💾 Archived View for clemat.is › saccophore › library › ebooks › Gibson › johnny_mnemonic.txt captured on 2021-12-17 at 13:26:06.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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************ JJoohhnnnnyy MMnneemmoonniicc ************
******** WWiilllliiaamm GGiibbssoonn ********
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs
of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming
for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're
technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get
as crude as possible. These days, thought, you have to be pretty
technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. I'd had to turn
both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on the lathe, and
then load then myself; I'd had to dig up an old microfiche with
instructions for hand- loading cartidges; I'd had to build a lever-
action press to seat the primers -all very tricky. But I knew they'd
work.
The meet was set for the Drome at 2300, but I rode the tube three
stops past the closest platform and walked back. Immaculate
procedure. I checked myself out in the chrome siding of a coffee
kiosk, your basic sharp-faced Caucasoid with a ruff of stiff, dark
hair. The girls at Under the Knife were big on Sony Mao, and it was
getting harder to keep them from adding the chic suggestion of
epicanthic folds. It probably wouldn't fool Ralfi Face, but it might
get me next to his table. The Drome is a single narrow space with a
bar down one side and tables along the other, thick with pimps and
handlers and a arcame array of dealers. The Magnetic Dog Sisters
were on the door that night, and I didn't relish trying to get out
past them if things didn't work out. They were two meters tall and
thin as greyhounds. One was black and the other white, but aside
from that they were as nearly identical as cosmetic surgery could
make them. They'd been lovers for years and were bad news in the
tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male.
Ralfi was sitting at his usual table. Owing me a lot of money. I had
hundreds of megabytes stashed in my head on an idiot.savant basis
information I had no conscious access to. Ralfi had left it there.
He hadn't, however, came back for it. Only Ralfi could retrieve the
data, with a code phrase of his own invention. I'm not cheap to
begin with, but my overtime on storage is astronomical. And Ralfi
had been very scarce.
Then I'd heard that Ralfi Face wanted to put out a contract on me.
So I'd arranged to meet him in the Drome, but I'd arranged it as
Edward Bax, clandestine importer, late of Rio and Peking.
The Drome stank of biz, a metallic tang of nervous tension. Muscle-
boys scattered through the crowd were flexing stock parts at one
another and trying on this, cold grins, some of them so lost under
superstructures of muscle graft that their outlines weren't really
human. Pardon me. Pardon me, friends. Just Eddie Bax here, Fast
Eddie the Importer, with his professionally nondescript gym bag, and
please ignore this shit, just wide enough to admit his right hand.
Ralfi wasn't alone. Eighty kilos of blond California beef perched
alerty in the chair next to his, martial arts written all over him.
Fast Eddie Bax was in the chair opposite them before the beef's
hands were off the table. 'You black belt?' I asked eagerly. He
nodded, blue eyes running an automatic scanning pattern between my
eyes and my hands. 'Me too,' I said. 'Got mine here in the bag.' And
I shoved my hand through the slit and thumbed the safety off. Click.
'Double twelve-gauge with the triggers wired together.'
'That's a gun', 'Ralfi said, putting a plump. restraining hand on
his boy's taut blue nylon chest. 'Johnny has a antique firearm in
his bag.' So much for Enward Bax.
I guess he'd always been Ralfi Something or Orther, but he owed his
acquired surname to a singular vanity. Built something like an
overripe pear, he'd worn the oncefamous face of Christian White for
twenty years - Christian White of the Atyan Reggae Band, Sony Mao to
his generation, and final champion of race rocks. I'm a whiz at
trivia.
Christian White: classic pop face with a singer's highdefinition
muscles, chiseled cheekbones. Angelic in one light, handsomely
depraved in another. But Ralfi's eyes lived behind that face, and
they were small and cold and black.
'Please,' he said, 'let's work this out like businessmen.' His voice
was marked by a horrible prehensile sincerity, and the corners of
his beautifull Christian White mouth were always wet. 'Lewis here,'
nodding in the beefboy's direction, 'is a meatball.' Lewis took his
impassively, looking like something built from a kit. 'You aren't a
meatball, Johnny.'
'Sure I am, Ralfi, a nice meatball chock-full of implants where u
can store your dirty laundry while you go off shopping for people to
kill me. From my end of this bag, Ralfi, it looks like you've got
some explaining to do.'
'It's this last batch of product, Johnny.' He sighed deeply. 'In my
role as broker - ' 'Fence,' I corrected.
'As broker, I am usually very careful as to sources.'
'You buy only from those who steal the best. Got it.'
He sighed again. 'I try,' he said wearily, 'not to buy from fools..
This time, I'm afraid, I've done that.' Third sigh was the cue for
Lewis to trigger the neural disruptor they'd taped under my side of
the table. I put everything I had into curling the index finger of
my right hand, but I no longer seemed to be connected to it. I could
feel the metal of the gun and the foam-padded tape. I'd wrapped
around the stubby grip, but my hands were cool wax, distant and
inert. I was hoping Lewis was a true meatball, thick enough to go
for the gym bag and snag my rigid trigger finger, but he wasn't.
'We've been very worried about you Johnny. Very worried. You see,
that's Yakuza property you have there. A fool took it from them,
Johnny. A dead fool.'
Lewis giggled.
It all made sense then, an ugly kind of sense, like bags of wet sand
settling around my head. Killing wasn't Ralfi's style. Lewis wasn't
even Ralfi's style. But he'd got himself stuck between the Sons of
the Neon Chrysanthemum and something that belonged to them - or,
more likely, something of theirs that belonged to someone else.
Ralfi, of course, could use the code phrase to throw me into idiot
savant, and I'd spill their hot program without remembering a single
quarter tone. For a fence like Ralfi, that would ordinarity have
been enough. But not for the Yakuza. The Yakuza would know about
Squids, for one thing, and they wouldn't want to worry about one
lifting those dim and permanent traces of their program out of my
head. I didn't know very much about Squids, but I'd heard stories,
and I made it a point never to repeat them to my clients. No, the
Yakuza wouldn't like that; it looked too much like envidence. They
hadn't got where they were by leaving evidence around. Or alive.
Lewis was grinning. I think he was visualizing a point just behind
my forehead and imagining how he could get there the hard way.
'Hey,' said a low voice, feminine, from somewhere behind my right
shoulder, 'you cowboys sure aren't having too lively a time.' 'Pack
it, bitch,' Lewis said, his tanned face very still. Ralfi looked
blank.
'Lighten up. You want to buy some good free base?' She pulled up a
chair and quickly sat before either of them could stop her. She was
barely inside my fixed field of vision, a thin girl with mirrored
glasses, her dark hair cut in a rough shag. She wore black leather,
open over a T- shirt slashed diagonally with stripes of red and
black. 'Eight thou a gram weirht.'
Lewis snorted his exasperation and tried to slap her out of the
chair. Somehow he didn't quite connect, and her hand came up and
seemed to brush his wrist as it passed. Bright blood sprayed the
table. He was clutching his wrist white-knuckle tight, blood
tricklng from between his fingers.
But hadn't her hand been empty?
He was going to need a tendon stapler. He stood up carefully,
without bothering to push his chair back. The chair toppled
backward, and he stepped out of of my line of sight without a word.
'He better get a medic to look at that,' she said. 'That's a nasty
cut.'
'You have no idea,' said Ralfi, suddenly sounding very tired, 'the
depths of shit you have just gotten yourself into.'
'No kidding? Myster. I get real excited by mysteries. Like why your
friends here's do quiet. Frozen, like. Or what this thing here is
for,' and she held up the little control unit that she'd somehow
taken from Lewis. Ralfi looked ill.
'You, ah, want maybe a quarter-million to give me that and take a
walk?'
A fat hand came up to stroke his pale, lean face nervously.
'What I want,' she said, snapping her fingers so that the unit spun
and glitterd, 'is work. A job. Your boy hurt his wrist. But a
quarter'll do for a retainer.'
Ralfi let his breath out explosively and began to laugh, exposing
teeth that hadn't been kept up to the Chriatian White standard. The
she turned the disruptor off.
'Two million,' I said.
'My kind of man,' she said, and laughed. 'What's in the bag?'
'A shotgun.'
'Crude.' It might have been a compliment.'
Ralfi said nothing at all.
'Name's Millions. Molly Millions. You want to get out of here, boss?
People are starting to stare.' She stood up. She was wearing leather
jeans the colour of dried blood.
And I saw for the first time that the mirrored lenses were surgical
inlays, the silver rising smoothly from her high cheekbones, sealing
her eyes in their sockets, I saw my new face twinned there.
'I'm Johnny,' I said. 'We're taking Mr face with us.'
He was outside, waiting. Looking like your standard tourist tech, in
plastic zoris and a silly Hawaiian shirt printed with blowups of his
firm's most popular microprocessor; a mild little guy, the kind most
likely to wind up drunk on sake in a bar that puts out miniature
rice crackers with seaweed garnish. He looked like the kind who sing
the corporate anthem and cry, who shake hands endlessly with the
bartender. And the pimps and the dealers would leave him alone,
pegging him as innately conservative. Not up for much, and carefull
with his credit when he was.
The way I figured it later, they must have amputated part of his
left thumb, somewhere behind the first joint, replacing it with a
prosthetic tip, and cored the stump, fiting it with a spool and
socket molded from one of the Ono-Sendai diamond analogs. Then
they'd carefully wound the spool with three meters of monomolecular
filement. Molly got into some kind of exchange with the Magnetic Dog
Sisters, giving me a chance to usher Ralfi through the door with the
gym bag pressed lightly against the base of his spine. She seemend
to know them. I heard the black one laugh.
I glanced up, out of some passing reflex, maybe because I've never
got used to it, to the soaring arcs of light and the shadows of the
geodesics above them. maybe that saved me. Ralfi kept walking, but I
don't think he was trying to escape. I think he'd already given up.
Probably he already had an idea of what we were up against.
I looked back down in time to see him explode.
Playback on full recall shows Ralfi stepping foward as the little
tech sidles out os nowhere, smilling. Just a suggestion of a bow,
and his left thumb falls of. It'a a conjuring trick. The thumb hangs
suspended. Mirrors? Wires? And Ralfi stops, his back to us, dark
crescents of sweat under the armpits of his pale summer suit. He
knows. He must have known. And then the joke-shop thumbtip, heavy as
lead, arcs out in a lighting yo-yo trick, and the invisible thread
connectingit to the killer's hand passes laterally through Ralfi's
skull, just above his eyebrows, whips up, and descends, slicing the
pearshaped torso diaganally from shoulder to rib cage. Cuts so fine
that no blood flows until synapses misfire and the first tremors
surrender the body to gravity.
Ralfi tumbled apart in a pink cloud of fluids, the three mismatched
section rolling forwardon the tiled pavement. In total silence.
I brought the gym bag up, and my hand convulsed. The recoil nearly
broke my wrist.
It must have been raining; ribbons of water cascaded from a ruptured
geodesic and spattered on the tile behind us. We crouched in the
narrow gap between a surgical boutique and an antique shop. She'd
just edged one mirrored eye around the corner to report a single
Volks module in frond of the Drome, red lights fliashing. They were
sweeping Ralfi up. Asking questions.
I was covered in scorched white fluff. The tennis socks. The gym bag
was a ragged plastic cuff around my wrist. 'I don't see how the hell
I missed him.'
'Cause he's faxt, so fast.' She hugged her knees and rocked back and
forth on her bootheels. 'His nervous system's jacked up. He's
factory custom.' She grinned and gave a little squeal of delight.
'I'm gonna get that boy. Tonight. He's the best, number one, top
dollar, state of the art.'
'What you're going to get, for this boy's two million, is my ass out
of here. Your boyfriend back there was mostly grown in a vat in
Chiba City. He's a Yakuza assassin.'
'Chiba. Yeah. See, Molly's been Chiba, too.' And she showed me her
hands, fingers slighly spread. Her fingers were slender, tapered,
very white against the polished burgundy nails. Ten blades snicked
straight out from their recesses beneath her nails, each one a
narrow, doubleedged scalpel in pale blue steel.
* * *
I'd never spent much time in Nighttown. Nobody there had anything to
pay me to remember, and most of them had a lot they paid regularly
to forget. Generations of sharpsshooters had clipped away at the
neon until the maintenance crews gave up. Even at noon the arcs were
soot-black against faintest pearl.
Where do you go when the world's wealthiest criminal order is
feeling for you with calm, distant fingers? Where do you hide from
the Yakuza, so powerful that it owns comsats and at least three
shuttles? The Yakuza is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-
Sendai. Fifty years before I was born the Yakuza had already
absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse.
Molly had an answer: You hide in the Pit, in the lowest circle,
where any outside influence generates swift, cocentric ripples of
raw menace. You hide in Nighttown. Better yet, you hide above
Nighttown, because the Pit's inverted, and the bottom of its bowl
touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown never sees, sweating under
its own filmament of acrylic resin, up where the Lo Teks crouch in
the dark like gargoyles, black-market cigarettes dangling from their
lips.
She had another answer, too.
'So you're locked up good and tight, Johnny-san? No way to get that
program without the password?' She led me into the shadows that
waited beyord the bright tube platform. The concrete walls were
overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single
metascrawl of rage and frustration.
'The stored data are fed in through a modified series of
microsurgical contraautism prostheses.' I reeled off a numb version
of my standard sales pitch. 'Client's code is stored in a special
chip; barring Squids, which we in the trade don't like to talk
about, there's no way to recover your phrase. Can't drug it out, cut
it out, torture it. I don't know it, never did.'
'Squids? Crawly things with arms?' We emerged into a deserted street
market. Shadowy figures watched us from across a makeshift square
littered with fish heads and rotting fruit.
'Superconducting quantum interfence detectors. Used them in the war
to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.'
'Yeah? Navy stuff? From the war? Squid'll read that chip of yours?'
She'd stopped walking, and I felt her eyes on me behind those twin
mirrors.
'Even the primitive models could measure a magnetic field a
billionth the strenght of geomagnetic force; it's like pulling a
whisper out of cheering stadium.'
'Cops can do that already, with parabolic microphones and lasers.'
'But your data's still secure.' Pride in profession. 'No
government'll let their cops have Squids, not even the security
heavies. Too much chance of interdepartmental funnies; they're too
likely to watergate you.'
'Navy stuff,' she said, and her grin gleamed in the shadows. 'Navy
stuff. I got a friend down here who was in the navy, name's Jones. I
think you'd better meet him. He's a junkie, though. So we'll have to
take him something.'
'A junkie?'
'A dolphin.'
He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin's point of view
he might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling
sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water stopped over the side,
wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg.
He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his
sides, a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated
armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of
his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions
gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-white hide.
Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded
doen the side of the tank.
'What is this place?' I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting
chain link and things under tarps. Above the tank hung a clumsy
wooden framework, crossed and recrossed by rows of dusty Christmas
lights.
'Funland. Zoo and carnival rides. "talk with the War Whale." All
that. Some whale Jones is...'
Jones reared again and fixed me with a sad and ancient eye.
'How's he talk?' Suddenly I was anxious to go.
'Thta's the catch. Say "Hi," Jones.'
And all the bulbs lit simultaneously. They were flashing red, white,
and blue.
RWBRWBRWB
RWBRWBRWB
RWBRWBRWB
RWBRWBRWB
RWBRWBRWB
'Good with symbols, see, but the code'w recricted. In the navy they
had him wired into an audiovisual display.' She drew the narrow
package from a jacket pocket. 'Pure shit, Jones. Want it?' He froze
in the water and started to sink. I felt a strange panic,
remembering that he wasn't a fish that he could drown. 'We want the
key to Johnny's bank, Jones. We want it fast.'
The lights flickered, died. 'Go for it, Jones!'
B
BBBBBBBBB
B
B
B
Blue bulbs, cruciform. Darkness. 'Pure! It's clean. Come on, Jones.'
WWWWWWWWW
WWWWWWWWW
WWWWWWWWW
WWWWWWWWW
WWWWWWWWW
White sodium glare washed her features, stark monochrome, shadows
cleaving from her cheekbones.
R RRRRR
R R
RRRRRRRRR
R R
RRRRR R
The arms of the red swastika were twisted in her silver glasses.
'Give it to him,' I said. 'We've got it.'
Ralfi Face. No imagination.
Jones heaved half his armored bulk over the edge of his tank, and I
thought the metal would give way. Molly stabbed him overhand with
the Syrette, driving the needle between two plates. Propellant
hissed. Patterns of light exploded, sparming across the frame and
then fading to black.
We left him drifting, rolling languorously in the dark water. Maybe
he was dreaming of his war in the Pacific, of the cyber mines he'd
swept, nosing gently into their circuitry with the Squid he'd used
to pick Ralfi's pathetic password from the chip buried in my head.
'I can see them slipping up when he was demobbed, letting him out of
the navy with that gear intact, but how does a cybernetic dolphin
get wired to smack?'
'The war,' she said. 'They all were. Navy did it. How else you
get'em working for you?'
I'm not sure this profiles as good business,' the pirate said,
angling for better money. 'Target specs on a comsat that isn't in
the book -'
'Waste my time and you won't profile at all,' said Molly, learning
across his scarred plastic desk to prod him with her forefinger.
'So maybe you want to buy your microwaves somewhere else?' he was a
tough kid, behind his Mao-job. A Nighttowner by birth, probably. Her
hand blurred down the frond of his jacket, completely severing a
lapel without even rumpling the fabric.
'So we got a deal ot not?'
'Deal,' he said starting at his ruined lapel with what he must have
hoped was only polite interest. 'Deal.' While I checked the two
records we'd bought she extracted the slip of paper I'd given her
from the zippered wrist pocket of her jacket. She unfolded it and
read sirently, moving her lips. She shrugged. 'This is it?'
'Shoot,' I said, punching the RECORD studs of the two desks
simultaneously.
'Christian White,' she recited, 'and his Aryan Reggae Band.'
Fairtful Ralfi, a fan to his dying day.
Transition to idiot-savant mode is always less abrupt than I except
it to be. The pirate broadcaster's front was a failing travel agancy
in a pastel cube that boasted a desk, three chairs, and a faded
poster of a Swiss orbital spa. A pair of toy birds with blown-glass
bodies and tin legs were sipping monotonously from a Styrofoarm cup
of water on the ledge beside Molly's shoulder. As I phased into
mode, they accelerated gradually until their DayGlo-feathered crowns
became solid arcs of color. The LEDs that told seconds on the
plastic wall clock had become meaningless pulsing grids, and Molly
and the Mao-faced boy grew hazy, their arms blurring occasionally in
insect-quick ghosts of gesture. And then it all faded to cool gray
static and an endless tone poem in the artificial language.
I sat and sang dead Ralfi's stolen program for three hours.
The mall runs forty kilometers from end, a ragged overlap of Fuller
domes roofing what was once a suburbanartery. If they turn off the
arcs on a clean day. a gray approximation of sunlight filters
through layers of acrylic, a view like the prison sketches of
Giovanni Piranesi. The three southernmost kilometers roof Nighttown.
Nighttown pays no taxes, no utilities. The neon arcs are dead, and
the geodesics have been smoked black by decades of cooking fires. In
the nearly total darkness of a Nighttown noon, who notices a few
dozen mad children lost in the rafters?
We'd been climbing for two hours, up concrete stairs and steel
ladders with perforated rungs, past abandoned gantries and dust-
covered tools. We'd started in what looked like a disused
maintenance yard, stacked with truangular roofing segments.
Everything there had been covered with that same uniform layer of
spraybomb graffiti: gang names, dates back to the turn of the
century. The graffiti followed us up, gradually thinning until a
single name was repeated at intervals. LO TEK. In dripping black
capitals.
'Who's Lo Tek?'
'Not us, boss.' She climbed a shivering aluminium ladder and
vanished throught a hole in a sheet of corrugated plastic. '"Low
technique, low technology."' The plastic muffled her voice. I
followed her up, nursing an aching wrist. 'Lo Teks, they'd think
that shotgun trick of yours was effete.'
An hour later I dragged myself up through another hole, this one
sawed crookedly in a sagging sheet of plywood, and met my first Lo
Tek.
'S okay,' Molly said, her hand brushing my shoulder. 'It's just Dog.
Hey, Dog.'
In the narrow beam of her taped flash, he regaeded us with his one
eye and slowly extuded a thick lenght of grayish tongue, licking
huge canines. I wondered how they wrote off tooth-bud transplants
from Dopermans as low technology. Immunosuppressives don;t exactly
grow on trees.
'Moll.' Dental augmentation impeded his speech. A string of saliva
dangled from the twisted lower lip. 'Heard ya comin'. Long time.' He
might have been fifteen, but the fangs and the bright mosaic of
scars compined with the gaping socket to present a mask of total
bestiality. It had taken time and a certain kind of creavity to
assemble that face, and his posture told-me he enjoyed living behind
it. He wore a pair of decaying jeans, black with grime and shiny
along the creases. His chest and feet werebare. He did something
with his mouth that approximated a grin. 'Bein' followed, you.'
Far off, in Nighttown, a water vendor cried his trade.
'Strings jumping, Dog?' She swung her flash to the side, and I saw
thin cords tied to eyebolts, cords that ran to the edge and
vanished.
'Kill the fuckin' light!'
She snapped it off.
'How come the one who's followin' you's got no light?'
'Doesn't need it. That one's bad news, Dog. Your sentries give him a
tumble, they'll come home in easy-tocarry sections.'
'This a friend, Moll?' He sounded uneasy. I heard his feet shift on
the worn plywood.
'No. But he's mine. And this one,' slapping my shoulders, 'he's a
friend. Got that?'
'Sure,' he said, without much enthusiasm, padding to the platform's
adge, where the eyebolts were. He began to pluck out some kind of
message on the taut cords.
Nighttown spread beneath us like a toy village for rats; tiny
windows showed candlelight, with only a few harsh, bright squares
lit by battery lanterns and carbide lamps. I imagined the old men at
their endless games of dominoes, under warm, fat drops of water that
fell from wet wash hung out on poles between the plywood shanties.
Then I tried to imagine him climbing patiently up throught the
darkeness in his zoris and unly tourist shirt, bland and unhurried.
How was he tracking us?
'Good,' said Molly. 'he smells up.'
'Smoke?' Dog dragged a crumpled pack from his pocket and prized out
a flattened cigarette. I squinted at the trademark whilw he lit it
for me with a kitchen match. Yiheyuan filters. Beijing Cigarette
Factory. I decided that the Lo Teks were black marketeers. Dog and
Molly went back to their argument, which seemed to revolve around
Molly's desire to use some particular piece of Lo Tek real estate.
'I've done you a lot of favors, man. I want that floor. And I want
the musik.'
'You're not Lo Tek...'
This must have been going on for the better part of a twisted
kilometer, Dog leading us along swaying catwalks and up rope
ladders. The Lo Teks leech their webs and huddling places to the
city's fabric with thick gobs of epoxy and sleep above the abyss in
mesh hammocks. Their country is so attenuated that in places it
consists of little more than holds and feet, sawed into geodesic
struts.
The Killing Floor, she called it. Scrambling after her, my new Eddie
Bax shoes slipping on worm metal and damp plywood, I wondered how it
could be any more lethal than the rest of the territory. At the same
time I sensed that Dog's protests were rirtual and that she already
expected to get whatever it was she wanted.
Somewhere beneath us, Jones would be circling his takn, feeling the
first twinges of junk sickness. The police would be boring the Drome
regulars with questions about Ralfi. What did he do? Who was he with
before he stepped outside? And the Yakuza would be settling its
ghostly bulk over the city's data banks, probing for faint images of
me reflected in numbered accounts, securities transactions, bills
for utilities. We're an information economy. They teach you that in
school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to
live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits,
seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments
that can be retrieved, amplified...
But by now the pirate would have shuttled our message into line for
blackbox transmissions to the Yakuza comsat. A simple message: Call
off the dogs or we wideband your program.
The programm. I had no idea what it contained. I still don't. I only
sing the song, with zero comprehension. It was probably research
data, the Yakuza being given to advanced forms of industrial
espionage. A genteel business, stealing from Ono-Sendai as a matter
of course and politely holding their data for ransom, threatening to
blunt the conglomorate's research edge by making the product public.
But why couldn't any number play? Wouldn't they be happier with
something to sell back to Ono-Sendai, happier than they'd be with
one dead Johnny from Memory Lane?
Their programm was on its way to an address in Sydney, to a place
that held letters for clients and didn't ask questions once you'd
paid a small retainer. Fourth-class surface mail. I'd erased most of
the other copy and recorded our message in the resulting gap,
leaving just enough of the programm to identify it as the real
thing.
My wrist hurt. I wanted to stop, to lie down, to sleep. I knew that
I'd lose my grip and fall soon, knew that the sharp black shoes I'd
bought for my evening as Eddie Bax would lose their purchase and
carry me down to Nighttown. But he rose in my mind like a cheap
religious hologram, glowing, the enlarged chip in his Hawaiian shirt
looming like a reconnaissance shot of some doomed urban nucleus.
So I followed Dog and Molly through Lo Tek heaven, jury-rigged and
jerry-built from scraps that even Nighttown didn't want. The Killing
Floor was eight meters on a side. A giant had threaded steel cable
back and forth through a junkyard and drawn it all taut. It creaked
when it moved, and it moved constantly, swaying and buckingas the
gathering Lo Teks arranged themselves on the shelf of plywood
surrounding it. The wood was silver with age, polished with long use
and deeply etched with initials, threats, declarations of passion.
This was suspended from a separate set of cables, which last
themselves in darkness beyord the raw white glare of the two ancient
floods suspended above the Floor.
A girl with teeth like Dog's hit the Floor on all fours. Her breast
were tattooed with indigo spirals. Then she was across the Floor,
laughing, grappling with a boy who was drinking dark liquid from a
liter flask. Lo Tek fansion ran to scars and tattoos. And teeth. The
electricity they were tapping to light the Killing Floor seemed to
be an exception to their overall aesthetic, made in the name of...
rirtual, sport, art? I didn't know, but I could see that the Floor
was something special. I had the look of having been assembled over
generations.
I held the useless shotgun under my jacket. Its hardness and left
were comforting, even thought I had no more shells. And it came to
me that I had no idea at all of what was really happening, or of
what was supposed to happen. And that was the nature of my game,
because I'd spent most of my life as a blind receptacle to be filled
with other people;s knowledge and then drained, spouting synthetic
languages I'd never understand. A very technical boy. Sure.
And then I noticed just how quiet the Lo Teks had become. He was
there, at the edge of the light, taking in the Killing Floor and the
gallery of silent Lo Teks with a tourist's calm. And as our eyes met
for the first time with mutual recognition, a memory clicked into
place for me, of Paris, and the long Mercedes electrics gliding
through the rain to Notre Dame; mobile greenhouses, Japanese faces
behind the glass, and a hundred Nikons rising in blind phototropism,
flowers of steel and crystel. Behind his eyes, as they found me,
those same shutters whirring.
I looked for Molly Millions, but she was gone. The Lo Teks parted to
let him step up on to the bench. He bowed, smiling, and stepped
smoothly out of his sandals, leaving them side by side, perfectly
aligned, and then he stepped down on to the Killing Floor. He came
for me, across that shifting trampoline of scrap, as easily as any
tourist padding across synthetic pile in any featureless hotel.
Molly hit the Floor, moving.
The Floor screamed.
It was miked and amplified, with pickups riding the four fat coil
springs at the corners and contact mikes taped at random to rusting
machine fragments. Somewhere the Lo Teks had an amp and a
synthesizer, and now I made out of shapes of speakers overhead,
above the cruel white floods.
A drumbeat began, electronic, like an amplified heart, steady as a
metronome.
She'd removed her leather jacket and boots; her T-shirt was
sleeveless, faint teeltales of Chiba City circuitry traced along her
thin arms. Her leather jeans greamed under the floods. She began to
dance.
She flexed her knees, white feet tensed on a flattened gas tank, and
the Killing Floor began to heave in response. The sound it made was
like a world ending, like the wires that hold heaven snapping and
coiling across the sky.
He rode with it, for a few heartbeats, and then he moved, judging
the movement of the Floor perfectly, like a man stepping from one
flat stone to another in an ornamental garden.
He pulled the tip from his trumb with the grace of a man at ease
with social gesture and flung it at her. Under the floods, the
filament eas refracting thread of rainbow. She threw herself flat
and rolled, jackknifing up as the molecule whipped past, steel claws
snapping into the light in what must have been an automatic rictus
of defense. The drum pulse quickened, and she bounced with it, her
dark hair wild around the blank silver lenses, her mouth thin, lips
taut with concentration. The Killing Floor boomed and roared, and
the Lo Teks were screaming their excitement.
He retracted the filament to a whirling meter-wide circle of ghostly
polychrome and spun it in front of him, trumbless hand held lever
with his sternum. A shield.
And Molly seemed to let something go, something inside, and that was
the real start of her mad-dog dance. She jumped, twisting, lunging
sideways, landing with both feet on an alloy engine block wired
directly to one of the coil springs. I cupped my hands over my ears
and knelt in a vertigo of sound, thinking Floor and benches were on
their way down, down to Nighttown, and I saw us tearing through the
shanties, the wet wash, exploding on the tiles like rotten fruit.
But the cables held, and the Killing Floor rose and fell like a
crazy metal sea. And Molly danced on it.
And at the end, just before he made his final cast with the
filament, I saw in his face, an expression that didn't seem to
belong there. It wasn't fear and it wasn't anger. I think it was
disbelief, stunned incomprehension mingled with pure aesthetic
revulsion at what he was seeing, hearing - at what was happening to
him. He retracted the whirling filament, the ghost disk shrinking to
the size of a dinner plate as he whipped his arm above his head and
brought it down, the thumbtip curving out for Molly like a live
thing.
The Floor carried her down, the molecule passing just above her
head; the Floor whiplashed, lifting him into the path of the taut
molecule. It shold have passed hermlessly over his head and been
withdrawn into its diamondhard socket. It took his hand off just
behind the wrist. There was a gap in the Floor in frond of him, and
he went through it like a diver, with a strange deliberate grace, a
defeated kamikaze on his way down to Nighttown. Partly, I think, he
took that dive to buy himself a few seconds of the dignity of
silence. She'd killed him with culture shock.
The Lo Teks roared, but someone shut the amplifier off, and Molly
rode the Killing Floor into silence, hanging on now, her face white
and blank, until the pitching slower and there was only a faint
pinging of tortured metal and the grating of rust on rust.
We searched the Floor for the severed hand, but we never found it.
All we found was a graceful curve in one piece of rusted steel,
where the molecule went through. Its edge was bright as new chrome.
We never learned whether the Yakuza had a accepted our terms, or
ever whether they got our message. As far as I know, their program
is still waiting for Eddie Bax on a shelf in the back room of a gift
shop on the third level of Sydney Central-5. Probably they sold the
original back to Ono-Sendai months ago. But maybe they did get the
pirate's broadcast, because nobody's come looking for me yet, and
it's been nearly a year. If they do come, they'll have a long climp
up through the dark, past Dog's sentries, and I don't look much like
Eddie Bax these days.
I let Molly take care of that, with a local anesthetic. And my new
teeth have almost grown in.
I decited to stay up here. When I looked out across the Killing
Floor, before he came, I saw how hollow I was. And I knew I was sick
of being a bucket. So now I climb down and visit Jones, almost every
night. We're partners now, Jones and I, and Molly Millions, too.
Molly handles our business in the Drome. Jones is still in Funland,
but he has a bigger tank, with fresh seawater trucked in once a
week. And he has his junk, when he needs it. He still talks to the
kids with his frame of lights, but he talks to me on a new display
unit in a shed that I rent there, a better unit than the one he used
in the navy.
And we're all making good money, better money than I made before,
because Jone's Squid can read the traces of anything that anyone
ever srored in me, and he gives it to me on the display unit in
languages I can Understand. So we're learning a lot about all my
formed clients. And one day I'll have a surgeon dig all the silicon
out of my amygdalae, and I'll live with my own memories and nobody
else's, the way other people do. But not for a while.
In the meantime it's really okay up here, way up in the dark,
smoking a Chinese filtertip and listening to the condensation that
drips from the geodesics. Real quiet up here - unless a pair of Lo
Teks decide to dance on the Killing Floor.
It's educational, too. With Jones to help me figure things out, I'm
getting to be the most technical boy in town.
Brought to you
by
_T_h_e_ _C_y_b_e_r_p_u_n_k_ _P_r_o_j_e_c_t