At the moment, Tanaseda Sadaato was apparently in Newpest. One of the larger cities, it occupies the eastern coastline like an infected wound. I was several hours away from it geographically but seconds away virtually. Kovacs, I remembered distantly as I parked in front of a low-grade VR stall several blocks away from Aiura's upscale fortress, was from there originally. Inside, I plugged myself into one of the neural nodes dangling from a wall socket, its mess of dulled silver electrodes almost colorless in the dim lighting, and settled in next to two other occupants, their bodies listless and vacant. Hypnotic patterns, meant to draw my attention and consciousness into the compliant state necessary for VR experiences, settled and seethed across my vision as the machinery pulled me under. I awoke in a flat, endless gray space which I immediately began to populate with data on the sempai. I needed a certain amount of discretion and preparation for this trick, but it didn't take me too long before I felt ready. A few hours in real time can be stretched for days in VR.

VR's a strange beast. At the most basic level it's an environment built from the electrons on up by human beings; its rules may be esoteric, but certainly less esoteric than the ones that govern the physical universe. Thing is, it's been centuries since we could build a virtual world sufficiently illusory to pass as the real one if you don't remember jacking in. It's been even longer since anything human's been writing the rules or compiling the code. Compilers begat parsers begat evolutionary computation begat swarm intelligence; for a while people had to at least start the process off with a carefully-prepared articulation of their needs but a couple centuries ago the firms just started plugging big data into a learning network and the AIs themselves started anticipating everything instead. One top of their incomprehensible yet efficient digital architecture is the everyday virtual reality that human intelligences inhabit and interact in, a dream manufactured in the mind of ineffable giants swimming far below the surface.

You'd think we'd fear that reality more. You'd think it'd bother us. I think it did, once, back before it all seemed run of the mill. But now, living as a dream in the fractured network-spanning consciousness of a digital god is just part of the scenery.

When I booted in, the server nexii resolved around me into alleyway streets with protrusions of bars, hotels, and even the occasional law firm. The streets were the public server infrastructure, the buildings privately owned hubs. Newpest proper lacked a true virtual hub, but the yakuza and various other vested private interests had built their own private hubs. They'd even linked them together, out of some misplaced and obsolete sense of public service, via a ramshackle public server theoretically maintained by the municipality of Newpest.

The yakuza's hub was a bar, carved out of some offshoot breed of yellow sandstone that went well with its tawdry and disused aesthetic. A bouncer waited outside, head bald with heavily muscled tattooed arms and a stocky build. She was leaning against one of the entrance's pillars, shoulder folded neatly against the concrete. Her gaze flickered onto mine as I stepped into her field of view.

"Looking for Tanaseda," I tried.

The bouncer's eyes stared back unblinking. "Who are you?"

"Tell him it's Harlan."

The bouncer's eyes glazed momentarily. The streets were almost entirely deserted, but behind me I could feel one or two passers-by, at least one rubbernecking curiously as they walked away. I wondered idly whether the bouncer was a real person or not; an AI enforcer would be just as effective, but I could almost see the yakuza paying someone to stand door guard even in virtual.

A minute passed. About long enough for Tanaseda to terminate an incoming call and enter this one.

"Enter."

Dimly lit interior, pipe smoke left curling gently in the air like the most fragile of sculptures. A bartender looked up from where he sat behind the table, idly polishing a shot glass. Off the shelf software.

From one corner of the bar, Tanaseda looked up from his sake and his eyes locked onto mine. For the briefest of moments, I felt the beginnings of fear, wondered how many lives Tanaseda had snuffed out over how many long centuries of immortal living assured through money, power, and the routine wonders of cortical stack technology. Then the glory of mission time snuffed it out. Envoy conditioning, awake and moving. Patterns of lies mapped themselves out in my mind like jet contrails.

He gestured with one hand to the seat in front of him. I made my walk to him idle, motioned on the way for a glass of sake like his.

"Tanaseda," I called. "A pleasure."

He waited until I'd sat. Cold green eyes glimmered at me like polished gems.

"And you are?"

"Is this area secure?" I asked him. "And private? No monitoring by anyone else?"

Tanaseda snorted. "Of course. Now, tell me, who is it would use the name Harlan so lightly?"

You can implement body language modification software in VR. Programmed poker faces, minute alterations that hint at suppressed panic or relief when in fact the speaker is in fact experiencing nothing of the sort. One of the things I'd looked for when I was preparing, when I was scraping through Tanaseda's profile with a micrometer comb. He was a bit of a Luddite when it came to those sorts of alterations, as it had turned out. No indication over years of interactions with Aiura that he'd ever relied on those sorts of negotiation augments. A discipline thing, I suppose.

It did make him easier to read for me. I guess he had pretty minimal experience in negotiating with Envoy consciousnesses, especially one that had just spent the last few hours reviewing all of Aiura's recorded negotiations with him. I can't blame him there.

"One of their messengers," I told him, and leaned back as my drink was placed in front of me. I sipped experimentally, and found it was close enough to real for my tastes at least. "The regime has a few things to request of you, sempai. Call them reparations."

The sempai snorted. "Reparations. Whatever it is, go through the proper channels. Harlan has a yakuza contact, and I am not-"

I slipped a nondescript disk on the table between the two of us.

"What is that?" asked Tanaseda.

I shrugged. "Upload it into your mainframe and see. Just make sure you're connected to the rest of your network when you do so."

Tanaseda stiffened. "What you are insinuating... Is this-"

"No. If we wanted to wipe your stacks, we'd have the grace to do it the old-fashioned way rather than spike your feeds with a virus. But we've decided there needs to be increased monitoring."

The old yakuza sat still as glass for a long moment. Then his hands slammed down on the table in a rare display of anger. I watched with detached interest as the reverberations resonated and died in my sake.

"Go back to whatever bureaucratic master holds your leash, and wish you were ronin," Tanaseda spat. "You interrupt me, make empty boasts of your honored affiliations, threaten me, tell me to turn upon my own. Your master will be contacted, and informed of your behavior, and when he does, I will perhaps request to be present when you are being reprimanded."

"Maybe," I said, and stretched in my seat. "I think Aiura may have something to say about that, though."

The yakuza went very still.

Months prior, it had been Tanaseda who had first spoken with Aiura about the Sylvie and the Quallgrist plague she'd released. He'd been her liaison, and to all appearances they'd kept each other well informed.

But there were indications that he hadn't quite been honest with her. The yakuza were the underdogs here; if they'd been able to isolate Makita and ransom her back to Harlan there would have been political implications lasting for centuries. Aiura had been aware of the possibility, but she'd had too much to lose not to let the yakuza run a bit wilder than she'd probably have liked. When I'd found an encrypted call to Tanaseda buried in his virtual call access history, its telemetry leading through a labyrinth of proxy nodes to a coastline node nearby a haiduci base of operations, I'd started to suspect that Tanaseda had some leads.

He certainly hadn't told Aiura.

Add to that the fact that Aiura had been spending a lot of time in virtual, coordinating between her different legions and liaisons. Add the fact that she'd been regularly exchanging data with Tanaseda, that she'd just happened to have terminated a call with him moments prior to when she'd gone out to deal with our little disguised as a suicide strike. That a few hours would be long enough for shit to hit the fan, and as far as Tanaseda knew, for Harlan to lean on her for renewed vigor and improved results.

Call it serendipity, but Tanaseda was off balance, and we'd need the yakuza going forward.

"You're bluffing," he said at last.

"Ask her. Call her up right now. She's the one who sent me here."

He stared, as if an apparition had leapt from my throat and curled into a ghostlike horror in front of him. "Aiura... is aware that we did everything in our power-"

"To avoid making such terrible mistakes, yes. And yet you did." I tilted my head. "We can't afford to withhold information from one another, sempai. You are surely aware that the infection has spread to even New Tokyo. We are within days of losing any chance of keeping this contained. You'll open your networks to us."

There. That should be vague enough to put the fear of the angelfire into him. Even if I wasn't entirely on the mark about what he'd been up to.

"I. This must be discussed with the other-"

"It doesn't," I said with brutal finality. "You will bring the programs on this disk back with you into your secured network. You will be contacted. You will upload our remaining intrusion and monitoring software into your virtual holdings using what's on that disk, and the yakuza network will be compromised to us from then on. Any data there will be completely and immediately accessible to us, until we tell you otherwise. And if you don't want to hear it from Aiura, perhaps you could bear hearing it from Harlan."

His face broke, became ashen.

I got up and left without saying another word, left my tab scattered on my half of the table.

The VR was fading from view mere heartbeats after I'd left the yakuza bar. I opened my eyes to find the familiar hypnotic holograms floating in front of me like the hangover after a long night drinking. I reached back and yanked the neural 'trodes off of the dampened skin on the back of my neck, left them dangling for the next customer. My fingers had closed around the earpieces when a toneless voice in my ear said, "Incoming call from-" the voice shifted into monotone-"No Address Found. Do you wish to take the call?"

I slipped the trode back on.

"Jack, I presume," I whispered.

On the other end of the line, a soft chuckle. "Jack. A pleasure to meet you, again. But I prefer Aiura."

"I'll be sure to keep that in mind."

"Progress?"

"He's been turned."

"Good work. I'll await his call. You're going to New Hok."

"Specifics?"

"On the way. Get us into another sleeve, too. Liu's going back to his day job."

Envoys aren't much for hierarchies, but we functionalized as we went. 'Aiura' was at the information hub. She was the natural candidate for organizing us.

"Noted."