All Tomorrow's Parties (Bridge Trilogy, #3)

by William Gibson

Plus there’s your more mature sociopaths; older, more complicated, polypharmic …” “Say what?” “Mix their shit,” Durius said. “Get lateral.

Raton has a long, narrow skull and wears contacts with vertical irises, like a snake. Silencio wonders if Raton is supposed to look like a rat who’s eaten a snake, and now maybe the snake is looking out through its eyes.

Playboy is the biggest, his bulk wrapped in a long, formal topcoat worn over jeans and old work boots. He has a Pancho Villa mustache, yellow aviator glasses, a black fedora.

Raton and Playboy use the black two, maybe three times in a day and a night. Three times with the black, then they must use the white as well. The white is more expensive, but too much black and they start to talk fast and maybe see people who are not there.

“Speaking with Jesus,” Playboy calls that, but the white he calls “walking with the king.” But it is not walking: white brings stillness, silence, sleep. Silencio prefers the white nights.

Silencio knows that they buy the white from a black man, but the black from a white man, and he assumes this is the mystery depicted in the picture Raton wears on the chain around his neck: the black and the white teardrops swirling together to make roundness; in the whi...

To get the money they talk to people, usually in dark places, so the ...

As he buttons his jeans, he sees the man step away from the window, still moving toward Treasure, where Playboy says there are people who live like animals. Silencio, who knows only dogs and pigeons and gulls, has a picture in his head of dog-toothed men with wings.

Now he comes over the rolls of plastic like he is flying, with his knife shining in his hand, and Silencio sees the picture of a man with dog teeth and wings, and Raton’s teeth are like that, his snake eyes wide.

God’s Little Toy, Tessa called her silver balloon. Disembodied eye. She sent it on slow cruises through the house, mining for image fragments. Everyone who lived here was constantly taping everyone else, except Iain, and Iain wore a motion-capture suit, even slept in it, and was recording every move he ever made.

The Hole is that which Laney’s being is constructed around. The Hole is absence at the fundamental core. The Hole is that into which he has always stuffed things: drugs, career, women, information. Mainly—lately—information. Information. This flow. This … corrosion. Drift.

That Hole at the core of Laney’s being, that underlying absence, he begins to suspect, is not so much an absence in the self as of the self.

The components fell away, leaving the singed green boards with their inlaid foil maps of imaginary cities, residue of the second age of electronics.

But maybe Lucky Dragon knew something people didn’t, he thought. Things could change. His father, for instance, used to swear that Times Square had been a really dangerous place.

“Identify yourself, please.” Lucky Dragon ATMs all had this same voice, a weird, uptight, strangled little castrato voice, and he wondered why that was. But you could be sure they’d worked it out: probably it kept people from standing around, bullshitting with the machine. But Rydell knew that you didn’t want to do that anyway, because the suckers would pepper-spray you.

What the notices didn’t say, and Lucky Dragon wasn’t telling, was that if you tried seriously to dick with one, drive a crowbar into the money slot, say, the thing would mist you and itself down with water and then electrify itself.

amphetamine-reptile

He wore that hearing-secret-harmonies expression people wore when they tuned guitars.

“Don’t take it with you. Find a shop there called Bad Sector and tell them you need the cable.” “What kind of cable?” “They’ll be expecting you,” Laney said and hung up. Rydell sat there on the end of the bed, with the sunglasses on, thoroughly pissed off at Laney.

“Look at that,” Tessa said, as she edged the van past an old Hummer, ex-military,

The other presented in far more abstract form: an only vaguely human figure, the space where its head should have been was coronaed in a cyclical and on-going explosion of blood and matter, as though a sniper’s victim, in the instant of impact, had been recorded and looped. The halo of blood and brains flickered, never quite attaining a steady state. Beneath it, an open mouth, white teeth exposed in a permanent, silent scream. The rest, except for the hands, clawed as in agony around the gleaming arms of the chair, seemed constantly to be dissolving in some terrible fiery wind.

“In your situation,” said the Rooster, and its voice, just then, seemed composed primarily of the sound of breaking glass, modulated into the semblance of human speech, “you might be advised to listen to anyone who cares to address you.

“It’s the music of a disenfranchised, mostly white proletariat,” Tessa said, “barely hanging on in post-post-industrial America.

The locals tended to tattoos, facial piercings, and asymmetrical haircuts,

The jeans were nearly as expensive, and more complicated in their sourcing, the denim woven in Japan on ancient, lovingly maintained American looms and then finished in Tunisia to the specifications of a team of Dutch designers and garment historians. This was the kind of stuff that Carson cared deeply about, this absolutely authentic fake stuff,

Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies. Each one would have a dress code, characteristic forms of artistic expression, a substance or substances of choice, and a set of sexual values at odds with those of the culture at large. And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct.” “Extinct?” “We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters.

When Chevette had made it clear she didn’t do drugs, Tara-May had said that that would make networking a little harder, not having anything to quit, but that there were groups for everything and that was probably the best way to meet people who could help you with your career.

Something is wrong, Laney thinks; something is wrong with his eyes, because now the Suit’s luminous shirt glows with the light of a thousand suns, and all the rest is black, the black of old negatives.