Outside Fabrika, like subwoofed thunder, she heard the rumble of two, maybe three AVs. Arasaka, she assumed, on their way to storm the castle. V would have jacked into the Fabrika BBS, since she doubted the Myasniki were sophisticated enough for a comsnet architecture, and listened in on the situation; but then she imagined Uncle Sam whispering jingoism into her ear, subliminals keying her to attack, to attack for president and for country, and for the lucrative military industrial-complex.
No thanks, she thought. Bad enough the elites were always playing power-games with the plebs. Last thing V wanted to do was to aid and abet an AI, one that was programmed to predict, calculate, optimize, and generate effective social algorithms, in those same power-games. With elites, they were still people, and you could kill people. But an AI wasn't something you could gun down. Killing an AI was like trying to murder software. Sure, you could kill the program, rewrite the software and its code; but that software's source code would still exist somewhere in its original form, in some corpo-repository, waiting for someone else to fork it.
Judy came out from behind an opaque sheet of blood-spattered plastic. "Found somethin' you can use," she said, handing V a sticky black garbage bag.
V took the bag. "Thanks, babe."
Judy disappeared behind the plastic again, into what had once served as the apartment's kitchen. V stuffed Sergei into the bag and tied it off, then followed Judy. The rust-flecked sink gurgled like a queasy stomach, and the spigot rattled, spewed a deluge of opaque, grayish-brown water. "This place," said Judy, making a face, washing her hands with a crusty, off-white sliver of soap, "is the fuckin' pits. I seen Northside squats nicer than this shithole."
"Shoulda seen the place I was squattin' in, down in Dogtown," said V, and cleaned her hands in the water with the soap. The water had an unpleasant odor, like old rust and mildew. "Reminds me of that dump, this place," she added, drying her hands with a gently soiled microfiber rag. V ducked past the plastic tacked over the kitchenette's doorway, heaved up the bag and slung it over her shoulder. Sergei was heavy; felt like she was toting around half a car transmission.
Call Incoming flashed over her vision. Ayako's render appeared, in a cage of cold nonspace. "Heya, Val. I'm jacked into the mainframe," she said. "Got us a nice, cozy encrypted neurolink, courtesy of Mochi's comms-protocol. One sec." She went quiet for a moment, ran some kind of command in her call-window. A few seconds later, Judy came in on a splice, her window opposite Ayako's. Then both windows vanished, and Ayako said, "Droppin' things down to audio, so you don't have a buncha renders cluttering your HUD, Val. Need to keep everything to skull-chatter. 'Sakas are crawling all over Fabrika, and there's a Militech AV en route."
"I thought Militech was tryin' to avoid war with 'Saka," said V. "That was what Meredith said."
"Either your Militech choomba lied to you, someone pulled some shit behind her back, or Sam's vector is up to some scop again." Ayako paused, then asked, "You get Sergei?"
"In a bag," said V. "Right here. His neuralware's intact, port included."
"Thank Christ," said Ayako. She sounded distracted, as if she were concentrating very hard on some particular task. "Here," she said at length. "Found this in the subnet. Map. Reconfigured it into an ARM, an augmented reality map. Worked out a route should let you bypass most of the 'Sakas." She sent over the file, and V opened it, ran the executable.
The ARM's bright digital overlay slid into existence from invisible cardinal points, like the time-lapsed bloom of a virtual flower. A beam of red dotted lines directed her toward the door, highlighting as though it were framed in red neon. "Gonna be quiet for a bit," Ayako informed them. "Needa focus now. Run into any snags, Mochi's here to help. The joys of being an AI, able to split yourself off into dedicated subroutines."
V followed the dotted line. An intrusive thought, something about signing her name on the dotted line of the death certificate that was their present situation, occurred to her. They had two megacorpos converging on their position. Felt like they, her and Judy, were caught between two tectonic plates slewing toward each other, and V was bracing herself for the crash-collision, the doomsday earthquake that would shake the world down.
Maybe that was the apocalypse the corpos were hoarding their money for, V idly considered, following the line out of the apartment, down the hallway. Investment capital for a new future, one they build from the ground-up. Or maybe it was a barrow thing, treasures those kings and queens could carry with them into the afterlife.
Oiwa was still gone, out like a light, in the hallway. V imagined microscopic ripperdocs inside her: buzzing clouds of countless cell-sized Viktors and Busters repairing the wires and integrated circuits that constituted the onryō's nervous system with the steady, ruthless precision of hornets reconstructing a damaged hive. If V jacked into Oiwa's neural port right now, the diags off her biomon-analog—because V couldn't imagine her having enough meat to warrant an actual biomon—would probably say the onryō was executing a full reboot sequence. And that was fine, thought V, because it meant the cyberninja would be rebooting for a while, and she and Judy would be long gone by the time her sensorium came back online.
The orientation of the ARM changed, rearranging its angles and geometry to accommodate V's shifting position in realspace. V stumbled and slid over blood-slick propylene and severed limbs, the casualties of Oiwa's perfectly calibrated brutality, following the dotted line into an apartment on her left.
Someone had cranked the air-conditioning up in here. The walls of the adjoining apartment had been sledgehammered out, cadavers wrapped in black plastic garbage bags hanging along the walls on makeshift tracks, like slabs of so much factory-meat. Coolers were stacked like foam ziggurats, like the vast, pyramidal corporate dataforts of cyberspace, each one tagged with a different colored spray-paint—some kind of grading system, V assumed.
The dotted line directed her and Judy to a door at the back of the apartment, into a collapsed bathroom, and pointed them down. Judy spoke over the neurowire, her oculars glowing with blue television-light, mouth unmoving. "We really just gonna climb through a hole in the floor?"
V nodded, shifting the bag full of Sergei slung over her shoulder. "Damn right," she replied, and swung down through the hole, slowly and one-handedly monkeying down a lattice of old, rusty pipes, the texture rough and unpleasant against her palms, and rubber hoses that had, at one point, connected into the building's water reservoir, pumped it up into the apartments.
It wasn't a far drop into the apartment below, maybe twenty feet; the floors between the rooms were thick concrete, hollowed out to accommodate maintenance accesses and Fabrika's utility systems, which, in several places, seemed to have been jury-rigged, added onto, over the years.
She set the bag down, raising her arms. "Go ahead," she told Judy, over the neurowire. "Jump down, I gotcha."
Judy, who wasn't as proficient at climbing, carefully descended the lattice, then let go. V caught her around the waist, set her down on her feet. "Thanks, babe," she said without speaking, and V smiled, slung the bag over her shoulder again.
As the map guided them out of the apartment, this one half-collapsed, they found themselves standing in front of a nineteenth story window. Beyond the greasy, fly-specked slab of rain-splattered Lexan, V observed a Militech AV descending. She and Judy ducked as its floodlight snapped on, washing the hallway in stark white surgical light, then swung away, beaming down through the mist. V heard the rattle of machine guns as the Militech gunners opened fire on the yard below, but she couldn't see the situation on the ground through the cloudburst and the rain-scattered glare of the floodlight.
"Mochi," she said, over the neuro, "what's the sitch?"
Mochi's little cat voice meowed over Ayako's link. "Militech AV is landing," the AI told them. "Myasniki and Arasaka are already fighting on the ground. Heavy losses on the Scav side. Biotechnica comsnet chatter suggests they're dispatching an intermediary force."
"Biotechnica's got fuckin' paramilitary, Mochi? I thought they contracted out to Militech for security."
"They're testing company paramilitary here in Phoenix," said Mochi. "Peacekeeping force to maintain the company's neutrality in inter-corporate conflicts."
"Always how it starts out," said Judy bitterly, on the neuro. "S'just 'nother way to say 'soldier'."
"Yes, that's true, Judy-san," agreed Mochi. "And this situation with Arasaka and Militech presents a ripe opportunity for Biotechnica to test their paramilitary capabilities."
"And how tight they can squeeze 'fore Phoenix gets uncomfortable." V stood up, glanced out the window—still couldn't see anything beyond the sheets of rain—and, satisfied they were for go, resumed their escape from the megabuilding.
"Up ahead," said Mochi, "is the elevator shaft. There's a maintenance ladder you and Judy-san can climb down."
"Can't get the elevator online, Mochi?"
"No, V-san. Power has been cut to it."
"Greaaaaaat."
The doors to the shaft stood slightly ajar, inert on their induction strip. The dotted line told them to descend. V stuck her head into the humid darkness beyond the doors and looked down. It stank of piss and rust. Something brushed her cheek—a dangling cable, the end tufted with frayed steel filament. The ladder looked makeshift: steel rungs soldered to stained concrete, painted in a peeling layer of yellow latex and broken at ten-foot intervals by landings cobbled out of sheet metal and plywood.
"V-san, Arasaka soldiers are converging on your position!"
She heard carbon-fiber boots thudding on the propylene carpet, the clatter of gear and guns. V saw them, Arasaka spec-ops in ceramic gusoku plate, the clusters of red LED glittering on their kabutos like the ruby eyes of spiders. Probably a goods-recovery team on their way to retrieve Oiwa, she decided. One of them shouted at them in Japanese.
The 'Sakas opened fire, and she and Judy swung themselves onto the ladder, scrambling down the rungs into stinking darkness.