Burning Chrome
|
|||||
|
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 towering dark, too late. We've done it. The matrix folds itself around me like an origami trick. And the loft smells of sweat and burning circuitry. I thought I heard Chrome scream, a raw metal sound, but I couldn't have. Bobby was laughing, tears in his eyes. The elapsed-time figure in the corner of the monitor read 07:24:05. The burn had taken a little under eight minutes. And I saw that the Russian program had melted in its slot. We'd given the bulk of Chrome's ZOrich account to a dozen world charities. There was too much there to move, and we knew we had to break her, burn her straight down, or she might come after us. We took less than ten percent for ourselves and shot it through the Long Hum setup in Macao. They took sixty percent of that for themselves and kicked what was left back to us through the most convoluted sector of the Hong Kong exchange. It took an hour before our money started to reach the two accounts we'd opened in Zurich. I watched zeros pile up behind a meaningless figure on the monitor. I was rich. Then the phone rang. It was Miles. I almost blew the code phrase. "Hey, Jack, man, I dunno what's it all about, with this girl of yours? Kinda funny thing here..." "What? Tell me." "I been on her, like you said, tight but out of sight. She goes to the Loser, hangs out, then she gets a tube. Goes to the House of Blue Lights " "She what?" "Side door. Employees only. No way I could get past their security." "Is she there now?" "No, man, I just lost her. It's insane down here, like the Blue Lights just shut down, looks like for good, seven kinds of alarms going off, everybody running, the heat out in riot gear. . . . Now there's all this stuff going on, insurance guys, real-estate types, vans with munici- pal plates.... "Miles, where'd she go?" "Lost her, Jack." "Look, Miles, you keep the money in the envelope, right?" "You serious? Hey, I'm real sorry. I " Ihung up. "Wait'll we tell her," Bobby was saying, rubbing a towel across his bare chest. "You tell her yourself, co,wboy. I'm going for a walk." So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics. I didn't think, just put one foot in front of another, but after a while I did think, and it all made sense. She'd needed the money. I thought about Chrome, too. That we'd killed her, murdered her, as surely as if we'd slit her throat. The night that carried me along through the malls and plazas would be hunting her now, and she had nowhere to go. How many enemies would she have in this crowd alone? How many would move, now they weren't held back by fear of her money? We'd taken her for everything she had. She was back on the street again. I doubted she'd live till dawn. Finally I remembered the cafe, the one where I'd met Tiger. Her sunglasses told the whole story, huge black shades with a telltale smudge of fleshtone paintstick in the corner of one lens. "Hi, Rikki," I said, and I was ready when she took them off. Blue, Tally Isham blue. The clear trademark blue they're famous for, ZEISS IKON ringing each iris in tiny capitals, the letters suspended there like flecks of gold. "They're beautiful," I said. Paintstick covered the bruising. No scars with work that good. "You made some money." "Yeah, I did." Then she shivered. "But I won't make any more, not that way." ``I think that place is out of business.~~ "Oh." Nothing moved in her face then. The new blue eyes were still and very deep. "It doesn't matter. Bobby's waiting for you. We just pulled down a big score." "No. I've got to go. I guess he won't understand, but I've got to go." I nodded, watching the arm swing up to take her hand; it didn't seem to be part of me at all, but she held on to it like it was. "I've got a one-way ticket to Hollywood. Tiger knows some people I can stay with. Maybe I'll even get to Chiba City." She was right about Bobby. I went back with her. He didn't understand. But she'd already served her pur- pose, for Bobby, and I wanted to tell her not to hurt for him, because I could see that she did. He wouldn't even come out into the hallway after she had packed her bags. I put the bags down and kissed her and messed up the paintstick, and something came up inside me the way the killer program had risen above Chrome's data. A sudden stopping of the breath, in a place where no word is. But she had a plane to catch. Bobby was slumped in the swivel chair in front of his monitor, looking at his string of zeros. He had his shades on, and I knew he'd be in the Gentleman Loser by nightfall, checking out the weather, anxious for a sign, someone to tell him what his new life would be like. I couldn't see it being very different. More com- fortable, but he'd always be waiting for that next card to fall. I tried not to imagine her in the House of Blue Lights, working three-hour shifts in an approximation of REM sleep, while her body and a bundle of condi- tioned reflexes took care of business. The customers never got to complain that she was faking it, because those were real orgasms. But she felt them, if she felt them at all, as faint silver flares somewhere out on the edge of sleep. Yeah, it's so popular, it's almost legal. The customers are torn between needing someone and wanting to be alone at the same time, which has prob- ably always been the name of that particular game, even before we had the neuroelectronics to enable them to have it both ways. I picked up the phone and punched the number for her airline. I gave them her real name, her flight num- ber. "She's changing that," I said, "to Chiba City. Thatright. Japan." I thumbed' my credit card into the slot and punched my ID code. "First class." Distant hum as they scanned my credit records. "Make that a return ticket." But I guess she cashed the return fare, or else didn't need it, because she hasn't come back. And sometimes late at night I'll pass a window with posters of simstim stars, all those beautiful, identical eyes star- ing back at me out of faces that are nearly as identical, and sometimes the eyes are hers, but none of the faces are, none of them ever are, and I see her far out on the edge of all this sprawl of night and cities, and then she waves goodbye. |
|||||
|