Neuromancer (Chapter 10)

10

He was numb, as they went through customs, and Molly did most of the talking. Maelcum remained on board _Garvey._ Customs, for Freeside, consisted mainly of proving your credit. The first thing he saw, when they gained the inner surface of the spindle, was a branch of the Beautiful Girl coffee franchise.
`Welcome to the Rue Jules Verne,' Molly said. `If you have trouble walking, just look at your feet. The perspective's a bitch, if you're not used to it.'
They were standing in a broad street that seemed to be the floor of a deep slot or canyon, its either end concealed by subtle angles in the shops and buildings that formed its walls. The light, here, was filtered through fresh green masses of vege tation tumbling from overhanging tiers and balconies that rose above them. The sun...
There was a brilliant slash of white somewhere above them, too bright, and the recorded blue of a Cannes sky. He knew that sunlight was pumped in with a Lado-Acheson system whose two-millimeter armature ran the length of the spindle, that they generated a rotating library of sky effects around it, that if the sky were turned off, he'd stare up past the armature of light to the curves of lakes, rooftops of casinos, other streets... But it made no sense to his body.
`Jesus,' he said, `I like this less than SAS.'
`Get used to it. I was a gambler's bodyguard here for a month.'
`Wanna go somewhere, lie down.'
`Okay. I got our keys.' She touched his shoulder. `What happened to you, back there, man? You flatlined.'
He shook his head. `I dunno, yet. Wait.'
`Okay. We get a cab or something.' She took his hand and led him across Jules Verne, past a window displaying the sea son's Paris furs.
`Unreal,' he said, looking up again.
`Nah,' she responded, assuming he meant the furs, `grow it on a collagen base, but it's mink DNA. What's it matter?'

`It's just a big tube and they pour things through it,' Molly said. `Tourists, hustlers, anything. And there's fine mesh money screens working every minute, make sure the money stays here when the people fall back down the well.'
Armitage had booked them into a place called the Inter continental, a sloping glass-fronted cliff face that slid down into cold mist and the sound of rapids. Case went out onto their balcony and watched a trio of tanned French teenagers ride simple hang gliders a few meters above the spray, triangles of nylon in bright primary colors. One of them swung, banked, and Case caught a flash of cropped dark hair, brown breasts, white teeth in a wide smile. The air here smelled of running water and flowers. `Yeah,' he said, `lotta money.'
She leaned beside him against the railing, her hands loose and relaxed. `Yeah. We were gonna come here once, either here or some place in Europe.'
`We who?'
`Nobody,' she said, giving her shoulders an involuntary toss. `You said you wanted to hit the bed. Sleep. I could use some sleep.'
`Yeah,' Case said, rubbing his palms across his cheek bones. `Yeah, this is some place.'
The narrow band of the Lado-Acheson system smoldered in abstract imitation of some Bermudan sunset, striped by shreds of recorded cloud. `Yeah,' he said, `sleep.'
Sleep wouldn't come. When it did, it brought dreams that were like neatly edited segments of memory. He woke re peatedly, Molly curled beside him, and heard the water, voices drifting in through the open glass panels of the balcony, a woman's laughter from the stepped condos on the opposite slope. Deane's death kept turning up like a bad card, no matter if he told himself that it hadn't been Deane. That it hadn't, in fact, happened at all. Someone had once told him that the amount of blood in the average human body was roughly equiv alent to a case of beer.
Each time the image of Deane's shattered head struck the rear wall of the office, Case was aware of another thought, something darker, hidden, that rolled away, diving like a fish, just beyond his reach.
Linda.
Deane. Blood on the wall of the importer's office.
Linda. Smell of burnt flesh in the shadows of the Chiba dome. Molly holding out a bag of ginger, the plastic filmed with blood. Deane had had her killed.
Wintermute. He imagined a little micro whispering to the wreck of a man named Corto, the words flowing like a river, the flat personality-substitute called Armitage accreting slowly in some darkened ward... The Deane analog had said it worked with givens, took advantage of existing situations.
But what if Deane, the real Deane, had ordered Linda killed on Wintermute's orders? Case groped in the dark for a cigarette and Molly's lighter. There was no reason to suspect Deane, he told himself, lighting up. No reason.
Wintermute could build a kind of personality into a shell. How subtle a form could manipulation take? He stubbed the Yeheyuan out in a bedside ashtray after his third puff, rolled away from Molly, and tried to sleep.
The dream, the memory, unreeled with the monotony of an unedited simstim tape. He'd spent a month, his fifteenth sum mer, in a weekly rates hotel, fifth floor, with a girl called Marlene. The elevator hadn't worked in a decade. Roaches boiled across grayish porcelain in the drain-plugged kitchenette when you flicked a lightswitch. He slept with Marlene on a striped mattress with no sheets.
He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting con tents of the dumpsters.
They'd each had a dozen beers, the afternoon a wasp stung Marlene. `Kill the fuckers,' she said, her eyes dull with rage and the still heat of the room, `burn 'em.' Drunk, Case rum maged in the sour closet for Rollo's dragon. Rollo was Mar lene's previous -- and, Case suspected at the time, still occasional -- boyfriend, an enormous Frisco biker with a blond lightning bolt bleached into his dark crewcut. The dragon was a Frisco flamethrower, a thing like a fat anglehead flashlight. Case checked the batteries, shook it to make sure he had enough fuel, and went to the open window. The hive began to buzz.
The air in the Sprawl was dead, immobile. A wasp shot from the nest and circled Case's head. Case pressed the ignition switch, counted three, and pulled the trigger. The fuel, pumped up to 100 psi, sprayed out past the white-hot coil. A five-meter tongue of pale fire, the nest charring, tumbling. Across the alley, someone cheered.
`Shit!' Marlene behind him, swaying. `Stupid! You didn't burn 'em. You just knocked it off. They'll come up here and kill us!' Her voice sawing at his nerves, he imagined her en gulfed in flame, her bleached hair sizzling a special green.
In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the black ened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt.
He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed.
Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, re vealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet.
When he did hit the ignition, it exploded with a thump, taking an eyebrow with it. Five floors above him, from the open window, he heard Marlene laughing.
He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark. Afterimages, retinal flares. The sky outside hinted at the start of a recorded dawn. There were no voices now, only the rush of water, far down the face of the Intercontinental.
In the dream, just before he'd drenched the nest with fuel, he'd seen the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly embossed into its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it there.

Molly insisted on coating him with bronzer, saying his Sprawl pallor would attract too much attention.
`Christ,' he said, standing naked in front of the mirror, `you think that looks real?' She was using the last of the tube on his left ankle, kneeling beside him.
`Nah, but it looks like you care enough to fake it. There. There isn't enough to do your foot.' She stood, tossing the empty tube into a large wicker basket. Nothing in the room looked as though it had been machine-made or produced from synthetics. Expensive, Case knew, but it was a style that had always irritated him. The temperfoam of the huge bed was tinted to resemble sand. There was a lot of pale wood and handwoven fabric.
`What about you,' he said, `you gonna dye yourself brown? Don't exactly look like you spend all your time sunbathing.'
She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. `I'm an exotic. I got a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna look like a cheap-ass hood who's up for what he can get, so the instant tan's okay.'
Case regarded his pallid foot morosely, then looked at him self in the mirror. `Christ. You mind if I get dressed now?' He went to the bed and began to pull his jeans on. `You sleep okay? You notice any lights?'
`You were dreaming,' she said.
They had breakfast on the roof of the hotel, a kind of meadow, studded with striped umbrellas and what seemed to Case an unnatural number of trees. He told her about his attempt to buzz the Berne AI. The whole question of bugging seemed to have become academic. If Armitage were tapping them, he'd be doing it through Wintermute.
`And it was like real?' she asked, her mouth full of cheese croissant. `Like simstim?'
He said it was. `Real as this,' he added, looking around. `Maybe more.'
The trees were small, gnarled, impossibly old, the result of genetic engineering and chemical manipulation. Case would have been hard pressed to distinguish a pine from an oak, but a street boy's sense of style told him that these were too cute, too entirely and definitively treelike. Between the trees, on gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass, the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel's guests from the unfal tering radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun. A burst of French from a nearby table caught his attention: the golden children he'd seen gliding above river mist the evening before. Now he saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect produced by selective melanin boosting, multiple shades overlapping in rec tilinear patterns, outlining and highlighting musculature, the girl's small hard breasts, one boy's wrist resting on the white enamel of the table. They looked to Case like machines built for racing; they deserved decals for their hairdressers, the de signers of their white cotton ducks, for the artisans who'd crafted their leather sandals and simple jewelry. Beyond them, at another table, three Japanese wives in Hiroshima sackcloth awaited sarariman husbands, their oval faces covered with ar tificial bruises; it was, he knew, an extremely conservative style, one he'd seldom seen in Chiba.
`What's that smell?' he asked Molly, wrinkling his nose.
`The grass. Smells that way after they cut it.'
Armitage and Riviera arrived as they were finishing their coffee, Armitage in tailored khakis that made him look as though his regimental patches had just been stripped, Riviera in a loose gray seersucker outfit that perversely suggested prison.
`Molly, love,' Riviera said, almost before he was settled on his chair, `you'll have to dole me out more of the medicine. I'm out.'
`Peter,' she said, `and what if I won't?' She smiled without showing her teeth.
`You will,' Riviera said, his eyes cutting to Armitage and back.
`Give it to him,' Armitage said.
`Pig for it, aren't you?' She took a flat, foil-wrapped packet from an inside pocket and flipped it across the table. Riviera caught it in midair. `He could off himself,' she said to Ar mitage.
`I have an audition this afternoon,' Riviera said. `I'll need to be at my best.' He cupped the foil packet in his upturned palm and smiled. Small glittering insects swarmed out of it, vanished. He dropped it into the pocket of his seersucker blouse.
`You've got an audition yourself, Case, this afternoon,' Armitage said. `On that tug. I want you to get over to the pro shop and get yourself fitted for a vac suit, get checked out on it, and get out to the boat. You've got about three hours.'
`How come we get shipped over in a shitcan and you two hire a _JAL_ taxi?' Case asked, deliberately avoiding the man's eyes.
`Zion suggested we use it. Good cover, when we move. I do have a larger boat, standing by, but the tug is a nice touch.'
`How about me?' Molly asked. `I got chores today?'
`I want you to hike up the far end to the axis, work out in zero-g. Tomorrow, maybe, you can hike in the opposite di rection.' Straylight, Case thought.
`How soon?' Case asked, meeting the pale stare.
`Soon,' Armitage said. `Get going, Case.'

`Mon, you doin' jus' fine,' Maelcum said, helping Case out of the red Sanyo vacuum suit. `Aerol say you doin' jus' fine.' Aerol had been waiting at one of the sporting docks at the end of the spindle, near the weightless axis. To reach it, Case had taken an elevator down to the hull and ridden a miniature induction train. As the diameter of the spindle nar rowed, gravity decreased; somewhere above him, he'd decided, would be the mountains Molly climbed, the bicycle loop, launching gear for the hang gliders and miniature microlights.
Aerol had ferried him out to _Marcus Garvey_ in a skeletal scooter frame with a chemical engine.
`Two hour ago,' Maelcum said, `I take delivery of Babylon goods for you; nice Japan-boy inna yacht, mos' pretty yacht.'
Free of the suit, Case pulled himself gingerly over the Ho saka and fumbled into the straps of the web. `Well,' he said, `let's see it.'
Maelcum produced a white lump of foam slightly smaller than Case's head, fished a pearl-handled switchblade on a green nylon lanyard out of the hip pocket of his tattered shorts and carefully slit the plastic. He extracted a rectangular object and passed it to Case. `Thas part some gun, mon?'
`No,' Case said, turning it over, `but it's a weapon. It's virus.'
`Not on _this_ boy tug, mon,' Maelcum said firmly, reaching for the steel cassette.
`A program. Virus program. Can't get into you, can't even get into your software. I've got to interface it through the deck, before it can work on anything.'
`Well. Japan-mon, he says Hosaka here'll tell you every what an' wherefore, you wanna know.'
`Okay. Well, you leave me to it, okay?'
Maelcum kicked off and drifted past the pilot console, bus ying himself with a caulk gun. Case hastily looked away from the waving fronds of transparent caulk. He wasn't sure why, but something about them brought back the nausea of SAS.
`What is this thing?' he asked the Hosaka. `Parcel for me.'
`Data transfer from Bockris Systems GmbH, Frankfurt, ad vises, under coded transmission, that content of shipment is Kuang Grade Mark Eleven penetration program. Bockris fur ther advises that interface with Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is entirely compatible and yields optimal penetration capabilities, particularly with regard to existing military systems...'
`How about an AI?'
`Existing military systems and artificial intelligences.'
`Jesus Christ. What did you call it?'
`Kuang Grade Mark Eleven.'
`It's Chinese?'
`Yes.'
`Off.' Case fastened the virus cassette to the side of the Hosaka with a length of silver tape, remembering Molly's story of her day in Macao. Armitage had crossed the border into Zhongshan. `On,' he said, changing his mind. `Question. Who owns Bockris, the people in Frankfurt?'
`Delay for interorbital transmission,' said the Hosaka.
`Code it. Standard commercial code.'
`Done.'
He drummed his hands on the Ono-Sendai.
`Reinhold Scientific A.G., Berne.'
`Do it again. Who owns Reinhold?'
It took three more jumps up the ladder before he reached Tessier-Ashpool.
`Dixie,' he said, jacking in, `what do you know about Chinese virus programs?'
`Not a whole hell of a lot.'
`Ever hear of a grading system like Kuang, Mark Eleven?'
`No.'
Case sighed. `Well, I got a user-friendly Chinese icebreaker here, a one shot cassette. Some people in Frankfurt say it'll cut an AI.'
`Possible. Sure. If it's military.'
`Looks like it. Listen, Dix, and gimme the benefit of your background, okay? Armitage seems to be setting up a run on an AI that belongs to Tessier-Ashpool. The mainframe's in Berne, but it's linked with another one in Rio. The one in Rio is the one that flatlined you, that first time. So it looks like they link via Straylight, the T-A home base, down the end of the spindle, and we're supposed to cut our way in with the Chinese icebreaker. So if Wintermute's backing the whole show, it's paying us to burn it. It's burning itself. And something that calls itself Wintermute is trying to get on my good side, get me to maybe shaft Armitage. What goes?'
`Motive,' the construct said. `Real motive problem, with an AI. Not human, see?'
`Well, yeah, obviously.'
`Nope. I mean, it's not human. And you can't get a handle on it. Me, I'm not human either, but I _respond_ like one. See?'
`Wait a sec,' Case said. `Are you sentient, or not?'
`Well, it _feels_ like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess...' The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case's spine. `But I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way _human.'_
`So you figure we can't get on to its motive?'
`It own itself?'
`Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the mainframe.'
`That's a good one,' the construct said. `Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI.'
`So it's getting ready to burn itself?' Case began to punch the deck nervously, at random. The matrix blurred, resolved, and he saw the complex of pink spheres representing a sikkim steel combine.
`Autonomy, that's the bugaboo, where your AI's are concerned. My guess, Case, you're going in there to cut the hard wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can't see how you'd distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that's maybe where the confusion comes in.' Again the nonlaugh. `See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing'll wipe it. _Nobody_ trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electro magnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.'
Case glared at the pink spheres of Sikkim.
`Okay,' he said, finally, `I'm slotting this virus. I want you to scan its instruction face and tell me what you think.'
The half sense of someone reading over his shoulder was gone for a few seconds, then returned. `Hot shit. Case. It's a slow virus. Take six hours, estimated, to crack a military target.'
`Or an AI.' He sighed. `Can we run it?'
`Sure,' the construct said, `unless you got a morbid fear of dying.'
`Sometimes you repeat yourself, man.'
`It's my nature.'

Molly was sleeping when he returned to the Intercontinental. He sat on the balcony and watched a microlight with rainbow polymer wings as it soared up the curve of Freeside, its tri angular shadow tracking across meadows and rooftops, until it vanished behind the band of the Lado-Acheson system.
`I wanna buzz,' he said to the blue artifice of the sky. `I truly do wanna get high, you know? Trick pancreas, plugs in my liver, little bags of shit melting, fuck it all. I wanna buzz.'
He left without waking Molly, he thought. He was never sure, with the glasses. He shrugged tension from his shoulders and got into the elevator. He rode up with an Italian girl in spotless whites, cheekbones and nose daubed with something black and nonreflective. Her white nylon shoes had steel cleats; the expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross be tween a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace. She was off for a fast game of something, but Case had no idea what.
On the roof meadow, he made his way through the grove of trees and umbrellas, until he found a pool, naked bodies gleaming against turquoise tiles. He edged into the shadow of an awning and pressed his chip against a dark glass plate. `Sushi,' he said, `whatever you got.' Ten minutes later, an enthusiastic Chinese waiter arrived with his food. He munched raw tuna and rice and watched people tan. `Christ,' he said, to his tuna, `I'd go nuts.'
`Don't tell me,' someone said, `I know it already. You're a gangster, right?'
He squinted up at her, against the band of sun. A long young body and a melanin-boosted tan, but not one of the Paris jobs.
She squatted beside his chair, dripping water on the tiles. `Cath,' she said.
`Lupus,' after a pause.
`What kind of name is that?'
`Greek,' he said.
`Are you really a gangster?' The melanin boost hadn't pre vented the formation of freckles.
`I'm a drug addict, Cath.'
`What kind?'
`Stimulants. Central nervous system stimulants. Extremely powerful central nervous system stimulants.'
`Well, do you _have_ any?' She leaned closer. Drops of chlorinated water fell on the leg of his pants.
`No. That's my problem, Cath. Do you know where we can get some?'
Cath rocked back on her tanned heels and licked at a strand of brownish hair that had pasted itself beside her mouth. `What's your taste?'
`No coke, no amphetamines, but _up,_ gotta be _up.'_ And so much for that, he thought glumly, holding his smile for her.
`Betaphenethylamine,' she said. `No sweat, but it's on your chip.'

`You're kidding,' said Cath's partner and roommate, when Case explained the peculiar properties of his Chiba pancreas. `I mean, can't you sue them or something? Malpractice?' His name was Bruce. He looked like a gender switch version of Cath, right down to the freckles.
`Well,' Case said, `it's just one of those things, you know? Like tissue matching and all that.' But Bruce's eyes had already gone numb with boredom. Got the attention span of a gnat, Case thought, watching the boy's brown eyes.
Their room was smaller than the one Case shared with Molly, and on another level, closer to the surface. Five huge Ciba chromes of Tally Isham were taped across the glass of the balcony, suggesting an extended residency.
`They're def triff, huh?' Cath asked seeing him eye the transparencies. `Mine. Shot 'em at the S/N Pyramid, last time we went down the well. She was _that_ close, and she just smiled, _so_ natural. And it was _bad_ there, Lupus, day after these Christ the King terrs put angel in the water, you know?'
`Yeah,' Case said, suddenly uneasy, `terrible thing.'
`Well,' Bruce cut in, `about this beta you want to buy...'
`Thing is, can I metabolize it?' Case raised his eyebrows.
`Tell you what,' the boy said. `You do a taste. If you pancreas passes on it, it's on the house. First time's free.'
`I heard that one before,' Case said, taking the bright blue derm that Bruce passed across the black bedspread.

`Case?' Molly sat up in bed and shook the hair away from her lenses.
`Who else, honey?'
`What's got into you?' The mirrors followed him across the room.
`I forget how to pronounce it,' he said, taking a tighty rolled strip of bubble-packed blue derms from his shirt pocket.
`Christ,' she said, `just what we needed.'
`Truer words were never spoken.'
`I let you out of my sight for two hours and you score.' She shook her head. `I hope you're gonna be ready for our big dinner date with Armitage tonight. This Twentieth Century place. We get to watch Riviera strut his stuff, too.'
`Yeah,' Case said, arching his back, his smile locked into a rictus of delight, `beautiful.'
`Man,' she said, `if whatever that is can get in past what those surgeons did to you in Chiba, you are gonna be in sad- ass shape when it wears off.'
`Bitch, bitch, bitch,' he said, unbuckling his belt. `Doom. Gloom. All I ever hear.' He took his pants off, his shirt, his underwear. `I think you oughta have sense enough to take advantage of my unnatural state.' He looked down. `I mean, _look_ at this unnatural state.'
She laughed. `It won't last.'
`But it will,' he said, climbing into the sand-colored temperfoam, `that's what's so _unnatural_ about it.'