Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson
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Johnny Mnemonic
William Gibson
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
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