N0ne took a step back. She kept her eyes locked onto gleaming mirror-reflective cyborg. She weighed her options. She said, “If you cooperate with my investigation and allow me to search your territory unimpeded, I will apologize to you.”

The Truman straightened and looked satisfied or at least less angry by his body language. His friends, however, began jeering. “She ain’t in no position to dictate terms, Plata!” “Show that corporate brujah what corpses get when they on 9th Street!” “Recicla ese robo-ho!”

One of the gangers initiated the fight. It was a tall woman with bio-organic bark covering her skin. She stood up and swung her arm. A wine shot out her wrist an tangled around one of the quadcopters. It fell to the ground with a crunch.

A second ganger, a short man built like a tank from his waist down, rolled forward on his treads. His face was replaced with a gold-plated revolver. He threw a heavy chain which lashed the second quadcopter and knocked it out of the air.

Plata, the silver-colored cyborg, lunged for N0ne. She dodged the clumsy move and drew a pistol from the holster on the back of her uniform. Targeting software sought out the softest target among hostiles. N0ne confirmed and fired a shot. The bullet hit the tank-cyborg in his heart. The bark-covered woman shouted incoherently and grabbed the tank-man’s drooping torso.

Plata moved with greater speed than she expected for his mass. He grabbed her gun arm and twisted it towards the ceiling. He lifted her off the ground by that arm, her dangling inches of the ground. He reached to her gun with his free hand and crushed it.

N0ne connected with the building’s network. Entering through the A.R. interface from the WasherWench machines, she found the central server which controlled all of the machines. The server was protected by a basic passive firewall, but the security proved no match for the quantum computing hardware which powered her body’s hacking functions. Dialing through a near-infinite quantity of possibly passwords and imputing them all at once, the commercial security software was no match for her state-of-the-art attack. It opened instantly and allowed her in to take full control of every machine. She commanded all of the machines to open at once and disgorge their contents. The room filled with soap suds and clothing. This drew the ganger’s attention away from N0ne.

In the slightly slower real world, her hand shot out with mechanical speed and touched Plata. The palm of her metal hand pressed against his metal chest. She couldn’t interface with him wirelessly like she could with the washers, but she could interface by direct touch. His firewall was better suited for keeping her out, exploiting quantum physics to combat quantum physics, but it had not been patched in months.

Plata’s free hand grabbed her wrist to yank it off his chest. He was too late. She was already inside. She sent a command to emergency eject his brain containment shell. Plata’s head shot off his body and bounced off the ceiling. Then she commanded the body to release its grip. Strong fingers uncurled off her wrists.

The bark woman screamed, “Asesina! Mataste a mis amigos!”

The woman presented a different challenge to N0ne. Her bio-ware could not be hacked in the same way, and her exoskeleton left no exposed vital targets. N0ne decided to give diplomacy one last chance.

She approached the bark woman with the toy dragon in one arm and Plata’s head in the other. She waded through waste-deep soap suds. While crossing the room, she went to work digitally. She transferred the business’s few credits to her own employee bank account. Then she scrubbed the data of her involvement by erasing all data with all the machines.

N0ne said, “The Truman you call Plata is not yet dead. He is merely immobilized. He could be repaired, or I could bake his brain inside one of these dryers. You other friend cannot be restored, but his mechanical parts may be salvaged. A retrieval team from the Hyperborean Procurement Division is already on its way to this location, and I suggest that you not be here when the team arrives. Accept this dragon as compensation for your loss.”