Mochi had parked the Quadra on the very edge of the launchpad, V sitting there with Judy in the shadow of its service structure. It was quiet this far from the spaceport terminal, and that was something new to V, the quiet. Quiet didn't really exist in Night City, or any city. Not Phoenix, not Atlanta. In this age of advanced technology, it almost felt as if the quiet had been purposefully excised, deemed too archaic by the sleek dynamo of technological progress—a thing belonging to some darker, less enlightened age.
V theorized that the quiet had been done away with because, in the quiet, people could think, and the corpos didn't want people to think. So they backfilled it with machine-noise, a constant subliminal hum to distract the masses from realizing that they were all just cows living in a one-percenter slaughterhouse.
She mentioned her theory to Judy, who said, "Makes a weird kinda sense, actually." She stared off into the Sonoran, into its drifts of trash and sun-rusted junk beyond the floodlights. "Ever notice we ain't really started t'think 'bout those kinda things until we joined the Aldecaldos?" Judy looked at her. "Guess not bein' surrounded all the time by biz and leadheads really helps get the noggin' joggin'." She tapped the wide muzzle of The Chaos against her temple for emphasis, grinning. With its hot tropical pink spray-job, the gun looked like a child's toy in her hand.
V watched the desert, cool, dry wind on her face. She looked at the Quadra. "How're y'even still here if the subnet's gone?" she asked. "Y'rooted somewhere in the localnet, or is the Quadra's subnet an isolate?"
"Isolate?" said Judy, raising an eyebrow.
"Isolated subnets. Think of 'em as walled-off cities," said V. "Y'can nest them in an existing subnet—so a sub-subnet. Usually use 'em for experimentation purposes. Like testin' viruses and shit. But sometimes 'runners use 'em as a kinda secure data-fortress."
"The Quadra is attached to another subnet," said Mochi's little cat-voice. "To Ayako-sama's personal subnet, which Mochi supposes classifies as an isolate of the Arasaka subnet."
V blinked, not sure if she heard right. "She's operatin' outta 'Saka's subnet?"
"Yes," said Mochi. "Mikoshi. But Ayako-sama is not part of Arasaka."
"Even so, s'fuckin' gonk-crazy, livin' in a stolen slice of Mikoshi," said V.
"But it kinda makes sense," said Judy, after a moment of mulling something over in her head. "It's so fuckin' crazy that even 'Saka wouldn't expect somethin' like that. S'like those stories y'read on the Net sometimes 'bout some psycho livin' for years in the crawlspace of someone's house." She paused. "Y'know," she said, "back when y'were allowed to own a house."
"Nobody ever owned their own house," V assured her. "'Fore the corpos, it was the government who owned that shit. Y'were just rentin' from them. Property taxes, think they were called."
"Crazy t'think there was even a time y'could at least have the illusion of ownin' property," said Judy, and sighed. "Don't even got that no more."
"Maybe there's a place out there still that'll let us," said V, smiling. "Find us a nice spot on a lake, maybe. One that ain't fuckin' full of trash and chemicals. Y'could dive while I chill on the dock."
Judy smiled. "What 'bout the Aldecaldos?"
"We'll always have their backs, and they'll always have ours. No matter what me and you end up doin' with ourselves, Jude." V snorted, then said, "'Sides, I doubt Panam'll just be like, 'see ya, have a good life'. She's our choom now. Probably swing by on the holidays or whatever with the rest of the Aldecaldos."
"I'd like that," said Judy. Then she added, "Don't get me wrong, I wanna see the road, travel 'round for a while. But eventually? Think I just want us t'settle down somewhere quiet." She looked out toward the Sonoran again, the metallic purple-green sheen of her hair glittering in the floods. "I think I like the quiet."
V nodded. "Me too."
Time passed. Still no Ayako. V was beginning to wonder if Mochi had just told them she'd survived to shield them from grosser emotions, but DHCs, far as she knew, weren't capable of deception. Deception required motive, and motive required thought. But DHCs couldn't think, therefore DHCs lacked motivation. They were just glorified virtual-assistants that projected an illusion of sentience. Like Brendan, that talking S.C.S.M she'd met back in Night City.
More time passed.
Eventually, Ayako, much to V's and Judy's relief, did show, laboring under Juan's inert bulk as she hauled him across the launchpad. Ayako looked banged-up, burned and singed and bruised; but her netsuit remained, thankfully, intact. Juan looked worse. Juan looked dead. Part of his face had melted away, down to muscle studded with shunts and resistors, filigreed with hairlines of microcircuitry. He'd need a faceplate, V thought, if he was still alive. The skin around his neuroport was blast-shadowed, as if it had been nuked. His netsuit was glitching, strobing a jumble of colorful shapes and error-codes.
V and Judy jumped to their feet, helping Ayako load Juan into the back of the Quadra. "He's still alive," said Ayako, before V could ask. "Barely. We need to get him to a fuckin' ripperdoc, stat." She dropped the back-door on the Quadra and secured it, then rounded the vehicle to the passenger-side. She tapped something out on the mobile; it creaked and whined on its attenuated framework, folding into the dashboard until the passenger-seat was clear. "Won't be needing this right now," she said.
"What 'bout you?" asked V. "You look bad."
"I'll be fine. Got an NSRM, nanotech self-repair module," said Ayako.
"Where the fuck didja klep nanotech?" asked V, incredulous.
"Ain't klepped it," said Ayako. "Biotechnica perk. Got this project they've been workin' on. Usin' nanites to facilitate healthy cellular growth by replenishing missing or defective cell populations in an organism. Idea was to use it on cancer patients. Nanites would act as facsimile cells, excise and kill the bad shit, then fill the gap and replicate as healthy tissue."
"Shit," said V, and gave a low whistle.
Ayako climbed into the driver's seat. "V," she said, "need you to squeeze into the back with Juan. You're the smallest person here. Sorry."
"Guess it pays t'be short sometimes," said V, crawling between the front seats to wedge herself into the back with Juan.
"I like it," said Judy, and sat in the passenger seat. "You bein' short, I mean."
"And I like that you're taller'n me, babe." V looked at Ayako, then said, "Let's take him to Buster. Anyone can fix up Juan, he can."
Ayako nodded, and drove.
There was a new group of homeless guys in front of Buster's clinic, and V was beginning to suspect the 'borg hired them as lookouts, cheap security. They didn't say anything as V punched the thumb-smudged call-button on the intercom mounted beside the clinic's solid steel door. "Buster," said V to the intercom, "we gotta choom needs your help. He's in a real bad way, man. Needs a fuckin' ripperdoc, a good one—and you're the best."
"No need for flattery, kid," came Buster's gruff voice. He beeped them in.
A scanner flashed overhead, first red, then green once it had concluded that none of them were a threat. A couple of Militech robots, probably salvaged from a scrapyard or given to Buster as a hand-me-down from some corpo, stood idle along the walls, their dented chassis painted in flaking military-green acrylic. Buster was sitting at his ripper-terminal, one-handedly tapping something out while his other hand, the multitool, fiddled with an articulated jib arm studded with an array of drill-bits, blades, and microsaws.
"Thanks, Buster. You're the preemest," said V.
"Load your choom onto the op-chair," said Buster. He stopped fiddling with the jib arm, looked at her with his green antique CRT oculars. "And what did I say about flattery, kid? No need." His gaze shifted to Ayako. "How about you? You're looking pretty shit."
"Gotta NSRM," said Ayako, and sat down on a foam-padded chair, the upholstery worn smooth by years of countless asses sitting there.
Buster whistled, hooking Juan to a machine and dosing him with anesthetic. "Best take care in these parts," advised Buster, turning to his ripper-terminal and typing out a sequence on the slide-out keyboard. "Tech like that will get you rolled right into a scav-clinic." He paused, studying something on his computer. The borg grunted. "This guy's lucky to even be alive. Neuralware's fucking deep-fried." He looked at them. "Guessing something to do with you three. Maybe a little rumble over in The Flues?"
Ayako didn't say anything. V spoke up. "Locos attacked the Digitales, took over the spaceport. Juan Bartmossed the Las Palmeras subnet."
Ayako gave her a sharp look. "He's Militech," she hissed.
"If you thought I was some corpo-dog, you wouldn't have brought your friend here," Buster said to her. "Quit the tough-girl act. It's goddamn annoying." Turning back to his computer, he slotted a shard, typed something out. "So what happened?" he asked, without looking at them. "Other than an entire subnet going kaput."
Ayako hesitated. Then, "The Locos tried to upload Uncle Sam into the subnet's mainframe. Somehow, they got their hands on a spore-infected shard." She turned to Judy and V. "They were using all those leadheads as a distraction. While everyone was focused on repelling them, Locos netrunners slipped into the system. Juan caught 'em, and before they could finish uploading the AI, he trashed the entire subnet, DataKrash-style."
"Locos," repeated Buster, as if the name meant something to him. "Los Locos Modernos?" When they told him yes, he continued, "They got connections to Militech. NUSA was trying to use them some years ago as a bludgeon against Arasaka, before Biotechnica became the big dog around Phoenix. Hired their 'runners to invade the Arasaka subnet in an attempt to sabotage it, steal some useful data. The usual bullshit. It worked. They got something: intel on SoulKiller, which they implemented in their initial trials for Uncle Sam when they were switching it over from an IWOS. Except they weren't interested in a soulkilling AI. They were interested in the engram shit. Lundee, specifically, was interested in that engram shit. Biointerfaces. Neural matrixes. Some other shit regarding black clinic trials Arasaka was running out of Chiba and Tokyo."
"Do you remember anything from when they were using you as a guinea pig?" asked Ayako.
Buster shook his head. "Not much," he said, checking Juan's vitals, his multitool hand transforming into a small, whirring blade. He started cutting into the skin around Juan's toasted neuroport. "They wiped most of my memory regarding the program."
"Any idea where the Locos could've gotten the infected shard? Someone connected to the program, maybe."
"Possibly," said Buster.
"And what bothers me," continued Ayako, furrowing her brow, "is how they even got it. The AI's core is inside a data-fortress. And that data-fortress is beyond a bunch of black ICE. I've seen it. So how? The Locos 'runners are good, but not that fucking good."
"Isolate," said Buster. "What you saw is an isolate. As for how they got the shard? No idea."
"A nested subnet?" said Ayako, frowning.
Buster nodded, his multitool hand folding and straightening into a drill. He took one of the drill-bits from the jib arm and screwed it on. "More like a prison. I might not remember much from the program, but I remember some. When Uncle Sam started going sentient, they locked it away inside an isolate within Militech's Crystal Palace subnet. See, those highriders operate on a separate Net from ours, and it got spared from the DataKrash. Lot of corpos use it for illicit biz." He drilled into Juan's neuroport, removing the old socket and replacing it with an anodyne socket to stymie the bleeding while Buster assessed the 'runner's burns with a magnifier. "But that subnet got hit back in 2022 by the Russians during the Fourth Corporate War. Small orbital skirmish. So Militech salvaged what they could and migrated the project's data to a new subnet afterward, and resumed the whole fucking thing. Couldn't tell you where they migrated all that data, but it's probably still on the Crystal Palace's Net. Something like that would have to be. Laws are a little muddy in space, see. Like committing crimes at sea in the old days. International waters. Justice gets nebulous when it's international."
"If the original subnet got destroyed," said Ayako slowly, puzzling something out, "and it was hooked into the Crystal Palace's Net, then that means wherever Uncle Sam was being kept, it was in space."
"Yeah," said Buster, his hand morphing into a pair of forceps with a loud, mechanical whine. "I remember an orbital station. But it kinda goes fuzzy after that. I was just an old, retired soldier back then. Delta jet pilot for the last leg of my military career. Fought in the First Orbital War."
"Crazy to think you flyin' up there in your sixties," said V.
"Age don't mean shit anymore, kid. Not with all this tech. You know that," said Buster. "I was a chrome-junkie back then. Back then, we called it going silicon, and it was new, exciting tech, and everyone wanted to go under the fucking knife. Including me." He paused, removing something, a cooked resistor, from Juan's neck. "Never wanted to become a borg, though." He removed another piece of fried tech with the forceps, dropped it onto a steel tray with a dull clink. "That choice was made for me, not by me." His tone turned bitter. "My fault, I guess. I showed the brass I was very tolerant of chrome."
V said nothing. The whine of Buster's servos filled the silence.
Ayako spoke. "Castlebreaker. You know anything about that, maybe?"
"ICEbreaker. Real sophisticated, supposedly," said Buster. "It was commissioned by Arasaka."
"Commissioned?" Ayako sounded surprised.
"Yeah," said Buster. "Never got used, though. Got lost after some Nomads hit an Arasaka convoy somewhere near Albuquerque and klepped it off them. Was all over the news, years ago." He dropped more baked tech onto the tray. "Probably sitting in some fucking junk-heap somewhere." Buster paused, then said, "Your friend's gonna be out for a while. Maybe find a bar or something, have a few drinks. Can't focus with all your yammering, deckhead."
They left the clinic. Ayako cleaned herself up in the public bathroom of a local fast-food joint, a place called Taco Ted's, and they wandered around Three Parks and its rough, claustrophobic streets hunting for a bar to marinate in. "You know," said V, walking between Ayako and Judy, her hands deep in the pockets of her bulky leather jacket, "I been thinkin'. What if we could trace the infected shard to its source?"
"Whaddya mean?" asked Judy.
"The Myasniki collected buncha Locos bodies, right? We might be able to pull some data off their 'ware if it ain't too fucked, reconstruct the sporeware in an isolate. Figure out how it works, run a traceback on its code. Maybe flip off Uncle Sam 'fore we pull the plug on the isolate."
Ayako raised her eyebrows in surprise. "I never expected to hear something that clever from you, V."
"Callin' me stupid or somethin'?"
"No," said Ayako, "that's not what I'm saying. I dunno. You work the huscle routine so well, sometimes I forget you're a netrunner too."
They found The Way Down, a dive on a side-street. It was loud, grimy and cramped—everything V liked and wanted in a bar. A mulch of trampled cigarette butts carpeted the concrete floor, a permanent fug of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, neon and holo-ads burning through the thick, blue haze like bright rainbow ghosts. A row of arcade cabinets stood against one wall, a jukebox on another, playing a song V had heard before in Night City—something about staying at houses, the tuned vocals set to a snare-and-kick electropop bassline.
The three of them sat at the end of the bar, which was little more than a slab of battered chipboard cut into an L-shape and painted in black acrylic. The bartender, a huge woman who wouldn't have looked out of place among the Animals, got their beers, then turned to serve a guy with a bright blue mohawk.
"So," said Judy, once they were a couple of drinks in and feeling good, "Mochi. What's the story there?"
Ayako stopped, mid-sip of her beer, and frowned. "Mochi was a cat I'd found, back when I'd lived in the Chiba-11 slums. Were best chooms, me and that cat." She stared into her beer as if she were trying to fish out her next words. "Well," she continued, slowly and a little drunkenly, "I got picked on a lot by the neighborhood kids. I was the weird net-girl. The hikikomori." She paused, considering. "They weren't wrong, I guess. Did my best to avoid people, never talked." She took a protracted swallow of her beer, hiccupped. "Me and Mochi were best chooms, because that fucking cat was the only goddamn friend I had. Never judged me. Never thought I was weird. And that was preem, you know?" Another gulp of beer. A sniffle. "Then Goro, this kid used to pick on me, took my cat while I was jacked in at the local cybercafe. He and his chooms put Mochi in a bag and kicked her to death, then threw the bag into the canal. He gloated about killing my cat. Him and his fucking friends."
"Goro?" said V, the name ringing familiar. "Goro Takemura?"
Ayako nodded. "'Saka picked him and some kids up not too long after that. Never saw him again. Not until I did that contract with 'Saka, anyway. Fucker rose through the ranks to become Saburo's personal bodyguard." She looked at V. "He didn't even remember me, V. He killed my fucking cat, tormented me, and didn't even remember 'cause I mattered so goddamn little to him."
"If it makes you feel better," said V, squeezing Ayako's arm, "Takemura's dead. Killed himself when that shit went down with 'Saka in Night City. I still got the text if y'wanna see it. Told me to burn in hell." She shot the text over to Ayako on an encrypted neurolink, saw the laser-dots in her oculars morph into throbbers as she accepted the data-transfer.
Once the download had finished, which had only taken a few milliseconds, the throbbers became pupils again, and Ayako grinned. "Good, fucking motherfucker," she muttered, knocking back the rest of her beer and flagging down the bartender for another. "I hope it fucking hurt." She said something else in Japanese, but it was too quick for V's auto-translator to pick up.
"Granted," said V, "he did save me from a landfill. But fuck cat-killers, man."
"Landfill?"
V told Ayako the story, the whole story, about Dex and the Konpeki job, over more beers, and some shots of whiskey. "Bet y'didn't hear half that shit on the Net, or in your dataflows," she said, pleasantly drunk now.
"Dex was a piece of shit," said Ayako. "I'm glad he got shot." She slung her arms across hers and Judy's shoulders. "And I'm glad that the one good thing Goro Takemura ever chose to do, V, was pull you outta a landfill."