Burning Chrome (2 page)

She had another answer, too.

‘So you're locked up good and tight, Johnny-san? No way to get that program without the password?' She led me into the shadows that waited beyond the bright tube platform. The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration.

‘The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical contraautism prostheses.' I reeled off a numb version of my standard sales pitch. ‘Client's code is stored in a special chip; barring Squids, which we in the trade don't like to talk about, there's no way to recover
your phrase. Can't drug it out, cut it out, torture it. I don't
know
it, never did.'

‘Squids? Crawly things with arms?' We emerged into a deserted street market. Shadowy figures watched us from across a makeshift square littered with fish heads and rotting fruit.

‘Superconducting quantum interference detectors. Used them in the war to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.'

‘Yeah? Navy stuff? From the war? Squid'll read that chip of yours?' She'd stopped walking, and I felt her eyes on me behind those twin mirrors.

‘Even the primitive models could measure a magnetic field a billionth the strength of geomagnetic force; it's like pulling a whisper out of a cheering stadium.'

‘Cops can do that already, with parabolic microphones and lasers.'

‘But your data's still secure.' Pride in profession. ‘No government'll let their cops have Squids, not even the security heavies. Too much chance of interdepartmental funnies; they're too likely to watergate you.'

‘Navy stuff,' she said, and her grin gleamed in the shadows. ‘Navy stuff. I got a friend down here who was in the navy, name's Jones. I think you'd better meet him. He's a junkie, though. So we'll have to take him something.'

‘A junkie?'

‘A dolphin.'

He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin's point of view he might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water slopped over the side, wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg.

He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-white hide.

Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded down the side of the tank.

‘What is this place?' I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting chain link and things under tarps. Above the tank hung a clumsy wooden framework, crossed and recrossed by rows of dusty Christmas lights.

‘Funland. Zoo and carnival rides. “Talk with the War Whale.” All that. Some whale Jones is…'

Jones reared again and fixed me with a sad and ancient eye.

‘How's he talk?' Suddenly I was anxious to go.

That's the catch. Say “hi,” Jones.'

And all the bulbs lit simultaneously. They were flashing red, white, and blue.

‘Good with symbols, see, but the code's restricted. In the navy they had him wired into an audiovisual display.' She drew the narrow package from a jacket pocket. ‘Pure shit, Jones. Want it?' He froze in the water and started to sink. I felt a strange panic, remembering that he wasn't a fish, that he could drown. ‘We want the key to Johnny's bank, Jones. We want it fast.'

The lights flickered, died.

‘Go for it, Jones!'

Blue bulbs, cruciform.

Darkness.

‘Pure! It's
clean
. Come on, Jones.'

White sodium glare washed her features, stark monochrome, shadows cleaving from her cheekbones.

The arms of the red swastika were twisted in her silver glasses. ‘Give it to him,' I said. ‘We've got it.'

Ralfi Face. No imagination.

Jones heaved half his armored bulk over the edge of his tank, and I thought the metal would give way. Molly stabbed him overhand with the Syrette, driving the needle between two plates. Propellant hissed. Patterns of light exploded, spasming across the frame and then fading to black.

We left him drifting, rolling languorously in the dark water. Maybe he was dreaming of his war in the Pacific, of the cyber mines he'd swept, nosing gently into their circuitry with the Squid he'd used to pick Ralfi's pathetic password from the chip buried in my head.

‘I can see them slipping up when he was demobbed, letting him out of the navy with that gear intact, but how does a cybernetic dolphin get wired to smack?'

‘The war,' she said. ‘They all were. Navy did it. How else you get 'em working for you?'

‘I'm not sure this profiles as good business,' the pirate said, angling for better money. ‘Target specs on a comsat that isn't in the book –'

‘Waste my time and you won't profile at all,' said Molly, leaning across his scarred plastic desk to prod him with her forefinger.

‘So maybe you want to buy your microwaves somewhere else?' he was a tough kid, behind his Mao-job. A Nighttowner by birth, probably.

Her hand blurred down the front of his jacket, completely severing a lapel without even rumpling the fabric.

‘So we got a deal or not?'

‘Deal,' he said, staring at his ruined lapel with what he must have hoped was only polite interest. ‘Deal.'

While I checked the two recorders we'd bought, she extracted the slip of paper I'd given her from the zippered wrist pocket of her jacket. She unfolded it and read silently, moving her lips. She shrugged. ‘This is it?'

‘Shoot,' I said, punching the RECORD studs of the two decks simultaneously.

‘Christian White,' she recited, ‘and his Aryan Reggae Band.'

Faithful Ralfi, a fan to his dying day.

Transition to idiot-savant mode is always less abrupt than I expect it to be. The pirate broadcaster's front was a failing travel agency in a pastel cube that boasted a desk, three chairs, and a faded poster of a Swiss orbital spa. A pair of toy birds with blown-glass bodies and tin legs were sipping monotonously from a Styrofoam cup of water on a ledge beside Molly's shoulder. As I phased into mode, they accelerated gradually until their Day-Glo-feathered crowns became solid arcs of color. The LEDs that told seconds on the plastic wall clock had become meaningless pulsing grids, and Molly and the Mao-faced boy grew hazy, their arms blurring occasionally in insect-quick ghosts of gesture. And then it all faded to cool gray static and an endless tone poem in an artificial language.

I sat and sang dead Ralfi's stolen program for three hours.

The mall runs forty kilometers from end to end, a ragged overlap of Fuller domes roofing what was once a suburban artery. If they turn off the arcs on a clear day, a gray approximation of sunlight filters through layers of arcylic, a view like the prison sketches of Giovanni Piranesi. The three southernmost kilometers roof Nighttown. Nighttown pays no taxes, no utilities. The neon arcs are dead, and the geodesics have been smoked black by decades of cooking fires. In the nearly total darkness of a Nighttown noon, who notices a few dozen mad children lost in the rafters?

We'd been climbing for two hours, up concrete stairs and steel ladders with perforated rungs, past abandoned gantries and dust-covered tools. We'd started in what looked like a disused maintenance yard, stacked with triangular roofing segments. Everything there had been
covered with that same uniform layer of spraybomb graffiti: gang names, initials, dates back to the turn of the century. The graffiti followed us up, gradually thinning until a single name was repeated at intervals, LO TEK. In dripping black capitals.

‘Who's Lo Tek?'

‘Not us, boss.' She climbed a shivering aluminium ladder and vanished through a hole in a sheet of corrugated plastic. ‘“Low technique, low technology.”' The plastic muffled her voice. I followed her up, nursing an aching wrist. ‘Lo Teks, they'd think that shotgun trick of yours was effete.'

An hour later I dragged myself up through another hole, this one sawed crookedly in a sagging sheet of plywood, and met my first Lo Tek.

‘'S okay,' Molly said, her hand brushing my shoulder, ‘It's just Dog. Hey, Dog.'

In the narrow beam of her taped flash, he regarded us with his one eye and slowly extruded a thick length of grayish tongue, licking huge canines. I wondered how they wrote off tooth-bud transplants from Dobermans as low technology. Immunosuppressives don't exactly grow on trees.

‘Moll.' Dental augmentation impeded his speech. A string of saliva dangled from his twisted lower lip. ‘Heard ya comin'. Long time.' He might have been fifteen, but the fangs and a bright mosaic of scars combined with the gaping socket to present a mask of total bestiality. It had taken time and a certain kind of creativity to assemble that face, and his posture told me he enjoyed living behind it. He wore a pair of decaying jeans, black with grime and shiny along the creases. His chest and feet were bare. He did something with his mouth that approximated a grin. ‘Bein' followed, you.'

Far off, down in Nighttown, a water vendor cried his trade.

‘Strings jumping, Dog?' She swung her flash to the side, and I saw thin cords tied to eyebolts, cords that ran to the edge and vanished.

‘Kill the fuckin' light!'

She snapped it off.

‘How come the one who's followin' you's got no light?'

‘Doesn't need it. That one's bad news, Dog. Your sentries give him a tumble, they'll come home in easy-to-carry sections.'

‘This a
friend
friend, Moll?' He sounded uneasy. I heard his feet shift on the worn plywood.

‘No. But he's mine. And this one,' slapping my shoulders, ‘he's a friend. Got that?'

‘Sure,' he said, without much enthusiasm, padding to the platform's edge, where the eyebolts were. He began to pluck out some kind of message on the taut cords.