A loud knock (loud enough she'd heard it all the way in hers and Judy's bedroom) at the front door roused V from her sleep. She bolted upright, snagged her Malorian from the cubby-hole above her head, and crawled out from the tangle of sheets, her photochromic compensators adjusting the ambient luminosity so she could see without stubbing her toe.

Judy was sleeping on her side, the micropore bandage slightly darker than her paleness, a thin rill of drool trickling out of the corner of her mouth. She stirred with a snort, opening her eyes. "Babe?" she questioned, groggily watching V from the bed. "Somethin' wrong?"

"You sleep, baby," said V, stroking Judy's head. She stood up, naked and shivering in the air-conditioning, her nipples hard pink points. She pulled on a pair of cotton shorts, and one of Judy's T-shirts, the one with the ukiyo-e ningyo printed on it. "Just gotta visitor. Gonna talk to 'em."

Judy rubbed her eyes. "What if it's Oiwa?"

"If it was Oiwa, the door'd be kicked down by now, Jude."

"Good point."

V padded out of their bedroom, opened the door to their apartment. Meredith and Ayako were standing there. "Fuck're you two doin' here? It's late."

"I got your voicemail," said Meredith, still dressed in the sweatpants and shirt she'd presumably gone to bed in. "I didn't want to talk over the wire. Things have been… weird."

"I let her in," said Ayako, and there was something different about her; she seemed disconcerted, a little distant. V chalked it up to the situation with Juan; that kind of thing would weigh heavy on anyone. "Seemed important, if she's comin' around this late in her pajamas."

Meredith walked in, and Ayako stood there in the doorway, looking like someone who wanted someone else to ask her if she was okay. "Y'wanna come in, Ayako?" asked V softly.

Ayako nodded, folding her arms across her chest and stepping inside. Judy shuffled out into the living-room, snugged up in the duvet, and flicked the lights on. "Gotta be bad if Captain Corpo's swingin' by at this hour," said Judy, her eyes tracking Meredith as she crossed the room to their kitchen and helped herself to the beer in their fridge.

"No shit," said Meredith, levering off the bottle-cap. "Just let me drink first before we get into it." She sat down at the table, lit a smoke, and knocked back her beer with all the elegance of a long-haul trucker.

V noticed Ayako edging toward the sliding doors that led out onto the balcony. She said, "Meet you out there in a sec."

It was a warm, breezy night. A nice night. V smelled fried, sweet things in the air, and she watched the neon, watched the forever-scroll of the ad-pillars. Patiently waiting for Ayako to talk, because she could sense that Ayako wanted, very badly, to talk. "I looked at that BD," said Ayako finally, and leaned on the handrail. "Locos used my exploit to break into the subnet. A VAP. That anomaly you marked, the one in the data-jungle? That was it."

"How'd they manage that?" asked V, leaning sideways on the handrail, looking at her. "Thought your VAP led into that old NUSA subnet."

"Ain't the VAP itself," said Ayako. "They knew how I did it, Val. My own method, my trick."

"Buster, he mentioned that subnet," said V. "Back when he was patchin' up Jude. Think maybe he told 'em? Know Militech used t'make deals with the Locos."

"Buster ain't a deckhead," said Ayako. "Guy don't know the first thing 'bout netrunnin'. Wouldn't know what to look for, or how it even worked. No, it wasn't him."

"He also mentioned somethin' 'bout a biointerface," said V carefully, now that they were on the subject of Buster. "Mean anythin' to you?"

"Yeah," said Ayako, her voice uncharacteristically soft, small. She sounded like a scared kid. "Saw some… things. In Oiwa's code. Before my connection got cut. She's one of those. A biointerface."

"You know if she's gone full-blown AI yet?"

"She is an AI, Val," said Ayako, turning toward her, the light of a Fuji Cigarettes holo-advertisement delineating the sharp cut of her cheek in a hairline of blue neon. "It's there, inside her. Her engram went through the same metamorphosis as Alt Cunningham's. Her data-complexity…."

"How is that possible?" asked V. "How can a fuckin' AI exist in her hardware without blowin' it to shit?"

"Compression," said Ayako. "Somehow, Arasaka managed to compress the AI's data. If I were to guess? Through partitioning. Basically, just another word for when an AI divides itself into subroutines. You saw it with Delamain, Mochi. Dunno for sure yet, but how I think they might've done it was by taking certain dedicated subroutines and compressin' them into a compact data-structure, leaving the unimportant bits, the fat, on a neural matrix somewhere."

"So like a demon," said V.

"But more advanced," said Ayako. She paused, considering something. Then, "Like chihuahuas. Despite bein' small, they're still descended from wolves like every other dog. Get what I'm tryin' to say?"

"You think 'Saka basically selectively 'bred' traits from some larger, more complex AI?"

"Somethin' like that," said Ayako. "Dogs are all dog-intelligent, just as all AIs are AI-intelligent. Meanin', it's still as dangerous as any AI despite its smaller size."

"She one of those 'Transcendental Humans' Buster and Meredith mentioned?"

"Not exactly, no," said Ayako. "Yes in the sense she's still, surprisingly, got enough 'ganic tissue to be considered human. But there ain't anythin' human 'bout her. She thinks like an AI because she is an AI. Programmed to kill, specifically."

An idea suddenly occurred to her, and V said, "Y'think she could've been modified from Soulkiller?"

"It's possible," said Ayako. "'Saka did a lot of experiments with Soulkiller before I came around. Tried a buncha different things with it. So parts of its code could've found its way into the onryō engrams."

"Y'dunno?" asked V.

Ayako shook her head. "I was tasked to transpile its source code, but that version of Soulkiller had already been tweaked to hell by other people." She stared off into the distance, her insets reflecting the cold blue mountain hologram logo of Fuji Cigarettes. "Can't help but feel Las Digitales—what happened to 'em, what's happenin' to Juan—is my fault. All my fuckin' around in the Net led to this. But I'm gonna make it right, once I reach Uncle Sam."

"None of this is your fault, Ayako," said V. "All of this," and she gestured around them, at the world and all of the shit within it, "is the fault of the corporations, of a fuckin' AI they made 'cause some old fuckers couldn't accept their humanity and the limitations comes with it." She took a cigarette from the pack she'd left on her plastic porch-table, let Ayako light it with a thin slab of Sarome steel. "But ain't that the same old song anyway?" she said, and looked sidelong at Ayako, blowing smoke toward the breeze, watching it ferry it away toward the skyline. "Old, rich motherfuckers got so much money that normal kicks just don't do it for 'em anymore, so they keep chasin' better highs. And what better high is there than bein' a god?" V shook her head. "Makes y'wonder what they'd do if they ever succeeded. I mean, where do y'go from godhood? It don't get no more up than that."

"Interplanetary conqueror-god?" joked Ayako.

"Don't give 'em any ideas," said V, chuckling. She finished her cigarette and flicked it off the balcony. "Anyway," she said, "better get in there, see what Meredith wants. C'mon."

Meredith was still sitting at their kitchen table, finishing off her second beer and third cigarette. "Sorry I've been dodging your calls," said Meredith, as Judy discreetly cracked open the sliding door to vent the cigarette smoke out of their apartment. "Been… getting these weird messages lately. On the holo. No idea who they're from."

"What kinda calls?" asked V, and sat down across from her, elbows on the scratched laminate tabletop.

"Threats," said Meredith. "Don't want me interfering with this Arasaka-Militech-Biotechnica shitshow. Want me to let it ride, or else. "

V frowned. "You're tryin' to stop it?"

"Of course I'm trying to fucking stop it," said Meredith. "I'm in charge of Government Relations, V. It's my job to avoid fucking catastrophes. A Fifth Corporate War benefits exactly no one." She finished her cigarette and dropped it into the ash-tray, shaped like a fish and painted in bright tropical pinks and greens. "Sure, in the short-term, Militech and their defense contractors make a lot of fucking eddies. But in the long-term? Money won't mean shit in a post-nuclear world. And make no mistake, that's exactly what a Fifth Corporate War would bring. We've done the projections, the simulations. All roads lead to a giant fucking mushroom cloud."

"We might be able to stop it," said V, sensing an opportunity. "But we're gonna need your credentials to get past the Biotechnica perimeter."

"Have you been fucking listening?" asked Meredith. "Someone's threatening my life, V. I need you here, in Phoenix."

V had been reluctant to tell Meredith much of anything, but she was running out of options. So, in careful omissions, V told her about Uncle Sam, how it was likely utilizing a vector to manipulate the corporations into a war. "We dunno who or what this vector is, but the Technomancers, they can get us answers." She didn't want to mention that the AI was somewhere in the Crystal Palace; desperate people, especially when those desperate people were desperate corpo-suits, tended to be unpredictable and rash—and the last thing V wanted was Militech and the NUSA reclaiming the AI and using it against their enemies. And knowing what she knew about President Myers, V knew that woman wouldn't hesitate to use Sam if she thought the AI could give the NUSA an advantage. After all, she'd been the same woman who'd used Songbird, despite the physical and mental toll it had been taking on her, as a bludgeon against the Blackwall.

It also made her wonder what the FIA's real intentions were toward Ayako. Nothing good, V knew, that much was clear; there was something markedly sinister in their interest, knowing what she knew now about Uncle Sam, the Black Clinic Trials, Lundee and his Transcendentalist ideology. How it all tied together, how it had all just been one long Darwinist sequence working toward a different kind of artificial intelligence: a chimera of human flaws grafted to an AI with no concept of human flaws, only of optimums and suboptimums.

Meredith heaved a sigh. "Fine," she said, after a moment, "I'll call BPS—that's Biotechnica Perimeter Security, in case you were wondering." She studied V for a moment as though she were trying to identify her in a line-up. Then, "Don't know how the Technomancers are going to help me with my problem, but you seem convinced enough that you're willing to go out into the Trash Pan to meet them. So I'll take the gamble—I don't really have any other choice."

"Gotta place y'can lay low in the meantime?" asked V.

Meredith nodded. "Yes, I think so. But I want you to stay in touch. Are we clear?"

"As crystal," said V, nodding. "Y'wanna crash here for tonight?"

Meredith made a face. "In this dump? Fuck no." She looked at Ayako. "But while I'm here, I want to talk to you, Yoshida."

"I'm not joinin' the FIA," said Ayako, the laser dots fixing on Meredith. "Not until I got no other choice."

"So V really didn't try to convince you."

"No," said Ayako, "she didn't." She turned, pacing in front of the sliding doors, staring out through the glass. "But I'll go if things don't work out." Ayako looked at Meredith, then said, "What Myers wants with me, it's nothin' good. Look at how she did So Mi. And I know she wants me doin' exactly what she had So Mi doin': divin' behind the Blackwall. I ain't gonna—not for NUSA, not for any corp. There's shit in cyberspace you and your corporat chooms ain't got the faintest inkling of. Lovecraft, he wasn't too far off in his stories. 'Cept these Elder Gods ain't sleepin' in Antarctica or under the sea; they're beyond the Blackwall, lurkin', waitin'."

Meredith laughed. "What, there a fucking digital Cthulu living in some Ghost Town called R'lyeh?"

"Not too far off," said Ayako, seriously. She stopped pacing, shook her head. "You got no idea, Meredith. Rogue AIs, they're no joke. But they think we are."

V was feeling very uncomfortable all of a sudden. She kept imagining something whispering to her the next time she jacked into cyberspace, the muscles between her shoulders tense. "Okay, can we stop talkin' 'bout cyberspace Elder Gods or whatever? Shit, I'm just gettin' back into netrunnin'. Cut me some slack."

"You need to know what we're up against," said Ayako. "Uncle Sam is just one AI, the most immediate threat. But there're others, and they like us 'bout as much as Sam does."