[quote=Theron]"And if there's anything going to be wrong with him other than fragile packaging without all his metal, a warning would be nice."[/quote]
"Like I said earlier. Once that gunk I just shot him up with finally starts peeling off from his neurons, his brain blood toxicity will skyrocket and he'll probably hemorrhage to death. That will happen in around a day, maybe. Probably a little less. Just get him to your people so they can put him on a slab, I'm sure they can do something for him." Tracy's entire body seemed to be distractedly shifting continually in the direction of the door, his eyes sliding across every surface of the room as he glanced around nervously.

"Wuh?" Golemeth managed.

"As for getting him to nap, just yank your coat's biomonitor feed. Once its source disconnects all of his autonomics will lose power again."

"Wuuuuugh?" Golemeth attempted, his eyes growing as wide as dinnerplates. From the way what remained of his neck muscles were shifting he was furiously struggling to move pieces of him that were no longer there.

"Now forgive me for saying I hope we never see each other again. If we do though, maybe we can try this again. The uh, helping each other thing, not the interrogating cyborgs in a sex dungeon thing. Bye." He turned and booked it out the room's door, the plastic-paneled door rocking against the opposite wall as it slammed open before starting to close again.

As Tracy was about to breeze by reception, the man in the wifebeater rapped on the glass divider to get his attention. Tracy stopped, clenched his fists, grit his teeth, and slowly turned his head to look at the man.

"What?!?"

"They might not have known something was wrong before." The receptionist said with a thin smile. "But they definitely do now."

"Do you even know who they [i]is[/i]?" Tracy snapped back. The receptionist's eyes flicked down and to the left at the monitor on his side of the wall briefly in response.

"Yeah that's what I thought. Stick to your little niche and don't be such a smartass, you'll live longer." Tracy muttered as he hurried out the front door.

The brief exchange had been more valuable than the receptionist could have known. Tracy had been operating on the assumption the [i]Phantasmagoria[/i] had already been en-route, but now it seemed more likely than not they had not been made aware of how Davidson's disappearance had fucked up their arrangement with him. Which meant Tracy might - [i]might[/i] - have an extra day or two before the end of his world.

The next course of action was pretty clear. He had to head to Deeptower ASAP and try to start eliminating possibilities in the great chain of things that could have gone wrong. Maybe Davidson had never handed the case off to his proxy. Maybe he handed it off to the proxy but something happened to them. Maybe the proxy got the case and went to Deeptower but never checked in. All Tracy knew was that something tied to Davidson's appearance had prevented Tracy from being informed he had to go to Deeptower to pick up the case. But now he knew. In the best scenario, the proxy was still there with the briefcase wondering where the hell his contact was. Tracy doubted the reality of the situation was going to be that tidy, but assuming he managed to get in and out alive, hopefully he could at least pinpoint at what step things had gone wrong.

Even the small, simplistic chain of getting 'in' and 'out' of Deeptower alive was laughable on its own of course, and figuring out [i]anything[/i] once he was inside was going to require a miracle. Deeptower had been architecturally inspired by the Kowloon Walled City, with the planners having more or less said: 'You know what would be great? This, but with a whole lot more verticality.' It was a hollow-interior tower nearly forty-stories in height above-ground and with nearly forty subterranean basement levels. It was made up as one massive empty shaft, with residential 'suites' built directly into the walls all the way up and down, all of them connected only by a tenuous network of rickety metal walkways and, nominally, by a pair of elevators that had likely never worked even when they had first been installed. The tower was rated for a presumed residential population of around two-thousand, assuming two people for each of the individual units on each floor of the building. In reality, Deeptower was presently home to well over ten-thousand people, if not more. Many of the individual residential units, already barely the size of broom-cupboards, had been converted into makeshift brothels, drug dens, ripperdoc sheds, and more. A thriving grey-and-black market industry flourished within Deeptower's internal shaft, with an entire working population being able to live their whole lives without setting foot outside or seeing the sun. And that was all without even touching upon the innumerable illegal tunnel networks below-ground that the residents had been carving out since forever. Even SWAT teams would not set foot in the place, and Corporate Security and Paramilitary firms rated the building as a 'Sextuple Hazard Pay Risk' area.

The entire place was a deathtrap and catastrophic public catastrophe waiting to happen. People in the surrounding neighborhoods took bets on when, exactly, the tower would collapse in on itself. It had already survived more than four historical fires that swept through every floor, and every layer of its structure had been punched through and riddled with unstable modifications by its residents. And Tracy was going to have to dive in, on his own, to look for a lead that may not even exist.

He hesitated. He had already poked around Babbage Cell earlier and had not found any trace of the case. That did not necessarily mean it was not there though. Davidson had a lot of high-security safes and storage units in there that Tracy had not been able to look in, conceivably it was just as likely the case was in one of them as opposed to the sprawling hell that was Deeptower. There was the small issue that those storage units possessed ultraviolet security ratings and that Tracy stood zero chance of getting inside them on his own of course, and time was a factor here. For a moment Tracy simply stood on the curb of the street, teetering at its edge as though he were standing atop a precipice in indecision of whether to fling himself off or not.

What he really needed right this second was more to go on. Another hint. Then it occurred to him.

[i]Nailtooth[/i] was still in town. Alone. Without his crew. Probably without much in the way of backup. If Tracy could jump him, catch him by surprise...If he could even [i]find[/i] him, of course. He could be anywhere in Night City, and Tracy had no decent means of tracking him down that would not also lead to him getting reduced to a black scorch-mark on the ground. Except...

He eyed the duffel-bag as inspiration struck. He had a time and place. He had something that had belonged to Nailtooth. What he needed was somebody who had top-shelf olfactory augs. He could hire them with a bluff, then have them track Nailtooth's location all the way from Babbage Cell to, hopefully, wherever he currently shacked up. The tricky part about that would just be finding somebody like that on such short notice.

Thus, Tracy began obliviously walking away from the parlor where he had just been working with Theron - who had the exact set of augs Tracy needed right that second.