And down now, down, the program a roller coaster through this fraying maze of shadow walls, gray cathedral spaces between the bright towers. Headlong speed. Black ice. Dont think about it. Black ice. Too many stories in the Gentleman Loser; black ice is a part of the mythology. Ice that kills. Illegal, but then aren’t we all? Some kind of neural-feedback weapon, and you connect with it only once. Like some hideous Word that eats the mind from the inside out. Like an epileptic spasm that goes on and on until there’s nothing left at all… And we’re diving for the floor of Chrome’s shadow castle. Trying to brace myself for the sudden stopping of breath, a sickness and final slackening of the nerves. Fear of that cold Word waiting, down there in the dark.
I went out and looked for Rikki, found her in a cafe with a boy with Sendai eyes, half-healed suture lines radiating from his bruised sockets. She had a glossy brochure spread open on the table, Tally Isham smiling up from a dozen photographs, the Girl with the Zeiss Ikon Eyes. Her little simstim deck was one of the things I’d stacked under my bench the night before, the one I’d fixed for her the day after I’d first seen her. She spent hours jacked into that unit, the contact band across her forehead like a gray plastic tiara. Tally Isham was her favorite, and with the contact band on, she was gone, off somewhere in the recorded sensorium of simstim s biggest star. Simulated stimuli: the world all the in- teresting parts, anyway as perceived by Tally Isham. Tally raced a black Fokker ground-effect plane across Arizona mesa tops. Tally dived the Truk Island pre- serves. Tally partied with the superrich on private Greek islands, heartbreaking purity of those tiny white seaports at dawn. Actually she looked a lot like Tally, same coloring and cheekbones. I thought Rikki’s mouth was stronger. More sass. She didn’t want to be Tally Isham, but she coveted the job. That was her ambition, to be in sim- stim. Bobby just laughed it off. She talked to me about it, though. “I-Iow’d I look with a pair of these?” she’d ask, holding a full-page headshot, Tally Isham’s blue Zeiss Ikons lined up with her own amber-brown. She’d had her corneas done twice, but she still wasn’t 20-20; so she wanted Ikons. Brand of the stars. Very expensive. “You still window-shopping for eyes?” I asked as I sat down. “Tiger just got some,” she said. She looked tired, I thought. Tiger was so pleased with his Sendais that he couldn’t help smiling, but I doubted whether he’d have smiled otherwise. He had the kind of uniform good looks you get after your seventh trip to the surgical boutique; he’d probably spend the rest of his life look- ing vaguely like each new season’s media front-runner; not too obvious a copy, but nothing too original, either. “Sendai, right?” I smiled back. He nodded. I watched as he tried to take me in with his idea of a professional simstim glance. He was pre- tending that he was recording. I thought he spent too long on my arm. “They’ll be great on peripherals when the muscles heal,” he said, and I saw how carefully he reached for his double espresso. Sendai eyes are notorious for depth-perception defects and warranty hassles, among other things. “Tiger’s leaving for Hollywood tomorrow.~~ “Then maybe Chiba City, right?” I smiled at him. He didn’t smile back. “Got an offer, Tiger? Know an agent?” “Just checking it out,” he said quietly. Then he got up and left. He said a quick goodbye to Rikki, but not to me. “That kid’s optic nerves may start to deteriorate in- side six months. You know that, Rikki? Those Sendais are illegal in England, Denmark, lots of places. You can’t replace nerves.” “Hey, Jack, no lectures.” She stole one of my croissants and nibbled at the top of one of its horns. “I thought I was your adviser, kid.” “Yeah. Well, Tiger’s not too swift, but everybody knows about Sendais. They’re all he can afford. So he’s taking a chance. If he gets work, he can replace them.” “With these?” I tapped the Zeiss Ikon brochure. “Lot of money, Rikki. You know better than to take a gamble like that.” She nodded. “I want Ikons.” “If you’re going up to Bobby’s, tell him to sit tight until he hears from ~ “Sure. It’s business?” “Business,” I said. But it was craziness. I drank my coffee, and she ate both my croissants. Then I walked her down to Bobby’s. I made fifteen calls, each one from a different pay phone. Business. Bad craziness. All in all, it took us six weeks to set the burn up, six weeks of Bobby telling me how much he loved her. I worked even harder, trying to get away from that. Most of it was phone calls. My fifteen initial and very oblique inquiries each seemed to breed fifteen more. I was looking for a certain service Bobby and I both imagined as a requisite part of the world’s clande- stine economy, but which probably never had more than five customers at a time. It would be one that never advertised. We were looking for the world’s heaviest fence, for a non-aligned money laundry capable of dry-cleaning a megabuck online cash transfer and then forgetting about it. All those calls were a wasted finally, because it was the Finn who put me on to what we needed. I’d gone up to New York to buy a new blackbox rig, because we were going broke paying for all those calls. I put the problem to him as hypothetically as possi- ble. “Macao,” he said. “Macao?” “The Long Hum family. Stockbrokers.” He even had the number. You want a fence, ask another fence. The Long Hum people were so oblique that they made my idea of a subtle approach look like a tactical nuke-out. Bobby had to make two shuttle runs to Hong Kong to get the deal straight. We were running out of capital, and fast. I still don’t know why I decided to go along with it in the first place; I was scared of Chrome, and I’d never been all that hot to get rich. I tried telling myself that it was a good idea to burn the House of Blue Lights because the place was a creep joint, but I just couldn’t buy it. I didn’t like the Blue Lights, because I’d spent a supr’~mely depressing eve- ning there once, but that was no excuse for going after Chrome. Actually I halfway assumed we were going to die in the attempt. Even with that killer program, the odds weren’t exactly in our favor. Bobby was lost in writing the set of commands we were going to plug into the dead center of Chrome’s computer. That was going to be my job, because Bobby was going to have his hands full trying to keep the Rus- sian program from going straight for the kill. It was too complex for us to rewrite, and so he was going to try to hold it back for the two seconds I needed. I made a deal with a streetfighter named Miles. He was going to follow Rikki the night of the burn, keep her in sight, and phone me at a certain time. If I wasn’t there, or didn’t answer in just a certain way, I’d told him to grab her and put her on the first tube out. I gave him an envelope to give her, money and a note. Bobby really hadn’t thought about that, much, how things would go for her if we blew it. He just kept telling me he loved her, where they were going to go together, how they’d spend the money. “Buy her a pair of Ikons first, man. That’s what she wants. She’s serious about that simstim scene.” “Hey,” he said, looking up from the keyboard, “she won’t need to work. We’re going to make it, Jack. She’s my luck. She won’t ever have to work again.” “Your luck,” I said. I wasn’t happy. I couldn’t remember when I had been happy. “You seen your luok around lately?” He hadn’t, but neither had I. We’d both been too busy. I missed her. Missing her reminded me of my one night in the House of Blue Lights, because I’d gone there out of missing someone else. I’d gotten drunk to begin with, then I’d started hitting Vasopressin inhalers. If your main squeeze has just decided to walk out on you, booze and Vasopressin are the ultimate in masochistic pharmacology; the juice makes you maudlin and the Vasopressin makes you remember, I mean really remember. Clinically they use the stuff to counter senile amnesia, but the street finds its own uses for things. So I’d bought myself an ultraintense replay of a bad affair; trouble is, you get the bad with the good. Go gunning for transports of animal ecstasy and you get what you said, too, and what she said to that, how she walked away and never looked back. I don’t remember deciding to go to the Blue Lights, or how I got there, hushed corridors and this really tacky decorative waterfall trickling somewhere, or maybe just a hologram of one. I had a lot of money that night; somebody had given Bobby a big roll for opening a three-second window in someone else’s ice. I don’t think the crew on the door liked my looks, but I guess my money was okay. I had more to drink there when I’d done what I went there for. Then I made some crack to the barman about closet necrophiliacs, and that didn’t go down too well. Then this very large character insisted on calling me War Hero, which I didn’t like. I think I showed him some tricks with the arm, before the lights went out, and I woke up two days later in a basic sleeping module somewhere else. A cheap place, not even room to hang yourself. And I sat there on that narrow foam slab and cried. Some things are worse than being alone. But the thing they sell in the House of Blue Lights is so popular that it’s almost legal.