At the heart of darkness, the still center, the glitch sys- tems shred the dark with whirlwinds of light, translu- cent razors spinning away from us; we hang in the center of a silent slow-motion explosion, ice fragments falling away forever, and Bobby’s voice comes in across light-years of electronic void illusion “Burn the bitch down. I can’t hold the thing back ” The Russian program, rising through towers of data, blotting out the playroom colors. And I plug Bobby’s homemade command package into the center of Chrome’s cold heart. The squirt transmission cuts in, a pulse of condensed information that shoots straight up, past the thickening tower of darkness, the Russian 188
program, while Bobby struggles to control that crucial second. An unformed arm of shadow twitches from the towering dark, too late. We’ve done it. The matrix folds itself around me like an origami trick. And the loft smells of sweat and burning circuitry. I thought I heard Chrome scream, a raw metal sound, but I couldn’t have.
Bobby was laughing, tears in his eyes. The elapsed-time figure in the corner of the monitor read 07:24:05. The burn had taken a little under eight minutes. And I saw that the Russian program had melted in its slot. We’d given the bulk of Chrome’s ZOrich account to a dozen world charities. There was too much there to move, and we knew we had to break her, burn her straight down, or she might come after us. We took less than ten percent for ourselves and shot it through the Long Hum setup in Macao. They took sixty percent of that for themselves and kicked what was left back to us through the most convoluted sector of the Hong Kong exchange. It took an hour before our money started to reach the two accounts we’d opened in Zurich. I watched zeros pile up behind a meaningless figure on the monitor. I was rich. Then the phone rang. It was Miles. I almost blew the code phrase. “Hey, Jack, man, I dunno what’s it all about, with this girl of yours? Kinda funny thing here…” “What? Tell me.” “I been on her, like you said, tight but out of sight. She goes to the Loser, hangs out, then she gets a tube. Goes to the House of Blue Lights ” “She what?” “Side door. Employees only. No way I could get past their security.” “Is she there now?”
“No, man, I just lost her. It’s insane down here,
like the Blue Lights just shut down, looks like for good,
seven kinds of alarms going off, everybody running, the
heat out in riot gear. . . . Now there’s all this stuff going
on, insurance guys, real-estate types, vans with munici-
pal plates….
“Miles, where’d she go?”
“Lost her, Jack.”
“Look, Miles, you keep the money in the envelope,
right?”
“You serious? Hey, I’m real sorry. I ”
Ihung up.
“Wait’ll we tell her,” Bobby was saying, rubbing a
towel across his bare chest.
“You tell her yourself, co,wboy. I’m going for a
walk.”
So I went out into the night and the neon and let the
crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be
just a segment of that mass organism, just one more
drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics. I
didn’t think, just put one foot in front of another, but
after a while I did think, and it all made sense. She’d
needed the money.
I thought about Chrome, too. That we’d killed her,
murdered her, as surely as if we’d slit her throat. The
night that carried me along through the malls and plazas
would be hunting her now, and she had nowhere to go.
How many enemies would she have in this crowd alone?
How many would move, now they weren’t held back by
fear of her money? We’d taken her for everything she
had. She was back on the street again. I doubted she’d
live till dawn.
Finally I remembered the cafe, the one where I’d
met Tiger.
Her sunglasses told the whole story, huge black
shades with a telltale smudge of fleshtone paintstick in
the corner of one lens. “Hi, Rikki,” I said, and I was
ready when she took them off.
Blue, Tally Isham blue. The clear trademark blue
they’re famous for, ZEISS IKON ringing each iris in tiny
capitals, the letters suspended there like flecks of gold.
“They’re beautiful,” I said. Paintstick covered the
bruising. No scars with work that good. “You made
some money.”
“Yeah, I did.” Then she shivered. “But I won’t
make any more, not that way.”
“I think that place is out of business.~~
“Oh.” Nothing moved in her face then. The new
blue eyes were still and very deep.
“It doesn’t matter. Bobby’s waiting for you. We
just pulled down a big score.”
“No. I’ve got to go. I guess he won’t understand,
but I’ve got to go.”
I nodded, watching the arm swing up to take her
hand; it didn’t seem to be part of me at all, but she held
on to it like it was.
“I’ve got a one-way ticket to Hollywood. Tiger
knows some people I can stay with. Maybe I’ll even get
to Chiba City.”
She was right about Bobby. I went back with her.
He didn’t understand. But she’d already served her pur-
pose, for Bobby, and I wanted to tell her not to hurt for
him, because I could see that she did. He wouldn’t even
come out into the hallway after she had packed her
bags. I put the bags down and kissed her and messed up
the paintstick, and something came up inside me the
way the killer program had risen above Chrome’s data.
A sudden stopping of the breath, in a place where no
word is. But she had a plane to catch.
Bobby was slumped in the swivel chair in front of
his monitor, looking at his string of zeros. He had his
shades on, and I knew he’d be in the Gentleman Loser
by nightfall, checking out the weather, anxious for a
sign, someone to tell him what his new life would be
like. I couldn’t see it being very different. More com-
fortable, but he’d always be waiting for that next card
to fall.
I tried not to imagine her in the House of Blue
Lights, working three-hour shifts in an approximation
of REM sleep, while her body and a bundle of condi-
tioned reflexes took care of business. The customers
never got to complain that she was faking it, because
those were real orgasms. But she felt them, if she felt
them at all, as faint silver flares somewhere out on the
edge of sleep. Yeah, it’s so popular, it’s almost legal.
The customers are torn between needing someone and
wanting to be alone at the same time, which has prob-
ably always been the name of that particular game, even
before we had the neuroelectronics to enable them to
have it both ways.
I picked up the phone and punched the number for
her airline. I gave them her real name, her flight num-
ber. “She’s changing that,” I said, “to Chiba City.
Thatright. Japan.” I thumbed’ my credit card into the
slot and punched my ID code. “First class.” Distant
hum as they scanned my credit records. “Make that a
return ticket.”
But I guess she cashed the return fare, or else
didn’t need it, because she hasn’t come back. And
sometimes late at night I’ll pass a window with posters
of simstim stars, all those beautiful, identical eyes star-
ing back at me out of faces that are nearly as identical,
and sometimes the eyes are hers, but none of the faces
are, none of them ever are, and I see her far out on the
edge of all this sprawl of night and cities, and then she
waves goodbye.