The games room in the Greyhound station was almost empty. A lone, long-jawed fourteen-year-old was bent over a console, maneuvering rainbow fleets of sub- marines in the murky grid of the North Atlantic. Deke sauntered in, wearing his new kicker drag, and leaned against a cinder-block wall made smooth by countless coats of green enamel. He’d washed the dye from his proleboy butch, boosted jeans and T-shirt from the Goodwill, and found a pair of stompers in the sauna locker of a highstack with cutrate security. “Seen Tiny around, friend?” The subs darted like neon guppies. “Depends on who’s asking.” Deke touched the remote behind his left ear. The Spad snap-rolled over the console, swift and delicate as a dragonfly. It was beautiful; so perfect, so true it made the room seem an illusion. He buzzed the grid, millimeters from the glass, taking advantage of the pro- grammed ground effect. The kid didn’t even bother to look up. “Jack- man’s,” he said. “Down Richmond Road, over by the surplus.” Deke let the Spad fade in midclimb. Jackman’s took up most of the third floor of an old brick building. Deke found Best Buy War Surplus first, then a broken neon sign over an unlit lobby. The sidewalk out front was littered with another kind of surplus damaged vets, some of them dating back to Indochina. Old men who’d left their eyes under Asian suns squatted beside twitching boys who’d inhaled mycotoxins in Chile. Deke was glad to have the battered elevator doors sigh shut behind him. A dusty Dr. Pepper clock at the far side of the long, spectral room told him it was a quarter to eight. Jack- man’s had been embalmed twenty years before he was born, sealed away behind a yellowish film of nicotine, of polish and hair oil. Directly beneath the clock, the flat eyes of somebody’s grandpappy’s prize buck regarded Deke from a framed, blown-up snapshot gone the slick sepia of cockroach wings. There was the click and whisper of pool, the squeak of a work boot twisting on linoleum as a player leaned in for a shot. Somewhere high above the green-shaded lamps hung a string of crepe-paper Christmas bells faded to dead rose. Deke looked from one cluttered wall to the next. No facilitator. “Bring one in, should we need it,” someone said. He turned, meeting the mild eyes of a bald man with steel-rimmed glasses. “My name’s Cline. Bobby Earl. You don’t look like you shoot pool, mister.” But there was nothing threatening in Bobby Earl’s voice or stance. He pinched the steel frames from his nose and polished the thick lenses with a fold of tissue. He reminded Deke of a shop instructor who’d patiently tried to teach him retrograde biochip installation. “I’m a gambler,” he said, smiling. His teeth were white plastic. “I know I don’t much look it.” “I’m looking for Tiny,” Deke said. “Well,” replacing the glasses, “you’re not going to find him. He’s gone up to Bethesda to let the V.A. clean his plumbing for him. He wouldn’t fly against you any how.” “Why not?” “Well, because you’re not on the circuit or I’d know your face. You any good?” When Deke nodded, Bobby Earl called down the length of Jackman’s, “Yo, Clarence! You bring out that facilitator. We got us a flyboy.” Twenty minutes later, having lost his remote and what cash he had left, Deke was striding past the bi soldiers of Best Buy. “Now you let me tell you, boy,” Bobby Earl had said in a fatherly tone as, hand on shoulder, he led Deke back to the elevator, “You’re not going to win against a combat vet you listening to me? I’m not even espe- cially good, just an old grunt who was on hype fifteen. maybe twenty times. 01′ Tiny, he was a pilot. Spent entire enlistment hyped to the gills. He’s got memb attenuation real bad . . . you ain’t never going to him.” It was a cool night. But Deke burned with anger and humiliation.
“Jesus, that’s crude,” Nance said as the Spad str mounds of pink underwear. Deke, hunched up on couch, yanked her flashy little Braun remote from behind his ear. “Now don’t you get on my case too, Miss rich- bitch gonna-have-a-job ” “Hey, lighten up! It’s nothing to do with you it’s just tech. That’s a really primitive wafer you got there. I mean, on the street maybe it’s fine. But compared to the work I do at school, it’s hey. You ought to let me re- write it for you.” “Say what?” “Lemme beef it up. These suckers are all written in hexadecimal, see, `cause the industry programmers are all washed-out computer hacks. That’s how they think. But let me take it to the reader-analyzer at the depart- ment, run a few changes on it, translate it into a modern wetlanguage. Edit out all the redundant intermediaries. That’ll goose up your reaction time, cut the feedback loop in half. So you’ll fly faster and better. Turn you into a real pro, Ace!” She took a hit off her bong, then doubled over laughing and choking. “Is that legit?” Deke asked dubiously. “Hey, why do you think people buy gold-wire re- motes? For the prestige? Shit. Conductivity’s better, cuts a few nanoseconds off the reaction time. And reac- tion time is the name of the game, kiddo.” “No,” Deke said. “If it were that easy, people’d already have it. Tiny Montgomery would have it. He’d have the best.” “Don’t you ever listen?” Nance set down the bong; brown water slopped onto the floor. “The stuff I’m working with is three years ahead of anything you’ll find on the street.” “No shit,” Deke said after a long pause. “I mean, you can do that?”