Mona Lisa Overdrive

by Willaim Gibson

  She helped him fashion a sling from a length of optic cable.

  "But Colin said she had forgotten . . ."

  "I haven’t," he said, and sucked air between his teeth, working the sling beneath his arm. "Seemed to happen, at the time. Lingers a bit . . ." He winced.

  "I’m sorry . . ."

  "‘S okay. Sally told me. About your mother, I mean."

  "Yes . . ." She didn’t look away. "She killed herself. In Tokyo . . ."

  "Whoever she was, that wasn’t her."

  "The unit . . ." She glanced toward the breakfast table.

  "She burnt it. Won’t matter to him, though. He’s still there. Has the run of it. What’s our Sally up to, then?"

  "She has Angela Mitchell with her. She’s gone to find the thing that all that comes from. Where we were. A place called New Jersey."

  The telephone rang.

  Kumiko’s father, head and shoulders, on the broad screen behind Tick’s telephone: he wore his dark suit, his Rolex watch, a galaxy of small fraternal devices in his lapel. Kumiko thought he looked very tired, tired and very serious, a serious man behind the smooth dark expanse of desk in his study. Seeing him there, she regretted that Sally hadn’t phoned from a booth with a camera. She would very much have liked to see Sally again; now, perhaps, it would be impossible.

  "You look well, Kumiko," her father said.

  Kumiko sat up very straight, facing the small camera mounted just below the wallscreen. In reflex, she summoned her mother’s mask of disdain, but it would not come. Confused, she dropped her gaze to where her hands lay folded in her lap. She was abruptly aware of Tick, of his embarrassment, his fear, trapped in the chair beside her, in full view of the camera.

  "You were correct to flee Swain’s house," her father said.

  She met his eyes again. "He is your kobun."

  "No longer. While we were distracted, here, with our own difficulties, he formed new and dubious alliances, pursuing courses of which we could not approve."

  "And your difficulties, Father?"

  Was there the flicker of a smile? "All that is ended. Order and accord are again established."

  "Er, excuse me, sir, Mr. Yanaka," Tick began, then seemed to lose his voice altogether.

  "Yes. And you are —?"

  Tick’s bruised face contorted in a huge and particularly lugubrious wink.

  "His name is Tick, Father. He has sheltered and protected me. Along with Col . . . with the Maas-Neotek unit, he saved my life tonight."

  "Really? I had not been informed of this. I was under the impression that you had not left his apartment."

  Something cold — "How?" she asked, sitting forward. "How could you know?"

  "The Maas-Neotek unit broadcast your destination, once it was known — once the unit was clear of Swain’s systems. We dispatched watchers to the area." She remembered the noodle seller . . . "Without, of course, informing Swain. But the unit never broadcast a second message."

  "It was broken. An accident."

  "Yet you say it saved your life?"

  "Sir," Tick said, "you’ll pardon me, what I mean is, am I covered? "

  "Covered?"

  "Protected. From Swain, I mean, and his bent SB friends and the rest . . ."

  "Swain is dead."

  There was a silence. "But somebody will be running it, surely. The fancy, I mean. Your business."

  Mr. Yanaka regarded Tick with frank curiosity. "Of course. How else might order and accord be expected to continue?"

  "Give him your word, Father," Kumiko said, "that he will come to no harm."

  Yanaka looked from Kumiko to the grimacing Tick. "I extend profound gratitude to you, sir, for having protected my daughter. I am in your debt."

  "Giri," Kumiko said.

  "Christ," Tick said, overcome with awe, "fucking fancy that."

  "Father," Kumiko said, "on the night of my mother’s death, did you order the secretaries to allow her to leave alone?"

  Her father’s face was very still. She watched it fill with a sorrow she had never before seen. "No," he said at last, "I did not."

  Tick coughed.

  "Thank you, Father. Will I be returning to Tokyo now?"

  "Certainly, if you wish. Though I understand you have been allowed to see very little of London. My associate will soon arrive at Mr. Tick’s apartment. If you wish to remain, to explore the city, he will arrange this."

  "Thank you, Father."

  "Goodbye, Kumi."

  And he was gone.

  "Now then," Tick said, wincing horribly as he extended his good arm, "help me up from this . . ."

  "But you require medical attention."

  "Don’t I then?" He’d managed to get to his feet, and was hobbling toward the toilet, when Petal opened the door from the dark upstairs hall. "If you’ve broken my bloody lock," Tick said, "you’d better pay me for it."

  "Sorry," Petal said, blinking. "I’ve come for Miss Yanaka."

  "Too bad, mate. Just had her dad on the phone. Told us Swain’s been topped. Told us he’s sending round the new boss." He smiled, crookedly, triumphantly.

  "But you see," Petal said gently, "that’s me."

  42

  Factory Floor

  Cherry’s still screaming.

  "Somebody shut her up," Molly says, where she’s standing by the door with her little gun, and Mona thinks she can do that, can pass Cherry a little of her stillness, where everything’s interesting and nothing’s pushing too hard, but on the way across the room she sees the crumpled Ziploc on the floor and remembers there’s a derm in there, maybe something that’ll help Cherry calm down. "Here," she says, when she gets to her, peels the backing off and sticks the derm on the side of Cherry’s neck. Cherry’s scream slides down the scale into a gurgle as she sinks down the face of old books, but Mona’s sure she’ll be okay, and anyway there’s shooting downstairs, guns: out past Molly a white tracer goes racketing and whanging around steel girders, and Molly’s yelling at Gentry can he turn the goddamn lights on?

  That had to mean the lights downstairs, because the lights up here were plenty bright, so bright she can see fuzzy little beads, traces of color, streaming off things if she looks close. Tracers. That’s what you call those bullets, the ones that light up. Eddy’d told her that in Florida, looking down the beach to where some private security was shooting them off in the dark.

  "Yeah, lights," the face on the little screen said, "the Witch can’t see . . ." Mona smiled at him. She didn’t think anybody else had heard. Witch?

  So Gentry and big Slick were tearing around yanking these fat yellow wires off the wall, where they’d been stuck with silver tape, and plugging them together with these metal boxes, and Cherry from Cleveland was sitting on the floor with her eyes closed, and Molly was crouched down by the door holding her gun with both hands, and Angie was —

  Be still.

  She heard somebody say that, but it was nobody in the room. She thought maybe it was Lanette, like Lanette could just say that, through time, through the stillness.

  Because Angie was just there, down on the floor beside the dead guy’s stretcher, her legs folded under her like a statue, her arms around him.

  The lights dimmed, when Gentry and Slick found their connection, and she thought she heard the face on the monitor gasp, but she was already moving toward Angie, seeing (suddenly, totally, so clearly it hurt) the fine line of blood from her left ear.

  Even then, the stillness held, though already she could feel raw hot points in the back of her throat, and remember Lanette explaining: You don’t ever snort this, it eats holes in you.

  And Molly’s back was straight, her arms stretched out . . . Straight out and down, not to that gray box, but to her pistol, that little thing, and Mona heard it go snik -snik -snik, and then three explosions, far off down there, and they must’ve been blue flashes, but Mona’s hands were around Angie now, wrists brushed by blood-smeared fur. To look into gone eyes, the light already fading. Just a long, longe
st way away.

  "Hey," Mona said, nobody to hear, just Angie toppling across the corpse in the sleeping bag, "hey . . ."

  She glanced up in time to catch a last image on that vid screen and see it fade.

  After that, for a long time, nothing mattered. It wasn’t like the not caring of the stillness, the crystal overdrive, and it wasn’t like crashing, just this past-it feeling, the way maybe a ghost feels.

  She stood beside Slick and Molly in the doorway and looked down. In the dim glare of big old bulbs she watched a metal spider thing jittering across the dirty concrete floor. It had big curved blades that snapped and whirled when it moved, but there was nobody in there moving, and the thing just went like a broken toy, back and forth in front of the twisted wreck of the little bridge she’d crossed with Angie and Cherry.

  Cherry had gotten up from the floor, pale and slackfaced, and peeled the derm from her neck. "Tha’s maj’ muscle relax’nt," she managed, and Mona felt bad because she knew she’d done something stupid when she’d thought she was trying to help, but wiz always did that, and how come she couldn’t stop doing it?

  Because you’re wired, stupid, she heard Lanette say, but she hadn’t wanted to remember that.

  So they all just stood there, looking down at the metal spider twitching and running itself down. All except Gentry, who was unscrewing the gray box from its frame over the stretcher, his black boots beside Angie’s red fur.

  "Listen," Molly said, "that’s a copter. Big one."

  She was the last one down the rope, except for Gentry, and he just said he wasn’t coming, didn’t care, he’d stay.

  The rope was fat and dirty gray and had knots tied in it to hang on to, like a swing she remembered from a long time ago. Slick and Molly had lowered the gray box first, down to a platform where the metal stairs weren’t wrecked. Then Molly went down it like a squirrel, seeming barely to hang on at all, and tied it tight to a railing. Slick went down slowly, because he had Cherry over his shoulder and she was still too relaxed to make it down herself. Mona still felt bad about that and wondered if that was why they’d decided to leave her there.

  It was Molly who’d decided, though, standing there by that window, watching people pop out of the long black helicopter and spread out across the snow.

  "Look at that," Molly’d said. "They know. Just come to pick up the pieces. Sense/Net. My ass is out of here."

  Cherry slurred that they were leaving too, she and Slick. And Slick shrugged, then grinned and put his arm around her.

  "What about me?"

  Molly looked at her. Or seemed to. Couldn’t really tell, with the glasses. White tooth showed against her lower lip, for just a second, then she said, "You stay, my advice. Let them sort it out. You haven’t really done anything. None of it was your idea. Think they’ll probably do right by you, or try to. Yeah, you stay."

  It didn’t make any sense to Mona, but now she felt so dead, so crash-sick, she couldn’t argue.

  And then they were just gone, down the rope and gone, and it was just like that, how people left and you didn’t ever see them anymore. She looked back into the room and saw Gentry pacing back and forth in front of his books, running the tip of his finger along them like he was looking for a special one. He’d thrown a blanket over the stretcher.

  So she just left, and she wouldn’t know if Gentry ever found his book or not, but that was how it was, so she climbed down the rope herself, which wasn’t as easy as Molly and Slick had made it look, particularly if you felt like Mona did, because Mona felt close to blacking out and her arms and legs didn’t seem to be working real good anyway, she had to sort of concentrate on making them move, and her nose and throat were swelling inside, so she didn’t notice the black guy until she was all the way down.

  He was standing down there looking at the big spider thing, which wasn’t moving at all. Looked up when the heel of her shoe grated across the steel platform. And something so sad about his face, when he saw her, but then it was gone and he was climbing the metal stairs, slow and easy, and as he got closer she began to wonder if he really was black. Not just the color, which he definitely was, but there was something about the shape of his bald skull, the angles of his face, not quite like anybody she’d seen before. He was tall, real tall. Wore a long black coat, leather so thin it moved like silk.

  "Hello, missy," he said, when he stood in front of her, reached out to raise her chin so she was looking straight into gold-flecked agate eyes like nobody in the world ever had. Long fingers so light against her chin. "Missy," he said, "how old are you?"

  "Sixteen . . ."

  "You need a haircut," he said, and there was something so serious about how he said it.

  "Angie’s up there," she said, pointing, when she found her voice again. "She’s — "

  "Hush."

  She heard metal noises far away in the big old building, and then a motor starting up. The hover, she thought, the one Molly’d driven here.

  The black man raised his eyebrows, except he didn’t have any eyebrows. "Friends?" He lowered his hand.

  She nodded.

  "Good enough," he said, and took her hand to help her down the stairs. At the bottom, still holding her hand, he led her around the wreck of the catwalk thing. Somebody was dead there, camo material and one of those big-voice things like cops have.

  "Swift," the black man called, out across that whole tall hollow space, between the black grids of windows without any glass, black lines against a white sky, winter morning, "get your ass over here. I found her."

  "But I’m not her . . ."

  And over there where the big doors stood open, against the sky and snow and rust, she saw this suit come walking, with his coat open and his tie flapping in the wind, and Molly’s hover swung past him, out those same doors, and he wasn’t even looking, because he was looking at Mona.

  "I’m not Angie," she said, and wondered if she ought to tell him what she’d seen, Angie and the young guy together on that little screen, just before it faded.

  "I know," the black man said, "but it grows on you."

  Rapture. Rapture’s coming.

  43

  Judge

  The woman led them to a hovercraft parked inside Factory, if you could call it parking when the front end was mashed up around a concrete tool mount. It was a white cargo job with CATHODE CATHAY lettered across the rear doors, and Slick wondered when she’d managed to get it in there without him hearing it. Maybe while Bobby the Count was pulling his diversion with the blimp.

  The aleph was heavy, like trying to carry a small engine block.

  He didn’t want to look at the Witch, because there was blood on her blades and he hadn’t made her for that. There were a couple of bodies around, or parts of them; he didn’t look at that either.

  He looked down at the block of biosoft and its battery pack and wondered if all that was still in there, the gray house and Mexico and 3Jane’s eyes.

  "Wait," the woman said. They were passing the ramp to the room where he kept his machines; the Judge was still there, the Corpsegrinder . . .

  She still had her gun in her hand. Slick put his hand on Cherry’s shoulder. "She said wait."

  "That thing I saw, last night," the woman said. "One-armed robot. That work?"

  "Yeah . . ."

  "Strong? Carry a load? Over rough ground?"

  "Yeah."

  "Get it."

  "Huh?"

  "Get it into the back of the hover. Now. Move."

  Cherry clung to him, weak-kneed from whatever it was that girl had given her.

  "You," Molly gestured toward her with the gun, "into the hover."

  "Go on," Slick said.

  He set the aleph down and walked up the ramp and into the room where the Judge was waiting in the shadows, the arm beside it on the tarp, where Slick had left it. Now he wouldn’t ever get it right, how the saw was supposed to work. There was a control unit there, on a row of dusty metal shelves. He picked it up and let the Judge p
ower up, the brown carapace trembling slightly.

  He moved the Judge forward, down the ramp, the broad feet coming down one-two, one-two, the gyros compensating, perfecting for the missing arm. The woman had the rear doors of the hover open, ready, and Slick marched the Judge straight over to her. She fell back slightly as the Judge towered over her, her silver glasses reflecting polished rust. Slick came up behind the Judge and started figuring the angles, how to get him in there. It didn’t make sense, but at least she seemed to have some idea of what they were doing, and anything was better than hanging around Factory now, with dead people all over. He thought about Gentry, up there with his books and those bodies. There’d been two girls up there, and they’d both looked like Angie Mitchell. Now one of them was dead, he didn’t know how or why, and the woman with the gun had told the other one to wait . . .

  "Come on, come on, get the fucking thing in, we gotta go . . ."

  When he’d managed to work the Judge into the back of the hover, legs bent, on its side, he slammed the doors, ran around, and climbed in on the passenger side. The aleph was between the front seats. Cherry was curled in the backseat, under a big orange parka with the Sense/Net logo on the sleeve, shivering.

  The woman fired up the turbine and inflated the bag. Slick thought they might be hung on the tool mount, but when she reversed, it tore away a strip of chrome and they were free. She swung the hover around and headed for the gates.

  On the way out they passed a guy in a suit and tie and a tweed overcoat, who didn’t seem to see them. "Who’s that?"

  She shrugged.

  "You want this hover?" she asked. They were maybe ten kilos from Factory now and he hadn’t looked back.

  "You steal it?"

  "Sure."

  "I’ll pass."

  "Yeah?"

  "I did time, car theft."

  "So how’s your girlfriend?"

  "Asleep. She’s not my girlfriend."

  "No?"

  "I get to ask who you are?"