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Case sat in the loft with the dermatrodes strapped across his forehead, watching motes dance in the diluted sunlight that filtered through the grid overhead. A countdown was in progress in one corner of the monitor screen. Cowboys didn't get into Simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a Simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but Simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. The commercial stuff was edited, of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the course of a segment, you didn't feel it. The screen bleeped a two-second warning. The new switch was patched into his Sendai with a thin ribbon of fiber optics. And one and two and-
Cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal points.
Smooth, he thought, but not smooth enough. Have to work on it. Then he keyed the new switch. The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and color…. She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices felt penned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill. For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes. The glasses didn't seem to cut down the sunlight at all. He wondered if the built-in amps compensated automatically. Blue alphanumerics winked the time, low in her left peripheral field. Showing off, he thought. Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made room. «How you doing, Case?» He heard the words and felt her form them. She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him catch his breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. He had no way to reply. Two blocks later, she was threading the outskirts of Memory Lane. Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he would have used to find his way. He began to find the passivity of the situation irritating. The transition to cyberspace, when he hit the switch, was instantaneous. He punched himself down a wall of primitive ice belonging to the New York Public Library, automatically counting potential windows. Keying back into her sensorium, into the sinuous flow of muscle, senses sharp and bright. He found himself wondering about the mind he shared these sensations with. What did he know about her? That she was another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the thing she did to make a living. He knew the way she'd moved against him, earlier, when she woke, their mutual grunt of unity when he'd entered her, and that she liked her coffee black, afterward…. Her destination was one of the dubious software rental complexes that lined Memory Lane. There was a stillness, a hush. Booths lined a central hall. The clientele were young, few of them out of their teens. They all seemed to have carbon sockets planted behind the left ear, but she didn't focus on them. The counters that fronted the booths displayed hundreds of slivers of microsoft, angular fragments of colored silicon mounted under oblong transparent bubbles on squares of white cardboard. Molly went to the seventh booth along the south wall. Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear. «Larry, you in, man?» She positioned herself in front of him. The boy's eyes focused. He sat up in his chair and pried a bright magenta splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail . «Hey, Larry.» «Molly.» He nodded. «I have some work for some of your friends, Larry.» Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red sport shirt and flicked it open, slotting the microsoft beside a dozen others. His hand hovered, selected a glossy black chip that was slightly longer than the rest, and inserted it smoothly into his head. His eyes narrowed. «Molly's got a rider,» he said, «and Larry doesn't like that.» «Hey,» she said, «I didn't know you were so . . . sensitive. I'm impressed. Costs a lot, to get that sensitive.» «I know you, lady?» The blank look returned. «You looking to buy some softs?» «I'm looking for the Moderns.» «You got a rider, Molly. This says.» He tapped the black splinter. «Somebody else using your eyes.» «My partner.» «Tell your partner to go.» «Got something for the Panther Moderns, Larry.» «What are you talking about, lady?» «Case, you take off,» she said, and he hit the switch, instantly back in the matrix. Ghost impressions of the software complex hung for a few seconds in the buzzing calm of cyberspace. «Panther Moderns,» he said to the Hosaka, removing the trodes. «Five minute precis.» «Ready,» the computer said.
It wasn't a name he knew. Something new, something that had come in since he'd been in Chiba. Fads swept the youth of the Spraw] at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly. «Go,» he said. The Hosaka had accessed its array of libraries, journals, and news services. The precis began with a long hold on a color still that Case at first assumed was a collage of some kind, a boy's face snipped from another image and glued to a photograph of a paint-scrawled wall. Dark eyes, epicanthic folds obviously the result of surgery, an angry dusting of acne across pale narrow cheeks. The Hosaka released the freeze; the boy moved, flowing with the sinister grace of a mime pretending to be a jungle predator. His body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern approximating the scribbled brickwork sliding smoothly across his tight one piece. Mimetic polycarbon. Cut to Dr. Virginia Rambali, Sociology, NYU, her name, faculty, and school pulsing across the screen in pink alphanumerics.
«Given their penchant for these random acts of surreal violence,» someone said, «it may be difficult for our viewers to understand why you continue to insist that this phenomenon isn't a form of terrorism.» Dr. RamBali smiled. «There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent….» «Skip it,» Case said.
Case met his first Modern two days after he'd screened the Hosaka's precis. The Moderns, he'd decided, were a contemporary version of the Big Scientists of his own late teens. There was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived sub cults and replicated them at odd intervals. The Panther Moderns were a soft head variant on the Scientists. If the technology had been available the Big Scientists would all have had sockets stuffed with microsofts. It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists. The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of diskettes from the Finn was a soft-voiced boy called Angelo. His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark— cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous. It was one of the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen. When Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large animal, Case was actually relieved. Tooth bud transplants. He'd seen that before. «You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you,» Molly said. Case nodded, absorbed in the patterns of the Sense/Net ice. This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He forgot to eat. Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of sushi on the corner of the long table. Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they'd set up in a corner of the loft. Ice patterns formed and reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ice. It was good ice. Wonderful ice. Its patterns burned there while he lay with his arm under Molly's shoulders, watching the red dawn through the steel grid of the skylight. Its rainbow pixel maze was the first thing he saw when he woke. He'd go straight to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in. He was cutting it. He was working. He lost track of days. And sometimes, falling asleep, particularly when Molly was off on one of her reconnaissance trips with her rented cadre of Moderns, images of Chiba came flooding back. Faces and Ninsei neon. Once he woke from a confused dream of Linda Lee, unable to recall who she was or what she'd ever meant to him. When he did remember, he jacked in and worked for nine straight hours. The cutting of Sense/Net's ice took a total of nine days. «I said a week,» Armitage said, unable to conceal his satisfaction when Case showed him his plan for the run. «You took your own good time.» «Balls,» Case said, smiling at the screen. «That's good work, Armitage.» «Yes,» Armitage admitted, «but don't let it go to your head. Compared to what you'll eventually be up against, this is an arcade toy.»
«Love you, Cat Mother,» whispered the Panther Modern's link man. His voice was modulated static in Case's headset. «Atlanta, Brood. Looks go. Go, got it?» Molly's voice was slightly clearer. «To hear is to obey.» The Moderns were using some kind of chicken wire dish in New Jersey to bounce the link man's scrambled signal off a Sons of Christ the King satellite in geosynchronous orbit above Manhattan. They chose to regard the entire operation as an elaborate private joke, and their choice of comsats seemed to have been deliberate. Molly's signals were being beamed up from a one-meter umbrella dish epoxy-ed to the roof of a black glass bank tower nearly as tall as the Sense/Net building. Atlanta. The recognition code was simple. Atlanta to Boston to Chicago to Denver, five minutes for each city. If anyone managed to intercept Molly's signal, unscramble it, synth her voice, the code would tip the Moderns. If she remained in the building for more than twenty minutes, it was highly unlikely she'd be coming out at all. Case gulped the last of his coffee, settled the trodes in place, and scratched his chest beneath his black t-shirt. He had only a vague idea of what the Panther Moderns planned as a diversion for the Sense/Net security people. His job was to make sure the intrusion program he'd written would link with the Sense/Net systems when Molly needed it to. He watched the countdown in the corner of the screen. Two. One. He jacked in and triggered his program. «Mainline,» breathed the link man, his voice the only sound as Case plunged through the glowing strata of Sense/Net ice. Good. Check Molly. He hit the Simstim and flipped into her sensorium. The scrambler blurred the visual input slightly. She stood before a wall of gold-flecked mirror in the building's vast white lobby, chewing gum, apparently fascinated by her own reflection. Aside from the huge pair of sunglasses concealing her mirrored insets, she managed to look remarkably like she belonged there, another tourist girl hoping for a glimpse of Tally Isham. She wore a pink plastic raincoat, a white mesh top, loose white pants cut in a style that had been fashionable in Tokyo the previous year. She grinned vacantly and popped her gum. Case felt like laughing. He could feel the micro pore tape across her ribcage, feel the flat little units under it: the radio, the Simstim unit, and the scrambler. The throat mike, glued to her neck, looked as much as possible like an analgesic dermadisk. Her hands, in the pockets of the pink coat, were flexing systematically through a series of tension-release exercises. It took him a few seconds to realize that the peculiar sensation at the tips of her fingers was caused by the blades as they were partially extruded, then retracted. He flipped back. His program had reached the fifth gate. He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck, making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card. The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms peeled off, meshing with the gate' s code fabric, ready to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived. He flipped again. Molly was strolling past the enormous circular reception desk at the rear of the lobby. 12:01:20 as the readout flared in her optic nerve. At midnight, synch Ed with the chip behind Molly's eye, the link man in Jersey had given his command. «Mainline.» Nine Moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl, had simultaneously dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones. Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and drifted out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different police departments and public security agencies were absorbing the information that an obscure sub sect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.
Case hit the switch as his program surged through the gates of the subsystem that controlled security for the Sense/Net research library. He found himself stepping into an elevator. «Excuse me, but are you an employee?» The guard raised his eyebrows. Molly popped her gum. «No,» she said, driving the first two knuckles of her right hand into the man's solar plexus. As he doubled over, clawing for the beeper on his belt she slammed his head sideways, against the wall of the elevator. Chewing a little more rapidly now, she touched CLOSE DOOR and STOP on the illuminated panel. She took a black box from her coat pocket and inserted a lead in the keyhole of the lock that secured the panel's circuitry.
The Panther Moderns allowed four minutes for their first move to take effect, then injected a second carefully prepared dose of misinformation. This time, they shot it directly into the Sense/Net building's internal video system. At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eighteen seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a susceptible segment of Sense/Net employees. Then something only vaguely like a human face filled the screens, its features stretched across asymmetrical expanses of bone like some obscene Mercator projection. Blue lips parted wetly as the twisted, elongated jaw moved. Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish clump of gnarled roots, fumbled toward the camera, blurred, and vanished. Subliminally rapid images of contamination: graphics of the building's water supply system, gloved hands manipulating laboratory glassware, something tumbling down into darkness, a pale splash…. The audio track, its pitch adjusted to run at just less than twice the standard playback speed, was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military uses of a substance known as HsG, a biochemical governing the human skeletal growth factor. Overdoses of HsG threw certain bone cells into overdrive, accelerating growth by factors as high as one thousand percent. At 12:05:00, the mirror-sheathed nexus of the Sense/Net consortium held just over three thousand employees. At five minutes after midnight, as the Moderns' message ended in a flare of white screen, the Sense/Net Pyramid screamed. Half a dozen NYPD Tactical hovercraft, responding to the possibility of Blue Nine in the building's ventilation system, were converging on the Sense/Net Pyramid. They were running full riot lights. A BAMA Rapid Deployment helicopter was lifting off from its pad on Riker's.
Case triggered his second program. A carefully engineered virus attacked the code fabric screening primary custodial commands for the sub-basement that housed the Sense/Net research materials. «Boston,» Molly's voice came across the link, «I'm downstairs.» Case switched and saw the blank wall of the elevator. She was unzipping the white pants. A bulky packet, exactly the shade of her pale ankle, was secured there with micro pore. She knelt and peeled the tape away. Streaks of burgundy flickered across the mimetic polycarbon as she unfolded the Modern suit. She removed the pink raincoat, threw it down beside the white pants, and began to pull the suit on over the white mesh top.
12:06:26. Case's virus had bored a window through the library's command ice. He punched himself through and found an infinite blue space ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight grid of pale blue neon. In the non space of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child's toy calculator, accessed through Case's Sen:j
dai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. Case began to key the sequence the Finn had purchased from a mid-eschelon sarariman with severe drug problems. He began to glide through the spheres as if he were on invisible tracks. Here. This one. Punching his way into the sphere, chill blue neon vault above him starless and smooth as frosted glass, he triggered a sub— program that effected certain alterations in the core custodial commands. Out now. Reversing smoothly, the virus reknitting the fabric of the window. Done.
Case hit the Sim-Stim 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 term 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 MW 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 getout 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 Yonder boy. «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 Doppler Ed 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 Yonder boy'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, Yonder boy.» «This is the message. Winter mute.» He spelled it out. «From you?» Case took a step forward. «No,» Yonderboy said. «For you.» «Who from?» «Winter mute,» 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 Beme, 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 Moderns 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 silicon»-the phrase had an old-fashioned ring for Case-and the microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery sales. With half a dozen chips in his new socket, Smith's knowledge of the art business was formidable, at least by the standards of his colleagues. But Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal request, one businessman to another. He wanted a go-to on the Tessier-Ashpool clan, he said, and it had to be executed in a way that would guarantee the impossibility of the subject ever tracing the inquiry to its source. It might be possible, the Finn had opined, but an explanation was definitely required. «It smelled,» the Finn said to Case, «smelled of money. And Smith was being very careful. Almost too careful.» Smith, it developed, had had a supplier known as Jimmy. Jimmy was a burglar and other things as well, and just back from a year in high orbit, having carried certain things back down the gravity well. The most unusual thing Jimmy had managed to score on his swing through the archipelago was a head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonne over platinum, studded with seedpearls and lapis. Smith, sighing, had put down his pocket microscope and advised Jimmy to melt the thing down. It was contemporary, not an antique, and had no value to the collector. Jimmy laughed. The thing was a computer terminal, he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes. It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed, a perverse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing. It was a curiosity. Smith jacked the head into his computer and listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures of last year's tax return. Smith' s clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion for clockwork automata approached fetishism. Smith shrugged, showing Jimmy his upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn shops. He could try, he said, but he doubted he could get much for it. When Jimmy had gone, leaving the head, Smith went over it carefully, discovering certain hallmarks. Eventually he'd been able to trace it to an unlikely collaboration between two Zurich artisans, an enamel specialist in Paris, a Dutch jeweler, and a California chip designer. It had been commissioned, he discovered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A. Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo collector, hinting that he was on the track of something noteworthy.
And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who walked in through the elaborate maze of Smith's security as though it didn't exist. A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master. It had come to his attention, the ninja said, that Smith might know of the whereabouts of this object. Smith told the man that he had no wish to die, and produced the head. And how much, his visitor asked did you expect to obtain through the sale of this object? Smith named a figure far lower than the price he'd intended to set. The ninja produced a credit chip and keyed Smith that amount out of a numbered Swiss account. And who, the man asked, brought you this piece? Smith told him. Within days, Smith learned of Jimmy's death. «So that was where I came in,» the Finn continued. «Smith knew I dealt a lot with the Memory Lane crowd, and that's where you go for a quiet go-to that'll never be traced. I hired a cowboy. I was the cut-out, so I took a percentage. Smith, he was careful. He'd just had a very weird business experience and he'd come out on top, but it didn't add up. Who'd paid, out of that Swiss stash? Yakuza? No way. They got a very rigid code covers situations like that, and they kill the receiver too, always. Was it spook stuff? Smith didn't think so. Spook biz has a vibe, you get so you can smell it. Well, I had my cowboy buzz the news morgues until we found Tessier-Ashpool in litigation. The case wasn't anything, but we got the law firm. Then he did the lawyer's ice and we got the family address. Lotta good it did us.» Case raised his eyebrows. «Freeside,» the Finn said. «The spindle. Turns out they own damn near the whole thing. The interesting stuff was the picture we got when the cowboy ran a regular go-to on the news morgues and compiled a precis. Family organization. Corporate structure. Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but there hasn't been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market in over a hundred years. On any market, as far as I know. You're looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high— orbit family, run like a corporation. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning. Orbital law's a lot softer on genetic engineering, right? And it's hard to keep track of which gen— eration, or combination of generations, is running the show at a given time.» «How's that?» Molly asked. «Got their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law, you're legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though nobody's seen the founding father in about thirty years. Founding momma, she died in some lab accident….» «So what happened with your fence?» «Nothing.» The Finn frowned. «Dropped it. We had a look at this fantastic tangle of powers of attorney the T-A's have, and that was it. Jimmy must've gotten into Straylight, lifted the head, and Tessier-Ashpool sent their ninja after it. Smith decided to forget about it. Maybe he was smart.» He looked at Molly. «The Villa Straylight. Tip of the spindle. Strictly private.» «You figure they own that ninja, Finn?» Molly asked. «Smith thought so.» «Expensive,» she said. «Wonder whatever happened to that little ninja, Finn?» «Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed.» «Okay,» Case said, «we got Armitage getting his goodies off an AI named Wintermute. Where's that get us?» «Nowhere yet,» Molly said, «but you got a little side gig now.» She drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. He opened it. Grid coordinates and entry codes. «Who's this?» «Armitage. Some data base of his. Bought it from the Mod— erns. Separate deal. Where is it?» «London,» Case said. «Crack it.» She laughed. «Earn your keep for a change.»
Case waited for a trans-BAMA local on the crowded plat— form. Molly had gone back to the loft hours ago, the Flatline's construct in her green bag, and Case had been drinking steadily ever since. It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills, obsessions, kneejerk responses…. The local came booming in along the black induction strip, fine grit sifting from cracks in the tunnel's ceiling. Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory— looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car's floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case's station. He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar suspended against the wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing beneath it in contorted capitals that mimicked printed Japanese. He walked through the crowd and stood beneath it, studying the thing. WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign. A blunt white spindle, flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes. He'd seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. It had never appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the Freeside banks as easily as he could reach Atlanta. Travel was a meat thing. But now he noticed the little sigil, the size of a small coin, woven into the lower left corner of the ad's fabric of light: T-A. He walked back to the loft, lost in memories of the Flatline. He'd spent most of his nineteenth summer in the Gentleman Loser, nursing expensive beers and watching the cowboys. He'd never touched a deck, then, but he knew what he wanted. There were at least twenty other hopefuls ghosting the Loser, that summer, each one bent on working joeboy for some cowboy. No other way to learn. They'd all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the 'Lanta fringes, who'd survived braindeath behind black ice. The grapevine-slender, street level, and the only one going— had little to say about Pauley, other than that he'd done the impossible. «It was big,» another would-be told Case, for the price of a beer, «but who knows what? I hear maybe a Brazilian payroll net. Anyway, the man was dead, flat down braindeath.» Case stared across the crowded bar at a thickset man in shirtsleeves, something leaden about the shade of his skin. «Boy,» the Flatline would tell him, months later in Miami, «I'm like them huge fuckin' lizards, you know? Had themself two goddam brains, one in the head an' one by the tailbone, kept the hind legs movin'. Hit that black stuff and ol' tailbrain jus' kept right on keepin' on.» The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange group anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of cyberspace…. And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus Russian heart, implanted in a POW camp during the war. He'd refused to replace the thing, saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing. Case fingered the slip of paper Molly had given him and made his way up the stairs. Molly was snoring on the temperfoam. A transparent cast ran from her knee to a few millimeters below her crotch, the skin beneath the rigid micropore mottled with bruises, the black shading into ugly yellow. Eight derms, each a different size and color, ran in a neat line down her left wrist. An Akai transdermal unit lay beside her, its fine red leads connected to input trodes under the cast. He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle of light fell directly on the Flatline's construct. He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in. It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder. He coughed. «Dix? McCoy? That you man?» His throat was tight. «Hey, bro,» said a directionless voice. «It's Case, man. Remember?» «Miami, joeboy, quick study.» «What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?» «Nothin'.» «Hang on.» He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it. «Dix? Who am I?» «You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?» «Ca-your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?» «Good question.» «Remember being here, a second ago?» «No.» «Know how a ROM personality matrix works?» «Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct.» «So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential, real time memory?» «Guess so,» said the construct. «Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?» «If you say so,» said the construct. «Who are you?» «Case.» «Miami,» said the voice, «joeboy, quick study.» «Right. And for starts, Dix, you and me, we're gonna sleaze over to London grid and access a little data. You game for that?» «You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?» «You want you a paradise,» the Flatline advised, when Case had explained his situation. «Check Copenhagen, fringes of the university section.» The voice recited coordinates as he punched. They found their paradise, a «pirate's paradise,» on the jumbled border of a low-security academic grid. At first glance it resembled the kind of graffiti student operators sometimes left at the junctions of grid lines, faint glyphs of colored light that shimmered against the confused outlines of a dozen arts faculties. «There,» said the Flatline, «the blue one. Make it out? That's an entry code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell'll get in here soon and read the whole damn board, change any codes they find posted. Kids'll steal the new ones tomorrow.» Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a standard phone code. With the Flatline's help, he connected with the London data base that Molly claimed was Armitage's. «Here,» said the voice, «I'll do it for you.» The Flatline began to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck, trying to catch the pauses the construct used to indicate timing. It took three tries. «Big deal,» said the Flatline. «No ice at all.» «Scan this shit,» Case told the Hosaka. «Sift for owner's personal history.» The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, re— placed by a simple lozenge of white light. «Contents are pri— marily video recordings of postwar military trials,» said the distant voice of the Hosaka. «Central figure is Colonel Willis Corto.» «Show it already,» Case said. A man's face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage's. Two hours later, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let the temperfoam mold itself against him. «You find anything?» she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep and drugs. «Tell you later,» he said, «I'm wrecked.» He was hungover and confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the various parts of a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka had sorted a thin store of data and assembled a precis, but it was full of gaps. Some of the material had been print records, reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case had had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments were audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing. Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot in the Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto's team had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moonlight, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe. «They sure as hell did shaft you, boss,» Case said, and Molly stirred beside him. The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus in the history of cybernetics. Corto and his team had been training for the run for three years. They were through the ice, ready to inject Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean. Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling…. There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned documents concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian gunship that managed to reach Finland. To be gutted, as it landed in a spruce grove, by an antique twenty-millimeter can— non manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert. Screaming Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the helicopter. The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped to a military facility in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It took eleven months for the Congressional aide to find him there. He listened to the sound of tubes draining. In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already un— derway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized, partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on Screaming Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto. He'd need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said, but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added, squeezing Corto's shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet. Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he preferred to testify as he was. No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The trials needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely. Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto's subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely the invention of a Congressional cabal with certain vested interests in saving particular portions of the Pentagon infrastructure. Corto gradually understood that the testimony he gave was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers directly responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of the emp installations at Kirensk. His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington. In an M Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide explained the terminal dangers involved in talking to the wrong people. Corto crushed the man's larynx with the rigid fingers of his right hand. The Congressional aide strangled, his face in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool Washington September. The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espionage records, and news files. Case watched Corto work corporate defectors in Lisbon and Marrakesh, where he seemed to grow obsessed with the idea of betrayal, to loathe the scientists and technicians he bought out for his employers. Drunk, in Singapore, he beat a Russian engineer to death in a hotel and set fire to his room. Next he surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory. Then as enforcer for a California gambling cartel, then as a paid killer in the ruins of Bonn. He robbed a bank in Wichita. The record grew vague, shadowy, the gaps longer. One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical interrogation, everything had gone gray. Translated French medical records explained that a man without identification had been taken to a Paris mental health unit and diagnosed as schizophrenic. He became catatonic and was sent to a government institution on the outskirts of Toulon. He became a subject in an experimental program that sought to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic models. A random selection of patients were provided with microcomputers and encouraged, with help from students, to program them. He was cured, the only success in the entire experiment. The record ended there.
Cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal points.
Smooth, he thought, but not smooth enough. Have to work on it. Then he keyed the new switch. The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and color…. She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices felt penned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill. For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes. The glasses didn't seem to cut down the sunlight at all. He wondered if the built-in amps compensated automatically. Blue alphanumerics winked the time, low in her left peripheral field. Showing off, he thought. Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made room. «How you doing, Case?» He heard the words and felt her form them. She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him catch his breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. He had no way to reply. Two blocks later, she was threading the outskirts of Memory Lane. Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he would have used to find his way. He began to find the passivity of the situation irritating. The transition to cyberspace, when he hit the switch, was instantaneous. He punched himself down a wall of primitive ice belonging to the New York Public Library, automatically counting potential windows. Keying back into her sensorium, into the sinuous flow of muscle, senses sharp and bright. He found himself wondering about the mind he shared these sensations with. What did he know about her? That she was another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the thing she did to make a living. He knew the way she'd moved against him, earlier, when she woke, their mutual grunt of unity when he'd entered her, and that she liked her coffee black, afterward…. Her destination was one of the dubious software rental complexes that lined Memory Lane. There was a stillness, a hush. Booths lined a central hall. The clientele were young, few of them out of their teens. They all seemed to have carbon sockets planted behind the left ear, but she didn't focus on them. The counters that fronted the booths displayed hundreds of slivers of microsoft, angular fragments of colored silicon mounted under oblong transparent bubbles on squares of white cardboard. Molly went to the seventh booth along the south wall. Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear. «Larry, you in, man?» She positioned herself in front of him. The boy's eyes focused. He sat up in his chair and pried a bright magenta splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail . «Hey, Larry.» «Molly.» He nodded. «I have some work for some of your friends, Larry.» Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red sport shirt and flicked it open, slotting the microsoft beside a dozen others. His hand hovered, selected a glossy black chip that was slightly longer than the rest, and inserted it smoothly into his head. His eyes narrowed. «Molly's got a rider,» he said, «and Larry doesn't like that.» «Hey,» she said, «I didn't know you were so . . . sensitive. I'm impressed. Costs a lot, to get that sensitive.» «I know you, lady?» The blank look returned. «You looking to buy some softs?» «I'm looking for the Moderns.» «You got a rider, Molly. This says.» He tapped the black splinter. «Somebody else using your eyes.» «My partner.» «Tell your partner to go.» «Got something for the Panther Moderns, Larry.» «What are you talking about, lady?» «Case, you take off,» she said, and he hit the switch, instantly back in the matrix. Ghost impressions of the software complex hung for a few seconds in the buzzing calm of cyberspace. «Panther Moderns,» he said to the Hosaka, removing the trodes. «Five minute precis.» «Ready,» the computer said.
It wasn't a name he knew. Something new, something that had come in since he'd been in Chiba. Fads swept the youth of the Spraw] at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly. «Go,» he said. The Hosaka had accessed its array of libraries, journals, and news services. The precis began with a long hold on a color still that Case at first assumed was a collage of some kind, a boy's face snipped from another image and glued to a photograph of a paint-scrawled wall. Dark eyes, epicanthic folds obviously the result of surgery, an angry dusting of acne across pale narrow cheeks. The Hosaka released the freeze; the boy moved, flowing with the sinister grace of a mime pretending to be a jungle predator. His body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern approximating the scribbled brickwork sliding smoothly across his tight one piece. Mimetic polycarbon. Cut to Dr. Virginia Rambali, Sociology, NYU, her name, faculty, and school pulsing across the screen in pink alphanumerics.
«Given their penchant for these random acts of surreal violence,» someone said, «it may be difficult for our viewers to understand why you continue to insist that this phenomenon isn't a form of terrorism.» Dr. RamBali smiled. «There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent….» «Skip it,» Case said.
Case met his first Modern two days after he'd screened the Hosaka's precis. The Moderns, he'd decided, were a contemporary version of the Big Scientists of his own late teens. There was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived sub cults and replicated them at odd intervals. The Panther Moderns were a soft head variant on the Scientists. If the technology had been available the Big Scientists would all have had sockets stuffed with microsofts. It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists. The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of diskettes from the Finn was a soft-voiced boy called Angelo. His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark— cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous. It was one of the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen. When Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large animal, Case was actually relieved. Tooth bud transplants. He'd seen that before. «You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you,» Molly said. Case nodded, absorbed in the patterns of the Sense/Net ice. This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He forgot to eat. Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of sushi on the corner of the long table. Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they'd set up in a corner of the loft. Ice patterns formed and reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ice. It was good ice. Wonderful ice. Its patterns burned there while he lay with his arm under Molly's shoulders, watching the red dawn through the steel grid of the skylight. Its rainbow pixel maze was the first thing he saw when he woke. He'd go straight to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in. He was cutting it. He was working. He lost track of days. And sometimes, falling asleep, particularly when Molly was off on one of her reconnaissance trips with her rented cadre of Moderns, images of Chiba came flooding back. Faces and Ninsei neon. Once he woke from a confused dream of Linda Lee, unable to recall who she was or what she'd ever meant to him. When he did remember, he jacked in and worked for nine straight hours. The cutting of Sense/Net's ice took a total of nine days. «I said a week,» Armitage said, unable to conceal his satisfaction when Case showed him his plan for the run. «You took your own good time.» «Balls,» Case said, smiling at the screen. «That's good work, Armitage.» «Yes,» Armitage admitted, «but don't let it go to your head. Compared to what you'll eventually be up against, this is an arcade toy.»
«Love you, Cat Mother,» whispered the Panther Modern's link man. His voice was modulated static in Case's headset. «Atlanta, Brood. Looks go. Go, got it?» Molly's voice was slightly clearer. «To hear is to obey.» The Moderns were using some kind of chicken wire dish in New Jersey to bounce the link man's scrambled signal off a Sons of Christ the King satellite in geosynchronous orbit above Manhattan. They chose to regard the entire operation as an elaborate private joke, and their choice of comsats seemed to have been deliberate. Molly's signals were being beamed up from a one-meter umbrella dish epoxy-ed to the roof of a black glass bank tower nearly as tall as the Sense/Net building. Atlanta. The recognition code was simple. Atlanta to Boston to Chicago to Denver, five minutes for each city. If anyone managed to intercept Molly's signal, unscramble it, synth her voice, the code would tip the Moderns. If she remained in the building for more than twenty minutes, it was highly unlikely she'd be coming out at all. Case gulped the last of his coffee, settled the trodes in place, and scratched his chest beneath his black t-shirt. He had only a vague idea of what the Panther Moderns planned as a diversion for the Sense/Net security people. His job was to make sure the intrusion program he'd written would link with the Sense/Net systems when Molly needed it to. He watched the countdown in the corner of the screen. Two. One. He jacked in and triggered his program. «Mainline,» breathed the link man, his voice the only sound as Case plunged through the glowing strata of Sense/Net ice. Good. Check Molly. He hit the Simstim and flipped into her sensorium. The scrambler blurred the visual input slightly. She stood before a wall of gold-flecked mirror in the building's vast white lobby, chewing gum, apparently fascinated by her own reflection. Aside from the huge pair of sunglasses concealing her mirrored insets, she managed to look remarkably like she belonged there, another tourist girl hoping for a glimpse of Tally Isham. She wore a pink plastic raincoat, a white mesh top, loose white pants cut in a style that had been fashionable in Tokyo the previous year. She grinned vacantly and popped her gum. Case felt like laughing. He could feel the micro pore tape across her ribcage, feel the flat little units under it: the radio, the Simstim unit, and the scrambler. The throat mike, glued to her neck, looked as much as possible like an analgesic dermadisk. Her hands, in the pockets of the pink coat, were flexing systematically through a series of tension-release exercises. It took him a few seconds to realize that the peculiar sensation at the tips of her fingers was caused by the blades as they were partially extruded, then retracted. He flipped back. His program had reached the fifth gate. He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck, making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card. The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms peeled off, meshing with the gate' s code fabric, ready to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived. He flipped again. Molly was strolling past the enormous circular reception desk at the rear of the lobby. 12:01:20 as the readout flared in her optic nerve. At midnight, synch Ed with the chip behind Molly's eye, the link man in Jersey had given his command. «Mainline.» Nine Moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl, had simultaneously dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones. Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and drifted out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different police departments and public security agencies were absorbing the information that an obscure sub sect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.
Case hit the switch as his program surged through the gates of the subsystem that controlled security for the Sense/Net research library. He found himself stepping into an elevator. «Excuse me, but are you an employee?» The guard raised his eyebrows. Molly popped her gum. «No,» she said, driving the first two knuckles of her right hand into the man's solar plexus. As he doubled over, clawing for the beeper on his belt she slammed his head sideways, against the wall of the elevator. Chewing a little more rapidly now, she touched CLOSE DOOR and STOP on the illuminated panel. She took a black box from her coat pocket and inserted a lead in the keyhole of the lock that secured the panel's circuitry.
The Panther Moderns allowed four minutes for their first move to take effect, then injected a second carefully prepared dose of misinformation. This time, they shot it directly into the Sense/Net building's internal video system. At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eighteen seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a susceptible segment of Sense/Net employees. Then something only vaguely like a human face filled the screens, its features stretched across asymmetrical expanses of bone like some obscene Mercator projection. Blue lips parted wetly as the twisted, elongated jaw moved. Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish clump of gnarled roots, fumbled toward the camera, blurred, and vanished. Subliminally rapid images of contamination: graphics of the building's water supply system, gloved hands manipulating laboratory glassware, something tumbling down into darkness, a pale splash…. The audio track, its pitch adjusted to run at just less than twice the standard playback speed, was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military uses of a substance known as HsG, a biochemical governing the human skeletal growth factor. Overdoses of HsG threw certain bone cells into overdrive, accelerating growth by factors as high as one thousand percent. At 12:05:00, the mirror-sheathed nexus of the Sense/Net consortium held just over three thousand employees. At five minutes after midnight, as the Moderns' message ended in a flare of white screen, the Sense/Net Pyramid screamed. Half a dozen NYPD Tactical hovercraft, responding to the possibility of Blue Nine in the building's ventilation system, were converging on the Sense/Net Pyramid. They were running full riot lights. A BAMA Rapid Deployment helicopter was lifting off from its pad on Riker's.
Case triggered his second program. A carefully engineered virus attacked the code fabric screening primary custodial commands for the sub-basement that housed the Sense/Net research materials. «Boston,» Molly's voice came across the link, «I'm downstairs.» Case switched and saw the blank wall of the elevator. She was unzipping the white pants. A bulky packet, exactly the shade of her pale ankle, was secured there with micro pore. She knelt and peeled the tape away. Streaks of burgundy flickered across the mimetic polycarbon as she unfolded the Modern suit. She removed the pink raincoat, threw it down beside the white pants, and began to pull the suit on over the white mesh top.
12:06:26. Case's virus had bored a window through the library's command ice. He punched himself through and found an infinite blue space ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight grid of pale blue neon. In the non space of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child's toy calculator, accessed through Case's Sen:j
dai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. Case began to key the sequence the Finn had purchased from a mid-eschelon sarariman with severe drug problems. He began to glide through the spheres as if he were on invisible tracks. Here. This one. Punching his way into the sphere, chill blue neon vault above him starless and smooth as frosted glass, he triggered a sub— program that effected certain alterations in the core custodial 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 spray— ing foam barricades now,» one noted, speaking for the benefit of his throat mike. «Rapids are still trying to land their copter.»Case hit the Sim-Stim 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 term 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 MW 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 getout 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 Yonder boy. «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 Doppler Ed 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 Yonder boy'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, Yonder boy.» «This is the message. Winter mute.» He spelled it out. «From you?» Case took a step forward. «No,» Yonderboy said. «For you.» «Who from?» «Winter mute,» 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 Beme, 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 Moderns 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 silicon»-the phrase had an old-fashioned ring for Case-and the microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery sales. With half a dozen chips in his new socket, Smith's knowledge of the art business was formidable, at least by the standards of his colleagues. But Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal request, one businessman to another. He wanted a go-to on the Tessier-Ashpool clan, he said, and it had to be executed in a way that would guarantee the impossibility of the subject ever tracing the inquiry to its source. It might be possible, the Finn had opined, but an explanation was definitely required. «It smelled,» the Finn said to Case, «smelled of money. And Smith was being very careful. Almost too careful.» Smith, it developed, had had a supplier known as Jimmy. Jimmy was a burglar and other things as well, and just back from a year in high orbit, having carried certain things back down the gravity well. The most unusual thing Jimmy had managed to score on his swing through the archipelago was a head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonne over platinum, studded with seedpearls and lapis. Smith, sighing, had put down his pocket microscope and advised Jimmy to melt the thing down. It was contemporary, not an antique, and had no value to the collector. Jimmy laughed. The thing was a computer terminal, he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes. It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed, a perverse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing. It was a curiosity. Smith jacked the head into his computer and listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures of last year's tax return. Smith' s clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion for clockwork automata approached fetishism. Smith shrugged, showing Jimmy his upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn shops. He could try, he said, but he doubted he could get much for it. When Jimmy had gone, leaving the head, Smith went over it carefully, discovering certain hallmarks. Eventually he'd been able to trace it to an unlikely collaboration between two Zurich artisans, an enamel specialist in Paris, a Dutch jeweler, and a California chip designer. It had been commissioned, he discovered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A. Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo collector, hinting that he was on the track of something noteworthy.
And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who walked in through the elaborate maze of Smith's security as though it didn't exist. A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master. It had come to his attention, the ninja said, that Smith might know of the whereabouts of this object. Smith told the man that he had no wish to die, and produced the head. And how much, his visitor asked did you expect to obtain through the sale of this object? Smith named a figure far lower than the price he'd intended to set. The ninja produced a credit chip and keyed Smith that amount out of a numbered Swiss account. And who, the man asked, brought you this piece? Smith told him. Within days, Smith learned of Jimmy's death. «So that was where I came in,» the Finn continued. «Smith knew I dealt a lot with the Memory Lane crowd, and that's where you go for a quiet go-to that'll never be traced. I hired a cowboy. I was the cut-out, so I took a percentage. Smith, he was careful. He'd just had a very weird business experience and he'd come out on top, but it didn't add up. Who'd paid, out of that Swiss stash? Yakuza? No way. They got a very rigid code covers situations like that, and they kill the receiver too, always. Was it spook stuff? Smith didn't think so. Spook biz has a vibe, you get so you can smell it. Well, I had my cowboy buzz the news morgues until we found Tessier-Ashpool in litigation. The case wasn't anything, but we got the law firm. Then he did the lawyer's ice and we got the family address. Lotta good it did us.» Case raised his eyebrows. «Freeside,» the Finn said. «The spindle. Turns out they own damn near the whole thing. The interesting stuff was the picture we got when the cowboy ran a regular go-to on the news morgues and compiled a precis. Family organization. Corporate structure. Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but there hasn't been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market in over a hundred years. On any market, as far as I know. You're looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high— orbit family, run like a corporation. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning. Orbital law's a lot softer on genetic engineering, right? And it's hard to keep track of which gen— eration, or combination of generations, is running the show at a given time.» «How's that?» Molly asked. «Got their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law, you're legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though nobody's seen the founding father in about thirty years. Founding momma, she died in some lab accident….» «So what happened with your fence?» «Nothing.» The Finn frowned. «Dropped it. We had a look at this fantastic tangle of powers of attorney the T-A's have, and that was it. Jimmy must've gotten into Straylight, lifted the head, and Tessier-Ashpool sent their ninja after it. Smith decided to forget about it. Maybe he was smart.» He looked at Molly. «The Villa Straylight. Tip of the spindle. Strictly private.» «You figure they own that ninja, Finn?» Molly asked. «Smith thought so.» «Expensive,» she said. «Wonder whatever happened to that little ninja, Finn?» «Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed.» «Okay,» Case said, «we got Armitage getting his goodies off an AI named Wintermute. Where's that get us?» «Nowhere yet,» Molly said, «but you got a little side gig now.» She drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. He opened it. Grid coordinates and entry codes. «Who's this?» «Armitage. Some data base of his. Bought it from the Mod— erns. Separate deal. Where is it?» «London,» Case said. «Crack it.» She laughed. «Earn your keep for a change.»
Case waited for a trans-BAMA local on the crowded plat— form. Molly had gone back to the loft hours ago, the Flatline's construct in her green bag, and Case had been drinking steadily ever since. It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills, obsessions, kneejerk responses…. The local came booming in along the black induction strip, fine grit sifting from cracks in the tunnel's ceiling. Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory— looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car's floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case's station. He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar suspended against the wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing beneath it in contorted capitals that mimicked printed Japanese. He walked through the crowd and stood beneath it, studying the thing. WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign. A blunt white spindle, flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes. He'd seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. It had never appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the Freeside banks as easily as he could reach Atlanta. Travel was a meat thing. But now he noticed the little sigil, the size of a small coin, woven into the lower left corner of the ad's fabric of light: T-A. He walked back to the loft, lost in memories of the Flatline. He'd spent most of his nineteenth summer in the Gentleman Loser, nursing expensive beers and watching the cowboys. He'd never touched a deck, then, but he knew what he wanted. There were at least twenty other hopefuls ghosting the Loser, that summer, each one bent on working joeboy for some cowboy. No other way to learn. They'd all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the 'Lanta fringes, who'd survived braindeath behind black ice. The grapevine-slender, street level, and the only one going— had little to say about Pauley, other than that he'd done the impossible. «It was big,» another would-be told Case, for the price of a beer, «but who knows what? I hear maybe a Brazilian payroll net. Anyway, the man was dead, flat down braindeath.» Case stared across the crowded bar at a thickset man in shirtsleeves, something leaden about the shade of his skin. «Boy,» the Flatline would tell him, months later in Miami, «I'm like them huge fuckin' lizards, you know? Had themself two goddam brains, one in the head an' one by the tailbone, kept the hind legs movin'. Hit that black stuff and ol' tailbrain jus' kept right on keepin' on.» The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange group anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of cyberspace…. And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus Russian heart, implanted in a POW camp during the war. He'd refused to replace the thing, saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing. Case fingered the slip of paper Molly had given him and made his way up the stairs. Molly was snoring on the temperfoam. A transparent cast ran from her knee to a few millimeters below her crotch, the skin beneath the rigid micropore mottled with bruises, the black shading into ugly yellow. Eight derms, each a different size and color, ran in a neat line down her left wrist. An Akai transdermal unit lay beside her, its fine red leads connected to input trodes under the cast. He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle of light fell directly on the Flatline's construct. He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in. It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder. He coughed. «Dix? McCoy? That you man?» His throat was tight. «Hey, bro,» said a directionless voice. «It's Case, man. Remember?» «Miami, joeboy, quick study.» «What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?» «Nothin'.» «Hang on.» He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it. «Dix? Who am I?» «You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?» «Ca-your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?» «Good question.» «Remember being here, a second ago?» «No.» «Know how a ROM personality matrix works?» «Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct.» «So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential, real time memory?» «Guess so,» said the construct. «Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?» «If you say so,» said the construct. «Who are you?» «Case.» «Miami,» said the voice, «joeboy, quick study.» «Right. And for starts, Dix, you and me, we're gonna sleaze over to London grid and access a little data. You game for that?» «You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?» «You want you a paradise,» the Flatline advised, when Case had explained his situation. «Check Copenhagen, fringes of the university section.» The voice recited coordinates as he punched. They found their paradise, a «pirate's paradise,» on the jumbled border of a low-security academic grid. At first glance it resembled the kind of graffiti student operators sometimes left at the junctions of grid lines, faint glyphs of colored light that shimmered against the confused outlines of a dozen arts faculties. «There,» said the Flatline, «the blue one. Make it out? That's an entry code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell'll get in here soon and read the whole damn board, change any codes they find posted. Kids'll steal the new ones tomorrow.» Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a standard phone code. With the Flatline's help, he connected with the London data base that Molly claimed was Armitage's. «Here,» said the voice, «I'll do it for you.» The Flatline began to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck, trying to catch the pauses the construct used to indicate timing. It took three tries. «Big deal,» said the Flatline. «No ice at all.» «Scan this shit,» Case told the Hosaka. «Sift for owner's personal history.» The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, re— placed by a simple lozenge of white light. «Contents are pri— marily video recordings of postwar military trials,» said the distant voice of the Hosaka. «Central figure is Colonel Willis Corto.» «Show it already,» Case said. A man's face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage's. Two hours later, Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let the temperfoam mold itself against him. «You find anything?» she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep and drugs. «Tell you later,» he said, «I'm wrecked.» He was hungover and confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the various parts of a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka had sorted a thin store of data and assembled a precis, but it was full of gaps. Some of the material had been print records, reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case had had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments were audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing. Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot in the Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto's team had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moonlight, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe. «They sure as hell did shaft you, boss,» Case said, and Molly stirred beside him. The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus in the history of cybernetics. Corto and his team had been training for the run for three years. They were through the ice, ready to inject Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean. Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling…. There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned documents concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian gunship that managed to reach Finland. To be gutted, as it landed in a spruce grove, by an antique twenty-millimeter can— non manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert. Screaming Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the helicopter. The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped to a military facility in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It took eleven months for the Congressional aide to find him there. He listened to the sound of tubes draining. In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already un— derway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized, partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on Screaming Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto. He'd need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said, but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added, squeezing Corto's shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet. Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he preferred to testify as he was. No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The trials needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely. Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto's subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely the invention of a Congressional cabal with certain vested interests in saving particular portions of the Pentagon infrastructure. Corto gradually understood that the testimony he gave was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers directly responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of the emp installations at Kirensk. His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington. In an M Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide explained the terminal dangers involved in talking to the wrong people. Corto crushed the man's larynx with the rigid fingers of his right hand. The Congressional aide strangled, his face in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool Washington September. The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espionage records, and news files. Case watched Corto work corporate defectors in Lisbon and Marrakesh, where he seemed to grow obsessed with the idea of betrayal, to loathe the scientists and technicians he bought out for his employers. Drunk, in Singapore, he beat a Russian engineer to death in a hotel and set fire to his room. Next he surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory. Then as enforcer for a California gambling cartel, then as a paid killer in the ruins of Bonn. He robbed a bank in Wichita. The record grew vague, shadowy, the gaps longer. One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical interrogation, everything had gone gray. Translated French medical records explained that a man without identification had been taken to a Paris mental health unit and diagnosed as schizophrenic. He became catatonic and was sent to a government institution on the outskirts of Toulon. He became a subject in an experimental program that sought to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic models. A random selection of patients were provided with microcomputers and encouraged, with help from students, to program them. He was cured, the only success in the entire experiment. The record ended there.