Neuromancer (Chapter 2)

2

After a year of coffins, the room on the twenty-fifth floor of the Chiba Hilton seemed enormous. It was ten meters by eight, half of a suite. A white Braun coffeemaker steamed on a low table by the sliding glass panels that opened onto a narrow balcony.
`Get some coffee in you. Look like you need it.' She took off her black jacket; the fletcher hung beneath her arm in a black nylon shoulder rig. She wore a sleeveless gray pullover with plain steel zips across each shoulder. Bulletproof. Case decided, slopping coffee into a bright red mug. His arms and legs felt like they were made out of wood.
`Case.' He looked up, seeing the man for the first time. `My name is Armitage.' The dark robe was open to the waist, the broad chest hairless and muscular, the stomach flat and hard. Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach. `Sun's up, Case. This is your lucky day, boy.'
Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked the scalding coffee. Brown stain running down the imitation ricepaper wall. He saw the angular gold ring through the left lobe. Special Forces. The man smiled.
`Get your coffee, Case,' Molly said. `You re okay, but you're not going anywhere 'til Armitage has his say.' She sat crosslegged on a silk futon and began to fieldstrip the fletcher without bothering to look at it. Twin mirrors tracking as he crossed to the table and refilled his cup.
`Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?' Armitage ran a large hand back through his cropped brown hair. A heavy gold bracelet flashed on his wrist. `Leningrad, Kiev, Siberia. We invented you in Siberia, Case.'
`What's that supposed to mean?'
`Screaming Fist, Case. You've heard the name.'
`Some kind of run, wasn't it? Tried to burn this Russian nexus with virus programs. Yeah, I heard about it. And nobody got out.'
He sensed abrupt tension. Armitage walked to the window and looked out over Tokyo Bay. `That isn't true. One unit made it back to Helsinki, Case.'
Case shrugged, sipped coffee.
`You're a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist. For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic module was a Nightwing microlight, a pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs.'
`Icebreakers,' Case said, over the rim of the red mug.
`Ice from _ICE,_ intrusion countermeasures electronics.'
`Problem is, mister, I'm no jockey now, so I think I'll just be going...'
`I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your kind.'
`You got zip to do with me and my kind buddy. You're rich enough to hire expensive razorgirls to haul my ass up here, is all. I'm never gonna punch any deck again, not for you or anybody else.' He crossed to the window and looked down. `That's where I live now.'
`Our profile says you're trying to con the street into killing you when you're not looking.'
`Profile?'
`We've built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each of your aliases and ran the skim through some military software. You're suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the outside. And our medical projection says you'll need a new pancreas inside a year.'
``We.'' He met the faded blue eyes. ``We' who?'
`What would you say if I told you we could correct your neural damage, Case?' Armitage suddenly looked to Case as if he were carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream, and that soon he'd wake. Armitage wouldn't speak again. Case's dreams always ended in these freezeframes, and now this one was over.
`What would you say, Case?'
Case looked out over the Bay and shivered.
`I'd say you were full of shit.'
Armitage nodded.
`Then I'd ask what your terms were.'
`Not very different than what you're used to, Case.'
`Let the man get some sleep, Armitage,' Molly said from her futon, the components of the fletcher spread on the silk like some expensive puzzle. `He's coming apart at the seams.'
`Terms,' Case said, `and now. Right now.'
He was still shivering. He couldn't stop shivering.

The clinic was nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster of sleek pavilions separated by small formal gardens. He remembered the place from the round he'd made his first month in Chiba.
`Scared, Case. You're real scared.' It was Sunday afternoon and he stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard. White boulders, a stand of green bamboo, black gravel raked into smooth waves. A gardener, a thing like a large metal crab, was tending the bamboo.
`It'll work Case. You got no idea, the kind of stuff Armitage has. Like he's gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing you with the program he's giving them to tell them how to do it. He'll put them three years ahead of the competition. You got any idea what that's worth?' She hooked thumbs in the beltloops of her leather jeans and rocked backward on the lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots. The narrow toes were sheathed in bright Mexican silver. The lenses were empty quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.
`You're street samurai,' he said. `How long you work for him?'
`Couple of months.'
`What about before that?'
`For somebody else. Working girl, you know?'
He nodded.
`Funny, Case.'
`What's funny?'
`It's like I know you. That profile he's got. I know how you're wired.'
`You don't know me, sister.'
`You're okay, Case. What got you, it's just called bad luck.'
`How about him? He okay, Molly?' The robot crab moved toward them, picking its way over the waves of gravel. Its bronze carapace might have been a thousand years old. When it was within a meter of her boots, it fired a burst of light, then froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained.
`What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet ass.' The crab had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked it with a smooth precision, the silver boot-tip clanging on the carapace. The thing fell on its back, but the bronze limbs soon righted it.
Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry of the gravel waves with the toes of his shoes. He began to search his pockets for cigarettes. `In your shirt,' she said.
`You want to answer my question?' He fished a wrinkled Yeheyuan from the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab of German steel that looked as though it belonged on an operating table.
`Well, I'll tell you, the man's definitely on to something. He's got big money now, and he's never had it before, and he gets more all the time.' Case noticed a certain tension around her mouth. `Or maybe, maybe something's on to him...' She shrugged.
`What's that mean?'
`I don't know, exactly. I know I don't know who or what we're really working for.'
He stared at the twin mirrors. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday morning, he'd gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours. Then he'd taken a long and pointless walk along the port's security perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the chainlink. If she'd followed him, she'd done a good job of it. He'd avoided Night City. He'd waited in the coffin for Armitage's call. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this girl with a gymnast's body and conjurer's hands.
`If you'll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to meet you.' The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the clinic without waiting to see if Case would follow.

Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine.
Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.
Voices.
Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given...

Hold still. Don't move.
And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone, a hundred faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond chainlink and the prison of the skull.
Goddamn don't you move.
Where the sky faded from hissing static to the noncolor of the matrix, and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars.
`Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!'
She was straddling his chest, a blue plastic syrette in one hand. `You don't lie still, I'll slit your fucking throat. You're still full of endorphin inhibitors.'

He woke and found her stretched beside him in the dark.
His neck was brittle, made of twigs. There was a steady pulse of pain midway down his spine. Images formed and reformed: a flickering montage of the Sprawl's towers and ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward him in the shade beneath a bridge or overpass...
`Case? It's Wednesday, Case.' She moved, rolling over, reaching across him. A breast brushed his upper arm. He heard her tear the foil seal from a bottle of water and drink. `Here.' She put the bottle in his hand. `I can see in the dark, Case. Microchannel image-amps in my glasses.'
`My back hurts.'
`That's where they replaced your fluid. Changed your blood, too. Blood 'cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal. And some new tissue patched into your liver. The nerve stuff, I dunno. Lot of injections. They didn't have to open anything up for the main show.' She settled back beside him. `It's 2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a readout chipped into my optic nerve.'
He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle. Gagged, coughed, lukewarm water spraying his chest and thighs.
`I gotta punch deck,' he heard himself say. He was groping for his clothes. `I gotta know...'
She laughed. Small strong hands gripped his upper arms. `Sorry, hotshot. Eight day wait. Your nervous system would fall out on the floor if you jacked in now. Doctor's orders. Besides, they figure it worked. Check you in a day or so.' He lay down again.
`Where are we?'
`Home. Cheap Hotel.'
`Where's Armitage?'
`Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something. We're out of here soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the Sprawl.' She touched his shoulder. `Roll over. I give a good massage.'
He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his fingers against the walls of the coffin. She settled over the small of his back, kneeling on the temperfoam, the leather jeans cool against his skin. Her fingers brushed his neck.
`How come you're not at the Hilton?'
She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs, and gently encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger. She rocked there for a minute in the dark, erect above him, her other hand on his neck. The leather of her jeans creaked softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself harden against the temperfoam.
His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed to retreat. He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back against the foam, pulling her down, licking her breasts, small hard nipples sliding wet across his cheek. He found the zip on the leather jeans and tugged it down.
`It's okay,' she said, `I can see.' Sound of the jeans peeling down. She struggled beside him until she could kick them away. She threw a leg across him and he touched her face. Unexpected hardness of the implanted lenses. `Don't,' she said, `finger prints.'
Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia. As she began to lower herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriv ing and receding. She slid down around him and his back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips.

On Ninsei, a thinner, weekday version of the crowd went through the motions of the dance. Waves of sound rolled from the arcades and pachinko parlors. Case glanced into the Chat and saw Zone watching over his girls in the warm, beer-smell ing twilight. Ratz was tending bar.
`You seen Wage, Ratz?'
`Not tonight.' Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at Molly.
`You see him, tell him I got his money.'
`Luck changing, my artiste?'
`Too soon to tell.'

`Well, I gotta see this guy,' Case said, watching his re flection in her glasses. `I got biz to cancel out of.'
`Armitage won't like it, I let you out of my sight.' She stood beneath Deane's melting clock, hands on her hips.
`The guy won't talk to me if you're there. Deane I don't give two shits about. He takes care of himself. But I got people who'll just go under if I walk out of Chiba cold. It's my people, you know?'
Her mouth hardened. She shook her head.
`I got people in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku and Asakuza, and they'll go _down,_ understand?' he lied, his hand on the shoulder of her black jacket. `Five. Five minutes. By your clock, okay?'
`Not what I'm paid for.'
`What you're paid for is one thing. Me letting some tight friends die because you're too literal about your instructions is something else.'
`Bullshit. Tight friends my ass. You're going in there to check us out with your smuggler.' She put a booted foot up on the dust-covered Kandinsky coffee table.
`Ah, Case, sport, it does look as though your companion there is definitely armed, aside from having a fair amount of silicon in her head. What is this about, exactly?' Deane's ghostly cough seemed to hang in the air between them.
`Hold on, Julie. Anyway, I'll be coming in alone.'
`You can be sure of that, old son. Wouldn't have it any other way.'
`Okay,' she said. `Go. But five minutes. Any more and I'll come in and cool your tight friend permanently. And while you're at it, you try to figure something out.'
`What's that?'
`Why I'm doing you the favor.' She turned and walked out, past the stacked white modules of preserved ginger.
`Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?' asked Julie.
`Julie, she's gone. You wanna let me in? Please, Julie?'
The bolts worked. `Slowly, Case,' said the voice.
`Turn on the works, Julie, all the stuff in the desk,' Case said, taking his place in the swivel chair.
`It's on all the time,' Deane said mildly, taking a gun from behind the exposed works of his old mechanical typewriter and aiming it carefully at Case. It was a belly gun, a magnum revolver with the barrel sawn down to a nub. The front of the trigger guard had been cut away and the grips wrapped with what looked like old masking tape. Case thought it looked very strange in Dean's manicured pink hands. `Just taking care, you understand. Nothing personal. Now tell me what you want.'
`I need a history lesson, Julie. And a go-to on somebody.'
`What's moving, old son?' Deane's shirt was candy-striped cotton, the collar white and rigid, like porcelain.
`Me, Julie. I'm leaving. Gone. But do me the favor, okay?'
`Go-to on whom, old son?'
`Gaijin name of Armitage, suite in the Hilton.'
Deane put the pistol down. `Sit still, Case.' He tapped something out on a lap terminal. `It seems as though you know as much as my net does, Case. This gentleman seems to have a temporary arrangement with the Yakuza, and the sons of the neon chrysanthemum have ways of screening their allies from the likes of me. I wouldn't have it any other way. Now, history. You said history.' He picked up the gun again, but didn't point it directly at Case. `What sort of history?'
`The war. You in the war, Julie?'
`The war? What's there to know? Lasted three weeks.'
`Screaming Fist.'
`Famous. Don't they teach you history these days? Great bloody postwar political football, that was. Watergated all to hell and back. Your brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in, where was it, McLean? In the bunkers, all of that... great scandal. Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to test some new technology. They knew about the Russians' de fenses, it came out later. Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse weapons. Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see.' Deane shrugged. `Turkey shoot for Ivan.'
`Any of those guys make it out?'
`Christ,' Deane said, `it's been bloody years... Though I do think a few did. One of the teams. Got hold of a Sov gunship. Helicopter, you know. Flew it back to Finland. Didn't have entry codes, of course, and shot hell out of the Finnish defense forces in the process. Special Forces types.' Deane sniffed. `Bloody hell.'
Case nodded. The smell of preserved ginger was over whelming.
`I spent the war in Lisbon, you know,' Deane said, putting the gun down. `Lovely place, Lisbon.'
`In the service, Julie?'
`Hardly. Though I did see action.' Deane smiled his pink smile. `Wonderful what a war can do for one's markets.'
`Thanks, Julie. I owe you one.'
`Hardly, Case. And goodbye.'

And later he'd tell himself that the evening at Sammi's had felt wrong from the start, that even as he'd followed Molly along that corridor, shuffling through a trampled mulch of ticket stubs and styrofoam cups, he'd sensed it. Linda's death, wait ing...
They'd gone to the Namban, after he'd seen Deane, and paid off his debt to Wage with a roll of Armitage's New Yen. Wage had liked that, his boys had liked it less, and Molly had grinned at Case's side with a kind of ecstatic feral intensity, obviously longing for one of them to make a move. Then he'd taken her back to the Chat for a drink.
`Wasting your time, cowboy,' Molly said, when Case took an octagon from the pocket of his jacket.
`How's that? You want one?' He held the pill out to her.
`Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver. Armitage had them designed to bypass that shit.' She tapped the octagon with one burgundy nail. `You're biochemically incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine.'
`Shit,' he said. He looked at the octagon, then at her.
`Eat it. Eat a dozen. Nothing'll happen.'
He did. Nothing did.
Three beers later, she was asking Ratz about the fights.
`Sammi's,' Ratz said.
`I'll pass,' Case said, `I hear they kill each other down there.'
An hour later, she was buying tickets from a skinny Thai in a white t-shirt and baggy rugby shorts.
Sammi's was an inflated dome behind a portside warehouse, taut gray fabric reinforced with a net of thin steel cables. The corridor, with a door at either end, was a crude airlock pre serving the pressure differential that supported the dome. Flu orescent rings were screwed to the plywood ceiling at intervals, but most of them had been broken. The air was damp and close with the smell of sweat and concrete.
None of that prepared him for the arena, the crowd, the tense hush, the towering puppets of light beneath the dome. Concrete sloped away in tiers to a kind of central stage, a raised circle ringed with a glittering thicket of projection gear. No light but the holograms that shifted and flickered above the ring, reproducing the movements of the two men below. Strata of cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until it struck currents set up by the blowers that supported the dome. No sound but the muted purring of the blowers and the amplified breathing of the fighters.
Reflected colors flowed across Molly's lenses as the men circled. The holograms were ten-power magnifications; at ten, the knives they held were just under a meter long. The knife fighter's grip is the fencer's grip, Case remembered, the fingers curled, thumb aligned with blade. The knives seemed to move of their own accord, gliding with a ritual lack of urgency through the arcs and passes of their dance, point passing point, as the men waited for an opening. Molly's upturned face was smooth and still, watching.
`I'll go find us some food,' Case said. She nodded, lost in contemplation of the dance.
He didn't like this place.
He turned and walked back into the shadows. Too dark. Too quiet.
The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese. Not really a Night City crowd. Techs down from the arcologies. He supposed that meant the arena had the approval of some corporate recreational committee. He wondered briefly what it would be like, working all your life for one zaibatsu. Company housing, company hymn, company funeral.
He'd made nearly a full circuit of the dome before he found the food stalls. He bought yakitori on skewers and two tall waxy cartons of beer. Glancing up at the holograms, he saw that blood laced one figure's chest. Thick brown sauce trickled down the skewers and over his knuckles.
Seven days and he'd jack in. If he closed his eyes now, he'd see the matrix.
Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance.
Then the fear began to knot between his shoulders. A cold trickle of sweat worked its way down and across his ribs. The operation hadn't worked. He was still here, still meat, no Molly waiting, her eyes locked on the circling knives, no Armitage waiting in the Hilton with tickets and a new passport and money. It was all some dream, some pathetic fantasy... Hot tears blurred his vision.
Blood sprayed from a jugular in a red gout of light. And now the crowd was screaming, rising, screaming -- as one fig ure crumpled, the hologram fading, flickering...
Raw edge of vomit in his throat. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, opened them, and saw Linda Lee step past him, her gray eyes blind with fear. She wore the same French fa tigues.
And gone. Into shadow.
Pure mindless reflex: he threw the beer and chicken down and ran after her. He might have called her name, but he'd never be sure.
Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light. Seared concrete beneath the thin soles of his shoes.
Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now, and again the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye, bobbing in his vision as he ran.
Someone tripped him. Concrete tore his palms.
He rolled and kicked, failing to connect. A thin boy, spiked blond hair lit from behind in a rainbow nimbus, was leaning over him. Above the stage, a figure turned, knife held high, to the cheering crowd. The boy smiled and drew something from his sleeve. A razor, etched in red as a third beam blinked past them into the dark. Case saw the razor dipping for his throat like a dowser's wand.
The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic explosions. Molly's fletchettes, at twenty rounds per second. The boy coughed once, convulsively, and toppled across Case's legs.
He was walking toward the stalls, into the shadows. He looked down, expecting to see that needle of ruby emerge from his chest. Nothing. He found her. She was thrown down at the foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed. There was a smell of cooked meat. The crowd was chanting the winner's name. A beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag. One white sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head.
Follow the wall. Curve of concrete. Hands in pockets. Keep walking. Past unseeing faces, every eye raised to the victor's image above the ring. Once a seamed European face danced in the glare of a match, lips pursed around the short stem of a metal pipe. Tang of hashish. Case walked on, feeling nothing.
`Case.' Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow. `You okay?'
Something mewled and bubbled in the dark behind her.
He shook his head.
`Fight's over, Case. Time to go home.'
He tried to walk past her, back into the dark, where some thing was dying. She stopped him with a hand on his chest. `Friends of your tight friend. Killed your girl for you. You haven't done too well for friends in this town, have you? We got a partial profile on that old bastard when we did you, man. He'd fry anybody, for a few New ones. The one back there said they got on to her when she was trying to fence your RAM. Just cheaper for them to kill her and take it. Save a little money... I got the one who had the laser to tell me all about it. Coincidence we were here, but I had to make sure.' Her mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin line.
Case felt as though his brain were jammed. `Who,' he said, `who sent them?'
She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger. He saw that her hands were sticky with blood. Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.

After the postoperative check at the clinic, Molly took him to the port. Armitage was waiting. He'd chartered a hovercraft. The last Case saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcologies. Then a mist closed over the black water and the drifting shoals of waste.