Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson

Watching the hypnotic sweep of the scanning pink ember, Kumiko had some idea of what it was that Sally spoke with. There were similar things in her father’s study, four of them, black lacquered cubes arranged along a low shelf of pine. Above each cube hung a formal portrait. The portraits were monochrome photographs of men in dark suits and ties, four very sober gentlemen whose lapels were decorated with small metal emblems of the kind her father sometimes wore. Though her mother had told her that the cubes contained ghosts, the ghosts of her father’s evil ancestors, Kumiko found them more fascinating than frightening. If they did contain ghosts, she reasoned, they would be quite small, as the cubes themselves were scarcely large enough to contain a child’s head. Her father sometimes meditated before the cubes, kneeling on the bare tatami in an attitude that connoted profound respect. She had seen him in this position many times, but she was ten before she heard him address the cubes. And one had answered. The question had meant nothing to her, the answer less, but the calm tone of the ghost’s reply had frozen her where she crouched, behind a door of paper, and her father had laughed to find her there; rather than scolding her, he’d explained that the cubes housed the recorded personalities of former executives, corporate directors. Their souls? she’d asked. No, he’d said, and smiled, then added that the distinction was a subtle one. »They are not conscious. They respond, when questioned, in a manner approximating the response of the subject. If they are ghosts, then holograms are ghosts.« After Sally’s lecture on the history and hierarchy of the Yakuza, in the robata bar in Earls Court, Kumiko had decided that each of the men in the photographs, the subjects of the personality recordings, had been an oyabun . The thing in the armored housing, she reasoned, was of a similar nature, though perhaps more complex, just as Colin was a more complex version of the Michelin guide her father’s secretaries had carried on her Shinjuku shopping expeditions. Finn, Sally called it, and it was evident that this Finn had been a friend or associate of hers. But did it wake, Kumiko wondered, when the alley was empty? Did its laser vision scan the silent fall of midnight snow?

»Europe,« Sally began, »when I split from Case I went all around there. Had a lot of money we got for the run, anyway it looked like a lot then. Tessier-Ashpool’s AI paid it out through a Swiss bank. It erased every trace we’d ever been up the well; I mean everything, like if you looked up the names we traveled under, on the JAL shuttle, they just weren’t there. Case checked it all out when we were back in Tokyo, wormed his way into all kinds of data; it was like none of it ever happened. I didn’t understand how it could do that, AI or not, but nobody ever really understood what happened up there, when Case rode that Chinese icebreaker through their core ice.« »Did it try to get in touch, after?« »Not that I know of. He had this idea that it was gone, sort of; not gone gone, but gone into everything, the whole matrix. Like it wasn’t in cyberspace anymore, it just was. And if it didn’t want you to see it, to know it was there, well, there was no way you ever could, and no way you’d ever be able to prove it to anybody else even if you did know. . . . And me, I didn’t wanna know. I mean, whatever it was, it seemed done to me, finished. Armitage was dead, Riviera was dead, Ashpool was dead, the Rasta tug pilot who took us out there was back in Zion cluster and he’d probably written it all off as another ganja dream. . . . I left Case in the Tokyo Hyatt, never saw him again. . . .« »Why?« »Who knows? Nothing much. I was young, it just seemed over.« »But you’d left her up the well. In Straylight.« »You got it. And I’d think about that, once in a while. When we were leaving, Finn, it was like she didn’t care about any of it. Like I’d killed her crazy sick father for her, and Case had cracked their cores and let their AIs loose in the matrix . . . So I put her on the list, right? You get big enough trouble one day, you’re being got at, you check that list.« »And you figured it for her, right off?« »No. I gotta pretty long list.« Case, who seemed to Kumiko to have been something more than Sally’s partner, never reentered her story. As Kumiko listened to Sally condense fourteen years of personal history for the Finn’s benefit, she found herself imagining this younger Sally as a bishonen hero in a traditional romantic video: fey, elegant, and deadly. While she found Sally’s matter-of-fact account of her life difficult to follow, with its references to places and things she didn’t know, it was easy to imagine her winning the sudden, flick-of-the-wrist victories expected of bishonen . But no, she thought, as Sally dismissed »a bad year in Hamburg,« sudden anger in her voice — an old anger, the year a decade past — it was a mistake to cast this woman in Japanese terms. There were no ronin , no wandering samurai; Sally and the Finn were talking business. She’d arrived at her bad year in Hamburg, Kumiko gathered, after having won and lost some sort of fortune. She’d won her share of it »up there,« in a place the Finn had called Straylight, in partnership with the man Case. In doing so, she’d made an enemy. »Hamburg,« the Finn interrupted, »I heard stories about Hamburg. . . .« »The money was gone. How it is, with a big score, when you’re young . . . No money was sort of like getting back to normal, but I was involved with these Frankfurt people, owed ’em, and they wanted to take it out in trade.« »What kinda trade?« »They wanted people hit.« »So?« »So I got out. When I could. Went to London . . .« Perhaps, Kumiko decided, Sally had once been something along ronin lines, a kind of samurai. In London, however, she’d become something else, a businesswoman. Supporting herself in some unspecified way, she gradually became a backer, providing funds for various kinds of business operations. (What was a »credit sink«? What was »laundering data«?) »Yeah,« the Finn said, »you did okay. Got yourself a share in some German casino.« »Aix-la-Chapelle. I was on the board. Still am, when I got the right passport.« »Settled down?« The laugh again. »Sure.« »Didn’t hear much, back here.« »I was running a casino. That was it. Doing fine.« »You were prizefighting. ‘Misty Steele,’ augmented featherweight. Eight fights, I made book on five of ’em. Blood matches, sweetmeat. Illegal.« »Hobby.« »Some hobby. I saw the vids. Burmese Kid opened you right up, living color . . .« Kumiko remembered the long scar. »So I quit. Five years ago and I was already five years too old.« »You weren’t bad, but ‘Misty Steele’ . . . Jesus.« »Gimme a break. Wasn’t me made that one up.« »Sure. So tell me about our friend upstairs, how she got in touch.« »Swain. Roger Swain. Sends one of his boys to the casino, would-be hardass called Prior. About a month ago.« »Swain the fixer? London?« »Same one. So Prior’s got a present for me, about a meter of printout. A list. Names, dates, places.« »Bad?« »Everything. Stuff I’d almost forgotten.« »Straylight run?« »Everything. So I packed a bag, got back to London, there’s Swain. He’s sorry, it’s not his fault, but he’s gotta twist me. Because somebody’s twisting him. Got his own meter of printout to worry about.« Kumiko heard Sally’s heels shift on the pavement. »What’s he want?« »A rip, warm body. Celeb.« »Why you?« »Come on, Finn, that’s what I’m here to ask you .« »Swain tell you it’s 3Jane?« »No. But my console cowboy in London did.« Kumiko’s knees ached. »The kid. Where’d you come by her?« »She turned up at Swain’s place. Yanaka wanted her out of Tokyo. Swain owes him giri .« »She’s clean, anyway, no implants. What I get out of Tokyo lately, Yanaka has his hands full. . . .« Kumiko shivered in the dark. »And the rip, the celeb?« the Finn continued. She felt Sally hesitate. »Angela Mitchell.« The pink metronome swinging silently, left to right, right to left. »It’s cold here, Finn.« »Yeah. Wish I could feel it. I just took a little trip on your behalf. Memory Lane. You know much about where Angie comes from?« »No.« »I’m in the oracle game, honey, not a research library. . . . Her father was Christopher Mitchell. He was the big shit in biochip research at Mass Biolabs. She grew up in a sealed compound of theirs in Arizona, company kid. About seven years ago, something happened down there. The street said Hosaka fielded a team of pros to help Mitchell make a major career move. The fax said there was a megaton blast on Maas property, but nobody ever found any radiation. Never found Hosaka’s mercs, either. Maas announced that Mitchell was dead, suicide.« »That’s the library. What’s the oracle know?« »Rumors. Nothing that hangs together on a line. Street said she turned up here a day or two after the blast in Arizona, got in with some very weird spades who worked out of New Jersey.« »Worked what?« »They dealt. ‘Ware, mostly. Buying, selling. Sometimes they bought from me. . . .« »How were they weird?« »Hoodoos. Thought the matrix was full of mambos ‘n’ shit. Wanna know something, Moll?« »What?« »They’re right.«

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *