A small smirk had formed, despite everything, at the disapproval of killing as a Plan B from Tallulah and Fashion.  Frankly, his totem would've raised the proverbial eyebrow if he didn't know Joe and, in fact, how things generally go on missions.

[color=8dc73f]"Not killing IS Plan A.  Plan B is where you ain't been given much of choice."[/color]

A simple-but-ultimately-true fact of life in the Shadows.  You can plan your daring escapade, use your stun grenades and gel rounds, close off enemes from you with a hacked door or a magic barrier - whatever pleases you.  At some point, though, things can and will go south, and when they do, you have to rapidly work to avoid being blown to slag while under the heading 'by whatever means necessary' or you don't get home.  This was said before Voice decided to voice their reasons for taking this mission.  Joe was...slightly irritated that they were kind of stepping over his 'before you tell us' bit, but the reasons behind it all would come out eventually.  So, for now, he waited for it.  When she started talking about her aura and how Joe seemed to have missed a beat somewhere, he interjected.

[color=8dc73f]"Gonna be honest, I wasn't paying close attention.  [i]No[/i] aura can look like [i]very little[/i] aura, at a glance.  I've seen plenty a' Sammies back in Seattle.  You see enough essence-shredders, you don't really look as hard to see if they got one or not."[/color]

His explanation was pretty understandable.  Unless he had a reason or overwhelming curiosity to take a closer look, he would have continued to assume that she was just another cybered-up Shadowrunner, and that's probably what alot of folks do, to be honest.  They figure that underneath all that chrome, there's a solitary glimmer in a small pool of essence that's just hidden away.  The alternatiives to that line of thinking can be pretty horrifying.  One was the very answer that was about to be given, and the other was [i]cyberzombies[/i].  Good god, when news of Hatchetman hit the Matrix, that was a shock.  From then on, you worried about seeing like say...a heavily-outfitted troll with way too much technology and gunfire, coming down on you like the [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3tfakWkXRo]Nemesis.[/url]

The real explanation was kind of a bigger hammer than that, to be sure.

Voice was made in a lab.  Completely made from scratch.  She was an artificial lifeform, not a lifeform in the traditional sense, which should account for her lack of aura.  However, as the story unfolded - A caring programmer defying Saeder-Krupp, a mission gone bad, a desperate call - Joe noticed something that was just a little out of place.  We'll get to that in a minute.  He could...sort of understand the idea that some unstable implantation was rewriting too much of her creator's brain.  They say that's a danger you can get if you're a chip-head, though of course you could never really say for sure, especially if you never knew the person before they programmed themselves to know kung fu.

Even still, what Voice was saying was that she was an AI, a totally autonomous being of digital code.  Now, Joe didn't know the specifics of the famous Renraku Shutdown - Maybe Fashion did - but ALOT of people got the word about how an AI had awakened and taken over.  You couldn't NOT hear about it, especially if you - like Joe - lived in Seattle.  Again, he wasn't aware of what exactly went wrong or what Deus was doing besides playing god in his backyard, but Crash 2.0 followed and that was a disaster.  In a way, that made alot of Joe's work at the time easier, since alot of electronic gear was out cold, but it also made things [i]messy[/i] on the streets.  Now, there were faced with an AI in a bottle, in a body, who acted very human and ALOT more humble than the other guy.  So, improvements have been made, clearly.  However, Saeder-Krupp intended this one as a weapon...  Well, [i]now[/i] it was time for that one thought to crop up as Joe confirmed via assensing that, yes, she had no essence.  She had no essence today.

[color=8dc73f]"One question.  If you're part of this woman, Miki, now...and you have no essence, no aura...what'd you do with [i]her[/i] body?"[/color]

Very simple question, really.  If she merged in Miki's head and presumably walked around in her body when she made her escape, what happened to her 'mother'?  She didn't chrome up her body, otherwise there would be some sign of [i]her[/i] aura.  This was a mundane object read when assensing.  She wasn't in [i]there[/i], physically.  How did she get this body and what happened to the last?  He had to assume that Vanessa and Diesel were either the Shadowrunners that got her out or associated with them or somehow a part of the process that made her how she was now.  Joe wanted to know how 'then' got to 'now'.