Neuromancer

by William Gibson

  “Wait,” the Finn said, and left the room.

  Molly took his place, extruded the blade from her index finger, and speared a grayish slab of herring. Case wandered aimlessly around the room, fingering the scanning gear on the pylons as he passed.

  Ten minutes and the Finn came bustling back, showing his teeth in a wide yellow smile. He nodded, gave Molly a thumbs-up salute, and gestured to Case to help him with the door panel. While Case smoothed the velcro border into place, the Finn took a flat little console from his pocket and punched out an elaborate sequence.

  “Honey,” he said to Molly, tucking the console away, “you have got it. No shit, I can smell it. You wanna tell me where you got it?”

  “Yonderboy,” Molly said, shoving the herring and crackers aside. “I did a deal with Larry, on the side.”

  “Smart,” the Finn said. “It’s an AI.”

  “Slow it down a little,” Case said.

  “Berne,” the Finn said, ignoring him. “Berne. It’s got limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of ’53. Built for Tessier-Ashpool S.A. They own the mainframe and the original software.”

  “What’s in Berne, okay?” Case deliberately stepped between them.

  “Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. I’ve got the Turing Registry numbers. Artificial intelligence.”

  “That’s all just fine,” Molly said, “but where’s it get us?”

  “If Yonderboy’s right,” the Finn said, “this AI is backing Armitage.”

  “I paid Larry to have the Moderns nose around Armitage a little,” Molly explained, turning to Case. “They have some very weird lines of communication. Deal was, they’d get my money if they answered one question: who’s running Armitage?”

  “And you think it’s this AI? Those things aren’t allowed any autonomy. It’ll be the parent corporation, this Tessle . . .”

  “Tessier-Ashpool S.A.,” said the Finn. “And I got a little story for you about them. Wanna hear?” He sat down and hunched forward.

  “Finn,” Molly said. “He loves a story.”

  “Haven’t ever told anybody this one,” the Finn began.

  THE FINN WAS a fence, a trafficker in stolen goods, primarily in software. In the course of his business, he sometimes came into contact with other fences, some of whom dealt in the more traditional articles of the trade. In precious metals, stamps, rare coins, gems, jewelry, furs, and paintings and other works of art. The story he told Case and Molly began with another man’s story, a man he called Smith.

  Smith was also a fence, but in balmier seasons he surfaced as an art dealer. He was the first person the Finn had known who’d “gone silicon”—the phrase had an old-fashioned ring for Case—and the microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery sales. With half a dozen chips in his new socket, Smith’s knowledge of the art business was formidable, at least by the standards of his colleagues. But Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal request, one businessman to another. He wanted a go-to on the Tessier-Ashpool clan, he said, and it had to be executed in a way that would guarantee the impossibility of the subject ever tracing the inquiry to its source. It might be possible, the Finn had opined, but an explanation was definitely required. “It smelled,” the Finn said to Case, “smelled of money. And Smith was being very careful. Almost too careful.”

  Smith, it developed, had had a supplier known as Jimmy. Jimmy was a burglar and other things as well, and just back from a year in high orbit, having carried certain things back down the gravity well. The most unusual thing Jimmy had managed to score on his swing through the archipelago was a head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonné over platinum, studded with seedpearls and lapis. Smith, sighing, had put down his pocket microscope and advised Jimmy to melt the thing down. It was contemporary, not an antique, and had no value to the collector. Jimmy laughed. The thing was a computer terminal, he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes. It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed, a perverse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing. It was a curiosity. Smith jacked the head into his computer and listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures of last year’s tax return.

  Smith’s clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion for clockwork automata approached fetishism. Smith shrugged, showing Jimmy his upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn shops. He could try, he said, but he doubted he could get much for it.

  When Jimmy had gone, leaving the head, Smith went over it carefully, discovering certain hallmarks. Eventually he’d been able to trace it to an unlikely collaboration between two Zurich artisans, an enamel specialist in Paris, a Dutch jeweler, and a California chip designer. It had been commissioned, he discovered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A.

  Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo collector, hinting that he was on the track of something noteworthy.

  And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who walked in through the elaborate maze of Smith’s security as though it didn’t exist. A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master. It had come to his attention, the ninja said, that Smith might know of the whereabouts of this object.

  Smith told the man that he had no wish to die, and produced the head. And how much, his visitor asked, did you expect to obtain through the sale of this object? Smith named a figure far lower than the price he’d intended to set. The ninja produced a credit chip and keyed Smith that amount out of a numbered Swiss account. And who, the man asked, brought you this piece? Smith told him. Within days, Smith learned of Jimmy’s death.

  “So that was where I came in,” the Finn continued. “Smith knew I dealt a lot with the Memory Lane crowd, and that’s where you go for a quiet go-to that’ll never be traced. I hired a cowboy. I was the cut-out, so I took a percentage. Smith, he was careful. He’d just had a very weird business experience and he’d come out on top, but it didn’t add up. Who’d paid, out of that Swiss stash? Yakuza? No way. They got a very rigid code covers situations like that, and they kill the receiver too, always. Was it spook stuff? Smith didn’t think so. Spook biz has a vibe, you get so you can smell it. Well, I had my cowboy buzz the news morgues until we found Tessier-Ashpool in litigation. The case wasn’t anything, but we got the law firm. Then he did the lawyer’s ice and we got the family address. Lotta good it did us.”

  Case raised his eyebrows.

  “Freeside,” the Finn said. “The spindle. Turns out they own damn near the whole thing. The interesting stuff was the picture we got when the cowboy ran a regular go-to on the news morgues and compiled a precis. Family organization. Corporate structure. Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but there hasn’t been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market in over a hundred years. On any market, as far as I know. You’re looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high-orbit family, run like a corporation. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning. Orbital law’s a lot softer on genetic engineering, right? And it’s hard to keep track of which generation, or combination of generations, is running the show at a given time.”

  “How’s that?” Molly asked.

  “Got their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law, you’re legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though nobody’s seen the founding father in about thirty years. Founding momma, she died in some lab accident. . . .”

  “So what happened with your fence?”

  “Nothing.” The Finn frowned. “Dropped it. We had a look at this fantastic tangle of powers of attorney the T-A’s have, and that was it. Jimmy must’ve gotten into Straylight,
lifted the head, and Tessier-Ashpool sent their ninja after it. Smith decided to forget about it. Maybe he was smart.” He looked at Molly. “The Villa Straylight. Tip of the spindle. Strictly private.”

  “You figure they own that ninja, Finn?” Molly asked.

  “Smith thought so.”

  “Expensive,” she said. “Wonder whatever happened to that little ninja, Finn?”

  “Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed.”

  “Okay,” Case said, “we got Armitage getting his goodies off an AI named Wintermute. Where’s that get us?”

  “Nowhere yet,” Molly said, “but you got a little side gig now.” She drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him. He opened it. Grid coordinates and entry codes.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Armitage. Some data base of his. Bought it from the Moderns. Separate deal. Where is it?”

  “London,” Case said.

  “Crack it.” She laughed. “Earn your keep for a change.”

  CASE WAITED FOR a trans-BAMA local on the crowded platform. Molly had gone back to the loft hours ago, the Flatline’s construct in her green bag, and Case had been drinking steadily ever since.

  It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man’s skills, obsessions, knee-jerk responses. . . . The local came booming in along the black induction strip, fine grit sifting from cracks in the tunnel’s ceiling. Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car’s floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case’s station.

  He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar suspended against the wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing beneath it in contorted capitals that mimicked printed Japanese. He walked through the crowd and stood beneath it, studying the thing. WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign. A blunt white spindle, flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes. He’d seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. It had never appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the Freeside banks as easily as he could reach Atlanta. Travel was a neat thing. But now he noticed the little sigil, the size of a small coin, woven into the lower left corner of the ad’s fabric of light: T-A.

  He walked back to the loft, lost in memories of the Flatline. He’d spent most of his nineteenth summer in the Gentleman Loser, nursing expensive beers and watching the cowboys. He’d never touched a deck, then, but he knew what he wanted. There were at least twenty other hopefuls ghosting the Loser, that summer, each one bent on working joeboy for some cowboy. No other way to learn.

  They’d all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the ’Lanta fringes, who’d survived braindeath behind black ice. The grapevine—slender, street level, and the only one going—had little to say about Pauley, other than that he’d done the impossible. “It was big,” another would-be told Case, for the price of a beer, “but who knows what? I hear maybe a Brazilian payroll net. Anyway, the man was dead, flat down braindeath.” Case stared across the crowded bar at a thickset man in shirt-sleeves, something leaden about the shade of his skin.

  “Boy,” the Flatline would tell him, months later in Miami, “I’m like them huge fuckin’ lizards, you know? Had themself two goddam brains, one in the head an’ one by the tailbone, kept the hind legs movin’. Hit that black stuff and ol’ tailbrain jus’ kept right on keepin’ on.”

  The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange group anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of cyberspace. . . .

  And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus Russian heart, implanted in a POW camp during the war. He’d refused to replace the thing, saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing. Case fingered the slip of paper Molly had given him and made his way up the stairs.

  Molly was snoring on the temperfoam. A transparent cast ran from her knee to a few millimeters below her crotch, the skin beneath the rigid micropore mottled with bruises, the black shading into ugly yellow. Eight derms, each a different size and color, ran in a neat line down her left wrist. An Akai transdermal unit lay beside her, its fine red leads connected to input trodes under the cast.

  He turned on the tensor beside the Hosaka. The crisp circle of light fell directly on the Flatline’s construct. He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in.

  It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.

  He coughed. “Dix? McCoy? That you man?” His throat was tight.

  “Hey, bro,” said a directionless voice.

  “It’s Case, man. Remember?”

  “Miami, joeboy, quick study.”

  “What’s the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “Hang on.” He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it. “Dix? Who am I?”

  “You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?”

  “Ca—your buddy. Partner. What’s happening, man?”

  “Good question.”

  “Remember being here, a second ago?”

  “No.”

  “Know how a ROM personality matrix works?”

  “Sure, bro, it’s a firmware construct.”

  “So I jack it into the bank I’m using, I can give it sequential, real time memory?”

  “Guess so,” said the construct.

  “Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?”

  “If you say so,” said the construct. “Who are you?”

  “Case.”

  “Miami,” said the voice, “joeboy, quick study.”

  “Right. And for starts, Dix, you and me, we’re gonna sleaze over to London grid and access a little data. You game for that?”

  “You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?”

  SIX

  “YOU WANT YOU a paradise,” the Flatline advised, when Case had explained his situation. “Check Copenhagen, fringes of the university section.” The voice recited coordinates as he punched.

  They found their paradise, a “pirate’s paradise,” on the jumbled border of a low-security academic grid. At first glance it resembled the kind of graffiti student operators sometimes left at the junctions of grid lines, faint glyphs of colored light that shimmered against the confused outlines of a dozen arts faculties.

  “There,” said the Flatline, “the blue one. Make it out? That’s an entry code for Bell Europa. Fresh, too. Bell’ll get in here soon and read the whole damn board, change any codes they find posted. Kids’ll steal the new ones tomorrow.”

  Case tapped his way into Bell Europa and switched to a standard phone code. With the Flatline’s help, he connected with the London data base that Molly claimed was Armitage’s.

  “Here,” said the voice, “I’ll do it for you.” The Flatline began to chant a series of digits, Case keying them on his deck, trying to catch the pauses the construct used to indicate timing. It took three tries.

  “Big deal,” said the Flatline. “No ice at all.”

  “Scan this shit,” Case told the Hosaka. “Sift for owner’s personal history.”

  The neuroelectronic scrawls of the paradise vanished, replaced by a simple lozenge of white light. “Contents are primarily video recordings of postwar military trials,” said the distant voice of the Hosaka. “Central figure is Colonel Willis Corto.”

  “Show it already,” Case said.

  A man’s face filled the screen. The eyes were Armitage’s.

  TWO HOURS LATER,
Case fell beside Molly on the slab and let the temperfoam mold itself against him.

  “You find anything?” she asked, her voice fuzzy with sleep and drugs.

  “Tell you later,” he said, “I’m wrecked.” He was hungover and confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the various parts of a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka had sorted a thin store of data and assembled a precis, but it was full of gaps. Some of the material had been print records, reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case had had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments were audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing.

  Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot in the Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto’s team had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moonlight, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe.

  “They sure as hell did shaft you, boss,” Case said, and Molly stirred beside him.

  The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus in the history of cybernetics. Corto and his team had been training for the run for three years. They were through the ice, ready to inject Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean.

  Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling. . . .

  There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned documents concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian gunship that managed to reach Finland. To be gutted, as it landed in a spruce grove, by an antique twenty-millimeter cannon manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert. Screaming Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the helicopter. The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped to a military facility in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It took eleven months for the Congressional aide to find him there. He listened to the sound of tubes draining. In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already underway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized, partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on Screaming Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto.