Count Zero
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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 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 Next page this?" The console had the blank, half-finished look of a factory prototype. "Maas-Neotek cyberspace deck Turner raised his eyebrows. "Yours?" "We got two. One's on site. From Hosaka. Fastest thing in the matrix, evidently, and Hosaka can't even de-engineer the chips to copy them. Whole other technology." "They got them from Mitchell?" "They aren't saying. The fact they'd let go of `em just to give our jockeys an edge is some indication of how badly they want the man." "Who's on console, Conroy?" "Jaylene Slide. I was talking to her just now." He jerked his head in the direction of the door. "The site man's out of L.A., kid called Ramirez." "They any good?" Turner replaced the dustcover. "Better be, for what they'll cost. Jaylene's gotten herself a hot rep the past two years, and Ramirez is her understudy. Shit' `Conroy shrugged' `you know these cowboys. Fuck- ing crazy `Where'd you get them? Where'd you get Gakey for that matter?" Conroy smiled. "From your agent, Turner." Turner stared at Conroy, then nodded. Turning, he lifted the edge of the next dustcover. Cases, plastic and styrofoam, stacked neatly on the cold metal of the table. He touched a blue plastic rectangle stamped with a silver monogram: S&W. "Your agent," Conroy said, as Turner snapped the case open. The pistol lay there in its molded bed of pale blue foam, a massive revolver with an ugly housing that bulged beneath the squat barrel. "S&W Tactical. .408. with a xenon projector," Conroy said. "What he said you'd want." Turner took the gun in his hand and thumbed the batterytest stud for the projector. A red LED in the walnut grip pulsed twice. He swung the cylinder out. "Ammunition?" "On the table. Hand-loads, explosive tips." Turner found a transparent cube of amber plastic, opened it with his left hand, and extracted a cartridge. "Why did they pick me for this, Conroy?" He examined the cartridge, then inserted it carefully into one of the cylinder's six chambers. "I dont know," Conroy said. "Felt like they had you slotted from go, whenever they heard from Mitchell . . Turner spun the cylinder rapidly and snapped it back into the frame. "I said, `Why did they pick me for this, Conroy?' He raised the pistol with both hands and extended his arms, pointing it directly at Conroy's face. "Gun like this, some- times you can see right down the bore, if the light's right, see if there's a bullet there." Conroy shook his head, very slightly. "Ormaybeyoucanseeitinoneoftheothercham~~ . "No," Conroy said, very softly, "no way." "Maybe the shrinks screwed up, Conroy. How about that?" "No," Conmy said, his face blank. "They didn't, and you won't." Turner pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber. Conmy blinked once, opened his mouth, closed it, watched as Turner lowered the Smith & Wesson. A single bead of sweat rolled down from Conroy's hairline and lost itself in an eyebrow. "Well?" Turner asked, the gun at his side. Conmy shrugged. "Don't do that shit," he said. "They want me that badT' Conroy nodded. "It's your show. Turner." "Where's Mitchell?" He opened the cylinder again and began to load the five remaining chambers. "Arizona. About fifty kilos from the Sonora line, in a mesatop research arcology. Maas Biolabs North America. They own everything around there, right down to the border, and the mesa's smack in the middle of the footprints of four recon satellites. Mucho tight." "And how are we supposed to get in?" "We aren't. Mitchell's coming out, on his own. We wait for him, pick him up, get his ass to Hosaka intact" Conroy hooked a forefinger behind the open collar of his black shirt and drew out a length of black nylon cord, then a small black nylon envelope with a Velcro fastener. He opened it carefully and extracted an object, which he offered to Turner on his open palm "Here. This is what he `sent Turner put the gun down on the nearest table and took the thing from Conroy. It was like a swollen gray microsoft. one end routine neurojack, the other a strange, rounded formation unlike anything he'd seen. "What is it?" "It's biosoft. Jaylene jacked it and said she thought it was output from an Al. It's sort of a dossier on Mitchell, with a message to Hosaka tacked on the end. You better jack it yourself; you wanna get the picture fast . . Turner glanced up from the gray thing "How'd it grab Jaylene?" "She said you better be lying down when you do it She didn't seem to like it much." Machine dreams hold a special vertigo. Turner lay down on a virgin slab of green temperfoam in the makeshift dorm and jacked Mitchell's dossier. It came on slow; he had time to close his eyes. Ten seconds later, his eyes were open. He clutched the green foam and fought his nausea. Again, he closed his eyes. . . . It came on, again, gradually, a flickering, nonlin- ear flood of fact and sensory data, a kind of narrative con- veyed in surreal jump cuts and juxtapositions. It was vaguely like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, at- tack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation, but rather with lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol system. The data had never been intended for human input. Eyes open, he pulled the thing from his socket and held it, his palm slick with sweat. It was like waking from a night- mare. Not a screamer, where impacted fears took on simple, terrible shapes, but the sort of dream, infinitely more disturb- ing, where everything is perfectly and horribly normal, and where everything is utterly wrong The intimacy of the thing was hideous He fought down waves of raw transference, bringing all his will to bear on crushing a feeling that was akin to love, the obsessive tender- ness a watcher comes to feel for the subject of prolonged surveillance. Days or hours later, he knew, the most minute details of Mitchell's academic record might bob to the surface of his mind, or the name of a mistress, the scent of her heavy red hair in the sunlight through He sat up quickly, the plastic soles of his shoes smacking the rusted deck. He still wore the parka, and the Smith & Wesson, in a side pocket, swung painfully against his hip. It would pass. Mitchell's psychic odor would fade, as surely as the Spanish grammar in the lexicon evaporated after each use. What he had experienced was a Maas security dossier compiled by a sentient computer, nothing more He replaced the biosoft in Conroy's little black wallet, smoothed the Velcro seal with his thumb, and put the cord around his neck. He became aware of the sound of waves lapping the flanks of the rig. "Hey, boss," someone said, from beyond the brown mili- tary blanket that screened the entrance to the dorm area, "Conroy says it's time for you to inspect the troops, then you and him depart for other parts." Oakey's bearded face slid from behind the blanket "Otherwise, I wouldn't wake you up, right?" "I wasn't sleeping," Turner said, and stood, fingers reflex- ively kneading the skin around the implanted socket. "Too bad," Oakey said. "I got derms'll put you under all the way, one hour on the button, then kick in some kind of righteous upper, get you up and on the case, no lie Turner shook his head. "Take me to Conroy" S TII[ MAIU..Y CHECKED iwro a small hotel with green plants in heavy brass pots, the corridors tiled like worn marble chessboards. The elevator was a scrolled gilt cage with rosewood panels smelling of lemon oil and small cigars. Her room was on the fifth floor. A single tall window overlooked the avenue, the kind of window you could actu- ally open. When the smiling bellman had gone, she collapsed into an armchair whose plush fabric contrasted comfortably with the muted Belgian carpet. She undid the zips on her old Paris boots for the last time, kicked them off, and stared at the dozen glossy carrier bags the bellman had arranged on the bed. Tomorrow, she thought, she'd buy luggage. And a toothbrush. "I'm in shock," she said to the bags on the bed. "I must take care. Nothing seems real now." She looked down and saw that her hose were both out at the toe. She shook her head. Her new purse lay on the white marble table beside the bed; it was black, cut from cowhide tanned thick and soft as Flemish butter. It had cost more than she would have owed Andrea for her share of a month's rent, but that was also true of a single night's stay in this hotel. The purse contained her passport and the credit chip she'd been issued in the Galerie Duperey, drawn on an account held in her name by an orbital branch of the Nederlands Algemeen Bank. She went into the bathroom and worked the smooth brass levers of the big white tub. Hot, aerated water hissed out through a Japanese filtration device. The hotel provided pack- ets of bath salts, tubes of creams and scented oils. She emptied a tube of oil into the filling tub and began to remove her clothes, feeling a pang of loss when she tossed the Sally Stanley behind her. Until an hour before, the year-old jacket had been her favorite garment and perhaps the single most expensive thing she'd ever owned. Now it was something for the cleaners to take away; perhaps it would find its way to one of the city's flea markets, the sort of place where she'd hunted bargains as an art-school girl. The mirrors misted and ran, as the room filled with scented steam, blurring the reflection of her nakedness. Was it really this easy? Had Virek's slim gold credit chip checked her out of her misery and into this hotel, where the towels were white and thick and scratchy? She was aware of a certain spiritual vertigo, as though she trembled at the edge of some precipice. She wondered how powerful money could actually be, if one had enough of it, really enough. She supposed that only the Vireks of the world could really know, and very likely they were functionally incapable of knowing; asking Virek would be like interrogating a fish in order to learn more about water. Yes, my dear, it's wet; yes, my child, it's certainly warm, scented, scratchy-toweled. She stepped into the tub and lay |
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