Gotoda was sitting behind the pawnshop's counter, screened off by a bullet-proof partition patched, in some places, with gobs of epoxy, staring placidly into space, as if seeing some god none of them could.
"What the fuck is this goblin doin' here?" asked V, staring at Ayako. "He told me he didn't know how to contact you, that you contacted him. Fuckin' little shit." She looked back at Gotoda, who still hadn't stirred from his trance. Meditation? Maybe it was some kind of zen thing, she thought.
Gotoda, as if he'd been listening the whole time, looked at V, still smiling like a junkie who'd finally gotten a fix after a long, painful dry-spell. "I said I do not know her number, not that I do not know where she is," said the weird little guy, and he stood up, a head shorter than V, two heads shorter than Judy. There was a blob of soy-sauce on his Us Cracks shirt, a dark brown bindi on Purple Force's forehead.
"Bullshit," she said, meeting the insect-calm of his oculars, "I asked if y'knew where to find her."
He shrugged, turned, began to absently sort through cardboard boxes overflowing with reams of ancient microfiche and printouts, old deck-parts, yellowing instruction manuals for cyberdecks that had been preem when V's grandma had been a kid. "She lives in the Net," said Gotoda, "and the Net is a vast place, V-san, so I do not know where to find her." He continued mindlessly sorting through the boxes until he found something that interested him, the plastic nacelle of some last-century fan.
"You know where her body is," she said, and gestured at Ayako, who was watching the exchange with obvious amusement.
"That is just meat," said Gotoda, and he tucked the nacelle under his arm, started pacing the aisles of tall, grubby plastic modular shelves behind the counter. Boxes sat on the shelves, all of them containing a random assortment of parts: coprocessors, loops of filament, silicon interface plugs, boosters. The nicer stock was arranged on squares of arterial red ultrasuede in Lexan showcases, displaying an impressive collection of refurbished hardware and chipware, jewelry, gun mods, katanas, tantos, shurikens.
V asked Ayako, "What the fuck is Gotoda's deal anyway?" She watched Judy peruse the hardware, probably hunting for something to tweak up the performance on her BD-editor.
"Some kinda feedback error in his neuralware," explained Ayako, her laser-pupils tracking the weird little man as he paced the store, still carrying the nacelle like a child carrying a toy. "He hears shit. Thinks something called Kami-sama speaks to him, but you ask me, it's just his 'ware picking up ad-subliminals. Felt bad for the little dude after Arasaka sacked him, so I just let him front my front so I don't gotta. He's a wiz at fixing things. Think he might've been a techie at some point." She looked at V, shrugging. "I can't do shit to help him, though," she told her, before V could ask. "His neuralware's encrypted with some serious corpo-ICE. I crack it, it's like tripping a burglar alarm. Arasaka'd have their 'runners riding my ass in no time." Ayako studied Gotoda as he leafed through a crumbling user's manual for Gen-1 BDs. "Bet he's got some nice company data in that head," she said, thoughtful. "It's a damn shame. But other than his talent at fixing things, he's useful in other ways. His Kami-sama helps him find people, dunno how. Maybe it's some kinda DHC, a dedicated heuristic controller linked to company satcoms. Kami-sama's how he found your ass in that shitty izakaya." She paused, then said, "It's like those pigs. The ones trained to sniff out truffles. Hear they still raise 'em in the Eurotheater, but I dunno."
"And I guess I'm the fuckin' truffle," said V.
"You are indeed, choom. A real delicacy," said Ayako, ignoring the look Judy gave her. She grinned. "But didn't know it was actually you until we met outside Technobaby's and I could direct-read your data. When I'd contacted Dean about the BD, I was just going off rumors you were his new merc." Reading the question on V's face, she added, "When I say rumors, I'm talking 'bout reads I got off the dataflows. Nobody else knows you're V unless you've told 'em."
Judy wedged herself between Ayako and V and said, "How 'bout we get to biz." She looked at Ayako, narrowing her eyes. "You mentioned havin' the gear to read cached data."
"Program on my deck," said Ayako, giving Judy's shimmering fishtail-bang a flip. "Just need a wreath with an editor chip I can sync it to." She turned to Gotoda, and said, "Yo, Gotoda. Bring me one of those BD wreaths that dorpher sold you yesterday."
Gotoda put down the manual he was leafing through, scrambling to retrieve a box from one of the shelves behind the counter. He fished around in the packing foam, coming up with the wreath, which he promptly delivered to Ayako's outstretched hand, smiling beatifically. "Here, Ayako-sama," he said.
"This wreath's last gen," said Judy disapprovingly, taking the thing from Ayako and turning it over in her hands. She sounded insulted, as if the wreath's oldness personally offended her.
"All I got," said Ayako, shrugging. She opened one of the Lexan showcases, retrieving a pale blue chip veined with microcircuitry and slotting it into the wreath. "I don't fuck with BDs unless I have to. When you're accustomed to the quality, full-bodied wine that is the Net, BDs are fucking grape-juice from artificial concentrate." She peered at Judy with the restless laser-dots of her eyes. "No offense, 'course."
"You want me to work, or you want me to beat you to death with this fuckin' wreath instead?"
"Calm down, Mox," said Ayako. "Ain't nobody gotta beat anybody."
"I ain't with the Mox anymore," said Judy. Then, conversationally, "Fuck off, deckhead."
"Your girl's a livewire," said Ayako delightedly, pushing open a door to the right of the epoxy-gobbed Lexan partition. Gotoda retreated to his stool, lost once again in his Zen-trance.
"Why I love her," said V, stroking Judy's cheek and giving her a peck on the lips, flashing a grin.
"You're gonna make me sick with all this lovey-dovey shit," said Ayako, smiling.
"Get used to it," said Judy, almost as if she were gloating. "'Cause we got lovey-dovey shit for days, chica."
They followed Ayako up a set up chipboard stairs painted in flaking blue latex. "I thought y'didn't do the whole feelings thing," teased V.
"Sometimes I make exceptions," said Judy, shooting a look at Ayako.
The apartment building in which the pawnshop resided was four stories high, ten apartments to each floor. The ground floor, which had once served as the building's lobby, had been converted into the pawnshop. The pawnshop, which was only nominally and functionally a pawnshop, served as the front for Ayako's side-biz in proscribed tech, a place the blackhats could come to off-load their hot soft, no fuss. Something told V that, from there, the tech probably wound up on the Chinese black-market, in the closed-circuit loop of their Deep Net technotrade. She wanted to ask Ayako about it, but doubted the 'runner would tell her anything. And anyway, V knew enough to know that it was a bad idea to poke your nose into someone's biz, especially when that biz was illegal.
They walked down a long hallway, the floorboards worn and scuffed, patinated in countless tiny scratches and random impacts, the acoustic drop-ceiling webbed thick with multicolored lengths of cables. A square of construction plastic covered one of the doorways on their left, stapled to the doorframe in lieu of an actual door. V glimpsed the inside of the apartment: construction materials, a couch, an inert television. Looked like nobody had lived there for years, if they ever had.
"Whole building's abandoned," Ayako explained, tracking her gaze. "'Cept for my apartment, and Gotoda's down on the second floor. Whole of Las Palmeras is basically a giant squat. Corpos don't see any real money to be made out here, so they leave the place to the gangs. Las Digitales are the big dogs 'round here, own—well, claimed—most of the buildings, and they rent 'em out at pretty fair rates. But they let me and Gotoda live here for free. I'm on good terms with the Digis, see." She paused, then said, "Only exception are the megabuildings. Those are owned by the corpos."
"So livin' in this dump instead of a comfy company apartment?" asked V.
"What part of 'free' ain't you understand, you gonk? Also, I'm a contractor—I don't qualify for company perks," said Ayako, grinning. "Anyway, I just do some work for the Digis, here and there. They even ran electricity to the building just for me and my shop."
"Front," corrected Judy.
"Potayto, putahto," said Ayako, dismissively.
Ayako's apartment was on the fourth floor, up three flights of chipboard steps, at the end of the hall. It was almost as if she'd intentionally chosen the apartment farthest from the street, from people, and somehow, that didn't surprise V. She'd called herself, back when she'd lived in Chiba, a digital hikikomori. Made sense she'd want to be as far from civilization as possible; she was already there anyway, permanently half-jacked into the Net, seeing reality as binary, as vector wireframe in augmented realspace. V asked her about it, gently as possible.
"I understand the world better that way," answered Ayako, automatically. "When you're staring at logic, there's no illogic." There was a neural scanner beside her door: a slab of molded plastic with an interface plug. These scanners were keyed to an encrypted neural microbank containing synaptic passwords. Reaching behind her ear, where the lobe connected with her skull, Ayako pinched a small stud between her thumb and finger, unspooling a length of fiber-optic cable sheathed in black silicon. She jacked it into the interface plug, and the scanner beeped its approval, the door smoothly sliding open, cable coiling back into its slot like a moray eel retreating into its borehole. "Welcome to my humble abode," she said, and stepped aside to wave them in.
Ayako's apartment was surprisingly cozy, decorated in a style that reminded V of geishapunk, a style that had been popular in Japantown, back in Night City, about two years ago before something newer and trendier had supplanted it. A small kitchen sat off the living-room. But what caught V's attention were the dozens of origami ikebana arrangements displayed around the apartment: colorful little cranes artfully incorporated into bonsai paper analogs.
"These are fuckin' nova," said V, picking up an arrangement of purple paper cranes blooming on the spindly branches of a paper bonsai tree. "I like this one," she added, smiling.
Judy was busy inspecting an arrangement made to resemble a cherry tree, but the blossoms were tiny pink paper cranes. "Seriously, these are preem."
"I find tutorials on the Net," said Ayako, sounding uncharacteristically shy. "Follow along in the virtual, but use real materials. Find it calming, meditative. Especially after a crazy run."
"One thing, though," said V. "Why cranes?"
"In Japan, they're symbols of luck and longevity," she explained. "You need to have luck to get longevity when it comes to cyberspace. Netrunning's a dangerous biz. So that's why cranes."
V gently set the arrangement down on the plastic cooler she'd found it on. "Should sell 'em or somethin'." Down a short hall, she found a cramped bathroom that was just a shower, toilet and sink. She asked, "If you never take the suit off, how do you fuckin' bathe?"
"I disconnect, you fucking gonk," said Ayako, and shivered. "I just don't like to," she added. "I've developed a kinda dependency on the Net. I need the Net like a junkie needs junk. Go fucking crazy without it."
"Cyberpsychosis?" asked V, very carefully.
"Maybe," said Ayako, shrugging. "I've had a lot of work done to get to the level I'm at." She waved them toward a door at the end of the hall, just past the bathroom.
What had probably once been a bedroom now served as a net-nest, the windows blacked out. Cutting-edge Japanese tech procured from the Chiba cyberclinics seemed to germinate in the room like some alien species of fungus. A huge computer took up the whole wall opposite the door, a polychromatic honeycomb of data-monitors ghosting up from countless hologram projectors, burning through a haze of coolant mist meant to keep the systems from overheating. Huge servers racked together by articulated steel frameworks, lost under the bulk of bundled cables. A padded net-chair, trimmed in chrome, stood at the center of the machine-sprawl, and in that harsh machine-light, it looked like some kind of torture device, wired to hot-rolled steel terminals by webs of insulated cables. A Masamune cyberdeck was mounted to the chair on attenuated struts, hundreds of sub-microprojectors working in concert to display a bright hologram UI rendered in Japanese.
"Jesus fuckin' Christ," said Judy, stepping into the net-den. She was gawking, and as a techie who'd gotten to work with some preem-grade stuff in her career, V knew it took a lot to make Judy gawk.
"That's a fuckin' Masamune," said V, practically drooling at the thing, her fingers itching to diddle its UI until it did something cool.
"The very best," agreed Ayako, seating herself in the net-chair. "Okay," she said, "I'm gonna prime the program to download to your wreath, Judy." She pulled out her loop of fiber-optic cable, connecting it to the Masamune's interface port. "Go ahead, get comfortable."
Judy put on the wreath, looked around for something to get comfortable on. "You don't have a bed or anything," she said.
"I sleep in the chair," said Ayako. "There's a bean-bag in the living-room. Bring that in here."
Judy left, came back with a bright red bean-bag chair, which she threw down on the floor. "All right," she said, flopping down on the bag and touching a stud on the wreath, "just okayed the download."
"Syncing, and go," said Ayako. Following the netrunner's synaptic commands, the UI shuffled through feeds like cards being shuffled at hummingbird speed, before slowing, stopping. "Data's compiling, reformatting." Ayako flicked her wrist, conjuring up a bright ghost-grid of keys, one-handedly tapping out a sequence, waiting. "Uploading to the monitor for V," she said, glancing up. The monitors coalesced into a singular, translucent screen. She looked over at Judy, who'd gone still as a corpse, eyes wide, reflecting swirls of color from the wreath's flashing optics. On-screen, the braindance started. "And we're in," said Ayako.