Burning Chrome
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Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 Next page their central research thrust. Balls. Bet your ass there's some kind of power struggle going on in Hosaka research. Somebody big's flying his favorites in and rubbing them all over Hiroshi for luck. When Hiroshi shoots the legs out from under genetic engineering, the Medina crowd's going to be ready. He drank his scotch and shrugged. Go to bed, he said. You're right, it's over. I did go to bed, but the phone woke me. Marrakech again, the white static of a satellite link, a rush of frightened Portuguese. Hosaka didn't freeze our credit, they caused it to evaporate. Fairy gold. One minute we were millionaires in the world's hardest currency, and the next we were paupers. I woke Fox. Sandii, he said. She sold out. Maas security turned her in Vienna. Sweet Jesus. I watched him slit his battered suitcase apart with a Swiss Army knife. He had three gold bars glued in there with contact cement. Soft plates, each one proofed and stamped by the treasury of some extinct African govern- ment. I should've seen it, he said, his voice flat. I said no. I think I said your name. Forget her, he said. Hosaka wants us dead. They'll assume we crossed them. Get on the phone and check our credit. Our credit was gone. They denied that either of us had ever had an account. Haul ass, Fox said. We ran. Out a service door, into Tokyo traffic, and down into Shinjuku. That was when I understood for the first time the real extent of Hosaka's reach. Every door was closed. People we'd done business with for two years saw us coming, and I'd see steel shut- ters slam behind their eyes. We'd get out before they had a chance to reach for the phone. The surface ten- sion of the underworld had been tripled, and every- where we'd meet that same taut membrane and be thrown back. No chance to sink, to get out of sight. Hosaka let us run for most of that first day. Then they sent someone to break Fox's back a second time. I didn't see them do it, but I saw him fall. We were in a Ginza department store an hour before closing, and I saw his arc off that polished mezzanine, down into all the wares of the new Asia. They missed me somehow,~and I just kept running. Fox took the gold with him, but I had a hundred new yen in my pocket. I ran. All the way to the New Rose Hotel. Now it's time. Come with me, Sandii. Hear the neon humming on the road to Narita International. A few late moths trace stop-motion circles around the floodlights that shine on New Rose. And the funny thing, Sandii, is how sometimes you just don't seem real to me. Fox once said you were cc- toplasm, a ghost called up by the extremes of econom- ics. Ghost of the new century, congealing on a thousand beds in the world's Hyatts, the world's Hiltons. Now I've got your gun in my hand, jacket pocket, and my hand seems so far away. Disconnected. I remember my Portuguese business friend forget- ting his English, trying to get it across in four languages I barely understood, and I thought he was telling me that the Medina was burning. Not the Medina. The brains of Hosaka's best research people. Plague, he was whispering, my businessman, plague and fever and death. Smart Fox, he put it together on the run. I didn't even have to mention finding the diskette in your bag in Germany. Someone had reprogrammed the DNA synthesizer, he said. The thing was there for the overnight construc- tion of just the right macromolecule. With its in-built computer and its custom software. Expensive, Sandii. But not as expensive as you turned out to be for Hosaka. I hope you got a good price from Maas. The diskette in my hand. Rain on the river. I knew, but I couldn't face it. I put the code for that meningial virus back into your purse and lay down beside you. So Moenner died, along with other Hosaka re- searchers. Including Hiroshi. Chedanne suffered per- manent brain damage. Hiroshi hadn't worried about contamination. The proteins he punched for were harmless. So the syn- thesizer hummed to itself all night long, building a virus to the specifications of Maas Biolabs GmbH. Maas. Small, fast, ruthless. All Edge. The airport road is a long, straight shot. Keep to the shadows. And I was shouting at that Portuguese voice, I made him tell me what happened to the girl, to Hiroshi's woman. Vanished, he said. The whir of Victorian clockwork. So Fox had to fall, fall with his three pathetic plates of gold, and snap his spine for the last time. On the floor of a Ginza department store, every shopper staring in the instant before they screamed. I just can't hate you, baby. And Hosaka's helicopter is back, no lights at all, hunting on infrared, feeling for body heat. A muffled whine as it turns, a kilometer away, swinging back toward us, toward New Rose. Too fast a shadow, against the glow of Narita. It's all right, baby. Only please come here. Hold my hand. The Winter Market It rains a lot, up here; there are winter days when it doesn't really get light at all, only a bright, indeter- inmate gray. But then there are days when it's like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sun- lit, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God's own movie. It was like that the day her agents phoned, from deep in the heart of their mirrored pyra- mid on Beverly Boulevard, to tell me she'd merged with the net, crossed over for good, that Kings of Sleep was going triple-platinum. I'd edited most of Kings, done the brain-map work and gone over it all with the fast- wipe module, so I was in line for a share of royalties. No, I said, no. Then yes, yes, and hung up on them. Got my jacket and took the stairs three at a time, straight out to the nearest bar and an eight-hour black- out that ended on a concrete ledge two meters above midnight. False Creek water. City lights, that same gray bowl of sky smaller now, illuminated by neon and mer- cury-vapor arcs. And it was snowing, big flakes but not many, and when they touched black water, they were gone, no trace at all. I looked down at my feet and saw my toes clear of the edge of concrete, the water between them. I was wearing Japanese shoes, new and expensive, glove-leather Ginza monkey boots with rubber-capped toes. I stood there for a long time before I took that first step back. my hand. Because she was dead, and I'd let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I'd helped her get that way. And because I knew she'd phone me, in the morning. My father was an audio engineer, a mastering engineer. He went way back, in the business, even before digi- tal. The processes he was concerned with were partly mechanical, with that clunky quasi-Victorian quality you see in twentieth-century technology. He was a lathe operator, basically. People brought him audio record- ings and he burned their sounds into grooves on a disk of lacquer. Then the disk was electroplated and used in the construction of a press that would stamp out records, the black things you see in antique stores. And I remember him telling me, once, a few months before he died, that certain frequencies transients, I think he called them could easily burn out the head, the cutting head, on a master lathe. These heads were incredibly ex- pensive, so you prevented burnouts with something called an accelerometer. And that was what I was thinking of, as I stood there, my toes out over the water: that head, burning out. Because that was what they did to her. And that was what she wanted. No accelerometer for Lise. I disconnected my phone on my way to bed. I did it with the business end of a West German studio tripod that was going to cost a week's wages to repair. Woke some strange time later and took a cab back to Granville Island and Rubin's place. Rubin, in some way that no one quite understands, is a master, a teacher, what the Japanese call a sensei. What he's the master of, really, is garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on. Gomi no sensei. Master of junk. I found him, this time, squatting between two vicious-looking drum machines I hadn't seen before, rusty spider arms folded at t~1e hearts of dented con- stellations of steel cans fished out of Richmond dump- sters. He never calls the place a studio, never refers to himself as an artist. "Messing around," he calls what he does there, and seems to view it as some extension of boyhood's perfectly bored backyard afternodns. He wanders through his jammed, littered space, a kind of minihangar cobbled to the water side of the Market, followed by the smarter and more agile of his creations, like some vaguely benign Satan bent on the elaboration of still stranger processes in his ongoing Inferno of gomi. I've seen Rubin program his constructions to identify and verbally abuse pedestrians wearing gar- ments by a given season's hot designer; others attend to more obscure missions, and a few seem constructed solely to deconstruct themselves ~vith as much attendant noise as possible. He's like a child, Rubin; he's also worth a lot of money in galleries in Tokyo and Paris. So I told him about Lise. He let me do it, get it out, then nodded. "I know," he said. "Some CBC creep phoned eight times." He sipped something out of a dented cup. "You wanna Wild Turkey sour?" |
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