The tug Marcus Garvey, a steel drum nine meters long and two in diameter, creaked and shuddered as Maelcum punched for a navigational burn. Splayed in his elastic g-web, Case watched the Zionite’s muscular back through a haze of sco- polamine. He’d taken the drug to blunt SAS, nausea, but the stimulants the manufacturer included to counter the scop had no effect on his doctored system. “How long’s it gonna take us to make Freeside?” Molly asked from her web beside Maelcum’s pilot module. “Don’ be long now, m’seh dat.” “You guys ever think in hours?” “Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean? Dread,” and he shook his locks, “at control, moo, an’ I an’ I come a Freeside when I an’ I come….” “Case,” she said, “have you maybe done anything toward getting in touch with our pal from Berne? Like all that time you spent in Zion, plugged in with your lips moving?” “Pal,” Case said, “sure. No. I haven’t. But I got a funny story along those lines, left over from Istanbul.” He told her about the phones in the Hilton. “Christ,” she said, “there goes a chance. How come you hung up?” “Coulda been anybody,” he lied. “lust a chip … I dunno….” He shrugged. “Not just ’cause you were scared, huh?” He shrugged again. “Do it now.” “What?” “Now. Anyway, talk to the Flatline about it.” “I’m all doped,” he protested, but reached for the trodes. His deck and the Hosaka had been mounted behind Maelcum’s module along with a very high-resolution Cray monitor. He adjusted the trodes. Marcus Garvey had been thrown together around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rec- tangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols, Lioos of Zion and Black Star Liners, the reds and greens and yellows over- laying wordy decals in Cyrillic script. Someone had sprayed Maelcum’s pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade. The gaskets around the airlock in the bow were festooned with semirigid globs and streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy strands of imitation seaweed. He glanced past Maelcum’s shoulder to the central screen and saw a docking display: the tug’s path was a line of red dots, Freeside a segmented green circle. He watched the line extend itself, generating a new dot. He jacked in. “Dixie?” “Yeah.” “You ever try to crack an AI?” “Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin’ jacked up real high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multina- tionals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree. Just larkin’ around, you know? And then I started picking up on this one cube, maybe three levels higher up. Jacked up there and made a pass.” “What did it look like, the visual?” “White cube.” “How’d you know it was an Al?” “How’d I know? Jesus. It was the densest ice I’d ever seen. So what else was it? The military down there don’t have any- thing like that. Anyway, I jacked out and told my computer to look it up.” “Yeah?” “It was on the Turing Registry. Al. Frog company owned its Rio mainframe.” Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite neuroelectronic void of the matrix. “Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?” “Tessier, yeah.” “And you went back?” “Sure. I was crazy. Figured I’d try to cut it. Hit the first strata and that’s all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin frying and pulled the trodes off me. Mean shit, that ice.” “And your EEG was flat.” “Well, that’s the stuff of legend, ain’t it?” Case jacked out. “Shit,” he said, “how do you think Dixie got himself flatlined, huh? Trying to buzz an AI. Great….” “Go on,” she said, “the two of you are supposed to be dynamite, right?”
“Dix,” Case said, “I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?” “Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.” Case punched for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave of exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled. The Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority was gone, replaced by the cool geometric intricacy of Zurich commercial banking. He punched again, for Berne. “Up,” the construct said. “It’ll be high.” They ascended lattices of light, levels strobing, a blue flicker. That’ll be it, Case thought. Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity. “Don’t look much, does it?” the Flatline said. “But just you try and touch it.” “I’m going in for a pass, Dixie.” “Be my guest.”