BURNING CHROME by William Gibson 1986

And Deke drove it home…. There was a moment of stunned silence as Tiny’s last plane vanished in a flash of light. “I did it,” Deke whispered. Then, louder, “Son of a bitch, I did it!” Across the table from him, Tiny twisted in his chair, arms jerking spastically; his head lolled over on one shoulder. Behind him, Bobby Earl Cline stared straight at Deke, his eyes hot coals. The gambler snatched up the Max and wrapped its ribbon around a stack of laminateds. Without warning, he flung the bundle at Deke’s face. Effortlessly, cas- ually, Deke plucked it from the air. For an instant, then, it looked like the gambler would come at him, right across the pool table. He was stopped by a tug on his sleeve. “Bobby Earl,” Tiny whispered, his voice choking with humiliation, “you gotta get me… out of here. ” Stiffly, angrily, Cline wheeled his friend around, and then away, into shadow. Deke threw back his head and laughed. By God, he felt good! He stuffed the Max into a shirt pocket, where it hung cold and heavy. The money he crammed into his jeans. Man, he had to jump with it, his triumph leaping up through him like a wild thing, fine and strong as the flanks of a buck in the deep woods he’d seen from a Greyhound once, and for this one moment it seemed that everything was worth it somehow, all the pain and misery he’d gone through to finally win. But Jackman’s was silent. Nobody cheered. No- body crowded around to congratulate him. He sobered, and silent, hostile faces swam into focus. Not one of these kickers was on his side. They radiated contempt, even hatred. For an interminably drawn-out moment the air trembled with potential violence . . . and then someone turned to the side, hawked up phlegm, and spat on the floor. The crowd broke up, muttering, one by one drifting into the darkness. Deke didn’t move. A muscle in one leg began to twitch, harbinger of the coming hype crash. The top of his head felt numb, and there was an awful taste in his mouth. For a second he had to hang on to the table with both hands to keep from falling down forever, into the living shadow beneath him, as he hung impaled by the prize buck’s dead eyes in the photo under the Dr. Pep- per clock. A little adrenaline would pull him out of this. He needed to celebrate. To get drunk or stoned and talk it up, going over the victory time and again, contradicting himself, making up details, laughing and bragging. A starry old night like this called for big talk. But standing there with all of Jackman’s silent and vast and empty around him, he realized suddenly that he had nobody left to tell it to. Nobody at all.

Burning Chrome

It was hot, the night we burned Chrome. Out in the malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to death against the neon, but in Bobby’s loft the only light came from a monitor screen and the green and red LEDs on the face of the matrix simulator. I knew every chip in Bobby’s simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII. the “Cyberspace Seven,” but I’d rebuilt it so many time that you’d have had a hard time finding a square millimeter of factory cir- cuitry in all that silicon. We waited side by side in front of the simulator console, watching the time display in the screen’s lower left corner. “Go for it,” I said, when it was time, but Bobby was already there, leaning forward to drive the Russian program into its slot with the heel of his hand. He did it with the tight grace of a kid slamming change into an ar- cade game, sure of winning and ready to pull down a string of free games. A silver tide of phosphenes boiled across my field of vision as the matrix began to unfold in my head, a 3-D chessboard, infinite and perfectly transparent. The Russian program seemed to lurch as we entered the grid. If anyone else had been jacked into that part of the matrix, he might have seen a surf of flickering shadow roll out of the little yellow pyramid that represented our computer. The program was a mimetic weapon, de- signed to absorb local color and present itself as a crash- priority override in whatever context it encountered. “Congratulations,” I heard Bobby say. “We just became an Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority inspec- tion probe. . . .” That meant we were clearing fiberoptic lines with the cybernetic equivalent of a fire siren, but in the simulation matrix we seemed to rush straight for Chrome’s data base. I couldn’t see it yet, but I already knew those walls were waiting. Walls of shadow, walls of ice. Chrome: her pretty childface smooth as steel, with eyes that would have been at home on the bottom of some deep Atlantic trench, cold gray eyes that lived under terrible pressure. They s~id she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her, rococo custom variations that took years to kill you. They said a lot of things about Chrome, none of them at all reassuring. So I blotted her out with a picture of Rikki. Rikki kneeling in a shaft of dusty sunlight that slanted into the loft through a grid of steel and glass: her faded camouflage fatigues, her translucent rose sandals, the good line of her bare back as she rummaged through a nylon gear bag. She looks up, and a half-blond curl falls to tickle her nose. Smiling, buttoning an old shirt of Bobby’s, frayed khaki cotton drawn across her breasts. She smiles. “Son of a bitch,” said Bobby, “we just told Chrome we’re an IRS audit and three Supreme Court subpoenas. … Hang on to your ass, Jack.~. . So long, Rikki. Maybe now I see you never. And dark, so dark, in the halls of Chromes s ice.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *