Mona Lisa Overdrive

by William Gibson

“The secret police. Bloody odd company he keeps, Swain: Buck House types, czars from the East End rookeries, senior police officers …”

  “Buck House?”

  “The Palace. Not to mention merchant bankers from the City, a simstim star, a drove or two of expensive panders and drug merchants …”

  “A simstim star?”

  “Lanier, Robin Lanier.”

  “Robin Lanier? He was here?”

  “Morning after your precipitous departure.”

  She looked into Colin’s transparent green eyes. “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you always?”

  “To the extent that I know it, yes.”

  “What are you?”

  “A Maas-Neotek biochip personality-base programmed to aid and advise the Japanese visitor in the United Kingdom.” He winked at her.

  “Why did you wink?”

  “Why d’you think?”

  “Answer the question!” Her voice loud in the mirrored room.

  The ghost touched his lips with a slim forefinger. “I’m something else as well, yes. I do display a bit too much initiative for a mere guide program. Though the model I’m based on is top of the line, extremely sophisticated. I can’t tell you exactly what I am, though, because I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” Again subvocally, carefully.

  “I know all sorts of things,” he said, and went to one of the dormer windows. “I know that a serving table in Middle Temple Hall is said to be made from the timbers of the Golden Hind; that you climb one hundred and twenty-eight steps to the walkways of Tower Bridge; that in Wood Street, right of Cheapside, is a plane tree thought to have been the one in which Wordsworth’s thrush sang loud.…” He spun suddenly to face her. “It isn’t, though, because the current tree was cloned from the original in 1998. I know all that, you see, and more, a very great deal more. I could, for instance, teach you the rudiments of snooker. That is what I am, or rather what I was intended to be, originally. But I’m something else as well, and very likely something to do with you. I don’t know what. I really don’t.”

  “You were a gift from my father. Do you communicate with him?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “You didn’t inform him of my departure?”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “I wasn’t aware of your having been away, until you activated me a moment ago.”

  “But you’ve been recording.…”

  “Yes, but not aware of it. I’m only ‘here’ when you activate me. Then I evaluate the current data.… One thing you can be fairly certain of, though, is that it simply isn’t possible to broadcast any sort of signal from this house without Swain’s snoops detecting it immediately.”

  “Could there be more of you, I mean another one, in the same unit?”

  “Interesting idea, but no, barring some harrowing secret breakthrough in technology. I’m pushing the current envelope a bit as it is, considering the size of my hardware. I know that from my store of general background information.”

  She looked down at the unit in her hand. “Lanier,” she said. “Tell me.”

  “Ten/twenty-five/sixteen: A.M.,” he said. Her head filled with disembodied voices.…

  PETAL: If you’ll follow me please, sir …

  SWAIN: Come into the billiard room.

  THIRD VOICE: You’d better have a reason for this, Swain. There are three Net men waiting in the car. Security will have your address in their database until hell freezes over.

  PETAL: Lovely car that is, sir, the Daimler. Take your coat?

  THIRD VOICE: What is it, Swain? Why couldn’t we meet at Brown’s?

  SWAIN: Take your coat off; Robin. She’s gone.

  THIRD VOICE: Gone?

  SWAIN: To the Sprawl. Early this morning.

  THIRD VOICE: But it isn’t time.…

  SWAIN: You think I sent her there?

  The man’s reply was hollow, indistinct, lost behind a closing door. “That was Lanier?” Kumiko asked silently.

  “Yes,” Colin replied. “Petal mentioned him by name in an earlier conversation. Swain and Lanier spent twenty-five minutes together.”

  Sound of a latch, movement.

  SWAIN: Bloody cock-up, not mine. I warned you about her, told you to warn them. Born killer, probably psychopathic …

  LANIER: And your problem, not mine. You need their product and my cooperation.

  SWAIN: And what’s your problem, Lanier? Why are you in this? Just to get Mitchell out of the way?

  LANIER: Where’s my coat?

  SWAIN: Petal, Mr. Lanier’s bloody coat.

  PETAL: Sir.

  LANIER: I have the impression they want your razorgirl as badly as they want Angie. She’s definitely part of the payoff. They’ll be taking her, too.

  SWAIN: Good luck to them, then. She’s already in position, in the Sprawl. Spoke with her on the phone an hour ago. I’ll be putting her together with my man over there, the one who’s been arranging for the … girl. And you’ll be going back over yourself?

  LANIER: This evening.

  SWAIN: Well, then, not to worry.

  LANIER: Goodbye, Swain.

  PETAL: He’s a right bastard, that one.

  SWAIN: I don’t like this, really.…

  PETAL: You like the goods though, don’t you?

  SWAIN: Can’t complain there, but why d’you think they want Sally as well?

  PETAL: Christ knows. They’re welcome to her.…

  SWAIN: They. I don’t like ‘theys’.…

  PETAL: They mightn’t be terribly happy to know she’d gone there on her own stick, with Yanaka’s daughter.…

  SWAIN: No. But we have Miss Yanaka back again. Tomorrow I’ll tell Sally that Prior’s in Baltimore, getting the girl into shape.…

  PETAL: That’s an ugly business, that is.…

  SWAIN: Bring a pot of coffee to the study.

  She lay on her back, eyes closed, Colin’s recordings unspooling in her head, direct input to the auditory nerves. Swain seemed to conduct the better part of his dealings in the billiard room, which meant that she heard people arriving and departing, heads and tails of conversations. Two men, one of whom might have been the red-faced man, held an interminable discussion of dog racing and tomorrow’s odds. She listened with special interest as Swain and the man from Special Branch (SB, Swain called it) settled an article of business directly beneath the marble bust, as the man was preparing to leave. She interrupted this segment half-a-dozen times to request clarification. Colin made educated guesses.

  “This is a very corrupt country,” she said at last, deeply shocked.

  “Perhaps no more than your own,” he said.

  “But what is Swain paying these people with?”

  “Information. I would say that our Mr. Swain has recently come into possession of a very high-grade source of intelligence and is busy converting it into power. On the basis of what we’ve heard, I’d hazard that this has probably been his line of work for some time. What’s apparent, though, is that he’s moving up, getting bigger. There’s internal evidence that he’s currently a much more important man than he was a week ago. Also, we have the fact of the expanded staff.…”

  “I must tell … my friend.”

  “Shears? Tell her what?”

  “What Lanier said. That she would be taken, along with Angela Mitchell.”

  “Where is she, then?”

  “The Sprawl. A hotel …”

  “Phone her. But not from here. D’you have money?”

  “A Mitsubank chip.”

  “No good in our phones, sorry. Have any coin?”

  She got up from the bed and sorted carefully through the odd bits of English money that had accumulated at the bottom of her purse. “Here,” she said, coming up with a thick gilt coin, “ten pounds.”

  “Need two of those to make a local call.” She tossed the brassy tenner back into her purse. “No, Colin. Not the phone. I know a better
way. I want to leave here. Now. Today. Will you help me?”

  “Certainly,” he said, “though I advise you not to.”

  “But I will.”

  “Very well. How do you propose to go about it?”

  “I’ll tell them,” she said, “that I need to go shopping.”

  27

  BAD LADY

  The woman must’ve gotten in sometime after midnight, she figured later, because it was after Prior came back with the crabs, the second bag of crabs. They really did have some good crabs in Baltimore, and coming off a run always gave her an appetite, so she’d talked him into going back for some more. Gerald kept coming in to change the derms on her arms; she’d give him her best goofy smile every time, squish the trank out of them when he’d gone, and then stick them back on. Finally Gerald said she should get some sleep; he put out the lights and turned down the fake window to its lowest setting, a bloodred sunset.

  When she was alone again, she slid her hand between the bed and the wall, found the shockrod in its hole in the foam.

  She fell asleep without meaning to, the red glow of the window like a sunset in Miami, and she must’ve dreamed of Eddy, or anyway of Hooky Green’s, dancing with somebody up there on the thirty-third floor, because when the crash woke her, she wasn’t sure where she was, but she had this very clear map of the way out of Hooky Green’s, like she knew she’d better take the stairs because there must be some kind of trouble.…

  She was half out of bed when Prior came through the door, like really through it, because it was still shut when he hit it. He came through it backward and it just went to splinters and honeycomb chunks of cardboard.

  She saw him hit the wall, and then the floor, and then he wasn’t moving anymore, and someone else was there in the doorway, backlit from the other room, and all she could see of the face were these two curves of reflected red light from that fake sunset.

  Pulled her legs back into bed and sank back against the wall, her hand sliding down to …

  “Don’t move, bitch.” There was something real scary about that voice, because it was too fucking cheerful, like throwing Prior through that door had been kind of a treat. “I mean really don’t move.…” And the woman was across the room in three strides, very close, so close that Mona felt the cold coming off the leather of the woman’s jacket.

  “Okay,” Mona said, “okay …”

  Then hands grabbed her, fast, and she was flat on her back, shoulders pressed down hard into the foam, and something—the shockrod—was right in front of her face.

  “Where’d you get this little thing?”

  “Oh,” Mona said, like it was something she might’ve seen once but forgotten about, “it was in my boyfriend’s jacket. I borrowed his jacket.…”

  Mona’s heart was pounding. There was something about those glasses.…

  “Did shithead know you had this little thing?”

  “Who?”

  “Prior,” the woman said, and let go of her, turning. Then she was kicking him, kicking Prior over and over, hard. “No,” she said, stopping as abruptly as she’d begun, “I don’t think Prior knew.”

  Then Gerald was in the doorway, just like nothing had happened, except he was looking ruefully at the part of the door that was still on the frame, rubbing his thumb over an edge of splintered laminate. “Coffee, Molly?”

  “Two coffees, Gerald,” the woman said, examining the shockrod. “Mine’s black.”

  Mona sipped her coffee and studied the woman’s clothes and hair while they waited for Prior to wake up. At least that’s what they seemed to be doing. Gerald was gone again.

  She wasn’t much like anybody Mona’d seen before; Mona couldn’t place her on the style map at all, except she must’ve had some money. The hair was European; Mona’d seen it like that in a magazine; she was pretty sure it wasn’t this season’s style anywhere, but it went okay with the glasses, which were insets, planted right in the skin. Mona’d seen a cabbie in Cleveland had those. And she wore this short jacket, very dark brown, too plain for Mona’s taste but obviously new, with a big white sheepskin collar, open now over a weird green thing trussed across her breasts and stomach like armor, which was what Mona figured it probably was, and jeans cut from some kind of gray-green mossy suede, thick and soft, and Mona thought they were the best thing about her outfit, she could’ve gone for a pair of those herself, except the boots spoiled them, these knee-high black boots, the kind bike racers wore, with thick yellow rubber soles and big straps across the insteps, chrome buckles all up and down, horrible clunky toes. And where’d she get that nail color, that burgundy? Mona didn’t think they even made that anymore.

  “What the hell are you looking at?”

  “Uh … your boots.”

  “So?”

  “They don’t make it with your pants.”

  “Wore ’em to kick the shit out of Prior.”

  Prior moaned on the floor and started trying to throw up. It made Mona feel kind of sick herself, so she said she was going to go to the bathroom.

  “Don’t try to leave.” The woman seemed to be watching Prior, over the rim of her white china cup, but with those glasses, it was hard to be sure.

  Somehow she found herself in the bathroom with her purse on her lap. She hurried, getting the hit together; didn’t grind it fine enough, so it burned the back of her throat, but like Lanette used to say, you don’t always have time for the niceties. And anyway, wasn’t that all a lot better now? There was a little shower in Gerald’s bathroom, but it looked like it hadn’t been used for a long time. She took a closer look and saw gray mold growing around the drain, and spots that looked like dried blood.

  When she came back, the woman was dragging Prior into one of the other rooms, pulling him by his feet. He had socks on, no shoes, Mona noticed now, like maybe he’d had his feet up to sleep. His blue shirt had blood on it and his face was all bruised.

  What Mona felt, as the rush kicked in, was a bright and innocent curiosity. “What are you doing?”

  “I think I’ll have to wake him up,” the woman said, like she was on the subway, talking about another passenger who was about to miss his stop. Mona followed her into the room where Gerald did his work, everything clean and hospital white; she watched as the woman got Prior up into a sort of chair like in a salon, with levers and buttons and things. It isn’t like she’s that strong, Mona thought, it’s like she knows which way to throw the weight. Prior’s head fell to the side as the woman fastened a black strap across his chest. Mona was starting to feel sorry for him, but then she remembered Eddy.

  “What is it?” The woman was filling a white plastic container with water from a chrome tap.

  Mona just kept trying to say it, feeling her heart race out of control on the wiz. He killed Eddy, she kept trying to say, but it wouldn’t come out. But then it must have, because the woman said, “Yeah, he’ll do that sort of thing … if you let him.” She threw the water over Prior, into his face and all down his shirt; his eyes snapped open and the white of the left one was solid red; the metal prongs of the shockrod snapped white sparks when the woman pressed it against the wet blue shirt. Prior screamed.

  Gerald had to get down on his hands and knees to pull her out from under the bed. He had cool, very gentle hands. She couldn’t remember how she’d gotten under there, but now everything was quiet. Gerald had on a gray topcoat and dark glasses.

  “You’re going with Molly now, Mona,” he said.

  She started to shake.

  “I think I’d better give you something for your nerves.”

  She jerked back, out of his grip. “No! Don’t fucking touch me!”

  “Leave it, Gerald,” the woman said from the door. “It’s time you go now.”

  “I don’t think you know what you’re doing,” he said, “but good luck.”

  “Thanks. Think you’ll miss the place?”

  “No. I was going to retire soon anyway.”

  “So was I,” the woman said, and th
en Gerald left, without even a nod for Mona.

  “Got any clothes?” the woman asked Mona. “Get ’em on. We’re leaving too.”

  Dressing, Mona found she couldn’t button her dress over her new breasts, so she left it open, putting Michael’s jacket on and zipping it up to her chin.

  28

  COMPANY

  Sometimes he just needed to stand there and look up at the Judge, or squat on the concrete beside the Witch. It held back the memory-stutter, to do that. Not the fugues, the real flashbacks, but this jerky unfocused feeling he got, like the memory tape kept slipping in his head, losing minute increments of experience … So he was doing that now, and it was working, and finally he noticed Cherry was there beside him.

  Gentry was up in the loft with the shape he’d captured, what he called a macroform node, and he’d hardly listened to what Slick had tried to tell him about the house and that whole place and Bobby the Count.

  So Slick had come down here to crouch next to an Investigator in the cold and dark, retracing all the things he’d done with so many different tools, and where he’d scrounged each part, and then Cherry reached out and touched his cheek with her cold hand.

  “You okay?” she asked. “I thought maybe it was happening to you again.…”

  “No. It’s just I gotta come down here, sometimes.”

  “He plugged you into the Count’s box, didn’t he?”

  “Bobby,” Slick said, “that’s his name. I saw him.”

  “Where?”

  “In there. It’s a whole world. There’s this house, like a castle or something, and he’s there.”

  “By himself?”

  “He said Angie Mitchell’s in there too.…”

  “Maybe he’s crazy. Is she?”

  “I didn’t see her. Saw a car he said was hers.”

  “She’s in some celebrity detox place in Jamaica, last I heard.”

  He shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He looked younger. Anybody’d look bad with all those tubes ’n’ shit in ’em. He figured Kid Afrika dumped him here because he got scared. He said if anybody comes looking for him, we jack him into the matrix.”

  “Why?”