The medical team Molly employed occupied two floors of an anonymous condo-rack near the old hub of Baltimore. The building was modular, like some giant version of Cheap Hotel each coffin forty meters long. Case met Molly as she emerged from one that wore the elaborately worked logo of one GERALD CHIN, DENTIST. She was limping. “He says if I kick anything, it’ll fall off.” “I ran into one of your pals,” he said, “a Modern.” “Yeah? Which one?” “Lupus Yonderboy. Had a message.” He passed her a paper napkin with W I N T E R M U T E printed in red feltpen in his neat, laborious capitals. “He said–” But her hand came up in the jive for silence. “Get us some crab,” she said.
After lunch in Baltimore, Molly dissecting her crab with alarming ease, they tubed in to New York. Case had learned not to ask questions; they only brought the sign for silence. Her leg seemed to be bothering her, and she seldom spoke. A thin black child with wooden beads and antique resistors woven tightly into her hair opened the Finn’s door and led them along the tunnel of refuse. Case felt the stuff had grown somehow during their absence . Or else it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl’s waste places. Beyond the army blanket, the Finn waited at the white table. Molly began to sign rapidly, produced a scrap of paper, wrote something on it, and passed it to the Finn. He took it between thumb and forefinger, holding it away from his body as though it might explode. He made a sign Case didn’t know, one that conveyed a mixture of impatience and glum resignation. He stood up, brushing crumbs from the front of his battered tweed jacket. A glass jar of pickled herring stood on the table beside a torn plastic package of flatbread and a tin ashtray piled with the butts of Partagas. “Wait,” the Finn said, and left the room. Molly took his place, extruded the blade from her index finger, and speared a grayish slab of herring. Case wandered aimlessly around the room, fingering the scanning gear on the pylons as he passed. Ten minutes and the Finn came bustling back, showing his teeth in a wide yellow smile. He nodded, gave Molly a thumbs-up salute, and gestured to Case to help him with the door panel. While Case smoothed the velcro border into place, the Finn took a flat little console from his pocket and punched out an elaborate sequence. “Honey,” he said to Molly, tucking the console away, “you have got it. No shit, I can smell it. You wanna tell me where you got it?” “Yonderboy,” Molly said, shoving the herring and crackers aside. “I did a deal with Larry, on the side.” “Smart,” the Finn said. “It’s an AI.” “Slow it down a little,” Case said. “Berne,” the Finn said, ignoring him. “Berne. It’s got limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of ’53. Built for Tessier-Ashpool S.A. They own the mainframe and the original software.” “What’s in Beme, okay?” Case deliberately stepped between them. “Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. I’ve got the Turing Registry numbers. Artificial intelligence.” “That’s all just fine,” Molly said, “but where’s it get us?” “If Yonderboy’s right,” the Finn said, “this Al is backing Armitage.” “I paid Larry to have the Moderns nose around Ammitage a little,” Molly explained, turning to Case. “They have some very weird lines of communication. Deal was, they’d get my money if they answered one question: who’s running Armitage?” “And you think it’s this AI? Those things aren’t allowed any autonomy. It’ll be the parent corporation, this Tessle. . .” “Tessier-Ashpool S.A.,” said the Finn. “And I got a little story for you about them. Wanna hear?” He sat down and hunched forward. “Finn,” Molly said. “He loves a story.” “Haven’t ever told anybody this one,” the Finn began.
The Finn was a fence, a trafficker in stolen goods, primarily in software. In the course of his business, he sometimes came into contact with other fences, some of whom dealt in the more traditional articles of the trade. In precious metals, stamps, rare coins, gems, jewelry, furs, and paintings and other works of art. The story he told Case and Molly began with another man’s story, a man he called Smith. Smith was also a fence, but in balmier seasons he surfaced as an art dealer. He was the first person the Finn had known who’d “gone silicon”–the phrase had an old-fashioned ring for Case–and the microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery sales. With half a dozen chips in his new socket, Smith’s knowledge of the art business was formidable, at least by the standards of his colleagues. But Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal request, one businessman to another. He wanted a go-to on the Tessier-Ashpool clan, he said, and it had to be executed in a way that would guarantee the impossibility of the subject ever tracing the inquiry to its source. It might be possible, the Finn had opined, but an explanation was definitely required. “It smelled,” the Finn said to Case, “smelled of money. And Smith was being very careful. Almost too careful.” Smith, it developed, had had a supplier known as Jimmy. Jimmy was a burglar and other things as well, and just back from a year in high orbit, having carried certain things back down the gravity well. The most unusual thing Jimmy had managed to score on his swing through the archipelago was a head, an intricately worked bust, cloisonne over platinum, studded with seedpearls and lapis. Smith, sighing, had put down his pocket microscope and advised Jimmy to melt the thing down. It was contemporary, not an antique, and had no value to the collector. Jimmy laughed. The thing was a computer terminal, he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes. It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed, a perverse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing. It was a curiosity. Smith jacked the head into his computer and listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures of last year’s tax return. Smith’ s clientele included a Tokyo billionaire whose passion for clockwork automata approached fetishism. Smith shrugged, showing Jimmy his upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn shops. He could try, he said, but he doubted he could get much for it. When Jimmy had gone, leaving the head, Smith went over it carefully, discovering certain hallmarks. Eventually he’d been able to trace it to an unlikely collaboration between two Zurich artisans, an enamel specialist in Paris, a Dutch jeweler, and a California chip designer. It had been commissioned, he discovered, by Tessier-Ashpool S.A. Smith began to make preliminary passes at the Tokyo collector, hinting that he was on the track of something noteworthy.