V parked her bike in the side-lot of the Phoenix Nest, wanting some sleep before they went to see Dean in the morning. She armed the anti-theft system, eyeing a huddle of New Luddites: wrapped in grubby sheets of radiant barrier insulation, which they believed shielded them from the insidious technowaves of modernity; they looked like they wanted to try some dipshit huscle routine on her. But one flash of Johnny's Malorian made them reconsider, retreat into deeper shadow beyond drifts of junk. Judy flipped them off as they climbed the steps of the megabuilding, dodging junkies and joytoys, dealers and pimps.
A crowd of people had congregated around a shuttered sushi-stall, where the junkie-prophet, perched atop a plastic cafe-table spraybombed in graffiti, preached to his whackjob congregation about the DataRapture. And after everything V knew about Uncle Sam now, it seemed a bit too prophetic, made a reflexive shiver ride down her spine.
Threading their way through the cluster of stalls that served as the megabuilding's ground-floor market, she and Judy found the elevator, punched for their floor. Rode the fifteen floors to their apartment, ignoring some tweaker, who reeked of urine and stale sweat, whining and twitching in the corner of the lift about needing more dorph, the drone of the televisions—someone had recently shot one of them out—going on about, of all places, Night City, some scandal that had gone down between Mayor Jefferson Perelez and a media he'd knocked out in a paranoid rage before whiplashing to a local story about an ongoing legal dispute between Arasaka and Militech over who-the-fuck-cared; V had learned to tune that shit out.
They stepped off the lift, navigating the concrete maze to their apartment. The hacked S.C.S.M called her a cockgobbler as she walked by it, and V couldn't help but laugh. "Not my thing," she told it, fishing a cigarette out of her jacket and lighting it with a plastic tube.
"You still got cigs?" asked Judy, and V passed her one automatically, lit it. "Bad habit," she remarked, and blew a ragged cloud of smoke. Judy leaned sideways against the railing overlooking the ground-floor market. Like most megabuildings, the Phoenix Nest had been built like a hollow cube, the ceiling glassed-off, supported by a lattice of steel beams, dusty neon sifting down into the building from a Bartz-Perez Electric Company billboard.
"Yeah, I know," said V, and hopped onto the railing beside her, staring at their apartment door, listening to a hundred disconnected conversations up and down the hallway. Someone was talking about the latest Kerry Eurodyne-US Cracks tour; another worried aloud about her rent being late while her choom went off on some fuck-the-establishment tangent; a starved-thin man with wide, bloodshot eyes wobbled up and down the corridor like a shaking animal, junkie-whining, snot dripping onto his scabbed upper-lip. "Man," she said, blowing smoke, "s'like there's no gettin' away from this shit."
Judy sucked on her cigarette, leaning back on her elbows. "Cities, they're just another mass-produced corpo product," she told V. "Cast 'em from the same mold, stuff 'em full of the same cancerous filler-shit like y'find in scopdogs, pump 'em out on conveyor belts into the larger world. Cheap, real cheap." She finished her cigarette, stubbing it out and flicking the butt away, into the market below. "I'll be glad to delta the fuck outta Phoenix once we got some eddies for ourselves and the clan."
"And once we help Ayako," said V, looking sidelong at Judy.
Judy nodded. She looked at V, bright pinpoints of S.C.S.M light catching in her eyes. "I ain't gonna let us be the reason a buncha people die. Besides, Ayako says she can help you. That's what matters to me the most." She frowned. "But y'know how they say when things sound too good to be true? After that shit your choom Songbird pulled on you, I dunno, babe."
"I know," said V. "But I gotta do what I gotta, exhaust all options." She finished her cigarette, put it out and tossed it. She hopped off the railing and ground the butt under her boot. "And I don't think Ayako's lyin' to us. I been 'round enough liars to sus 'em out, but I don't get that vibe from her. Think she feels my condition's on her, her responsibility to fix."
Putting her arm around Judy, V stepped into their apartment, locked the door behind them. "So y'think that whole 'Saka story's true?" asked Judy, looking at her.
"I do," said V, and flopped down on the couch, a cheap polyester sectional, which smelled of old cigarettes and food, squatting underneath a mobile of hologram adverts, forever turning, forever trying to sell them things they didn't need. Kicking off her boots, V put her socked feet on the lacquered particle-board table, idly watching the advert for some new BD series called Tu Lina, Mi Lina. Judy joined her on the couch, and V said to her, "Anyway, yeah, don't think she was bullshittin' us 'bout 'Saka. That was real anger we saw."
Judy nodded, fiddling with the small plastic case of the BD, repeatedly opening and closing the slot-drawer containing the datashard like someone clicking a pen while they were thinking. "Wonder why she ain't just contacted Dean, told him we did the job," she said.
"Dean's got this policy of handlin' a client's goods himself," said V. "Merc brings it to him directly, he'll personally send it to the client or some drop-point they designate. Think it's his way of maintainin' biz, connections, rep. Shows the client he's just as invested in their goods as the merc he sends after 'em." She shrugged. "Ayako's probably just gonna toss it into a digital trash-can. She's doin' us a solid by havin' us deliver it, keep us in Dean's good graces."
Judy nodded, laying the BD on the table. She rubbed her eyes with the points of her knuckles, yawned. "Man," she said, "I'm fuckin' tired." Judy got up. "Gonna grab a shower."
V stood up. "Comin'."
"You gonna call Panam?"
"Yeah," said V, "I'll give her a call in the mornin'. It's late, and she's probably tired from workin' all day on that hydroponics farm."
She and Judy showered, had some hard, fast fun against the wall, then changed into their pajamas and, their libidos thoroughly drained, crawled into bed. The bed, like most beds in megabuilding apartments, had been wedged into an alcove, slots in the walls serving as shelves. V—she'd gotten into the habit of it, ever since Johnny had accused her of never reading—took a book off one of the shelves, its pages made from compressed paper-flake, bound in a sleeve of reconstituted cardboard. It was a book about the history of cyberware, and she'd just gotten to the chapter on the Sandevistan OS. Preem stuff, those Sandies. Not really her style, though; V preferred quickhacks, guns, monowire. Technical shit for a technical girl. Johnny's Malorian was the exception, however, to her usual preference for smart-weps, because sentimentality, turned out, was a persistent bitch.
Judy, who had also taken up the habit of reading, although her books tended to revolve around techie shit, the ocean, and street-romance, shelved the book beside the jellyfish lava-lamp V had bought her on a whim, then laid back down. She reached for the articulated reading lamp, her tattooed finger, the black nail-polish beginning to chip, hovering over the power-stud. "Y'done readin'?" she asked, looking at V.
"Yeah," said V, shutting her book and stuffing it back into the shelf, "I'm good." She got comfortable under the covers with Judy, the two of them snuggling up, drifting off to the light patter of rain on their window.
It was still raining the next morning as they stepped out of the megabuilding. "Somethin' 'bout cloud-seedin'," said Judy, when V mentioned it was weird, seeing all this rain in Arizona. They rounded the building, New Luddites scattering from the side-lot like roaches, scuttling back into their shacks of corrugated steel and pallets. "Biotechnica stuff. They're deep in environmental revivalism. Y'know, bringin' the forests back and shit. And y'need water for plants." She shrugged, pulling on her helmet and switching to comms. "But they do lots of shit with biotech and genetic-engineering, too."
Cowpuncher's was Dean's place in New CityScape, and looked like a club that might have been built by some esoteric cadre of postmodernist cowboy enthusiasts. It was, in V's humble opinion, the singular ugliest building in Phoenix, but that ugliness seemed to work to its advantage, catering to a largely corpo-crowd who paid mega just to sit at the bar and mock Dean's bad taste. V felt there was some kind of joke in there about consumerism, something about paying for shit just to complain about it being shit.
The interior fared no better than the exterior of the place, showcasing some unpleasant flavor of Old West avant-garde. They approached the bar, where Herschel, a huge Hopi man and the resident bartender, slung drinks to corpo-rats, dressed like some dadaist gunslinger. "I will never not stop feelin' bad for ya, Hersh. Havin' to wear that shit, I mean," said V, as she and Judy approached the bar, a bright neon sunset over a bright neon desert on the wall behind the bartender lighting him from behind in a bruise-colored nimbus. "Dean 'round?"
Herschel looked at V like a man who wanted to be anywhere but here, ignoring some corpo-chick whining for another Highball Noon cocktail. "In his office," he grunted.
V nodded, turned away from the bar and made her way across the club, weaving through the custodians pushing brooms across the dance-floor. Hanging a right, she followed a corridor down past the maintenance rooms and slipped into Dean's office—right into his rendezvous with a joytoy. The girl yelped in surprise when she saw Judy and V, hauling her ass out of there before they could say what's up.
"Hi, Dean," said Judy.
"Goddamn, would you fuckin' call ahead," said Danny Dean, sitting down behind a desk of black-lacquered steel, hurriedly stuffing his dick back into his pants. He'd exchanged his Laoban suit for something a little nicer today, a gunmetal Jinguji suit that looked a bit too snug on his body, his frame mostly lost under swells of grafted muscle. A dippy bird idly sipped from a small paper cup of water on his desk, beside his computer.
"Got the gig done," said V, producing the datashard containing the BD and laying it on his desk.
"Ah," he said, "good work." The shard disappeared behind a gunmetal lapel, and his oculars flashed as he transferred the eddies into her Tycho account. "I'll be sure this gets back to the client."
V studied him a moment, then asked, "Dean, the name Uncle Sam mean anythin' to you?"
Dean eyed her for a moment, silent, his meaty hands automatically moving through a series of subtle tension-release exercises. "Myth," he said, finally. "Where'd you hear about that, V?"
"Y'know. Around," said V, shrugging.
"Around," repeated Dean, opening his cigar case and slipping a smoke out. He regarded her blandly through his Seocho aviators, the photochromic lenses tinted slightly to compensate for the glare coming off his monitor. She didn't know why he didn't just get photochromic compensators for his oculars, but then again, Dean did lots of shit V didn't get, like building this whole weird club or making his Hopi bartender dress up like a dada cowboy.
"Look, Dean, c'mon," said V. "You know I'm chooms with Dakota and Mitch, and they're your chooms. So how's 'bout ya do me a favor, old choom, and just tell me somethin'. You were Militech before you went Nomad. Y'gotta know somethin'."
"Not a Nomad anymore," said Dean. He heaved a sigh as if something had just given up inside him, then said, "Buster Kilroy."
"Who's Buster Kilroy?"
"An 130-year-old ripperdoc out in Three Parks. Ex-Militech. Maybe he knows something." Dean stared at her, his expression unreadable. Then, "I dunno why you're looking for things that don't concern you, V, but be careful."
"I will, Dean. Promise." V left Cowpuncher's, and as she and Judy mounted her bike, V said, "Just gotta ring Panam before we head over to Three Parks."