Neuromancer (Chapter 19)

19

The Villa Straylight was a parasitic structure, Case reminded himself, as he stepped past the tendrils of caulk and through _Marcus Garvey_'s forward hatch. Straylight bled air and water out of Freeside, and had no ecosystem of its own.
The gangway tube the dock had extended was a more elab orate version of the one he'd tumbled through to reach _Haniwa,_ designed for use in the spindle's rotation gravity. A corrugated tunnel, articulated by integral hydraulic members, each seg ment ringed with a loop of tough, nonslip plastic, the loops serving as the rungs of a ladder. The gangway had snaked its way around _Haniwa;_ it was horizontal, where it joined _Garvey_'s lock, but curved up sharply and to the left, a vertical climb around the curvature of the yacht's hull. Maelcum was already making his way up the rings, pulling himself up with his left hand, the Remington in his right. He wore a stained pair of baggy fatigues, his sleeveless green nylon jacket, and a pair of ragged canvas sneakers with bright red soles. The gangway shifted slightly, each time he climbed to another ring.
The clips on Case's makeshift strap dug into his shoulder with the weight of the Ono-Sendai and the Flatline's construct. All he felt now was fear, a generalized dread. He pushed it away, forcing himself to replay Armitage's lecture on the spin dle and Villa Straylight. He started climbing. Freeside's eco system was limited, not closed. Zion was a closed system, capable of cycling for years without the introduction of external materials. Freeside produced its own air and water, but relied on constant shipments of food, on the regular augmentation of soil nutrients. The Villa Straylight produced nothing at all.
`Mon,' Maelcum said quietly, `get up here, 'side me.' Case edged sideways on the circular ladder and climbed the last few rungs. The gangway ended in a smooth, slightly convex hatch, two meters in diameter. The hydraulic members of the tube vanished into flexible housings set into the frame of the hatch.
`So what do we --'
Case's mouth shut as the hatch swung up, a slight differential in pressure puffing fine grit into his eyes.
Maelcum scrambled up, over the edge, and Case heard the tiny click of the Remington's safety being released. `You th' mon in th' hurry...' Maelcum whispered, crouching there. Then Case was beside him.
The hatch was centered in a round, vaulted chamber floored with blue nonslip plastic tiles. Maelcum nudged him, pointed, and he saw a monitor set into a curved wall. On the screen, a tall young man with the Tessier-Ashpool features was brushing something from the sleeves of his dark suitcoat. He stood beside an identical hatch, in an identical chamber. `Very sorry, sir,' said a voice from a grid centered above the hatch. Case glanced up. `Expected you later, at the axial dock. One moment, please.' On the monitor, the young man tossed his head impatiently.
Maelcum spun as a door slid open to their left, the shotgun ready. A small Eurasian in orange coveralls stepped through and goggled at them. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He closed his mouth. Case glanced at the monitor. Blank.
`Who?' the man managed.
`The Rastafarian navy,' Case said, standing up, the cyber space deck banging against his hip, `and all we want's a jack into your custodial system.'
The man swallowed. `Is this a test? It's a loyalty check. It must be a loyalty check.' He wiped the palms of his hands on the thighs of his orange suit.
`No, mon, this a real one.' Maelcum came up out of his crouch with the Remington pointed at the Eurasian's face. `You move it.'
They followed the man back through the door, into a corridor whose polished concrete walls and irregular floor of overlap ping carpets were perfectly familiar to Case. `Pretty rugs,' Maelcum said, prodding the man in the back. `Smell like church.'
They came to another monitor, an antique Sony, this one mounted above a console with a keyboard and a complex array of jack panels. The screen lit as they halted, the Finn grinning tensely out at them from what seemed to be the front room of Metro Holografix. `Okay,' he said, `Maelcum takes this guy down the corridor to the open locker door, sticks him in there, I'll lock it. Case, you want the fifth socket from the left, top panel. There's adaptor plugs in the cabinet under the console. Needs Ono-Sendai twenty-point into Hitachi forty.' As Mael cum nudged his captive along, Case knelt and fumbled through an assortment of plugs, finally coming up with the one he needed. With his deck jacked into the adaptor, he paused.
`Do you have to look like that, man?' he asked the face on the screen. The Finn was erased a line at a time by the image of Lonny Zone against a wall of peeling Japanese posters.
`Anything you want, baby,' Zone drawled, `just hop it for Lonny...'
`No,' Case said, `use the Finn.' As the Zone image van ished, he shoved the Hitachi adaptor into its socket and settled the trodes across his forehead.

`What kept you?' the Flatline asked, and laughed.
`Told you don't do that,' Case said.
`Joke, boy,' the construct said, `zero time lapse for me. Lemme see what we got here...'
The Kuang program was green, exactly the shade of the T-A ice. Even as Case watched, it grew gradually more opaque, although he could see the black-mirrored shark thing clearly when he looked up. The fracture lines and hallucinations were gone now, and the thing looked real as _Marcus Garvey,_ a wingless antique jet, its smooth skin plated with black chrome.
`Right on,' the Flatline said.
`Right,' Case said, and flipped.

`-- like that. I'm sorry,' 3Jane was saying, as she bandaged Molly's head. `Our unit says no concussion, no permanent damage to the eye. You didn't know him very well, before you came here?'
`Didn't know him at all,' Molly said bleakly. She was on her back on a high bed or padded table. Case couldn't feel the injured leg. The synaesthetic effect of the original injection seemed to have worn off. The, black ball was gone, but her hands were immobilized by soft straps she couldn't see.
`He wants to kill you.'
`Figures,' Molly said, staring up at the rough ceiling past a very bright light.
`I don't think I want him to,' 3Jane said, and Molly pain fully turned her head to look up into the dark eyes.
`Don't play with me,' she said.
`But I think I might like to,' 3Jane said, and bent to kiss her forehead, brushing the hair back with a warm hand. There were smears of blood on her pale djellaba.
`Where's he gone now?' Molly asked.
`Another injection, probably,' 3Jane said, straightening up. `He was quite impatient for your arrival. I think it might be fun to nurse you back to health, Molly.' She smiled, absently wiping a bloody hand down the front of the robe. `Your leg will need to be reset, but we can arrange that.'
`What about Peter?'
`Peter.' She gave her head a little shake. A strand of dark hair came loose, fell across her forehead. `Peter has become rather boring. I find drug use in general to be boring.' She giggled. `In others, at any rate. My father was a dedicated abuser, as you must have seen.'
Molly tensed.
`Don't alarm yourself.' 3Jane's fingers brushed the skin above the waistband of the leather jeans. `His suicide was the result of my having manipulated the safety margins of his freeze. I'd never actually met him, you know. I was decanted after he last went down to sleep. But I did know him _very_ well. The cores know everything. I watched him kill my mother. I'll show you that, when you're better. He strangles her in bed.'
`Why did he kill her?' Her unbandaged eye focused on the girl's face.
`He couldn't accept the direction she intended for our fam ily. She commissioned the construction of our artificial intel ligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the AI's, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say. Tessier- Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity. Fascinating. I'll play her tapes for you, nearly a thousand hours. But I've never understood her, really, and with her death, her direction was lost. All direction was lost, and we began to burrow into ourselves. Now we seldom come out. I'm the exception there.'
`You said you were trying to kill the old man? You fiddled his cryogenic programs?'
3Jane nodded. `I had help. From a ghost. That was what I thought when I was very young, that there were ghosts in the corporate cores. Voices. One of them was what you call Win termute, which is the Turing code for our Berne AI, although the entity manipulating you is a sort of subprogram.'
`One of them? There's more?'
`One other. But that one hasn't spoken to me in years. It gave up, I think. I suspect that both represent the fruition of certain capacities my mother ordered designed into the original software, but she was an extremely secretive woman when she felt it necessary. Here. Drink.' She put a flexible plastic tube to Molly's lips. `Water. Only a little.'
`Jane, love,' Riviera asked cheerfully, from somewhere out of sight, `are you enjoying yourself?'
`Leave us alone, Peter.'
`Playing doctor...' Suddenly Molly stared into her own face, the image suspended ten centimeters from her nose. There were no bandages. The left implant was shattered, a long finger of silvered plastic driven deep in a socket that was an inverted pool of blood.
`Hideo,' 3Jane said, stroking Molly's stomach, _`hurt_ Peter if he doesn't go away. Go and swim, Peter.'
The projection vanished.
07:58:40, in the darkness of the bandaged eye.
`He said you know the code. Peter said. Wintermute needs the code.' Case was suddenly aware of the Chubb key that lay on its nylon thong, against the inner curve of her left breast.
`Yes,' 3Jane said, withdrawing her hand, `I do. I learned it as a child. I think I learned it in a dream... Or somewhere in the thousand hours of my mother's diaries. But I think that Peter has a point, in urging me not to surrender it. There would be Turing to contend with, if I read all this correctly, and ghosts are nothing if not capricious.'
Case jacked out.

`Strange little customer, huh?' The Finn grinned at Case from the old Sony.
Case shrugged. He saw Maelcum coming back along the corridor with the Remington at his side. The Zionite was smil ing, his head bobbing to a rhythm Case couldn't hear. A pair of thin yellow leads ran from his ears to a side pocket in his sleeveless jacket.
`Dub, mon,' Maelcum said.
`You're fucking crazy,' Case told him.
`Hear okay, mon. Righteous dub.'
`Hey, guys,' the Finn said, `on your toes. Here comes your transportation. I can't finesse many numbers as smooth as the pic of 8Jean that conned your doorman, but I can get you a ride over to 3Jane's place.'
Case was pulling the adaptor from its socket when the rid erless service cart swiveled into sight, under the graceless con crete arch marking the far end of their corridor. It might have been the one his Africans had ridden, but if it was, they were gone now. Just behind the back of the low padded seat, its tiny manipulators gripping the upholstery, the little Braun was steadily winking its red LED.
`Bus to catch,' Case said to Maelcum.