by Rudy Rucker
“What kind of business?” For a minute I really couldn’t remember.
“He say you company going need some Y9707 chip for robot.”
“Oh yes, I remember that. But I don’t work for a company anymore.”
“Maybe you tell somebody anyhow.”
“Maybe.” If Vinh Vo really had access to a big stash of cheap Y9707 chips, this could be an opportunity for me to play middleman and make some good bread. With the Adze and Veep kits on the market, the demand for Y9707s could run way ahead of the supply. Y9707s were wholesaling at twelve hundred bucks per chip and, I now recalled, Vinh had offered to sell me several hundred of them for $120 a chip. If I could find a way to resell them, I could make a thousand dollars profit on each chip. “Where would somebody reach Vinh Vo?”
Khanh Pham wrote a phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to me.
“Just out of theoretical curiosity, Khan, how does Vinh Vo get hold of his chips?”
“Many Vietnamese people who work in the fab and component plants give some chips to him. They bring chips home from assembly line. Vinh Vo is like a godfather to them.”
In other words Vinh Vo was running a protection racket that victimized his newly arrived fellow nationals. Those of them who were computer workers were allowed to pay Vinh Vo with chips instead of cash. Well, that explained how he could afford to sell the chips in the black market for one dollar on the ten. When Vinh had originally made me the offer, I’d been put off by the obvious criminality of the deal, but with my trials coming up and West West about to cut me loose, I had less and less to lose.
“I’ll think about calling him. Give my best to Nga.”
“She has two new boyfriend.” He giggled sputteringly and tossed his hair several times.
“Oh well!” I laughed along with him. He was a nice boy.
“Did you see my new motorcycle?” asked Khanh Pham. “Vinh Vo bought it for me!” There was indeed a black Kawasaki parked in front of the bakery.
“Congratulations!”
I took my sandwich down the street to a scuzzy bar called the Night Watch. This was not a yuppie watering hole like D. T. Finnegan’s; no, the Night Watch had black plywood walls, plastic furniture, and a resident motorcycle club: people with leather jackets that said “KNIGHTS OF THE NIGHT WATCH” on them. The Knights weren’t exactly Hell’s Angels—this was, after all, still Los Perros—but they were a fairly scurvy crew. Three of them were at a table in the rear: a fat man, a thin man, and a fat woman. I sat up at the bar to the left of a kid with shoulder-length brown hair. I ordered a beer and started in on my turkey croissant.
The wall to my left was covered with bright colored lights. There was a TV showing a vintage Porky Pig cartoon, a neon beer sign shaped like the Golden Gate Bridge, a 3-D magnetic pinball machine, a dollar-a-minute cyberspace game with a bicycle seat and handlebars, and a big Abbott wafer screen showing music videos from the Total Video Library in cyberspace. The current video was a horrible, yelling antique number captioned as being by somebody called Tom Jones singing something called “Delilah.” The bartender was lustily singing along.
“Jesus this is bad,” I couldn’t help saying. “This is the worst thing I’ve heard in my whole life.”
“The mid-twentieth century was a golden age for the vocal arts,” said the bartender. He was a blond, limp man with a mustache and a dirty T-shirt. He had a winningly sniggering way of talking. “Watch the finale. That’s when all the women throw their underwear onstage. It’s really choice.”
“I need another beer for this shit.”
“Punch up some country music after this, Lester,” twanged the boy next to me. “That’ll make us feel even more like drinkin’.” His voice trailed off at the end of every sentence. He had something on the bar in front of him, a little car or—I looked closer. It was a little car with the rubber head of a cow. This was the same boy who’d come up to me outside Queue’s gate. The bartender gave me another beer and drifted down to the other end of the bar to talk with the bikers.
“What’s up, doc?” said the boy to me, waggling his eyebrows. He tossed his head to get his rasta tangles out of his face. His thin lips pulled back in a stretching motion that was more wince than smile. His breath smelled of some unfamiliar chemical, and he looked zonked.
“Are you really Hex DEF6?” I’d taken the wrong approach in my last conversation with him. Though I was still angry about the voodoo cyberspace head trip he’d run on me back in the Antland of Fnoor, I tried to make my voice sound mild and admiring. The point was to get some information out of him.
“That’s not who I am,” he said with spaced-out precision. “Hex DEF6 was a gig. My name is Riscky Pharbeque and I’m from Fort Worth, Texas.” He stuck out his hand and I shook it.
“So who hired you to scare the shit out of me? Was it West West?”
“No, man, it was a guy called Dirk Blanda. Mattel Incorporated fronted him the money to burn you.”
“Dirk Blanda? My neighbor? The bodymapper who runs Dirk Blanda’s Personography? And—Mattel the toy company? I don’t get it.”
“It’s that Our American Home shit you did, old son. Perky Pat? You ripped off the CyberBarbie meshes Dirk did for Mattel, so they-all hired a phreak to burn you. Frontier justice, pardner. That’s how it goes. I picked the gig up off a phreak bulletin board. We call it the Burn Exchange, all kinds of kinky offers get posted there. But it was nothing personal, you wave?”
“Sure, Riscky, no problem,” I smiled. “But why was Hex DEF6 telling me to work for West West?”
“Well this was a real special gig. I got paid twice. Was supposed to get paid twice, anyhow. There was two rewards out on you, Jerzy. Blanda paid me up front to burn you, but a guy called Roger Coolidge said he’d pay me more to tell you to work for West West. Except he still hasn’t coughed up. He’s hog-stupid if he thinks he can short Riscky Pharbeque. I don’t much like Coolidge, and I might could burn him really bad.”
“That was really Roger there with us in Antland of Fnoor?” I remembered the weird gangster nightclub back room that the big ant had carried me to. Hex DEF6 had been there, and tuxedos of Roger and Susan Poker. Though when I’d asked Susan Poker about it, she’d insisted she was a computer illiterate who’d never been in cyberspace.
“That was Roger’s tuxedo all right, and he was in it—at least until I twisted him up. It was you, me, Roger and, oh yeah, Sue Poker. You know her, don’t you? Sue’s a cryp at Welsh & Tayke Realty. She knew your cyberspace access code, so I cut her in for fifteen percent. She wanted to watch me burn you, so I brought her along and slaved her tuxedo motions to the twitching of that big ant. Sue’s hot stuff under all that plastic.” Riscky Pharbeque cackled and then raised his voice to call to the bartender as Tom Jones reached his rutting, bellowing climax. “Come on, Lester, play some country next. Does Total Video got any like Charlie Daniels in all that old shit?”
“They’ve even got Van Halen, dude. Total Video rules.”
“Well git on it.”
“And give Riscky and me a round, Lester,” I called. “Two Coronas and two shots of tequila.”
“Thankee kindly,” said Riscky.
The bartender pressed a microphone button and asked the videoplayer for Charlie Daniels. The screen showed a grid of titled images and with Riscky’s loud advice, Lester tapped one of them. The music started. Lester served our drinks and went back to the bikers.
I raised my shot glass to Riscky Pharbeque in mock salute. “You’re a hell of a phreak, Riscky. As long as I’m asking questions, how about the GoMotion ants?”
“Wiggly little suckers. Hats off to you on that, Jerzy. All us phreaks are rooting for you.”
“I mean, how did you get an ant to swallow my hands and carry me to you?”
“Hellfire, Jerzy, I ain’t gonna give all my secrets away. If you want to know how to use the ants, go and ask them yourself.”
“I can’t. I don’t have a cyberdeck.”
“Business opp
ortunity!” twanged Riscky happily. He played his accent like a musical instrument. “I got a deck I can sell you from out of the trunk of my car.”
“How much?”
“It’s a forty-thousand-dollar Pemex model twelve. I ain’t had it but ten weeks. I’d be amenable to oh . . .” He regarded me narrowly, suddenly not seeming as drunk and stoned as I’d thought he was. “Nine hundred dollars cash. That’ll leave you about four hundred dollars in the bank.”
“Of course you know my bank balance?”
“I got an interest in you, Jerzy. You make a run across the street and get the cash from Wells Fargo and then I’ll move the deck to your Animata. Do you know how to connect to the moonroof satellite dish?”
“Well, sort of. Not really. But I want to.”
“I’ll help you for another hundred bucks. One thousand dollars for a Pemex cyberdeck twelve, next to new, fully configured, and hardware-installed on an invisible phreak patch to the Net. Deals don’t come much sweeter than that, Mister Rugby.”
“What’s the catch?”
“I don’t pay for the cyberdecks, old son. I just get ‘em delivered. I’m fixin’ to get me a Pemex thirteen delivered later today, so I might as well lay my old box off on you. I’ll have you up and running in an hour for one thousand dollars cash.”
The Charlie Daniels video ended and the floppy blond bartender started back up the bar toward us.
“Let’s do it, Mister Pharbeque,” I said.
Riscky waited in the bar while I got the money out of my bank. He’d been right about my balance: it was $1385. Just so I’d have some money in my pockets, I went ahead and took out thirteen hundred. Today was Tuesday, and on Friday my last paycheck from West West would come in. The last two weeks pay plus the four weeks severance pay would come to something like thirteen thousand dollars after taxes. Cash flow was all-important to me these days, as my credit cards had been canceled as soon as I’d been indicted for computer crime.
Riscky followed my car up to a deserted pull-out in the hills of Los Perros, about halfway to Queue’s. Within the hour, he had the Pemex cyberdeck installed in the trunk of my car right next to the map machine. The cyberdeck’s hookup to the Net was via the map machine’s antenna, which was a barely visible bull’s-eye of titanium rings embedded in the clear plastic of the Animata’s moonroof. The ring spacing was such that the pattern acted as a radio-wave Fresnel lens, able to transmit to and receive from satellites. Ordinarily the lens was only used to consult the navigational satellites, but with Riscky Pharbeque’s expertise, the system was soon tuned to the frequency of the cybernet communication satellites.
The Pemex twelve cyberdeck was awesome. It had a radio-connected headset that looked like a big pair of wraparound mirrorshades, and the control gloves were radio-linked as well.
“The deck can suck juice out of your car’s battery no matter if the car is off or on,” Riscky explained. “The glove and headset signals have a throw of four hundred feet. You can park your car and take the headset and gloves with you.”
“Does the deck always have to be on?” I asked. “Like overnight?”
“Naw, you can turn it on from the goggles, they’re sensitive to a certain sequence of taps. You do three fast taps, wait, then tap once, then wait, then tap four fast taps, then wait, and then tap one last time. That’s the code I set it to.”
I put on the goggles and tapped the Pharbeque three-one-four-one sequence on the temple. Ping, I was floating inside the familiar Bay Area Netport.
“I don’t have it set up for an office,” said Riscky half-apologetically. He was standing next to me. “We can’t use an office, ’cause this is an illegal connect. Turn her on and you pop up somewhere random in a given target space. I got the target set to the Netport. You can always change the target with the claim stake tool.”
I swung my head slowly back and forth. The visual effects were better than any I’d seen before—the resolution was incredibly high, and the updates were shockingly fast. There were no jaggies, no dithering, no lag time, no lurches, no compromises. What I saw was the purest and most convincing virtual reality I’d ever seen.
“It’s wonderful, Riscky. I didn’t know they made headsets this good.”
“Hell, Jerzy, I phreakified it is why it runs so good. This is an undocumented billion-pixel video mode. And look at this!” He tapped the other side of my headset in a five-nine-two-six tattoo, and suddenly it was as if I were looking through the headset at the dashboard of my car. I turned my head and saw Riscky. But the headset was opaque! Was this another dark dream, another voodoo cyberspace? I pulled the goggles off fast and looked at them. I hadn’t noticed before that there were two TV cameras like transparent glass pinheads set where my pupils would be.
“I call it stunglasses mode,” drawled Riscky. “You get a reality shunt going there, with real-world images being routed into cyberspace and back. You tap five-nine-two-six on the left temple to toggle it.”
“How am I going to remember both those four-digit sequences?”
“‘How I need a drink, alcoholic of course,’” said Riscky. “Count the letters in the words.”
“It’s pi!” I exclaimed, recognizing the mnemonic. “I love it! Here’s your money.”
Riscky took the money and cackled. His toy cow circled about in excited figure eights. “Go on in there and get even, Jerzy!” said Riscky. “Fuck Shit Up!” He got back in his car and drove off. I still had a half hour before I had to meet Gretchen. I put the headset back on and returned to the vast hall of the Bay Area Netport.
I flew over to a public rest room and made my way in past a gaggle of black-lipsticked grrls. I looked in the mirror to see what kind of user tuxedo Riscky had left on his machine? A silly tux, that’s what—I looked like a big, wheeled cart with two human hands and the imposing head of a Texas longhorn. The platonic ideal of Riscky’s toy.
“Hey, cow!” one of the grrls called to me. “Can we watch you take a piss?” She and her friends laughed like maniacs at this—not that tuxedos ever did take a piss, except in the farthest reaches of the specialty cyberporno arcades.
After staring at myself for awhile, I turned to look at the grrls, all pierced and leathered and tattooed. The one who’d called to me stepped forward and grabbed one of my horns. I felt it as a buzzing against the side of my head; apparently my new headset had touch-pads in its temples.
“I’m Bety Byte,” she said. “And you’re Riscky Pharbeque. We owe you a burn for what you did to the Cryp Club library, cow-patty.” She pulled out a little thing like a gun and shot it at me. Everything went black. At first I thought my system had crashed, but then when I flew forward, I saw that all Bety’s gun had done was to surround me with an opaque sphere.
As I flew out of the sphere, I tossed my head to hook one of my horns at Bety’s realistic icon, expecting my horn to pass harmlessly but perhaps intimidatingly through her. But Bety Byte had her surfaces custom-set for preemptive collision rejection, and my horn clattered off her with a vicious buzz on my temple. She popped her little geometry gun at me again, making things black again, and this time I just kept on going right out of the rest room and up toward the oversize bright pink and blue node of Magic Shell Mall, the cyberspace shopping mall where Gretchen had gone to Nordstrom’s.
Riscky must have had some kind of valid credit number installed in his system, for the Magic Shell node allowed me to enter. I popped out of the Bay Area Netport node that lay at the center of the mall. The green-and-gray light of the Netport node flickered behind me. All over the inner surface of the great Magic Shell were walkways and the shapes of stores.
I arced along a space path toward where the ant had taken me last month, to the vacant lot between the video store and the stockbroker: Total Video and Gibb & Gibb Stocks. I thudded down on my virtual wheels and trundled across the blank surface till I met a seam where two Magic Shell facets met. I turned and followed the seam to a shallow corner where three quadrilaterals met five narrow triang
les; this was the same corner as before. I peered at the corner, but I was too big to see if there still was a little round-off error hole in it.
I needed to shrink, but—I now realized—I didn’t know how. Perhaps Riscky already had put a “Shrink” hand gesture into his system library? I said “Show Tools,” out loud and, yes, Riscky’s system accepted this standard cyberspace command.
Several shapes appeared in the air before me—a telephone, a video camera, a claim stake, a typewriter, a calculator, an atlas, a can of spraypaint, a Swiss knife, a jet engine—but there was nothing that seemed obviously designed to change my size. I pried at the corner in the floor with my head’s long cowhorn, but it wouldn’t give. Maybe the Swiss knife? I was just opening out the can-opener blade when the grrls caught up with me.
“Bad cow!” yelled Bety Byte. She and her grrlfriends were touching down all around me. “Shoo, Riscky!” yelled one of them, and fired another geometry gun at me. I found myself enclosed inside a yellow tetrahedron, unable to see anything but my tool icons. I was going to have to get a new, shrinkable tuxedo and come back. I grabbed the jet engine, pointed the exhaust down toward my feet and pushed the button on its side. ZZZZOOOW! I burst out of the tetrahedron and flashed in along a radius straight toward the Netport node at the mall’s center.
When I popped out into the Netport, I stopped, took off the headset, and turned off the deck. Three-one-four-one. “How I need a.” I had to get a new tuxedo that had a control to make it shrink, and that didn’t make people think I was Riscky Pharbeque.
Since Riscky’s configuration didn’t have a virtual office where I could hack the system, the simplest thing would be to just buy a size-controllable tuxedo from Dirk Blanda’s Personography. I had a bone to pick with Dirk Blanda about his having hired Riscky to burn me, though I had to admit there was a sort of justice in it.
Tuxedos sold for seven hundred dollars, and I only had three hundred. Dirk Blanda was certainly the person to go to, unless he was still mad about the CyberBarbie meshes I’d ripped off. Getting him to make me a tux would be hard, but getting him to do it cut-rate might be impossible.
