William Gibson. Neuromancer

Into Molly’s tension, her back like rock, her hands around 3Jane’s throat. “Funny,” she said, “I know exactly what you’d look like. I saw it after Ashpool did the same thing to your clone sister.” Her hands were gentle, almost a caress. 3Jane’s eyes were wide with terror and lust she was shivering with fear and longing. Beyond the freefall tangle of 3Jane’s hair, Case saw his own strained white face, Maelcum behind him, brown hands on the leatherjacketed shoulders, steadying him above the carpet’s pattern of woven circuitry. “Would you?” 3Jane asked, her voice a child’s. “I think you would.” “The code,” Molly said. “Tell the head the code.” Jacking out.

“She wants it,” he screamed, “the bitch wants it!” He opened his eyes to the cool ruby stare of the terminal, its platinum face crusted with pearl and lapis. Beyond it, Molly and 3Jane twisted in a slow motion embrace. “Give us the fucking code,” he said. “If you don’t, what’ll change? What’ll ever fucking change for you? You’ll wind up like the old man. You’ll tear it all down and start building again! You’ll build the walls back, tighter and tighter…. I got no idea at all what’ll happen if Wintermute wins, but it’ll change something!” He was shaking, his teeth chattering. 3Jane went limp, Molly’s hands still around her slender throat, her dark hair drifting, tangled, a soft brown caul. “The Ducal Palace at Mantua,” she said, “contains a series of increasingly smaller rooms. They twine around the grand apartments, beyond beautifully carved doorframes one stoops to enter. They housed the court dwarfs.” She smiled wanly. “I might aspire to that, I suppose, but in a sense my family has already accomplished a grander version of the same scheme….” Her eyes were calm now, distant. Then she gazed down at Case. “Take your word, thief.” He jacked.

Kuang slid out of the clouds. Below him, the neon city. Behind him, a sphere of darkness dwindled. “Dixie? You here, man? You hear me? Dixie?” He was alone. “Fucker got you,” he said. Blind momentum as he hurtled across the infinite datascape. “You gotta hate somebody before this is over,” said the Finn’s voice. “Them, me, it doesn’t matter.” “Where’s Dixie?” “That’s kinda hard to explain, Case.” A sense of the Finn’s presence surrounded him, smell of Cuban cigarettes, smoke locked in musty tweed, old machines given up to the mineral rituals of rust. “Hate’ll get you through,” the voice said. “So many little triggers in the brain, and you just go yankin’ ’em all. Now you gotta hate. The lock that screens the hardwiring, it’s down under those towers the Flatline showed you, when you came in. He won’t try to stop you.” “Neuromancer,” Case said. “His name’s not something I can know. But he’s given up, now. It’s the T-A ice you gotta worry about. Not the wall, but internal virus systems. Kuang’s wide open to some of the stuff they got running loose in here.” “Hate,” Case said. “Who do I hate? You tell me.” “Who do you love?” the Finn’s voice asked. He whipped the program through a turn and dived for the blue towers. Things were launching themselves from the ornate sunburst spires, glittering leech shapes made of shifting planes of light. There were hundreds of them, rising in a whirl, their move- ments random as windblown paper down dawn streets. “Glitch systems,” the voice said.

He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang program met the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of light, he felt the shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the fabric of information loosening. And then–old alchemy of the brain and its vast phar- macy–his hate flowed into his hands. In the instant before he drove Kuang’s sting through the base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency ex- ceeding anything he’d known or imagined. Beyond ego, be- yond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo’s dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die. And one step in that dance was the lightest touch on the switch, barely enough to flip–

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