Bobby was a cowboy, and ice was the nature of his game, ice from ICE, Intrusion Countermeasures Elec- tronics. The matrix is an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems. Legitimate pro- grammers jack into their employers’ sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing the corporate data.
Towers and fields of it ranged in the colorless non- space of the simulation matrix, the electronic consen- sus-hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data. Legitimate pro- grammers never see the walls of ice they work behind, the walls of shadow that screen their operations from others, from industrial-espionage artists and hustlers like Bobby Quine. Bobby was a cowboy. Bobby was a cracksman, a burglar, casing mankind’s extended electronic nervous system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix, monochrome nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold spiral arms of military systems. Bobby was another one of those young-old faces you see drinking in the Gentleman Loser, the chic bar for computer cowboys, rustlers, cybernetic second-story men. We were partners. Bobby Quine and Automatic Jack. Bobby’s the thin, pale dude with the dark glasses, and Jack’s the mean-looking guy with the myoelectric arm. Bobby’s software and Jack’s hard; Bobby punches console and Jack runs down all the little things that can give you an edge. Or, anyway, that’s what the scene watchers in the Gentleman Loser would’ve told you, before Bobby de- cided to burn Chrome. But they also might’ve told you that Bobby was losing his edge, slowing down. He was twenty-eight, Bobby, and that’s old for a console cowboy. Both of us were good at what we did, but somehow that one big score just wouldn’t come down for us. I knew where to go for the right gear, and Bobby had all his licks down pat. He’d sit back with a white terry sweatband across his forehead and whip moves on those keyboards faster than you could follow, punching his way through some of the fanciest ice in the business, but that was when something happened that managed to get him totally wired, and that didn’t happen often. Not highly motivated, Bobby, and I was the kind of guy who’s happy to have the rent covered and a clean shirt to wear. But Bobby had this thing for girls, like they were his private tarot or something, the way he’d get himself moving. We never talked about it, but when it started to look like he was losing his touch that summer, he started to spend more time in the Gentleman Loser. He’d sit at a table by the open doors and watch the crowd slide by, nights when the bugs were at the neon and the air smelled of perfume and fast food. You could see his sunglasses scanning those faces as they passed, and he must have decided that Rikki’s was the one he was waiting for, the wild card and the luck changer. The new one.
I went to New York to check out the market, to see what was available in hot software. The Finn’s place has a defective hologram in the window, METRO HOLOGRAFIX, over a display of dead flies wearing fur coats of gray dust. The scrap’s waist- high, inside, drifts of it rising to meet walls that are barely visible behind nameless junk, behind sagging pressboard shelves stacked with old skin magazines and yellow-spined years of National Geographic. “You need a gun,” said the Finn. He looks like a recombo DNA project aimed at tailoring people for high-speed burrowing. “You’re in luck. I got the new Smith and Wesson, the four-oh-eight Tactical. Got this xenon projector slung under the barrel, see, batteries in the grip, throw you a twelve-inch high-noon circle in the pitch dark at fifty yards. The light source is so narrow, it’s almost impossible to spot. It’s just like voodoo in a nightfight.” I let my arm clunk down on the table and started the fingers drumming; the servos in the hand began whining like overworked mosquitoes. I knew that the Finn really hated the sound. “You looking to pawn that?” He prodded the Duralumin wrist joint with the chewed shaft of a felt-tip pen. “Maybe get yourself something a little quieter?” I kept it up. “I don’t need any guns, Finn.” “Okay,” he said, “okay,” and I quit drumming. “I only got this one item, and I don’t even know what it is. He looked unhappy. “I got it off these bridge-and.. tunnel kids from Jersey last week.” “So when’d you ever buy anything you didn’t know what it was, Finn?” “Wise ass.” And he passed me a transparent mailer with something in it that looked like an audio cassette through the bubble padding. “They had a passport,” he said. “They had credit cards and a watch. And that.” “They had the contents of somebody’s pockets, you mean.” He nodded. “The passport was Belgian. It was also bogus, looked to me, so I put it in the furnace. Put the cards in with it. The watch was okay, a Porsche, nice watch.” It was obviously some kind of plug-in military pro- gram. Out of the mailer, it looked like the magazine of a small assault rifle, coated with nonreflective black plastic. The edges and corners showed bright metal; it had been knocking around for a while. “I’ll give yo sake.” u a bargain on it, Jack. For old times’ I had to smile at that. Getting a bargain from the Finn was like God repealing the law of gravity when you have to carry a heavy suitcase down ten blocks of air- port corridor. “Looks Russian to me,” I said. “Probably the emergency sewage controls for some Leningrad suburb. Just what I need.” “You know,” said the Finn. “I got a pair of shoes older than you are. Sometimes I think you got about as much class as those yahoos from Jersey. What do you want me to tell you, it’s the keys to the Kremlin? You figure out what the goddamn thing is. Me, I just sell the stuff.” Ibought it.