Bodiless, we swerve into Chrome’s castle of ice. And we’re fast, fast. It feels like we’re surfing the crest of the invading program, hanging ten above the seething glitch systems as they mutate. We’re sentient patches of oil swept along down corridors of shadow. Somewhere we have bodies, very far away, in a crowded loft roofed with steel and glass. Somewhere we have microseconds, maybe time left to pull out. We’ve crashed her gates disguised as an audit and three subpoenas, but her defenses are specifically geared to cope with that kind of official intrusion. Her most sophisticated ice is structured to fend off warrants, writs, subpoenas. When we breached the first gate, the bulk of her data vanished behind core-command ice, these walls we see as leagues of corridor, mazes of shadow. Five separate landlines spurted May Day sig- nals to law firms, but the virus had already taken over the parameter ice. The glitch systems gobble the distress calls as our mimetic subprograms scan anything that hasn’t been blanked by core command. The Russian program lifts a Tokyo number from the unscreened data, choosing it for frequency of calls, average length of calls, the speed with which Chrome returned those calls. “Okay,” says Bobby, “we’re an incoming scram- bler call from a pal of hers in Japan. That should help.” Ride `em, cowboy.
Bobby read his future in women; his girls were omens, changes in the weather, and he’d sit all night in the Gentleman Loser, waiting for the season to lay a new face down in front of him like a card. I was working late in the loft one night, shaving down a chip, my arm off and the little waldo jacked straight into the stump.
Bobby came in with a girl I hadn’t seen before, and usually I feel a little funny if a stranger sees me working that way, with those leads clipped to the hard carbon studs that stick out of my stump. She came right over and looked at the magnified image on the screen, then saw the waldo moving under its vacuum-sealed dust cover. She didn’t say anything, just watched. Right away I had a good feeling about her; it’s like that some- times. “Automatic Jack, Rikki. My associate.” He laughed, put his arm around her waist, some- thing in his tone letting me know that I’d be spending the night in a dingy room in a hotel. “Hi,” she said. Tall, nineteen or maybe twenty, and she definitely had the goods. With just those few freckles across the bridge of her nose, and eyes some- where between dark amber and French coffee. Tight black jeans rolled to midcalf and a narrow plastic belt that matched the rose-colored sandals. But now when I see her sometimes when I’m trying to sleep, I see her somewhere out on the edge of all this sprawl of cities and smoke, and it’s like she’s a hologram stuck behind my eyes, in a bright dress she must’ve worn once, when I knew her, something that doesn’t quite reach her knees. Bare legs long and straight. Brown hair, streaked with blond, hoods her face, blown in a wind from somewhere, and I see her wave goodbye. Bobby was making a show of rooting through a stack of audio cassettes. “I’m on my way, cowboy,” I said, unclipping the waldo. She watched attentively as I put my arm back on. “Can you fix things?” she asked. “Anything, anything you want, Automatic Jack’ll fix it.” I snapped my Duralumin fingers for her. She took a little simstim deck from her belt and showed me the broken hinge on the cassette cover. “Tomorrow,” I said, “no problem.” And my oh my, I said to myself, sleep pulling me down the six flights to the street, what’ll Bobby’s luck be like with a fortune cookie like that? If his system worked, we’d be striking it rich any night now. In the street I grinned and yawned and waved for a cab.
Chrome’s castle is dissolving, sheets of ice shadow flickering and fading, eaten by the glitch systems that spin out from the Russian program, tumbling away from our central logic thrust and infecting the fabric of the ice itself. The glitch systems are cybernetic virus analogs, self-replicating and voracious. They mutate constantly, in unison, subverting and absorbing Chrome’s defenses. Have we already paralyzed her, or is a bell ringing somewhere, a red light blinking?. Does she know?