Danny Dean was what happened when you took a chronic alcoholic hick, stuffed him into a cheap Chinese suit vaguely echoing the Laoban style of the previous century, and gave him a superiority complex edging on caricature.
"You best not fuck this gig up, V. Lucky I'm even giving you another shot," said Danny Dean in the corner of her Kiroshi's ocular display, his twang placing him somewhere south, maybe Tennessee. His hair was cut in a shaggy sandy-blond mullet that had been in fashion a decade ago among Heywood's 6th Street chapter, his beard and mustache laser-stenciled in a pattern that might have been flames.
"What was I s'posed to do last time, choom?" She shifted on the temperfoam, trying to get comfortable and failing. The temperfoam was that hard mass-produced shit they used in cheap pod-hotels. "Eat fuckin' lead?"
"You were supposed to neutralize the target."
"I did," argued V. "Just a lil' more permanent than I was s'posed to. But the gonk fired on me first." She waved her hand dismissively. "Anyway, gig got done. Target down. So what's this next job?"
Danny regarded her blandly from behind the see-through plastic lenses of his budget Seocho aviators. "Need you to get a BD for a client off some gonk."
Call Incoming flashed over her vision in bright monospace. "Hold on, Dean," said V, splicing in the call. She grinned. "Hey, babe."
Judy appeared in the opposite corner of her ocular feed, looking annoyed. "Fuck, are you on the phone with Dean, Valerie?"
"Discussin' biz," said V.
"Yeah, so C your way outta this A-B conversation, Alvarez," said Dean to Judy.
"That's not how that fuckin' goes," said Judy, shifting a reconstituted paper bag into the crook of her arm while she fiddled with the lock. Then, to V, "Babe, door's fritzin' again. Need you to open it." She glanced at something off-screen. "Got this junkie lookin' funny at me."
"The end is nigh!" screamed someone off-screen. A tweaker voice. "The AIs are comin' over the wire upon chariots of binary, wielding swords of viral code! The end is nigh !"
"Seriously, Val," said Judy, giving her a hurry-the-fuck-up look.
"Look, I'm a very busy fixer," said Dean.
"Don't have a fuckin' coronary," V said to Dean. "Only take a sec, choom." She put the call on hold, stood up on wobbly, numb legs, and careened toward the apartment's door.
She jacked into the door's lock, sorted out the recurring syntax error in the wonky spaghetti-code that was the building's Net architecture. The door slid open, and Judy ducked inside just as the junkie launched into a manic sermon about the coming of their AI overlords.
"Jesus fuck, thought we left this kinda shit behind. Phoenix is just as bad as Night City," she said, setting the grocery bag on the countertop in the kitchenette. She wore her Aldecaldos moto-jacket, and dark jeans. "Got some cup-noodles, frozen dinners. They didn't have that thing you wanted, sorry."
"Don't worry 'bout it," said V, and kissed Judy's cheek. "Thanks for doin' the grocery run, Jude. Woulda done it myself, but y'know how Dean gets." Her neurowire buzzed like an impatient visitor repeatedly thumbing the doorbell. "Speakin' of, lemme get back to biz. Old Dean's gettin' pissed." She stepped back over to the bed, sat down cross-legged on the temperfoam and wired back into the call.
"Goddamn unprofessional," said Dean half heartedly.
"But you're still here," V pointed out.
Dean grunted and popped a green hexagon: some softer variant of amphetamine peculiar to Phoenix called Green Angel, of which Dean was hopelessly addicted. "Anyway," he said, his eyes glazing over, words taking on some fuzz, "this gig should be an easy one."
"Sure," said V. "Send me the detes." A notification blipped in her vision: RECEIVED . "Thanks, choom."
"Don't fuck this up, V." Dean vanished, his image folding away into the non-space of the Net like an elaborate origami trick. Fucker couldn't even disconnect like a normal person, she thought. Needed to do it with panache , with one of those preem effects packages. Waste of memory, V had long ago decided. Why buy cosmetic renders from some Net boutique when you could just run simplified vectors, move smooth and fast through cyberspace.
"What's the job?" asked Judy, popping the tab on a tall can of beer. V told her. Judy frowned, sipped her beer. "So nothin' 'bout the fuckin' biochip yet." She sighed, rolling her eyes. "Why the fuck did Panam put us into contact with this gonk?"
"'Cause we're broke, babe. New identities don't come cheap in an age of digital omniscience." V stood up, walked into the kitchenette to grab a beer for herself. She turned to Judy, leaning on the counter. The counter was a slab of laminated chipboard painted to only vaguely resemble granite."And someone didn't wanna work that hydroponics job near Flagstaff."
"I ain't pickin' vegetables," said Judy. "Not in this fuckin' shit heat."
"Panam's tryin' to barter labor for some growpods. Farm's one of the few hydroponics jobs ain't owned by corpos."
"Owners probably got some kinda arrangement with Biotechnica," said Judy, hoisting herself up onto the countertop and shrugging off her jacket. "Corpos don't allow independent operators, not really."
"Maybe," said V.
They drank their beers in silence, listening to the hum and rattle of the building's ancient vents. Then Judy spoke. "So Dean wants you kleppin' some kinda BD, huh?"
"Yep, got the detes. Ain't looked at 'em yet."
Judy nodded, looking concerned. "You don't think it's an XBD, do you?"
"Could be," said V, frowning.
"You'll check it, right?"
"Sure."
"And if it is," continued Judy, evenly, "you'll tell Dean to go fuck himself, 'cause we don't deal in that shit." Judy eyed her, her brown eyes flashing. " Right , Val? 'Cause we got scruples, you and me."
"Damn straight," agreed V. "No XBDs, Jude. Promise." And V meant that. Some things she wouldn't do for all the eddies in the world because, far as V was concerned, her conscience was priceless. And it was hers now. Not hers and Johnny's. That meant something to her. Like having something shiny and new and treating it with kid gloves because you didn't want to mess it up.
Judy grinned, hopping off the counter to lean against her, tattooed arms coiling around her waist like painted snakes. "That's my girl," she said, and she kissed V, and V tasted the beer on her tongue.
"How 'bout a walk, Jude?"
"It's gonna rain," said Judy, sullenly.
"Better rain than the fuckin' sun or sand," said V, grabbing her bulky leather Aldecaldos jacket and making her way toward the door. "C'mon. Wanna get a feel for the biz 'round Phoenix."
"Why?" said Judy, reluctantly pulling on her own jacket. "We're not stayin' here. Just 'til Panam and them get those growpods."
"And money," said V. "Clan still needs money to operate, Jude. And maybe we hear somethin' can help us with my biochip. Gotta do whatever I can if I wanna live beyond Alt's prognosis."
"What the fuck do AIs know 'bout illness anyway?" fumed Judy, following her out of the apartment and locking the door behind them. "Soulkiller a fuckin' ripperdoc all of a sudden?"
"Even Viktor said I'd die," said V, feeling a weird sort of apathy about it now. Death had become such a steady fixture in her life that she no longer really noticed it, or even cared. It was like a commute, a routine. Unremarkable. "But," said V, before Judy could start laying into her, "I ain't givin' up, Jude. Not when I got you." She grinned and put an arm around Judy. "Gotta stick 'round so I can impress your abuela in person, ranita ."
Judy cracked a palm on her ass, and V just about jumped out of her rockergirl boots. "Fuck off, Val," she said mildly, and smiled, cheeks dimpling. Her hair was closely shaved on one side, her long, swooping bang dyed a metallic green and pink that made V think of the tail of some tropical fish. "Y'know how I am 'bout feelings ."
"S'okay, babe," said V. "I gotta 'nough for both of us."
The Phoenix Nest megabuilding in which they temporarily resided was a thirty-story steel behemoth done in some vague, uneasy fusion of Soviet brutalism and some nameless urban industrial style that V, for whatever reason, liked to imagine as, specifically, German in origin.
Bright, angry scrawls of graffiti screamed on the concrete walls of the Phoenix Nest, its recycled air reeking of acrid beer-piss and stale, homeless sweat. A mulch of soggy cardboard, screamsheets, and foam crunched under their boots, junkies and dealers watching them from doorways, from damp slabs of temperfoam thrown on the floor, from nests of filthy blankets and crumpled plastic bags in the shadows pooling beside and between glitching vend-machines. Someone had reprogrammed one of S.C. to jangle out expletives as they passed by, and although V was sure it had been meant to piss people off, she just thought a vend-machine calling her a whore was hilarious.
"It's like we never left home," said V, ignoring the junkie-preacher, who she assumed had been the same junkie-preacher she'd heard on the call, sermonizing to a thin, raggedy crowd from atop a makeshift platform of foam coolers and plywood. He was howling about the DataRapture, that soon the AIs would come and take their faithful to a paradise beyond the Blackwall. "Look, even the junkies are the same."
"Sounds like you miss Night City, calabacita."
"Kinda," said V. "But I don't think I miss the city so much as the familiarity. I knew Night City. I dunno shit 'bout Phoenix." She paused, remembering something she'd read on a screamsheet. "Well, one thing. One point they were gonna spell it Feenickz, 'cause nobody could spell it the right way. Y'know literacy rates 'cross the States are 'round fifty percent now? Crazy shit. Hear it's better on the NUSA side, but no thanks, the East Coast can go fuck itself. Mightily."
They stepped out into daylight the color of lead. Phoenix looked like some deranged brutalist art installation Kandinsky might have built if he'd been a rivethead tripping on hallucinogens. It was a rusting, sandblasted factory-sprawl interspersed by Biotechnica-owned hydroponic parks and arcologies, and looping concrete interchanges and metro-rails.
Unlike Night City, Phoenix had never enjoyed the dividends of big-time corpo-money. Arasaka, as they did in most cities, maintained a small branch-office here, but the prevailing lords of the city were the Biotechnica suits. They'd cornered the agritech market while other corporations had been focused on wars and, later, focused on their investments in more lucrative places like New York or Night City. Biotechnica had made themselves an integral component of the Phoenix landscape, the foundation upon which this industrial fever-dream was built.
V swung right, following a loop of pavement to the side of the megabuilding. She'd parked her motorcycle in the lot there, because the parking garage had been converted into a homeless camp consisting, chiefly, of New Luddites. The New Luddites hated tech, and her motorcycle was preem, very flash tech—and it had been Jackie's. And V wasn't about to let a bunch of anti-techs part out her buddy's memory for eddies.
She tossed Judy the second helmet, a thing molded from high-performance carbon-fiber and shatterproof photochromic glass. A neon mermaid decal was printed on it, a nod to Judy's love of diving. "Take a drive 'round," said V, pulling on her own helmet and powering up the built-in comms. Easier to communicate that way while driving than with their neuralware. "Maybe find somethin' good to eat."
Judy put on her helmet and hopped onto the pillion. "I just went grocery shoppin', Val," she said over the comms.
"Yeah, well, the food'll be there later. Maybe I just wanna take my girl out for dinner."
"What about your biochip, Val? Your gig?"
"It ain't like they're goin' anywhere. C'mon, Jude. 'Sides, we find the right spot, people hear all sorts of shit." V squeezed the clutch and thumbed the ignition, the bike rumbling to life. She swung out, smooth, onto the road, weaving through traffic. "People eat, and when they eat, they chat."
It started pissing rain halfway to the Shibata Interchange, but V didn't mind; their jackets and helmets were treated with a waterproof polymer, and Jackie had installed traction mods on the bike.
V hit her blinker and banked right, coasting down the deceleration ramp into Little Japan. She found a promising spot to eavesdrop on biz, in a place called Riajuu Street. Stalls and hole-in-the-wall shops crowded the narrow vein of concrete, vaguely reminding her of Jig-Jig Street, but without the sex and dealers.
She parked the bike just off the alley and engaged the anti-theft mechanism: coded to her biometrics, the bike wouldn't start for anyone but her, and would instead blast the would-be thief with a powerful electroshock. But it didn't work on New Luddites, because none of them had any 'ware, which was why V had stashed the bike in that side-lot back at the Phoenix Nest. But the New Luddites never came to Little Japan; it was too uncomfortably technological for their virgin meat.
She and Judy ducked into an izakaya called Beautiful Lumps. The inside walls were dark imitation wood, the floor synthetic tatami. Lurid pink neon soaked the place in peepshow-light.
They grabbed seats at the counter, steam wafting into their faces from the grill and burners on the other side, where a sweaty Japanese man in a wifebeater cooked yakitori and karaage while his buddy slung sake and beer to rowdy locals.
V put in an order for some yakitori, and a pitcher of Japanese beer. When the guy came over with the food, V asked, "Yo, we're new in Phoenix. Any work 'round here for mercs?" She liked working a few fixers at a time, casting a wide net.
The man looked at her. "Kunoichi," he said.
V blinked. "What, choom?"
The man said nothing and walked off.
"Fuck," said V, tearing off a rubbery chunk of synthmeat and chewing, "this town's weird."
Judy shrugged. "They're all weird, babe."
"Kunoichi," said a Japanese man to their left, in accented English, "is a netrunner, the best in Phoenix. She's looking for a partner, I hear."