They laid Judy on the couch in Ayako's living-room, beneath a poster of some visual-kei band V didn't recognize. The wall upon which the poster was tacked was imitation rice-paper. "You listen to that shit?" asked V, staring at the poster of Japanese rockerboys, each one vaguely reminding V of some strange mutant species of anthropomorphic peacock.
"Prefer I listen to other shit like Lizzy Wizzy?" asked Ayako, amused. She was gathering paper-towels and cleaning supplies from the kitchen to clean Judy's mess in her net-den. "I listen to electroenka, too. Sometimes a bit of Kabuki Metal. Akuma no Ko's a great Kabuki Metal outfit, if you like Samurai."
"She's a fuckin' weirdo. Lizzy Wizzy, I mean," said V, remembering Lizzy's dead boyfriend in the No-Tell Motel, that over-chromed bitch gibbering about it being inspirational, his death, like some kind of psycho. "Met her once. Don't recommend it." She stuffed a red pillow of printed cotton, patterned in tiny cherry blossoms, under Judy's head. Then said to Ayako, "That DDOS? You clearly ain't the one who did it."
"I wasn't," confirmed Ayako. "Nasty pieces of work, that shit. Comes from the term they used to use to describe this old kiddy-script technique of bombarding a network with garbage data until it forced 'em offline. Distributed Denial of Service." She stuffed the cleaning supplies into an old shoebox, tucking it under her arm. "Some sick-fuck thought it'd be funny using that term for a technique to make people go offline . Another word for 'em is cortex-bomb. Makes neuralware go haywire; the patterns you see, they're a visual algorithm tweaked specifically to overload a gonk's informational input, send 'em into a kinda terminal seizure. The head blowin' up? That's just the neuralware blowing out. Cooling systems give out, heat builds up and expands— boom ."
"Wasn't so bad when we initially walked into the dollbox," said Judy, trying and failing to get comfortable. Ayako took something from a cabinet in her kitchen, handed it to Judy. A plastic sheet of red anodyne patches, each one roughly the size of a thumbnail. Judy peeled one off, pressed it onto her neck.
"'Course it wasn't," said Ayako. "DDOS works like a grenade. The initial boom sucks, but then there's nothing left but settling dust. That's when you walked in, when the dust was settling." She shrugged. "Still can give you a nasty fucking headache you stare at it too long, though. Make your neuralware glitch."
As the soft hand of endorphin-analog came down on Judy's nerves, smothering the pain, she looked relieved, a little high. "Compared to you and Valerie, my chrome's pretty fuckin' minimal."
"Don't even need to scan you to know that," said Ayako. "Also probably why it ain't affected you too bad." She disappeared into the net-den with the shoebox of cleaning supplies.
"Personally, I like the fact you ain't all chromed up," said V, smiling. Although she'd gotten a few significant cyberware upgrades out of necessity, V had always practiced caution, kept her chrome as minimal as she could afford to in her profession. The last thing she wanted was to go cyberpsycho, cut her short life even shorter. "Humans have gotten too fuckin' comfortable with treatin' our bodies like how our ancestors used to treat upgradin' their fuckin' PCs. Y'know, when they used to put all the pieces into giant towers and shit."
"Funny comin' from a merc," said Judy, smiling. She took V's hand, her thumb brushing the hard plastic monowire inset on her right wrist. "Think you'd be chrome's biggest fan."
"I only got chromed 'cause I had to," said V. "Wouldn't make it far as a merc without it." She paused, pondering the black nail-polish of Judy's thumbnail. "Truthfully, kinda envious y'don't need all this shit, Jude." She glanced over her shoulder, in the direction of Ayako's net-den. Kept her voice low; V was relatively sure Ayako had tweaked-up audioware. "There's barely anythin' 'ganic left in Ayako," she told her. "Like Songbird."
"Never met Songbird, but from what you told me, yeah," said Judy, nodding. She glanced past her shoulder. "Real chromehead, that one."
"More like a Nethead," said V. "The chrome was just necessary to facilitate her real addiction." She shook her head, looked at Judy. "Anyway," she said, "been thinkin' we should drop by Cowpuncher's, talk to Dean. Give him the BD, collect our money, maybe find out more about this Uncle Sam shit. He knows lots of people. Ex-Militech, too."
"Was thinkin' the same thing," said Judy, looking a little less sick now. She sat up, hugging the cherry blossom pillow. "Think Ayako's gonna fork over the BD?"
"I never intended to keep it," said Ayako, emerging from the net-den, flashing the BD. She tossed it over, and V caught it. "Got what I needed. And I don't wanna see you get fucked on gig-work with Dean."
"How much of our conversation didja hear?" asked V, sheepishly.
"All of it," said Ayako, grinning. "But I ain't offended, 'cause you're right. I am a Nethead. And the chrome was specifically to feed my bad habit." Her laser-dot eyes flickered onto Judy, strobing a once-over. "Good to see you're feeling better."
"Yeah," said Judy, nodding. "Can move without feelin' like I'm gonna hurl."
"Good," said Ayako. "Real tatami, this floor. I had to go through a Chiba black marketeer I know for this shit. And you can tell it's real, 'cause it's got that tatami smell. Fabricators still can't accurately copy it." She went to her kitchen, opened the fridge and took out three ice-cold cans of Sapporo beer, then joined them in the living-room. Handed one to V, the other to Judy—who looked a little leery to drink booze after she'd just finished upchucking her last meal. "Real Japanese beer," said Ayako, sitting down on the tatami and cracking open the can. "Not that synth-shit you're both used to."
V popped the tab on her can, sipped. "This is actually pretty damn good," she said, and sat down beside Judy on the sofa. The sofa was upholstered in pale microfiber leather, done in some sleek, minimalist Japanese style that seemed to emphasize function and sharp, clean lines, like something assembled by corporate aerospace engineers.
"'Course it is," said Ayako. "It's real beer." She knocked back a mouthful of the stuff, regarding them with an unreadable look, scan-light pupils flickering in the depths of her black glass insets. "I gotta prepare some stuff for a test-run," said Ayako, to V. "Show you what we're up against with Uncle Sam. Gonna take 'bout a day or two, so you got time to talk to Dean, whoever else you gotta."
V sipped her beer. "Test-run?"
Ayako nodded. "Found an old NUSA research net adjacent to Sam's system. Exploit in the net's architecture let me open a virtual access point into the AI's subnet. But I ain't been able to get close to the datafort. Shit's behind loads and loads of complex Black ICE." She paused to sip her beer, then said, "Ain't even sure I can reach the datafort from the VAP. It's like looking up into the sky and seeing, say, Venus. You can see it, sure. You know it's there and what it is, but you can't reach it."
"You're tellin' my calabacita to run through a fuckin' minefield of Black ICE," said Judy, looking as if she wanted to slap Ayako, "when you ain't even fuckin' sure you can reach the goddamn datafort?"
"That's cute, you calling her calabacita. Don't that mean 'pumpkin' or something? Don't got my translator running." She paused, drank. Then said, "You know in Peru when they call you pumpkin, they're just calling you dumb? Anyway, yeah, that's kinda what I'm asking her to do. But this is just a recon mission. Mostly."
"You're fuckin' crazy," said Judy. She finally opened her own beer, sipped very cautiously.
"Think we already established this," said Ayako, grinning. "I won't let anything happen to your girl, Judy. Promise."
"If y'couldn't reach the datafort, what makes you think I could?" said V, finishing her Sapporo and setting the empty can on the coffee-table. "I ain't a netrunner by profession. Just… kinda somethin' I picked up, got good at. I ain't nowhere near as good as you though, not for somethin' like this."
"I need someone reliable to watch my back in cyberspace," said Ayako. "And you're reliable as they come, choom. Somethin' goes wrong, I need you to finish. Castlebreaker can breach the data-wall, getcha inside. I keep the AI distracted while you destroy Sam's core." She sighed, sagged back against the wall beside a set of sliding glass doors, a balcony and the glittering neon of the Phoenix skyline on the other side. "But it's looking iffy now, the plan. I don't have Castlebreaker."
V watched the hologram pillars roll their endless ad-feeds, the sleek fuselages of hovercrafts gliding along beacon-lit skyways. It was weirdly beautiful, she thought. "Sense you're gonna follow up with another request," she said, finally.
"You're Aldecaldos, both of you," said Ayako. "Can see the colors on your jackets. I lost my connection to the Technomancers in the dollbox." She peered at them, very intently, as if attempting to calculate their answer, formulate an appropriate plea. "But the Aldecaldos, they got loads of connections. To StormTech, maybe even to the Technomancers. The Technomancers have Castlebreaker. We won't reach the core without it."
"You want us to get you another middleman," said V.
"It's not all for nothing, V," said Ayako. "You help me, I help you. I can fix your biochip. I told you that already."
"Yeah," said V, all her cynicism rising into her throat like bad heartburn, "I've been told that a lot . And still ain't seen no results." She stared at Ayako, narrowing her eyes. "What makes you any fuckin' different from everyone else who's told me the same shit?"
"Because I worked on the Relic," said Ayako, and it felt, then, as if time froze, the words hanging in the air like a ghost. "Contract for Arasaka," she continued. "I wrote the fucking program they used on that chip, V."
V's brain felt as if it were jammed. Then, "No, that was Anders Hellman."
"Anders Hellman was just the fucking theory guy," seethed Ayako, her words taut with anger. "A bankable face to slap onto the fucking product." Her face became a mask of cold, quiet rage. "There was a whole team behind that Eurotheater asshole," she continued, drawing up her legs, her hands resting on her knees. "But none of us got credit. Not an iota. Any wonder why Hellman didn't know how to fucking help you when you'd met him? I know 'bout that, V. That whole job you pulled on Hellman." She pointed at herself, then said, "I was the one who transpiled Soulkiller's source code to make the fucking thing. Not him."
"If that's true," said V, "then maybe gimme some fuckin' answers already."
"The answer's multifaceted, a stratum of so much shit," said Ayako. "Saburo Arasaka rushed the prototype, and then his son swiped it. Project was kinda dead, understandably, after that. And when Yoshinobu took over, us contractors were hunted down by Arasaka assassins and zeroed. I deleted my file in Arasaka's database, became a ghost so I wouldn't be gunned down by their soldiers or flatlined by their 'runners. Came to Phoenix 'cause I had some connections with the Las Digitales. Did some gigs for 'em. How I wound up stumbling across this Uncle Sam thing."
"I get Uncle Sam is bad news," said V, "but why are you so fuckin' bent on zeroin' it?"
"V," said Ayako, as if she were speaking to a small, deaf idiot child, "the AI was created to devise and optimize wartime and, later, social algorithms. To solve problems on a macro-level. If something is created to solve a problem to its most optimal conclusion, then what optimal conclusion do you think an AI, one that's sentient and hates humans, would come to when every fucking problem in this world is caused by humans?"
"Fuck," said V, grimacing.
"And when everything is digital, connected to the Net?"
"... Double fuck," said V.
"Fucking apocalypse," agreed Ayako. "It wouldn't be all at once. It would take time. But the end would come eventually. Maybe Uncle Sam starts with seizing control of the systems in some local police precinct. Military intervention, crisis averted. Sam shifts tactics. This time, it takes control of the military, gets access to, say, NUSA's nuclear launch-systems."
"Triple fuck," said V, rubbing her face, feeling the sharp edge of a headache at comprehending so much gruesome detail.
"Guess we don't gotta choice. Stoppin' this thing, I mean," said Judy, frowning. She looked Ayako up and down as if she were sizing her up. Then, "How do we know you ain't leadin' us into some kinda Arasaka trap?"
"If I were Arasaka," said Ayako, "I would've already killed you both."
"Or you're just waitin' to get your connection to the Technomancers," said Judy, skeptically.
"Look," said Ayako, suddenly sounding very tired, "I'm being as transparent with you both as possible."
V nodded. "Okay, then be transparent. I needa know what's fuckin' my chip."
"As I said, it's a multifaceted answer," said Ayako, rubbing the space between her eyes. "Other than the neural damage? Hardware and bioware incompatibilities." She studied V as if she were something in a petri-dish. "It wasn't designed for you; it was initially designed for Saburo. And it ain't just that. When they rushed the project, I was forced to get sloppy with the transpiling, take shortcuts. You're getting a taste of the shoddy-ass job I did." Ayako frowned, and she looked genuinely sorry. "I never wanted to kill anyone, V. And I'm gonna make things right. I just need your help."