Oiwa was destabilizing the entire subnet. V watched texture-maps warp and disintegrate, error codes flashing, warning her of corrupted data. She knew if things kept up like this, the whole subnet would collapse; it was jigged for a DHC, not a full-blown AI.
"How we gonna surprise her?" asked V.
"She ain't gonna be expectin' that kinda firepower from you," answered Ayako.
"Somehow I doubt that," said V.
They found the elevator with Mochi's help, piled in. V saw Oiwa coming up fast on them, slapping the DOWN button on the touchscreen until the fucking elevator moved. She figured the lag came from textures and other data loading on the level below theirs. As the doors closed, V heard Oiwa's katana strike the texture-mapped chrome. Mochi shored up a layer of ICE, like a thin membrane of something vaguely resembling black polymer, around the elevator so the thing didn't come apart as they loaded in, dispersing their data into cyberspace. Ayako said, "Her corruptin' the data like that? Virus. Startin' to make sense how she got like this."
V looked at her, their avatars stark in the unflattering approximation of fluorescent light from the overhead panels. "The fuck y'talkin' 'bout?" she asked.
Mochi spoke, her little cat voice trilling over the subliminal hum of the elevator's soundbite. "She has been aggregating data, Valerie-san," said the AI, staring up at her. "Infecting the neuroware of the people she kills, converting their data into engramic data which she merges with her code, allowing her to become more data-complex. She is part of Soulkiller, has modified its programming into a kind of compiler."
"So basically," said V, "she's eatin' peoples' souls. Their fuckin' engrams. Like Alt did."
"In a way, yes," said Mochi.
"We gotta stop her," said V. "Here and now."
"Agreed," said Ayako.
The elevator stopped, Mochi's ICE dissolving into metadata, doors opening to another data-strata presenting as the bland, inoffensive decor of some corpo-office. The small bobtail padded ahead of them, leading the way. "I'm executing an obfuscation program from my maneki-neko suite. It will buy us some time," said the cat. "But it won't throw Oiwa-san off our scent for long."
"Anythin' 'sides her we gotta worry 'out?" asked V.
"As we move down through the data-strata, closer to the core? Anti-intrusion soft," meowed Mochi. "Demons," the cat added, helpfully.
"Anythin' to 'em? They watchdogs, anti-personnel?"
"Both, Valerie-san," said Mochi. The AI looked up, and V tracked the cat's gaze to a camera, its red light blinking. "They watch."
"They ain't gonna attack, though," said Ayako. "Not as long as we got Mochi. Her maneki-neko soft is preem."
"I'll lead you to the next elevator," meowed Mochi.
As they ventured deeper into the subnet, into this nowhere-place of sham doors and fluorescent-textured panels with too much bloom, V saw the demons: shadowy figures that looked like corpo-suits haunting the places where the pretend-light didn't touch, eyes like shelled boiled eggs, white and pupilless. Their features, what little V could see of them, were the default of what you'd expect from corpo-suits: neatly-groomed, inconspicuous in their stock-beauty. They followed them at a distance, drifting through the dark places like ghosts, lights flickering with their silent advance.
"Fuckin' creepin' me out, those things," said V, biofeedback imparting the sense of a shiver rattling down her spine.
"You'll be fine," said Ayako. "Even if Mochi wasn't here, I got tools on the Masamune you can use against 'em."
"Would Castlebreaker work?" asked V.
"Considerin' the demons're probably subroutines of the DHC? Guessin' so," said Ayako.
That made V feel a little better about penetrating the system; at least they had some kind of recourse if things got hairy.
Found the second elevator. Mochi padded inside, Ayako and V trailing the little cat. Down several more levels into the subnet's data-stratum, the doors opened on a dark concrete hallway lit by red emergency lights. Looked like some kind of maintenance-access.
Mochi was gone now, footsteps behind them, the walls and floors glitching into artifacts, affording glimpses of the polygonal wireframe underneath. V heard a katana scraping against concrete somewhere in the dark, dozens of shadows encroaching on them, closer and closer. Data became unstable, dissolving into screes of unsalvageable bytes, error codes flashing.
"Mochi got chased out by Oiwa," said Ayako, trying not to sound panicked—and failing. She shakily added, "Might take her a bit to reconnect."
V turned to look, saw the demons minced into pieces, derezzed. Oiwa was stalking toward them, her avatar a phantom of dense code, katana, which V assumed represented a virus, swiftly and silently cutting down any demons who swarmed her, trying to keep her from advancing deeper into the subnet. "I've had enough of you both," said the AI in garbled, auto-translated English, taking the head off of a demon in a quick, clean slash of her katana.
V and Ayako bolted down the seemingly infinite corridor, V's heart pounding in her chest, her biomonitor flashing a warning, letting her know that her vitals were tanking: heart-rate going wild, arrhythmic, body-temperature mounting to critical levels, blood-pressure edging up toward hypertension. "Gotta jack out, right now," said Ayako. "Or you're gonna fuckin' die."
"We do that, we ain't reachin' the core. Can't disarm the security systems otherwise, which means we ain't gettin' into Sam's facility," said V.
"We'll find another access point," said Ayako. "I'll help."
"How the fuck y'gonna help, way y'are now?"
"You'll see, Val. Trust me."
No transition: V found jarred to consciousness, Judy, her brow furrowed with worry, kneeling beside her, V's personal link pinched between her thumb and finger. "You were burnin' up, 'bout to flatline," she said, over the loud whine of something mechanical. "Militech's 'bout to cut the doors open with an omnicutter. We gotta move, calabacita. You okay to move, or I gotta carry you?"
"Be fine," V assured her, climbing to her feet. "We gotta find 'nother access point."
"Lucy is on that right now," said Panam, pointing her sawed-off at the door. Then, "When they come through, we blast them."
V grabbed the Malorian from the bag Lucy's inside-man had brought, and nodded. "Right. I got this—"
She stopped, heard the whine of a turret emplacement, the sudden rattle of automatic fire. The Militechs screamed, started trading bullets, but were ripped apart—blood sprayed through the cut the Militechs had made in the door, someone's ocularware skidding across the tile, its synthetic optical nerve, sheathed in a pink membrane of vat-grown muscle, twitching like a worm.
Lucy suddenly came over the holo, sounding panicked. "The DHC's core's been infected," she said. "That fucking AI's been chasing you? It has control over the torus' security systems. You go into that hallway, you're gonna get zeroed by high-velocity HMGs. Turned into pink fucking clouds of bodily fluids."
"So what the fuck should we do?" asked V.
An ARM overtook her vision, a hairline vector of light highlighting a nearby maintenance-access hatch. "Drop down there," said Lucy. "Hatch is sealed, but I'm sure you can rip it open."
"I can," said V, making her way over to the hatch, digging her fingers into the seams and pulling hard, the flexors in her muscles going taut as bowstrings, working studiously to budge the heavy steel slab. She managed to get it open with some help from Panam and Judy, and V helped them down into the hatch, jumping in after them.
The tunnel was only wide enough for them to crawl in single-file. LED strips bathed the cramped, hot space in sickly yellowish light, bundled multicolor cables snaking along the walls and floor, connecting into sub-distributors and power-regulators. Reeked of metal and rubber down there.
"No cameras down there, so the AI's blind for the moment," Lucy informed them. "Follow the indicators on the ARM, you'll eventually hit an electrical room. From there, I'll adjust the ARM's parameters, have it lead you to another access-point so you can jack back into the NET, take out the fucking subnet's core."
"Y'hear from Ayako at all?" asked V, on the holo.
"Isn't she on the neural matrix?"
"No," said V, starting to crawl forward on her elbows and knees, Panam and Judy right behind her, "she stayed in the subnet, I think. Don't hear or see her. Probably tryin' to draw Oiwa's attention away from us."
"I see her reckless streak's stubborn as it's always been," said Lucy, sounding none too pleased. Then, "I'll keep playing defense for you guys, but haul ass. I've never gone up against an AI, not like this."