The first thing that struck V about the torus' subnet was the fact it was actually rendered out. No longer a low-res wireframe reproduction approximating physical space, the subnet had instead taken on the lobotomized veneer of an office building. The carpet was textured in cheap, gray polyester fiber, the walls texture-mapped in white plaster, decorated in stock-print assets of landscapes and flower arrangements—the kind of bland, inoffensive art corpos usually bought wholesale from Net-asset stores to populate their orientation BDs. Rows of black plastic chairs lined the walls, wedged between water-coolers and the vertices of fern-renders. Fluorescent panels hummed overhead, glowing with too much bloom, casting the hallway in stark, unflattering medical light.
"It's a DHC," said Ayako, standing beside V, her netsuit and pozer-jacket blood-red and fluorescent yellow against the gray, unobtrusive backdrop—to the point it strained V's neuro-optics if she stared at the clash in contrast too long. "Real basic AI," continued Ayako, laser-pupils scanning the hallway, like she expected someone to walk out from somewhere and shake their hands. "Can't understand more subjective human concepts like 'style'. Techies in HR program 'em to be as inoffensive as possible."
"HR programs their fuckin' DHCs?" asked V, skeptical.
"Lotta corporations do that," said Ayako, and looked at her. "Wanna appeal to the widest possible demographic, internally and externally. But they grind 'em down all the same, no matter who they are or where they come from." Ayako leaned toward her, voice dropping to something almost conspiratorial. "What they ain't realized is that tryin' to appeal to everybody winds up appealin' to nobody. But you tell marketin' that, you'd think you told 'em to suck lead."
As they walked, the hallway seemed to loop the same sequence of frames, on and on, and she noticed her framerate starting to tank, get real choppy. When V stopped to peek through one of the doors along the wall, all she saw was the neuroelectric void of cyberspace, gridlines like fluorescent tubes stretching on into nothing. DATA NOT FOUND flashed in front of her, hanging there in the void like an omen. "This shit is creepin' me out," said V, closing the door. "S'like those fuckin' liminal spaces Judy likes."
"All of cyberspace is liminal, dumbass," said Ayako, smiling.
"Yeah, well, I hate these fuckin' high-res environments," said V, looking around. "Makes my brain itch."
"Well, now you got the Masamune OS," said Ayako. "Can render higher res environments without takin' a huge toll on your brain. You're dual-bootin' the Sandy and Masamune, right?"
V nodded.
"Masamune's good if you wanna real robust netrunnin' toolkit," said Ayako. "Your modified Sandy's like the lite version of the Masamune OS. It's more for maneuverin' around and cuttin' ICE, whereas Masamune's what you want when you're dealin' with serious Black ICE and AIs."
"Was able to cut through Black ICE before, no problem," said V.
"'Cause of Castlebreaker, choom," said Ayako, snickering. "All you've ever cut is mid-grade Black ICE. You ain't never seen actual, full-blown AI ICE, Val. But you gotta taste of it durin' the spaceport netrun, and that one time you tried quick-hackin' Oiwa. Now just imagine that, but on fuckin' Animal juice."
V grimaced. "Shit."
When the hallway looped again, her framerate took another nosedive, and V found herself rubberbanding through the hallway like a borked animation. No closer to anything even nominally resembling the subnet's core either. Ayako said, "Dunno why it took me so long to realize it, but this is an infinite loop. Code's been fucked with. Keeps goin' like this, the subnet'll crash, throw us out. Gonna need you to break the sequence."
"Why can't you?"
"'Cause I'm a ghost," said Ayako. "Ain't got hardware anymore. Or permission to use yours." She looked at V, then said, "Toggle over to the Masamune OS and run a program called Halt in the CLI."
V flipped the synaptic trigger to the Masamune, pulled up the CLI and scrolled through the commands. Found Halt, ran it.
A sudden sensation hit her, then, like the hallway suddenly jarred to a stop on some conveyor belt she hadn't even known had been there. Her framerate smoothed to a crisp, clean two hundred frames, and her Masamune's neurodisplay sharpened, rendered every fiber in the carpet, every subtle mottle in the pale plaster. V found it kind of overwhelming in its clarity—a distinct, sharp pang of anxiety, like her body was screaming at her to haul ass—and quickly toggled back to her Sandy, which rendered her neurodisplay at a lower resolution, made it easier to process the dataload.
"How the fuck didja handle that kinda neuro-load?" she asked Ayako, though V already knew the answer.
"My chrome was built to host an AI," said Ayako, like she knew V had already known that, and she was tired of repeating herself. "My neuroprocessin' is different from yours, Val. Us Black Clinic netrunners were equipped to perceive the Net, and the world outside the Net, like AI."
"I don't like that fuckin' OS," said V, her biofeedback reproducing a fear-shiver. "Triggered my goddamn fight-or-flight, and my body was tellin' me to fly fuckin' far away."
"Gonna have to deal with it when we're up against Sam, Oiwa," said Ayako, and shrugged. "Ain't gonna kill you, promise. Long as you don't spend hours and hours in it, your skullsponge will be fine. Your new upgrades were jigged to handle the load, at least for a bit."
V nodded. "So we're lookin' for an elevator or a staircase, I'm guessin'?" She looked at Ayako. "Usually how these environments're set up. You go down if you wanna reach the core."
"You got it," said Ayako. "My guess? Probably lookin' for an elevator. Somethin' locked behind employee codes. Nothin' the Masamune can't decrypt."
V's neuroware approximated another shiver. "God," she said, "that OS gives me the goddamn creeps."
"We could take the stairs," said Ayako. "But might go on for a long time, stairs. Tire out your brain, make you wanna jack out."
"Fuck that," said V. "Find ourselves a goddamn elevator."
They continued walking. Despite the infinite loop having been halted, the virtual environment still felt like it went on forever, the same sequence of gray corpo-blandness. They found Mochi sitting on a plastic chair beside a watercooler, watching them. "Need help finding the elevator?" meowed the cat.
"Where the hell have you been?" asked V.
"Busy," said Mochi, and hopped down from the chair, stretching like pulled dough. "Oiwa-san is in the system," added the little bobtail. "I'm going to help you get to the core before she can reach you."
"Goto shut her down," reasoned V.
"Only her body," said Mochi. "Severed the connection with her engram. She is, as of now, very much confined to the Net. And she is hunting you, Valerie-san."
As the cat said that, the fluorescent panels started to flicker, some going out entirely in a pop-spray of phosphors and glass. The place slowly took on more of a nightmare quality as textures warped or went missing, error messages flashing like dozens of neon signs where data had become so broken that it had disintegrated into screes of corrupted bytes.
Behind her, V saw the flickering polygons of a woman at the end of the hall, heard the soundbite of a blade scraping against plaster. A garbled Japanese voice spoke, gradually transitioning into English as the figure drifted into the proximity of V's auto-translator. "You must be stupid," said Oiwa, her eyes ruby pinpoints in the deeper shadows of the corridor, where the lights had gone out, and the textures and polygons of the environment strobed and warped. "You are a netrunner, Valerie-san. On the Net, you are prey, and I am the apex predator. I don't need a body to destroy you."
"If she kills you here," said Ayako, "that's it, Valerie. You're done. Biochip won't save you from your brain boilin' like oden."
"Follow me," said Mochi, loping ahead.
"We gotta surprise her," said Ayako, sprinting alongside V. "You'll have to switch to the Masamune OS, launch Castlebreaker from that. OS automatically wraps the ICEbreaker in a Balron. Make it hard enough to punch through her ICE."