Mona Lisa Overdrive

by Willaim Gibson

  "Did it try to get in touch, after?"

  "Not that I know of. He had this idea that it was gone, sort of; not gone gone, but gone into everything, the whole matrix. Like it wasn’t in cyberspace anymore, it just was. And if it didn’t want you to see it, to know it was there, well, there was no way you ever could, and no way you’d ever be able to prove it to anybody else even if you did know . . . And me, I didn’t wanna know. I mean, whatever it was, it seemed done to me, finished. Armitage was dead, Riviera was dead, Ashpool was dead, the Rasta tug pilot who took us out there was back in Zion cluster and he’d probably written it all off as another ganja dream . . . I left Case in the Tokyo Hyatt, never saw him again . . ."

  "Why?"

  "Who knows? Nothing much. I was young, it just seemed over."

  "But you’d left her up the well. In Straylight."

  "You got it. And I’d think about that, once in a while. When we were leaving, Finn, it was like she didn’t care about any of it. Like I’d killed her crazy sick father for her, and Case had cracked their cores and let their AIs loose in the matrix . . . So I put her on the list, right? You get big enough trouble one day, you’re being got at, you check that list."

  "And you figured it for her, right off?"

  "No. I gotta pretty long list."

  Case, who seemed to Kumiko to have been something more than Sally’s partner, never reentered her story.

  As Kumiko listened to Sally condense fourteen years of personal history for the Finn’s benefit, she found herself imagining this younger Sally as a bishonen hero in a traditional romantic video: fey, elegant, and deadly. While she found Sally’s matter-of-fact account of her life difficult to follow, with its references to places and things she didn’t know, it was easy to imagine her winning the sudden, flick-of-the-wrist victories expected of bishonen. But no, she thought, as Sally dismissed "a bad year in Hamburg," sudden anger in her voice — an old anger, the year a decade past — it was a mistake to cast this woman in Japanese terms. There were no ronin, no wandering samurai; Sally and the Finn were talking business.

  She’d arrived at her bad year in Hamburg, Kumiko gathered, after having won and lost some sort of fortune. She’d won her share of it "up there," in a place the Finn had called Straylight, in partnership with the man Case. In doing so, she’d made an enemy.

  "Hamburg," the Finn interrupted, "I heard stories about Hamburg . . ."

  "The money was gone. How it is, with a big score, when you’re young . . . No money was sort of like getting back to normal, but I was involved with these Frankfurt people, owed ‘em, and they wanted to take it out in trade."

  "What kinda trade?"

  "They wanted people hit."

  "So?"

  "So I got out. When I could. Went to London . . ."

  Perhaps, Kumiko decided, Sally had once been something along ronin lines, a kind of samurai. In London, however, she’d become something else, a businesswoman. Supporting herself in some unspecified way, she gradually became a backer, providing funds for various kinds of business operations. (What was a "credit sink"? What was "laundering data"?)

  "Yeah," the Finn said, "you did okay. Got yourself a share in some German casino."

  "Aix-la-Chapelle. I was on the board. Still am, when I got the right passport."

  "Settled down?" The laugh again.

  "Sure."

  "Didn’t hear much, back here."

  "I was running a casino. That was it. Doing fine."

  "You were prizefighting. ‘Misty Steele,’ augmented featherweight. Eight fights, I made book on five of ‘em. Blood matches, sweetmeat. Illegal."

  "Hobby."

  "Some hobby. I saw the vids. Burmese Kid opened you right up, living color . . ."

  Kumiko remembered the long scar.

  "So I quit. Five years ago and I was already five years too old."

  "You weren’t bad, but ‘Misty Steele’ . . . Jesus."

  "Gimme a break. Wasn’t me made that one up."

  "Sure. So tell me about our friend upstairs, how she got in touch."

  "Swain. Roger Swain. Sends one of his boys to the casino, would-be hardass called Prior. About a month ago."

  "Swain the fixer? London?"

  "Same one. So Prior’s got a present for me, about a meter of printout. A list. Names, dates, places."

  "Bad?"

  "Everything. Stuff I’d almost forgotten."

  "Straylight run?"

  "Everything. So I packed a bag, got back to London, there’s Swain. He’s sorry, it’s not his fault, but he’s gotta twist me. Because somebody’s twisting him. Got his own meter of printout to worry about." Kumiko heard Sally’s heels shift on the pavement.

  "What’s he want?"

  "A rip, warm body. Celeb."

  "Why you?"

  "Come on, Finn, that’s what I’m here to ask you."

  "Swain tell you it’s 3Jane?"

  "No. But my console cowboy in London did."

  Kumiko’s knees ached.

  "The kid. Where’d you come by her?"

  "She turned up at Swain’s place. Yanaka wanted her out of Tokyo. Swain owes him giri."

  "She’s clean, anyway, no implants. What I get out of Tokyo lately, Yanaka has his hands full . . ."

  Kumiko shivered in the dark.

  "And the rip, the Celeb?" the Finn continued.

  She felt Sally hesitate. "Angela Mitchell."

  The pink metronome swinging silently, left to right, right to left.

  "It’s cold here, Finn."

  "Yeah. Wish I could feel it. I just took a little trip on your behalf. Memory Lane. You know much about where Angie comes from?"

  "No."

  "I’m in the oracle game, honey, not a research library . . . Her father was Christopher Mitchell. He was the big shit in biochip research at Mass Biolabs. She grew up in a sealed compound of theirs in Arizona, company kid. About seven years ago, something happened down there. The street said Hosaka fielded a team of pros to help Mitchell make a major career move. The fax said there was a megaton blast on Maas property, but nobody ever found any radiation. Never found Hosaka’s mercs, either. Maas announced that Mitchell was dead, suicide."

  "That’s the library. What’s the oracle know?"

  "Rumors. Nothing that hangs together on a line. Street said she turned up here a day or two after the blast in Arizona, got in with some very weird spades who worked out of New Jersey."

  "Worked what?"

  "They dealt. ‘Ware, mostly. Buying, selling. Sometimes they bought from me . . ."

  "How were they weird?"

  "Hoodoos. Thought the matrix was full of mambos ‘n’shit. Wanna know something, Moll?"

  "What?"

  "They’re right."

  23

  Mirror Mirror

  She came out of it like somebody had thrown a switch.

  Didn’t open her eyes. She could hear them talking in another room. Hurt lots of places but not any worse than the wiz had. The bad crash, that was gone, or maybe muted by whatever they’d given her, that spray.

  Paper smock coarse against her nipples; they felt big and tender and her breasts felt full. Little lines of pain tweaking across her face, twin dull aches in her eyesockets, sore rough feeling in her mouth and a taste of blood.

  "I’m not trying to tell you your business," Gerald was saying, above a running tap and a rattle of metal, like he was washing pans or something, "but you’re kidding yourself if you think she’d fool anyone who didn’t want to be fooled. It’s really a very superficial job." Prior said something she couldn’t make out. "I said superficial, not shoddy. That’s quality work, all of it. Twenty-four hours on a dermal stimulator and you won’t know she’s been here. Keep her on the antibiotics and off stimulants; her immune system isn’t all it could be." Then Prior again, but she still couldn’t catch it.

  Opened her eyes but there was only the ceiling, white squares of acoustic tile. Turned her head to the left. White plastic wall with one of those fak
e windows, hi-rez animation of a beach with palm trees and waves; watch the water long enough and you’d see the same waves rolling in, looped, forever. Except the thing was broken or worn out, a kind of hesitation in the waves, and the red of the sunset pulsed like a bad fluorescent tube.

  Try right. Turning again, feeling the sweaty paper cover on the hard foam pillow against her neck . . .

  And the face with bruised eyes looking at her from the other bed, nose braced with clear plastic and micropore tape, some kind of brown jelly stuff smeared back across the cheekbones . . .

  Angie. It was Angie’s face, framed by the reflected sunset stutter of the defective window.

  "There was no bonework," Gerald said, carefully loosening the tape that held the little plastic brace in place along the bridge of her nose. "That was the beauty of it. We planed some cartilage in the nose, working in through the nostrils, then went on to the teeth. Smile. Beautiful. We did the breast augmentation, built up the nipples with vat-grown erectile tissue, then did the eye coloration . . ." He removed the brace. "You mustn’t touch this for another twenty-four hours."

  "That how I got the bruises?"

  "No. That’s secondary trauma from the cartilage job." Gerald’s fingers were cool on her face, precise. "That should clear up by tomorrow."

  Gerald was okay. He’d given her three derms, two blue and a pink, smooth and comfortable. Prior definitely wasn’t okay, but he was gone or anyway out of sight. And it was just nice, listening to Gerald explain things in his calm voice. And look what he could do.

  "Freckles," she said, because they were gone.

  "Abrasion and more vat tissue. They’ll come back, faster if you get too much sun . . ."

  "She’s so beautiful . . ." She turned her head.

  "You, Mona. That’s you."

  She looked at the face in the mirror and tried on that famous smile.

  Maybe Gerald wasn’t okay.

  Back in the narrow white bed again, where he’d put her to rest, she raised her arm and looked at the three derms. Trank. Floating.

  She worked a fingernail under the pink derm and peeled it off, stuck it on the white wall, and pushed hard with her thumb. A single bead of straw-colored fluid ran down. She carefully peeled it back and replaced it on her arm. The stuff in the blue ones was milky white. She put them back on too. Maybe he’d notice, but she wanted to know what was happening.

  She looked in the mirror. Gerald said he could put it back the way it was, someday, if she wanted him to, but then she wondered how he’d remember what she’d looked like. Maybe he’d taken a picture or something. Now that she thought about it, maybe there wasn’t anybody who’d remember how she’d looked before. She guessed Michael’s stim deck was probably the closest bet, but she didn’t know his address or even his last name. It gave her a funny feeling, like who she’d been had wandered away down the street for a minute and never come back. But then she closed her eyes and knew she was Mona, always had been, and that nothing much had changed, anyway not behind her eyelids.

  Lanette said it didn’t matter, how you got yourself changed. Lanette told her once that she didn’t have 10 percent of her own face left, the one she’d been born with. Not that you’d guess, except for the black around her lids so she never had to mess with mascara. Mona had thought maybe Lanette hadn’t got such good work done, and it must have shown once in Mona’s eyes, because then Lanette said: You shoulda seen me before, honey.

  But now here she was, Mona, stretched out straight in this skinny bed in Baltimore, and all she knew about Baltimore was the sound of a siren from down in the street and the motor running on Gerald’s air-conditioner.

  And somehow that turned into sleep, she didn’t know for how long, and then Prior was there with his hand on her arm, asking her if she was hungry.

  She watched Prior shave his beard. He did it at the stainless surgical sink, trimming it back with a pair of chrome scissors. Then he switched to a white plastic throw-away razor from a box of them that Gerald had. It was strange watching his face come out. It wasn’t a face she’d have expected: it was younger. But the mouth was the same.

  "We gonna be here much longer, Prior?"

  He had his shirt off for the shave; he had tattoos across his shoulders and down his upper arms, dragons with lion-heads. "Don’t worry about it," he said.

  "It’s boring."

  "We’ll get you some stims." He was shaving under his chin.

  "What’s Baltimore like?"

  "Bloody awful. Like the rest of it."

  "So what’s England like?"

  "Bloody awful." He wiped his face with a thick wad of blue absorbent paper.

  "Maybe we could go out, get some of those crabs. Gerald says they got crabs."

  "They do," he said. "I’ll get some in."

  "How about you take me out?"

  He tossed the blue wad into a steel waste canister. "No, you might try to run away."

  She slid her hand between the bed and the wall and found the torn foam air cell where she’d hidden the shockrod. She’d found her clothes in a white plastic bag. Gerald came in every couple of hours with fresh derms; she’d wring them out as soon as he’d gone. She’d figured if she could get Prior to take her out to eat, she could make a move in the restaurant. But he wasn’t having any.

  In a restaurant she might even be able to get a cop, because now she figured she knew what the deal was.

  Snuff. Lanette had told her about that. How there were men who’d pay to have girls fixed up to look like other people, then kill them. Had to be rich, really rich. Not Prior, but somebody he worked for. Lanette said these guys had girls fixed to look like their wives sometimes. Mona hadn’t really believed it, back then; sometimes Lanette told her scary stuff because it was fun to be scared when you knew you were pretty safe, and anyway Lanette had a lot of stories about weird kinks. She said suits were the weirdest of all, the big suits way up in big companies, because they couldn’t afford to lose control when they were working. But when they weren’t working, Lanette said, they could afford to lose it any way they wanted. So why not a big suit somewhere who wanted Angie that way? Well, there were lots of girls got themselves worked over to look like her, but they were mostly pathetic. Wannabes — and she hadn’t ever seen one who really looked much like Angie, anyway not enough to fool anybody who cared. But maybe there was somebody who’d pay for all this just to get a girl who did look like Angie. Anyway, if it wasn’t snuff, what was it?

  Now Prior was buttoning his blue shirt. He came over to the bed and pulled the sheet down to look at her breasts. Like he was looking at a car or something.

  She yanked the sheet back up.

  "I’ll get some crabs." He put his jacket on and went out. She could hear him saying something to Gerald.

  Gerald stuck his head in. "How are you, Mona?"

  "Hungry."

  "Feeling relaxed?"

  "Yeah . . ."

  When she was alone again, she rolled over and studied her face, Angie’s face, in the mirrored wall. The bruising was almost gone. Gerald taped things like miniature trodes to her face and hooked them to a machine. Said they made it heal real fast.

  It didn’t make her jump, now, Angie’s face in the mirror. The teeth were nice; the teeth you’d wanna keep anyway. She wasn’t sure about the rest, not yet.

  Maybe she should just get up now, get her clothes on, head for the door. If Gerald tried to stop her, she could use the rod. Then she remembered how Prior had turned up at Michael’s, like he’d had somebody watching her, all night, following her. Maybe somebody watching now, outside. Gerald’s place didn’t seem to have any windows, not real ones, so she’d have to go out the door.

  And she was starting to want her wiz bad, too, but if she did even a little, Gerald would notice. She knew her kit was there, in her bag under the bed. Maybe if she did some, she thought, she’d just do something. But maybe it wouldn’t be the right thing; she had to admit that what she did on wiz didn’t always work out,
even though it made you feel like you couldn’t make a mistake if you tried.

  Anyway, she was hungry, and too bad Gerald didn’t have some kind of music or something, so maybe she’d just wait for that crab . . .

  24

  In a Lonely Place

  And Gentry standing there with the Shape burning behind his eyes, holding out the trode-net under the glare of bare bulbs, telling Slick why it had to be that way, why Slick had to put the trodes on and jack straight into whatever the gray slab was inputting to the still figure on the stretcher.

  He shook his head, remembering how he’d come to Dog Solitude. And Gentry started talking faster, taking the gesture for refusal.

  Gentry was saying Slick had to go under, he said maybe just for a few seconds, while he got a fix on the data and worked up a macroform. Slick didn’t know how to do that, Gentry said, or he’d go under himself; it wasn’t the data he wanted, just the overall shape, because he thought that would lead him to the Shape, the big one, the thing he’d chased for so long.

  Slick remembered crossing the Solitude on foot. He’d been scared that the Korsakov’s would come back, that he’d forget where he was and drink cancer-water from the slimed red puddles on the rusty plain. Red scum and dead birds floating with their wings spread. The trucker from Tennessee had told him to walk west from the highway, he’d hit two-lane blacktop inside an hour and get a ride down to Cleveland, but it felt like longer than an hour now and he wasn’t so sure which way was west and this place was spooking him, this junkyard scar like a giant had stomped it flat. Once he saw somebody far away, up on a low ridge, and waved. The figure vanished, but he walked that way, no longer trying to skirt the puddles, slogging through them, until he came to the ridge and saw that it was the wingless hulk of an airliner half-buried in rusted cans. He made his way up the incline along a path where feet had flattened the cans, to a square opening that had been an emergency exit. Stuck his head inside and saw hundreds of tiny heads suspended from the concave ceiling. He froze there, blinking in the sudden shade, until what he was seeing made some kind of sense. The pink plastic heads of dolls, their nylon hair tied up into topknots and the knots stuck into thick black tar, dangling like fruit. Nothing else, only a few ragged slabs of dirty green foam, and he knew he didn’t want to stick around to find out whose place it was.