Virtual Light (Bridge, #1)

by William Gibson

Chevette just thought it made him look kind of dangerous. Which he wasn’t, usually, unless he got himself around a bottle or two of whiskey and forgot where he was or who he was with; like particularly if he mistook Chevette for her mother, which he’d done a couple of times, but she’d always gotten away from him and he’d always been sorry about it afterward, bought her Ring-Dings and stuff from the Seven-Eleven.

“Now come on down here,” he said, stressing each word just the same.

He moved in closer. “Get your feet apart …” The gun touched her neck.

His other hand slid under Skinner’s jacket, feeling for a weapon. “Stay that way.” He’d missed Skinner’s knife, the one with the fractal blade.

He’d shoot them, she decided. Just pop them and roll them over into the dark. You could see it in his face. It was right there.

Proj, she thought, crouching to run, but then the black thing hit him and knocked him flat, flapping down out of the dark above them with a sound like broken wings. A roll of tarpaper. She made out Sammy Sal then, standing up there on a dark carbon cross-brace, his arm around an upright. She thought she saw his white smile. “Forgot this,” he said, and tossed something down. The glasses in their case. Hands tied, she caught them anyway, like they knew where they wanted to go. She’d never know why he did that. Because the little pistol made a chewing sound then, blue pops like a dozen backfires run together, and Sammy Sal went over backward off the brace, just gone. And then she was running.

It tightened. He scrambled for the toolkit, amazed to see it open, as Skinner kicked it over with his heel, spilling a hundred pieces of tooled metal. “Blue handles!” The bolt-cutter was long, clumsy, its handles wrapped in greasy blue tape. He saw the red band narrowing, starting to sink below the level of his flesh. Fumbled the cutter one-handed from the tangle, sank its jaws blindly into his wrist and brought all his weight down on the uppermost handle. A stab of pain. The detonation. Skinner blew air out between his lips, a long low sound of relief. “You okay?”

He stood there for several minutes, uncertain of what he should do. Finally he took a seat on the paint-splattered stool beside the little table where he had so recently been a prisoner.

But this feeling had come, that day, and swallowed everything up inside it, so big you couldn’t really prove it was there except by an arithmetic of absence and the memory of better days. And she’d moved around in it, whatever it was, from one point to another, ’til she’d wound up behind that wire in Beaverton, in a place so bad it was like a piece of broken glass to rub against that big empty.

And didn’t Sammy Sal drift that way now, maybe already clear of the dead zone that chased the fish off the years of toxic lead fallen there from uncounted coats of paint, out into the current that sailed the bridge’s dead, people said, past Mission Rock, to wash up at the feet of the micropored wealthy jogging the concrete coast of China Basin?

Sammy Sal dead, maybe Skinner, too. Him and that grad student tied up up there with the plastic worms.

“Stormin’,” he said, like he was glad to note the world outside continuing on any recognizable course at all, however drastic. “Stormin’ down rain.”

How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only knew for the first time that you’d ever had them. Took a mother’s leaving for you to know she’d ever been there, because otherwise she was that place, everything, like weather.

Orlovsky walked over to her table, still taking his time, making the rest of the room take that same time. His hand still on that gun.

They’d run all these tests on him and decided he wasn’t racist. He wasn’t, either, but not because he thought about it particularly. He just couldn’t see the point. It just made for a lot of hassle, being that way, so why be that way? Nobody was going to go back and live where they lived before, were they, and if they did (he vaguely suspected) there wouldn’t be any Mongolian barbecue and maybe we’d all be listening to Pentecostal Metal and anyway the President was black.

Rydell was behind Orlovsky when he tried to bring the gun up again, and, well, it was just one of those times.

Something inside her stopped, learning this about bullets: that one second there isn’t any hole, the next second there is. Nothing in between. You see it happen, but you can’t watch it happening.

“Can’t say you much look like Christians.” Chevette Washington sort of leaned across Rydell and gave the guard this stare. “I don’t know about you, brother, but we’re Aryan Nazarene, out of Eugene. We wouldn’t want to even come in there, say you got any mud people, any kind of race-mixing. Race-traitors all over, these days.”

He perched on the edge of the recliner so he wouldn’t have to actually recline in it.

And I don’t want to be in there by myself, not with my head stuck in one of those eyephone things. His parents could walk in. He might listen.”

Chevette tried smiling at him, but it didn’t seem to help.

Rydell had liked doing Dream Walls, when he was a kid in high school. It was this Japanese franchise operation they set up in different kinds of spaces, mostly in older malls;

and you could see what other people were doing at the same time, and maybe even put your stuff together with theirs, if you both wanted to. He’d

aramid

Sublett had this little white Eurocar called a Montxo. She knew that because she’d had to look at the logo on the dash all the way from Paradise.

She looked at the handcuff. She’d covered it over with black epoxy goop and a bunch of pink and blue beads she’d got off Sublett’s mother; basically it looked like shit, but then again it didn’t look all that much like a handcuff.

And here she was standing on this escalator, about a mile long, just going up and up, and around her all these people who must’ve belonged there.

it was like he felt cut loose from things. Kept talking about his apostasy and these movies he liked, and somebody called Cronenberg.

What it had in it was the glasses. Addressed to Karen Mendelsohn.

pushed the button. “Yes?” It was one of those computers. “Allied Messenger, for Karen Mendelsohn.” “A delivery?” “She’s gotta sign for it.” “Authorized to barcode—” “Her hand. Gotta see her hand. Do it. You know?” Silence. “Nature of delivery?” “You think I open them or what?” “Nature of delivery?” “Well,” Chevette said, “it says ‘Probate Court,’ it’s from San Francisco, and you don’t open the door, Mr. Wizard, it’s on the next plane back.” “Wait, please,” said the computer.

“Ms. Mendelsohn,” he said, “afraid we’ve got us a security emergency, here.” Karen Mendelsohn was looking at him. “Emergency?” “Nothing to worry about,” Sublett said. He put his hand on Chevette’s shoulder and guided her in, past Karen Mendelsohn. “Situation’s under control. Appreciate your cooperation.”

who’d be tap-tapping away on some new laptop, getting the call traced. To a cell-node in Oakland, and then to a tumbled number.

But there were other crimes you could still call computer crimes in the old sense, because they usually involved professional criminals, and these criminals still thought of themselves as hackers. The public, the Fed had told them, still tended to think of hackers as some kind of romantic bullshit thing, sort of like kids moving the outhouse. Merry pranksters. In the old days, he said, lots of people still didn’t know there was an outhouse there to be moved, not until they wound up in the shit.

Then Chevette came over and hugged him, all of her pressing up against him, and just sort of looking up at him from under that crazy-ass haircut. And he liked that, even if her eyes were all red and her nose was running.

“Ah,” Yamazaki said, with what he hoped was tact.

Something to see. Sort of Mardi Gras feel to it. Lot of the younger people take their clothes off, but I don’t know about this weather.

The term Virtual Light was coined by scientist Stephen Beck to describe a form of instrumentation that produces “optical sensations directly in the eye without the use of photons” (Mondo 2000).