Virtual Light (Bridge, #1)

by William Gibson

accrete,

They were Israeli riot-control devices, air-powered, that fired one-inch cubes of recycled rubber. They looked like the result of a forced union between a bullpup assault rifle and an industrial staple gun, except they were made out of this bright yellow plastic.

not one of them as nice as Karen, who had long brown hair.

He turned to Sublett. “Man, you still haven’t got your ass vaccinated yet, you got nothin’ but stone white-trash ignorance to thank for it.”

Pale, sort of jellyfish thing. He asked her if it was true they were alive. She told him it wasn’t, exactly, but it was almost, and the rest of it was Bucky balls and subcellular automata. And he wouldn’t even know it was there, but no way was she going to put it in in front of him.

What he’d come to like best, cruising with Gunhead,

Flashback is over when you mention the car

Karen said it was Aggressive Retro Seventies and she was getting a little tired of it. Rydell saw how she could be, but figured it might not be polite to say so.

Sublett yelped as the crash-harnesses tightened automatically, yanking him up out of his usual slouch.

But it had been the last tag of the day, a package for a lawyer, with Tenderloin’s trash-fires burning so close by, and around them, huddled, all those so terminally luckless, utterly and chemically lost. Faces aglow in the fairy illumination of the tiny glass pipes. Eyes

The women wore clothes Chevette had only seen in magazines. Rich people, had to be, and foreign, too. Though maybe rich was foreign enough.

Then there were a couple of pretty obvious Tenderloin working-girls, too, but maybe that was no more than the accepted amount of local color for whatever this was supposed to be.

but just then the lights go out, the music starts, and its the intro to Chrome Koran’s “She God’s Girlfriend.”

With the asshole gone, or anyway forgotten, she notices how much better these people look dancing.

His stiff collar’s popped off at the front and sticks up behind his neck like a slipped halo.

And Chevette, glancing down, sees something sticking out of a pocket in the tobacco-colored leather. Then it’s in her hand, down the front of her bike-pants, she’s out the door, and the asshole hasn’t even noticed. In the sudden quiet of the corridor, party sounds receding as she heads for the elevator, she wants to run. She wants to laugh, too, but now she’s starting to feel scared.

But her bike is there, on B-2, behind a column of nicked concrete. “Back off,” it says when she’s five feet away. Not loud, like a car, but it sounds like it means it. Under its coat of spray-on imitation rust and an artful bandaging of silver duct-tape, the geometry of the paper-cored, carbon-wrapped frame makes Chevette’s thighs tremble. She slips her left hand through the recognition-loop behind the seat.

He tried to sneak a look, see what the lady was trying to sell to the fat man, but she caught his eye and that wasn’t good.

Dawn like tarnished silver.

The integrity of its span was rigorous as the modern program itself, yet around this had grown another reality, intent upon its own agenda. This had occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imaginable technique and material. The result was something amorphous, startlingly organic. At night, illuminated by Christmas bulbs, by recycled neon, by torchlight, it possessed a queer medieval energy. By day, seen from a distance, it reminded him of the ruin of England’s Brighton Pier, as though viewed through some cracked kaleidoscope of vernacular style.

The night before grabbed her by the back of the neck.

You couldn’t tell what it was made of, and that meant expensive.

Those glasses, nested there. Big and black. Like that Orbison in the poster stuck to Skinner’s wall,

and it was Asahi Engineering.

She bedded the glasses in black suede,

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Warbaby.” Warbaby wore a black Stetson set dead level on his head,

Warbaby rumbled, like a tectonic plate giving up and diving for China,

bolus

The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous—in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication.

With your memo in the girl’s bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit.

nanomech,

Yamazaki swallowed. “And then?” “We started climbing. The towers.

Skinner’s story seemed to radiate out, through the thousand things, the unwashed smiles and the smoke of cooking, like concentric rings of sound from some secret bell, pitched too low for the foreign, wishful ear.

The day gone gray after morning’s promise.

armature.

He knew every building, every door, what the security was like. He had the mess game down, Bunny did, and, better still, he knew the lore, all the history, the stories that made you know you were part of something, however crazy it got, that was worth doing.

“Name ‘Pavlov’ ring a bell?” Freddie said, to no one in particular.

Downtown San Francisco was really something. With everything hemmed in by hills, built up and down other hills, it gave Rydell a sense of, well, he wasn’t sure. Being somewhere. Somewhere in particular. Not that he was sure he liked being there. Maybe it just felt so much the opposite of L.A. and that feeling like you were cut loose in a grid of light that just spilled out to the edge of everything. Up here he felt like he’d come in from somewhere, these old buildings all around and close together, nothing more modern than that one big spikey one with the truss-thing on it (and he knew that one was old, too).

“That’s a restaurant,” Freddie said, “and it’s so expensive, you can’t even go in there.” “Well,” Rydell said, “there’s lots of those.” “No, man,” Freddie insisted, “I mean even if you were rich, had money out your ass, you could not go in there. Like it’s private. Japanese thing.”

Korean robot bugs that cleaned up when you weren’t looking.

Rydell wondered when he was going to have a chance to buy some clothes, and where he should go to do it. He looked at Freddie’s shirt, thinking Freddie probably wasn’t the guy to ask.

Sometimes, when she rode hard, when she could really proj, Chevette got free of everything: the city, her body, even time. That was the messenger’s high, she knew, and though it felt like freedom, it was really the melding-with, the clicking-in, that did it. The bike between her legs was like some hyper-evolved alien tail she’d somehow extruded, as though over patient centuries; a sweet and intricate bone-machine, grown Lexan-armored tires, near-frictionless bearings, and gas-filled shocks. She was entirely part of the city, then, one wild-ass little dot of energy and matter, and she made her thousand choices, instant to instant, according to how the traffic flowed, how rain glinted on the street-car tracks, how a secretary’s mahogany hair fell like grace itself, exhausted, to the shoulders of her loden coat.

The eyes, very pale and wide-set, were the eyes of something watching from beneath still water.

There’d only ever been three really good, that was to say seriously magic, times in Chevette’s life. One was the night Sammy Sal had told her he’d try to get her on at Allied, and he had. One was the day she’d paid cash money for her bike at City Wheels, and rode right on out of there. And there’d been the night she first met Lowell at Cognitive Dissidents—if you could count that now as lucky.

At first she didn’t even know that it made her feel good; it was just this weird thing, maybe the fever had left her a little crazy, but one day she’d decided she was just happy, a little happy, and she’d have to get used to it.

“Eat that sandwich,” he said. “Look like you need it.” She did, and she did, and that was how they got to talking.

Then she was up and out and into one of the weird pockets of stillness you got up there sometimes. Usually the wind made you want to lie down and hang on, but then there were these patches when nothing moved, dead calm.

“This Mr. Loveless,” Yamazaki said. “He ask to meet you.” Gold flashed up at Chevette from the stranger’s grin. “Hi there,” he said, taking his hand out of the side pocket of his long black raincoat. The gun wasn’t very big, but there was something too easy in the way he held it, like a carpenter with a hammer. He was wearing surgical gloves. “Why don’t you come on down here?”

try and recover this little baby. Baby girl,” Freddie added, like he liked the ring of that.

Then he unlaced his trainers and tried to figure out a way to change pants, socks, and underwear without having to put his feet on the floor, which was wet. He thought about doing it in the tub, but that looked sort of scummy, too. Decided you could manage it, sort of, by standing with your feet on the top of your sneakers, and then sort of half-sitting on the toilet.

Chevette’s mother had had this boyfriend once named Oakley, who drank part-time and drove logging trucks the rest, or anyway he said he did. He was a long-legged man with his blue eyes set a little too far apart, in a face with those deep seams down each cheek. Which made him look, Chevette’s mother said, like a real cowboy.