Chapter Text
The first time V began to wonder whether leaving her clan behind for a life in the city was a mistake was when she watched her best friend die. The second time was about ten minutes later, when she got shot in the head. The third was waking up buried by rubble in a landfill. There was, she was starting to think, something to the idea that this city chewed you up and spat you out, but for a little while she was too busy to give it much thought, what with the terrorist mass murderer who had taken up residence in her brain and started redecorating. It had been, all things considered, one of her worse weeks.
“Fuckin’ useless,” Johnny Silverhand commented, watching her try and fail to hack a terminal. He sat atop a throne of empty cardboard boxes which looked as though the weight of the hallucinated engram might be enough to topple them to the floor.
“Oh, sorry, should I be planting a nuclear bomb in it instead? Accidentally cause half a million deaths? Do we think that will fix it?”
She swore under her breath, looking around. Hadn’t got used to speaking to him inside her mind yet, and that was a mistake when trying to infiltrate this Tyger Claws casino quietly. When she looked back, he was gone. As usual when she brought it up she felt a twinge of guilt, though she wasn’t sure if it was hers for mentioning it or his for the mass murder. Maybe a bit of both.
It took her another ten minutes, but she got it eventually. It wasn’t even part of the job; she just needed the extra eddies. Getting out of there after was harder. The thing with trying to be sneaky was it left a whole lot of people alive and wandering around, but it was part of the job, and anyway she was determined to keep her body count lower than Johnny’s, if only to prove a point. The margin was still the size of the Atlantic ocean, but every bit helped.
“Behind you,” Johnny said, his voice loud inside her head, “duck left, behind that freezer.”
She did, instinctively, and two secs later one of the guards walked by, his shiny gold jacket glinting in the fluorescent lights. It had already become second nature, trusting Johnny like this, because despite what he said the first night they properly met, he did in fact need her body alive. For his sake and hers.
“Thanks,” she mouthed, trusting he could feel it and work out what she meant.
She crept out, choking out one guard on the way and leaving her leaned against the wall. The angle had been wrong for stealth; she would have spotted V. Johnny followed, back in the visible spectrum, kicking ineffectually at pieces of trash on the ground, his boot going right through them. It pissed him off, being like this. She couldn’t blame him for that, any person would be pissed off in that situation, but then most things seemed to piss Johnny Silverhand off. And that wasn’t new, she had lived through enough of his memories to gather as much.
They deltaed out, dropped the thing in the drop point, and then Wakako called and called V a good girl. A few minutes later she sat on a concrete square of uncertain purpose, looking out at the city before her. With a glitching sound Johnny appeared next to her, lighting up a smoke.
“Does it help?”
“What?”
“The digital cig?”
“Nah. Somethin’ do do with the hands I don’t got. Till enough of me overwrites you that you get the craving it’ll have to do.”
V nodded. “Sorry. Always found the smell of it gross.”
He didn’t comment on the apology. Knew it wasn’t about the cigs so much as the sitch. The way things sucked now, for both of them, but even more so for Johnny. And, well, if they let it go on long enough it’d swap round. Maybe that was fair.
“Considered vaping?”
“The fuck’s vaping?”
“Huh. Guess it fell outta fashion then. Makes sense. Not as good as the real thing.”
The sun emerged from behind a cloud, and V tilted her face up towards it, closing her eyes. Maybe she needed to take some inspo from Johnny, bring shades everywhere. If you ignored the smells and the noise it was almost entirely unlike the open road.
“Miss it?” Johnny asked, like he could see her thoughts. Fuck, maybe he could. She could feel his moods, she was pretty sure, at least when they got strong enough. Maybe he got imagery, or nostalgia, or maybe her actual internal monologue. Hi Johnny.
“Being out there? Freedom? Having people who gave a shit about me? Yeah.”
“You agree to take down ‘Saka with me, I’ll give a shit about you,” he promised.
“Uh-huh? You gotta. Can’t eventually take this hot bod unless it stays alive long enough.”
“Told you, not gonna,” he said, hint of irritation in his voice. “Not if you help me take ‘em down. ‘Sides, never particularly wanted to be a chick.”
“Shoulda caught me four years ago, then,” V said, shrugging.
“Nah. Seen your memories, kid, this is an improvement.”
Rude. Not wrong, but rude. But he looked kind of amused, and she was starting to like the little moments like that. It might be a shitty fucking sitch she was in, but at least she had someone who understood, who was in it with her. Even if him being in it with her was in fact the essence of the problem.
“Why don’t you go back?”
“To the clan?” He nodded. “Things started changing. For the worse. My clan joined Snake Nation.”
“Huh. New in my day. Still around, then?”
“Still around. There were disagreements. Politics, ethics. I don’t know, joining up with bigger and bigger entities, seems antithetical to the point of us, you know? Or to them, I guess. Not a nomad any more.”
“Nomads incorporated?” Johnny suggested, and V laughed.
“Somethin’ like that, yeah. Guess NC’s not really the place you go to run away from that kinda shit, but…”
“But it’s a place you run away to,” Johnny finished.
“Yeah,” she agreed. Just for a moment she wished she had a smoke to light too. “That what you did?”
“Yep.”
“Gonna elaborate or do I gotta wait for the full BD experience of your memories.”
Johnny looked at her for a long moment, like he was trying to figure her out, or possibly diagnose her with something serious. The distinction was almost meaningless when it came to him.
“You don’t know? Never read a fuckin’ thing about the greatest band in NC history?”
“Uh,” she countered. “Um. I mean, not really.”
“Fuck’s sake, you’re literally wearing Ker’s merch, you gonk.”
V looked down at herself. She was, in fact, wearing a poorly screen printed and mildly misspelled Kerry Eurodynne tank she bought off some street vendor. She looked back at Johnny, her eyes widened.
“Oh! Oh, Kerry Eurodyne used to be in Samurai.”
“Jesus fucking christ.”
She shrugged. “I think of him more as a solo artist. Has been since like, before you died, right?”
Johnny took off his sunglasses, specifically to look at her, incredulously. Like of course she should know the backstory of a band that broke up sixty-nine years ago. But then he sighed, and put them back on.
“Guess of all the scop you could be listenin’ to, his is the best.”
“Wait, so in your memory, that guy with the… with the hair, that’s him?”
“Dunno what memory you’re talking about, but statistically it’s likely, yeah.”
V nodded. That made sense. He had seemed intensely familiar in a way she hadn’t been able to place, but she had figured that was because he was Johnny’s bandmate, that it was his feeling.
“Hard to recognise without the chrome and the blue eyes,” she said.
“The fucking what,” said Johnny.
“I’ll show you when we get home.”
-
Johnny stood behind V, looking over her shoulder and through her eyes simultaneously at the person who bore a distinct resemblance to his best friend. The guy he had known for his entire life (or at least the part of his life he was willing to consciously remember). And it was his face, broadly speaking. Not so much older than he remembered, but his hair was short and silvery, his eyes were blue and gold. There was cyberware in his face, down his throat.
“This what he looks like now?”
V flipped through a few more of the photos on his website. It looked a whole lot like websites used to look in the early Samurai days. Relic of the Net going under or simply retro web design? He wasn’t sure.
“Yep. What he’s looked like as long as I remember, anyway. Had a couple of his records. Not sure where they are now. Left most of my stuff behind with the family.”
V’s apartment, for all it had been her home for months now, still looked bare. Messy, sure, but impersonally so. Take out and delivery boxes and empty bottles, dirty clothes on the floor. The latter had been recategorised by V as more sleeping options for their newly adopted cat. Whatever kept her sane. Ish. And whatever kept him personally from sanity. There was a radio, perpetually on, which was great, except for the scop they played, but V had no guitar, not even an acoustic one, and no record player. The chick made baffling life choices.
“Looks… different.”
V clicked back to one of the old shots from their Samurai days. 2007, Johnny could tell by the exact constellation of pins and patches on Kerry’s vest. One band that had only started getting big enough to hear about that year, and another where it had turned out the lead singer was violently homophobic the year after. They’d both been fans before that, and then got drunk and burnt all their records and merch and officially announced how much they sucked at the next gig they played.
Fuck, they were so young back then. Johnny reached out towards the screen, then caught himself. Poked at the pixels making up that hair band Kerry always insisted on.
“Told him this looked dumb a million times,” he said. “Guess that didn’t stop him keeping this shot forever.”
“I think it looks kinda cute,” V said, “in a baby punk kind of way.”
Much as Johnny disagreed with how she said it, she wasn’t wrong. Kerry at nineteen, face still having that softly rounded thing going on. Just before he had started growing that dumb moustache. Fuck. Johnny missed him. Glad, of course, he had made it, that he was still alive in this distant and unsettling future, which was both exactly like the past and nothing like it at all. A point of connection for his code to cling to. Glad he was still making music, too, although it was obvious he’d sold out.
“Ever seen him play?”
“Yeah,” V said, nodding, scrolling through some archived list of concerts, “uh… fuck, can’t remember which of these it was. Not in NC. Some festival, up North. Few years ago.”
“He any good?”
He felt V smile. Funny, feeling her face move like it was his own. He wasn’t used to it yet, but he had the sinking feeling he was going to get real familiar with it.
“Pretty good, yeah,” she said. “Even got his autograph.”
“Uh-huh. He loved that. The attention, the adoring fans.”
“And you didn’t?” she asked, turning to face him. He looked down at her face, then down at her tits, and felt her face settle into mild exasperation. But honestly he was stuck with her body, and if nothing else it meant a pair of tits to look at whenever he wanted to, and he was gonna take what advantages he got. Besides, he knew she liked them a whole lot too.
“More in the abstract. Freaked me out talkin’ to ‘em too much. Dunno, telling me my songs saved their damned lives and shit. Not my goddamn responsibility, keeping kids from killing themselves. Why I burnt all my fan mail.”
“I distinctly remember you fucking a whole lot of groupies,” V countered, managing to give off the impression that somehow this was not a good thing. Fucking weird ass kid.
“Yep. Didn’t talk much. Managed to find better uses for mouths.”
“Eww,” she said, although he could feel she didn’t mean it. Could tell maybe the memories got her kind of hard. He’d let her pretend, though. Didn’t hurt.
She closed the website, getting up. Grabbed Nibbles’ food bowl and began the arcane preparation rituals the little raw chicken looking gremlin apparently demanded. One of the last cats in NC and still that picky. Reason there weren’t many left, maybe.
“What did you get him to sign?” he asked, appearing sitting on her desk. “Your tits?”
“No. Never understood that. Don’t get to keep it? Less you run to a tattoo artist after, have it inked forever, I guess. Nah, a poster. Managed to spell my name wrong.” She scrolled through a series of images on her tablet, presumably looking for it to demonstrate before giving up when the microwave dinged. Extracting the bowl of truly awful smelling synth tuna, she drizzled a hint of original flavour Nicola over it, and set it down next to the water bowl. Nibbles sniffed it, considered for a moment, and then jumped up on the couch to give itself a bath. Herself? Johnny hadn’t looked too close.
“Spelled a single letter wrong? That does sound like him.”
“Was going by the full thing back then. Kind of testing out a new name, seeing how it felt, somewhere far from the folks I knew. I don’t know, having a guy I looked up to that much mess it up, kinda felt like a sign.”
“Can assure you there’s no greater meaning behind it. His spelling sucks. Should see the first of his lyric drafts, complete mess. Still, don’t mean he was wrong. V’s good. Suits you.”
He hadn’t meant to pay her a compliment, but he didn’t completely regret it. Sitch aside, the two of them kind of got along. Maybe because their brains were merging into one, maybe not. He wasn’t sure whether any of them would be able to make the distinction before long. She was a dumb kid, and kind of a shit merc, but he had also once been a dumb kid, and it was a position he could respect. A necessary phase of life. Sure, he had been a world famous rock star by the time he was twenty-three, but people couldn’t all reach the same heights as him. As things stood, there were probably worse people whose heads he could have ended up in. She shared his distrust of systems and corporations, nomad life had made her appreciate a good car or bike, and if she liked Kerry’s music, well, he guessed that was a pretty good sign of her taste.
“Thanks. Hey, if we go see your old choom, think he’ll sign something new for me?”
“Worth a shot.”