@sanguisfulgur / theo gets an ac starter.
It’d taken time and resources that he didn’t have to spare to get it done -- as much as he loved the idea of taking down two Meths with one stone (especially when said stone was being paid for out of one of their very deep pockets) -- he didn’t have the time he wanted to spend on cracking open the stack he’d been entrusted with, in a roundabout fashion, by his sleeve’s predecessor. Just how many rabbit holes was this Ryker going to get him dragged down, anyways? He was all for rebelling against the hierarchy, but he had enough on his plate dealing with Bancroft’s mess than dealing with all the people that seemed to want Ryker dead and buried. It was getting difficult to keep the reasons straight at this point, even for him. Being a crooked cop. Not being a crooked enough cop. Banging the wrong person’s girl.
And somewhere in all that mess there seemed to be people wanting to pick him off for his own sake. Funny how a few hundred years on ice didn’t really seem to kill as many grudges as he’d have thought.
Here and now, though, he had the benefit of time. Time worked the way he wanted it to, in the virtual world. Money had bought him what he couldn’t manage on his own: a secure off the grid location in the real world to store the stack, an array that would let him control the narrative and the most expensive of the tools. Someone with the right combination of skill level to crack the Meth’s stack and low enough morals to do it for the money Takeshi had to offer... without said morals being so low that they’d just turn around and sell him back out to the Meth in question.
All because of a pretty face.
The construct was simple enough to start with. Blank walls, blank hallways, empty doorways, white on white on white that stretched on endlessly. The stack’s mind would fill in the pieces, bit by bit as the algorithm plucked the memories from the ones and zeroes. Eventually, when the construct spun up enough times, it would be filled with an endless loop of the worst of the worst memories the stack had stored. A living nightmare. Now, it was just a blank canvas. Kovacs could’ve waited until it had run its course, but he was curious to see the before. He hadn’t bothered with a refit of his own avatar. From what he’d gathered, Ryker and this Theo had a history. One that might play to his advantage.
A flip of a mental switch cued the spin up of the Meth. Takeshi -- Ryker, as the man would perceive him -- sat, in a white chair in a white room, cigarette unlit, rolling between thumb and forefinger. Better to cave to the cravings in the construct than the real world. “Welcome back.” Let him spend some time trying to remember if he’d been spun up in this setting, in this face to face, before. If he had, and Tak hadn’t wanted him to remember, he wouldn’t.