Gotoda and a couple of Ayako's chooms from the Digitales trucked their few possessions from the Phoenix Nest to Las Palmeras in a stolen rental. Their new apartment was ancient: hardwood floors, plaster walls, furniture that had been brand-new in her great-grandmother's time. An odor of old cigarettes, dust, and something that vaguely reminded V of bananas, hung in the air. The place even came with a burner stove, and those things had been illegal since the 2020s.
"S'like one of those history BDs," said Judy, unpacking her BD editor and it's peripherals from a box packed with foam. She started to carefully unwrap her gear from taped parcels of pink anti-static bubble-wrap. "Once saw this BD from the 1990s," she continued, and looked around. "Place reminds me of that."
V was packing food, which mostly consisted of cup-noodles, beer, and takeout leftovers, into an avocado-colored refrigerator. Wasn't even a smartfridge. Just a handle, a simple temp-control mechanism that was all dials, no touch-screen to speak of. "Place even has a fuckin' phone," she said, pointing to the plastic handset on the wall. "Only seen one of those once, down in Dogtown." V paused, thought about Johnny, how he'd shown her how to use it. Felt an uncomfortable knot in her chest. "Don't work, though. No dial-tone."
Judy looked at her. "What the fuck is a dial-tone?"
V finished putting the food away. "S'like this dronin' noise old phones make." She did her best to imitate the sound, and Judy laughed. "No, serious," said V, grinning, "s'what it sounds like, no shit." She watched as Judy began assembling her gear in the corner of the living-room with quick, quiet efficiency. "Can't fit it into the bedroom after all, huh?"
"Nope," confirmed Judy, and shook her head, cabling her BD-editor to her computer rig. "Too damn small." She looked up at V and smiled, winked in that way always made V's heart skip a little. "Not that I mind. S'real cozy."
"Got our own balcony too, which is preem," said V.
Once Judy finished setting up her computer station, they went out onto the balcony for smokes. Their apartment was two doors down from Ayako's, but she wasn't outside. Probably jacked into her Masamune, thought V, cruising the gridlines of cyberspace. She'd wanted to figure out how Arasaka had sniffed out their little op. Something about dataflows, seeing weird shapes in the information. Matter, Ayako had told them, was just data, and it could be cooked down to mathematical paradigms that could be interpreted, compiled. And that was all cyberspace was: matter, reduced to mathematical paradigms and compiled into code-armature. Ayako could read the changes in the world, there in cyberspace, as easily as their ancient ancestors had once read the skies to predict the weather.
"How do you figure 'Saka caught on?" V leaned on the railing, watching the holograms dance like neon ghosts above the skyline, the ad-pillars scrolling forever toward the smoggy sky: a perpetual reel of faces telling them to buy things, to watch the idiot-shows, to listen to the talking heads.
"Corpos got their fingers in so many goddamn pies, I'm surprised it took 'em this long to find out." Judy looked at her, smoke curling away from the cherry of her cigarette. "On the plus side," she continued, slipping V under her arm, "they dunno it's us."
V cuddled in close, sucking down another lungful of smoke. A membrane fitted into her bronchi filtered out the carcinogens. She had to get it changed every three years at a ripperdoc, but she probably wouldn't live to see her next clean-out anyway.
She put her head on Judy's shoulder. Her girl had a few inches on her, but V liked that Judy was taller than she was. "Dunno it's us for now," reasoned V, and took her cigarette between her fingers, flicking ash over the railing. "But 'Saka's gonna figure it out eventually, I think."
"Probably," said Judy. "But when's that ever stopped us?" She kissed V.
Before V knew it, they were finishing their smokes and tumbling, naked, into bed, Judy's mouth trailing kisses from between her breasts, down…
They showered in the morning, took their time with each other, their fingers exploring the damp folds of velvet between their thighs. V was just about to drop to her knees when her phonics tuned to the loud knocking at their front door.
"Fuckin' seriously," said V, and she sighed and stood up. Judy softly swore in Spanish, and the two of them put on T-shirts and shorts, and went to the front door.
Ayako smiled. "Don't look so happy to see me," she said, inviting herself into the apartment. "But promise, I come bearing news."
"So let's hear it," said V, and flopped down on her couch, elbows on the backrest. "Y'kinda interrupted somethin'."
"Yeah, I kinda got that sense," said Ayako, blatantly unconcerned that she'd interrupted them. "So I was looking at the dataflows. Found a real interesting one. Encrypted subnet communicating with a 'Saka comsnet." She noticed the look on Judy's face, then elaborated, "Comsnets are essentially corpo subnets dedicated to communication lines. Where corpos keep all their emails and shit. Great access points for an intrepid netrunner, since the ICE tends to be thinner on comsnets."
"So wouldn't the other subnet, the encrypted one, be a comsnet too?" asked Judy, clearly trying to parse all this netspeak.
"No," said Ayako, "because this encrypted subnet was too small to be corpo. Its visual representation is a little black cube. Personal subnet, but it's using the Digi's net-protocols to communicate."
"Did you crack it?" asked V.
"Here's where shit gets weird. That little cube? Dense fuckin' ICE. Drifted too close and nearly got flatlined when I tried to cut into it." Ayako sat down on the armrest of their couch, idly fiddling with a flap of upholstery where it had started to peel, exposing old foam. "So I slipped into 'Saka's comsnet after spending a few hours cutting through the ICE. Found a couple of messages from this cube. Someone's been spying on me."
V frowned. "Any idea who it is? The Digitales, maybe."
Ayako shrugged. "Maybe, but I doubt it. I dunno what to make of it." She sighed, tracing the edges of her WNI. "I've been trying to cross-reference with the dataflows I see in halfspace, but nothing is really lining up."
"Halfspace?" said V.
"What I see with these," said Ayako, tapping the corner of her right ocular, the restless laser-dot pupil steady on V. "That interstitial space where matter starts to become data." She paused. "I could show you."
V blinked. "How?"
Ayako reached behind her ear, extruded the loop of fiber-optic cable. "Can interface directly with your neuralware." She looked at Judy, adding, "If your girl's okay with it."
"Honestly," said Judy, "I'm kinda curious. If Valerie's okay with it, I don't mind."
V was curious herself, and she gave the okay, let Ayako wire into her neuroport.
Nothing at first. Then, slowly, phosphenes started to boil in the edges of V's vision, occluding her sight with a cataract of raw, chaotic data. The room, the things and people in it, cooked down into code, where reality became the gray space between the real and the digital hallucination. Flows of data accreted and dispersed, formed shapes and dissolved within the colorless void of that quasi-cyberspace.
It seemed, to V, that the more complexity an object had, the denser its data, the more defined its shape. She saw Judy and Ayako as armatures wearing skins of data, accreting slowly until they became themselves, sharply defined. And as she looked out toward Phoenix, its data burned solid, pulsing steadily and nauseatingly, overwhelming her with its complexity.
She heard Ayako say something, and then halfspace suddenly vanished, her vision returning, blurry but gradually coming into focus. V pitched forward off the couch and vomited explosively onto the floor, dimly aware of the blood dripping from her nostrils.
"What the fuck did you do to her?" she heard Judy scream, her voice drifting in as if from a long way away, over some weak, nameless frequency.
"V," said Ayako, her cool hands on her shoulders, helping her sit upright. "You're gonna be fine," she told her. "You looked at Phoenix. Thankfully, just a glance."
"I swear to fuckin' God if you hurt her, I'm gonna hurt you," said Judy, helping V up onto the couch.
"I'm sorry," said Ayako. "I should have warned you." She looked at Judy. "She's gonna be fine. I jacked out in time."
V became aware, then, of her throbbing head, her heart jackhammering in her chest, dangerously arrhythmic, and she was sweating.
"I didn't think the dataflows would overwhelm you like that," said Ayako. "I'm so sorry."
Her body slowly composed itself, heartbeat relaxing, the tension in her body releasing, bleeding out. "How d'you fuckin' live like that?" she asked. V was thirsty, her throat like a tube of sandpaper. Judy went into the kitchen, came back with bottled water and stuck it in her hand.
"Used to it," said Ayako. "How I've always lived."
V fumbled with the cap on the bottle, managed to twist it off and swallow a mouthful of blessedly cold water. Then she asked, "Why the fuck would y'wanna live like that?"
"Clearly," said Ayako, "you've never lived in the Chiba slums. I was from Chiba-11. Worst fuckin' slum in the whole city, choom." She frowned, sat down in the battered armchair that had come with the apartment, the upholstery duct-taped in several places. "You know my family used to be rich? Way back. We're talkin' Edo shit. We got rich off silkworms. Yūki-tsumugi. Had a big mansion and everything in Miyazu." She paused. "Then we lose it all, wind up in Chiba because my family couldn't afford to live in Kyoto prefecture anymore. Turned it into a fuckin' tourist-park for rich asshats. So we lived in Chiba for a couple generations, scraped by. My dad worked as a tailor for the corpos. Mom worked in an udon shop. Barely made enough to get by. So I'd scrounge some New Yen by selling scrap I pulled outta the dumps. Then I'd disappear into a cybercafe for as long as the money let me. My world became the Net, because it was the only goddamn thing keeping me from throwing myself in front of a train."
V listened, and Judy had settled down enough to listen too. "Sounds like my childhood, kinda. In Heywood."
"Living in Heywood would have been preferable," said Ayako. "You can find ways to live in chaos, little pockets of freedom. No such thing in Japan. Japan is a collectivist society, a fine sieve where only the acceptable sifts through. You're expected to police yours and everyone else's behavior. Keep the harmony. But it's that harmony lets the corpos maintain their stranglehold on society over there." She stood up. "Bought my first cyberdeck after hustling gigs on those cybercafe rigs. Never looked back after that."
"Why tell us all this?" asked V, wiping the crusts of blood from her nostrils.
"Because maybe," began Ayako, and she sounded as if she were struggling to say whatever it was that she wanted to say next. "Because maybe," she continued, "I'm starting to see you guys as my friends."
"Sounds like it's hurtin' you to say that," said V, amused.
"It is," said Ayako, grimacing. "I've never had… I've never been good with people. Friends were somethin' I didn't think I needed or wanted. And then you assholes come along and change that, and I hate that you're makin' me care. Meat-concerns aren't supposed to be my concerns. Netrunners, we have a certain disdain for the flesh. For meat. Meat is a prison for professionals who thrive as ghosts."