Meredith Stout

Meredith Stout is a senior operations manager at Militech and one of the first corporate players V deals with. After the Maelstrom gang hijacks a Militech convoy, the company suspects someone on the inside helped, and Stout is ordered to find the leak. With her job and her life on the line, she is combing Watson for leads by the time V hears of her.

Their paths cross during The Pickup, the Act 1 job in which V and Jackie Welles must obtain a stolen Militech Flathead combat bot from Maelstrom. Dexter DeShawn passes V her number, and if V calls, the meeting under an overpass in Northside starts with one of her bodyguards jacking into V for a brisk interrogation. Satisfied, Stout offers a deal: Militech money to buy the bot, loaded on a credchip that carries a daemon she does not mention. V’s answer decides how the job ends for her, and a cooperative V may hear from her again.

Stout has little screen time, so her design does much of the work. Quest director Paweł Sasko has explained that it was built to signal an obsession with control and power, drawing on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novella Venus in Furs, which also gives her follow-up quest its title. He also pointed to the broken-heart tattoo behind her ear as a sign of an old wound beneath the executive polish.