Cyberpunk

by Victoria Blake

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—”

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  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.

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  “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.

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  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.”

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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