Neuromancer (6 page)

“Quine dead too?”

“No such luck. He’s in Europe. He doesn’t come into this.”

“Well, if we can get the Flatline, we’re home free. He was the best. You know he died
braindeath three times?”

She nodded.

“Flatlined on his EEG. Showed me tapes. ‘Boy, I was
daid
.’ ”

“Look, Case, I been trying to suss out who it is is backing Armitage since I signed
on. But it doesn’t feel like a zaibatsu, a government, or some Yakuza subsidiary.
Armitage gets orders. Like something tells him to go off to Chiba, pick up a pillhead
who’s making one last wobble through the burnout belt, and trade a program for the
operation that’ll fix him up. We coulda bought twenty world class cowboys for what
the market was ready to pay for that surgical program. You were good, but not
that
good. . . .” She scratched the side of her nose.

“Obviously makes sense to somebody,” he said. “Somebody big.”

“Don’t let me hurt your feelings.” She grinned. “We’re gonna be pulling one hardcore
run, Case, just to get the Flatline’s construct. Sense/Net has it locked in a library
vault uptown. Tighter than an eel’s ass, Case. Now, Sense/Net, they got all their
new material for the fall season locked in there too. Steal that and we’d be richer
than shit. But no, we gotta get us the Flatline and nothing else. Weird.”

“Yeah, it’s all weird. You’re weird, this hole’s weird, and who’s the weird little
gopher outside in the hall?”

“Finn’s an old connection of mine. Fence, mostly. Software. This privacy biz is a
sideline. But I got Armitage to let him be our tech here, so when he shows up later,
you never saw him. Got it?”

“So what’s Armitage got dissolving inside you?”

“I’m an easy make.” She smiled. “Anybody any good at what they do, that’s what they
are
, right? You gotta jack, I gotta tussle.”

He stared at her. “So tell me what you know about Armitage.”

“For starters, nobody named Armitage took part in any Screaming Fist. I checked. But
that doesn’t mean much. He doesn’t look like any of the pics of the guys who got out.”
She shrugged. “Big deal. And starters is all I got.” She drummed her nails on the
back of the chair. “But you
are
a cowboy, aren’t you? I mean, maybe you could have a little look around.” She smiled.

“He’d kill me.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I think he needs you, Case, and real bad. Besides, you’re a clever
john, no? You can winkle him, sure.”

“What else is on that list you mentioned?”

“Toys. Mostly for you. And one certified psychopath name of Peter Riviera. Real ugly
customer.”

“Where’s he?”

“Dunno. But he’s one sick fuck, no lie. I saw his profile.” She made a face. “Godawful.”
She stood up and stretched, catlike. “So we got an axis going, boy? We’re together
in this? Partners?”

Case looked at her. “I gotta lotta choice, huh?”

She laughed. “You got it, cowboy.”

“T
HE MATRIX HAS
its roots in primitive arcade games,” said the voice-over, “in early graphics programs
and military experimentation with cranial jacks.” On the Sony, a two-dimensional space
war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial
possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab
animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks
and war planes. “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions
of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . .
A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the
human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the
mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .”

“What’s that?” Molly asked, as he flipped the channel selector.

“Kid’s show.” A discontinuous flood of images as the selector cycled. “Off,” he said
to the Hosaka.

“You want to try now, Case?”

Wednesday. Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with Molly beside him. “You want
me to go out, Case? Maybe easier for you, alone. . . .” He shook his head.

“No. Stay, doesn’t matter.” He settled the black terry sweatband across his forehead,
careful not to disturb the flat Sendai dermatrodes. He stared back at the deck on
his lap, not really seeing it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed
shuriken burning with reflected neon. He glanced up; on the wall, just above the Sony,
he’d hung her gift, tacking it there with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the
hole at its center.

He closed his eyes.

Found the ridged face of the power stud.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge
of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols,
figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

Please, he prayed,
now
—

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

Now
—

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding—

And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless
home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening
to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond
the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the
spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.

And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing
the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

M
OLLY WAS GONE
when he took the trodes off, and the loft was dark. He checked the time. He’d been
in cyberspace for five hours. He carried the Ono-Sendai to one of the new worktables
and
collapsed across the bedslab, pulling Molly’s black silk sleeping bag over his head.

The security package taped to the steel firedoor bleeped twice. “Entry requested,”
it said. “Subject is cleared per my program.”

“So open it.” Case pulled the silk from his face and sat up as the door opened, expecting
to see Molly or Armitage.

“Christ,” said a hoarse voice, “I know that bitch can see in the dark. . . .” A squat
figure stepped in and closed the door. “Turn the lights on, okay?” Case scrambled
off the slab and found the old-fashioned switch.

“I’m the Finn,” said the Finn, and made a warning face at Case.

“Case.”

“Pleased to meecha, I’m sure. I’m doing some hardware for your boss, it looks like.”
The Finn fished a pack of Partagas from a pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco
filled the room. He crossed to the worktable and glanced at the Ono-Sendai. “Looks
stock. Soon fix that. But here’s your problem, kid.” He took a filthy manila envelope
from inside his jacket, flicked ash on the floor, and extracted a featureless black
rectangle from the envelope. “Goddamn factory prototypes,” he said, tossing the thing
down on the table. “Cast ’em into a block of polycarbon, can’t get in with a laser
without frying the works. Booby-trapped for x-ray, ultrascan, God knows what else.
We’ll get in, but there’s no rest for the wicked, right?” He folded the envelope with
great care and tucked it away in an inside pocket.

“What is it?”

“It’s a flipflop switch, basically. Wire it into your Sendai here, you can access
live or recorded simstim without having to jack out of the matrix.”

“What for?”

“I haven’t got a clue. Know I’m fitting Moll for a broadcast rig, though, so it’s
probably her sensorium you’ll access.” The Finn scratched his chin. “So now you get
to find out just how tight those jeans really are, huh?”

C
ASE 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 fiberoptics.

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
feltpenned 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 sportshirt and flicked it
open, slotting the microsoft beside a dozen others. His hand hovered, selected a glossy
black chip that was slightly longer than the rest, and inserted it smoothly into his
head. His eyes narrowed.

“Molly’s got a rider,” he said, “and Larry doesn’t like that.”

“Hey,” she said, “I didn’t know you were so . . . sensitive. I’m impressed. Costs
a lot, to get that sensitive.”

“I know you, lady?” The blank look returned. “You looking to buy some softs?”

“I’m looking for the Moderns.”

“You got a rider, Molly. This says.” He tapped the black splinter. “Somebody else
using your eyes.”

“My partner.”

“Tell your partner to go.”

“Got something for the Panther Moderns, Larry.”

“What are you talking about, lady?”

“Case, you take off,” she said, and he hit the switch, instantly back in the matrix.
Ghost impressions of the software complex hung for a few seconds in the buzzing calm
of cyberspace.

“Panther Moderns,” he said to the Hosaka, removing the trodes. “Five minute precis.”

“Ready,” the computer said.

It wasn’t a name he knew. Something new, something that had come in since he’d been
in Chiba. Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl
at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen
weeks, and then vanish utterly. “Go,” he said. The Hosaka had accessed its array of
libraries, journals, and news services.

The precis began with a long hold on a color still that Case at first assumed was
a collage of some kind, a boy’s face snipped from another image and glued to a photograph
of a paint-scrawled wall. Dark eyes, epicanthic folds obviously the result of surgery,
an angry dusting of acne across pale narrow cheeks. The Hosaka released the freeze;
the boy moved, flowing with the sinister grace of a mime pretending to be a jungle
predator. His body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern approximating the scribbled
brickwork sliding smoothly across his tight onepiece. 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.

C
ASE 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 subcults and replicated them at odd intervals.
The Panther Moderns were a softhead variant on the Scientists. If the technology had
been available, the Big Scientists would all have had sockets stuffed with microsofts.
It was the style that
mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers,
nihilistic technofetishists.

The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of diskettes from the Finn was a
soft-voiced boy called Angelo. His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark-cartilage
polysaccharides, smooth and hideous. It was one of the nastiest pieces of elective
surgery Case had ever seen. When Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines
of some large animal, Case was actually relieved. Toothbud 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.”

“L
OVE YOU
, C
AT
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 chickenwire 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 micropore
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.

A
T MIDNIGHT
,
SYNCHED
with the chip behind Molly’s eye, the link man in Jersey had given his command. “Mainline.”
Nine Moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl, had simultaneously
dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones. Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up,
and drifted out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different police
departments and public security agencies were absorbing the information that an obscure
subsect 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.