Cyberpunk
Page 42
for homicide, for gang torture, or anything. No major psychopaths. Not a bad
cell to be in.
“You Jerome-X, really?” Swish fluted. She (Jerome always thought of a
queen as she and her, out of respect for the tilt of her consciousness) was
probably Filipino; had her face girled up at a cheap clinic. Cheeks built up for a heart shape, eyes rounded, lips filled out, tits looking like there were a
couple of tin funnels under her jammies. Some of the collagen they’d injected
to fill out her lips had shifted its bulk so her lower lip was lopsided. One
cheekbone was a little higher than the other. A karmic revenge on at least
some of malekind, Jerome thought, for forcing women into girdles and
footbinding and anorexia. What did this creature use her chip for, besides
getting high?
“Oooh, Jerome-X! I saw your tag before on the TV. The one when your face
kind of floated around the President’s head and some printout words came
out of your mouth and blocked her face out. God, she’s such a cunt.”
“What words did he block her out with?” Eddie asked.
“I think . . . ‘Would you know a liar if you heard one anymore?’ That’s what
it was!” Swish said. “It was sooo perfect, because that cunt wanted that war
to go on forever, you know she did. And she lies about it, ooh God she lies.”
“You just think she’s a cunt because you want one,” Eddie said, dropping his pants to use the toilet. He talked loudly to cover up the noise of it. “You want one and you can’t afford it. I think the Prez was right, the fucking Mexican
People’s Republic is jammin’ our borders, sending commie agents in—”
352
WOLVES OF THE PLATEAU
Swish said, “Oh, God, he’s a Surf Nazi—but God yes, I want one—I want
her cunt. That bitch doesn’t know how to use it anyway. Honey, I know how I’d use that thing—” Swish stopped abruptly and shivered, hugged herself.
Using her long purple nails, she reached up and pried loose a flap of skin
behind her ear, plucked out her chip. She wet it, adjusted its feed mode, put
it back in, tapping it with the activation mouse under a nail. She pressed
the flap shut. Her eyes glazed as she adjusted. She could get high on the
chip-impulses for maybe twenty-four hours and then it’d kill her. She’d
have to go cold turkey or die. Or get out. And maybe she’d been doing it
for a while now . . .
None of them would be allowed to post bail. They’d each get the two years
mandatory minimum sentence. Illegal augs, the feds thought, were getting
out of hand. Black-market chip implants were good for playing havoc with
the state database lottery; used by bookies of all kinds; used to keep accounts where the IRS couldn’t find them unless they cornered you physically and
broke your code; the aug chips were used to out-think banking computers,
and for spiking cash machines; used to milk the body, prod the brain into
authorizing the secretion of betaendorphins and ACTH and adrenaline and
testosterone and other biochemical toys; used to figure the odds at casinos;
used to compute the specs for homemade designer drugs; used by the mob’s
street dons to play strategy and tactics; used by the kid gangs for the same
reasons; used for illegal congregations on the Plateau.
It was the Plateau, Jerome thought, that really scared the shit out of the
feds. It had possibilities.
It was way beyond the fucking Internet; it was past the Deep Internet; it
was even beyond the Grid.
The trashcan dragged in a cot for the extra man, shoved it folded under the
door, and blared, “Lights out, all inmates are required to be i-i-in their bu-
unks-s-s . . .” Its voice was failing.
After the trashcan and the light had gone, they climbed off their bunks and
sat hunkered in a circle on the floor.
They were on chips, but not transmission-linked to one another. Jacked-up
on the chips, they communicated in a spoken shorthand.
353
JOHN SHIRLEY
“Bull,” Bones was saying. “Door.” He was a voice in the darkness; a
scarecrow of shadow.
“Time,” Jessie said.
“Compatibility? Know?” Eddie said.
Jerome said, “Noshee!” Snorts of laughter from the others.
“Link check,” Bones said.
“Models?” Jessie said.
Then they joined in an incantation of numbers.
It was a fifteen-minute conversation in less than a minute.
Translated, the foregoing conversation went: “It’s bullshit, you get past the
trashcan, there’s human guards, you can’t reprogram them.”
“But at certain hours,” Jessie told him, “there’s only one on duty. They’re
used to seeing the can bring people in and out. They won’t question it till
they try to confirm it. By then we’ll be on their ass.”
“We might not be compatible,” Eddie had pointed out. “You understand,
compatible?”
“Oh, hey, man, I think we can comprehend that,” Jerome said, making the others snort with laughter. Eddie wasn’t liked much.
Then Bones had said, “The only way to see if we’re compatible is to do a
systems link. We got the links, we got the thinks, like the man says. It’s either the chain that holds us in, or it’s the chain that pulls us out.”
Jerome’s scalp tightened. A systems link. A mini-Plateau. Sharing
minds. Brutal intimacy. Maybe some fallout from the Plateau. He wasn’t
ready for it.
If it went sour, he could get time tacked onto his sentence for attempted
jailbreak. And somebody might get dusted. They might have to kill a human
guard. Jerome had once punched a dealer in the nose, and the spurt of blood
had made him sick. He couldn’t kill anyone. But . . . he had shit for
alternatives. He knew he wouldn’t make it through two years anyway, when
they sent him up to the Big One.
The Big One’d grind him up for sure. They’d find his chip there, and it’d
piss them off. They’d let the bulls rape him and give him the New Virus; he’d
flip out from being locked in and chipless, and they’d put him under Aversion
Rehab and burn him out.
Jerome savaged a thumbnail with his incisors. Sent to the Big One.
354
WOLVES OF THE PLATEAU
He’d been trying not to think about it. Making himself take it one day at
a time. But now he had to look at the alternatives. His stomach twisted itself
to punish him for being so stupid. For getting into dealing augments so he
could finance a big transer. Why? A transer didn’t get him anything but his face pirated onto local TV for maybe twenty seconds. He’d thrown himself
away trying to get it . . .
Why was it so fucking important? his stomach demanded, wringing itself vindictively.
“Thing is,” Bones said, “we could all be cruisin’ into a setup. Some kind of
sting thing. Maybe it’s a little too weird how the police prober let us all
through.”
(Someone listening would have heard him say, “Sting, funny luck.”)
Jessie snorted. “I tol’ you, man. The prober is paid off. They letting them all through because some of them are mob. I know that, because I’m part of the
thing. We deal wid the Russians. Okay?”
(“Probe greased, fa-me.”)
“You with the mob?�
� Bones asked.
(“You’m?”)
“You got it. Just a dealer. But I know where a half million Newbux wortha
augshit is, so they going to get me out if I do my part. The way the system is set up, the prober had to let everyone through. His boss thinks we got our chips
taken out when they arraigned us; sometimes they do it that way. This time it was supposed to be the jail surgeon. By the time they catch up their own red tape, we get outta here. Now listen—we can’t do the trashcan without we all get into it, because we haven’t got enough K otherwise. So who’s in, for fuck’s sake?”
He’d said, “Low, half mill, bluff surgeon, there here, twip, all-none, who
yuh fucks?”
Something in his voice skittered with claws behind smoked glass: he was
getting testy, irritable from the chip adjustments for his nicotine habit, maybe other adjustments: the side effects of liberal cerebral self-modulating burning through a threadbare nervous system.
The rest of the meeting, translated . . .
“I dunno,” Eddie said. “I thought I’d do my time, ’cause if it goes sour—”
“Hey man,” Jessie said, “I can take your fuckin’ chip. And be out before they notice your ass don’t move no more.”
355
JOHN SHIRLEY
“The man’s right,” Swish said. Her pain-suppression system was unraveling,
axon by axon, and she was running out of adjust. “Let’s just do it, okay?
Please? Okay? I gotta get out. I feel like I wish I was dogshit so I could be
something better.”
“I can’t handle two years in the Big, Eddie, and I’ll do what I gotta, dudeski,”
Jerome heard himself say, realizing he was helping Jessie threaten Eddie.
Amazed at himself. Not his style.
“It’s all of us or nobody, Eddie,” Bones said.
Eddie was quiet for a while.
Jerome had turned off his chip, because it was thinking endlessly about
Jessie’s plan, and all it came up with was an ugly model of the risks. You had
to know when to go with intuition.
Jerome was committed. And he was standing on the brink of link. The time
was now, starting with Jessie.
Jessie was operator. He picked the order. First Eddie, to make sure about him. Then Jerome. Maybe because he had Jerome scoped for a refugee from
the middle class, an anomaly here, and Jerome might try and raise the Heat
on his chip, make a deal. Once they had him linked in, he was locked up.
After Jerome, it’d be Bones and then Swish.
They held hands, so that the link signal, transmitted from the chip using the
electric field generated by the brain, would be carried with the optimum fidelity.
He heard them exchange frequency designates, numbers strung like beads
in the darkness, and heard the hiss of suddenly indrawn breaths as Jessie and
Eddie linked in. And he heard, “Let’s go, Jerome.”
Jerome’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, the night giving up some of its
buried light, and Jerome could just make a crude outline of Jessie’s features
like a charcoal rubbing from an Aztec carving.
Jerome reached to the back of his own head, found the glue-tufted hairs
that marked his flap, and pulled the skin away from the chip’s jack unit. He
tapped the chip. It didn’t take. He tapped it again, and this time he felt the
shift in his bioelectricity; felt it hum between his teeth.
Jerome’s chip communicated with his brain via an interface of nano-print
configured rhodopsin protein; the ribosomes borrowing neurohumoral
356
WOLVES OF THE PLATEAU
transmitters from the brain’s blood supply, reordering the transmitters so that they carried a programmed pattern of ion releases for transmission across
synaptic gaps to the brain’s neuronal dendrites; the chip using magnetic
resonance holography to collate with brain-stored memories and psychological
trends. Declaiming to itself the mythology of the brain; reenacting on its
silicon stage the Legends of his subjective world history.
Jerome closed his eyes and looked into the back of his eyelids. The digital
read-out was printed in luminous green across the darkness. He focused on
the cursor, concentrated so it moved up to ACCESS. He subverbalized,
“Open frequency.” The chip heard his practiced subverbalization, and
numbers appeared on the back of his eyelids: 63391212.70. He read them out
to the others and they picked up his frequency. Almost choking on the word,
knowing what it would bring, he told the chip: “Open.”
It opened to the link. He’d only done it once before. It was illegal, and he
was secretly glad it was illegal because it scared him. “They’re holding the
Plateau back,” his brain-chip wholesaler had told him, “because they’re
scared of what worldwide electronic telepathy might bring down on them.
Like, everyone will collate information, use it to see through the bastards’
game, throw the assbites out of office.”
Maybe that was the real reason. It was something the power brokers
couldn’t control. But there were other reasons.
Reasons like a strikingly legitimate fear of people going mad.
All Jerome and the others wanted was a sharing of processing capabilities.
Collaborative calculation. But the chips weren’t designed to filter out the
irrelevant input before it reached the user’s cognition level. Before the chip
had done its filtering, the two poles of the link—Jerome and Jessie—would
each see the swarming hive of the other’s total consciousness. Would see how
the other perceived themselves to be, and then objectively, as they really
were.
He saw Jessie as a grid and as a holographic entity. He braced himself and
the holograph came at him, an abstract tarantula of computer-generated
color and line, scrambling down over him . . . and for an instant it crouched
in the seat of his consciousness: Jessie. Jesus Chaco.
Jessie was a family man. He was a patriarch, a protector of his wife and six
kids (six kids!) and his widowed sister’s four kids and of the poor children of 357
JOHN SHIRLEY
his barrio. He was a muddied painting of his father, who had fled the social
forest fire of Mexico’s civil war between the drug cartels and the government,
spiriting his capital to Los Angeles where he’d sown it into the black market.
Jessie’s father had been killed defending territory from the Russian-American
mob; Jessie compromised with the mob to save his father’s business, and
loathed himself for it. Wanted to kill their bosses; had to work side by side
with them. Perceived his wife as a functional pet, an object of adoration who
was the very apotheosis of her fixed role. To imagine her doing other than
child-rearing and keeping house would be to imagine the sun become a
snowball, the moon become a monkey. Jessie’s family insistently clung to the
old, outdated roles.
And Jerome glimpsed Jessie’s undersides; Jesus Chaco’s self-image with its
outsized penis and impossibly spreading shoulders, sitting in a perfect and
shining cherry automobile, always the newest and most luxurious model, the
automotive throne from which he surveyed his kingdom. Jerome saw guns
emerging from the grill of the car to splash Jessie’s enemies apart with his
unceasing ammunition . . . It w
as a Robert Williams cartoon capering at the
heart of Jessie’s unconscious . . . Jessie saw himself as Jerome saw him; the
electronic mirrors reflecting one another. Jessie cringed.
Jerome saw himself then, reflected back from Jessie.
He saw Jerome-X on a video screen with lousy vertical hold; wobbling,
trying to arrange its pixels firmly and losing them. A figure of mewling
inconsequence; a brief flow of electrons that might diverge left or right like
spray from a water hose depressed with the thumb. Raised in a high-security
condo village, protected by cameras and computer lines to private security
thugs; raised in a media-windowed womb, with PCs and VCRs and a thousand
varieties of video games; shaped by cable TV and fantasy rental; sexuality
imprinted by sneaking his parents’ badly hidden cache of brainsex files. And
in stations from around the world, seeing the same StarFaces appear on
channel after channel as the star’s fame spread like a stain across the
frequency bands. Seeing the Star’s World Self crystallizing; the media figure
coming into definition against the backdrop of media competition, becoming
real in this electronic collective unconscious.
Becoming real, himself, in his own mind, simply because he’d appeared on
a few thousand TV screens, through video tagging, transer graffiti. Growing
358
WOLVES OF THE PLATEAU
up with a sense that media events were real and personal events were not.
Anything that didn’t happen on the Grid didn’t happen. Even as he hated
conventional programming, even as he regarded it as the cud of ruminants,
still the net and tv and di-vees defined his sense of personal unreality; and
left him unfinished.
Jerome saw Jerome: perceiving himself unreal. Jerome: scamming a transer,
creating a presence via video graffiti. Thinking he was doing it for reasons of radical statement. Seeing, now, that he was doing it to make himself feel
substantial, to superimpose himself on the Media Grid . . .
And then Eddie’s link was there, Eddie’s computer model sliding down over
Jerome like a mudslide. Eddie seeing himself as a Legendary Wanderer, a rebel,
a homemade mystic; his fantasy parting to reveal an anal-expulsive sociopath;
a whiner perpetually scanning for someone to blame for his sour luck.
Suddenly Bones tumbled into the link; a complex worldview that was a sort