The Japanese man looked like any other Japanese man V had ever seen. Dressed in a faded Us Cracks shirt, plastic neon green flip-flops, and baggy rugby shorts printed in a pattern that might have represented microcircuitry, the guy was the sort most people would look at and then never think about again. But there was something in his face, a certain street-calm quality, which told V he was a local-local, the kind that knew people and whom people knew. But there was something else in the eyes too, a kind of vacancy that made V uneasy.
"Yeah?" said V, tearing off another chunk of synthmeat and chewing it with great effort. Stuff tasted like a rubber boot boiled in mutant chicken stock, she decided. "Guessin' you're the fixer 'round Little Japan."
"Not a fixer," said the Japanese man, and shook his head. "A facilitator, I suppose, for Kunoichi. For others. I am very good at facilitating." He grinned broadly, showing teeth that looked too big for his mouth.
"You're a professional middleman," said V. She scanned the man with her Kiroshi oculars: encrypted neuralware, Kiroshi oculars, a few cheap dental implants, a prosthetic leg. "Don't seem to be a doll," she concluded, toggling the oculars back to standard-render mode. "Mostly 'ganic."
"It's rude to scan people without their permission," said the man blandly, and helped himself to a deep gulp of beer. He swallowed a burp, then said, "But yes, I am not a doll. I am Gotoda."
"You know where we can find Kunoichi, Gotoda?"
"No," said Gotoda. "She calls me, tells me to put feelers out. So I do."
"Great. You gotta number, then?"
"No. She calls me, I do not call her."
V sighed, finishing her yakitori. Unlike the yakitori, she found that the beer was pretty good, and probably the only reason, other than biz, people packed into this greasejoint. "Great," she said, and stared at Gotoda, who drank his beer and hummed along to Ponpon Shit on the bar's audiotech as if the weirdo had forgotten he'd even been speaking to her. "So," V continued carefully, as if trying not to wake Gotoda from a psychotic trance, "how's this help me if I can't get into contact with Kunoichi?"
"You don't," said Gotoda, as if seeing or hearing her for the first time. "Not unless Kunoichi wishes you to contact her."
"Babe, fuck this guy," said Judy, grabbing her arm. "C'mon, let's delta. You already gotta gig anyway."
"Yeah," said V, tossing a couple of eddies onto the counter. "Tell Kunoichi if she needs a good merc, contact Sherry Shiv." Her forger, who moonlighted as a stripper-doll at a club called The Funbox, had chosen the name for her, and although it wasn't exactly V's style, it had a certain ring to it that she liked. And it was still better than Judy's new name, Trudy Starr, which was the best the forger could do for her. She flicked her biz-detes to Gotoda's 'ware, then said, "That's my number."
"Interesting," said Gotoda, eyes glowing with artificial microlight. "Burner." His eyes went brown again, and he grinned his too-big teeth at her. "Who are you hiding from, Sherry Shiv?"
"Just like my privacy," said V, and ducked out of Beautiful Lumps before the creep got a little too inquisitive.
Rain sizzled across the Riajuu pavement, street-tourists in bright neon rain-ponchos crowding around stalls selling secondhand clothes and electronics, and refurbished 'ware that had been cutting-edge a decade ago. The air smelled of fried things, of wet concrete and burnt circuitry, thrumming with the electronic pulse of Japanese Denpa music bassing down into subsonics. Holograms ghosted up from their projectors, beckoning and bowing passersby into cramped shops and restaurants. A hologram, done up to look like the ghost of some long-dead Geisha, tried luring her and Judy into a shop called Kawaii, which seemed to primarily deal in knock-off kimonos machine-cut from bright lengths of printed Chinese polyester. An aluminum shoe-rack sat out front, displaying a row of geta cast in lurid neon plastics, their price handwritten in black felt-pen on laminated sheets of compressed paper-flake.
Underneath the Shibata Interchange, the market seemed to accrete into a jumbled wad of neon and shops, which, V theorized, was probably because, at present, it was the driest part of Riajuu Street.
They found a concrete bench wedged between advertisement kiosks that were programmed to bypass the ad-blockers on oculars and castigate a user for daring to have ad-blockers in the first place, and S.C. that were, to V's immense disappointment, entirely too polite. After V swiped away a clutter of discarded foam containers and crumpled cans from the bench, they sat down, and V pulled up the detes Dean had flicked to her.
Her target was a doll-proxy named Yuki Fujiki, last seen in Gijutsu, a highly flash, highly technical area of Little Japan, and probably the whole of Phoenix. It was the beating heart of the industrial sprawl, where a continuous flow of imported Japanese tech-commerce came and went, circulating Phoenix and the various markets of the Free States like a much-needed blood transfusion. Dean had provided her with the club's coords, and a minute-long clip of cam-footage that showed Yuki Fujiki walking into a club called Technobaby's, but never walking out. V figured Yuki had either been killed, scavved, or trafficked; that was usually how this kind of thing had gone in Night City, and how it probably went in Phoenix. But she'd been surprised before.
She flicked off the file, then said to Judy, "Gonna head over to a place called Technobaby's. Y'know it?"
Judy made a face. "Remember Clouds?"
V did remember Clouds, and the weird therapy session she'd been given by a cubicle's resident doll. "Ah, shit. It's like that, huh?"
Judy nodded. "Scrollin' a BD for a freelance gig," she said, shrugging. "Dude who ordered the edit was bangin' some doll at Technobaby's."
Later, they found two Gomi Boys—Phoenix's analog to the Tyger Clawz—curled at the foot of V's bike, their 'ware sizzling and the air thick with the burnt-electric reek of fried circuitry, and of cooked meat. The silicon of their oculars had burst and oozed out of their plastic sockets, hardening into something like epoxy resin. The one gonk's arm, a pneumatic cyberarm cased in grubby pale plastic, kept flopping around like a dying fish, a tuft of wires from a popped hydraulic injector-socket spitting pale blue sparks.
"Shouldn'ta touched the bike, gonks," she told the dead guys, patting them down for eddies. Between the two, she came away with about a hundred eddies. "These fuckin' gangsters never carry much paper," said V, folding the bills and pocketing them in her jacket. "Sure, y'can hack their credchips, but ain't much point to it 'cause the banks shut down that shit soon as their biomons give out. And then they do a fuckin' traceback ping on you if you try to crack 'em."
"And we don't need that kinda heat," agreed Judy, pulling on her helmet and thumbing the power-switch for the comms. "It was already a fuckin' pain in the ass gettin' the firmware changed on our biomons. Don't need the corpos whiffin' our scent."
"Thankfully," said V, swinging a gloveleather leg over the bike, "our bank accounts are off-planet, stored on a private Tycho cryptoserver. Not gonna compromise our money. Banks work with the suits." She put her helmet on, switched over to comms and added, "Hell, they are the fuckin' suits. Subsidiaries." She glanced at the bodies, tapping her black-painted fingernails on the handlebars, a thought beginning to occur to her, one she was about to share with Judy before Judy cut her off.
"We ain't scavvin' their fuckin' 'ware, Valerie," said Judy, pointedly.
V heaved a sigh. "Probably a good idea. Might have fuckin' repoware on those things if they ain't paid 'em off." She shook her head, disarmed the anti-theft mechanism so the bike would unlock, then drove to Technobaby's.
Technobaby's stood at the very center of Gijutsu, wedged between the four-star Pisano Hotel, and the glass arcology of the Biotechnica branch-office. V didn't like being this close to a corpo-hive, not after what had happened in Night City, but she reminded herself that none of them probably even knew who she was; as competitors in a highly cutthroat market, it wasn't as if Biotechnica and Arasaka gossiped with each other about their biz. Besides, she'd changed her identity, gotten a whole new life. V hadn't changed her looks, sure, and neither had Judy—both of them were too attached to their own appearances as well as to each other's—but that didn't really matter. If Biotechnica or someone else ran a bio-read, their names would come up as Sherry Shiv and Trudy Starr, formerly of Texas, and if they kept digging into their data, the only thing they'd excavate were the bytes constituting the made-up lives of made-up women.
V parked the bike, and they walked toward the club, the thump of bad stripper-pop throbbing in her ears like a tumescent heartbeat. "So, Gotoda," said Judy, walking alongside her, face washed in the neon-glow of the Technobaby's sign. "Whaddya think his deal is, Val?"
"Bein' a fuckin' weirdo," said V automatically, hooking her thumbs in the pockets of her leather Aldecaldos jacket.
"What kinda gig y'think Kunoichi was lookin' to partner up for?"
V shrugged. "With netrunners? Who fuckin' knows."
"You do netrunning," Judy pointed out.
"Which is why I know I can't know what she wants," answered V, absently fiddling with her barbell piercing. She shrugged again. "Somethin' to do with the Net probably, but the Net's a big place." Looking at Judy, she added, "But netrunners usually pay mega for gigs, 'cause most of 'em, at least the really good ones, got money. Hafta, if y'wanna afford all that shiny tech."
"Then why ain't we rich?" asked Judy, grinning.
"'Cause I am a very mediocre netrunner," said V.
"You ain't that mediocre, Val. You're pretty nova at it."
"I guess," said V. "But netrunnin' ain't somethin' I wanna do as my main thing. Real easy way to piss off the corpos, netrunnin'. Dive into the wrong subnet, get a little too close to a corporate datafort? You're lookin' at felonies and worse."
"Yeah, I'm kinda glad you're just stickin' to the street-merc thing," said Judy. "Less of a digital trail. Don't want you taken away by Arasaka or somethin', y'know?"
V smiled, leaned over to kiss her. "I ain't goin' nowhere," she said. "Not for a few more months."
Judy didn't look comforted by that, but she never did. V had learned to grudgingly accept her mortality and its rush toward termination, but Judy still struggled with it, with the idea that, one day, V just wouldn't be there anymore. She'd been trying to prepare Judy for the finale neither of them wanted; but if a cure never turned up, there was nothing they could do about it except make the best of the time V had left, and V was okay with that, if things went that way. She'd rather die quietly among friends with her girl beside her than go out with a bang, living on as nothing but a memory in the minds of Night City's guttertrash as just another punk who burned out too soon, but damn, they would say, didn't she go out like a fucking rockergirl.
That wasn't her anymore, she thought. Maybe it had never been. She'd just gotten it into her head that that was how you were supposed to go out, because it was how everyone else in Heywood had wanted to go out.
The bouncer on the door, a huge dark-skinned guy in a leather vest who looked more 'borg than human, read them with his oculars, the dark lenses winking reddish microlight. "You're Dean's merc?" he asked, his accent Jamaican. He folded his huge, trunk-like arms across his broad chest, the synthskin etched in hairline patterns of microcircuitry like the lines of a city-grid. "Sherry Shiv," he added, as if V needed to be reminded of her name—which she sometimes did. He added, "Said nothin' 'bout no Trudy Starr, though."
"She's my partner," said V. "Works with me. I can call Dean, y'want an okay."
"Not necessary," said the bouncer, stepping aside so they could pass. "Go on."