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"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
control 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 nonspace
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.
He 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 paler gray.
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 OnoSendai. "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 Simstim 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 Sprawl 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 softhead 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 epoxyed 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, synched 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
Modems' 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 Modem
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 nonspace 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 subprogram that
effected certain alterations in the core custodial commands.
Out now. Reversing smoothly, the virus reknitting the fabric of the
window.
Done.
In the Sense/Net lobby, two Panther Moderns sat alertly behind a low
rectangular planter, taping the riot with a video camera. They both wore
chameleon suits. "Tacticals are spraying foam barricades now," one noted,
speaking for the benefit of his throat mike. "Rapids are still trying to
land their copter."
Case hit the Simstim switch. And flipped into the agony of broken bone.
Molly was braced against the blank gray wall of a long corridor, her breath
coming ragged and uneven. Case was back in the matrix instantly, a white-hot
line of pain fading in his left thigh.
"What's happening, Brood?" he asked the link man.
"I dunno, Cutter. Mother's not talking. Wait."
Case's program was cycling. A single hair-fine thread of crimson
neon extended from the center of the restored window to the shifting outline
of his icebreaker. He didn't have time to wait. Taking a deep breath,
he flipped again.
Molly took a single step, trying to support her weight on the corridor
wall. In the loft, Case groaned. The second step took her over an
outstretched arm. Uniform sleeve bright with fresh blood. Glimpse of a
shattered fiberglass shock stave. Her vision seemed to have narrowed to a
tunnel. With the third step, Case screamed and found himself back in the
matrix.
"Brood? Boston, baby. . ." Her voice tight with pain. She coughed.
"Little problem with the natives. Think one of them broke my leg."
"What you need now, Cat Mother?" The link man's voice was
indistinct, nearly lost behind static.
Case forced himself to flip back. She was leaning against the wall,
taking all of her weight on her right leg. She fumbled through the contents
of the suit's kangaroo pocket and withdrew a sheet of plastic studded
with a rainbow of dermadisks. She selected three and thumbed them hard
against her left wrist, over the veins. Six thousand micrograms of endorphin
analog came down on the pain like a hammer, shattering it. Her back arched
convulsively. Pink waves of warmth lapped up her thighs. She sighed and
slowly relaxed.
"Okay, Brood. Okay now. But I'll need a medical team when l come
out. Tell my people. Cutter, I'm two minutes from target. Can you
hold?"
"Tell her I'm in and holding," Case said.
Molly began to limp down the corridor. When she glanced back, once,
Case saw the crumpled bodies of three Sense/Net security guards. One of them
seemed to have no eyes.
"Tacticals and Rapids have sealed the ground floor, Cat Mother. Foam
barricades. Lobby's getting juicy."
"Pretty juicy down here," she said, swinging herself through a pair of
gray steel doors. "Almost there, Cutter."
Case flipped into the matrix and pulled the trodes from his forehead.
He was drenched with sweat. He wiped his forehead with a towel, took a quick
sip of water from the bicycle bottle beside the Hosaka, and checked the map
of the library displayed on the screen. A pulsing red cursor crept through
the outline of a doorway. Only millimeters from the green dot that indicated
the location of the Dixie Flat line's construct. He wondered what it
was doing to her leg, to walk on it that way. With enough endorphin analog,
she could walk on a pair of bloody stumps. He tightened the nylon harness
that held him in the chair and replaced the trodes.
Routine now: trodes, jack, and flip.
The Sense/Net research library was a dead storage area; the materials
stored here had to be physically removed before they could be interfaced.
Molly hobbled between rows of identical gray lockers.
"Tell her five more and ten to her left, Brood," Case said.
"Five more and ten left, Cat Mother," the link man said.
She took the left. A white-faced librarian cowered between two lockers,
her cheeks wet, eyes blank. Molly ignored her. Case wondered what the
Moderns had done to provoke that level of terror. He knew it had something
to do with a hoaxed threat, but he'd been too involved with his ice to
follow Molly's explanation.
"That's it," Case said, but she'd already stopped in front
of the cabinet that held the construct. Its lines reminded Case of the
Neo-Aztec bookcases in Julie Deane's anteroom in Chiba.
"Do it, Cutter," Molly said.
Case flipped to cyberspace and sent a command pulsing down the crimson
thread that pierced the library ice. Five separate alarm systems were
convinced that they were still operative. The three elaborate locks
deactivated, but considered themselves to have remained locked. The
library's central bank suffered a minute shift in its permanent
memory: the construct had been removed, per executive order, a month before.
Checking for the authorization to remove the construct, a librarian would
find the records erased.
The door swung open on silent hinges.
"0467839," Case said, and Molly drew a black storage unit from the
rack. It resembled the magazine of a large assault rifle, its surfaces
covered with warning decals and security ratings.
Molly closed the locker door; Case flipped.
He withdrew the line through the library ice. It whipped back into his
program, automatically triggering a full system reversal. The Sense/Net
gates snapped past him as he backed out, subprograms whirling back into the
core of the icebreaker as he passed the gates where they had been stationed.
"Out, Brood," he said, and slumped in his chair. After the
concentration of an actual run, he could remain jacked in and still retain
awareness of his body. It might take Sense/Net days to discover the theft of
the construct. The key would be the deflection of the Los Angeles transfer,
which coincided too neatly with the Modern's terror run. He doubted
that the three security men Molly had encountered in the corridor would live
to talk about it. He flipped.
The elevator, with Molly's black box taped beside the control
panel, remained where she'd left it. The guard still lay curled on the
floor. Case noticed the derm on his neck for the first time. Something of
Molly's, to keep him under. She stepped over him and removed the black
box before punching LOBBY.
As the elevator door hissed open, a woman hurtled backward out of the
crowd, into the elevator, and struck the rear wall with her head. Molly
ignored her, bending over to peel the derm from the guard's neck. Then
she kicked the white pants and the pink raincoat out the door, tossing the
dark glasses after them, and drew the hood of her suit down across her
forehead. The construct, in the suit's kangaroo pocket, dug into her
sternum when she moved. She stepped out.
Case had seen panic before, but never in an enclosed area.
The Sense/Net employees, spilling out of the elevators, had surged for
the street doors, only to meet the foam barricades of the Tacticals and the
sandbag-guns of the BAMA Rapids. The two agencies, convinced that they were
containing a horde of potential killers, were cooperating with an
uncharacteristic degree of efficiency. Beyond the shattered wreckage of the
main street doors, bodies were piled three deep on the barricades. The
hollow thumping of the riot guns provided a constant background for the
sound the crowd made as it surged back and forth across the lobby's
marble floor. Case had never heard anything like that sound.
Neither, apparently, had Molly. "Jesus," she said, and hesitated. It
was a sort of keening, rising into a bubbling wail of raw and total fear.
The lobby floor was covered with bodies, clothing, blood, and long trampled
scrolls of yellow printout.
"C'mon, sister. We're for out. " The eyes of the two
Moderns stared out of madly swirling shades of polycarbon, their suits
unable to keep up with the confusion of shape and color that raged behind
them. "You hurt? C'mon. Tommy'll walk you." Tommy handed
something to the one who spoke, a video camera wrapped in polycarbon.
"Chicago," she said, "I'm on my way." And then she was falling,
not to the marble floor, slick with blood and vomit, but down some blood
warm well, into silence and the dark.
The Panther Modern leader, who introduced himself as Lupus Yonderboy,
wore a polycarbon suit with a recording feature that allowed him to replay
backgrounds at will. Perched on the edge of Case's worktable like some
kind of state of the art gargoyle, he regarded Case and Armitage with hooded
eyes. He smiled. His hair was pink. A rainbow forest of microsofts bristled
behind his left ear; the ear was pointed, tufted with more pink hair. His
pupils had been modified to catch the light like a cat's. Case watched
the suit crawl with color and texture.
"You let it get out of control," Armitage said. He stood in the center
of the loft like a statue, wrapped in the dark glossy folds of an
expensive-looking trench coat.
"Chaos, Mr. Who," Lupus Yonderboy said. "That is our mode and modus.
That is our central kick. Your woman knows. We deal with her. Not with you,
Mr. Who." His suit had taken on a weird angular pattern of beige and pale
avocado. "She needed her medical team. She's with them. We'll
watch out for her. Everything's fine." He smiled again.
"Pay him," Case said.
Armitage glared at him. "We don't have the goods."
"Your woman has it," Yonderboy said.
"Pay him."
Armitage crossed stiffly to the table and took three fat bundles of New
Yen from the pockets of his trench coat. "You want to count it?" he asked
Yonderboy.
"No," the Panther Modern said. "You'll pay. You're a Mr.
Who. You pay to stay one. Not a Mr. Name."
"I hope that isn't a threat," Armitage said.
"That's business," said Yonderboy, stuffing the money into the
single pocket on the front of his suit.
The phone rang. Case answered. "Molly," he told Armitage, handing him
the phone.
The Sprawl's geodesics were lightening into predawn gray as Case
left the building. His limbs felt cold and disconnected. He couldn't
sleep. He was sick of the loft. Lupus had gone, then Armitage, and Molly was
in surgery somewhere. Vibration beneath his feet as a train hissed past.
Sirens Dopplered in the distance.
He took corners at random, his collar up, hunched in a new leather
jacket, flicking the first of a chain of Yeheyuans into the gutter and
lighting another. He tried to imagine Armitage's toxin sacs dissolving
in his bloodstream, microscopic membranes wearing thinner as he walked. It
didn't seem real. Neither did the fear and agony he'd seen
through Molly's eyes in the lobby of Sense/Net. He found himself
trying to remember the faces of the three people he'd killed in Chiba.
The men were blanks; the woman reminded him of Linda Lee. A battered
tricycle-truck with mirrored windows bounced past him, empty plastic
cylinders rattling in its bed.
"Case."
He darted sideways, instinctively getting a wall behind his back.
"Message for you, Case." Lupus Yonderboy's suit cycled through
pure primaries. "Pardon. Not to startle you."
Case straightened up, hands in jacket pockets. He was a head taller
than the Modern. "You ought a be careful, Yonderboy."
"This is the message. Wintermute." He spelled it out.
"From you?" Case took a step forward.
"No," Yonderboy said.
"For you."
"Who from?"
"Wintermute," Yonderboy repeated, nodding, bobbing his crest of pink
hair. His suit went matte black, a carbon shadow against old concrete. He
executed a strange little dance, his thin black arms whirling, and then he
was gone. No. There. Hood up to hide the pink, the suit exactly the right
shade of gray, mottled and stained as the sidewalk he stood on. The eyes
winked back the red of a stoplight. And then he was really gone.
Case closed his eyes, massaged them with numb fingers, leaning back
against peeling brickwork.
Ninsei had been a lot simpler.
The medical team Molly employed occupied two floors of an anonymous
condo-rack near the old hub of Baltimore. The building was modular, like
some giant version of Cheap Hotel each coffin forty meters long. Case met
Molly as she emerged from one that wore the elaborately worked logo of one
GERALD CHIN, DENTIST. She was limping.
"He says if I kick anything, it'll fall off."
"I ran into one of your pals," he said, "a Modern."
"Yeah? Which one?"
"Lupus Yonderboy. Had a message." He passed her a paper napkin with W I
N T E R M U T E printed in red feltpen in his neat, laborious capitals. "He
said-- " But her hand came up in the jive for silence.
"Get us some crab," she said.
After lunch in Baltimore, Molly dissecting her crab with alarming ease,
they tubed in to New York. Case had learned not to ask questions; they only
brought the sign for silence. Her leg seemed to be bothering her, and she
seldom spoke.
A thin black child with wooden beads and antique resistors woven
tightly into her hair opened the Finn's door and led them along the
tunnel of refuse. Case felt the stuff had grown somehow during their absence
. Or else it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under
the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a
crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the
Sprawl's waste places.
Beyond the army blanket, the Finn waited at the white table.
Molly began to sign rapidly, produced a scrap of paper, wrote something
on it, and passed it to the Finn. He took it between thumb and forefinger,
holding it away from his body as though it might explode. He made a sign
Case didn't know, one that conveyed a mixture of impatience and glum
resignation. He stood up, brushing crumbs from the front of his battered
tweed jacket. A glass jar of pickled herring stood on the table beside a
torn plastic package of flatbread and a tin ashtray piled with the butts of
Partagas.
"Wait," the Finn said, and left the room.
Molly took his place, extruded the blade from her index finger, and
speared a grayish slab of herring. Case wandered aimlessly around the room,
fingering the scanning gear on the pylons as he passed.
Ten minutes and the Finn came bustling back, showing his teeth in a
wide yellow smile. He nodded, gave Molly a thumbs up salute, and gestured to
Case to help him with the door panel. While Case smoothed the velcro border
into place, the Finn took a flat little console from his pocket and punched
out an elaborate sequence.
"Honey," he said to Molly, tucking the console away, "you have got it.
No shit, I can smell it. You wanna tell me where you got it?"
"Yonderboy," Molly said, shoving the herring and crackers aside. "I did
a deal with Larry, on the side."
"Smart," the Finn said. "It's an AI."
"Slow it down a little," Case said.
"Berne," the Finn said, ignoring him. "Berne. It's got limited
Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of '53. Built for
Tessier-Ashpool S.A. They own the mainframe and the original software."
"What's in Berne, okay?" Case deliberately stepped between them.
"Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. I've got the
Turing Registry numbers. Artificial intelligence."
"That's all just fine," Molly said, "but where's it get
us?"
"If Yonderboy's right," the Finn said, "this Al is backing
Armitage."
"I paid Larry to have the Modems nose around Ammitage a little," Molly
explained, turning to Case. "They have some very weird lines of
communication. Deal was, they'd get my money if they answered one
question: who's running Armitage?"
"And you think it's this AI? Those things aren't allowed
any autonomy. It'll be the parent corporation, this Tessle. . ."
"Tessier-Ashpool S.A.," said the Finn. "And I got a little story for
you about them. Wanna hear?" He sat down and hunched forward.
"Finn," Molly said. "He loves a story."
"Haven't ever told anybody this one," the Finn began.
The Finn was a fence, a trafficker in stolen goods, primarily in
software. In the course of his business, he sometimes came into contact with
other fences, some of whom dealt in the more traditional articles of the
trade. In precious metals, stamps, rare coins, gems, jewelry, furs, and
paintings and other works of art. The story he told Case and Molly began
with another man's story, a man he called Smith.
Smith was also a fence, but in balmier seasons he surfaced as an art
dealer. He was the first person the Finn had known who'd "gone
"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
control 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 nonspace
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.
He 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 paler gray.
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 OnoSendai. "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 Simstim 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 Sprawl 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 softhead 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 epoxyed 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, synched 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
Modems' 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 Modem
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 nonspace 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 subprogram that
effected certain alterations in the core custodial commands.
Out now. Reversing smoothly, the virus reknitting the fabric of the
window.
Done.
In the Sense/Net lobby, two Panther Moderns sat alertly behind a low
rectangular planter, taping the riot with a video camera. They both wore
chameleon suits. "Tacticals are spraying foam barricades now," one noted,
speaking for the benefit of his throat mike. "Rapids are still trying to
land their copter."
Case hit the Simstim switch. And flipped into the agony of broken bone.
Molly was braced against the blank gray wall of a long corridor, her breath
coming ragged and uneven. Case was back in the matrix instantly, a white-hot
line of pain fading in his left thigh.
"What's happening, Brood?" he asked the link man.
"I dunno, Cutter. Mother's not talking. Wait."
Case's program was cycling. A single hair-fine thread of crimson
neon extended from the center of the restored window to the shifting outline
of his icebreaker. He didn't have time to wait. Taking a deep breath,
he flipped again.
Molly took a single step, trying to support her weight on the corridor
wall. In the loft, Case groaned. The second step took her over an
outstretched arm. Uniform sleeve bright with fresh blood. Glimpse of a
shattered fiberglass shock stave. Her vision seemed to have narrowed to a
tunnel. With the third step, Case screamed and found himself back in the
matrix.
"Brood? Boston, baby. . ." Her voice tight with pain. She coughed.
"Little problem with the natives. Think one of them broke my leg."
"What you need now, Cat Mother?" The link man's voice was
indistinct, nearly lost behind static.
Case forced himself to flip back. She was leaning against the wall,
taking all of her weight on her right leg. She fumbled through the contents
of the suit's kangaroo pocket and withdrew a sheet of plastic studded
with a rainbow of dermadisks. She selected three and thumbed them hard
against her left wrist, over the veins. Six thousand micrograms of endorphin
analog came down on the pain like a hammer, shattering it. Her back arched
convulsively. Pink waves of warmth lapped up her thighs. She sighed and
slowly relaxed.
"Okay, Brood. Okay now. But I'll need a medical team when l come
out. Tell my people. Cutter, I'm two minutes from target. Can you
hold?"
"Tell her I'm in and holding," Case said.
Molly began to limp down the corridor. When she glanced back, once,
Case saw the crumpled bodies of three Sense/Net security guards. One of them
seemed to have no eyes.
"Tacticals and Rapids have sealed the ground floor, Cat Mother. Foam
barricades. Lobby's getting juicy."
"Pretty juicy down here," she said, swinging herself through a pair of
gray steel doors. "Almost there, Cutter."
Case flipped into the matrix and pulled the trodes from his forehead.
He was drenched with sweat. He wiped his forehead with a towel, took a quick
sip of water from the bicycle bottle beside the Hosaka, and checked the map
of the library displayed on the screen. A pulsing red cursor crept through
the outline of a doorway. Only millimeters from the green dot that indicated
the location of the Dixie Flat line's construct. He wondered what it
was doing to her leg, to walk on it that way. With enough endorphin analog,
she could walk on a pair of bloody stumps. He tightened the nylon harness
that held him in the chair and replaced the trodes.
Routine now: trodes, jack, and flip.
The Sense/Net research library was a dead storage area; the materials
stored here had to be physically removed before they could be interfaced.
Molly hobbled between rows of identical gray lockers.
"Tell her five more and ten to her left, Brood," Case said.
"Five more and ten left, Cat Mother," the link man said.
She took the left. A white-faced librarian cowered between two lockers,
her cheeks wet, eyes blank. Molly ignored her. Case wondered what the
Moderns had done to provoke that level of terror. He knew it had something
to do with a hoaxed threat, but he'd been too involved with his ice to
follow Molly's explanation.
"That's it," Case said, but she'd already stopped in front
of the cabinet that held the construct. Its lines reminded Case of the
Neo-Aztec bookcases in Julie Deane's anteroom in Chiba.
"Do it, Cutter," Molly said.
Case flipped to cyberspace and sent a command pulsing down the crimson
thread that pierced the library ice. Five separate alarm systems were
convinced that they were still operative. The three elaborate locks
deactivated, but considered themselves to have remained locked. The
library's central bank suffered a minute shift in its permanent
memory: the construct had been removed, per executive order, a month before.
Checking for the authorization to remove the construct, a librarian would
find the records erased.
The door swung open on silent hinges.
"0467839," Case said, and Molly drew a black storage unit from the
rack. It resembled the magazine of a large assault rifle, its surfaces
covered with warning decals and security ratings.
Molly closed the locker door; Case flipped.
He withdrew the line through the library ice. It whipped back into his
program, automatically triggering a full system reversal. The Sense/Net
gates snapped past him as he backed out, subprograms whirling back into the
core of the icebreaker as he passed the gates where they had been stationed.
"Out, Brood," he said, and slumped in his chair. After the
concentration of an actual run, he could remain jacked in and still retain
awareness of his body. It might take Sense/Net days to discover the theft of
the construct. The key would be the deflection of the Los Angeles transfer,
which coincided too neatly with the Modern's terror run. He doubted
that the three security men Molly had encountered in the corridor would live
to talk about it. He flipped.
The elevator, with Molly's black box taped beside the control
panel, remained where she'd left it. The guard still lay curled on the
floor. Case noticed the derm on his neck for the first time. Something of
Molly's, to keep him under. She stepped over him and removed the black
box before punching LOBBY.
As the elevator door hissed open, a woman hurtled backward out of the
crowd, into the elevator, and struck the rear wall with her head. Molly
ignored her, bending over to peel the derm from the guard's neck. Then
she kicked the white pants and the pink raincoat out the door, tossing the
dark glasses after them, and drew the hood of her suit down across her
forehead. The construct, in the suit's kangaroo pocket, dug into her
sternum when she moved. She stepped out.
Case had seen panic before, but never in an enclosed area.
The Sense/Net employees, spilling out of the elevators, had surged for
the street doors, only to meet the foam barricades of the Tacticals and the
sandbag-guns of the BAMA Rapids. The two agencies, convinced that they were
containing a horde of potential killers, were cooperating with an
uncharacteristic degree of efficiency. Beyond the shattered wreckage of the
main street doors, bodies were piled three deep on the barricades. The
hollow thumping of the riot guns provided a constant background for the
sound the crowd made as it surged back and forth across the lobby's
marble floor. Case had never heard anything like that sound.
Neither, apparently, had Molly. "Jesus," she said, and hesitated. It
was a sort of keening, rising into a bubbling wail of raw and total fear.
The lobby floor was covered with bodies, clothing, blood, and long trampled
scrolls of yellow printout.
"C'mon, sister. We're for out. " The eyes of the two
Moderns stared out of madly swirling shades of polycarbon, their suits
unable to keep up with the confusion of shape and color that raged behind
them. "You hurt? C'mon. Tommy'll walk you." Tommy handed
something to the one who spoke, a video camera wrapped in polycarbon.
"Chicago," she said, "I'm on my way." And then she was falling,
not to the marble floor, slick with blood and vomit, but down some blood
warm well, into silence and the dark.
The Panther Modern leader, who introduced himself as Lupus Yonderboy,
wore a polycarbon suit with a recording feature that allowed him to replay
backgrounds at will. Perched on the edge of Case's worktable like some
kind of state of the art gargoyle, he regarded Case and Armitage with hooded
eyes. He smiled. His hair was pink. A rainbow forest of microsofts bristled
behind his left ear; the ear was pointed, tufted with more pink hair. His
pupils had been modified to catch the light like a cat's. Case watched
the suit crawl with color and texture.
"You let it get out of control," Armitage said. He stood in the center
of the loft like a statue, wrapped in the dark glossy folds of an
expensive-looking trench coat.
"Chaos, Mr. Who," Lupus Yonderboy said. "That is our mode and modus.
That is our central kick. Your woman knows. We deal with her. Not with you,
Mr. Who." His suit had taken on a weird angular pattern of beige and pale
avocado. "She needed her medical team. She's with them. We'll
watch out for her. Everything's fine." He smiled again.
"Pay him," Case said.
Armitage glared at him. "We don't have the goods."
"Your woman has it," Yonderboy said.
"Pay him."
Armitage crossed stiffly to the table and took three fat bundles of New
Yen from the pockets of his trench coat. "You want to count it?" he asked
Yonderboy.
"No," the Panther Modern said. "You'll pay. You're a Mr.
Who. You pay to stay one. Not a Mr. Name."
"I hope that isn't a threat," Armitage said.
"That's business," said Yonderboy, stuffing the money into the
single pocket on the front of his suit.
The phone rang. Case answered. "Molly," he told Armitage, handing him
the phone.
The Sprawl's geodesics were lightening into predawn gray as Case
left the building. His limbs felt cold and disconnected. He couldn't
sleep. He was sick of the loft. Lupus had gone, then Armitage, and Molly was
in surgery somewhere. Vibration beneath his feet as a train hissed past.
Sirens Dopplered in the distance.
He took corners at random, his collar up, hunched in a new leather
jacket, flicking the first of a chain of Yeheyuans into the gutter and
lighting another. He tried to imagine Armitage's toxin sacs dissolving
in his bloodstream, microscopic membranes wearing thinner as he walked. It
didn't seem real. Neither did the fear and agony he'd seen
through Molly's eyes in the lobby of Sense/Net. He found himself
trying to remember the faces of the three people he'd killed in Chiba.
The men were blanks; the woman reminded him of Linda Lee. A battered
tricycle-truck with mirrored windows bounced past him, empty plastic
cylinders rattling in its bed.
"Case."
He darted sideways, instinctively getting a wall behind his back.
"Message for you, Case." Lupus Yonderboy's suit cycled through
pure primaries. "Pardon. Not to startle you."
Case straightened up, hands in jacket pockets. He was a head taller
than the Modern. "You ought a be careful, Yonderboy."
"This is the message. Wintermute." He spelled it out.
"From you?" Case took a step forward.
"No," Yonderboy said.
"For you."
"Who from?"
"Wintermute," Yonderboy repeated, nodding, bobbing his crest of pink
hair. His suit went matte black, a carbon shadow against old concrete. He
executed a strange little dance, his thin black arms whirling, and then he
was gone. No. There. Hood up to hide the pink, the suit exactly the right
shade of gray, mottled and stained as the sidewalk he stood on. The eyes
winked back the red of a stoplight. And then he was really gone.
Case closed his eyes, massaged them with numb fingers, leaning back
against peeling brickwork.
Ninsei had been a lot simpler.
The medical team Molly employed occupied two floors of an anonymous
condo-rack near the old hub of Baltimore. The building was modular, like
some giant version of Cheap Hotel each coffin forty meters long. Case met
Molly as she emerged from one that wore the elaborately worked logo of one
GERALD CHIN, DENTIST. She was limping.
"He says if I kick anything, it'll fall off."
"I ran into one of your pals," he said, "a Modern."
"Yeah? Which one?"
"Lupus Yonderboy. Had a message." He passed her a paper napkin with W I
N T E R M U T E printed in red feltpen in his neat, laborious capitals. "He
said-- " But her hand came up in the jive for silence.
"Get us some crab," she said.
After lunch in Baltimore, Molly dissecting her crab with alarming ease,
they tubed in to New York. Case had learned not to ask questions; they only
brought the sign for silence. Her leg seemed to be bothering her, and she
seldom spoke.
A thin black child with wooden beads and antique resistors woven
tightly into her hair opened the Finn's door and led them along the
tunnel of refuse. Case felt the stuff had grown somehow during their absence
. Or else it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under
the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a
crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the
Sprawl's waste places.
Beyond the army blanket, the Finn waited at the white table.
Molly began to sign rapidly, produced a scrap of paper, wrote something
on it, and passed it to the Finn. He took it between thumb and forefinger,
holding it away from his body as though it might explode. He made a sign
Case didn't know, one that conveyed a mixture of impatience and glum
resignation. He stood up, brushing crumbs from the front of his battered
tweed jacket. A glass jar of pickled herring stood on the table beside a
torn plastic package of flatbread and a tin ashtray piled with the butts of
Partagas.
"Wait," the Finn said, and left the room.
Molly took his place, extruded the blade from her index finger, and
speared a grayish slab of herring. Case wandered aimlessly around the room,
fingering the scanning gear on the pylons as he passed.
Ten minutes and the Finn came bustling back, showing his teeth in a
wide yellow smile. He nodded, gave Molly a thumbs up salute, and gestured to
Case to help him with the door panel. While Case smoothed the velcro border
into place, the Finn took a flat little console from his pocket and punched
out an elaborate sequence.
"Honey," he said to Molly, tucking the console away, "you have got it.
No shit, I can smell it. You wanna tell me where you got it?"
"Yonderboy," Molly said, shoving the herring and crackers aside. "I did
a deal with Larry, on the side."
"Smart," the Finn said. "It's an AI."
"Slow it down a little," Case said.
"Berne," the Finn said, ignoring him. "Berne. It's got limited
Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of '53. Built for
Tessier-Ashpool S.A. They own the mainframe and the original software."
"What's in Berne, okay?" Case deliberately stepped between them.
"Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. I've got the
Turing Registry numbers. Artificial intelligence."
"That's all just fine," Molly said, "but where's it get
us?"
"If Yonderboy's right," the Finn said, "this Al is backing
Armitage."
"I paid Larry to have the Modems nose around Ammitage a little," Molly
explained, turning to Case. "They have some very weird lines of
communication. Deal was, they'd get my money if they answered one
question: who's running Armitage?"
"And you think it's this AI? Those things aren't allowed
any autonomy. It'll be the parent corporation, this Tessle. . ."
"Tessier-Ashpool S.A.," said the Finn. "And I got a little story for
you about them. Wanna hear?" He sat down and hunched forward.
"Finn," Molly said. "He loves a story."
"Haven't ever told anybody this one," the Finn began.
The Finn was a fence, a trafficker in stolen goods, primarily in
software. In the course of his business, he sometimes came into contact with
other fences, some of whom dealt in the more traditional articles of the
trade. In precious metals, stamps, rare coins, gems, jewelry, furs, and
paintings and other works of art. The story he told Case and Molly began
with another man's story, a man he called Smith.
Smith was also a fence, but in balmier seasons he surfaced as an art
dealer. He was the first person the Finn had known who'd "gone