William Gibson. Neuromancer

“I been lookin’ for you, man.” She took a seat opposite him, her elbows on the table. The sleeves of the blue zip suit had been ripped out at the shoulders; he automatically checked her arms for signs of terms or the needle. “Want a cigarette?” She dug a crumpled pack of Yeheyuan filters from an ankle pocket and offered him one. He took it, let her light it with a red plastic tube. “You sleep in’ okay, Case? You look tired.” Her accent put her south along the Sprawl, toward Atlanta. The skin below her eyes was pale and unhealthy-looking, but the flesh was still smooth and firm. She was twenty. New lines of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the corners of her mouth. Her dark hair was drawn back, held by a band of printed silk. The pattern might have represented microcircuits, or a city map. “Not if I remember to take my pills,” he said, as a tangible wave of longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the wavelength of amphetamine. He remembered the smell of her skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her locked across the small of his back. All the meat, he thought, and all it wants. “Wage,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “He wants to see you with a hole in your face.” She lit her own cigarette. “Who says? Ratz? You been talking to Ratz?” “No. Mona. Her new squeeze is one of Wage’s boys.” “I don’t owe him enough. He does me, he’s out the money anyway.” He shrugged.

“Too many people owe him now, Case. Maybe you get to be the example. You seriously better watch it.” “Sure. How about you, Linda? You got anywhere to sleep?” “Sleep.” She shook her head. “Sure, Case.” She shivered, hunched forward over the table. Her face was filmed with sweat. “Here,” he said, and dug in the pocket of his windbreaker, coming up with a crumpled fifty. He smoothed it automatically, under the table, folded it in quarters, and passed it to her. “You need that, honey. You better give it to Wage.” There was something in the gray eyes now that he couldn’t read, something he’d never seen there before. “I owe Wage a lot more than that. Take it. I got more coming,” he lied, as he watched his New Yen vanish into a zippered pocket. “You get your money, Case, you find Wage quick.” “I’ll see you, Linda,” he said, getting up. “Sure.” A millimeter of white showed beneath each of her pupils. Sanpaku. “You watch your back, man.” He nodded, anxious to be gone. He looked back as the plastic door swung shut behind him, saw her eyes reflected in a cage of red neon.

Friday night on Ninsei. He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised coffee shop called Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an arcade. He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the man’s right hand. Was it authentic? if that’s for real, he thought, he’s in for trouble. If it wasn’t, served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic. The sarariman had been Japanese, but the Ninsei crowd was a gaijin crowd. Groups of sailors up from the port, tense solitary tourists hunting pleasures no guidebook listed, Sprawl heavies showing off grafts and implants, and a dozen distinct species. of hustler, all swarming the street in an intricate dance of desire and commerce. There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of historical park, a reminder of humble origins. But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself. Was Linda right, he wondered, staring up at the lights? Would Wage have him killed to make an example? It didn’t make much sense, but then Wage dealt primarily in proscribed biologicals, and they said you had to be crazy to do that. But Linda said Wage wanted him dead. Case’s primary insight into the dynamics of street dealing was that neither the buyer nor the seller really needed him. A middleman’s business is to make himself a necessary evil. The dubious niche Case had carved for himself in the criminal ecology of Night City had beep cut out with lies, scooped out a night at a time with betrayal. Now, sensing that its walls were starting to crumble, he felt the edge of a strange euphoria. The week before, he’d delayed transfer of a synthetic glandular extract, retailing it for a wider margin than usual. He knew Wage hadn’t liked that. Wage was his primary supplier, nine years in Chiba and one of the few gaijin dealers who’d Managed to forge links with the rigidly stratified criminal establishment beyond Night City’s borders. Genetic materials and hormones trickled down to Ninsei along an intricate ladder of fronts and blinds. Somehow Wage had managed to trace something back, once, and now he enjoyed steady connections in a dozen cities. Case found himself staring through a shop window. The place sold small bright objects to the sailors. Watches, flicknives, lighters, pocket VTRs, Sims Tim decks, weighted man- riki chains, and shuriken. The shuriken had always fascinated him, steel stars with knife-sharp points. Some were chromed, others black, others treated with a rainbow surface like oil on water. But the chrome stars held his gaze. They were mounted against scarlet ultra suede with nearly invisible loops of nylon fish line, their centers stamped with dragons or yin yang symbols. They caught the street’s neon and twisted it, and it came to Case that these were the stars under which he voyaged, his destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome. “Julie,” he said to his stars. “Time to see old Julie. He’ll know.”

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