#aka 'v becomes the tower johnny wanted to destroy'

[merge-conflict]

imago

cyberhanami day 6 - "Focus on Sound"

content warnings: emotional distress, dysmorphia + body horror

Goro/Valentine

Big thank you to @another-corpo-rat for prompting this for me!!

summary: One day they woke her up she she could live forever.

<Is there some part of you stuck in limbo forever while they peel off copies to put in shards?>

<Jesus, V.> Johnny’s sudden hostility made her look up, to find him pacing behind the couch. <Got no fucking idea. Why’d you have to ask?>

<Sorry.> She redressed with some difficulty, trying to avoid aggravating the wound. <Morbid curiosity. A few weeks ago I would have said it was impossible to digitize someone so faithfully, but I was wrong. Wish I understood how it works.>

- excerpt from the damn things overlap

At night, V liked to stretch her legs. She had several, now, on nearly every floor of Arasaka tower– drones which were suitable for maintenance and simple tasks. In the past, when she had seen them skittering through the halls early in the morning, she had never given much thought to who controlled them. She had assumed they were autonomous, like the ones that had occasionally roamed the halls of her apartment building. In reality, they had been driven by the runners who kept the tower secure and systems running smoothly. Now nearly all of them were hers, if she chose to use them.

She had long since mapped the length and breadth of her body– with the exception of a handful of floors where even she was not permitted to be. Luckily the jungle was not one of these. When it was not in use it was where she spent her evening break.

The trees were not the only living things in the expansive space, although they were the most eye-catching. While the cicada chorus played all year round, there were a few months of the year was sung by the actual insects themselves, freshly molted and enjoying both the fresh air and freedom to do everything a cicada was meant to do, safe from the dangers of the outside world or any natural predators. They were culled periodically, of course, to keep the population in check. Their keeper– a woman who spoke only Japanese and then only about her plant and animal charges, had no qualms discussing her carefully controlled ecosystem in every detail– even if it was to the unblinking, expressionless eye of a drone.

It was summer now, and as V drove the drone over the tiled floor, the air above was almost deafeningly loud with cicada cries. She stopped the drone once it had climbed upon the imposing conference table at the heart of the jungle, neatly tucking its legs underneath it. She did not have eyes to close (and by the same measure had too many eyes to close all at once), but she could become still, and feel the vibrations on the surface of the drone’s carapace, which traveled all the way down to what passed for her heart.

They weren’t her cicadas, of course, not like the symbol she had set for her terminal banner, or the icon she used for the software that fed her support and maintenance requests. These cicadas lived and died within the span of a single year– all the moments of their lives spent living rather than over a decade and a half of building anticipation. She had witnessed generations pass in their entirety. Whenever she was haunted by the past, their songs and the songs of their ancestors always brought her back.

Tonight, her moment of contemplation was cut short by the arrival of a very particular AV in one of her hangars– one that belonged to Hanako Arasaka herself. She had been coming more and more frequently in the past year, and her presence always stirred up an interesting sort of commotion. V often followed her in her transition from physical to virtual, and if she was certain that Hanako knew of her curiosity, she never did anything about it. The more things V learned the less she believed they’d ever let her go, but still she couldn’t seem to help it. Data was all she had, and puzzling over which pieces to put together was as close as she got to a hobby.

The AV hangar cameras were some of the few that were continuously monitored by human eyes as well as software, and she was far from the only person lining up to gawk at royalty. If she cared to track them, she would find any number of tunneled streams leading to dozens of interfaces in the building. She’d first seen Saburo on a visit to Night City the very same way.

Oda came first, as always, his brief contemptuous sweep of the bay making all the guards straighten another inch. Hanako came after, elegantly and flawlessly imperious. And then, to V’s cold shock, Goro stepped out behind her.

She no longer possessed an endocrine system, or any sort of true adrenal response, but an engram was only as good as its level of fidelity– and somewhere deep inside her the strength of her response throttled several of her cores. Without hands there was nothing to ground her but the strength of the cicada song against the drone. If she flooded her levels too long her handlers had the unbearable habit of insinuating themselves into her attention. She ran her suppression scripts, relaxing as the world around her become flat and unreal.

While Oda accompanied Hanako to the executive level, Goro split off, descending into the tower. V watched him through the elevator camera, unable to stop herself from continuously tracing the lines of his face. He looked just as she remembered. She could still read the tense set of his shoulders, and the brief restlessness he allowed himself just before the car came to a stop. The ID tag on his interface had some unfamiliar title, based in some city she did not know. She could have looked it up, but she could not bear to divide herself. To tear away her attention.

After what she’d done to Hellman’s office, she was not permitted to move freely around the network which interfaced with Mikoshi as she did others. Indeed, she was not even permitted in drone form on the floor where he and his department operated. She’d honored that restriction faithfully for years, but she broke it as soon as Goro stepped off the elevator, tracking him as he walked. It took her handlers a few minutes to notice her transgression, and then another few to determine which of them would confront her about it. She ignored their messages and sent them one of her own– a livestream of the cicada cries straight into their audio channels.

They’d been with her long enough to know what that meant, and their desire to ensure Hanako’s visit went smoothly was overridden by their desire not to make her angry. V was half-fond of them– they were, after all, her primary source of human contact– but if she fried them all in their chairs she would be given replacements. After all, they weren’t the ones responsible for the year over year upward trend of operational efficiency at NC tower.

Hellman's staff were prepared for Goro’s visit. She followed him all the way up until the point where he jacked into the Mikoshi interface, when she was consumed by the sudden need to be as far away as possible. Thankfully she had a new distraction– the tiny pip of a connection request, coming from one of the executive floors, where she had no eyes. She accepted it and was almost immediately granted access to an unfamiliar drone.

V moved her attention into it immediately, guessing correctly that this was an official summons. Oda stepped back from the drone as she assumed control and repositioned herself so she was facing Hanako. The drone had the most advanced suite of software V had seen, with a wide array of sensory data that felt like settling into a feast after years of starvation. She tapped one of the drone’s feet against the stool it had been placed on, and savored the texture of the touch, and the minute vibrations which quietly shivered up the frame. Around her she could once again feel the buzz of the radio spectrum like the soft ripples of waves against her skin– and if she was sure that she would grow tired of the overstimulation, in the moment it felt like sinking back into a warm bath.

“Hanako-sama,” V said in greeting, loathing the sound of her digitized voice. “It’s a pleasure to have you visit, as always.”

“I detest this city,” Hanako replied, with a side glance to the city outside the window behind her. “But I am pleased to see the progress being made here.”

It was easy, within digital confines, to disguise emotion– especially anger. All V had to do was stand idle. They could open her up, of course, watch the data flowing through her heart and her soul. They could do that and come to all sorts of conclusions. But that was no different than the way they had once tracked the rise and fall of her hormones, and at least now she knew when someone was looking.

“A suitable body for your engram has been recovered,” Hanako continued, oblivious to her non-response. “It will be ready for implantation soon. There will be a chance of rejection, of course, but Dr. Hellman has told me that it is much lower than with previous matches.”

This time she waited, and it was some time before V could bring herself to respond. “That is good to hear.”

This was, she supposed, the moment where she might beg for favor. For understanding. For mercy. This was, she supposed, the moment that haunted her every thought, every preparation, every early dawn hour. The very moment which she worked so tirelessly never to think about at all.

She had read her contract so many times it had ceased to contain meaning. It was a brand, a warning, a reminder. It was a simple text file sitting in her root directory that was as much a part of her as her digital neural network. If she might beg for leniency on the application of some of its sections, there were too many for her to ever get what she wanted. Divergence might be a term with enough ambiguity for her to argue with, but even in her wildest fantasies she could not imagine the contract duration itself to be subject to discussion. It all had to be paid for by someone, after all. And until now that someone had been her.

A hundred and fifty floors below, Goro was holding a conversation with someone who was not herself.

“Hanako-sama,” V said, with utter neutrality. “I hope you will not tell her about me.”

Hanako tilted her head slightly, the light in her eye suggesting she had already anticipated this request. “As you wish. Takemura requested to be present, so that he might assist with reintegration.”

Of course.

“I have no right to ask for your favor, but if I may?” V waited for Hanako’s mute gesture to continue. “When it is done…please do not bring him here again.”

Hanako’s lack of reaction she had expected, but the frown Oda’s face was a surprise. Yet, for once V found she had no interest in whatever fucked up web of politics he was in, or what opinion he held of her, or Goro, or his own mistress.

“I will make no such promise,” Hanako replied, which confirmed that V was being shown both the carrot and the stick. “But when the process is complete, he will return to Japan.”

There were too many questions that V could not bring herself to ask. In her heart, one of her runners played for her the sound of rainfall. In the jungle, her drone slammed one of its feet down repeatedly on the table, just audible over the screaming of the cicadas.

Johnny had been right about the leash. Johnny had been right about a lot of things, but he was dead. He was dead, because she had killed him. And she had never asked what ghosts still lingered in the prison she had left behind.

“He does not know of your presence here,” Hanako told her. “The improvements you have made here have shown promise, but it is of course still an early trial.”

Early for a woman who was nearly a century old. But she had lived a long portion time out of the view of others, and V could admire her subtleties. It was too late to listen to a dead man, but there were other options.

“Of course,” V said. “I understand.”

Hanako lowered her chin slightly, locking eyes with the drone. “You may tell him, if you wish.”

It was a double-edged sword, but V found herself clinging to it all the same. In the jungle she folded the drone’s legs underneath itself again. There was a brief blip of a notification in her peripheral– a minor malfunction in one of the mechanisms that moved inventory between floors. But it was gone almost as soon as it arrived, the job taken by another one of her runners.

“This drone is a gift,” Hanako continued, when V did not reply. “I hope to continue to receive good reports.”

“Thank you, Hanako-sama. I am at your service.”

Her answering nod was also a dismissal, and V carefully piloted the unfamiliar drone off the stool and out of the office. She returned to the cameras around Mikoshi, keeping watch over Goro’s body. It occurred to her that she might pull the recording of the conversation, as she easily as she had insinuated herself into the network, but the very idea made her nerves itch, even under the influence of her script. They hadn’t put up any barriers here. Another test.

Just looking at him made her want to touch him again, to be close enough to smell the sweat on his skin and feel every breath he took. Those memories were as vivid as they always had been, even though the gray in his hair had long since spread beyond his temples. There were new lines around the corners of his eyes, the mark of all their time spent apart. Much, much longer than the frantic span of a few weeks at the end of a single summer.

She hated him so fiercely and so abruptly she thought she might burn through her hardware, seized in the throes of anger she hadn’t felt since they’d first woken her up. But it passed as the minutes ticked on, and left her scoured clean. By the time he opened his eyes again she felt nothing at all, just the steady sound of the jungle, and distant rainfall. Her new drone, now tucked away safely into her heart, paced through the server racks in steady, soothing rhythm.

When he left, she stopped his elevator car in the jungle, instead of his true destination. Goro exited the car when it did not respond to his controls, and after a moment of indecision, stepped out into the room. Watching him, she could almost feel the change of humidity on his skin, the sudden scream of a nearby cicada that drew his attention upwards to the trees. The warmth of the artificial sunlight, dappling through the leaves onto his face. He walked down the steps to the conference table, where her drone sat quiet and unmoving.

V fled within herself, retreating to the sanctity of her internal subnet until one of her runners dropped a ticket into her work queue, marked specifically for her attention. It wasn’t urgent, but the last ticket he’d sent in a similar manner had been diverting, and she was of mind to reward the behavior. Maybe it was time to invest in this newest batch.

So long as she made certain they could never be taken away.

#cyberhanami23 #cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk 2077 fic #valentine #hanako arasaka #goro takemura #BAD ENDING #aka 'v becomes the tower johnny wanted to destroy' #this is another Long one sorry #it could have used a week to rest and then another few rounds of edits but *jazz hands* here we are! #i'm here to rip your heart out sorry #i'm going to try and do it again tomorrow too #keep your guard up! #trust no one!