"Are you fucking crazy?" said Panam, glowering on the holo. She looked tired. Her tanned skin had ripened to a deep, rich brown.
"Probably, but I don't gotta choice," said V, straddling her bike, ignoring the dealers loitering on the slick, mottled sidewalk in front of Cowpuncher's, all of them sizing up her and Judy, determining whether or not they could be a sale. The dealers around Cowpuncher's, who almost exclusively belonged to the Paradise Cooks, tended to target the suits because suits were soft, easy money; but during slower hours, the Cooks tried to push their shit on anyone who looked even mildly interested at the prospect of getting high. They were also the guys who'd invented Green Angel, readily supplying Dean's habit at a discount in exchange for preferential dealing rights in and around Cowpuncher's.
"You do have a choice, Val," said Panam, sounding steadily more exasperated. "You could not work with a former 'Saka goon, and wait for me to talk to StormTech."
"I don't got time for the corpo runaround bullshit, Panam," said V. "I'm on a short clock. I'm not waitin' around 'til we hit Chicago."
Panam sighed, staring at something off-screen. Judy said, "I don't like it either, Panam, but Valerie's already made up her mind. And you know how she is. Fuckin' thick-ass skull."
"I don't get bad vibes from Ayako," said V, to Panam. She leaned her arms on the bike's handlebars, rain beading on the shoulders of her jacket. The Paradise Cooks, sensing neither V or Judy were the least bit interested in buying drugs, shuffled off to work a pair of young office-techs down from the arcologies. "In fact, this is the first time I've felt there might actually be a fuckin' chance for me."
"Even so," said Panam, taking a deep breath, the anger draining out of her, "she's asking a huge favor. Technomancers, Val? They're mercenaries. Their fellow Nomads only matter to them if they can pay, and we can't pay a helluva lot right now." She rubbed her temples, as if trying to massage away a headache. Antique resistors and tiny beads of Arizona turquoise were woven into her dark, sun-matted locks. "Look," she said, "I'll see what I can do, okay? I think Carol's done some biz with them before."
"You won't hafta pay," V assured her. "Ayako's got the eddies. She already cut some kinda deal with 'em, but lost her intro-man."
"If that's the case," said Panam, "then I'll see what I can do." She hung up.
V killed her phone-link and looked at Judy. "Takes care of that." She put on her helmet, the photochromic compensators in her visor kicking in automatically, rezzing up visuals until the world balanced out, its details crystalline.
"You're a smooth gato, babe," said Judy, face disappearing behind her helmet's tinted visor. V planted a pale hand on the helmet and gave Judy a playful shove. Judy switched on comms, her modulated laughter erupting over the link like cascading static. "Don't be like that, babe," she teased. "It was a compliment."
"Compliment this," said V, holding her hand up to Judy's visor and extending her middle-finger.
"It did a nova job in the shower last night."
V snorted. "I'm gonna push you off this bike. But thanks, I know. Playin' guitar makes 'em real nimble." She wiggled her fingers for emphasis before tugging on her moto-gloves and punching the coords for Buster's clinic into her bike's geonav.
Cutting away from the curb, scattering soggy screamsheets and spraying wet grit, V engaged the traction mods and tore off toward Three Parks, Judy squeezing her tight around the middle.
Three Parks was a rough, mean side of town: pre-war brickworks huddling in the damp shadows beneath Phoenix's vast network of interchanges and overpasses, their rust-stained concrete scrawled over in confused jumbles of graffiti. Pawnshops, cash-ins, secondhands, greasejoints and pachinko parlors crowded the narrow tarmac veins that served as streets, which seemingly zigzagged, turned, looped onto each other at random intervals as though Three Parks had been procedurally generated by some neurotic AI.
Buster had stashed his clinic down a cramped alley between a twenty-four hour laundromat, and a discount electronics store called Ted's Bargain Bin, down a set of concrete steps that carried them through a tunnel lined with tiny shopfronts that seemed to chiefly deal in knock-offs, BDs, and refurbished cyberware. A few homeless guys were smoking outside the clinic at the end of the tunnel as Judy and V approached, half-heartedly panhandling to uninterested passersby.
The clinic looked shuttered, even abandoned. The harsh blue-gray neon of its sign had the effect of leaching color from the world: a bleach-light cutting cold, stark shadows, reducing people to ghosts in its glare.
"The ripperdoc is by appointment only," croaked one of the homeless men, the light making his weathered skin look grayish-white where it hit: a crumpled, sun-bleached paper bag smoothed over a skull. He was smoking a cheap cigarette, cupped in his fist like a convict or a soldier. A shred of synth-tobacco stuck to his bottom-lip.
"You know him?" asked V, staring at the man, putting on her best huscle-face.
The man stared back with hooded eyes, motionless.
"Asked you a question," said V.
"Whaddya want with Ol' Kilroy?" asked the man, like a dad questioning V's intentions with his daughter.
"None of your goddamn biz, choom."
The man looked her up and down. "Definitely no Militech spook, sure as shit," said the homeless man. He paused, as if considering something. Then, "Hundred eddies, we'll get Ol' Kilroy to open up."
V pinched the ridged, pyramidal pull-stud of her monowire between her thumb and finger, slowly extruding the oiled, telescopic loops of razor-sharp microfilament from the plastic casing inset in her wrist. "Or," she countered, "I just cut you into fuckin' chunks instead, bang on the door 'til I get an answer."
"Enough," said another voice, and that was when V noticed the intercom mounted beside the door. It was an old, gravelly voice, like wet pebbles churning in a blender. "Let the merc in, Skeet."
The homeless guy, who apparently was named Skeet, glanced between the monowire and V, then stepped aside. "You're lucky, fucking punk," Skeet told her.
V let go of the monowire; it snapped and retracted, coiling smoothly into its housing. "Nah, man, you're the lucky one," she told him. "Don't care if you're some ex-con or war-vet. Your 'ware's outmoded." She shoved Skeet aside, and she and Judy stepped into Buster's clinic.
The clinic, to V's enormous surprise, looked top-line, the kind that might have catered to a wealthy, corporate clientele. But what surprised her even more than the digs was the man running the place. He looked like Adam Smasher if Adam Smasher had been some prototype Militech superweapon, an anti-aircraft turret with legs.
Unlike Adam Smasher, however, Buster's face was still recognizably human, and that human was old, his skin liver-spotted and lined, skull stubbled with white-gray hair. He stared at them, his oculars flickering the phosphor green of antique computer monitors, and held up, flexed, a hand that looked both claw and surgical multitool.
"You Dean's choom?"
V stared up at the behemoth, a lump of nervous tension lodging in her throat. "That's me," she confirmed.
Buster looked at Judy. "And you're—"
"Someone who ain't lookin' to fuck with you, choom."
He laughed, the sound grating in his throat. "Good. Smart kid," said the ripperdoc, lumbering over to his op-terminal on legs like pneumatic pistons. He punched a sequence into his op-terminal, his fingers picking at the keys like the articulated legs of a mechanical spider. "Judy Alvarez." Before Judy could ask him how he knew her name, Buster said, "Dean told me who you and your output are. Was just giving you the courtesy of introducing yourselves, but," and he looked at them and grinned like a bear-trap, displaying a mouthful of steel toothbud implants, "can see you're both a bit tongue-tied."
V got a grip on herself. Borgs like Smasher and Buster made her feel something profoundly visceral, a revulsion akin to whiplash. Probably because, unlike most people, who still aspired to the illusion of their humanity, people like Buster and Smasher went out of their way to completely eschew it. "Yeah," she said, finally, "he said y'might know somethin' about Uncle Sam?"
Buster settled his enormous bulk in his work-chair, the thing protesting his weight. He stared at her with uncomfortable gravitas, his multitool hand folding into itself, transforming into a hand like an elaborate origami trick. "Bad old project," he said at length. Then, "What do you know about Donald Lundee?"
"Militech CEO back in the 2040s, right?"
Buster nodded, the servos in his artificial vertebrae whirring softly. "Served with him in Vietnam, later in the Gulf and the First Central American Conflict. Real hothead." He paused. The corners of his mouth were very wet. "And then there were the corpo-wars. Wasted a lot of young, patriotic flesh in those wars, all to sate his vendetta against Arasaka. Lundee resented Saburo Arasaka, resented Japan. Pissed off the Japanese were doing better than the Americans despite getting whooped in the war. He wanted the same sort of success for NUSA. Wanted to be NUSA's Arasaka."
"And what's that gotta do with Uncle Sam?" asked V.
"You young kids are always so impatient," said Buster. "I'm getting to that. What made Saburo Arasaka so powerful?" He paused as if waiting for an answer, but before either she or Judy could give one, Buster interrupted them. "Prescience." He enunciated the word carefully, like an invocation. "Saburo was a walking, talking predictive simulation when it came to the world. Lundee got it into his head that he could match Saburo, elevate NUSA in the same way Saburo had elevated Japan. Uncle Sam was an opportunity that presented itself. After seeing what it could do in the Fourth Corporate War, Dundee had an epiphany: take Uncle Sam, fuse it to meat via a modified neural matrix. Make himself the social calculator, become the generator of algorithmic change. Human and AI existing within the same system, working in tandem. Partners. Human emotions, synthetic logic. AIs are never truly sentient. They simply simulate sentience, albeit very convincingly. Just as humans are never truly creatures of logic. We merely simulate being creatures of logic, albeit very convincingly."
"You tellin' me Dundee wanted to fuse with this AI?"
"You deaf, kid? Yes." He gestured at himself. "But they needed prototypes, proofs-of-concepts. I got voluntold by my superiors to participate in the Uncle Sam project, because I proved to be damned tolerant of the shit they were borging me up with. Ultimately, their attempts didn't work. AIs are just so much data, stuffing them into even the most cutting-edge neuralware is like trying to bottle a fucking flood. Militech would've scrapped me with the rest of the fuck-ups if I wasn't such a damn good ripperdoc."
"You do rip-work for Militech?" asked Judy, bristling a little.
"Yeah," said Buster, "but I don't like it. Either that or they kill me." He paused, running a metal claw over his closely-shaven hair, sweat filming his scalp. "Probably wouldn't mind that much, them killing me. Don't even feel human anymore." He looked at his hand, the one that unfolded into a mean-looking multitool, and said, "Can't even off myself. Wish I could." He sounded tired, threadbare. A ghost who badly wanted to pass on from this world. "They coded a failsafe into my firmware to prevent it. Fuckers."
"Jesus," said V, "I'm sorry, Buster."
"So am I," grunted the borg, shifting in his seat. "Fucking Dundee and his fucking ambitions." Buster went quiet, then asked, "Why're you looking for Uncle Sam, anyway?"
"Wanna destroy it," said V, matter-of-factly.
Buster grinned like a skull. "Good. About fucking time someone tried."
Outside the clinic, someone, maybe Skeet, screamed and died.
"Well," said Buster, his multitool-hand moving through its transformation sequence, resolving into the shape of a handcannon, its skeletal barrel wide enough to swallow V's fist, "maybe wishes do come true."