REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLZZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Arasaka Tower. Floor eighty-five. Taro Hayashi's office.
No dust. No noise. Even the air moved at a calculated rate. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, Night City's neon fractured in the heavy rain like a circuit board with a bad connection.
Hayashi stood at the window with his back to the door. A deep grey custom suit. The Arasaka family crest on his lapel pin caught the cold overhead light.
"Enter."
The door slid open without sound.
Sato, the security division echelon head, walked in. Steady. A data pad in his hand. His expression was the expression of soone about to present a quarterly security report, not a death notification.
"Director." Sato stopped three ters from the desk and gave a slight bow. His voice was level. "Deputy Director Jiro Hayashi was found murdered under the Sixth Street bridge. His embedded recall chip confirms execution by high-caliber kinetic weapons. Vital signs at zero."
Hayashi did not turn. He set down his whiskey glass. Ice found the crystal and made a clean sound.
"Cause."
"Preliminary assessnt: professional rc ambush. The assailant used modified signal-blocking equipnt. Neither the trauma team nor company security had a response window. No biological trace at the scene."
"Damage assessnt."
"Beyond Jiro himself, the car's onboard server was brute-forced and abandoned in Pacifica. The credit chips were cracked. The assailant did not take the physical cash, but it is possible Jiro disclosed company information before death."
Hayashi turned.
No expression. No grief, no anger. Not even the trace of surprise that would have co from receiving news about a stranger. Hearing of his younger brother's death registered with the sa weight as a report of casualties among low-level security contractors.
"Put the data on screen."
The holographic projection opened. Blue light streams wove into a complex network: Jiro Hayashi's last movents before death.
Hayashi moved to the projection. His fingers moved through the air as if tracing the surface of sothing interesting.
"Sato. Have you ever studied glass?"
"Yes, director."
"When a nail is driven into glass by force, invisible cracks form in the surrounding area." Hayashi's voice was low and asured, carrying the particular weight of a man who had excised all the unnecessary variables from his thinking. "Unintelligent security people would focus on Jiro's death. Find the killer, get a na, find an address. That wastes processing power."
His finger stopped on the red dot where Jiro's signal had gone dark.
"We look at the cracks. Follow the cracks to where they converge, and that is where the problem started. The cracks are in the business he handled. He should have had close contact with those Yakuza. Pull that data for ."
Sato organized the data imdiately. Hayashi's finger moved through the stream at a pace that suggested he had done this many tis before.
"In the past two weeks, the only external resource Jiro accessed with any frequency was the Tyger Claws."
On the holographic map, Kabuki lit up instantly.
"Have the Yakuza submit all recent attack locations. Then identify any common denominators and filter. Go."
Sato noted it on his data pad. "Once located, should I dispatch a special operations unit for cleanup imdiately?"
"No rush."
Hayashi picked up his glass again.
"Raise the encryption level on every project connected to Jiro. Increase security clearance on high-priority items by two tiers. As for Jiro's private accounts and assets, apply standard procedure. He created no value for the company while he was alive. There is no reason to spend resources on him now that he is not."
"Understood, director."
Sato turned and left. The door closed without sound.
Hayashi looked at the death data. At Jiro's wide-open eyes in the final image.
"Jiro."
He swirled the glass slowly. He raised it toward his brother's eyes on the screen as if completing a ceremony that had no witnesses, and drank.
....
Jotaro Shoji pushed through the heavy soundproof door with the expression of a man who had been building toward an outburst for two hours. As the Tyger Claws' art director in Kabuki, the one thing he had no tolerance for was surprises. Specifically the kind that disrupted production.
"Damn it. I was gone two hours."
He crossed into the space he referred to as the Sanctuary, still working through curses under his breath. He had run through the possibilities on the way: equipnt failure, an uncooperative subject, so officer with a death wish running a sweep. He was prepared for problems.
He was not prepared for a floor covered in shredded at and blood that hadn't fully dried yet.
His director was distributed across the floor in the general configuration of a lted wax figure. Around him: Tyger Claws mbers in various states of non-functionality, so with their limbs at wrong angles, so with their skulls opened. Blood and the acrid chemistry of the acid had spent enough ti together under the pink neon that the combination had fernted into sothing almost sweet.
"What the-"
"Which piece of garbage did this?! My studio!"
He roared. His fists were closed. His knuckles were pale.
Fury rolled through him. The entire Symphony of Suffering series, months of planning and preparation, dismantled in two hours by soone who apparently hadn't even had the courtesy to be professional about it. He wanted to find whoever had done this and put them in sothing new.
"Boss."
One of his remaining n was pressed into a corner, pointing at the cara on its tripod.
"That person. When they left. The equipnt is still running."
Shoji's fury stopped.
He turned and looked at the cara. The red recording indicator was still blinking. A patient, tireless eye watching over the scene it had captured.
In that mont, Shoji's face did sothing that had nothing to do with rage.
The fury pulled back like a tide. What ca in behind it was sothing close to rapture. His pupils expanded. His breathing changed. The corners of his mouth moved against his apparent control.
"Still running. He actually left it running."
He crossed to the cara and touched it the way a man touches sothing he has been looking for for a long ti. Trembling, he pressed play, casting the image onto the large holographic screen.
The footage played.
No script. No rehearsal. No performance.
On screen: the man in the glowing cube mask dropped from the second-floor corridor. His movents had no hesitation in them at all. The Nine Tails assault rifle opened up. The sound of kinetic rounds tearing air ca through the high-fidelity microphones with complete clarity.
The director he'd lost writhed in the acid on screen and scread, and the fear and despair in it had a quality that no professional had ever produced for him. Not once, in all his years of production.
"Beautiful."
Shoji said it quietly, staring at the screen with sothing burning in his eyes.
"This is art. This is what it was always supposed to be. Look at the composition. Look at the light. That blood pattern look at the arc on it. Mathematically perfect."
He had entirely forgotten about the bodies on the floor. About his dead crew. About the person who had co into his studio and done this to it.
In his eyes, this was not a cri scene. This was an uncut docuntary. Raw, genuine, with no artificiality in it anywhere.
"Boss." His man asked the question carefully. "This footage. Is it still usable?"
"Usable?" Shoji was on his feet. He was moving. His arms were in the air.
"The previous material was fake and everyone could tell. The audience stopped believing it. But this one is real. This is actual death. Pure and unmanaged."
He plugged his portable terminal into the system and his fingers started moving across the keyboard at the pace of soone who had been waiting years for exactly this material.
"This shot here, bring up the exposure, I want the neon reflecting off the mask face fully visible. Here push the gunshots louder. I want the audience to feel the pressure wave in their ears. And this mont, this mber going airborne, I need this in slow motion."
He edited while humming sothing tuneless, wearing the expression of a person in the middle of creating sothing they've always wanted to make.
"I already have the title. Cube Head's Execution Suite: Act One."
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