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===========
Neuromancer
===========
by
William Gibson
Dedication:
for Deb
who made it possible
with love
PART ONE
CHIBA CITY BLUES
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned
to a dead channel.
"It's not like I'm using," Case heard someone say, as he
shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the
Chat. "It's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency."
It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo
was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there
for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.
Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously
as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw
Case and smiled, his teeth a web work of East European steel
and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the
unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval
uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with
Joe boys," Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his
good hand. "Maybe some business with you, Case?"
Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged
The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff
of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something
heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he
reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis,
a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby
pink plastic. "You are too much the artiste, Herr Case." Ratz
grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his
overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. "You are
the artiste of the slightly funny deal."
"Sure," Case said, and sipped his beer. "Somebody's gotta
be funny around here. Sure the fuck isn't you."
The whore's giggle went up an octave.
"Isn't you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he's
a close personal friend of mine."
She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible
spitting sound, her lips barely moving. But she left.
"Jesus," Case said, "what kind a creep joint you running here?
Man can't have a drink."
"Ha," Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag,
"Zone shows a percentage. You I let work here for entertainment
value."
As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange
instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated
conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause.
Then the whore's giggle rang out, tinged with a certain hysteria.
Ratz grunted. "An angel passed."
"The Chinese," bellowed a drunken Australian, "Chinese
bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a
nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate...."
"Now that," Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly
rising in him like bile, "that is so much bullshit."
The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than
the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were
the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly,
and still they couldn't repair the damage he'd suffered in that
Memphis hotel.
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading
nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the
corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in
his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless
void.... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the
Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy.
Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the
dreams came on in the Japanese night like live wire voodoo
and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the
dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands
clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers,
trying to reach the console that wasn't there.
"I saw your girl last night," Ratz said, passing Case his
second Kirin.
"I don't have one," he said, and drank.
"Miss Linda Lee."
Case shook his head.
"No girl? Nothing? Only biz, friend artiste? Dedication to
commerce?" The bartender's small brown eyes were nested
deep in wrinkled flesh. "I think I liked you better, with her.
You laughed more. Now, some night, you get maybe too artistic,
you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts."
"You're breaking my heart, Ratz." He finished his beer,
paid and left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rain-stained
khaki nylon of his windbreaker. Threading his way
through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat.
Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy
a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by
the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the
biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a
byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace
deck that projected his disembodied consciousness
into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief
he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided
the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls
of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.
He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd
never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something
for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam.
He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it
mattered now. He'd expected to die, then, but they only smiled.
Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the
money. And he was going to need it. Because--still smiling--
they were going to make sure he never worked again.
They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian
mycotoxin.
Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning
out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.
The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.
For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace,
it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy
hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt
for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of
his own flesh.
His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat
sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through
the closed circuit of the world's black markets like the seashells
of the Trobriand islanders. It was difficult to transact legitimate
business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already
illegal.
In Japan, he'd known with a clenched and absolute certainty,
he'd find his cure. In Chiba. Either in a registered clinic or in
the shadow land of black medicine. Synonymous with implants,
nerve-splicing, and micro bionics, Chiba was a magnet for the
Sprawl's techno-criminal subcultures.
In Chiba, he'd watched his New Yen vanish in a two-month
round of examinations and consultations. The men in the black
clinics, his last hope, had admired the expertise with which
he'd been maimed, and then slowly shaken their heads.
Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the
port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all
night like vast stages; where you couldn't see the lights of
Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering
hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay
was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals
of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes
dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and
city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an
area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart.
By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless,
the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned
silver sky.
Two blocks west of the Chat, in a teashop called the Jarre
de The, Case washed down the night's first pill with a double
espresso. It was a flat pink octagon, a potent species of Brazilian
dex he bought from one of Zone's girls.
The Jarre was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in
red neon.
At first, finding himself alone in Chiba, with little money
and less hope of finding a cure, he'd gone into a kind of terminal
overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had
seemed to belong to someone else. In the first month, he'd
killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before
would have seemed ludicrous. Ninsei wore him down until the
street itself came to seem the externalization of some death
wish, some secret poison he hadn't known he carried.
Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism,
designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb
permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you
sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd
break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either
way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague
memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or
lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger
with New Yen for the clinic tanks.
Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the
accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace,
the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.
Alone at a table in the Jarre de The, with the octagon coming
on, pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, suddenly aware
of each tingling hair on his arms and chest, Case knew that at
some point he'd started to play a game with himself, a very
ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire. He no longer
carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions. He ran
the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and he had a reputation
for being able to get whatever you wanted. A part of him knew
that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his
customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him
basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time. And
that was the part of him, smug in its expectation of death, that
most hated the thought of Linda Lee.
He'd found her, one rainy night, in an arcade.
Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette
smoke, holograms of Wizard's Castle, Tank War Europa,
the New York skyline.... And now he remembered her that
way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to
a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Castle burned,
forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank
War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck
sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon. He was riding
high that night, with a brick of Wage's ketamine on its way
to Yokohama and the money already in his pocket. He'd come
in out of the warm rain that sizzled across the Ninsei pavement
and somehow she'd been singled out for him, one face out of
the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she
played. The expression on her face, then, had been the one
he'd seen, hours later, on her sleeping face in a port side coffin,
her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in
flight.
Crossing the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal
he'd made, he saw her glance up. Gray eyes rimmed with
smudged black paintstick. Eyes of some animal pinned in the
headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
Their night together stretching into a morning, into tickets
at the hover port and his first trip across the Bay. The rain kept
up, falling along Harajuku, beading on her plastic jacket, the
children of Tokyo trooping past the famous boutiques in white
loafers and cling wrap capes, until she'd stood with him in the
midnight clatter of a pachinko parlor and held his hand like a
child.
It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved
through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of
reflexive need. He'd watched her personality fragment, calving
like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen
the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. He'd watched
her track the next hit with a concentration that reminded him
of the mantises they sold in stalls along Shiga, beside tanks of
blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo.
He stared at the black ring of grounds in his empty cup. It
was vibrating with the speed he'd taken. The brown laminate
of the table top was dull with a patina of tiny scratches. With
the dex mounting through his spine he saw the countless random
impacts required to create a surface like that. The Jarre was
decorated in a dated, nameless style from the previous century,
an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese plastics,
but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though
the bad nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked
the mirrors and the once glossy plastics, leaving each surface
fogged with something that could never be wiped away.
"Hey. Case, good buddy...."
He looked up, met gray eyes ringed with paintstick. She
was wearing faded French orbital fatigues and new white sneakers.
"I been lookin' for you, man." She took a seat opposite
him, her elbows on the table. The sleeves of the blue zip suit
had been ripped out at the shoulders; he automatically checked
her arms for signs of derms or the needle. "Want a cigarette?"
She dug a crumpled pack of Yeheyuan filters from an ankle
pocket and offered him one. He took it, let her light it with a
red plastic tube. "You sleep in' okay, Case? You look tired."
Her accent put her south along the Sprawl, toward Atlanta.
The skin below her eyes was pale and unhealthy-looking, but
the flesh was still smooth and firm. She was twenty. New lines
of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the
corners of her mouth. Her dark hair was drawn back, held by
a band of printed silk. The pattern might have represented
microcircuits, or a city map.
"Not if I remember to take my pills," he said, as a tangible
wave of longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the
wavelength of amphetamine. He remembered the smell of her
skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her
locked across the small of his back.
All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.
"Wage," she said, narrowing her eyes. "He wants to see
you with a hole in your face." She lit her own cigarette.
"Who says? Ratz? You been talking to Ratz?"
"No. Mona. Her new squeeze is one of Wage's boys."
"I don't owe him enough. He does me, he's out the money
anyway." He shrugged.
"Too many people owe him now, Case. Maybe you get to
be the example. You seriously better watch it."
"Sure. How about you, Linda? You got anywhere to sleep?"
"Sleep." She shook her head. "Sure, Case." She shivered,
hunched forward over the table. Her face was filmed with
sweat.
"Here," he said, and dug in the pocket of his windbreaker,
coming up with a crumpled fifty. He smoothed it automatically,
under the table, folded it in quarters, and passed it to her.
"You need that, honey. You better give it to Wage." There
was something in the gray eyes now that he couldn't read,
something he'd never seen there before.
"I owe Wage a lot more than that. Take it. I got more
coming," he lied, as he watched his New Yen vanish into a
zippered pocket.
"You get your money, Case, you find Wage quick."
"I'll see you, Linda," he said, getting up.
"Sure." A millimeter of white showed beneath each of her
pupils. Sanpaku. "You watch your back, man."
He nodded, anxious to be gone.
He looked back as the plastic door swung shut behind him,
saw her eyes reflected in a cage of red neon.
Friday night on Ninsei.
He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised
coffee shop called Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an
arcade. He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman
by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the
back of the man's right hand.
Was it authentic? if that's for real, he thought, he's in for
trouble. If it wasn't, served him right. M-G employees above
a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors
that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like
that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a
black clinic.
The sarariman had been Japanese, but the Ninsei crowd was
a gaijin crowd. Groups of sailors up from the port, tense solitary
tourists hunting pleasures no guidebook listed, Sprawl heavies
showing off grafts and implants, and a dozen distinct species.
of hustler, all swarming the street in an intricate dance of desire
and commerce.
There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City
tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea
that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of
historical park, a reminder of humble origins. But he also
saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies
require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its inhabitants,
but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for
technology itself.
Was Linda right, he wondered, staring up at the lights?
Would Wage have him killed to make an example? It didn't
make much sense, but then Wage dealt primarily in proscribed
biologicals, and they said you had to be crazy to do that.
But Linda said Wage wanted him dead. Case's primary
insight into the dynamics of street dealing was that neither the
buyer nor the seller really needed him. A middleman's business
is to make himself a necessary evil. The dubious niche Case
had carved for himself in the criminal ecology of Night City
had beep cut out with lies, scooped out a night at a time with
betrayal. Now, sensing that its walls were starting to crumble,
he felt the edge of a strange euphoria.
The week before, he'd delayed transfer of a synthetic glandular
extract, retailing it for a wider margin than usual. He
knew Wage hadn't liked that. Wage was his primary supplier,
nine years in Chiba and one of the few gaijin dealers who'd
Managed to forge links with the rigidly stratified criminal establishment
beyond Night City's borders. Genetic materials and
hormones trickled down to Ninsei along an intricate ladder of
fronts and blinds. Somehow Wage had managed to trace something
back, once, and now he enjoyed steady connections in a
dozen cities.
Case found himself staring through a shop window. The
place sold small bright objects to the sailors. Watches, flicknives,
lighters, pocket VTRs, Sims Tim decks, weighted man-
riki chains, and shuriken. The shuriken had always fascinated
him, steel stars with knife-sharp points. Some were chromed,
others black, others treated with a rainbow surface like oil on
water. But the chrome stars held his gaze. They were mounted
against scarlet ultra suede with nearly invisible loops of nylon
fish line, their centers stamped with dragons or yin yang symbols.
They caught the street's neon and twisted it, and it came
to Case that these were the stars under which he voyaged, his
destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.
"Julie," he said to his stars. "Time to see old Julie. He'll
know."
Julius Deane was one hundred and thirty-five years old, his
metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums
and hormones. His primary hedge against aging was a yearly
pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons re-set the code
of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba. Then he'd fly
to Hong-Kong and order the year's suits and shirts. Sex-less and
inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in
his devotion to esoteric forms of tailor-worship. Case had never
seen him wear the same suit twice, although his wardrobe
seemed to consist entirely of meticulous reconstructions of garments
of the previous century. He affected prescription lenses,
framed in spidery gold, ground from thin slabs of pink synthetic
quartz and beveled like the mirrors in a Victorian doll house.
His offices were located in a warehouse behind Ninsei, part
of which seemed to have been sparsely decorated, years before,
with a random collection of European furniture, as though
Deane had once intended to use the place as his home. Neo-Aztec
bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room
where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps
perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in
scarlet-lacquered steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between
the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete
floor. Its hands were holograms that altered to match the convolutions
of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct
time. The room was stacked with white fiberglass shipping
modules that gave off the tang of preserved ginger.
"You seem to be clean, old son," said Deane's disembodied
voice. "Do come in."
Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive
imitation-rosewood door to the left of the bookcases. JULIUS
DEANE IMPORT EXPORT was lettered across the plastic in
peeling self-adhesive capitals. If the furniture scattered in
Deane's makeshift foyer suggested the end of the past century,
the office itself seemed to belong to its start.
Deane's seamless pink face regarded Case from a pool of
light cast by an ancient brass lamp with a rectangular shade of
dark green glass. The importer was securely fenced behind a
vast desk of painted steel, flanked on either side by tall, drawer
Ed cabinets made of some sort of pale wood. The sort of
thing, Case supposed, that had once been used to store written
records of some kind. The desktop was littered with cassettes,
scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of some sort of
clockwork typewriter, a machine Deane never seemed to get
around to reassembling.
"What brings you around, boy?" Deane asked, offering
Case a narrow bonbon wrapped in blue-and-white checked paper.
"Try one. Tins Ting Djahe, the very best." Case refused
the ginger, took a seat in a yawing wooden swivel chair, and
ran a thumb down the faded seam of one black jeans-leg. "Julie
I hear Wage wants to kill me."
"Ah. Well then. And where did you hear this, if I may?"
"People."
"People," Deane said, around a ginger bonbon. "What sort
of people? Friends?"
Case nodded.
"Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?"
"I do owe him a little money, Deane. He say anything to
you?"
"Haven't been in touch, of late." Then he sighed. "If I did
know, of course, I might not be in a position to tell you. Things
being what they are, you understand."
"Things?"
"He's an important connection Case."
"Yeah. He want to kill me, Julie?"
"Not that I know of." Deane shrugged. They might have
been discussing the price of ginger. "If it proves to be an
unfounded rumor, old son, you come back in a week or so and
I'll let you in on a little something out of Singapore."
"Out of the Nan Hai Hotel, Bencoolen Street?"
"Loose lips, old son!" Deane grinned. The steel desk was
jammed with a fortune in debugging gear.
"Be seeing you, Julie. I'll say hello to Wage."
Deane's fingers came up to brush the perfect knot in his
pale silk tie.
He was less than a block from Deane's office when it hit,
the sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass,
and very close.
The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something
Case took for granted. The trick lay in not letting it get out of
control. But that could be quite a trick, behind a stack of
octagons. He fought the adrenaline surge and composed his
narrow features in a mask of bored vacancy, pretending to let
the crowd carry him along. When he saw a darkened display
window, he managed to pause by it. The place was a surgical
boutique, closed for renovations. With his hands in the pockets
of his jacket, he stared through the glass at a flat lozenge of
vat grown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation jade.
The color of its skin reminded him of Zone's whores; it was
tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a sub-cutaneous
chip. Why bother with the surgery, he found himself thinking,
while sweat coursed down his ribs, when you could just carry
the thing around in your pocket?
Without moving his head, he raised his eyes and studied
the reflection of the passing crowd.
There.
Behind sailors in short-sleeved khaki. Dark hair, mirrored
glasses, dark clothing, slender. . .
And gone.
Then Case was running, bent low, dodging between bodies.
"Rent me a gun, Shin?"
The boy smiled. "Two hour." They stood together in the
smell of fresh raw seafood at the rear of a Shiga sushi stall.
"You come back, two hour."
"I need one now, man. Got anything right now?"
Shin rummaged behind empty two-liter cans that had once
been filled with powdered horseradish. He produced a slender
package wrapped in gray plastic. "Taser. One hour, twenty
New Yen. Thirty deposit."
"Shit. I don't need that. I need a gun. Like I maybe wanna
shoot somebody, understand?"
The waiter shrugged, replacing the taser behind the horseradish
cans. "Two hour."
He went into the shop without bothering to glance at the
display of shuriken. He'd never thrown one in his life.
He bought two packs of Yeheyuans with a Mitsubishi Bank
chip that gave his name as Charles Derek May. It beat Truman
Starr, the best he'd been able to do for a passport.
The Japanese woman behind the terminal looked like she
had a few years on old Deane, none of them with the benefit
of science. He took his slender roll of New Yen out of his
pocket and showed it to her. "I want to buy a weapon."
She gestured in the direction of a case filled with knives.
"No," he said, "I don't like knives."
She brought an oblong box from beneath the counter. The
lid was yellow cardboard, stamped with a crude image of a
coiled cobra with a swollen hood. Inside were eight identical
tissue-wrapped cylinders. He watched while mottled brown
fingers stripped the paper from one. She held the thing up for
him to examine, a dull steel tube with a leather thong at one
end and a small bronze pyramid at the other. She gripped the
tube with one hand, the pyramid between her other thumb and
forefinger, and pulled. Three oiled, telescoping segments of
tightly wound coil spring slid out and locked. "Cobra," she said.
Beyond the neon shudder of Ninsei, the sky was that mean
shade of gray. The air had gotten worse; it seemed to have
teeth tonight, and half the crowd wore filtration masks. Case
had spent ten minutes in a urinal, trying to discover a convenient
way to conceal his cobra; finally he'd settled for tucking the
handle into the waistband of his jeans, with the tube slanting
across his stomach. The pyramidal striking tip rode between
his ribcage and the lining of his windbreaker. The thing felt
like it might clatter to the pavement with his next step, but it
made him feel better.
The Chat wasn't really a dealing bar, but on weeknights it
attracted a related clientele. Fridays and Saturdays were different.
The regulars were still there, most of them, but they
faded behind an influx of sailors and the specialists who preyed
on diem. As Case pushed through the doors, he looked for
Ratz, but the bartender wasn't in sight. Lonny Zone, the bar's
resident pimp, was observing with glazed fatherly interest as
one of his girls went to work on a young sailor. Zone was
addicted to a brand of hypnotic the Japanese called Cloud
Dancers. Catching the pimp's eye, Case beckoned him to the
bar. Zone came drifting through the crowd in slow motion, his
long face slack and placid.
"You seen Wage tonight, Lonny?"
Zone regarded him with his usual calm. He shook his head.
"You sure, man?"
"Maybe in the Namban. Maybe two hours ago."
"Got some Joeboys with him? One of 'em thin, dark hair,
maybe a black jacket?"
"No," Zone said at last, his smooth forehead creased to
indicate the effort it cost him to recall so much pointless detail.
"Big boys. Graftees." Zone's eyes showed very little white and
less iris; under the drooping lids, his pupils were dilated and
enormous. He stared into Case's face for a long time, then
lowered his gaze. He saw the bulge of the steel whip. "Cobra,"
he said, and raised an eyebrow. "You wanna fuck somebody
up?"
"See you, Lonny." Case left the bar.
His tail was back. He was sure of it. He felt a stab of elation
the octagons and adrenaline mingling with something else.
You're enjoying this, he thought; you're crazy.
Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was
like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself
in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and
it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the
matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish
cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a high-speed
drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all
around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made
flesh in the mazes of the black market....
Go it, Case, he told himself. Suck 'em in. Last thing they'll
expect. He was half a block from the games arcade where he'd
first met Linda Lee.
He bolted across Ninsei, scattering a pack of strolling sailors.
One of them screamed after him in Spanish. Then he was
through the entrance, the sound crashing over him like surf,
subsonics throbbing in the pit of his stomach. Someone scored
a ten-megaton hit on Tank War Europa, a simulated air burst
drowning the arcade in white sound as a lurid hologram fireball
mushroomed overhead. He cut to the right and loped up a flight
of unpainted chip board stairs. He'd come here once with Wage,
to discuss a deal in proscribed hormonal triggers with a man
called Matsuga. He remembered the hallway, its stained matting,
the row of identical doors leading to tiny office cubicles.
One door was open now. A Japanese girl in a sleeveless black
t-shirt glanced up from a white terminal, behind her head a
travel poster of Greece, Aegian blue splashed with streamlined
ideograms.
"Get your security up here," Case told her.
Then he sprinted down the corridor, out of her sight. The
last two doors were closed and, he assumed, locked. He spun
and slammed the sole of his nylon running shoe into the blue-lacquered
composition door at the far end. It popped, cheap
hardware falling from the splintered frame. Darkness there, the
white curve of a terminal housing. Then he was on the door
to its right, both hands around the transparent plastic knob,
leaning in with everything he had. Something snapped, and he
was inside. This was where he and Wage had met with Matsuga,
but whatever front company Matsuga had operated was
long gone. No terminal, nothing. Light from the alley behind
the arcade, filtering in through soot blown plastic. He made out
a snake like loop of fiber optics protruding from a wall socket,
a pile of discarded food containers, and the blade less nacelle
of an electric fan.
The window was a single pane of cheap plastic. He shrugged
out of his jacket, bundled it around his right hand, and punched.
It split, requiring two more blows to free it from the frame.
Over the muted chaos of the games, an alarm began to cycle,
triggered either by the broken window or by the girl at the head
of the corridor.
Case turned, pulled his jacket on, and flicked the cobra to
full extension.
With the door closed, he was counting on his tail to assume
he'd gone through the one he'd kicked half off its hinges. The
cobra's bronze pyramid began to bob gently, the spring-steel
shaft amplifying his pulse.
Nothing happened. There was only the surging of the alarm,
the crashing of the games, his heart hammering. When the fear
came, it was like some half-forgotten friend. Not the cold
rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear.
He'd lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he'd
almost forgotten what real fear was.
This cubicle was the sort of place where people died. He
might die here. They might have guns....
A crash, from the far end of the corridor. A man's voice,
shouting something in Japanese. A scream, shrill terror. Another
crash.
And footsteps, unhurried, coming closer.
Passing his closed door. Pausing for the space of three rapid
beats of his heart. And returning. One, two, three. A bootheel
scraped the matting.
The last of his octagon-induced bravado collapsed. He
snapped the cobra into its handle and scrambled for the window,
blind with fear, his nerves screaming. He was up, out, and
falling, all before he was conscious of what he'd done. The
impact with pavement drove dull rods of pain through his shins.
A narrow wedge of light from a half-open service hatch
framed a heap of discarded fiber optics and the chassis of a
junked console. He'd fallen face forward on a slab of soggy
chip board, he rolled over, into the shadow of the console. The
cubicle's window was a square of faint light. The alarm still
oscillated, louder here, the rear wall dulling the roar of the
games.
A head appeared, framed in the window, back lit by the
fluorescents in the corridor, then vanished. It returned, but he
still couldn't read the features. Glint of silver across the eyes.
"Shit," someone said, a woman, in the accent of the northern
Sprawl.
The head was gone. Case lay under the console for a long
count of twenty, then stood up. The steel cobra was still in his
hand, and it took him a few seconds to remember what it was.
He limped away down the alley, nursing his left ankle.
Shin's pistol was a fifty-year-old Vietnamese imitation of
a South American copy of a Walther PPK, double-action on
the first shot, with a very rough pull. It was chambered for .22
long rifle, and Case would've preferred lead azide explosives
to the simple Chinese hollow points Shin had sold him. Still
it was a handgun and nine rounds of ammunition, and as he
made his way down Shiga from the sushi stall he cradled it in
his jacket pocket. The grips were bright red plastic molded in
a raised dragon motif, something to run your thumb across
in the dark. He'd consigned the cobra to a dump canister on
Ninsei and dry-swallowed another octagon.
The pill lit his circuits and he rode the rush down Shiga to
Ninsei, then over to Baiitsu. His tail, he'd decided, was gone
and that was fine. He had calls to make, biz to transact, and
it wouldn't wait. A block down Baiitsu, toward the port, stood
a featureless ten-story office building in ugly yellow brick. Its
windows were dark now, but a faint glow from the roof was
visible if you craned your neck. An unlit neon sign near the
main entrance offered CHEAP HOTEL under a cluster of ideograms.
If the place had another name, Case didn't know it; it
was always referred to as Cheap Hotel. You reached it through
an alley off Baiitsu, where an elevator waited at the foot of a
transparent shaft. The elevator, like Cheap Hotel, was an afterthought,
lashed to the building with bamboo and epoxy. Case
climbed into the plastic cage and used his key, an unmarked
length of rigid magnetic tape.
Case had rented a coffin here, on a weekly basis, since he'd
arrived in Chiba, but he'd never slept in Cheap Hotel. He slept
in cheaper places.
The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the sides
of the cage was scratched and thumb-smudged. As it passed the
fifth floor, he saw the lights of Ninsei. He drummed his fingers
against the pistol grip as the cage slowed with a gradual hiss.
As always, it came to a full stop with a violent jolt, but he
was ready for it. He stepped out into the courtyard that served
the place as some combination of lobby and lawn.
Centered in the square carpet of green plastic turf, a lapanese
teenager sat behind a C-shaped console, reading a textbook.
The white fiberglass coffins were racked in a framework of
industrial scaffolding. Six tiers of coffins, ten coffins on a side.
Case nodded in the boy's direction and limped across the plastic
grass to the nearest ladder. The compound was roofed with
cheap laminated matting that rattled in a strong wind and leaked
when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to open
without a key.
The expansion-grate catwalk vibrated with his weight as he
edged his way along the third tier to Number 92. The coffins
were three meters long, the oval hatches a meter wide and just
under a meter and a half tall. He fed his key into the slot and
waited for verification from the house computer. Magnetic bolts
thudded reassuringly and the hatch rose vertically with a creak
of springs. Fluorescents flickered on as he crawled in, pulling
the hatch shut behind him and slapping the panel that activated
the manual latch.
There was nothing in Number 92 but a standard Hitachi
pocket computer and a small white styrofoam cooler chest. The
cooler contained the remains of three ten-kilo slabs of dry ice
carefully wrapped in paper to delay evaporation, and a spun
aluminum lab flask. Crouching on the brown temper foam slab
that was both floor and bed, Case took Shin's .22 from his
pocket and put it on top of the cooler. Then he took off his
jacket. The coffin's terminal was molded into one concave wall,
opposite a panel listing house rules in seven languages. Case
took the pink handset from its cradle and punched a Hong-Kong
number from memory. He let it ring five times, then hung up.
His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi
wasn't taking calls.
He punched a Tokyo number in Shinjuku.
A woman answered, something in Japanese.
"Snake Man there?"
"Very good to hear from you," said Snake Man, coming in
on an extension. "I've been expecting your call."
"I got the music you wanted." Glancing at the cooler.
"I'm very glad to hear that. We have a cash flow problem.
Can you front?"
"Oh, man, I really need the money bad...."
Snake Man hung up.
"You shit " Case said to the humming receiver. He stared
at the cheap little pistol.
"Iffy," he said, "it's all looking very iffy tonight."
Case walked into the Chat an hour before dawn, both hands
in the pockets of his jacket; one held the rented pistol, the other
the aluminum flask.
Ratz was at a rear table, drinking Apollonaris water from
a beer pitcher, his hundred and twenty kilos of doughy flesh
tilted against the wall on a creaking chair. A Brazilian kid
called Kurt was on the bar, tending a thin crowd of mostly
silent drunks. Ratz's plastic arm buzzed as he raised the pitcher
and drank. His shaven head was filmed with sweat. "You look
bad, friend artiste," he said, flashing the wet ruin of his teeth.
"I'm doing just fine," said Case, and grinned like a skull.
"Super fine." He sagged into the chair opposite Ratz, hands
still in his pockets.
"And you wander back and forth in this portable bombshelter
built of booze and ups, sure. Proof against the grosser emotions,
yes?"
"Why don't you get off my case, Ratz? You seen Wage?"
"Proof against fear and being alone," the bartender continued.
"Listen to the fear. Maybe it's your friend."
"You hear anything about a fight in the arcade tonight, Ratz?
Somebody hurt?"
"Crazy cut a security man." He shrugged. "A girl, they
say."
"I gotta talk to Wage, Ratz, I. . ."
"Ah." Ratz's mouth narrowed, compressed into a single
line. He was looking past Case, toward the entrance. "I think
you are about to."
Case had a sudden flash of the shuriken in their window.
The speed sang in his head. The pistol in his hand was slippery
with sweat.
"Herr Wage," Ratz said, slowly extending his pink manipulator
as if he expected it to be shaken. "How great a pleasure.
Too seldom do you honor us."
Case turned his head and looked up into Wage's face. It
was a tanned and forgettable mask. The eyes were vat grown
sea-green Nikon transplants. Wage wore a suit of gunmetal
silk and a simple bracelet of platinum on either wrist. He was
flanked by his Joe boys, nearly identical young men, their arms
and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.
"How you doing, Case?"
"Gentlemen," said Ratz, picking up the table's heaped ashtray
in his pink plastic claw, "I want no trouble here." The
ashtray was made of thick, shatterproof plastic, and advertised
Tsingtao beer. Ratz crushed it smoothly, butts and shards of
green plastic cascading onto the table top. "You understand?"
"Hey, sweetheart," said one of the Joe boys, "you wanna try
that thing on me?"
"Don't bother aiming for the legs, Kurt," Ratz said, his tone
conversational. Case glanced across the room and saw the Brazilian
standing on the bar, aiming a Smith & Wesson riot gun
at the trio. The thing's barrel, made of paper-thin alloy wrapped
with a kilometer of glass filament, was wide enough to swallow
a fist. The skeletal magazine revealed five fat orange cartridges,
subsonic sandbag jellies.
"Technically nonlethal," said Ratz.
"Hey, Ratz," Case said, "I owe you one."
The bartender shrugged. "Nothing, you owe me. These,"
and he glowered at Wage and the Joe boys, "should know better.
You don't take anybody off in the Chatsubo."
Wage coughed. "So who's talking about taking anybody
off? We just wanna talk business. Case and me, we work
together."
Case pulled the .22 out of his pocket and level led it at
Wage's crotch. "I hear you wanna do me." Ratz's pink claw
closed around the pistol and Case let his hand go limp.
"Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with
you, you wig or something? What's this shit I'm trying to kill
you?" Wage turned to the boy on his left. "You two go back
to the Namban. Wait for me."
Case watched as they crossed the bar, which was now entirely
deserted except for Kurt and a drunken sailor in khakis,
who was curled at the foot of a barstool. The barrel of the
Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the door, then swung back
to cover Wage. The magazine of Case's pistol clattered on the
table. Ratz held the gun in his claw and pumped the round out
of the chamber.
"Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?" Wage asked.
Linda.
"Who told you, man? Somebody trying to set you up?"
The sailor moaned and vomited explosively.
"Get him out of here," Ratz called to Kurt, who was sitting
on the edge of the bar now, the Smith & Wesson across his
lap, lighting a cigarette.
Case felt the weight of the night come down on him like a
bag of wet sand settling behind his eyes. He took the flask out
of his pocket and handed it to Wage. "All I got. Pituitaries.
Get you five hundred if you move it fast. Had the rest of my
roll in some RAM, but that's gone by now."
"You okay, Case?" The flask had already vanished behind
a gunmetal lapel. "I mean, fine, this'll square us, but you look
bad. Like hammered shit. You better go somewhere and sleep."
"Yeah." He stood up and felt the Chat sway around him.
"Well, I had this fifty, but I gave it to somebody." He giggled.
He picked up the .22's magazine and the one loose cartridge
and dropped them into one pocket, then put the pistol in the
other. "I gotta see Shin, get my deposit back."
"Go home," said Ratz, shifting on the creaking chair with
something like embarrassment. "Artiste. Go home."
He felt them watching as he crossed the room and shouldered
his way past the plastic doors.
"Bitch," he said to the rose tint over Shiga. Down on Ninsei
the holograms were vanishing like ghosts, and most of the neon
was already cold and dead. He sipped thick black coffee from
a street vendor's foam thimble and watched the sun come up.
"You fly away, honey. Towns like this are for people who like
the way down." But that wasn't it, really, and he was finding
it increasingly hard to maintain the sense of betrayal. She just
wanted a ticket home, and the RAM in his Hitachi would buy
it for her, if she could find the right fence. And that business
with the fifty; she'd almost turned it down, knowing she was
about to rip him for the rest of what he had.
When he climbed out of the elevator, the same boy was on
the desk. Different textbook. "Good buddy," Case called across
the plastic turf, "you don't need to tell me. I know already.
Pretty lady came to visit, said she had my key. Nice little tip
for you, say fifty New ones?" The boy put down his book.
"Woman," Case said, and drew a line across his forehead with
his thumb. "Silk." He smiled broadly. The boy smiled back,
nodded. "Thanks, ass hole," Case said.
On the catwalk, he had trouble with the lock. She'd messed
it up somehow when she'd fiddled it, he thought. Beginner.
He knew where to rent a black box that would open anything
in Cheap Hotel. Fluorescents came on as he crawled in.
"Close the hatch real slow, friend. You still got that Saturday
night special you rented from the waiter?"
She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the coffin.
She had her knees up, resting her wrists on them, the pepper box
muzzle of a flechette pistol emerged from her hands.
"That you in the arcade?" He pulled the hatch down.
"Where's Linda?"
"Hit that latch switch."
He did.
"That your girl? Linda?"
He nodded.
"She's gone. Took your Hitachi. Real nervous kid. What
about the gun, man?" She wore mirrored glasses. Her clothes
were black, the heels of black boots deep in the temper foam.
"I took it back to Shin, got my deposit. Sold his bullets
back to him for half what I paid. You want the money?"
"No."
"Want some dry ice? All I got, right now."
"What got into you tonight? Why'd you pull that scene at
the arcade? I had to mess up this rentacop came after me with
nun chucks. "
"Linda said you were gonna kill me."
"Linda said? I never saw her before I came up here."
"You aren't with Wage?"
She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were surgically
inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to
grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by
dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers curled around the
fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished burgundy.
The nails looked artificial. "I think you screwed up, Case. I
showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture."
"So what do you want, lady?" He sagged back against the
hatch.
"You. One live body, brains still somewhat intact. Molly,
Case. My name's Molly. I'm collecting you for the man I work
for. Just wants to talk, is all. Nobody wants to hurt you "
"That's good."
"'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's just
the way I'm wired." She wore tight black glove leather jeans
and a bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric that seemed
to absorb light. "If I put this dart gun away, will you be easy,
Case? You look like you like to take stupid chances."
"Hey, I'm very easy. I'm a pushover, no problem."
"That's fine, man." The fletcher vanished into the black
jacket. "Because you try to fuck around with me, you'll be
taking one of the stupidest chances of your whole life."
She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly
spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four
centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the
burgundy nails.
She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.
After a year of coffins, the room on the twenty-fifth floor
of the Chiba Hilton seemed enormous. It was ten meters by
eight, half of a suite. A white Braun coffee maker steamed on
a low table by the sliding glass panels that opened onto a narrow
balcony.
"Get some coffee in you. Look like you need it." She took
off her black jacket, the fletcher hung beneath her arm in a
black nylon shoulder rig. She wore a sleeveless gray pullover
with plain steel zips across each shoulder. Bulletproof, Case
decided, slopping coffee into a bright red mug. His arms and
legs felt like they were made out of wood.
"Case." He looked up, seeing the man for the first time.
"My name is Armitage." The dark robe was open to the waist,
the broad chest hairless and muscular, the stomach flat and
hard. Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach. "Sun's
up, Case. This is your lucky day, boy."
Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked
the scalding coffee. Brown stain running down the imitation
rice paper wall. He saw the angular gold ring through the left
lobe. Special Forces. The man smiled.
"Get your coffee, Case," Molly said. "You're okay, but
you're not going anywhere 'til Armitage has his say." She sat
cross legged on a silk futon and began to fieldstrip the fletcher
without bothering to look at it. Twin mirrors tracking as he
crossed to the table and refilled his cup.
"Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?" Armitage
ran a large hand back through his cropped brown hair.
A heavy gold bracelet flashed on his wrist. "Leningrad, Kiev,
Siberia. We invented you in Siberia, Case."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Screaming Fist, Case. You've heard the name."
"Some kind of run, wasn't it? Tried to burn this Russian
nexus with virus programs. Yeah, I heard about it. And nobody
got out."
He sensed abrupt tension. Armitage walked to the window
and looked out over Tokyo Bay. "That isn't true. One unit
made it back to Helsinki, Case."
Case shrugged, sipped coffee.
"You're a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs
you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming
Fist. For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic
module was a Nightwing micro light, a pilot, a matrix deck, a
jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The Mole series
was the first generation of real intrusion programs."
"Icebreakers," Case said, over the rim of the red mug.
"Ice from ICE, intrusion countermeasures electronics."
"Problem is, mister, I'm no jockey now, so I think I'll just
be going...."
"I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your
kind."
"You got zip to do with me and my kind, buddy. You're
rich enough to hire expensive razor girls to haul my ass up here,
is all. I'm never gonna punch any deck again, not for you or
anybody else." He crossed to the window and looked down.
"That's where I live now."
"Our profile says you're trying to con the street into killing
you when you're not looking."
"Profile?"
"We've built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each
of your aliases and ran the skim through some military software.
You're suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the
outside. And our medical projection says you'll need a new
pancreas inside a year."
"We." He met the faded blue eyes. "We who?"
"What would you say if I told you we could correct your
neural damage, Case'?" Armitage suddenly looked to Case as
if he were carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously
heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream, and that
soon he'd wake. Armitage wouldn't speak again. Case's dreams
always ended in these freeze frames, and now this one was
over.
"What would you say, Case?"
Case looked out over the Bay and shivered.
"I'd say you were full of shit."
Armitage nodded.
"Then I'd ask what your terms were."
"Not very different than what you're used to, Case."
"Let the man get some sleep, Armitage," Molly said from
her futon, the components of the fletcher spread on the silk
like some expensive puzzle. "He's coming apart at the seams."
"Terms," Case said, "and now. Right now."
He was still shivering. He couldn't stop shivering.
The clinic was nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster
of sleek pavilions separated by small formal gardens. He remembered
the place from the round he'd made his first month
in Chiba.
"Scared, Case. You're real scared." It was Sunday afternoon
and he stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard. White boulders,
a stand of green bamboo, black gravel raked into smooth waves.
A gardener, a thing like a large metal crab, was tending the
bamboo.
"It'll work, Case. You got no idea, the kind of stuff Armitage
has. Like he's gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing
you with the program he's giving them to tell them how to do
it. He'll put them three years ahead of the competition. You
got any idea what that's worth?" She hooked thumbs in the
belt loops of her leather jeans and rocked backward on the
lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots. The narrow toes
were sheathed in bright Mexican silver. The lenses were empty
quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.
"You're street samurai," he said. "How long you work for
him?"
"Couple of months."
"What about before that?"
"For somebody else. Working girl, you know?"
He nodded.
"Funny, Case."
"What's funny?"
"It's like I know you. That profile he's got. I know how
you're wired."
"You don't know me, sister."
"You're okay, Case. What got you, it's just called bad luck."
"How about him? He okay, Molly?" The robot crab moved
toward them, picking its way over the waves of gravel. Its
bronze carapace might have been a thousand years old. When
it was within a meter of her boots, it fired a burst of light, then
froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained.
"What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet
ass." The crab had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked
it with a smooth precision, the silver boot-tip clanging on the
carapace. The thing fell on its back, but the bronze limbs soon
righted it.
Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry
of the gravel waves with the toes of his shoes. He began to
search his pockets for cigarettes. "In your shirt," she said.
"You want to answer my question?" He fished a wrinkled
Yeheyuan from the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab
of German steel that looked as though it belonged on an operating
table.
"Well, I'll tell you, the man's definitely on to something.
He's got big money now, and he's never had it before, and he
gets more all the time." Case noticed a certain tension around
her mouth. "Or maybe, maybe something's on to him...."
She shrugged.
"What's that mean?"
"I don't know, exactly. I know I don't know who or what
we're really working for."
He stared at the twin mirrors. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday
morning, he'd gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours .
Then he'd taken a long and pointless walk along the port's
security perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the
chain link. If she'd followed him, she'd done a good job of it.
He'd avoided Night City. He'd waited in the coffin for Armitage's
call. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this
girl with a gymnast's body and conjurer's hands.
"If you'll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to
meet you." The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the
clinic without waiting to see if Case would follow.
Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine.
Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image
fading down corridors of television sky.
Voices.
Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves,
pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given....
Hold still. Don't move.
And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone,
a hundred faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and
whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond chain link
and the prison of the skull.
Goddamn don't you move.
Where the sky faded from hissing static to the non color of
the matrix, and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars.
"Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!"
She was straddling his chest, a blue plastic syrette in one
hand. "You don't lie still, I'll slit your fucking throat. You're
still full of endorphin inhibitors."
He woke and found her stretched beside him in the dark.
His neck was brittle, made of twigs. There was a steady
pulse of pain midway down his spine. Images formed and
reformed: a flickering montage of the Sprawl's towers and
ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward him in the
shade beneath a bridge or overpass....
"Case? It's Wednesday, Case." She moved, rolling over,
reaching across him. A breast brushed his upper arm. He heard
her tear the foil seal from a bottle of water and drink. "Here."
She put the bottle in his hand. "I can see in the dark, Case.
Micro channel image-amps in my glasses."
"My back hurts."
"That's where they replaced your fluid. Changed your blood
too. Blood 'cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal.
And some new tissue patched into your liver. The nerve stuff
I dunno. Lot of injections. They didn't have to open anything
up for the main show." She settled back beside him. "It's
2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a readout chipped into my optic nerve."
He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle. Gagged, coughed,
lukewarm water spraying his chest and thighs.
"I gotta punch deck, ' he heard himself say. He was groping
for his clothes. "I gotta know...."
She laughed. Small strong hands gripped his upper arms.
"Sorry, hotshot. Eight day wait. Your nervous system would
fall out on the floor if you jacked in now. Doctor's orders.
Besides, they figure it worked. Check you in a day or so." He
lay down again.
"Where are we?"
"Home. Cheap Hotel."
"Where's Armitage?"
"Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something. We're
out of here soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the
Sprawl." She touched his shoulder. "Roll over. I give a good
massage."
He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his
fingers against the walls of the coffin. She settled over the
small of his back, kneeling on the temper foam, the leather
jeans cool against his skin. Her fingers brushed his neck.
"How come you're not at the Hilton?"
She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs
and gently encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger.
She rocked there for a minute in the dark, erect above him,
her other hand on his neck. The leather of her jeans creaked
softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself harden
against the temper foam.
His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed
to retreat. He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back
against the foam, pulling her down, licking her breasts, small
hard nipples sliding wet across his cheek. He found the zip on
the leather jeans and tugged it down.
"It's okay," she said, "I can see." Sound of the jeans peeling
down. She struggled beside him until she could kick them away.
She threw a leg across him and he touched her face. Unexpected
hardness of the implanted lenses. "Don't," she said, "fingerprints."
Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it
over her, his thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers
spread across the labia. As she began to lower herself, the
images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriving
and receding. She slid down around him and his back arched
convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping
down on him again and again, until they both had come, his
orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the
matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down
hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet
against his hips.
On Nisei, a thinner, weekday version of the crowd went
through the motions of the dance. Waves of sound rolled from
the arcades and pachinko parlors. Case glanced into the Chat
and saw Zone watching over his girls in the warm, beer-smelling
twilight. Ratz was tending bar.
"You seen Wage, Ratz?"
"Not tonight." Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at
Molly.
"You see him, tell him I got his money."
"Luck changing, my artiste?"
"Too soon to tell."
"Well, I gotta see this guy," Case said, watching his reflection
in her glasses. "I got biz to cancel out of."
"Armitage won't like it, I let you out of my sight." She
stood beneath Deane's melting clock, hands on her hips.
"The guy won't talk to me if you're there. Deane I don't
give two shits about. He takes care of himself. But I got people
who'll just go under if I walk out of Chiba cold. It's my people,
you know?"
Her mouth hardened. She shook her head.
"I got people in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku
and Asakuza, and they'll go down, understand?" he lied, his
hand on the shoulder of her black jacket. "Five. Five minutes.
By your clock, okay?"
"Not what I'm paid for."
"What you're paid for is one thing. Me letting some tight
friends die because you're too literal about your instructions is
something else."
"Bullshit. Tight friends my ass. You're going in there to
check us out with your smuggler." She put a booted foot up
on the dust-covered Kandinsky coffee table.
"Ah, Case, sport, it does look as though your companion
there is definitely armed, aside from having a fair amount of
silicon in her head . What is this about, exactly?" Deane ' s ghostly
cough seemed to hang in the air between them.
"Hold on, Julie. Anyway, I'll be coming in alone."
"You can be sure of that, old son. Wouldn't have it any
other way."
"Okay," she said. "Go. But five Minutes. Any more and
I'll come in and cool your tight friend permanently. And while
you're at it, you try to figure something out."
"What's that?"
"Why I'm doing you the favor." She turned and walked
out, past the stacked white modules of preserved ginger.
"Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?" asked Julie.
"Julie, she's gone. You wanna let me in? Please, Julie?"
The bolts worked. "Slowly, Case," said the voice.
"Turn on the works, Julie, all the stuff in the desk," Case
said, taking his place in the swivel chair.
"It's on all the time," Deane said mildly, taking a gun from
behind the exposed works of his old mechanical typewriter and
aiming it carefully at Case. It was a belly gun, a magnum
revolver with the barrel sawn down to a nub. The front of the
trigger-guard had been cut away and the grips wrapped with
what looked like old masking tape. Case thought it looked very
strange in Dean's manicured pink hands. "Just taking care, you
Understand. Nothing personal. Now tell me what you want."
"I need a history lesson, Julie. And a go-to on somebody."
"What's moving, old son'?" Deane's shirt was candy-striped
cotton, the collar white and rigid, like porcelain.
"Me, Julie. I'm leaving. Gone. But do me the favor, okay?"
"Go-to on whom, old son?"
"Gaijin name of Armitage, suite in the Hilton."
Deane put the pistol down. "Sit still, Case." He tapped
something out on a lap terminal. "It seems as though you know
as much as my net does, Case. This gentleman seems to have
a temporary arrangement with the Yakuza, and the sons of the
neon chrysanthemum have ways of screening their allies from
the likes of me. I wouldn't have it any other way. Now, history.
You said history." He picked up the gun again, but didn't point
it directly at Case. "What sort of history?"
"The war. You in the war, Julie?"
"The war? What's there to know? Lasted three weeks."
"Screaming Fist."
"Famous. Don't they teach you history these days? Great
bloody postwar political football, that was. Watergated all to
hell and back. Your brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in,
where was it, McLean? In the bunkers, all of that... great
scandal. Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to
test some new technology. They knew about the Russians' defenses,
it came out later. Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse
weapons. Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see." Deane
shrugged. "Turkey shoot for Ivan."
"Any of those guys make it out?"
"Christ,'' Deane said, "it's been bloody years.... Though
I do think a few did. One of the teams. Got hold of a Sov
gunship. Helicopter, you know. Flew it back to Finland. Didn't
have entry codes, of course, and shot hell out of the Finnish
defense forces in the process. Special Forces types." Deane
sniffed. "Bloody hell."
Case nodded. The smell of preserved ginger was overwhelming.
"I spent the war in Lisbon, you know," Deane said, putting
the gun down. "Lovely place, Lisbon."
"In the service, Julie?"
"Hardly. Though I did see action." Deane smiled his pink
smile. "Wonderful what a war can do for one's markets."
"Thanks, Julie. I owe you one."
"Hardly, Case. And goodbye."
* * *
And later he'd tell himself that the evening at Sammi's had
felt wrong from the start, that even as he'd followed Molly
along that corridor, shuffling through a trampled mulch of ticket
stubs and styrofoam cups, he'd sensed it. Linda's death, waiting....
They'd gone to the Namban, after he'd seen Deane, and
paid off his debt to Wage with a roll of Armitage's New Yen.
Wage had liked that, his boys had liked it less, and Molly had
grinned at Case's side with a kind of ecstatic feral intensity,
obviously longing for one of them to make a move. Then he'd
taken her back to the Chat for a drink.
"Wasting your time, cowboy," Molly said, when Case took
an octagon from the pocket of his jacket.
"How's that? You want one?" He held the pill out to her.
"Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver.
Armitage had them designed to bypass that shit." She tapped
the octagon with one burgundy nail. "You're biochemically
incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine."
"Shit," he said. He looked at the octagon, then at her.
"Eat it. Eat a dozen. Nothing'll happen."
He did. Nothing did.
Three beers later, she was asking Ratz about the fights.
"Sammi's," Ratz said.
"I'll pass," Case said, "I hear they kill each other down
there."
An hour later, she was buying tickets from a skinny Thai
in a white t-shirt and baggy rugby shorts.
Sammi's was an inflated dome behind a port side warehouse,
taut gray fabric reinforced with a net of thin steel cables. The
corridor, with a door at either end, was a crude airlock preserving
the pressure differential that supported the dome. Fluorescent
rings were screwed to the plywood ceiling at intervals,
but most of them had been broken. The air was damp and close
with the smell of sweat and concrete.
None of that prepared him for the arena, the crowd, the
tense hush, the towering puppets of light beneath the dome.
Concrete sloped away in tiers to a kind of central stage, a raised
circle ringed with a glittering thicket of projection gear. No
light but the holograms that shifted and flickered above the
ring, reproducing the movements of the two men below. Strata
of cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until it struck
currents set up by the blowers that supported the dome. No
sound but the muted purring of the blowers and the amplified
breathing of the fighters.
Reflected colors flowed across Molly's lenses as the men
circled. The holograms were ten-power magnifications; at ten,
the knives they held were just under a meter long. The knife-fighter's
grip is the fencer's grip, Case remembered, the fingers
curled, thumb aligned with blade. The knives seemed to move
of their own accord, gliding with a ritual lack of urgency through
the arcs and passes of their dance, point passing point, as the
men waited for an opening. Molly's upturned face was smooth
and still, watching.
"I'll go find us some food," Case said. She nodded, lost in
contemplation of the dance.
He didn't like this place.
He turned and walked back into the shadows. Too dark.
Too quiet.
The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese. Not really a Night
City crowd. Teaks down from the arcologies. He supposed that
meant the arena had the approval of some corporate recreational
committee. He wondered briefly what it would be like, working
all your life for one zaibatsu. Company housing, company
hymn, company funeral.
He'd made nearly a full circuit of the dome before he found
the food stalls. He bought yakitori on skewers and two tall
waxy cartons of beer. Glancing up at the holograms, he saw
that blood laced one figure's chest. Thick brown sauce trickled
down the skewers and over his knuckles.
Seven days and he'd jack in. If he closed his eyes now,
he'd see the matrix.
Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance.
Then the fear began to knot between his shoulders. A cold
trickle of sweat worked its way down and across his ribs. The
operation hadn't worked. He was still here, still meat, no Molly
waiting, her eyes locked on the circling knives, no Armitage
waiting in the Hilton with tickets and a new passport and
money. It was all some dream, some pathetic fantasy.... Hot
tears blurred his vision.
Blood sprayed from a jugular in a red gout of light. And
now the crowd was screaming, rising, screaming--as one figure
crumpled, the hologram fading, flickering....
Raw edge of vomit in his throat. He closed his eyes, took
a deep breath, opened them, and saw Linda Lee step past him
her gray eyes blind with fear. She wore the same French fatigues.
And gone. Into shadow.
Pure mindless reflex: he threw the beer and chicken down
and ran after her. He might have called her name, but he'd
never be sure.
Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light. Seared
concrete beneath the thin soles of his shoes.
Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now
and again the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye,
bobbing in his vision as he ran.
Someone tripped him. Concrete tore his palms.
He rolled and kicked, failing to connect. A thin boy, spiked
blond hair lit from behind in a rainbow nimbus, was leaning
over him. Above the stage, a figure turned, knife held high,
to the cheering crowd. The boy smiled and drew something
from his sleeve. A razor, etched in red as a third beam blinked
past them into the dark. Case saw the razor dipping for his
throat like a dowser's wand.
The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic
explosions. Molly's fletchettes, at twenty rounds per second.
The boy coughed once, convulsively, and toppled across Case's
legs.
He was walking toward the stalls, into the shadows. He
looked down, expecting to see that needle of ruby emerge from
his chest. Nothing. He found her. She was thrown down at the
foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed. There was a smell of
cooked meat. The crowd was chanting the winner's name. A
beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag. One white
sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head.
Follow the wall. Curve of concrete. Hands in pockets. Keep
walking. Past unseeing faces, every eye raised to the victor's
image above the ring. Once a seamed European face danced
in the glare of a match, lips pursed around the short stem of a
metal pipe. Tang of hashish. Case walked on, feeling nothing.
"Case." Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow. "You
okay?"
Something mewlcd and bubbled in the dark behind her.
He shook his head.
"Fight's over, Case. Time to go home."
He tried to walk past her. back into the dark, where something
was dying. She stopped him with a hand on his chest.
"Friends of your tight friend. Killed your girl for you. You
haven't done too well for friends in this town, have you? We
got a partial profile on that old bastard when we did you, man.
He'd fry anybody, for a few New ones. The one back there
said they got on to her when she was trying to fence your RAM.
Just cheaper for them to kill her and take it. Save a little
money.... I got the one who had the laser to tell me all about
it. Coincidence we were here, but I had to make sure." Her
mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin line.
Case felt as though his brain were jammed. "Who," he said,
"who sent them?"
She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger.
He saw that her hands were sticky with blood. Back in the
shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.
After the postoperative check at the clinic, Molly took him
to the port. Armitage was waiting. He'd chartered a hovercraft.
The last Case saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcologies.
Then a mist closed over the black water and the drifting
shoals of waste.
PART TWO
THE SHOPPING
EXPEDITION
Home.
Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan
Axis.
Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every
thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen.
Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to
pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation.
Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale.
Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes
per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in
midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial
parks ringing the old core of Atlanta. . .
Case woke from a dream of airports, of Molly's dark leathers
moving ahead of him through the concourses of Narita, Schipol,
Orly.... He watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish
vodka at some kiosk, an hour before dawn.
Somewhere down in the Sprawl's ferro-concrete roots, a
train drove a column of stale air through a tunnel. The train
itself was silent, gliding over its induction cushion, but displaced
air made the tunnel sing, bass down into subsonics.
Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused dust to
rise from the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor.
Opening his eyes, he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach
across an expanse of very new pink temper foam. Overhead,
sunlight filtered through the soot-stained grid of a skylight.
One half-meter square of glass had been replaced with chipboard,
a fat gray cable emerging there to dangle within a few
centimeters of the floor. He lay on his side and watched her
breathe, her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the
functional elegance of a war plane's fusilage. Her body was
spare, neat, the muscles like a dancer's.
The room was large. He sat up. The room was empty, aside
from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and
identical, that lay beside it. Blank walls, no windows, a single
white-painted steel fire door. The walls were coated with countless
layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this
kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate
in the inter zone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite
art.
He was home.
He swung his feet to the floor. It was made of little blocks
of wood, some missing, others loose. His head ached. He
remembered Amsterdam, another room, in the Old City section
of the Centrum, buildings centuries old. Molly back from the
canal's edge with orange juice and eggs. Armitage off on some
cryptic foray, the two of them walking alone past Dam Square
to a bar she knew on a Damrak thoroughfare. Paris was a
blurred dream. Shopping. She'd taken him shopping.
He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that
lay at his feet, and knelt beside the bags. The first one he
opened was Molly's: neatly folded clothing and small expensive-looking
gadgets. The second was stuffed with things he
didn't remember buying: books, tapes, a Simstim deck, clothing
with French and Italian labels. Beneath a green t-shirt, he
discovered a flat, origami-wrapped package, recycled Japanese
paper.
The paper tore when he picked it up; a bright nine-pointed
star fell--to stick upright in a crack in the parquet.
"Souvenir," Molly said. "I noticed you were always looking
at 'em." He turned and saw her sitting cross legged on the bed,
sleepily scratching her stomach with burgundy nails.
"Someone's coming later to secure the place," Armitage
said. He stood in the open doorway with an old-fashioned
magnetic key in his hand. Molly was making coffee on a tiny
German stove she took from her bag.
"I can do it," she said. "I got enough gear already. Infrascan
perimeter, screamers..."
"No," he said, closing the door. "I want it tight."
"Suit yourself." She wore a dark mesh t-shirt tucked into
baggy black cotton pants.
"You ever the heat, Mr. Armitage?" Case asked, from where
he sat, his back against a wall.
Armitage was no taller than Case, but with his broad shoulders
and military posture he seemed to fill the doorway. He
wore a somber Italian suit; in his right hand he held a briefcase
of soft black calf. The Special Forces earring was gone. The
handsome, inexpressive features offered the routine beauty of
the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past
decade's leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes
heightened the effect of a mask. Case began to regret the question.
"Lots of Forces types wound up cops, I mean. Or corporate
security," Case added uncomfortably. Molly handed him a
steaming mug of coffee. "That number you had them do on
my pancreas, that's like a cop routine."
Armitage closed the door and crossed the room, to stand in
front of Case. "You're a lucky boy, Case. You should thank
me."
"Should l?" Case blew noisily on his coffee.
"You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you
frees you from a dangerous dependency."
"Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency."
"Good, because you have a new one."
"How's that?" Case looked up from his coffee. Armitage
was smiling.
"You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various
main arteries, Case. They're dissolving. Very slowly, but they
definitely are dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. You're
already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin. It was the
one your former employers gave you in Memphis."
Case blinked up at the smiling mask.
"You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Case, but
that's all. Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that
will dissolve the bond without opening the sacs. Then you'll
need a blood change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you're back
where I found you. So you see, Case, you need us. You need
us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter."
Case looked at Molly. She shrugged.
"Now go down to the freight elevator and bring up the cases
you find there." Armitage handed him the magnetic key. "Go
on. You'll enjoy this, Case. Like Christmas morning."
Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like wind-blown
grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies
of need and gratification.
He sat beside Molly in filtered sunlight on the rim of a dry
concrete fountain, letting the endless stream of faces recapitulate
the stages of his life. First a child with hooded eyes, a
street boy, hands relaxed and ready at his sides; then a teenager,
face smooth and cryptic beneath red glasses. Case remembered
fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the rose
glow of the dawn geodesics.
He shifted on the concrete, feeling it rough and cool through
the thin black denim. Nothing here like the electric dance of
Ninsei. This was different commerce, a different rhythm, in
the smell of fast food and perfume and fresh summer sweat.
With his deck waiting, back in the loft, an Ono-Sendai
Cyberspace 7. They'd left the place littered with the abstract
white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic
film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono-Sendai; next
year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a
dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffee maker. Armitage
had only waited for Case's approval of each piece.
"Where'd he go?" Case had asked Molly.
"He likes hotels. Big ones. Near airports, if he can manage
it. Let's go down to the street." She'd zipped herself into an
old surplus vest with a dozen oddly shaped pockets and put on
a huge pair of black plastic sunglasses that completely covered
her mirrored insets.
"You know about that toxin shit, before?" he asked her, by
the fountain. She shook her head. "You think it's true?"
"Maybe, maybe not. Works either way."
"You know any way I can find out?"
"No," she said, her right hand coming up to form the jive
for silence. "That kind of kink's too subtle to show up on a
scan." Then her fingers moved again: wait. "And you don't
care that much anyway. I saw you stroking that Sendai; man,
it was pornographic." She laughed.
"So what's he got on you? How's he got the working girl
kinked?"
"-Professional pride, baby, that's all." And again the sign
for silence. "We're gonna get some breakfast, okay? Eggs, real
bacon. Probably kill you, you been eating that rebuilt Chiba
krill for so long. Yeah, come on, we'll tube in to Manhattan
and get us a real breakfast."
Lifeless neon spelled out METRO HOLOGRAFIX in dusty
capitals of glass tubing. Case picked at a shred of bacon that
had lodged between his front teeth. He'd given up asking her
where they were going and why; jabs in the ribs and the sign
for silence were all he'd gotten in reply. She talked about the
season's fashions, about sports, about a political scandal in
California he'd never heard of.
He looked around the deserted dead end street. A sheet of
newsprint went cart wheeling past the intersection. Freak winds
in the East side; something to do with convection, and an
overlap in the domes. Case peered through the window at the
dead sign. Her Sprawl wasn't his Sprawl? he decided. She'd
led him through a dozen bars and clubs he'd never seen before,
taking care of business, usually with no more than a nod.
Maintaining connections.
Something was moving in the shadows behind METRO
HOLOGRAFIX.
The door was a sheet of corrugated roofing. In front of it,
Molly's hands flowed through an intricate sequence of jive that
he couldn't follow. He caught the sign for cash, a thumb brushing
the tip of the forefinger. The door swung inward and sheled
him into the smell of dust. They stood in a clearing, dense
tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves
of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that
had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He
could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur
back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded
with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish antenna,
a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of
alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded
into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as
he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted
scrap. He heard the door close behind them. He didn't look
back.
The tunnel ended with an ancient Army blanket tacked across
a doorway. White light flooded out as Molly ducked past it.
Four square walls of blank white plastic, ceiling to match,
floored with white hospital tile molded in a non slip pattern of
small raised disks. In the center stood a square, white-painted
wooden table and four white folding chairs.
The man who stood blinking now in the doorway behind
them, the blanket draping one shoulder like a cape, seemed to
have been designed in a wind tunnel. His ears were very small,
plastered flat against his narrow skull, and his large front teeth,
revealed in something that wasn't quite a smile, were canted
sharply backward. He wore an ancient tweed jacket and held
a handgun of some kind in his left hand. He peered at them,
blinked, and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket. He gestured
to Case, pointed at a slab of white plastic that leaned near the
doorway. Case crossed to it and saw that it was a solid sandwich
of circuitry, nearly a centimeter thick. He helped the man lift
it and position it in the doorway. Quick, nicotine-stained fingers
secured it with a white velcro border. A hidden exhaust fan
began to purr.
"Time," the man said, straightening up, "and counting. You
know the rate, Moll."
"We need a scan, Finn. For implants."
"So get over there between the pylons. Stand on the tape.
Straighten up, yeah. Now turn around, gimme a full threesixty."
Case watched her rotate between two fragile-looking
stands studded with sensors. The man took a small monitor
from his pocket and squinted at it. "Something new in your
head, yeah. Silicon. coat of pyrolitic carbons. A clock, right?
Your glasses gimme the read they always have, low-temp isotropic
carbons. Better biocompatibility with pyrolitics, but
that's your business, right? Same with your claws."
"Get over here, Case." He saw a scuffed X in black on the
white floor. "Turn around. Slow."
"Guy's a virgin." The man shrugged. "Some cheap dental
work, is all."
"You read for biologicals?" Molly unzipped her green vest
and took off the dark glasses.
"You think this is the Mayo? Climb on the table, kid, we'll
run a little biopsy." He laughed, showing more of his yellow
teeth. "Nah. Finn's word, sweetmeat, you got no little bugs,
no cortex bombs. You want me to shut the screen down?"
"Just for as long as it takes you to leave, Finn. Then we'll
want full screen for as long as we want it."
"Hey, that's fine by the Finn, Moll. You're only paying by
the second."
They sealed the door behind him and Molly turned one of
the white chairs around and sat on it, chin resting on crossed
forearms. "We talk now. This is as private as I can afford."
"What about?"
"What we're doing."
"What are we doing?"
"Working for Armitage."
"And you're saying this isn't for his benefit?"
"Yeah. I saw your profile, Case. And I've seen the rest of
our shopping list, once. You ever work with the dead?"
"No." He watched his reflection in her glasses. "I could, I
guess. I'm good at what I do." The present tense made him
nervous.
"You know that the Dixie Flatline's dead?"
He nodded. "Heart, I heard."
"You'll be working with his construct." She smiled. "Taught
you the ropes, huh? Him and Quine. I know Quine, by the
way. Real asshole."
"Somebody's got a recording of McCoy Pauley? Who?"
Now Case sat, and rested his elbows on the table. "I can't see
it. He'd never have sat still for it."
"Sense/Net. Paid him mega, you bet your ass."
"Quine dead too?"
"No such luck. He's in Europe. He doesn't come into this."
"Well, if we can get the Flatline, we're home free. He was
the best. You know he died brain death three times?"
She nodded.
"Flat lined on his EEG. Showed me tapes. 'Boy, I was daid.' "
"Look, Case, I been trying to suss out who it is is backing
Armitage since I signed on. But it doesn't feel like a zaibatsu,
a government, or some Yakuza subsidiary. Armitage gets orders.
Like something tells him to go off to Chiba, pick up a
pillhead who's making one last wobble throught the burnout
belt, and trade a program for the operation that'll fix him up.
We could a bought twenty world class cowboys for what the
market was ready to pay for that surgical program. You were
good, but not that good...." She scratched the side of her
nose.
"Obviously makes sense to somebody," he said. "Somebody
big."
"Don't let me hurt your feelings." She grinned. "We're
gonna be pulling one hardcore run, Case, just to get the Flatline's
construct. Sense/Net has it locked in a library vault uptown.
Tighter than an eel's ass, Case. Now, Sense/Net, they
got all their new material for the fall season locked in there
too. Steal that and we'd be richer than shit. But no, we gotta
get us the Flatline and nothing else. Weird."
"Yeah, it's all weird. You're weird, this hole's weird, and
who's the weird little gopher outside in the hall?"
"Finn's an old connection of mine. Fence, mostly. Software.
This privacy biz is a sideline. But I got Armitage to let him
be our tech here, so when he shows up later, you never saw
him. Got it?"
"So what's Armitage got dissolving inside you?"
"I'm an easy make." She smiled. "Anybody any good at
what they do, that's what they are, right? You gotta jack, I
gotta tussle."
He stared at her. "So tell me what you know about Armitage."
"For starters, nobody named Armitage took part in any
Screaming Fist. I checked. But that doesn't mean much. He
doesn't look like any of the pics of the guys who got out." She
shrugged. "Big deal. And starters is all I got." She drummed
her nails on the back of the chair. "But you are a cowboy,
aren't you? I mean, maybe you could have a little look around."
She smiled.
"He'd kill me."
"Maybe. Maybe not. I think he needs you, Case, and real
bad. Besides, you're a clever john, no? You can winkle him,
sure."
"What else is on that list you mentioned?"
"Toys. Mostly for you. And one certified psychopath name
of Peter Riviera. Real ugly customer."
"Where's he?"
"Dunno. But he's one sick fuck, no lie. I saw his profile."
She made a face. "God awful." She stood up and stretched,
catlike. "So we got an axis going, boy? We're together in this?
Partners?"
Case looked at her. "I gotta lotta choice, huh?"
She laughed. "You got it, cowboy."
"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games," said
the voice-over, "in early graphics programs and military experimentation
with cranial jacks." On the Sony, a two-dimensional
space war faded behind a forest of mathematically
generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic
spirals- cold blue military footage burned through, lab
animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire con.
trot circuits of tanks and war planes. "Cyberspace. A consensual
hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate
operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical
concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted
from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable
complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non space of
the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights,
receding...."
"What's that?" Molly asked, as he flipped the channel selector.
"Kid's show." A discontinuous flood of images as the selector
cycled. "Off," he said to the Hosaka.
"You want to try now, Case?"
Wednesday. Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with
Molly beside him. "You want me to go out, Case? Maybe
easier for you, alone...." He shook his head.
"No. Stay, doesn't matter." He settled the black terry sweatband
across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai
dermatrodes. He stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing
it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed
shuriken burning with reflected neon. He glanced up; on the
wall, just above the Sony, he'd hung her gift, tacking it there
with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its center.
closed his eyes.
Found the ridged face of the power stud.
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes
boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking
past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures,
faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed, now--
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now--
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of palergray.
Expanding-- And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick,
the unfolding of his distance less home, his country, transparent
3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the
stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority
burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of
America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms
of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft,
distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his
face.
Molly was gone when he took the trodes off, and the loft
was dark. He checked the time. He'd been in cyberspace for
five hours. He carried the Ono-Sendai to one of the new worktables
and collapsed across the bedslab, pulling Molly's black
silk sleeping bag over his head.
The security package taped to the steel fire door bleeped
twice. "Entry requested," it said. "Subject is cleared per my
program."
"So open it." Case pulled the silk from his face and sat up
as the door opened, expecting to see Molly or Armitage.
"Christ," said a hoarse voice, "I know that bitch can see in
the dark...." A squat figure stepped in and closed the door.
"Turn the lights on, okay?" Case scrambled off the slab and
found the old-fashioned switch.
"I'm the Finn," said the Finn, and made a warning face at
Case.
"Case."
"Pleased to meecha, I'm sure. I'm doing some hardware
for your boss, it looks like." The Finn fished a pack of Partagas
from a pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled
the room. He crossed to the worktable and glanced at the Ono-Sendai.
"Looks stock. Soon fix that. But here is your problem,
kid." He took a filthy manila envelope from inside his jacket,
flicked ash on the floor, and extracted a featureless black rectangle
from the envelope. "Goddamn factory prototypes," he
said, tossing the thing down on the table. "Cast 'em into a
block of polycarbon, can't get in with a laser without frying
the works. Booby-trapped for x-ray, ultrascan, God knows
what else. We'll get in, but there's no rest for the wicked,
right?" He folded the envelope with great care and tucked it
away in an inside pocket.
"What is it?"
"It's a flip flop switch, basically. Wire it into your Sendai
here, you can access live or recorded Sims Tim without having
to jack out of the matrix."
"What for?"
"I haven't got a clue. Know I'm fitting Moll for a broadcast
rig, though, so it's probably her sensorium you'll access." The
Finn scratched his chin. "So now you get to find out just how
tight those jeans really are, huh?"
Case sat in the loft with the dermatrodes strapped across his
forehead, watching motes dance in the diluted sunlight that
filtered through the grid overhead. A countdown was in progress
in one corner of the monitor screen.
Cowboys didn't get into Simstim, he thought, because it
was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and
the little plastic tiara dangling from a Simstim deck were basically
the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a
drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms
of presentation, but Simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous
multiplication of flesh input. The commercial stuff was edited,
of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the course
of a segment, you didn't feel it.
The screen bleeped a two-second warning.
The new switch was patched into his Sendai with a thin
ribbon of fiber optics.
And one and two and--
Cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal points.
Smooth, he thought, but not smooth enough. Have to work on it.
Then he keyed the new switch.
The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of
sound and color.... She was moving through a crowded street,
past stalls vending discount software, prices felt penned on sheets
of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells
of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill. For
a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her
body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger
behind her eyes.
The glasses didn't seem to cut down the sunlight at all. He
wondered if the built-in amps compensated automatically. Blue
alphanumerics winked the time, low in her left peripheral field.
Showing off, he thought.
Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She
seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone,
but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made
room.
"How you doing, Case?" He heard the words and felt her
form them. She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling
a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him catch his
breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. He had no way
to reply.
Two blocks later, she was threading the outskirts of Memory
Lane. Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he
would have used to find his way. He began to find the passivity
of the situation irritating.
The transition to cyberspace, when he hit the switch, was
instantaneous. He punched himself down a wall of primitive
ice belonging to the New York Public Library, automatically
counting potential windows. Keying back into her sensorium,
into the sinuous flow of muscle, senses sharp and bright.
He found himself wondering about the mind he shared these
sensations with. What did he know about her? That she was
another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the
thing she did to make a living. He knew the way she'd moved
against him, earlier, when she woke, their mutual grunt of
unity when he'd entered her, and that she liked her coffee black,
afterward....
Her destination was one of the dubious software rental complexes
that lined Memory Lane. There was a stillness, a hush.
Booths lined a central hall. The clientele were young, few of
them out of their teens. They all seemed to have carbon sockets
planted behind the left ear, but she didn't focus on them. The
counters that fronted the booths displayed hundreds of slivers
of microsoft, angular fragments of colored silicon mounted
under oblong transparent bubbles on squares of white cardboard.
Molly went to the seventh booth along the south wall.
Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly
into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the
socket behind his ear.
"Larry, you in, man?" She positioned herself in front of
him. The boy's eyes focused. He sat up in his chair and pried
a bright magenta splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail .
"Hey, Larry."
"Molly." He nodded.
"I have some work for some of your friends, Larry."
Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red
sport shirt and flicked it open, slotting the microsoft beside a
dozen others. His hand hovered, selected a glossy black chip
that was slightly longer than the rest, and inserted it smoothly
into his head. His eyes narrowed.
"Molly's got a rider," he said, "and Larry doesn't like that."
"Hey," she said, "I didn't know you were so . . . sensitive.
I'm impressed. Costs a lot, to get that sensitive."
"I know you, lady?" The blank look returned. "You looking
to buy some softs?"
"I'm looking for the Moderns."
"You got a rider, Molly. This says." He tapped the black
splinter. "Somebody else using your eyes."
"My partner."
"Tell your partner to go."
"Got something for the Panther Moderns, Larry."
"What are you talking about, lady?"
"Case, you take off," she said, and he hit the switch, instantly
back in the matrix. Ghost impressions of the software
complex hung for a few seconds in the buzzing calm of cyberspace.
"Panther Moderns," he said to the Hosaka, removing the
trodes. "Five minute precis."
"Ready," the computer said.
It wasn't a name he knew. Something new, something that
had come in since he'd been in Chiba. Fads swept the youth
of the Spraw] at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise
overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.
"Go," he said. The Hosaka had accessed its array of libraries,
journals, and news services.
The precis began with a long hold on a color still that Case
at first assumed was a collage of some kind, a boy's face
snipped from another image and glued to a photograph of a
paint-scrawled wall. Dark eyes, epicanthic folds obviously the
result of surgery, an angry dusting of acne across pale narrow
cheeks. The Hosaka released the freeze; the boy moved, flowing
with the sinister grace of a mime pretending to be a jungle
predator. His body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern
approximating the scribbled brickwork sliding smoothly across
his tight one piece. Mimetic polycarbon.
Cut to Dr. Virginia Rambali, Sociology, NYU, her name,
faculty, and school pulsing across the screen in pink alphanumerics.
"Given their penchant for these random acts of surreal violence,"
someone said, "it may be difficult for our viewers to
understand why you continue to insist that this phenomenon
isn't a form of terrorism."
Dr. RamBali smiled. "There is always a point at which the
terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at
which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the
terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself.
Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related.
The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely
in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness
of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from
the original sociopolitical intent...."
"Skip it," Case said.
Case met his first Modern two days after he'd screened the
Hosaka's precis. The Moderns, he'd decided, were a contemporary
version of the Big Scientists of his own late teens. There
was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl,
something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived
sub cults and replicated them at odd intervals. The Panther Moderns
were a soft head variant on the Scientists. If the technology
had been available the Big Scientists would all have had sockets
stuffed with microsofts. It was the style that mattered and
the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical
jokers, nihilistic technofetishists.
The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of
diskettes from the Finn was a soft-voiced boy called Angelo.
His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark-
cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous. It was one of
the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen. When
Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large
animal, Case was actually relieved. Tooth bud transplants. He'd
seen that before.
"You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you," Molly
said. Case nodded, absorbed in the patterns of the Sense/Net
ice.
This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being.
He forgot to eat. Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of
sushi on the corner of the long table. Sometimes he resented
having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they'd set
up in a corner of the loft. Ice patterns formed and reformed on
the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious
traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ice.
It was good ice. Wonderful ice. Its patterns burned there while
he lay with his arm under Molly's shoulders, watching the red
dawn through the steel grid of the skylight. Its rainbow pixel
maze was the first thing he saw when he woke. He'd go straight
to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in. He was cutting
it. He was working. He lost track of days.
And sometimes, falling asleep, particularly when Molly was
off on one of her reconnaissance trips with her rented cadre of
Moderns, images of Chiba came flooding back. Faces and
Ninsei neon. Once he woke from a confused dream of Linda
Lee, unable to recall who she was or what she'd ever meant
to him. When he did remember, he jacked in and worked for
nine straight hours.
The cutting of Sense/Net's ice took a total of nine days.
"I said a week," Armitage said, unable to conceal his satisfaction
when Case showed him his plan for the run. "You
took your own good time."
"Balls," Case said, smiling at the screen. "That's good work,
Armitage."
"Yes," Armitage admitted, "but don't let it go to your head.
Compared to what you'll eventually be up against, this is an
arcade toy."
"Love you, Cat Mother," whispered the Panther Modern's
link man. His voice was modulated static in Case's headset.
"Atlanta, Brood. Looks go. Go, got it?" Molly's voice was
slightly clearer.
"To hear is to obey." The Moderns were using some kind
of chicken wire dish in New Jersey to bounce the link man's
scrambled signal off a Sons of Christ the King satellite in
geosynchronous orbit above Manhattan. They chose to regard
the entire operation as an elaborate private joke, and their
choice of comsats seemed to have been deliberate. Molly's
signals were being beamed up from a one-meter umbrella dish
epoxy-ed to the roof of a black glass bank tower nearly as tall
as the Sense/Net building.
Atlanta. The recognition code was simple. Atlanta to Boston
to Chicago to Denver, five minutes for each city. If anyone
managed to intercept Molly's signal, unscramble it, synth her
voice, the code would tip the Moderns. If she remained in the
building for more than twenty minutes, it was highly unlikely
she'd be coming out at all.
Case gulped the last of his coffee, settled the trodes in place,
and scratched his chest beneath his black t-shirt. He had only
a vague idea of what the Panther Moderns planned as a diversion
for the Sense/Net security people. His job was to make
sure the intrusion program he'd written would link with the
Sense/Net systems when Molly needed it to. He watched the
countdown in the corner of the screen. Two. One.
He jacked in and triggered his program. "Mainline," breathed
the link man, his voice the only sound as Case plunged through
the glowing strata of Sense/Net ice. Good. Check Molly. He
hit the Simstim and flipped into her sensorium.
The scrambler blurred the visual input slightly. She stood
before a wall of gold-flecked mirror in the building's vast white
lobby, chewing gum, apparently fascinated by her own reflection.
Aside from the huge pair of sunglasses concealing her
mirrored insets, she managed to look remarkably like she
belonged there, another tourist girl hoping for a glimpse of
Tally Isham. She wore a pink plastic raincoat, a white mesh
top, loose white pants cut in a style that had been fashionable
in Tokyo the previous year. She grinned vacantly and popped
her gum. Case felt like laughing. He could feel the micro pore
tape across her ribcage, feel the flat little units under it: the
radio, the Simstim unit, and the scrambler. The throat mike,
glued to her neck, looked as much as possible like an analgesic
dermadisk. Her hands, in the pockets of the pink coat, were
flexing systematically through a series of tension-release exercises.
It took him a few seconds to realize that the peculiar
sensation at the tips of her fingers was caused by the blades as
they were partially extruded, then retracted.
He flipped back. His program had reached the fifth gate.
He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of
him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck,
making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled
like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card.
The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had
accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's
Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms
peeled off, meshing with the gate' s code fabric, ready
to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived.
He flipped again. Molly was strolling past the enormous
circular reception desk at the rear of the lobby.
12:01:20 as the readout flared in her optic nerve.
At midnight, synch Ed with the chip behind Molly's eye, the
link man in Jersey had given his command. "Mainline." Nine
Moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl,
had simultaneously dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones.
Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and drifted
out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different
police departments and public security agencies were absorbing
the information that an obscure sub sect of militant Christian
fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced
clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as
Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid.
Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been
shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in
eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.
Case hit the switch as his program surged through the gates
of the subsystem that controlled security for the Sense/Net
research library. He found himself stepping into an elevator.
"Excuse me, but are you an employee?" The guard raised
his eyebrows. Molly popped her gum. "No," she said, driving
the first two knuckles of her right hand into the man's solar
plexus. As he doubled over, clawing for the beeper on his belt
she slammed his head sideways, against the wall of the elevator.
Chewing a little more rapidly now, she touched CLOSE
DOOR and STOP on the illuminated panel. She took a black box
from her coat pocket and inserted a lead in the keyhole of the
lock that secured the panel's circuitry.
The Panther Moderns allowed four minutes for their first
move to take effect, then injected a second carefully prepared
dose of misinformation. This time, they shot it directly into
the Sense/Net building's internal video system.
At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eighteen
seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a susceptible
segment of Sense/Net employees. Then something only
vaguely like a human face filled the screens, its features stretched
across asymmetrical expanses of bone like some obscene Mercator
projection. Blue lips parted wetly as the twisted, elongated
jaw moved. Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish
clump of gnarled roots, fumbled toward the camera, blurred,
and vanished. Subliminally rapid images of contamination:
graphics of the building's water supply system, gloved hands
manipulating laboratory glassware, something tumbling down
into darkness, a pale splash.... The audio track, its pitch adjusted
to run at just less than twice the standard playback speed,
was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military
uses of a substance known as HsG, a biochemical governing
the human skeletal growth factor. Overdoses of HsG threw
certain bone cells into overdrive, accelerating growth by factors
as high as one thousand percent.
At 12:05:00, the mirror-sheathed nexus of the Sense/Net
consortium held just over three thousand employees. At five
minutes after midnight, as the Moderns' message ended in a
flare of white screen, the Sense/Net Pyramid screamed.
Half a dozen NYPD Tactical hovercraft, responding to the
possibility of Blue Nine in the building's ventilation system,
were converging on the Sense/Net Pyramid. They were running
full riot lights. A BAMA Rapid Deployment helicopter was
lifting off from its pad on Riker's.
Case triggered his second program. A carefully engineered
virus attacked the code fabric screening primary custodial commands
for the sub-basement that housed the Sense/Net research
materials. "Boston," Molly's voice came across the link, "I'm
downstairs." Case switched and saw the blank wall of the
elevator. She was unzipping the white pants. A bulky packet,
exactly the shade of her pale ankle, was secured there with
micro pore. She knelt and peeled the tape away. Streaks of
burgundy flickered across the mimetic polycarbon as she unfolded
the Modern suit. She removed the pink raincoat, threw
it down beside the white pants, and began to pull the suit on
over the white mesh top.
12:06:26.
Case's virus had bored a window through the library's command
ice. He punched himself through and found an infinite
blue space ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight
grid of pale blue neon. In the non space of the matrix, the interior
of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension;
a child's toy calculator, accessed through Case's Sendai
would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung
with a few basic commands. Case began to key the sequence
the Finn had purchased from a mid-eschelon sarariman with
severe drug problems. He began to glide through the spheres
as if he were on invisible tracks.
Here. This one.
Punching his way into the sphere, chill blue neon vault above
him starless and smooth as frosted glass, he triggered a sub-
program that effected certain alterations in the core custodial