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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.»
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
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 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?»