Cyberpunk

by Victoria Blake

help spread information about two things, the first being the 911 conspiracy,

  and the second being a government-operated data-center, Big Brother style,

  outside Salt Lake City.

  The world seems to keep getting weirder and weirder, with no end in sight.

  Thank you to everybody who helped with story suggestions, with author

  suggestions, and with new ways to look at the subject. But thank you especially to the authors in this collection, and to the authors who have written and

  continue to write cyberpunk, knowingly or not. You have given us a new view

  on the world, and a new voice to the great tech experiment that defines our

  age. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

  013

  JOHNNY MNEMONIC

  By William Gibson

  I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis

  socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think

  you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though,

  you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. I’d

  had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock on the lathe, and

  then load them myself; I’d had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions

  for hand-loading cartridges; I’d had to build a lever-action press to seat the

  primers—all very tricky. But I knew they’d work.

  The meet was set for the Drome at 2300, but I rode the tube three stops

  past the closest platform and walked back. Immaculate procedure.

  I checked myself out in the chrome siding of a coffee kiosk, your basic

  sharp-faced Caucasoid with a ruff of stiff, dark hair. The girls at Under the

  Knife were big on Sony Mao, and it was getting harder to keep them from

  adding the chic suggestion of epicanthic folds. It probably wouldn’t fool Ralfi Face, but it might get me next to his table.

  The Drome is a single narrow space with a bar down one side and tables

  along the other, thick with pimps and handlers and an arcane array of dealers.

  The Magnetic Dog Sisters were on the door that night, and I didn’t relish

  trying to get out past them if things didn’t work out. They were two meters

  tall and thin as greyhounds. One was black and the other white, but aside

  from that they were as nearly identical as cosmetic surgery could make them.

  They’d been lovers for years and were bad news in the tussle. I was never

  quite sure which one had originally been male.

  Ralfi was sitting at his usual table. Owing me a lot of money. I had hundreds

  of megabytes stashed in my head on an idiot/savant basis—information I had

  no conscious access to. Ralfi had left it there. He hadn’t, however, come back

  for it. Only Ralfi could retrieve the data, with a code phrase of his own

  invention. I’m not cheap to begin with, but my overtime on storage is

  astronomical. And Ralfi had been very scarce.

  WILLIAM GIBSON

  Then I’d heard that Ralfi Face wanted to put out a contract on me. So I’d

  arranged to meet him in the Drome, but I’d arranged it as Edward Bax,

  clandestine importer, late of Rio and Peking.

  The Drome stank of biz, a metallic tang of nervous tension. Muscle-boys

  scattered through the crowd were flexing stock parts at one another and

  trying on thin, cold grins, some of them so lost under superstructures of

  muscle graft that their outlines weren’t really human.

  Pardon me. Pardon me, friends. Just Eddie Bax here, Fast Eddie the

  Importer, with his professionally nondescript gym bag, and please ignore this

  slit, just wide enough to admit his right hand.

  Ralfi wasn’t alone. Eighty kilos of blond California beef perched alertly in

  the chair next to his, martial arts written all over him.

  Fast Eddie Bax was in the chair opposite them before the beef’s hands were

  off the table. “You black belt?” I asked eagerly. He nodded, blue eyes running

  an automatic scanning pattern between my eyes and my hands. “Me too,” I

  said. “Got mine here in the bag.” And I shoved my hand through the slit and

  thumbed the safety off. Click. “Double twelve-gauge with the triggers wired

  together.”

  “That’s a gun,” Ralfi said, putting a plump, restraining hand on his boy’s

  taut blue nylon chest. “Johnny has an antique firearm in his bag.” So much

  for Edward Bax.

  I guess he’d always been Ralfi Something or Other, but he owed his acquired

  surname to a singular vanity. Built something like an overripe pear, he’d worn

  the once-famous face of Christian White for twenty years—Christian White

  of the Aryan Reggae Band, Sony Mao to his generation, and final champion

  of race rocks. I’m a whiz at trivia.

  Christian White: classic pop face with a singer’s high-definition muscles,

  chiseled cheekbones. Angelic in one light, handsomely depraved in another.

  But Ralfi’s eyes lived behind that face, and they were small and cold and

  black.

  “Please,” he said, “let’s work this out like businessmen.” His voice was

  marked by a horrible prehensile sincerity, and the corners of his beautiful

  Christian White mouth were always wet. “Lewis here,” nodding in the

  beefboy’s direction, “is a meatball.” Lewis took this impassively, looking like something built from a kit. “You aren’t a meatball, Johnny.”

  016

  JOHNNY MNEMONIC

  “Sure I am, Ralfi, a nice meatball chock-full of implants where you can

  store your dirty laundry while you go off shopping for people to kill me. From

  my end of this bag, Ralfi, it looks like you’ve got some explaining to do.”

  “It’s this last batch of product, Johnny.” He sighed deeply. “In my role as

  broker—”

  “Fence,” I corrected.

  “As broker, I’m usually very careful as to sources.”

  “You buy only from those who steal the best. Got it.”

  He sighed again. “I try,” he said wearily, “not to buy from fools. This time,

  I’m afraid, I’ve done that.” Third sigh was the cue for Lewis to trigger the

  neural disruptor they’d taped under my side of the table.

  I put everything I had into curling the index finger of my right hand, but I

  no longer seemed to be connected to it. I could feel the metal of the gun and

  the foam-padded tape I’d wrapped around the stubby grip, but my hands were

  cool wax, distant and inert. I was hoping Lewis was a true meatball, thick

  enough to go for the gym bag and snag my rigid trigger finger, but he wasn’t.

  “We’ve been very worried about you, Johnny. Very worried. You see, that’s

  Yakuza property you have there. A fool took it from them, Johnny. A dead fool.”

  Lewis giggled.

  It all made sense then, an ugly kind of sense, like bags of wet sand settling

  around my head. Killing wasn’t Ralfi’s style. Lewis wasn’t even Ralfi’s style.

  But he’d got himself stuck between the Sons of the Neon Chrysanthemum

  and something that belonged to them—or, more likely, something of theirs

  that belonged to someone else. Ralfi, of course, could use the code phrase to

  throw me into idiot/savant, and I’d spill their hot program without

  remembering a single quarter tone. For a fence like Ralf
i, that would ordinarily have been enough. But not for the Yakuza. The Yakuza would know about

  Squids, for one thing, and they wouldn’t want to worry about one lifting

  those dim and permanent traces of their program out of my head. I didn’t

  know very much about Squids, but I’d heard stories, and I made it a point

  never to repeat them to my clients. No, the Yakuza wouldn’t like that; it

  looked too much like evidence. They hadn’t got where they were by leaving

  evidence around. Or alive.

  Lewis was grinning. I think he was visualizing a point just behind my

  forehead and imagining how he could get there the hard way.

  017

  WILLIAM GIBSON

  “Hey,” said a low voice, feminine, from somewhere behind my right

  shoulder, “you cowboys sure aren’t having too lively a time.”

  “Pack it, bitch,” Lewis said, his tanned face very still. Ralfi looked blank.

  “Lighten up. You want to buy some good free base?” She pulled up a chair

  and quickly sat before either of them could stop her. She was barely inside my

  fixed field of vision, a thin girl with mirrored glasses, her dark hair cut in a rough shag. She wore black leather, open over a T-shirt slashed diagonally

  with stripes of red and black. “Eight thou a gram weight.”

  Lewis snorted his exasperation and tried to slap her out of the chair.

  Somehow he didn’t quite connect, and her hand came up and seemed to

  brush his wrist as it passed. Bright blood sprayed the table. He was clutching

  his wrist white-knuckle tight, blood trickling from between his fingers.

  But hadn’t her hand been empty?

  He was going to need a tendon stapler. He stood up carefully, without

  bothering to push his chair back. The chair toppled backward, and he stepped

  out of my line of sight without a word.

  “He better get a medic to look at that,” she said. “That’s a nasty cut.”

  “You have no idea,” said Ralfi, suddenly sounding very tired, “the depths of

  shit you have just gotten yourself into.”

  “No kidding? Mystery. I get real excited by mysteries. Like why your friend

  here’s so quiet. Frozen, like. Or what this thing here is for,” and she held up the little control unit that she’d somehow taken from Lewis. Ralfi looked ill.

  “You, ah, want maybe a quarter-million to give me that and take a walk?”

  A fat hand came up to stroke his pale, lean face nervously.

  “What I want,” she said, snapping her fingers so that the unit spun and

  glittered, “is work. A job. Your boy hurt his wrist. But a quarter’ll do for a

  retainer.”

  Ralfi let his breath out explosively and began to laugh, exposing teeth that

  hadn’t been kept up to the Christian White standard. Then she turned the

  disruptor off.

  “Two million,” I said.

  “My kind of man,” she said, and laughed. “What’s in the bag?”

  “A shotgun.”

  “Crude.” It might have been a compliment.

  Ralfi said nothing at all.

  018

  JOHNNY MNEMONIC

  “Name’s Millions. Molly Millions. You want to get out of here, boss? People

  are starting to stare.” She stood up. She was wearing leather jeans the color

  of dried blood.

  And I saw for the first time that the mirrored lenses were surgical inlays,

  the silver rising smoothly from her high cheekbones, sealing her eyes in their

  sockets. I saw my new face twinned there.

  “I’m Johnny,” I said. “We’re taking Mr. Face with us.”

  He was outside, waiting. Looking like your standard tourist tech, in plastic

  zoris and a silly Hawaiian shirt printed with blowups of his firm’s most popular microprocessor; a mild little guy, the kind most likely to wind up drunk on

  sake in a bar that puts out miniature rice crackers with seaweed garnish. He

  looked like the kind who sing the corporate anthem and cry, who shake hands

  endlessly with the bartender. And the pimps and the dealers would leave him

  alone, pegging him as innately conservative. Not up for much, and careful

  with his credit when he was.

  The way I figured it later, they must have amputated part of his left thumb,

  somewhere behind the first joint, replacing it with a prosthetic tip, and cored the stump, fitting it with a spool and socket molded from one of the Ono-Sendai diamond analogs. Then they’d carefully wound the spool with three

  meters of monomolecular filament.

  Molly got into some kind of exchange with the Magnetic Dog Sisters,

  giving me a chance to usher Ralfi through the door with the gym bag pressed

  lightly against the base of his spine. She seemed to know them. I heard the

  black one laugh.

  I glanced up, out of some passing reflex, maybe because I’ve never got used

  to it, to the soaring arcs of light and the shadows of the geodesics above

  them. Maybe that saved me.

  Ralfi kept walking, but I don’t think he was trying to escape. I think he’d

  already given up. Probably he already had an idea of what we were up against.

  I looked back down in time to see him explode.

  Playback on full recall shows Ralfi stepping forward as the little tech sidles

  out of nowhere, smiling. Just a suggestion of a bow, and his left thumb falls

  off. It’s a conjuring trick. The thumb hangs suspended. Mirrors? Wires? And

  019

  WILLIAM GIBSON

  Ralfi stops, his back to us, dark crescents of sweat under the armpits of his

  pale summer suit. He knows. He must have known. And then the joke-shop

  thumb tip, heavy as lead, arcs out in a lighting yo-yo trick, and the invisible thread connecting it to the killer’s hand passes laterally through Ralfi’s skull, just above his eyebrows, whips up, and descends, slicing the pear-shaped

  torso diagonally from shoulder to rib cage. Cuts so fine that no blood flows

  until synapses misfire and the first tremors surrender the body to gravity.

  Ralfi tumbled apart in a pink cloud of fluids, the three mismatched sections

  rolling forward onto the tiled pavement. In total silence.

  I brought the gym bag up, and my hand convulsed. The recoil nearly broke

  my wrist.

  It must have been raining; ribbons of water cascaded from a ruptured geodesic

  and spattered on the tile behind us. We crouched in the narrow gap between

  a surgical boutique and an antique shop. She’d just edged one mirrored eye

  around the corner to report a single Volks module in front of the Drome, red

  lights flashing. They were sweeping Ralfi up. Asking questions.

  I was covered in scorched white fluff. The tennis socks. The gym bag was a

  ragged plastic cuff around my wrist. “I don’t see how the hell I missed him.”

  “’Cause he’s fast, so fast.” She hugged her knees and rocked back and forth

  on her bootheels. “His nervous system’s jacked up. He’s factory custom.” She

  grinned and gave a little squeal of delight. “I’m gonna get that boy. Tonight.

  He’s the best, number one, top dollar, state of the art.”

  “What you’re going to get, for this boy’s two million, is my ass out of here.

  Your boyfriend back there was mostly grown in a vat in Chiba City. He’s a

  Yakuza assassin.”

  “Chiba. Yeah. See, Molly’s been Chiba, too.” And she showed me her hands,

  fingers slightly spread. Her fingers were slender, tapered, very white against
the polished burgundy nails. Ten blades snicked straight out from their recesses

  beneath her nails, each one a narrow, double-edged scalpel in pale blue steel.

  I’d never spent much time in Nighttown. Nobody there had anything to pay

  me to remember, and most of them had a lot they paid regularly to forget.

  020

  JOHNNY MNEMONIC

  Generations of sharpshooters had clipped away at the neon until the

  maintenance crews gave up. Even at noon the arcs were soot-black against

  faintest pearl.

  Where do you go when the world’s wealthiest criminal order is feeling for

  you with calm, distant fingers? Where do you hide from the Yakuza, so

  powerful that it owns comsats and at least three shuttles? The Yakuza is a

  true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I was born,

  the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse.

  Molly had an answer: you hide in the Pit, in the lowest circle, where any

  outside influence generates swift, concentric ripples of raw menace. You hide

  in Nighttown. Better yet, you hide above Nighttown, because the Pit’s

  inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown

  never sees, sweating under its own firmament of acrylic resin, up where the

  Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles, black-market cigarettes dangling

  from their lips.

  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