Neuromancer (7 page)

C
ASE 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 blackbox from her coat pocket and inserted a lead in the keyhole
of the lock that secured the panel’s circuitry.

T
HE
P
ANTHER
M
ODERNS
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.

C
ASE 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 micropore. 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 nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given
data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child’s toy calculator,
accessed through Case’s Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness
hung with a few basic commands. Case began to key the sequence the Finn had purchased
from a mid-echelon sarariman with severe drug problems. He began to glide through
the spheres as if he were on invisible tracks.

Here. This one.

Punching his way into the sphere, chill blue neon vault above him starless and smooth
as frosted glass, he triggered a subprogram that effected certain alterations in the
core custodial commands.

Out now. Reversing smoothly, the virus reknitting the fabric of the window.

Done.

I
N THE
S
ENSE
/N
ET
lobby, two Panther Moderns sat alertly behind a low rectangular planter, taping the
riot with a video camera. They both wore chameleon suits. “Tacticals are spraying
foam barricades now,” one noted, speaking for the benefit of his throat mike. “Rapids
are still trying to land their copter.”

C
ASE HIT THE
simstim switch. And flipped into the agony of broken bone. Molly was braced against
the blank gray wall of a long corridor, her breath coming ragged and uneven. Case
was back in the matrix instantly, a white-hot line of pain fading in his left thigh.

“What’s happening, Brood?” he asked the link man.

“I dunno, Cutter. Mother’s not talking. Wait.”

Case’s program was cycling. A single hair-fine thread of crimson neon extended from
the center of the restored window to the shifting outline of his icebreaker. He didn’t
have time to wait. Taking a deep breath, he flipped again.

Molly took a single step, trying to support her weight on the corridor wall. In the
loft, Case groaned. The second step took her over an outstretched arm. Uniform sleeve
bright with fresh blood. Glimpse of a shattered fiberglass shockstave. 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 I 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 Flatline’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 blackbox taped beside the control panel, remained where
she’d left it. The guard still lay curled on the floor. Case noticed the derm on his
neck for the first time. Something of
Molly’s, to keep him under. She stepped over him and removed the blackbox before punching
LOBBY.

As the elevator door hissed open, a woman hurtled backward out of the crowd, into
the elevator, and struck the rear wall with her head. Molly ignored her, bending over
to peel the derm from the guard’s neck. Then she kicked the white pants and the pink
raincoat out the door, tossing the dark glasses after them, and drew the hood of her
suit down across her forehead. The construct, in the suit’s kangaroo pocket, dug into
her sternum when she moved. She stepped out.

Case had seen panic before, but never in an enclosed area.

The Sense/Net employees, spilling out of the elevators, had surged for the street
doors, only to meet the foam barricades of the Tacticals and the sandbag-guns of the
BAMA Rapids. The two agencies, convinced that they were containing a horde of potential
killers, were cooperating with an uncharacteristic degree of efficiency. Beyond the
shattered wreckage of the main street doors, bodies were piled three deep on the barricades.
The hollow thumping of the riot guns provided a constant background for the sound
the crowd made as it surged back and forth across the lobby’s marble floor. Case had
never heard anything like that sound.

Neither, apparently, had Molly. “Jesus,” she said, and hesitated. It was a sort of
keening, rising into a bubbling wail of raw and total fear. The lobby floor was covered
with bodies, clothing, blood, and long trampled scrolls of yellow printout.

“C’mon, sister. We’re for out.” The eyes of the two Moderns stared out of madly swirling
shades of polycarbon, their suits unable to keep up with the confusion of shape and
color that raged behind them. “You hurt? C’mon. Tommy’ll walk you.” Tommy handed something
to the one who spoke, a video camera wrapped in polycarbon.

“Chicago,” she said, “I’m on my way.” And then she was falling, not to the marble
floor, slick with blood and vomit, but down some bloodwarm well, into silence and
the dark.

T
HE
P
ANTHER
M
ODERN
leader, who introduced himself as Lupus Yonderboy, wore a polycarbon suit with a
recording feature
that allowed him to replay backgrounds at will. Perched on the edge of Case’s worktable
like some kind of state of the art gargoyle, he regarded Case and Armitage with hooded
eyes. He smiled. His hair was pink. A rainbow forest of microsofts bristled behind
his left ear; the ear was pointed, tufted with more pink hair. His pupils had been
modified to catch the light like a cat’s. Case watched the suit crawl with color and
texture.

“You let it get out of control,” Armitage said. He stood in the center of the loft
like a statue, wrapped in the dark glossy folds of an expensive-looking trenchcoat.

“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 trenchcoat. “You want to count it?” he asked Yonderboy.

“No,” the Panther Modern said. “You’ll pay. You’re a Mr. Who. You pay to stay one.
Not a Mr. Name.”

“I hope that isn’t a threat,” Armitage said.