The receptionist, a svelte woman of indeterminate ethnicity—not that ethnicity meant much anymore in an age of affordable bodysculpting, where everything from your skin to your genitals could be customized—greeted them with a practiced sales-smile, the kind that was meant to put customers at ease, but for V, just made the woman look like she wanted to sell her a used car.
"How can I help you, ladies?" asked the woman, her voice tweaked by an audiomod composed of random soundbites that, to V, sounded like ice-tinkle and windchimes, and something that made her think of glass. It was one of the weirdest things she'd ever heard, and she'd once met a car who spoke in autotune. "We have a few available cubicles," the receptionist added, helpfully.
"We're not here for dolls," said V, flicking the woman her gig-detes. The receptionist's eyes flashed electric blue, faded back to an artificial approximation of hazel. V said, "We're looking for Yuki Fujiki."
The receptionist tapped a sequence out on her computer: a concave terminal molded from dark, glossy plastic and glass. "Checked into Cubicle Fifteen, up in VIP," said the woman, red-tipped fingers flickering over the keyboard, her oculars fixed on the screen, catching crescents of monitor-light. "That was 9:15 pm yesterday," she told them, looking troubled. "No checkout."
"Name of the doll in fifteen," said V.
"Nicole Devereux," said the woman. "But Nicole wasn't in yesterday."
Sounded like Nicole had cut a little sublease agreement with someone, thought V. Not that V blamed the doll; there was, short of a few exceptions, nothing wrong with hustling some side-cash. "So if she wasn't in yesterday, who logged Fujiki into an empty cubicle?" asked V, deciding not to mention her own theories, mostly because she didn't want Nicole to lose her job for wanting to make some extra scratch.
"Sandra, the other hostess," said the receptionist. "The other VIPs were booked for a company thing, so Sandra offered one of our standards instead, but Ms. Fujiki wasn't interested. Makes no sense why she'd log her in."
"Mind if we look around?" asked V.
"Dean sent you, so go ahead."
If there was one thing V could say about Old Dean, it was that the man knew everyone, and everyone knew him—and feared him, because the guy was ex-Militech, had lots of friends in high and low places. His utter entrenchment in the city's ecology had been a blessing for V, opening doors for her that would have otherwise firmly stayed shut. Of course, she owed Panam too, for this streak of luck; she'd been the one who'd put V into contact with Dean.
V said to Judy, "Yuki hacked the computer, or the netrunner using her as a proxy did. You used to work as a techie for Clouds, babe." She looked at Judy. "Any reason our girl was so hell-bent on that particular cubicle?"
"VIP boxes in Clouds had preem ANC gear to cut down on noise, better than the shit in the standards. Total privacy." Sliding her hand into the back-pocket of V's gloveleather jeans, Judy elaborated, "Corpos would rent 'em out for special meetings, or, y'know, some real fucked-up sex. Some of those suits are into real nasty shit, Val." She pulled a face, like she'd just whiffed a bad odor, and V tried not to think about her own weird encounter with that Militech suit, Meredith Stout, at the No-Tell. "You wouldn't believe some of the virtus I used to see—needed fuckin' bleach to clean that gunk," Judy told her. "But yeah, what I'm tryin' to say is that you go VIP if y'want the most privacy."
"So y'think Yuki was doin' one or the other?"
"Would bet eddies on it," said Judy. "And this BD we're gettin'? Bet it's got some nasty shit on it. Dean probably wants to blackmail someone, maybe a corpo."
"Think it's worth gettin' in touch with the doll?"
Judy shook her head. "Nah, not at the moment, don't think. Maybe if we find somethin' warrants reachin' out." She shrugged her tattooed shoulders. "But you ask me, just sounds like Devereux was tryin' to make some quick cash, and didn't really consider what she was gettin' into. Wouldn't be the first doll who did, definitely won't be the last."
Technobaby's occupied three stories of a forty-story megabuilding, ten dollboxes to a floor. She and Judy rode the elevator up to the second floor, making their way past the smooth, opaque black glass of cubicles, bright holograms peddling doll-flesh, S.C. advertising everything from condoms to force-feedback porn BDs and ten-speed dildos. V couldn't imagine why anyone would want a ten-speed dildo, but that was what the S.C. had been designed for: to push unnecessary products onto impulsive buyers.
They found Cubicle Fifteen. Before they'd departed the front-desk, the clerk had handed V a keycard, the kind that were programmed with disposable algorithms so 'runners and techies couldn't make copies. V couldn't understand why anyone would want to break into a dollbox, but as she pondered it, the idea didn't seem so weird, especially with some of the doll-otakus lurking around, out there in the world.
She fed the keycard to the scan-slot, and it beeped an affirmative, the mirror-like door of the cubicle sliding open, silent, on its magnetic track. The walls of the dollbox were slabbed in optical glass, could be tuned to display a VES, a virtual environment space, from a microcontroller. Presently, the glass looped a cubist collage, each shape a fragment from some larger cityscape, rainy and dark, wet neon like blots of watercolor on pavement. A lounge-space occupied the center of the room, the furniture sleek and expensive, upholstered in real leather, not the synthetic shit the corpos cultivated from yeast into collagen. A bed stood on the far side of the dollbox, apparently unused.
V screwed her eyes against the cubist watercolor nightmare crawling on the walls. "This fuckin' shit is givin' me a headache," she said. "Neuralware's gettin' scrambled. Can't process the shift in the patterns quickly 'nough."
Judy found the microcontroller and shut the glass off, the colors fading into blissful darkness. "Fuckin' rich assholes always got the weirdest tastes," she said. "Could've picked a backdrop from the islands or somethin', but nah, they pick a fuckin' cubist DDOS."
"Is that what that was?"
Judy nodded. "Neural processors can't handle that kinda sensory output in realspace. Somethin' 'bout algorithms that make the interpreters work harder, overclock 'em."
V nodded. "It's like takin' a piece of cyberspace into realspace. It don't mesh. We—'runners—ain't equipped for that kinda input here." She paused, her hands resting on the backrest of the lounge-sofa like pale animals. "Wonder if Fujiki was behind it?"
"Or the gonks she was meetin' with," said Judy. "Maybe deal, whatever it was, went sideways."
"As shady deals usually do," said V, shaking her head. She toggled the scanner on her oculars, but she was picking up nothing. No blood, nothing broken. No damage. She circled the dollbox, methodically casing the place like she'd done to apartments in her Heywood youth, hunting for valuables to klep—stupid, very stupid, she thought, in hindsight; the only people in Heywood who'd had valuables were the dealers, and other thieves. How she'd managed to survive into adulthood still remained a mystery.
Judy said, "Found somethin', Valerie."
V raised her head—she'd been looking under the bed—and looked at Judy. "What's up?"
Judy tossed her a shard, V smoothly snatching it out of the air. "Think our girl left it here, hopin' it'd point someone in the right direction?"
V scanned the thing for malware, but it came up clean. She slotted it in the port behind her ear, monospace text boiling into existence like phosphenes, slowly scrolling down her vision. It read:
Yuki: Thanks for meeting me, Bogeyman.
Bogeyman: You're lucky we're even giving you the time of day. Straight to biz, shall we?
Yuki: I have the eddies. Do you have Castlebreaker?
Bogeyman: Not here, no. We go to my people to do the deal, in our camp, our turf.
Yuki: Then why the fuck are we here?
Bogeyman: We had to make sure you weren't corpo, or worse, a proxy for some Voodoo Brother shithead. So if you'll kindly flip your doll protocol so I can talk to Ku—fuck, my fucking head!
Yuki: Shit, shit, shit. Fucking shit. He's fucking dead. Fucking overloaded—
The shard ended there, and V ejected it, holding it between her thumb and finger, thoughtful. "Our proxy was keepin' a transcript of the conversation. Meetin' with some gonk called themselves Bogeyman. Mentioned a camp. Nomad, maybe?"
"We could ask Panam," said Judy, shrugging. She was sitting on the backrest of the sofa, boot-heels wedged into the leather.
"Maybe. Jude, you ever hear 'bout somethin' called 'Castlebreaker'?"
"You're the 'runner, babe," said Judy.
"A mediocre one," she reminded her. Then, "Bogeyman's 'ware got fried. Flatlined him. Yuki didn't do it, though."
"Maybe she got hit, too."
"Maybe, but if that's the case, she got moved by someone else wasn't Bogeyman." V sighed, pocketing the shard in a zippered pocket on her jacket. "Fuck, and she's got our BD." She paused, chewing the inside of her cheek. "Well," said V, "only one other place to check."
That place was the alley behind Technobaby's, in the dumpster. And that was where they found her, Yuki Fujiki sprawled out among sticky garbage bags, her head blown wide open, circuits fried beyond anything even a scav would want to salvage; although, as V surveyed the damage a little more, she realized the doll's neural processor was gone. No Bogeyman, though, in the dumpster or any other part of the alley.
"Guess Bogeyman got scavved," she said to Judy. "By whoever cooked his skullsponge. And no fuckin' BD." V hopped down from the dumpster, a thought occurring to her. "You can record virtus off your neuralware, right?" The question was a rhetorical one—V already knew you could—but she was trying to work something out in her head, fit jigsaw pieces together.
"Sure," said Judy. "Loads the data into your bank, and you can take that data, load it onto memchips. Then techies like me take that raw stuff, clean it up into a pristine experience."
"Whoever killed Bogeyman and Yuki, they got her BD." V punched the dumpster, bags shifting, tumbling down onto Yuki, entombing her in refuse. "I fucked this up," said V, feeling an uncomfortable tightness in her gut. "Dean ain't gonna give me work anymore." She pushed away from the dumpster, running her hands back through her hair. "Fuck, he's a fuckin' gonk, sure, but he's the best fixer in this goddamn town."
Judy squeezed her shoulder, then pulled her into a tight hug. "Chill," she said, "there's still someone else lookin' to hire someone, babe." She grinned, and her grin made V feel a little better.
"Gotoda said he don't even know how to contact her, Jude."
Judy opened her mouth to say something, but someone, another woman, spoke. "You don't need to go through Gotoda, V," said the voice.
V's head snapped in the direction of the voice, because this person had been the first one in Phoenix, other than Judy, to use her real name. "Dunno who the fuck you're talkin' 'bout," she lied. "Name's Sherry Shiv."
The woman stepped into a pool of vapor-light. Japanese. Wore a red mil-grade cooling suit, and the kimono-print on it might have been cranes. Bright canary-yellow pozer-jacket, a wide, obi-like belt printed in a floral pattern that made V think of summer. Black carbon-fiber exojacks done up to vaguely resemble tabi boots. She carried a thermal katana; V had seen a few of the higher-up Tyger Clawz using those, back in Night City.
"I'm here. Gotoda doesn't know it, but I can hack his oculars." Kunoichi smiled, although her oculars did little to lend it any warmth: two narrow lenses of dark shatterproof glass, restless beads of laser-light flickering at their centers as analogs for pupils. Her hair was closely shaved on the sides, the rest tied back in a dark, glossy ponytail. "He's a fucking gonk, but a useful one. Used to be Arasaka, once upon a time. But I'm not here to talk about useful idiots."
"Lady, fuck off," said V, panicking a little. Kunoichi gave off corpo-vibes, some serious puppet energy, and V didn't like that. She also didn't like that her facilitator was a former Arasaka suit.
"You want the BD, right? For Dean."
V went for her gun, Johnny's old Malorian, and Judy reached into her jacket for her iron. "What the fuck do you know 'bout what I want?" asked V, playing her usual huscle routine, because that was usually enough to get people to fuck off.
"Who do you think contacted Dean about it?" asked Kunoichi. "Me, dumbass. I wanted to lure you out, make sure it was you, the real V. Not some punk-kid pretending to be you for street-cred." She sheathed the katana in a custom tantalum carbide back-rig, then showed her hands: chill, we're chill.
"How the fuck do you know who I am?" asked V.
"While you were fucking around in Mikoshi, I gotta chance to slip in, partition some of it off for my own use. Preem fucking Net-estate." Kunoichi grinned. "Call me Ayako," said Ayako. "Ayako Yoshida. I know about the Relic, V, and I can help you. Actually help you. Not Songbird and her bullshit promises. Not Arasaka's. Not Reed and his fucking surgery—which, by the way, had you taken, would have put you in a coma and prevented you from ever using cyberware again. Good call, not doing that."
"And you're just… gonna help me? If I help you. Help you do what, exactly?"
"I need to destroy an AI," said Ayako.
"Oh, is that all?" said V, laying the sarcasm on real thick.
"It's beyond the Blackwall," said Ayako. "I've been there."