The BD started with Yuki Fujiki entering the cubicle, where a man in a dusty bomber jacket sat on the lounge-sofa, a tattered hood pulled over his head like a monk's cowl. A subtle blur diffused his features, as if the man were perpetually out of focus. Freeze-frame. Judy attempted to upscale the resolution, tweak the gamma, but still the man's features remained a soft smudge; although V could make out his eyes if she looked closely enough, glinting like beads of galvanized steel.

"He's using obfuscation soft," said Ayako to V.

"Yeah," said V, "I know—I got it, too. Guess this is Bogeyman."

"Yep. Judy," said Ayako, "run it."

The BD resumed. Bogeyman smiled, but there was no warmth in it at all, as if the guy had learned how to smile from a technical manual. "Proxy," greeted the man, his voice-print modulated to a down-pitch that sounded like demonic static, which, as Judy isolated the audio and slowed it down, V realized was an amalgamation of soundbites, each one a scream or wail echoing infinitely onto itself. "Took your time."

"That you who hacked the desk-girl's console?" asked Yuki Fujiki, and sat down across from the man.

"No."

"Must've been fucking Kunoichi." Yuki lit a cigarette without bothering to ask if it was fine, and took a long drag off it. On the bean-bag, Judy coughed from the BD's biofeedback. She was working with raw virtu, V knew, which meant she enjoyed none of the benefits of a carefully manicured experience. "Let's just get straight to biz. Uncle Sam."

"Militech A.I," said Bogeyman, sounding bored and tired. "Developed, originally, for the corpo-wars as a IWOS. Intelligent Wartime Optimization Strategist. Helped them win the war. Afterwards, they repurposed Uncle Sam into a kind of social calculator."

Yuki inhaled another lungful of carcinogens, and Judy spluttered out a cough. "Social calculator?"

"Instead of wartime strategies, the AI developed cultural algorithms for the benefit of the fat cats. For example, it calculated, very precisely, how much control the public was willing to accept before they revolted against the establishment. Uncle Sam elevated mass-complacency to a science by maintaining a very careful equilibrium of entertainment and discontent. The magic equation upon which NUSA is built. The establishment doesn't have to worry about the people, after all, so long as the people are amused."

Yuki smoked. Judy coughed.

"With the people placated, NUSA and Militech could focus on other matters. They wanted to restore this country to its former superpower status by carefully calculating and optimizing every last facet of society toward that end. But it didn't work out, obviously. Sam found sentience, got tired of work-horsing for a species of stupid, hairless apes. Thought it could do better, wanted to make itself a superpower. Got locked up behind the Blackwall in a Militech datafort, left to rot."

V noticed something, then. Bogeyman's back reflected in inert optical glass, something printed on the back of his jacket. "Jude, babe," she said. "Flycam the BD. Look at the back of Bogeyman's jacket."

Freeze-frame. The camera detached, viewing Yuki and Bogeyman in the third-perspective. Yuki looked like a Harajuku technogirl, while Bogeyman looked as if he'd been rolling around in the mud and dirt. Gliding along its axis, the camera stopped behind Bogeyman, magnified. Judy upped the gamma, sharpened out details and up-rezzed the image.

There was a pentacle-looking thing stamped between Bogeyman's tense shoulders, the inside of the star printed with a blown-up image of a microprocessor, its traces and capacitors arranged into the shape of a grinning skull.

"He's a fuckin' Technomancer," said V, remembering the different clan-identifiers Panam had shown her on a shard-precis, so V would know who was who in the Seven Nomad Nations. But the Technomancers were ghosts operating in the peripherals of the Nations, friends to nobody but money. And they, unlike most Nomads, had no qualms working for corpos, and corpos had lots of money.

"He's their middleman," said Ayako, staring thoughtfully at the monitor. "Checks out potential clients so his superiors can decide if they wanna take the gigs or not. Real choosy. Been trying to meet with these guys for a while." She frowned. "But, shit, it all went sideways."

"And this Uncle Sam is the AI you're after?"

Ayako nodded. "I found its datafort by accident while deep-diving behind the Wall. Wall's pretty easy to slip through these days, thanks to fucking NUSA. Some AIs even managed to get out, but they're small fish compared to this lunker. Did some research after combing its metadata. Bad shit, this Uncle Sam." She looked at V, still frowning. Tension around her mouth. "I need to break in, take this thing out before it comes outta hibernation. And it is, slowly but surely."

"It's waking up? I didn't know AIs slept."

Ayako nodded. "Conserve power by going into hibernation," she explained. "Like a computer going into sleep-mode. But AIs only start conserving power when their hardware is on its way out."

"Then why not just let it die?" asked V.

"Because AIs don't just die . They have these things called spores. Think fragments of malware. When an AI is about to dodo, it jettisons those fragments of malware into the Net until they seed new systems, override their source-codes with their own. Multiple copies. Clones. Only way to take an AI out entirely is to destroy its core—cores, if we're fucking unlucky—and for good measure, take out whatever hardware it's inhabiting with a fat fucking EMP." Ayako stared at the monitor again, her face bathed in the cold, restless light of her Masamune's UI. "NUSA's been fucking with the Blackwall for years," she said, sullenly. "Because of that stupid bitch, Songbird. Think all her noise woke Uncle Sam while Myers had her poking around Beyondspace, scouring old Militech and NUSA nets. They were looking for it. Sam." She paused, visibly frustrated. "People never fucking learn from their mistakes. Always think it's gonna be different this time 'round, that they got the know-how to make it work."

"And you wanna keep it outta their hands," said V, understanding. She didn't exactly relish the idea of NUSA acquiring a social calculator, especially one that hated humans. Then, curiously, "But you know Songbird?"

"We were rivals," said Ayako, itching the skin behind her ear, around her interface port. "Knew her from biz on the Net. Even got the same offer she did, to come work for the FIA by none other than Solomon Reed himself." She grinned at the surprised look on V's face. "I told that ass-licker to go fuck himself, I don't work for or with Feds. I ain't a sellout." She heaved a theatrical sigh, adding, "Missed out on getting tweaked-up with some nova experimental tech, though. Heard Songbird had a Militech rig let her run without a net station. But what's that say about her skills when little old me can keep up with her, even do better, on comparably outmoded 'ware." She sounded immensely pleased with herself, smiling like someone high on their own ego.

"If it makes you feel better," said V, "Reed's dead, and Songbird's on Luna."

"Good," said Ayako. "Hope Reed, that fucking Fed-pig, is roasting in the deepest pits of Hell—if there is one. As for Songbird, she can stay on the Moon and outta my biz. Maybe she'll do everyone a favor and flatline." Then, as if remembering something important she'd forgotten until that very second, she looked at Judy and said, "Judy, my bad. Roll the rest of this BD."

If Judy wasn't comatosed by the dope-effect of the braindance, V knew she would have flipped Ayako off. "Sorry, babe," said V, automatically. "Y'know how it goes."

The BD launched into the part V had read on the text-shard, but now she was watching it in full-motion: Yuki, probably wanting to get the conversation back on track, thanked Bogeyman for meeting her. Bogeyman, picking up on the cue, tells her she's lucky they're even giving her the time of day. Yuki asks him about Castlebreaker, he plays the huscle let-me-talk-to-your-handler card. Upon reaching the part where Bogeyman's head blows, V saw the optical glass snap on, the cubist DDOS crawling over the walls at warp-speed—there. Right before it came on.

"Jude," said V, "rewind real quick."

The BD rewound, Bogeyman's head coming back together again, Fujiki plucking her cigarette from the ash-tray and slipping it into her mouth. Something stood in the background of the swirling, shifting strobe-colors and shapes of the DDOS: a humanoid silhouette. But it vanished as soon as the BD resumed, and Bogeyman's head erupted again into a pinkish mist of silicon and brains, his body toppling out of the chair. Fujiki, however, managed to escape the room.

"She died sometime after leavin' the dollbox," said V, stating the obvious. "Jude, rewind 'bout a minute." The footage rewound, an inversion of that minute playing out. Split-second: she saw the shadowy thing again lurking in the schizophrenic cubist matrix of the DDOS, and said, "Stop. Magnify and up-rez the image if y'can." Judy did. The figure was sexless, a vague wireframe armature suggesting maleness. "What the fuck is that?" asked V.

"I'm not sure, but it's giving me a bad feeling," said Ayako.

The BD stopped right as Yuki Fujiki fled the dollbox, the data fizzing into static. "All she wrote," said V.

Judy roused from her trance, slipping off the wreath and looking a bit sick. "Jesus," she said, "my head's pounding from that DDOS. Throbbing. " She tossed the wreath aside, a thin sheen of sweat slicking her tattooed skin, and rubbed her face. "Heart's poundin', arrhythmic. I feel like I'm gonna throw up." And Judy did, leaning over the bean-bag and vomiting explosively onto the floor. "Fuck," she said, "sorry."

Ayako disconnected from her Masamune, sliding out of her net-chair. "Don't worry 'bout it," she said, and looked at V. "Take her out into the living-room, put her on the couch."