Johnny Mnemonic
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Pages: 1 2 3 4 Next page my wrist. It must have been raining; ribbons of water cascaded from a ruptured geodesic and spattered on the tile behind us. We crouched in the narrow gap between a surgical boutique and an antique shop. She'd just edged one mirrored eye around the corner to report a single Volks module in frond of the Drome, red lights fliashing. They were sweeping Ralfi up. Asking questions. I was covered in scorched white fluff. The tennis socks. The gym bag was a ragged plastic cuff around my wrist. 'I don't see how the hell I missed him.' 'Cause he's faxt, so fast.' She hugged her knees and rocked back and forth on her bootheels. 'His nervous system's jacked up. He's factory custom.' She grinned and gave a little squeal of delight. 'I'm gonna get that boy. Tonight. He's the best, number one, top dollar, state of the art.' 'What you're going to get, for this boy's two million, is my ass out of here. Your boyfriend back there was mostly grown in a vat in Chiba City. He's a Yakuza assassin.' 'Chiba. Yeah. See, Molly's been Chiba, too.' And she showed me her hands, fingers slighly spread. Her fingers were slender, tapered, very white against the polished burgundy nails. Ten blades snicked straight out from their recesses beneath her nails, each one a narrow, doubleedged scalpel in pale blue steel. *** I'd never spent much time in Nighttown. Nobody there had anything to pay me to remember, and most of them had a lot they paid regularly to forget. Generations of sharpsshooters had clipped away at the neon until the maintenance crews gave up. Even at noon the arcs were soot-black against faintest pearl. Where do you go when the world's wealthiest criminal order is feeling for you with calm, distant fingers? Where do you hide from the Yakuza, so powerful that it owns comsats and at least three shuttles? The Yakuza is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I was born the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse. Molly had an answer: You hide in the Pit, in the lowest circle, where any outside influence generates swift, cocentric ripples of raw menace. You hide in Nighttown. Better yet, you hide above Nighttown, because the Pit's inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown never sees, sweating under its own filmament of acrylic resin, up where the Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles, black-market cigarettes dangling from their lips. She had another answer, too. 'So you're locked up good and tight, Johnny-san? No way to get that program without the password?' She led me into the shadows that waited beyord the bright tube platform. The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration. 'The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical contraautism prostheses.' I reeled off a numb version of my standard sales pitch. 'Client's code is stored in a special chip; barring Squids, which we in the trade don't like to talk about, there's no way to recover your phrase. Can't drug it out, cut it out, torture it. I don't know it, never did.' 'Squids? Crawly things with arms?' We emerged into a deserted street market. Shadowy figures watched us from across a makeshift square littered with fish heads and rotting fruit. 'Superconducting quantum interfence detectors. Used them in the war to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.' 'Yeah? Navy stuff? From the war? Squid'll read that chip of yours?' She'd stopped walking, and I felt her eyes on me behind those twin mirrors. 'Even the primitive models could measure a magnetic field a billionth the strenght of geomagnetic force; it's like pulling a whisper out of cheering stadium.' 'Cops can do that already, with parabolic microphones and lasers.' 'But your data's still secure.' Pride in profession. 'No government'll let their cops have Squids, not even the security heavies. Too much chance of interdepartmental funnies; they're too likely to watergate you.' 'Navy stuff,' she said, and her grin gleamed in the shadows. 'Navy stuff. I got a friend down here who was in the navy, name's Jones. I think you'd better meet him. He's a junkie, though. So we'll have to take him something.' 'A junkie?' 'A dolphin.' He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin's point of view he might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water stopped over the side, wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg. He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-white hide. Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded doen the side of the tank. 'What is this place?' I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting chain link and things under tarps. Above the tank hung a clumsy wooden framework, crossed and recrossed by rows of dusty Christmas lights. 'Funland. Zoo and carnival rides. "talk with the War Whale." All that. Some whale Jones is...' Jones reared again and fixed me with a sad and ancient eye. 'How's he talk?' Suddenly I was anxious to go. 'Thta's the catch. Say "Hi," Jones.' And all the bulbs lit simultaneously. They were flashing red, white, and blue. RWBRWBRWB RWBRWBRWB RWBRWBRWB RWBRWBRWB RWBRWBRWB 'Good with symbols, see, but the code'w recricted. In the navy they had him wired into an audiovisual display.' She drew the narrow package from a jacket pocket. 'Pure shit, Jones. Want it?' He froze in the water and started to sink. I felt a strange panic, remembering that he wasn't a fish that he could drown. 'We want the key to Johnny's bank, Jones. We want it fast.' The lights flickered, died. 'Go for it, Jones!' B BBBBBBBBB B B B Blue bulbs, cruciform. Darkness. 'Pure! It's clean. Come on, Jones.' WWWWWWWWW WWWWWWWWW WWWWWWWWW WWWWWWWWW WWWWWWWWW White sodium glare washed her features, stark monochrome, shadows cleaving from her cheekbones. R RRRRR R R RRRRRRRRR R R RRRRR R The arms of the red swastika were twisted in her silver glasses. 'Give it to him,' I said. 'We've got it.' Ralfi Face. No imagination. Jones heaved half his armored bulk over the edge of his tank, and I thought the metal would give way. Molly stabbed him overhand with the Syrette, driving the needle between two plates. Propellant hissed. Patterns of light exploded, sparming across the frame and then fading to black. We left him drifting, rolling languorously in the dark water. Maybe he was dreaming of his war in the Pacific, of the cyber mines he'd swept, nosing gently into their circuitry with the Squid he'd used to pick Ralfi's pathetic password from the chip buried in my head. 'I can see them slipping up when he was demobbed, letting him out of the navy with that gear intact, but how does a cybernetic dolphin get wired to smack?' 'The war,' she said. 'They all were. Navy did it. How else you get'em working for you?' I'm not sure this profiles as good business,' the pirate said, angling for better money. 'Target specs on a comsat that isn't in the book -' 'Waste my time and you won't profile at all,' said Molly, learning across his scarred plastic desk to prod him with her forefinger. 'So maybe you want to buy your microwaves somewhere else?' he was a tough kid, behind his Mao-job. A Nighttowner by birth, probably. Her hand blurred down the frond of his jacket, completely severing a lapel without even rumpling the fabric. 'So we got a deal ot not?' 'Deal,' he said starting at his ruined lapel with what he must have hoped was only polite interest. 'Deal.' While I checked the two records we'd bought she extracted the slip of paper I'd given her from the zippered wrist pocket of her jacket. She unfolded it and read sirently, moving her lips. She shrugged. 'This is it?' 'Shoot,' I said, punching the RECORD studs of the two desks simultaneously. 'Christian White,' she recited, 'and his Aryan Reggae Band.' Fairtful Ralfi, a fan to his dying day. Transition to idiot-savant mode is always less abrupt than I except it to be. The pirate broadcaster's front was a failing travel agancy in a pastel cube that boasted a desk, three chairs, and a faded poster of a Swiss orbital spa. A pair of toy birds with blown-glass bodies and tin legs were sipping monotonously from a Styrofoarm cup of water on the ledge beside Molly's shoulder. As I phased into mode, they accelerated gradually until their DayGlo-feathered crowns became solid arcs of color. The LEDs that told seconds on the plastic wall clock had become meaningless pulsing grids, and Molly and the Mao-faced boy grew hazy, their arms blurring occasionally in insect-quick ghosts of gesture. And then it all faded to cool gray static and an endless tone poem in the artificial language. I sat and sang dead Ralfi's stolen program for three hours. The mall runs forty kilometers from end, a ragged overlap of Fuller domes roofing what was once a suburbanartery. If they turn off the arcs on a clean day. a gray approximation of sunlight filters through layers of acrylic, a view like the prison sketches of Giovanni Piranesi. The three southernmost kilometers roof Nighttown. Nighttown pays no taxes, no utilities. The neon arcs are dead, and the geodesics have been smoked black by decades of cooking fires. In the nearly total darkness of a Nighttown noon, who notices a few dozen mad children lost in the |
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