The room was large. He sat up. The room was empty, aside from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it. Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel firedoor. The walls were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art.
He was home.
He swung his feet to the floor. It was made of little blocks of wood, some missing, others loose. His head ached. He remembered Amsterdam, another room, in the Old City section of the Centrum, buildings centuries old. Molly back from the canal's edge with orange juice and eggs. Armitage off on some cryptic foray, the two of them walking alone past Dam Square to a bar she knew on a Damrak thoroughfare. Paris was a blurred dream. Shopping. She'd taken him shopping.
He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that lay at his feet, and knelt beside the bags. The first one he opened was Molly's: neatly folded clothing and small expensive-looking gadgets. The second was stuffed with things he didn't remember buying: books, tapes, a simstim deck, clothing with French and Italian labels. Beneath a green t-shirt, he discovered a flat, origami-wrapped package, recycled Japanese paper.
The paper tore when he picked it up; a bright nine-pointed star fell -to stick upright in a crack in the parquet.
`Souvenir,' Molly said. `I noticed you were always looking at 'em.' He turned and saw her sitting crosslegged on the bed, sleepily scratching her stomach with burgundy nails.
`Someone's coming later to secure the place,' Armitage said. He stood in the open doorway with an old-fashioned magnetic key in his hand. Molly was making coffee on a tiny German stove she took from her bag.
`I can do it,' she said. `I got enough gear already. Infrascan perimeter, screamers...'
`No,' he said, closing the door. `I want it tight.'
`Suit yourself.' She wore a dark mesh t-shirt tucked into baggy black cotton pants.
`You ever the heat, Mr.~ Armitage?' Case asked, from where he sat, his back against a wall.
Armitage was no taller than Case, but with his broad shoulders and military posture he seemed to fill the doorway. He wore a somber Italian suit; in his right hand he held a briefcase of soft black calf. The Special Forces earring was gone. The handsome, inexpressive features offered the routine beauty of the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past decade's leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes heightened the effect of a mask. Case began to regret the question.
`Lots of Forces types wound up cops, I mean. Or corporate security,' Case added uncomfortably. Molly handed him a steaming mug of coffee. `That number you had them do on my pancreas, that's like a cop routine.'
Armitage closed the door and crossed the room, to stand in front of Case. `You're a lucky boy, Case. You should thank me.'
`Should I?' Case blew noisily on his coffee.
`You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency.'
`Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.'
`Good, because you have a new one.'
`How's that?' Case looked up from his coffee. Armitage was smiling.
`You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various main arteries, Case. They're dissolving. Very slowly, but they definitely are dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. You're already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin. It was the one your former employers gave you in Memphis.'
Case blinked up at the smiling mask.
`You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Case, but that's all. Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that will dissolve the bond without opening the sacs. Then you'll need a blood change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you're back where I found you. So you see, Case, you need us. You need us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter.'
Case looked at Molly. She shrugged.
`Now go down to the freight elevator and bring up the cases you find there.' Armitage handed him the magnetic key. `Go on. You'll enjoy this, Case. Like Christmas morning.'
Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification.
He sat beside Molly in filtered sunlight on the rim of a dry concrete fountain, letting the endless stream of faces recapitulate the stages of his life. First a child with hooded eyes, a street boy, hands relaxed and ready at his sides; then a teenager, face smooth and cryptic beneath red glasses. Case remembered fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the rose glow of the dawn geodesics. [13]
He shifted on the concrete, feeling it rough and cool through the thin black denim. Nothing here like the electric dance of Ninsei. This was different commerce, a different rhythm, in the smell of fast food and perfume and fresh summer sweat.
With his deck waiting, back in the loft, an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7. They'd left the place littered with the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker. Armitage had only waited for Case's approval of each piece.
`Where'd he go?' Case had asked Molly.
`He likes hotels. Big ones. Near airports, if he can manage it. Let's go down to the street.' She'd zipped herself into an old surplus vest with a dozen oddly shaped pockets and put on a huge pair of black plastic sunglasses that completely covered her mirrored insets.
`You know about that toxin shit, before?' he asked her, by the fountain. She shook her head. `You think it's true?'
`Maybe, maybe not. Works either way.'
`You know any way I can find out?'
`No,' she said, her right hand coming up to form the jive for silence. `That kind of kink's too subtle to show up on a scan.' Then her fingers moved again: wait. `And you don't care that much anyway. I saw you stroking that Sendai; man, it was pornographic.' She laughed.
`So what's he got on you? How's he got the working girl kinked?'
`Professional pride, baby, that's all.' And again the sign for silence. `We're gonna get some breakfast, okay? Eggs, real bacon. Probably kill you, you been eating that rebuilt Chiba krill for so long. Yeah, come on, we'll tube in to Manhattan and get us a real breakfast.'
Lifeless neon spelled out METRO HOLOGRAFIX in dusty capitals of glass tubing. Case picked at a shred of bacon that had lodged between his front teeth. He'd given up asking her where they were going and why; jabs in the ribs and the sign for silence were all he'd gotten in reply. She talked about the season's fashions, about sports, about a political scandal in California he'd never heard of.
He looked around the deserted dead end street. A sheet of newsprint went cartwheeling past the intersection. Freak winds in the East side; something to do with convection, and an overlap in the domes. Case peered through the window at the dead sign. Her Sprawl wasn't his Sprawl, he decided. She'd led him through a dozen bars and clubs he'd never seen before, taking care of business, usually with no more than a nod. Maintaining connections.
Something was moving in the shadows behind METRO HOLOGRAFIX.
The door was a sheet of corrugated roofing. In front of it, Molly's hands flowed through an intricate sequence of jive that he couldn't follow. He caught the sign for cash,a thumb brushing the tip of the forefinger. The door swung inward and she led him into the smell of dust. They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish antenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh o
f lost summers staring blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted scrap. He heard the door close behind them. He didn't look back.
The tunnel ended with an ancient Army blanket tacked across a doorway. White light flooded out as Molly ducked past it.
Four square walls of blank white plastic, ceiling to match, floored with white hospital tile molded in a nonslip pattern of small raised disks. In the center stood a square, white-painted wooden table and four white folding chairs.
The man who stood blinking now in the doorway behind them, the blanket draping one shoulder like a cape, seemed to have been designed in a wind tunnel. His ears were very small, plastered flat against his narrow skull, and his large front teeth, revealed in something that wasn't quite a smile, were canted sharply backward. He wore an ancient tweed jacket and held a handgun of some kind in his left hand. He peered at them, blinked, and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket. He gestured to Case, pointed at a slab of white plastic that leaned near the doorway. Case crossed to it and saw that it was a solid sandwich of circuitry, nearly a centimeter thick. He helped the man lift it and position it in the doorway. Quick, nicotine-stained fingers secured it with a white velcro border. A hidden exhaust fan began to purr.
`Time,' the man said, straightening up, `and counting. You know the rate, Moll.'
`We need a scan, Finn. For implants.'
`So get over there between the pylons. Stand on the tape. Straighten up, yeah. Now turn around, gimme a full threesixty.' Case watched her rotate between two fragile-looking stands studded with sensors. The man took a small monitor from his pocket and squinted at it. `Something new in your head, yeah. Silicon, coat of pyrolitic carbons. A clock, right? Your glasses gimme the read they always have, low-temp isotropic carbons. Better biocompatibility with pyrolitics, but that's your business, right? Same with your claws.'
`Get over here, Case.' He saw a scuffed X in black on the white floor. `Turn around. Slow.'
`Guy's a virgin.' The man shrugged. `Some cheap dental work, is all.'
`You read for biologicals?' Molly unzipped her green vest and took off the dark glasses.
`You think this is the Mayo? Climb on the table, kid, we'll run a little biopsy.' He laughed, showing more of his yellow teeth. `Nah. Finn's word, sweetmeat, you got no little bugs, no cortex bombs. You want me to shut the screen down?'
`Just for as long as it takes you to leave, Finn. Then we'll want full screen for as long as we want it.'
`Hey, that's fine by the Finn, Moll. You're only paying by the second.'
They sealed the door behind him and Molly turned one of the white chairs around and sat on it, chin resting on crossed forearms. `We talk now. This is as private as I can afford.'
`What about?'
`What we're doing.'
`What are we doing?'
`Working for Armitage.'
`And you're saying this isn't for his benefit?'
`Yeah. I saw your profile, Case. And I've seen the rest of our shopping list, once. You ever work with the dead?'
`No.' He watched his reflection in her glasses. `I could. I guess. I'm good at what I do.' The present tense made him nervous.
`You know that the Dixie Flatline's dead?'
He nodded. `Heart, I heard.'
`You'll be working with his construct.' She smiled. `Taught you the ropes, huh? Him and Quine. I know Quine, by the way. Real asshole.'
`Somebody's got a recording of McCoy Pauley? Who?' Now Case sat, and rested his elbows on the table. `I can't see it. He'd never have sat still for it.'
`Sense/Net. Paid him mega, you bet your ass.'
`Quine dead too?'
`No such luck. He's in Europe. He doesn't come into this.'
`Well, if we can get the Flatline, we're home free. He was the best. You know he died braindeath three times?'
She nodded.
`Flatlined on his EEG. Showed me tapes. Boy, I was daid.'
`Look, Case, I been trying to suss out who it is is backing Armitage since I signed on. But it doesn't feel like a zaibatsu, a government, or some Yakuza subsidiary. Armitage gets orders. Like something tells him to go off to Chiba, pick up a pillhead who's making one last wobble through the burnout belt, and trade a program for the operation that'll fix him up. We coulda bought twenty world class cowboys for what the market was ready to pay for that surgical program. You were good, but not thatgood...' She scratched the side of her nose.
`Obviously makes sense to somebody,' he said. `Somebody big.'
`Don't let me hurt your feelings.' She grinned. `We're gonna be pulling one hardcore run, Case, just to get the Flatline's construct. Sense/Net has it locked in a library vault uptown. Tighter than an eel's ass, Case. Now, Sense/Net, they got all their new material for the fall season locked in there too. Steal that and we'd be richer than shit. But no, we gotta get us the Flatline and nothing else. Weird.'
`Yeah, it's all weird. You're weird, this hole's weird, and who's the weird little gopher outside in the hall?'
`Finn's an old connection of mine. Fence, mostly. Software. This privacy biz is a sideline. But I got Armitage to let him be our tech here, so when he shows up later, you never saw him. Got it?'
`So what's Armitage got dissolving inside you?'
`I'm an easy make.' She smiled. `Anybody any good at what they do, that's what they are,right? You gotta jack, I gotta tussle.'
He stared at her. `So tell me what you know about Armitage.'
`For starters, nobody named Armitage took part in any Screaming Fist. I checked. But that doesn't mean much. He doesn't look like any of the pics of the guys who got out.' She shrugged. `Big deal. And starters is all I got.' She drummed her nails on the back of the chair. `But you area cowboy, aren't you? I mean, maybe you could have a little look around.' She smiled.
`He'd kill me.'
`Maybe. Maybe not. I think he needs you, Case, and real bad. Besides, you're a clever john, no? You can winkle him, sure.'
`What else is on that list you mentioned?'
`Toys. Mostly for you. And one certified psychopath name of Peter Riviera. Real ugly customer.'
`Where's he?'
`Dunno. But he's one sick fuck, no lie. I saw his profile.' She made a face. `Godawful.' She stood up and stretched, catlike. `So we got an axis going, boy? We're together in this? Partners?'
Case looked at her. `I gotta lotta choice, huh?'
She laughed. `You got it, cowboy.'
`The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,' said the voice-over, `in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.' On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. `Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...'
`What's that?' Molly asked, as he flipped the channel selector.
`Kid's show.' A discontinuous flood of images as the selector cycled. `Off,' he said to the Hosaka.
`You want to try now, Case?'
Wednesday. Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with Molly beside him. `You want me to go out, Case? Maybe easier for you, alone...' He shook his head.
`No. Stay, doesn't matter.' He settled the black terry sweatband across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai dermatrodes [14]. He stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed shuriken burning with reflected neon. He glanced up; on the wall, just above the Sony, he'd hung her gift, tacking it there with a yellow-headed drawing pin through th
e hole at its center.
He closed his eyes.
Found the ridged face of the power stud.
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed, now --
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now --
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding --
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.
Molly was gone when he took the trodes off, and the loft was dark. He checked the time. He'd been in cyberspace for five hours. He carried the Ono-Sendai to one of the new worktables and collapsed across the bedslab, pulling Molly's black silk sleeping bag over his head.
The security package taped to the steel firedoor bleeped twice. `Entry requested,' it said. `Subject is cleared per my program.'
`So open it.' Case pulled the silk from his face and sat up as the door opened, expecting to see Molly or Armitage.
`Christ,' said a hoarse voice, `I know that bitch can see in the dark...' A squat figure stepped in and closed the door. `Turn the lights on, okay?' Case scrambled off the slab and found the old-fashioned switch.
`I'm the Finn,' said the Finn, and made a warning face at Case.
`Case.'
`Pleased to meecha, I'm sure. I'm doing some hardware for your boss, it looks like.' The Finn fished a pack of Partagas from a pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the room. He crossed to the worktable and glanced at the Ono Sendai. `Looks stock. Soon fix that. But here's your problem, kid.' He took a filthy manila envelope from inside his jacket, flicked ash on the floor, and extracted a featureless black rectangle from the envelope. `Goddamn factory prototypes,' he said, tossing the thing down on the table. `Cast 'em into a block of polycarbon, can't get in with a laser without frying the works. Booby-trapped for x-ray, ultrascan, God knows what else. We'll get in, but there's no rest for the wicked, right?' He folded the envelope with great care and tucked it away in an inside pocket.
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