Neuromancer, page 9
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?”
6
“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.
He’d need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said, but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added, squeezing Corto’s shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet.
Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he preferred to testify as he was.
No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The trials needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely.
Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto’s subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely the invention of a Congressional cabal with certain vested interests in saving particular portions of the Pentagon infrastructure. Corto gradually understood that the testimony he gave was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers directly responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of the emp installations at Kirensk.
His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington. In an M Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide explained the terminal dangers involved in talking to the wrong people. Corto crushed the man’s larynx with the rigid fingers of his right hand. The Congressional aide strangled, his face in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool Washington September.
The Hosaka rattled through police reports, corporate espionage records, and news files. Case watched Corto work corporate defectors in Lisbon and Marrakesh, where he seemed to grow obsessed with the idea of betrayal, to loathe the scientists and technicians he bought out for his employers. Drunk, in Singapore, he beat a Russian engineer to death in a hotel and set fire to his room.
Next he surfaced in Thailand, as overseer of a heroin factory. Then as enforcer for a California gambling cartel, then as a paid killer in the ruins of Bonn. He robbed a bank in Wichita. The record grew vague, shadowy, the gaps longer.
One day, he said, in a taped segment that suggested chemical interrogation, everything had gone gray.
Translated French medical records explained that a man without identification had been taken to a Paris mental health unit and diagnosed as schizophrenic. He became catatonic and was sent to a government institution on the outskirts of Toulon. He became a subject in an experimental program that sought to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic models. A random selection of patients were provided with microcomputers and encouraged, with help from students, to program them. He was cured, the only success in the entire experiment.
The record ended there.
Case turned on the foam and Molly cursed him softly for disturbing her.
THE TELEPHONE RANG. He pulled it into bed. “Yeah?”
“We’re going to Istanbul,” Armitage said. “Tonight.”
“What does the bastard want?” Molly asked.
“Says we’re going to Istanbul tonight.”
“That’s just wonderful.”
Armitage was reading off flight numbers and departure times.
Molly sat up and turned on the light.
“What about my gear?” Case asked. “My deck.”
“Finn will handle it,” said Armitage, and hung up.
Case watched her pack. There were dark circles under her eyes, but even with the cast on, it was like watching a dance. No wasted motion. His clothes were a rumpled pile beside his bag.
“You hurting?” he asked.
“I could do with another night at Chin’s.”
“Your dentist?”
“You betcha. Very discreet. He’s got half that rack, full clinic. Does repairs for samurai.” She was zipping her bag. “You ever been to ’Stambul?”
“Couple days, once.”
“Never changes,” she said. “Bad old town.”
“IT WAS LIKE this when we headed for Chiba,” Molly said, staring out the train window at blasted industrial moonscape, red beacons on the horizon warning aircraft away from a fusion plant. “We were in L.A. He came in and said Pack, we were booked for Macau. When we got there, I played fantan in the Lisboa and he crossed over into Zhongshan. Next day I was playing ghost with you in Night City.” She took a silk scarf from the sleeve of her black jacket and polished the insets. The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete.
The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.
7
IT WAS RAINING in Beyoglu, and the rented Mercedes slid past the grilled and unlit windows of cautious Greek and Armenian jewelers. The street was almost empty, only a few dark-coated figures on the sidewalks turning to stare after the car.
“This was formerly the prosperous European section of Ottoman Istanbul,” purred the Mercedes.
“So it’s gone downhill,” Case said.
“The Hilton’s in Cumhuriyet Caddesi,” Molly said. She settled back against the car’s gray ultrasuede.
“How come Armitage flies alone?” Case asked. He had a headache.
“ ’Cause you get up his nose. You’re sure getting up mine.”
He wanted to tell her the Corto story, but decided against it. He’d used a sleep derm, on the plane.
The road in from the airport had been dead straight, like a neat incision, laying the city open. He’d watched the crazy walls of patchwork wooden tenements slide by, condos, arcologies, grim housing projects, more walls of plyboard and corrugated iron.
The Finn, in a new Shinjuku suit, sarariman black, was waiting sourly in the Hilton lobby, marooned on a velour armchair in a sea of pale blue carpeting.
“Christ,” Molly said. “Rat in a business suit.”
They crossed the lobby.
“How much you get paid to come over here, Finn?” She lowered her bag beside the armchair. “Bet not as much as you get for wearing that suit, huh?”
The Finn’s upper lips drew back. “Not enough, sweetmeat.” He handed her a magnetic key with a round yellow tag. “You’re registered already. Honcho’s upstairs.” He looked around. “This town sucks.”
“You get agoraphobic, they take you out from under a dome. Just pretend it’s Brooklyn or something.” She twirled the key around a finger. “You here as valet or what?”
“I gotta check out some guy’s implants,” the Finn said.
“How about my deck?” Case asked.
The Finn winced. “Observe the protocol. Ask the boss.”
Molly’s fingers moved in the shadow of her jacket, a flicker of jive. The Finn watched, then nodded.
“Yeah,” she said, “I know who that is.” She jerked her head in the direction of the elevators. “Come on, cowboy.” Case followed her with both bags.
THEIR ROOM MIGHT have been the one in Chiba where he’d first seen Armitage. He went to the window, in the morning, almost expecting to see Tokyo Bay. There was another hotel across the street. It was still raining. A few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country. He watched a dull black Citroen sedan, a primitive hydrogen-cell conversion, as it disgorged five sullen-looking Turkish officers in rumpled green uniforms. They entered the hotel across the street.
He glanced back at the bed, at Molly, and her paleness struck him. She’d left the micropore cast on the bedslab in their loft, beside the transdermal inducer. Her glasses reflected part of the room’s light fixture.
He had the phone in his hand before it had a chance to ring twice. “Glad you’re up,” Armitage said.
“I’m just. Lady’s still under. Listen, boss, I think it’s maybe time we have a little talk. I think I work better if I know a little more about what I’m doing.”
Silence on the line. Case bit his lip.
“You know as much as you need to. Maybe more.”
“You think so?”
“Get dressed, Case. Get her up. You’ll have a caller in about fifteen minutes. His name is Terzibashjian.” The phone bleated softly. Armitage was gone.
“Wake up, baby,” Case said. “Biz.”
“I’ve been awake an hour already.” The mirrors turned.
“We got a Jersey Bastion coming up.”
“You got an ear for language, Case. Bet you’re part Armenian. That’s the eye Armitage has had on Riviera. Help me up.”
Terzibashjian proved to be a young man in a gray suit and gold-framed, mirrored glasses. His white shirt was open at the collar, revealing a mat of dark hair so dense that Case at first mistook it for some kind of t-shirt. He arrived with a black Hilton tray arranged with three tiny, fragrant cups of thick black coffee and three sticky, straw-colored Oriental sweets.
“We must, as you say in Ingiliz, take this one very easy.” He seemed to stare pointedly at Molly, but at last he removed the silver glasses. His eyes were a dark brown that matched the shade of his very short military-cut hair. He smiled. “It is better, this way, yes? Else we make the tunel infinity, mirror into mirror. . . . You particularly,” he said to her, “must take care. In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such modifications.”
