Chapter Text
“Mikoshi has begun to malfunction,” said a man whose digital ghost now wore his son’s body.
Arasaka Saburo sat straight-backed in his black leather chair behind a tiered marble table, his back to the ridged skyline of Tokyo city. The same table, chair, and bonsai adorned Saburo’s offices in every key Arasaka complex. When he had been Saburo’s bodyguard, Takemura knew them in perfect detail. Memorised exits, defensible positions, and potential situational weaknesses, down to questions of ventilation and security rotations. Being in such an office again after a year away from his role felt disorienting, rather than familiar. Unsettling, to hear Saburo’s clipped intonation emerge from Yorinobu’s mouth, a man Takemura had once written off as reckless and dissolute.
Saburo’s offices had no seats for guests. No one was expected to remain long enough to waste Saburo’s time. Takemura had spent years quietly positioned in the corner close to the main entrance, his back to reinforced plascrete, ears and enhanced senses primed for problems. To stand before Saburo’s desk like a penitent was new.
“How may I help?” Takemura asked, keeping his tone low and respectful. Once, he thought that he understood the employer he had venerated. He knew that Saburo detested flattery and small talk. Expressions of modesty only bored him. Takemura did not see how he could be of any assistance to a malfunctioning digital fortress run by the best netrunners that Arasaka credit could buy. However, if Saburo had recalled him from Kagawa because of Mikoshi, then Takemura could only ask for instructions.
Instead of giving him marching orders, Saburo studied Takemura, flicking his cold gaze over the sharp new suit, the updated implants. Strange when made by Yorinobu's angular features, his cheekbones grown more prominent in his lean face, eyes no longer hidden behind aviators. “How are you finding Kagawa?”
Startled, Takemura would’ve met Saburo’s gaze but for sheer habit. “Over the past year, output on the Arasaka manufacturing plant has—”
“That is not what I asked.”
Takemura hoped his confusion didn’t show on his face. “I have no complaints,” he opted to say. “Nothing appears out of the ordinary.”
“You are adjusting well.” This was not a question. “There were doubts whether you would be able to manage Arasaka’s network of interests and assets in Kagawa. So far, you have proved more than capable.”
Praise from Saburo always unsettled Takemura more than a scolding. From Saburo, it was never so simple. “Thank you, Saburo-sama. I will continue to do my best.”
“A year ago, Hanako advised me to allow you aboard the orbital station to speak with that mercenary. To advise him to upload himself to the Secure Your Soul program.”
Saburo always spoke in a measured, formal Japanese that would sound old-fashioned to most—its cadences and diction a century old. Particularly in Tokyo, where language always seemed to evolve faster than Takemura could keep up with. Saburo’s inner circle and his family strived to emulate him, along with those who worked in the Arasaka Towers in Tokyo and Kyoto. It made stepping into those Towers feel like stepping sideways into another version of Japan—one indifferent to socmed trends and slang, a place that sometimes felt surgically removed from its host cities. Takemura didn’t use to notice, but after a year in Kagawa, it felt disorienting.
“Yes, Saburo-sama. V was disappointed to learn that Arasaka could do nothing further for him but ultimately chose to sign the contract.”
“Did you believe that Arasaka could do nothing more?”
What sort of question was that? “So I was told. By Hanako-sama.” Takemura had been handed a medical report detailing V’s rapid mental decline. It had been upsetting to read.
“When you visited the mercenary in his ward, you called his living quarters barbaric.” Saburo’s expression did not change, but Takemura was used to all his subtle tells. Impossible to read for most. Not for a man who had spent decades in Saburo’s shadow.
Takemura chose his following words with care, keeping his tone calm. Saburo preferred to talk to people with spine. It was why he had been amused rather than horrified like his daughter Hanako when V had flipped off his engram, or so Takemura had heard. “The ward was bare, and V was not allowed to contact anyone but his assigned doctor and the guard save for a brief window. I lodged a complaint after I left.”
Having experienced the best of Arasaka's healthcare facilities on Earth whenever he had to recover from injuries, Takemura had been startled at how sparse the orbital ward had been. More like a cell than a ward. Takemura didn’t remember if there’d been a response to his complaint. He had been busy. Taking the reins of power in Kagawa had been a little like being kicked into the deep end of a pool, circled by sharks.
“Your complaint has been addressed, the doctor disciplined, procedures reviewed. Further, Arasaka has made headway in its flash cloning procedures. A suitable body for your friend may soon be available within three months.”
Relief and joy nearly swept away Takemura’s discipline. He bowed. “That is good to hear.”
Strangely enough, Saburo leant back in his chair with a soft grunt—a sound Takemura knew to indicate disappointment. “I thought that assigning you to Kagawa would hone you, not make you complacent.”
Takemura froze. He reviewed all they had said to date, then the sudden, curt summons he’d received hours ago. The odd direction of Saburo’s questions.
The nature of the man he called a friend.
“V has something to do with Mikoshi’s malfunctions?” Takemura guessed.
“You do not sound surprised.”
“He is the most talented netrunner I have ever met.” Charismatic, highly intelligent, and ruthless—V’s netrunning and technical skills made him effectively a one-man-army. Something Takemura had seen firsthand at Arasaka Industrial Complex. He hadn’t thought it possible for a netrunner equipped with gear cobbled off the street to breach and take down an Arasaka mech in a matter of seconds.
“Arasaka netrunners have been monitoring the situation for months. There appears to be an external breach from somewhere in Night City—difficult to pinpoint. But Mikoshi’s security superstructure also seems to be changing from within. The only unusual new addition to Secure Your Soul within the last year is V. Perhaps it is not his fault,” Saburo said, though his flat tone indicated that he thought otherwise. “Find out. Access Mikoshi from within the Tokyo control room and talk to V. You may advise him of the availability of a clone. Alternatively, you may also remind him that under the terms of the contract he signed, Arasaka has full discretion to do what we like to his engram.”
The carrot, then the stick. Takemura had done such procedures countless times on Saburo’s behalf, particularly when he had been younger. Less so now, and never to anyone he had considered a personal friend. He dropped his gaze to his shoes. “Yes, Saburo-sama.”
Saburo did not ever bother to dismiss a subordinate verbally—he expected those worthy of his time to know when they were no longer needed in his presence. Takemura bowed, taking his leave. As he walked to the lifts, he realised he had been sweating. His skin began to cool in the over-conditioned air, chilling him.
#
Takemura had visited a Mikoshi chamber in Tokyo once when Saburo had been giving the new Emperor of Japan a tour. It had been a strained affair—Saburo brusque, the Emperor polite. She had declined in the end to encode her engram. Saburo had not been surprised, nor had he looked disappointed. It didn’t matter, after all. Japan’s monarchy, one of the last in the world, was a relic of the distant past; a ceremonial mascot trotted out whenever one of them got married or died. Shuttered away from the world, like the Sanshu-no-Jingi—the imperial regalia—that they possessed.
When Takemura had been a child, his mother had once told him stories of the regalia. The mirror, Yata-no-Kagami, which represented wisdom. The jewel, Yasakani-no-Magatama, representing benevolence. And the sword, Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, the emblem of valour. Takemura, perhaps unsurprisingly, had been most interested in the sword. According to legend, its owner had been trapped in open grassland by a treacherous warlord, the grass set aflame by arrows to burn him to death. Desperate, the warrior tried to cut the grass with his sword, only to realise that with the blade, he could control the wind. He used it to redirect the fire, burning the warlord to death.
Saburo had a replica of Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi made, lovingly crafted. It hung in pride of place within a chamber of art adjacent to his office in Tokyo. There was a replica of Yata-no-Kagami in Kyoto. However, Saburo had made no replica of the jewel, having never found any use for benevolence. So Takemura had always understood. He knew his role as he sat before the projection deck in the Mikoshi chamber and breathed in its sterile air. A blade against a threat, here to defend its master. It was a role he had played for years.
The air above the deck flickered, and then a familiar figure appeared. Flickering and translucent in blue, a ghost who had legally died but a year ago. V glanced at Takemura and grinned with friendly mischief, his handsome, almost pretty face sketched vaguely against steel by the hologram. “You again,” he said.
“V,” Takemura began, then closed his mouth uncomfortably. The blade before the grass, hesitating.
“Fancy,” V said, glancing around the sterile steel and glass chamber. His gaze lingered on the two-way observation mirror where netrunners and scientists monitored their conversation, then jumped back to Takemura. “Arasaka pay you extra to be the bearer of bad news?”
“What makes you think so?” It felt strange to be speaking English again. In Kagawa, Takemura hardly ever had to. He was a year rusty.
“Last time I saw you, they’d kicked you over to tell me I was dying. To get you to persuade me to sign my soul away,” V said. He wore the same simple shirt and pants that he’d been wearing in the ward when they had last met, even though engrams usually projected themselves in their preferred clothes. “Well, what’s wrong now? Hit me.”
A sign of something, perhaps. Takemura didn’t know V well enough to guess. “Nothing is wrong. A suitable body for you will be ready within three months. Soon, you’d be able to meet me in Kagawa as we agreed.”
“Read about Kagawa when I was first ‘loaded,” V said. He sat, folding his knees into a lotus position, leaning forward. “Famous for sanuki udon. Sounds good.”
“And hone-tsuki-dori.”
“Olives, too.” V looked reflective. “Never eaten a real olive.”
“You can, in Kagawa. Soon.” Takemura hesitated. “You read about Kagawa from within Mikoshi?” Did engrams within Mikoshi have open access to the Net?
“Yeah. Why, is that strange? I’m supposed to be getting the VIP treatment here, after all, like all the other ‘invited’ guests. Unlike the uninvited guests, who get stuffed into empty boxes and presumably scream into the void for fuckin’ ever.”
The edge in V’s voice was brittle. Like the man Takemura had met in the orbital station, one breath away from violence. “It is my understanding that you should be,” Takemura said, wishing he had checked. But had that information been considered relevant, Saburo would have provided it. “The ward you were kept in for the tests—I’ve made a complaint. The doctor has been disciplined.”
V laughed. He had once possessed a joyous laugh, playful and infectious. Had made Takemura smile now and then at that, something Takemura hadn’t thought possible when he’d first been exiled to a filthy city he’d grown to loathe. Now, V’s laugh sounded jagged, rent with something dissonant. Digital interference, perhaps. “You think I give a damn whether that lady loses her job or not? Fuck. Goro, you haven’t changed at all. Still don’t fuckin’ know anything. Worse, once you do know somethin’, you let it fuckin’ slide.”
“What do you mean?” Takemura asked, frowning.
“Saburo having fun wearing his son’s skin?”
“Saburo-sama has stabilised Arasaka’s interests.”
“I mean. Don’t that creep you out at all?”
No, Takemura wanted to say, but he couldn’t. Though, agreeing wouldn’t be true, either. Conscious that they were being observed, Takemura said, “It was… difficult to get used to, at the beginning.”
“I bet. That’s probably why they slung you over to Kagawa, dressing it up as a promotion. Didn’t want you within stranglin’ range of the boss no more.”
“It is a promotion.” As with many conversations with V, this was starting to veer out of control and off-topic. “As I told you before, I believe that Hanako-sama made the—”
“Best decision at the time, yeah, I heard. For herself. She’s back in her safe little glass bubble, ain’t she? Where she always wanted to be. Insulated away from having to make any more ugly decisions by her daddy. Who is now also her brother. Damn, that’s fucked up.” As Takemura scowled, V laughed again. Louder this time, closer to human. “You think I don’t have a right to be pissed? Goro, I bled for Arasaka. Betrayed friends, burned bridges. All for what?”
“You will get what you’re due,” Takemura said, forcing himself to be patient. “Within three months.”
“You believe that?” V asked, chuckling. “You think this flash-cloning capability just sprang up over the last year? Cloning ain’t exactly new. It’s tech that’s been kickin’ around since 1885. Arasaka got fingers in every organ-vat business across the globe. If flash cloning were a thing, they could’a had a body for me primed up and ready for transfer right from the start. After my surgery, even. But maybe they wanted a guinea pig. Wanted to see what’d happen if a man hosted a biochip with an invasive engram for a few weeks, only to have that engram removed. Why’d you think I was kicked into that cell of a ward rather than something preem? ‘Course, once I didn’t have much of a use for them any longer, they sent you over to ask me to sign the dregs away.”
“Yet you signed,” Takemura said.
“Baby,” V said, with a flirtatious wink, “they chose you well. I’d have signed whatever you’d asked me to sign.” He leant back as Takemura blinked, the playfulness leeching away. “Fuckin’ schmuck that I was. Johnny was right, and he ain’t even here anymore to say that he told me so.”
“Are you behind what has happened to Mikoshi?” Takemura asked. He was, all of a sudden, exhausted. As much as he didn’t like what V was saying, he could never turn from the truth. Now that he thought about it, when he had accessed V’s file on record, it had read like an impersonal series of observations on a specimen. V had not been given any new medications, any further treatments after surgery. He had been left to decline, his mental and physical collapse becoming a matter of clinical interest.
Then Takemura had been sent in, likely when V had been deemed more of a threat than of use. As he was now.
V studied Takemura with his unsettling, translucent stare. “You startin’ to see it now, ain’t ya. The way your boss uses everyone. You, me, his own damned kids.”
“I work for him. It is an honour and a privilege,” Takemura said.
“Yeah? Well, I don’t see it that way. Never have, never fuckin’ will. Y’know, when Yorinobu strangled Saburo, I could’a stopped him. Took him a while to choke the life out of that old monster. Would’a been a matter of slinging over a daemon; I didn’t even have to kill Yorinobu if I didn’t want to. But I didn’t. I’d say it was shock, but at the time, I was thinking: good fuckin’ riddance and all that. And that was before I’d even met Johnny.” V spun a cigarette out of the air, the artificial ‘smoke’ flickering, just as translucent. “‘Course, if I’d guessed how much fuckin’ trouble that’d put me through… but nah. Saburo would’ve had me and Jackie killed anyway. Family laundry can’t fuckin’ air to the public, yeah?” He lowered his voice. “I’ll watch my back if I were you.”
“V,” Takemura grit out. Anger pressed to the fore, starting to shred his self-control. A flaw in his discipline—nothing new around V. V always could get so quickly under his skin. “If you had anything to do with Mikoshi, Arasaka has the right to shred your engram. Like what they did to Silverhand.”
Again, V laughed. “You ever seen The Watchmen? Old American holo. Adaptation of a comic book classic.”
Startled out of his temper by the non sequitur, Takemura said, “No?”
“There’s a prison scene in it, when one guy gets locked into a jail full’a people he put there.” V’s tone changed, becoming a low snarl. “‘None of you seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with me’.”
V’s engram disappeared. Startled, Takemura rose to his feet—had the session been so abruptly terminated? “Bring him back,” Takemura told the two-way glass in Japanese. “I haven’t begun negotiating.” Surely Saburo hadn’t already given the kill order.
The silence stretched, even as Takemura slowly sat back down. The netrunners were asking Saburo for a reprieve, perhaps, listening for instructions. Arasaka was very much a bureaucracy at the worst of times. As Takemura mentally reviewed his conversation with V, trying to prepare himself for more, Saburo called him directly.
“You are no longer needed here. Return to Kagawa,” Saburo said.
“But—” Takemura cut himself off. He had never questioned Saburo’s orders. “Yes, Saburo-sama.”
“You disagree.”
“Is...” Takemura hesitated. Usually, he would have dropped the subject, but something about V’s furious malice hung in the air. Accusingly. “Are you planning on shredding V’s engram?”
A pause, then, “Had that been an option, you would not have been called here.”
Had V somehow…? “Respectfully speaking, Saburo-sama, V does not trust anyone else in Arasaka but me. May I continue to speak to him?”
“He has told you nothing useful.”
An excuse. Saburo only made excuses when he was being cautious—which meant the malfunction was likely worse than Takemura imagined. “Allow me to go to Night City,” Takemura asked, trying to keep his tone calm and humble. “I know V’s contacts. I can find the external disturbance.”
Saburo fell silent, thinking. Never a good sign. Saburo’s most bloodless decisions were often made decisively. When he needed to think, he was weighing a scale heavy with lives—one with assets he valued.
“Go,” Saburo said, and closed the connection.
Takemura rose to his feet, exhaling loudly. He had recovered his poise by the door. Making his way to the obs room, he pushed past a startled netrunner by the door. “The file on V’s engram and details about the current situation with Mikoshi,” he said in a clipped voice. “Copy the files to me.”
“It’s classified,” said the netrunner he’d shoved past.
“If I am here, am I not cleared for access? Or would you like to check with Saburo-sama and waste his time?” Takemura glared at the netrunner. After a few seconds, he quailed, with an uneasy look at the rest of his team. They avoided his eyes.
“Here.” The netrunner passed Takemura a databank from the table. As Takemura nodded and began to leave, the netrunner ventured, “Good luck.”
Takemura grunted as he made his way to the lifts. Luck. He had a bad feeling that he would need it.