Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson

The Rip

The airport sucked a groggy Danielle Stark away down a pastel corridor lined with reporters, cameras, augmented eyes, while Porphyre and three Net security men swept Angie through the closing ring of journalists, a choreographed piece of ritual that had more to do with providing dramatic visuals than protection. Anyone present had already been cleared by security and the PR department. Then she was alone with Porphyre in an express elevator, on their way to the heliport the Net maintained on the terminal’s roof. As the doors opened, into gusts of wet wind across brilliantly lit concrete, where a new trio of security men waited in giant fluorescent-orange parkas, Angie remembered her first glimpse of the Sprawl, when she’d ridden the train up from Washington with Turner. One of the orange parkas ushered them across an expanse of spotless concrete to the waiting helicopter, a large twin-prop Fokker finished in black chrome. Porphyre led the way up the spidery, matte-black stairway. She followed without looking back. She had something now, a new determination. She’d decided to contact Hans Becker through his agent in Paris. Continuity had the number. It was time, time to make something happen. And she’d make something happen with Robin as well; he’d be waiting now, she knew, at the hotel. The helicopter told them to fasten their seatbelts. As they lifted off, there was virtual silence in the soundproofed cabin, only a throbbing in the bones, and for a strange second she seemed able to hold the whole of her life in mind and know it, see it for what it had been. And it was this, she thought, that the dust had drifted over and concealed, and that had been freedom from pain. And the site of the soul ‘s departure , said an iron voice, out of candleglow and the roar of the hive. . . . »Missy?« Porphyre from the seat beside her, leaning close . . . »I’m dreaming. . . .« Something had been waiting for her, years ago, in the Net. Nothing like the loa, like Legba or the others, though Legba, she knew, was Lord of the Crossroads; he was synthesis, the cardinal point of magic, communication. . . . »Porphyre,« she asked, »why did Bobby leave?« She looked out at the Sprawl’s tangled grid of light, at the domes picked out in red beacons, seeing instead the datascape that had drawn him, always, back to what he’d believed was the only game worth playing. »If you don’t know, missy,« Porphyre said, »who does?« »But you hear things. Everything. All the rumors. You always have. . . .« »Why ask me now?« »It’s time. . . .« »I remember talk , understand? How people who aren’t famous talk about those who are. Maybe someone who claimed they knew Bobby talked to someone else, and it came around. . . . Bobby was worth talking about because he was with you, understand? That’s a good place to start, missy, because he wouldn’t have found that so very gratifying, would he? Story was, he’d set out hustling on his own, but he’d found you instead, and you rolled higher and faster than anything he could’ve dreamed of. Took him up there, understand? Where the kind of money he’d never even dreamed of, back in Barrytown, was just change. . . .« Angie nodded, looking out over the Sprawl. »Talk was he had his own ambitions, missy. Something driving him. Drove him off, finally . . .« »I didn’t think he’d leave me,« she said. »When I first came to the Sprawl, it was like being born. A new life. And he was there, right there, the very first night. Later, when Legba — when I was with the Net . . .« »When you were becoming Angie.« »Yes. And as much of me as that took, I knew he’d be there. And also that he’d never buy it, entirely, and I needed that, how it was still just a scam, to him, the whole business. . . .« »The Net?« »Angie Mitchell. He knew the difference between it and me.« »Did he?« »Maybe he was the difference.« So high above the lines of light . . .

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