Vice Tower does not appear on tourist maps.
It exists in the financial district the way a footnote exists in a contract—acknowledged only when necessary, ignored until it matters. The entrance is unmarked glass between a ramen stand and a building that pretends to sell insurance. Kaito approaches at 19:53, wearing black that apologizes for nothing, the sakura pin left in a drawer where it can't testify.
The door knows him before he touches it.
Inside, the lobby is ambient lighting and the kind of silence you get when sound dampening costs more than honesty. A woman at the desk—cosmetic mods so subtle she looks like a photograph of beauty that learned to breathe—nods once. "Eighty-seven. The lift knows."
It does. The elevator rises without asking, without music, just the hum of expensive machinery doing expensive work. The walls are black mirror. Kaito watches himself ascend and wonders if he's going up or if the city is letting him fall with style.
Floor eighty-seven opens onto a corridor that smells like leather and decisions. Two guards bracket the entrance—Arasaka security, but the kind that doesn't wear the logo. They scan him with implants that taste his biometrics and file him under "expected." One gestures: forward, left, through the doors where the air gets thinner.
The room is not a room. It is a statement about what rooms could be if money and silence had children.
The floor is black marble shot through with gold—not veins, arteries. The furniture is minimal because excess would be redundant. One wall is glass holding the city like a specimen. The other walls are art: a Hokusai wave that might be original, might be perfect enough that original is irrelevant; a piece of calligraphy that says something about impermanence in characters so old they predate the corporations that would later monetize the sentiment.
Twelve people occupy the space like pieces on a board mid-game.
He recognizes some: a Biotechnica executive whose cologne costs more than surgeries. A fixer whose face he knows from encrypted channels—Muamar "El Capitán" Reyes, voice like gravel education. A media consultant who shapes narratives the way sculptors shape clay, except the clay is public opinion and the sculptures are profitable lies. A woman in Militech slate who sits like she's calculating everyone's threat coefficient and finding them all wanting.
Others are deliberately anonymous—faces that have paid for the privilege of being forgotten by cameras, names that exist only in oral tradition and banking logs.
And at the window, back to the room, hands clasped in a way that suggests they have held kingdoms: a man in a charcoal suit that fits like a second skin, like the body underneath was measured twice and cut once.
Yorinobu Arasaka.
Except.
Except Kaito looks at the posture—too straight, too formal, none of the loose rebellion Yorinobu cultivated in his exile years. Looks at the hands—no rings, no augments, just flesh that has never needed to prove anything. Looks at the way the man holds his shoulders, the angle of his head, the stillness that isn't meditation but authority so old it has forgotten to pretend it ever doubted itself.
And knows.
The thing wearing Yorinobu's body turns.
The face is correct—Yorinobu's sharp features, his careful mouth, the eyes that once burned with the righteous anger of a son disappointing his father on purpose. But the expression is wrong. Too controlled. Too patient. The smile that forms is not Yorinobu's rebel smirk but something older, colder, the smile of a man who has outlived his detractors by outliving death itself.
"Kuroda," the thing says, and the voice is Yorinobu's vocal cords producing Saburo's cadence. "Thank you for attending."
Kaito's cortex screams the answer his face refuses to show: Relic. Saburo. Consumed.
He bows—the precise angle, buying time while his mind recalibrates reality. When he straightens, he has composed his face into respect that costs him nothing. "Yorinobu-sama. The invitation was unexpected."
"The best opportunities are." The thing—Saburo wearing Yorinobu's meat like a stolen coat—gestures to an empty chair. "Please. We were discussing the future."
Kaito sits. The leather exhales beneath him. Around the circle, eyes evaluate. El Capitán nods fractionally, acknowledging. The Biotechnica executive ignores him with the precision of someone who has been told to ignore him. The Militech woman smiles like a blade being sharpened.
"The future," Saburo continues, still using Yorinobu's mouth, "is a product most corporations fail to deliver correctly. They promise transformation. They deliver quarterly adjustments." He turns from the window, and Kaito sees it clearly now—the way Yorinobu's body has been re-taught to move, the muscle memory overwritten, the gait adjusted to carry a century of authority in a frame that only existed for thirty years.
"True transformation," Saburo says, "requires sacrifice. The willingness to let go of what you were to become what the future requires."
The room listens. Kaito listens. His pulse is a countdown.
"Some sacrifice their ethics," Saburo continues, pacing now, Yorinobu's legs moving in Saburo's rhythm. "Some sacrifice their loyalty. Some—" his eyes land on Kaito, "—sacrifice their obedience in small, calculated doses, testing whether the institution they inherit can survive their improvements."
A ripple of amusement in the room. Kaito does not blink.
"You accessed restricted data," Saburo says. It is not an accusation. It is a recitation of fact. "A file we archived. A boy who tried to climb faster than his chassis could carry him. You left the data untouched. This demonstrates either wisdom or fear. I am curious which."
Kaito's options cascade:
Lie: claim ignorance, be dismissed.
Deflect: change the subject, be transparent.
Engage: admit the truth, survive or die by what comes next.
He chooses the third option because the first two are already dead.
"Fear would have stopped me from entering the system," Kaito says. "Wisdom would have told me the data itself was irrelevant. I left it because taking it would have told you I needed it. Not taking it told you I understood the lesson embedded in its existence."
"And what lesson is that?"
"That the corporation archives failure not to prevent it, but to study the patterns. David Martinez was not a cautionary tale. He was a case study in what happens when ambition exceeds infrastructure."
Saburo's smile—Yorinobu's mouth performing Saburo's satisfaction—widens a fraction. "Correct. And what did your study conclude?"
Kaito feels the weight of the room, the way power has paused its game to watch a pawn speak. "That infrastructure is the only immortality the corporation offers. Chrome fails. Bodies burn out. Legends become murals. But the systems that process them outlive everyone."
"Including those who built the systems?"
The question is a trapdoor. Kaito sees it, sees the answer Saburo wants, sees the answer that would be true, sees the answer that would let him leave this room intact.
"No one outlives the system," Kaito says carefully. "They either become part of it or they get processed by it."
"And you believe this."
"I believe the evidence."
Saburo stops pacing. Yorinobu's body, Saburo's will. "I am one hundred and fifty-eight years old," he says, and the room does not react because everyone here already knows. "I have outlived rivals, allies, children, ideologies, entire markets. I have done this not by resisting death but by redefining it. The body you see is not the body I was born into. It is simply the most recent vessel."
He gestures at himself—at Yorinobu's stolen frame—with something between pride and clinical detachment. "My son believed he could escape the family by burning it. He was young. He was foolish. He was wrong. Now he serves the family more completely than he ever did in life. His rebellion was archived. His body was repurposed. This is efficiency."
The horror is so vast Kaito cannot let himself feel it. Not here. Not now. He files it in the same partition where he keeps everything too heavy to carry in real-time: the knowledge that Saburo Arasaka killed his own son by wearing him, that Yorinobu's exile and rebellion and righteous anger are now just subroutines being overwritten by a ghost that refused to leave the board.
"You are wondering," Saburo says, reading Kaito's controlled face like a balance sheet, "if I am telling you this as a warning or as an offer."
"I am wondering," Kaito says, voice steady because steadiness is the only weapon he has left, "if you are telling me this to see if I will break."
"Break?" Saburo's laugh is Yorinobu's vocal cords forgetting they used to belong to someone who laughed differently. "No. Breaking is cheap. Any fool with pressure can break a person. I am telling you this to see if you are intelligent enough to understand the gift being offered."
"The gift of knowing that death is optional if you are willing to consume your children."
The room freezes. The Militech woman's smile hardens into something sharp. El Capitán's posture shifts—not much, but enough to say this just became interesting. The Biotechnica executive stares at Kaito like he just announced his own execution.
Saburo does not move. Yorinobu's face, Saburo's control. "You have courage," he says finally. "Foolish courage, but courage nonetheless. Yorinobu had courage. It did not save him. What saved him—what gives him immortality now—is that he was useful even in death."
He steps closer. Kaito does not lean back. To lean back is to admit the pressure.
"You will be useful, Kuroda. The question is whether you will be useful in life or in death. Whether you will build your own infrastructure or become a case study for someone else to learn from." Saburo's hand—Yorinobu's hand, controlled by a century of calculated violence—rests on Kaito's shoulder. "Hanako believes you have potential. I believe you have ambition. Let us see which one outlives the other."
The hand lifts. The room exhales.
"You are dismissed," Saburo says, returning to the window. "Consider what you have seen here. Consider what it costs to build something that outlives you. Consider whether you are building or being built."
Kaito stands. Bows. Turns. Walks toward the door with the gait of someone who has not just learned that hell has a waiting list and his name is already on it.
At the threshold, Saburo speaks again. "Kuroda. When you see my daughter, you will not speak of this conversation."
Not a request. A fact being established.
"I understand," Kaito says.
"Do you?" Saburo turns one last time, and in the glass behind him Kaito sees both their reflections: a boy pretending to be composed, and a ghost wearing his son like a suit that finally fits. "Understanding is the first sacrifice. Silence is the second. If you master both, you may yet become someone worth consuming."
Kaito leaves.
The elevator descends in silence. His reflection in the black mirror shows a face that has not changed. The thing behind the face is rewriting itself frantically, recalibrating every assumption, every plan, every careful calculation about how the board is arranged.
Saburo Arasaka is not dead.
Yorinobu Arasaka is not alive.
Hanako serves a father who murdered her brother by becoming him.
And Kaito just sat in a room where everyone knew and no one said it, because saying it would make them infrastructure's next meal.
The lobby releases him. The street receives him. Night City continues its performance—neon and chrome and people pretending they're not being processed.
His agent vibrates. A message from Hanako: Adequate attendance. We will speak tomorrow.
He stares at the text. Tries to read it for signs she knows. Signs she doesn't. Signs she's complicit or victim or something worse than either.
He walks. No destination. Just motion because stillness right now would mean thinking, and thinking would mean admitting what he just learned:
That the corporation does not archive ghosts.
It employs them.
That David Martinez was filed under incident because his death was loud.
That Yorinobu Arasaka was filed under reorganization because his death was useful.
That Kaito Kuroda is being measured for a suit he hasn't decided if he'll wear or become.
He thinks about Emi asking what's wrong with him.
He thinks about the funeral he's attending.
He finally knows whose.