Count Zero (Sprawl, #2)

by William Gibson

She took a deep breath. “Herr Virek, what if I fail? How long do I have to locate this artist?” “The rest of your life,” he said.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Machine dreams hold a special vertigo.

“A woman, you want to know,” she said. “Know anything about breeding dogs?” “No,” he said. “I didn’t think so.” She squinted at him. “We got a kid, too. Ours. She carried it.” “DNA splice?” She nodded. “That’s expensive,” he said. “You know it; wouldn’t be here if we didn’t need to pay it off. But she’s beautiful.” “Your woman?” “Our kid.”

Bobby shifted uncomfortably. The elevator made him self-conscious. It was the size of a small bus, and although it wasn’t crowded, he was the only white. Black people, he noted, as his eyes shifted restlessly down the thing’s length, didn’t look half dead under fluorescent light, the way white people did.

Bobby was working on a new theory of personal deportment; he didn’t quite have the whole thing yet, but part of it involved the idea that people who were genuinely dangerous might not need to exhibit the fact at all, and that the ability to conceal a threat made them even more dangerous.

“I got a pair of shoes older than you are, so what the fuck should I expect you to know? There were cowboys ever since there were computers. They built the first computers to crack German ice, right? Codebreakers. So there was ice before computers, you wanna look at it that way.”

Now and ever was, fast forward, Jammer’s deck jacked up so high above the neon hotcores, a topography of data he didn’t know. Big stuff, mountain-high, sharp and corporate in the nonplace that was cyberspace. “Slow it down, Bobby.” Jackie’s voice low and sweet, beside him in the void.

Two hours to departure. Whatever Virek might say, she was sure that his machine was already busy, infiltrating the shuttle’s crew or roster of passengers, the substitutions lubricated by a film of money . . . There would be last-minute illnesses, changes in plans, accidents

Turner snapped the biosoft back into his socket. This time, when it was over, he said nothing at all. He put his arm back around Angie and smiled, seeing the smile in the window. It was a feral smile; it belonged to the edge.

“How come you didn’t mention this to Beauvoir?” Jackie was folding things back into the white case. “Honey,” Jammer said, “you’ll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.”