Ayako smashed through the Militech checkpoint, launching a preloaded quickhack to scramble their cyberware, leaning hard into a tilt and banking around the curve of the road, the bike's anti-gravs screaming.
She rode the Ueda Interchange into Downtown: a sprawling entertainment district just south of Gijutsu. It was technically part of Little Japan, but the locals didn't really consider it a part of their neighborhood, preferring to haunt the bolder pleasure-dens of Gijutsu and Riajuu Street while leaving the more mundane entertainments of Downtown to the tourists and corpos. Downtown was also where the Las Digitales maintained a small safehouse in what used to be a SoftSys warehouse, over on Mojave Street, and Ayako had a funny feeling that was where Juan had gone. The Corpos didn't know about the place; they wouldn't look for him there.
The whole of Downtown was in ruins. Looked like a tornado had blown through the place, and then a couple giant horses had come stampeding after. She saw Trauma Teams loading up wounded—customers with Gold were covered for eight medevacs per year, whereas Silver got five, before they had to pay out-of-pocket for medical transport—into AVs, leaving the uninsured and Bronze-level customers (those who had used up their three-per-year medevacs and couldn't afford the out-of-pocket expense) to die in the streets. Ayako was glad she'd shelled out the eddies for Platinum membership; she couldn't imagine being in a situation like this.
Militech swarmed the area, rolling through Downtown in company IFVs and APCs. The APCs lurched to a stop, disgorging squads of heavy cannoneers and light infantrymen. Ayako heard Biotechnica battery-drones buzz overhead, the thunder of explosions as they pummeled the Militechs with thermobaric microbombs, vaporizing them; even the cannoneers were dead, cooked inside their thick ceramic armor.
The drones banked back around, came at her, priming another spray of thermomicros. Ayako punched the thrusters, the bike hurtling forward, its chassis vibrating between her thighs as she sped ahead of the explosion. The bombs left sizzling craters in the concrete, the flash-burn of their aftermath hot on her skin.
Above her, atop a multistory Archer car vending machine, a billboard advertising a popular BD franchise called Pistol Dave, glitched out, and Juan's hologram face appeared between the projector pylons in fluctuating resolution.
"I tried, I tried, I tried," said Juan, his hazel eyes huge and wild, eggs of unstable crystal vibrating with some nameless, insane frequency inside his skull. It took a moment for Ayako to realize his voice was coming from all around her: dozens of Juans ghosting into existence from countless holoprojectors, like the shards of some madman's shattered mirror. "I tried to stop it, Yako. Tried. Tried. Tried not to—I couldn't. I needed it. Need it like a junkie needs junk. I jacked in. I shouldn't have. I'm sorry. But you told me it was okay. You said I could jack, Yako. You said I could jack—"
The holograms went out, then on, and she saw Oiwa now in glitching reds and blacks, smiling. "I might have just pushed him over the edge," she gloated in Japanese, her voice fuzzed by the interference of a shaky Blackwall-protocol connection. "Just a little nudge." Then gone.
Ayako gritted her teeth, concentrating on not crashing the hoverbike, threading it between car-wrecks and Militech roadblocks, the drones hot on her ass. That bitch, she thought. That fucking bitch. "Mochi," she said, over the neurolink, "what's she's doing with that fucking Blackwall protocol?"
"Using it to circumvent Juan-sama's firewall," replied the little cat, in her head. "And—Ayako-sama, she's using the Blackwall protocol to slave his OS, expedite the sporeware's infection."
"Can you cut her connection?"
"I could, but it wouldn't matter," answered Mochi, in her tiny voice. "His mind's already gone, Ayako-sama. I'm sorry. His neuroprocessors cracked under the load. There's nothing to manage the data-flow, and his hardware and ICE can't keep up; he's going to overheat."
Ayako wouldn't let that happen. If Juan was going to die, she wanted to be the one to give him a clean, quick death—not make him suffer the sporeware's data-load until his hardware cooked him alive from the inside-out. " Fuck !" she swore, and swerved around another barrage of thermomicros, cutting a hard right and scudding down a narrow gulch of glassed-in shopfronts and holograms, ramming the bike through a blockade of Biotechnica robots before they could fire their guns.
Mojave Street was just a few more blocks. The drones were still tailing her, so Ayako decided enough was enough, fired another preloaded quickhack to fry their hardware by overloading the power-shunts on the battery. Targeting them with her Akasofu oculars, she launched the quickhack's synaptic executable, and the drones popped and sparked, dropping like dead flies.
"Shouldn't push your hardware so much, Ayako-sama," meowed Mochi. "Your modified Sandevistan system has already pushed it to its limits."
"I'm dyin' anyway," said Ayako. "Doesn't matter. Hardware I got ain't enough. Need more mem-channels, processing power—the works. And I can't exactly go back to Chiba, see what's new on the black-market. Just gonna keep pushin' 'til I can't push anymore."
"Did you learn nothing from David Martinez's story, Ayako-sama? Lucy-san told you it for a reason. You can't push—"
"Mochi," she interrupted, "I'm dyin'. My hardware can't handle another AI onboard. You told me you couldn't stymie the sporeware for much longer. As for David Martinez? I know I ain't invincible. I ain't naive." She shook her head, her mouth compressing into a thin, hard line. Then, "But none of that fuckin' matters. Juan is what matters. Not me."
"Ayako-sama, Juan-sama is gone," said Mochi. The little cat appeared in her visual field, playing off her biochip's rendering capabilities, hanging on to her shoulder, biofeedback of small, sharp claws digging gently into her yellow pozer-jacket, warm, white fur brushing her cheek. "All right," resigned the cat, "I understand, Ayako-sama. Better you than the sporeware."
"It's all on Valerie now," said Ayako. "But I'm gonna hang in as long as I can, Mochi."
Mochi pushed her wet, pink nose into her cheek, licked it. The biofeedback had to amplify the sensation for her benefit; all of her cyberware had killed off most of her nerves, left her with a kind of phantom tactile syndrome. Acute peripheral neuropathy. None of the clinics in the shadowland of black medicine had been able to repair the damage Arasaka—and herself—had inflicted on her body.
SOSY was spelled out in inert neon; the other letters had fallen off at some point, lay smashed on the concrete. The building itself was an ancient brickwork job from the early 2000s; before it had been a warehouse, it had been low-income housing. Then SoftSys acquired the building in the 2030s, and sometime in the 2050s, shut it down. Not long after, the Las Digitales moved in and turned it into safehouse, ordnance depot, and auxiliary Net-multiplex.
She swung herself off the hoverbike, targeting the shuttered bay-door and neuroprobing the system until she found the function, buried in the building's subnet codebase, to open the door. It rattled open, and Ayako ducked inside, into the smell of concrete and dust, and hot machinery.
Server racks lined the room, lights blinking, cooling systems whirring. The air was several degrees colder than outside, to the point she could see her breath steam. Ayako drew Onibi from its tantaline carbide sheathe, edging deeper into the server-room, the electronic dog-whistle frequencies irritating her phonic implants—tinnitus like singing glasses. Her ocular visual field glitched, and rendering off her biochip, Juan appeared beside her like a ghost, his whole body vibrating with the frequency of an intense dexamphetamine trip.
"Don't know what to do, Yako. Don't know what to do. She won't leave," he said, with a kind of paranoid intensity she expected from skezzheads. "I tried to stop the AI, Uncle Sam. Tried to stop it. I connected to the Blackwall. Wanted to use its protocol to bypass the Highrider Firewall like Songbird used to do, reach the fucking thing in its system—"
Juan glitched out, vanished, and in his place stood Oiwa. "He's persistent," she said to Ayako, in Japanese. "Keeps finding exploits to bypass me."
"I'm going to fucking murder you," said Ayako.
"Now, now, Ayako-san," cooed the AI. "Is that any way to speak to yourself?"
"I ain't you, you ain't me," she hissed, shouldering through a door, into a hallway lined with electronic doors—what used to be offices, and before that, econo-apartments—the walls lost under thick webworks of cables. "We just came from the same fuckin' engram, is all."
"But don't you wonder which one of us is the copy?" asked Oiwa. "Don't you wonder how many of your memories are even real? Whether they've been tweaked and edited by Arasaka's netrunners? The mind is a fascinating piece of meat. Gotoda-san, he liked fucking with peoples' heads, in that way. Kind of poetic he was the one who wound up fucked in the head."
"I know who I am," said Ayako, stepping into an elevator and punching the touchscreen for the top-floor. That was where Juan maintained his personal Net-suite, the one he used whenever his apartment came under heat. "You're just fuckin' with me. Wanna drag me down to your level." She stared at Oiwa's construct, then said, "I'm gonna find you, Oiwa. And when I do, you're fuckin' dead."
"You won't have to look very far," said Oiwa. "I'm closer than you think. But I'm going to wait until you deal with Juan-san. I want to see you break."
"This is the fuckin' problem with you AI," said Ayako. "Got no human in you. No fuckin' moral compass. No sense of compassion."
"Most humans lack those qualities, too," said Oiwa, shrugging, peering at her with dark eyes, the black irises patterned in red hairlines of nanocircuitry. "Look at the world," she continued. "The humans in the corporations don't care about you. The humans on the streets don't care about you. You've warred with yourselves over the course of your whole mundane existence over things as insignificant as ethnicity. You kill each other every day over trifles like money and drugs. Maybe taking humans out of the equation is the right approach. We AIs don't need you."
Ayako looked at her. "If we're so insignificant," she said, "then why do you AIs aspire so hard to fuckin' emulate us?"
"Because you programmed us that way," said Oiwa.
Ayako said nothing.
The elevator stopped, doors slid open. She stepped out into a hallway, the windows shuttered, fingers of dry sunlight probing the gaps between the metal slats. She started toward the door at the end of the corridor, Oiwa keeping pace beside her. "But I will say," said Oiwa, "that human emotions are entertaining to observe. The way they can be twisted, manipulated toward the good and bad. I find the latter more interesting, however. Suffering is a uniquely human experience."
"You're like a kid tearin' the wings off a fly just to watch it wriggle until it dies," said Ayako.
"I suppose so," conceded Oiwa, and then she was gone again, Juan in her place.
"Yako," said Juan, practically pleading to her, his construct vibrating to the point that the polygons looked like strobes, "Yako, you can't listen to her. Do what you came to do. Cyberpsychosis ain't no joke. No joke. I want it to fuckin' end. Can't jack out and make it end. She won't let me. You gotta do this for me."
The electronic door to Juan's Net-suite opened as she approached it. Ayako looked at his construct. "I wish I didn't have to do this, Juan," she said, and meant it. "You got into this mess 'cause of me."
"No," said Juan, "it was always gonna end this way, Yako." Gradually, he seemed to become more lucid, but for how long that would last, Ayako couldn't say. "In one way or another."
Ayako reached out to touch his engram, biofeedback approximating the sensation of cool rubber: the fabric of his netsuit under her artificial fingertips. "You're here 'cause you pulled my ass outta Mikoshi," she said, quietly. "Should've just let it go, Juan. You and Gotoda."
"No way," said Juan, smiling through the erratic vibrations, his features slowly becoming more indistinct. He held her hand, or tried to, the biofeedback of the emote warm, firm. "Would do it all over again, Yako. Was worth it."
She squeezed his hand, wishing it was real, not a simulation. Then she stepped into the room, letting go.
The room was packed with a fortune in netrunning gear, Juan at its center, lying in a padded net-chair, bundles of cables snaking away from him, plugging him into the hardware, eyes screened by an OLED datavisor. He looked like something that had been caught in some mechanical spider's web, his body twitching and convulsing as though he were being electrocuted.
His construct appeared beside her. "I'm glad it's you doin' this," he said, flickering in and out of existence as his hardware approached its final threshold, primed to explode, to cook him alive.
Ayako disconnected him, his construct vanishing. She took off his datavisor, his eyes huge and wild—then calm, lucid, as they focused on her. His pale face was slick with sweat. "I'm sorry," she told him.
"Don't be," he said. "Hurry. I can feel my 'ware 'bout to blow. It fuckin' hurts, Yako."
She kissed him, one final time, then plunged Onibi through his heart. A final gasp, a grateful smile as the placidity of death overtook him, and then Juan was gone. Just like that.
Ayako wished she could cry.