least through the merc "work environment". The term she made up put a smirk on her sore face. She imagined V standing pensively in front of a pile of gangoons with shorted, smoking implants; her beautiful asymmetric hair flowing to the side, tongue out in the corner of her mouth, eddies for a successful gig lighting up her blue Kiroshi eyes with an otherwordly gleam...
"OK, Jud. Back to biz," she said, shaking it off, while her fingers juggled her contacts.
They always called the ripperdoc first in the movies. Perhaps because it was actually a sensible option to start looking. Digging in a person's guts and brains and other parts was a rather intimate process that also tended to dispose them greatly towards the doc. Making it easier to spill the guts, figuratively, because you have no choice but to trust the choom responsible for your life.
Viktor Vector. Call.
She got an answer almost immediately. The ripperdoc was hunched over in a dark room, some broadcast glinting off his black old-fashioned glasses. He didn't seem to be busy, but a full complement of tools adorned his clean medical suit and the telltale doc cyberglove was fitted on his hand.
"Viktor? Are you Viktor?" she demanded with more energy than she had expected.
"I'm off today, unless..." his face displayed sudden recognition, "Judy?"
"How'd you know me?" she asked.
"Oh, but to have one's ears buzzed for weeks," his eyes formed a semblance of a smile and he nodded. "Glad to finally make acquiantance, despite," he waved his palm, "the situation."
"For weeks?" she repeated, frowning deeply. "I was such a gonk..." Only seven days had passed since their diving trip with V where they'd made clear their feelings toward each other, at last.
Viktor continued, seemingly not noticing Judy's remark. "I have to say, she hasn't shown yet. But yesterday, it..." Viktor paused and grew visibly more downcast. "I must have been too stern with her."
"How bad was it?" Judy asked quietly.
"She came in a walking corpse and shut down for hours. Not sure if it was her or... the other one walking. But after all my effort I told her to fix the problem in no small words. And then," he threw the hand up, "the news."
"Can I talk to you off the holo?"
"You can, but I'm not leavin' the clinic."
"I see, I'll come over real soon. Thank you lots."
It seemed V had been more of a close friend with the doc than just his regular. And she barely mentioned him, usually as but one of the chooms of her late partner in crime, Jackie. There was also this girl Jackie was absolutely hooked with... What was her name? Perhaps it was herself, Judy chided, who hadn't listened quite as intently when V had been describing her associates. In Judy's defense, V had served a magnificent enough distraction.
Judy let off a sigh and called up the city map to estimate the route. Viktor's clinic was less than fifteen minutes away, on Bradbury and Buran. The entrance was located in an alley with preferred access path through 'Misty's Esoterica'. Aha! That was the girl's name. Judy added her detes, only to find her already in the contact list. Must've been V's work.
Just as she was requesting today's traffic advisory, a soft chime indicated that her BD was complete. Judy carefully popped out the shard, and for a moment held it close in her cupped hands, tracing the storage device's jagged contour with her thumb. The thing contained one of the most profound experiences in Judy's life, and she was so happy to have shared it with V. The uncertainty of waters closing over them, the humming of the same melody, first unsteadily and out of tune, then, suddenly, a chorus of two coming together, wordlessly singing in unison, a burst of pure emotion. The two of them suspended in the dark beneath, away from the world and out of time, as thoughts intertwined and minds echoed each other's deep longing...
Of course, she had also edited away the most terrifying part. V's biochip had acted out as they had entered the sunken ruins of the town's church. She had shuddered, and Judy only'd had a second to grab her hand. The neural feedback had been excruciating. Pleasing and calming only moments before, their perfectly synced link had struck back with heart-piercing sharpness. And the sensory deprivation underwater must have multiplied the effect. It was only her trained consciousness, tempered with all kinds of outworldly raw braindance templates, that had given them a chance not to stay forever inside the decrepit ruin. Even now, the tame, painless memories of the mad scramble to drag thrashing, uncooperative V first towards the light and then the safety of the shore still regularly spiked Judy's already fitful sleep with primal dread.
Judy tucked the shard safely inside her overalls.
She looked over her small apartment, where she had dwelled for the entirety of her stay in Night City. What she was starting, could easily see her to never return. Judy barely felt anything over that, her mind busy prodding and probing the aspects of her sole task.
She closed the open window, the seldom used metal blinds grudgingly rattling down. She grabbed V's small locker from the guest room, too light for bright memories. Lastly, she brought out her neglected gun, a bitter reminder of the way the rare moments of bliss usually came to an end.
She went down the decaying stairs, never looking back.