Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson

‘Smoke?’ Dog dragged a crumpled pack from his pocket and prized out a flattened cigarette. I squinted at the trademark whilw he lit it for me with a kitchen match. Yiheyuan filters. Beijing Cigarette Factory. I decided that the Lo Teks were black marketeers. Dog and Molly went back to their argument, which seemed to revolve around Molly’s desire to use some particular piece of Lo Tek real estate. ‘I’ve done you a lot of favors, man. I want that floor. And I want the musik.’ ‘You’re not Lo Tek…’ This must have been going on for the better part of a twisted kilometer, Dog leading us along swaying catwalks and up rope ladders. The Lo Teks leech their webs and huddling places to the city’s fabric with thick gobs of epoxy and sleep above the abyss in mesh hammocks. Their country is so attenuated that in places it consists of little more than holds and feet, sawed into geodesic struts. The Killing Floor, she called it. Scrambling after her, my new Eddie Bax shoes slipping on worm metal and damp plywood, I wondered how it could be any more lethal than the rest of the territory. At the same time I sensed that Dog’s protests were rirtual and that she already expected to get whatever it was she wanted. Somewhere beneath us, Jones would be circling his takn, feeling the first twinges of junk sickness. The police would be boring the Drome regulars with questions about Ralfi. What did he do? Who was he with before he stepped outside? And the Yakuza would be settling its ghostly bulk over the city’s data banks, probing for faint images of me reflected in numbered accounts, securities transactions, bills for utilities. We’re an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified… But by now the pirate would have shuttled our message into line for blackbox transmissions to the Yakuza comsat. A simple message: Call off the dogs or we wideband your program. The programm. I had no idea what it contained. I still don’t. I only sing the song, with zero comprehension. It was probably research data, the Yakuza being given to advanced forms of industrial espionage. A genteel business, stealing from Ono-Sendai as a matter of course and politely holding their data for ransom, threatening to blunt the conglomorate’s research edge by making the product public. But why couldn’t any number play? Wouldn’t they be happier with something to sell back to Ono-Sendai, happier than they’d be with one dead Johnny from Memory Lane? Their programm was on its way to an address in Sydney, to a place that held letters for clients and didn’t ask questions once you’d paid a small retainer. Fourth-class surface mail. I’d erased most of the other copy and recorded our message in the resulting gap, leaving just enough of the programm to identify it as the real thing. My wrist hurt. I wanted to stop, to lie down, to sleep. I knew that I’d lose my grip and fall soon, knew that the sharp black shoes I’d bought for my evening as Eddie Bax would lose their purchase and carry me down to Nighttown. But he rose in my mind like a cheap religious hologram, glowing, the enlarged chip in his Hawaiian shirt looming like a reconnaissance shot of some doomed urban nucleus. So I followed Dog and Molly through Lo Tek heaven, jury-rigged and jerry-built from scraps that even Nighttown didn’t want. The Killing Floor was eight meters on a side. A giant had threaded steel cable back and forth through a junkyard and drawn it all taut. It creaked when it moved, and it moved constantly, swaying and buckingas the gathering Lo Teks arranged themselves on the shelf of plywood surrounding it. The wood was silver with age, polished with long use and deeply etched with initials, threats, declarations of passion. This was suspended from a separate set of cables, which last themselves in darkness beyord the raw white glare of the two ancient floods suspended above the Floor. A girl with teeth like Dog’s hit the Floor on all fours. Her breast were tattooed with indigo spirals. Then she was across the Floor, laughing, grappling with a boy who was drinking dark liquid from a liter flask. Lo Tek fansion ran to scars and tattoos. And teeth. The electricity they were tapping to light the Killing Floor seemed to be an exception to their overall aesthetic, made in the name of… rirtual, sport, art? I didn’t know, but I could see that the Floor was something special. I had the look of having been assembled over generations. I held the useless shotgun under my jacket. Its hardness and left were comforting, even thought I had no more shells. And it came to me that I had no idea at all of what was really happening, or of what was supposed to happen. And that was the nature of my game, because I’d spent most of my life as a blind receptacle to be filled with other people;s knowledge and then drained, spouting synthetic languages I’d never understand. A very technical boy. Sure. And then I noticed just how quiet the Lo Teks had become. He was there, at the edge of the light, taking in the Killing Floor and the gallery of silent Lo Teks with a tourist’s calm. And as our eyes met for the first time with mutual recognition, a memory clicked into place for me, of Paris, and the long Mercedes electrics gliding through the rain to Notre Dame; mobile greenhouses, Japanese faces behind the glass, and a hundred Nikons rising in blind phototropism, flowers of steel and crystel. Behind his eyes, as they found me, those same shutters whirring. I looked for Molly Millions, but she was gone. The Lo Teks parted to let him step up on to the bench. He bowed, smiling, and stepped smoothly out of his sandals, leaving them side by side, perfectly aligned, and then he stepped down on to the Killing Floor. He came for me, across that shifting trampoline of scrap, as easily as any tourist padding across synthetic pile in any featureless hotel. Molly hit the Floor, moving. The Floor screamed. It was miked and amplified, with pickups riding the four fat coil springs at the corners and contact mikes taped at random to rusting machine fragments. Somewhere the Lo Teks had an amp and a synthesizer, and now I made out of shapes of speakers overhead, above the cruel white floods. A drumbeat began, electronic, like an amplified heart, steady as a metronome. She’d removed her leather jacket and boots; her T-shirt was sleeveless, faint teeltales of Chiba City circuitry traced along her thin arms. Her leather jeans greamed under the floods. She began to dance. She flexed her knees, white feet tensed on a flattened gas tank, and the Killing Floor began to heave in response. The sound it made was like a world ending, like the wires that hold heaven snapping and coiling across the sky. He rode with it, for a few heartbeats, and then he moved, judging the movement of the Floor perfectly, like a man stepping from one flat stone to another in an ornamental garden. He pulled the tip from his trumb with the grace of a man at ease with social gesture and flung it at her. Under the floods, the filament eas refracting thread of rainbow. She threw herself flat and rolled, jackknifing up as the molecule whipped past, steel claws snapping into the light in what must have been an automatic rictus of defense. The drum pulse quickened, and she bounced with it, her dark hair wild around the blank silver lenses, her mouth thin, lips taut with concentration. The Killing Floor boomed and roared, and the Lo Teks were screaming their excitement. He retracted the filament to a whirling meter-wide circle of ghostly polychrome and spun it in front of him, trumbless hand held lever with his sternum. A shield. And Molly seemed to let something go, something inside, and that was the real start of her mad-dog dance. She jumped, twisting, lunging sideways, landing with both feet on an alloy engine block wired directly to one of the coil springs. I cupped my hands over my ears and knelt in a vertigo of sound, thinking Floor and benches were on their way down, down to Nighttown, and I saw us tearing through the shanties, the wet wash, exploding on the tiles like rotten fruit. But the cables held, and the Killing Floor rose and fell like a crazy metal sea. And Molly danced on it. And at the end, just before he made his final cast with the filament, I saw in his face, an expression that didn’t seem to belong there. It wasn’t fear and it wasn’t anger. I think it was disbelief, stunned incomprehension mingled with pure aesthetic revulsion at what he was seeing, hearing – at what was happening to him. He retracted the whirling filament, the ghost disk shrinking to the size of a dinner plate as he whipped his arm above his head and brought it down, the thumbtip curving out for Molly like a live thing. The Floor carried her down, the molecule passing just above her head; the Floor whiplashed, lifting him into the path of the taut molecule. It shold have passed hermlessly over his head and been withdrawn into its diamondhard socket. It took his hand off just behind the wrist. There was a gap in the Floor in frond of him, and he went through it like a diver, with a strange deliberate grace, a defeated kamikaze on his way down to Nighttown. Partly, I think, he took that dive to buy himself a few seconds of the dignity of silence. She’d killed him with culture shock. The Lo Teks roared, but someone shut the amplifier off, and Molly rode the Killing Floor into silence, hanging on now, her face white and blank, until the pitching slower and there was only a faint pinging of tortured metal and the grating of rust on rust. We searched the Floor for the severed hand, but we never found it. All we found was a graceful curve in one piece of rusted steel, where the molecule went through. Its edge was bright as new chrome.

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