V brushed her teeth in the apartment's tiny bathroom, studying her reflection in the spotty mirror: so pale she practically shimmered in the incandescence, the black roots of her dyed-red hair beginning to show.

She spat foamy toothpaste into the sink, rinsed the rest out with ice-cold, metallic-tasting water, then padded out into the hallway. Panam had fallen asleep on their couch halfway through a documentary about Jinja, a Shinto Radicals orbital colony built out of an abandoned Chinese satdock, the remote still in her hand. V turned the TV off, patted Panam's sun-matted locks as she passed her to enter the kitchen, and fixed herself a mug of tea.

Judy was still up when V slipped into their bedroom, reading a book on physiology by the aquarium-light of the jellyfish lamp. V slid into the bed, sipping her mug of lavender tea. "New book?" she asked.

"Buster's lendin' it to me," replied Judy, smiling. There were several fluorescent slips of paper stuck to the pages: notes she'd been taking on the various functions of the human body. "Said to me, 'You wanna be a ripperdoc? Cute. Read this'. Gave me a couple other books to read. Shards, too. 'Bout anatomy and stuff." Her big, brown eyes glittered impishly as she added, "Not that I need lessons in your anatomy, babe."

V grinned, gave her a playful shove. She finished her tea, set the empty mug down on their bedside table. "Y'don't gotta off-switch, do ya?" she teased, crawling under the covers.

"Nope," said Judy, and she marked off her place in the book, closed it. She studied V for a moment, then asked, "Y'okay, Valerie? Kinda heavy, that shit Goto dumped on ya."

"Just… guess I'm still processin' it," said V, looking at her. "Figured the Konpeki dweller just, I dunno, managed to shake off the Flathead, get T-Bug." She folded her arms behind her head, watching the wall, the languid undersea-glow of the lamp floating the shadows of its jellyfish on a gentle, vertical current. "But no, turns out T-Bug got flatlined by a netrunnin' hit-team, one Goto was part of."

Judy lay on her side, facing V. She said, "They had a job."

"I guess," said V, and sighed.

"Konpeki was part of the 'Saka net, Valerie. She knew the risks," said Judy, watching her, her black-tipped fingers automatically tracing the pale silver capillaries of V's subdermal microcircuitry. "And wasn't like Goto took pleasure in it. Sounded sorry, like he wished it coulda been any other way."

"I know," said V. "Guess s'just harder to swallow when y'know the choom did the killin'."

"Funny comin' from a Heywood girl," said Judy. She grinned, straddling V's legs in one smooth motion, her knees deep in the temperfoam. She teased off her sports-bra, freeing her breasts. "Figured you ain't known a choom who ain't killed someone." Taking V's hand, Judy guided it to her breast, the one with the red spiderweb tattoo, and V squeezed automatically, the hard, dark point of Judy's nipple pressing into her palm. "Myself included. Woodman. But," continued Judy, still grinning, peeling V out of her pajamas with the casualness of someone opening a package, "lemme take your mind off things, calabacita." She hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her panties, slid them down, her labia pink and wet. "I'm fuckin' horny."

They licked and rode each other deep into the night, surfing the lurching, spasmodic waves of multiple orgasms into sleep-crash and dreams.

V dreamed about Gotoda, a bright pixelated ghost swimming through the data-sea of the NUSA subnet. Data that slowly began to accrete, resolving into a face of crude polygonal planes that gradually took on the smooth texture-map of sampled alabaster. Uncle Sam's mouth warped and distended as it opened and swallowed Gotoda whole, the animation playing out in a sequence of jerky frames, the low-poly Melpomene leering against the neuroelectric void of cyberspace, its wireframe bones shifting, vertices rearranging themselves into the suggestion of Donald Lundee's armature.

She woke to the buzz of her neurowire, sweating, her heart jackhammering in her chest. Fumbling through her synaptic commands, V opened the call, Meredith frowning at her from the virtual cage of her call-window. "Meet me in Moretti Park," she told her, the curtness in her voice blunted by exhaustion. "It's a hydroponic park by the Pisano, over in Gijutsu."

V opened her mouth to ask details, but Meredith's window executed its sign-off animation before she could, and she was gone. "Fuckin' suits."

Dry sunlight filtered through the slats of their blinds, pinstriping their bed. Judy was curled on her side, rolled up in stolen blankets, her back to V.

That dream had been something else, she thought, rubbing the sleep-crust from her eyes. Vivid. Uncomfortably vivid. V shook Judy, who mumbled sleepily and pulled the pillow over her head. "Jude," she said, and shook her again, "c'mon, baby. Up. Gotta meet Meredith."

Judy roused like someone returning from the dead, her hair sticking up at odd, stiff angles, like tufts of colorful aluminum wires. She sat up, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms. Her nipples were hard, pink studs in the cold air, her pale skin stippled with goosebumps. "Mierda, you crank up the air-conditionin' or somethin'? My tits could cut diamonds right now." She swaddled herself in the blanket and slipped out of the bed, shuffling over to the thermostat to crank it down, seemingly amused by the anachronism of the act.

V wasn't cold; she had thermoregulators installed to shunt the excess heat off her hardware, so her body ran warmer than others. "I did," she confessed. "Right 'fore we went to sleep."

"All that chrome, babe," said Judy, smiling. Still burritoed in the blanket, she shuffled off toward the shower, and V went with her.

After a quickie, they dressed and made their way into the living-room. Panam was just stepping into their apartment, carrying a bag of food and a cardboard tray of coffees. Her clothes were clean. "About time you both woke up," she said, setting the bag and tray on the glass-topped coffee-table.

"Time is it 'zactly?" asked V.

"Seven," replied Panam. "Finished some errands, did my laundry, then got us coffee and breakfast burritos from Don Paco's. Great place."

"What time you get up?" asked Judy.

"Five," said Panam.

"I hate that you're a mornin' person," chuckled V, helping herself to a coffee, a smiling cartoon vaquero printed on the foam cup, and a large, paper-wrapped egg and chorizo burrito. "Thanks, Pan. 'Preciate the food."

"No problem. You both have nothing but cold takeout in your fridge." She sat down on the couch, regarding them mildly. "Meeting with that suit?"

V nodded, unwrapping the burrito and taking a huge bite. She chewed; the chorizo was good, the right level of spiciness, and the eggs were soft, buttery, and spiked with jalapeño. The cheese burnt the roof of her mouth. "Yep," she said, tonguing the raw spot on the top of her mouth. "Meetin' her in Moretti Park. Y'know it?"

"Hydroponic park owned by Biotechnica," said Panam, starting on her own burrito of eggs and machaca. "Like all of them in Phoenix. Think that one is a rainforest biome. Corpo place, you know? Where they do their meditative yoga or whatever." She popped the lid off her cup, the rich aroma of Mexican cinnamon wafting up from it, and sipped her coffee carefully.

V finished her burrito in three huge bites, washed it down with her café con leche. "Fun." She yawned, then said, "Better get goin' 'fore Meredith loses her shit. Stick 'round in the apartment long as y'wanna, Pan."

"Going to take you up on that offer," said Panam, grinning. "Could use the break from sleeping in a tent. And from Mitch and Cassidy clanging around on the Basilisk at all hours." V handed Panam the spare key, and she looked at it as though it were a piece of alien technology. "Well, shit," said Panam, "this place has mechanical locks?"

"Yup," said V. "Buildin' is fuckin' ancient. Ayako keeps all the nice tech in her apartment."

She and Judy took the bike, and it did run as good as it looked, gliding smoothly over the sun-cooked Phoenix asphalt, hot enough you could fry eggs on it if you wanted to. Air rolled over them as though the Sonoran were mouth-breathing hot halitosis on them, and V wove between cars, bright sunlight glinting off their chassis. She smoothly swung the bike onto the deceleration ramp into Little Japan, coasting down.

V banked left and rode the asphalt veins into the beating heart of Gijutsu, scattering a pack of Gomi Boys who'd gathered in front of a pachinko parlor to flex their rides in an impromptu car-meet.

Merging into the Pisano Roundabout, V hung right until she found her street, riding past neon shopfronts, inert in the sizzling glare of daylight, and found Moretti Park on a side-street. It was a huge hydroponic complex of steel lattices and honeycombed glass, in it a vast biome of cloned rainforest flora. It looked less like a park, V decided, and more like some expo showcase: an elaborate tank containing the reconstituted microcosm of Amazonia.

She parked the bike and engaged the anti-theft mechanism. Helmets tucked in the crooks of their arms, V and Judy stepped through the automatic doors, the glass panels trimmed in thick rubber gaskets to preserve the climate differential.

The air was humid and wet inside Moretti Park. A hologram, its streamlined beauty a bland distillation of the decade's leading media faces, ghosted into existence; V realized the glass walkway here was, in fact, a holotrack, so the hologram could move in real-time with the park's guests. The hologram introduced itself as ALI, the Assisted Learning Interface it clarified, before it launched into a precis about Franco Moretti, some big suit in Biotechnica, and his love for the rainforest—how his team had been working tirelessly to revive Amazonian flora and fauna extinguished by illegal logging operations financed by the Mexican Cartels. Overhead, cloned parrots flew like colorful darts between the acai palms and huimbas, and insects buzzed noisily in huge bushes of orchids and heliconias. Somewhere, a monkey trilled and whooped. "Biotechnica cloned a family of capuchins," ALI informed them. "The company introduced them to the park a week ago." Then the hologram began to explain the taxonomy of capuchins in its manicured, encyclopedic tone, and she and Judy departed down the holowalk, and ALI, likely registering their resounding disinterest in assisted learning, didn't follow them.

They found Meredith at a kiosk manned by a tired-looking Hispanic woman in a Biotechnica coverall. The suit was sipping coffee from a foam cup, and she said to them, "Say it's authentic coffee from Brazil. My ass, which is eighty percent polysaccharide-collagen compound grown in a dermal clinic vat, is more authentic than this coffee." Meredith was wearing a black corpo-dress, different from the one she'd worn the day V had met with her to discuss Ayako, and white pumps. She looked at Judy. "Why the fuck is the Mox here?"

"I ain't Mox anymore, fuck off."

"Uh-huh," said Meredith, unimpressed. She sipped her coffee, gestured for them to follow her. "Either of you want any of this shit coffee before we get down to business?"

"Nah," said V, "we had breakfast."

"Good. I have to be at the office soon, anyway. Sooner we talk, the better."

They found a bench beside an infokiosk describing the plants in the immediate area, and a S.C.S.M selling tropical-flavored NiCola and fruit-paste. "So," said V, and sat down on the bench, "you had nothin' to do with what went down at Fabrika?"

"No, dumbass. I already said that," said Meredith, looking at her. "Someone is setting me up. I don't know who, but I think I know why."

"And why's that?" asked Judy, from beside V.

"The company needs a patsy, or likelier, someone wants my job," said Meredith, as though that should have been obvious. She rubbed the space between her eyes, pacing slowly, her high-heels ticking against the holowalk. "Look," she said, and looked at them, "when your girl," and she was talking to Judy now, "met with me in Night City, I was a senior operations manager in Internal Investigations. Now I'm in charge of Government Relations, the whole fucking enchilada. That was thanks for rooting out Gilchrist, the mole who'd gotten our convoy hi-jacked by Maelstrom." She paused. "Now," she continued, looking increasingly more distressed, her coiffed corpo-neatness unraveling at the seams, "I'm on the fucking chopping block. Biotechnica contacted Militech. My employer thinks I instigated that shit-show at Fabrika as some kind of provocation." She looked at them, almost pleadingly. "But I had nothing to do with it," she said, as though she were asserting her innocence to some jury convinced of her guilt. "I was only here to retrieve Kunoichi—Ayako Yoshida—and get her on NUSA's payroll. I was told to do it with absolutely no bloodshed, and I was fine with that. I wasn't interested in picking a fight with Arasaka."

"So whaddya want from me, Meredith?" asked V. "You tellin' me this, I can't do anythin' for you. Corpo-infightin' ain't exactly my territory."

"I want you to find out who did it," said Meredith, pointing at her. "And I'll pay you well for the trouble. I'll even throw in a bonus to hire your services as a bodyguard."

"Look, Meredith, I can look into it for you, sure, if you're willin' to put out the eddies. But a bodyguard? I got things t'do. I'm a Nomad. I can't follow you 'round everywhere, at all hours."

"Wouldn't be all hours—fuck no, I like my privacy, and you'd drive me fucking nuts—but when and if I ask. I'll pay you right on the spot, no fuss."

"First you want me t'convince Ayako to join NUSA and the FIA, now y'wanna hire me as a PI and bodyguard. Why not get a security team? Y'got the eddies."

"Who contracts out most security jobs?"

"Milit—oh."

"Exactly," said Meredith. "Besides," she continued, "you're the best merc around. You have—or you did before you changed your fucking identity—an established reputation. You're the best eddies can buy short of Adam Smasher, but he's dead and was Arasaka's lapdog anyway."

"Look," said V, "fine. If you're willin' t'pay, I need the scratch anyhow." And she did need the money; the eddies from Dean's BD job were starting to run thin, and short of asking Ayako or Judy for money, which V would never do, she would have needed to pick up another gig or two anyway to pad out her account. "But don't go involvin' me in corpo-shit, okay? I don't wanna get more involved with Militech than I already am by doin' you this solid."

"Thank you, V," said Meredith, and she sounded as if she genuinely meant that. Then she composed herself, her panic and bad nerves crystallizing into smooth, unperturbed ice. "Anyway," she said, "whether you like it or not, you're involved with Militech. You're after Uncle Sam."

"And somethin' has been buggin' me 'bout that," said V. "Militech. If they know 'bout the AI, where t'find its access-point, why ain't they done anythin' to get it? Somethin' tells me company brass ain't too concerned 'bout it bein' a dangerous weapon, like y'said." She paused, absently studying the omamori on her moto-helmet. "People always think they can do better than the people came before 'em, especially when those people got money. Treat money like an exorcism. Figure if things go tits-up, they can just throw money at the problem like it's holy water, and that'll banish the monster."

There was a long, uncomfortable pause, like someone had just told a rude joke whose punchline nobody found funny. Meredith, after a slow sip of her coffee, said, "Nobody actually knows where it is. I," and she heaved a sigh, shook her head, "I lied to you, okay? I was trying to get you on our side, to talk to Yoshida on our behalf." She paused, pacing back and forth in front of them. "All the data on the project was lost during the Fourth Corporate War. Russians launched an orbital attack on several of our orbital stations and trashed our hardware beyond repair." She lit an expensive-looking cigarette, slender and with a carbon filter. "But the real blow came from an Arasaka netrunning team. They infiltrated the project's subnet and infected it with a virus, and what Militech managed to salvage was moved and kept very hush-hush by certain members of the company. A cult, you could say, spearheaded by Lundee."

"A cult?" said V, thinking back to all those things she'd read on the Net about elites engaging in sex-cults and devil-worship, and ritualistic baby-eating or whatever.

"Lundee was obsessed with artificial intelligence," said Meredith. "I was fresh in the company when he was in charge. But the guy talked non-stop about transcendental humans, the marriage of AI and flesh, and all this other crazy shit." She took a long drag off the cigarette and blew a cloud of fragrant smoke. "Kept saying Arasaka was the thing preventing him from being humanity's Prometheus, from handing over the fire of evolution or whatever to the masses. That Arasaka was the reason NUSA couldn't lead humanity to where it needed to go. You would've never known the asshole was crazy from the news-feeds, but he was." She sucked down another lungful of smoke, then expelled it and said, "Rumors were that Arasaka was attempting to do something similar, this AI and human thing, and that the reason they attacked the subnet at all was because it contained data stolen from them." Meredith shrugged. "Just things I heard, back when I was Internal Investigations. I never pried much. Prying is dangerous in any corporation."

They left Moretti with Meredith and walked her to her car, this one a new rental. As the car pulled off, V put the pieces together in her head and said, "Story's startin' to come together." She looked at Judy, expounding, "Black clinic trials, under Arasaka's direction, fine-tuned this 'transcendental human' idea through experimentation on people like Gotoda and Ayako—netrunning virtuosos, basically. Militech stole the data, built the Uncle Sam project as something more war-functional, and Arasaka tried to steal it back; but the AI was sentient by then, wiped them out. Lundee's weird transcendental human corpo-cult took the data to push it back in its intended direction, then locked it up in that isolate aboard the Crystal Palace when they realized Sam had become self-aware—lured those netrunners into the subnet on its own accord, with real malice."

Judy shook her head. "Jesus," she said, "this is a lot more fucked-up than we thought."

"Somethin' to discuss with Ayako after we finish with her Net BD. Among other things."