"What the fuck is Gotoda doin' with a neural matrix?" asked V, settling into the net-chair and connecting her personal link to the dataterm's neuroport. The netsuit under her clothes felt ice-cold against her skin, the chair itself padded in high-performance cooling foam that molded to the curve of her back. Ergonomic, and only slightly less uncomfortable than an ice-bath.

"No clue," said Ayako, lowering herself into the chair beside V and connecting into another neuroport. "But I gotta feelin' we're gonna find out pretty soon."

"Data-flows tellin' you somethin'?"

"Yeah. Somethin' in the pattern suggests we're 'bout to hit a datanex," said Ayako, and paused. "Kinda. Flows are kinda fucky right now. Probably Sam's doin'. Maybe Gotoda's."

V glanced at Gotoda's corpse across the room. "Anyone comin' to get the meat?"

Ayako shook her head. "Probably not. Sam would've cut off his Trauma coverage. No interference."

V blinked. "AIs can do that?"

"AIs can do pretty much anythin' you can imagine, Val," said Ayako, looking at her. "Deactivatin' someone's Trauma coverage can be done by any netrunner with the know-how. Ain't got the best cybersecurity, those guys. Refuse to upgrade 'cause they're fuckin' cheap, like all corpos." She tipped her head back on the foam pillow of the net-chair, then asked, "Ready to go under, choom?"

"Yeah," said V, the phosphenes already boiling in the edges of her vision, the non-color of the matrix and its glittering ziggurats of corporate data slowly phasing into view, "let's take care of this shit and get to space."

Except something changed, shifted, in the middle of her transition from realspace to cyberspace. And rather than finding herself on the gridlines of the matrix, surrounded by the distant, polychromatic ziggurats of dataforts, V instead found herself in a dark room, the walls and floor textured in high-resolution scuffed concrete. Through a window, which was nothing more than a pane of taped, fly-specked plastic, she saw the bright neon logo of a hostess club called Love-Love Girl, heard people laughing and talking in Japanese beyond the walls, smelled yakitori and stale beer.

Mochi hopped down from a stack of pallets, peering up at her and Ayako. Ayako looked just as confused as V did, and Mochi said, "Don't you remember, Ayako-sama? Chiba-11."

"I know where we are," said Ayako. Ayako's avatar looked just like she did in realspace, but sharper, more high-def, like she'd been put through an SSAA filter. "I remember Love-Love Girl. It was three blocks from my apartment. Just tryin' to figure out why it's here."

"You don't recognize the building?" asked Mochi.

"How could I?" said Ayako. "It's just fuckin' concrete." She hesitated, knitting her eyebrows. "But… I dunno, kinda seems familiar."

V glanced behind her. A rusted fire-door painted in flaking white latex. Lengths of plastic tarp and boxes overflowing with junk were stacked against the walls of the concrete room, covered in a thick layer of dust. "Warehouse, maybe. Some kinda storage?"

"It's meant to look discreet," meowed Mochi, and glanced at a cheap fiberboard door at the back of the room, beyond tangles of pallets and junk, and moldering drifts of screamsheets featuring dozens of smiling, half-naked gravure and AV idoru. A neural microbank was mounted beside the door, seemingly broken. "We just have to wait," said Mochi, settling on her haunches and licking a paw.

She heard Trevor's voice from somewhere behind her, but when V looked, he wasn't there. "I'm in spectator mode right now," explained Trevor. "Can't reach the isolate you're in without directly accessing the mainframe. Can only peek. But man, the macroform of this simulation is fuckin' wild."

"Mind elaboratin'? Never really got into that macroform shit," said Ayako. "I don't give a shit 'bout the shapes of cyberspace. It's like astrology for netrunners. Fuckin' pointless."

"It's like one of those haunted houses," said Trevor. "Like all the rooms got different themes, but they're all meant to evoke somethin' in the person passin' through. Not fear, but like… I dunno. Like it's tryin' to remind someone of somethin'. Or someone's rememberin' somethin' in real-time." He paused, then said, "Gotoda's corticals were still firin', right?"

"Yeah," said V, "Buster got the read himself."

"Thinkin' this macroform's bein' built in realtime by Sam," said Trevor, finally. "Or it's bleedout. Data leakage." He paused, like he was thinking hard about something. "But," he continued, "data leakage wouldn't have this kinda shape. Makes you wonder. Why's an AI wanna rebuild someone's memories?"

"To learn," said Ayako, simply. "All information is good information, and AI's are only as good as they know. C'mon, choom, you know this shit."

"Or," said Trevor, "Sam's tryin' to find somethin' on 'Saka in Gotoda's memories. If that shit you sent to me 'bout Donald Lundee is true, Yako."

"Won't know how true until we're at the Palace," said Ayako.

The door opened behind them, spilling a wedge of lurid neon across the gritty concrete floor. V turned, saw a couple of people—all Japanese: a frowning sarariman, a short guy in a mil-grade cooling suit with the look of a Visual Kei rockerboy, the third a woman with an ugly facial implant that made her smile split her whole face—walking a young, malnourished Japanese girl inside. The girl kind of looked like Ayako, V decided, but like Ayako if she'd been described by someone who'd only seen her once. Probably from before Arasaka had stuffed her full of experimental black clinic tech.

Upon closer inspection, V realized that she recognized the two men: Gotoda and Yuji. Gotoda looked like a totally different guy: no longer the strange but inconspicuous Japanese man she knew, Gotoda, in this memory, was a young, vibrant guy, maybe in his twenties, with a cherry-red mohawk and a smile that seemed electric. Yuji was younger in this memory too, his face no longer weathered from the harshness of nomadic life, but smooth and manicured, professionally maintained by the Tokyo gene-clinics.

V, however, didn't recognize the slit-mouthed woman with them. She kind of reminded V of Rogue, but more sinister and willowy. Her eyes were flat and black like a shark's. "Kuchisake-onna," said Ayako, watching the group walk past them as if they were ghosts. "My old fixer. One sold me off to 'Saka under the pretense of a 'contract'." She watched her younger self walk by. Young Ayako looked half-starved and overtired, the skin beneath her eyes an unhealthy pale. "This was when my Net withdrawals were gettin' to the point I'd need to start upgradin' my hardware. Was nineteen here, I think. Maybe twenty. Kuchisake-onna told me new chrome would come with the job." She frowned. "And come it fuckin' did."

V watched as Yuji connected his personal link to the neurobank by the door. Magnetic locks thumped out of place, and the door slid open. "Come on," he said to the others in Japanese, "they're waiting inside."

Young Gotoda laughed. "This is it," he said to Young Ayako, his accent distinctly Kansai. He spoke, V's auto-translator informed her, some flavor of Osakan street-Japanese. "This is the big leagues, Kanto-jin."

Young Ayako smiled. "Yes, Gotoda-san," she said, "this is the big leagues, I guess."

The group filed through the door, and V and Ayako trailed after them. Then the scenery suddenly shifted and rearranged itself, data recompiling, rendering graphical representation. She heard screams, whiffed cooked flesh and hot metal. In a room tarped in blood-spattered plastic, V watched a Black Clinic ripperdoc carving into Ayako's flesh, removing pieces and replacing them with Arasaka chrome.

Then the scenery shifted again, a lag in the latency as the data took a moment to reassess and reconstruct. V saw Ayako, chromed out and older now, hooked into an Arasaka deep-dive rig, and in the microsuite beside her lay Gotoda, their faces smooth and catatonic as they sleepwalked the collective hallucination of cyberspace. They sat there in the cold glow of the machinery, in the lurid red of LED strips and flatscreen monitors, like some foreign species of monk meditating on the raw, rich corporate data of some neuroelectric Shangri-La. Some of the netrunners in that room, V realized, were dead; their vitals had flatlined. Arasaka spooks disconnected them with all the dispassionate air of a coroner performing their duties, zipping them into bags and loading them into freezers.

""Saka would part 'em out when they died," said Ayako, her tone as dispassionate as the faces of the spooks. "Sell the good parts to the Black Clinics and Yakuza, then dump the leftovers into Chiba-11 bargain bins." She looked at V, her expression unreadable. " After they wiped any pertinent data and stored it, 'course."

"Fuckin' shit, Ayako. That's—"

"That's just how it was in Chiba," said Ayako, shrugging. "No different than the shit goes down in Night City."

V opened her mouth to reply, stopped when she caught the reek of burnt flesh and electronics. This time, the spooks wheeled Ayako out just as dispassionately as they'd wheeled out the other netrunners. V glimpsed her corpse, right before they bagged her: her hardware had burned right through her synthskin and meat. "Holy fuck," was all she got out, shaking her head.

"Already told you what happened to my original body," said Ayako.

Another shift in the matrix, and this time, she saw the spooks talking to Gotoda in a dark corporate office, caged in the neon skyline of Tokyo. He was older and less vibrant now, and seemed distracted. "It's not a good idea," he was saying to the spooks in Japanese.

"Saboru-sama has already decided," said one of the spooks, and V realized it was Takemura, just a little younger, less gray in his hair, and less hardware. "He wishes for you to contact Biotechnica, Gotoda-san. They are, according to our intel, experimenting with cloning technology. Growing test-subjects for their virological research."

"She is dead," said Gotoda, running his hands back through his shag of black hair. He massaged his temples like he was feeling the sharp edge of a migraine. "What Saboru-sama wants is—"

"Unethical?" said the other spook, whom V now recognized as Yuji. "It doesn't matter, Gotoda-san."

"But he wants to use her original body, Ikeda-senpai," said Gotoda. "For the onryō engrams. In good conscience I can't—"

"Your conscience does not matter, Gotoda-san," interrupted Takemura, mildly. "What matters is what Saboru-sama wants. He will explain when he arrives. Ayako-sama had rare black clinic tech, and Arasaka will not see their investment wasted."

"It's not right, Takemura-san," said Gotoda, almost whining.

V glanced at Ayako, who stood there, motionless.

"It is not a matter of right and wrong, Gotoda-san," said Yuji. "It is a matter of necessity. If we're to compete with Militech—"

"Militech can go to Hell!" shouted Gotoda, practically ripping out fistfuls of his hair.

"Calm down, Gotoda-san," said Takemura.

Gotoda took a deep breath, composed himself. Started massaging his temples again. "Uncle Sam is too dangerous to pursue," he said, finally.

"Militech stole our data to build the AI," said Yuji. "The company only wants back what is ours, Gotoda-san."