Ice walls flick away like supersonic butterflies made of shade. Beyond them, the matrix’s illusion of infinite space. It’s like watching a tape of a prefab building going up; only the tape’s reversed and run at high speed, and these walls are torn wings. Trying to remind myself that this place and the gulfs beyond are only representations, that we aren’t “in” Chrome’s computer, but interfaced with it, while the matrix simulator in Bobby’s loft generates this illu- sion . . . The core data begin to emerge, exposed, vulnerable…. This is the far side of ice, the view of the matrix I’ve never seen before, the view that fifteen million legitimate console operators see daily and take for granted. The core data tower around us like vertical freight trains, color-coded for access. Bright primaries, im- possibly bright in that transparent void, linked by countless horizontals in nursery blues and pinks. But ice still shadows something at the center of it all: the heart of all Chrome’s expensive darkness, the very heart..
It was late afternoon when I got back from my shopping expedition to New York. Not much sun through the skylight, but an ice pattern glowed on Bobby’s monitor screen, a 2-D graphic representation of someone’s com- puter defenses, lines of neon woven like an Art Deco prayer rug. I turned the console off, and the screen went completely dark. Rikki’s things were spread across my workbench, nylon bags spilling clothes and makeup, a pair of bright red cowboy boots, audio cassettes, glossy Japanese magazines about simstim stars. I stacked it all under the bench and then took my arm off, forgetting that the program I’d brought from the Finn was in the right- hand pocket of my jacket, so that I had to fumble it out left-handed and then get it into the padded jaws of the jeweler’s vise. The waldo looks like an old audio turntable, the kind that played disc records, with the vise set up under a transparent dust cover. The arm itself is just over a centimeter long, swinging out on what would’ve been the tone arm on one of those turntables. But I don’t look at that when I’ve clipped the leads to my stump; I look at the scope, because that’s my arm there in black and white, magnification 40 x. I ran a tool check and picked up the laser. It felt a little heavy; so I scaled my weight-sensor input down to a quarter-kilo per gram and got to work. At 40 x the side of the program looked like a trailer truck. It took eight hours to crack: three hours with the waldo and the laser and four dozen taps, two hours on the phone to a contact in Colorado, and three hours to run down a lexicon disc that could translate eight-year. old technical Russian. Then Cyrillic alphanumerics started reeling dowi the monitor, twisting themselves into English halfwa down. There were a lot of gaps, where the lexicon rai up against specialized military acronyms in the readou I’d bought from my man in Colorado, but it did give m some idea of what I’d bought from the Finn. I felt like a punk who’d gone out to buy a switch. blade and come home with a small neutron bomb. Screwed again, I thought. What good’s a neutro~ bomb in a streetfight? The thing under the dust covei was right out of my league. I didn’t even know where to unload it, where to look for a buyer. Someone had, but he was dead, someone with a Porsche watch and a fake Belgian passport, but I’d never tried to move in those circles. The Finn’s muggers from the `burbs had knocked over someone who had some highly arcane connections. The program in the jeweler’s vise was a Russian military icebreaker, a killer-virus program. It was dawn when Bobby came in alone. I’d fallen asleep with a bag of takeout sandwiches in my lap. “You want to eat?” I asked him, not really awake, holding out my sandwiches. I’d been dreaming of the program, of its waves of hungry glitch systems and mimetic subprograms; in the dream it was an animal of some kind, shapeless and flowing. He brushed the bag aside on his way to the console, punched a function key. The screen lit with the intricate pattern I’d seen there that afternoon. I rubbed sleep from my eyes with my left hand, one thing I can’t do with my right. I’d fallen asleep trying to decide whether to tell him about the program. Maybe I should try to sell it alone, keep the money, go somewhere new, ask Rikki to go with me. “Whose is it?” I asked. He stood there in a black cotton jump suit, an old leather jacket thrown over his shoulders like a cape. He hadn’t shaved for a few days, and his face looked thin- ner than usual. “It’s Chrome’s,” he said. My arm convulsed, started clicking, fear translated to the myoclectrics through the carbon studs. I spilled the sandwiches; limp sprouts, and bright yellow dairy- produce slices on the unswept wooden floor. “You’re stone crazy,” I said. “No,” he said, “you think she rumbled it? No way. We’d be dead already. I locked on to her through a triple-blind rental system in Mombasa and an Algerian comsat. She knew somebody was having a look-see, but she couldn’t trace it.” If Chrome had traced the pass Bobby had made at her ice, we were good as dead. But he was probably right, or she’d have had me blown away on my way back from New York. “Why her, Bobby? Just give me one reason… Chrome: I’d seen her maybe half a dozen times in the Gentleman Loser. Maybe she was slumming, or checking out the human condition, a condition she didn’t exactly aspire to. A sweet little heart-shaped face framing the nastiest pair of eyes you ever saw. She’d looked fourteen for as long as anyone could remember, hyped out of anything like a normal metabolism on some massive program of serums and hormones. She was as ugly a customer as the street ever produced, but she didn’t belong to the street anymore. She was one of the Boys, Chrome, a member in good standing of the local Mob subsidiary. Word was, she’d gotten started as a dealer, back when synthetic pituitary hormones were still proscribed. But she hadn’t had to move hormones for a long time. Now she owned the House of Blue Lights. “You’re flat-out crazy, Quine. You give me one sane reason for having that stuff on your screen. You ought to dump it, and I mean now. “Talk in the Loser,” he said, shrugging out of the leather jacket. “Black Myron and Crow Jane. Jane, she’s up on all the sex lines, claims she knows where the money goes. So she’s arguing with Myron that Chrome’s the controlling interest in the Blue Lights, not just some figurehead for the Boys.” ” `The Boys,’ Bobby,” I said. “That’s the opera- tive word there. You still capable of seeing that? We don’t mess with the Boys, remember? That’s why we’re still walking around.” “That’s why we’re still poor, partner.” He settled back into the swivel chair in front of the console, un- zipped his jump suit, and scratched his skinny white chest. “But maybe not for much longer.” “I think maybe this partnership just got itself per- manently dissolved.” Then he grinned at me. Tjie grin was truly crazy, feral and focused, and I knew that right then he really didn’t give a shit about dying. “Look,” I said, “I’ve got some money left, you know? Why don’t you take it and get the tube to Miami, catch a hopper to Montego Bay. You need a rest, man. You’ve got to get your act together.” “My act, Jack,” he said, punching something on the keyboard, “never has been this together before.” The neon prayer rug on the screen shivered and woke as an animation program cut in, ice lines weaving with hypnotic frequency, a living mandala. Bobby kept punching, and the movement slowed; the pattern re- solved itself, grew slightly less complex, became an alternation between two distant configurations. A first- class piece of work, and I hadn’t thought he was still that good. “Now,” he said, “there, see it? Wait. There. There again. And there. Easy to miss. That’s it. Cuts in every hour and twenty minutes with a squirt transmis- sion to their comsat. We could live for a year on what ~he pays them weekly in negative interest.” “Whose comsat?” “Zurich. Her bankers. That’s her bankbook, Jack. That’s where the money goes. Crow Jane was right.” I stood there. My arm forgot to click. “So how’d you do in New York, partner? You get anything that’ll help me cut ice? We’re going to need whatever we can get.~~ I kept my eyes on his, forced myself not to look in the direction of the waldo, the jeweler’s vise. The Rus- sian program was there, under the dust cover. Wild cards, luck changers. “Where’s Rikki?” I asked him, crossing to the con- sole, pretending to study the alternating patterns on the screen. “Friends of hers,” he shrugged, “kids, they’re all into simstim.” He smiled absently. “I’m going to do it for her, man.” “I’m going out to think about this, Bobby. You want me to come back, you keep your hands off the board.” “I’m doing it for her,” he said as the door closed behind me. “You know lam.”