Virtual Light (Bridge, #1)

by William Gibson

The eight empty bottles, plastic miniatures, are carefully aligned with the edge of the coffee table: a Japanese vodka, Come Back Salmon, its name more irritating than its lingering aftertaste.

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His gaze strays to NHK Weather. A low-pressure front is crossing Kansas. Next to it, an eerily calm Islamic downlink ceaselessly reiterates the name of God in a fractal-based calligraphy.

And every passing face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed behind filters. Some, honoring the Day of the Dead, resemble the silver-beaded jaws of grinning sugar-skulls. Whatever form they take, their manufacturers all make the same dubious, obliquely comforting claims about viroids. He’s thought to escape the sameness, perhaps discover something of beauty or passing interest, but here there are only masked faces, his fear, the lights.

He’d overheard one of them explaining to the foreman that what they were doing was exposing the integrity of the material’s passage through time. He thought that was probably bullshit, but he sort of liked the sound of it anyway; like what happened to old people on television.

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Now here he was in Los Angeles, driving a six-wheeled Hotspur Hussar with twenty coats of hand-rubbed lacquer. The Hussar was an armored Land Rover that could do a hundred and forty on a straightaway, assuming you could find one open and had the time to accelerate. Hernandez, his shift super, said you couldn’t trust an Englishman to build anything much bigger than a hat, not if you wanted it to work when you needed it; he said IntenSecure should’ve bought Israeli or at least Brazilian, and who needed Ralph Lauren to design a tank anyway?

As Hernandez was fond of pointing out, SoCal had stricter regulations for who could or couldn’t be a hairdresser.

Gunhead’s displays were featureless slabs of liquid crystal; they woke when Rydell inserted the key, typed the security code, and ran a basic systems check. The cameras under the rear bumper were his favorites; they made parking really easy; you could see exactly where you were backing up. The downlink from the Death Star wouldn’t work while he was still in the car wash, too much steel in the building, but it was Sublett’s job to keep track of all that with an ear-bead.

There was a notice posted in the staff room at IntenSecure, telling you it was company policy not to call it that, the Death Star, but everybody did anyway. The LAPD called it that themselves. Officially it was the Southern California Geosynclinical Law Enforcement Satellite.

That's no moon...

L.A. was full of mysteries, when you looked at it that way. No bottom to it.

“Sales is about providing an experience, Berry. The customer needs information, you provide it. But you give ’em an experience, too.” Kevin tapped his two-inch spindle of smooth white beef-bone by way of illustration. “Then you sell them a new outfit.”

There was a big painting of the Rapture in the window of Nightmare Folk Art. Rydell knew paintings like that from the sides of Christian vans parked beside shopping centers. Lots of bloody car-wrecks and disasters, with all the Saved souls flying up to meet Jesus, whose eyes were a little too bright for comfort. This one was a lot more detailed than the ones he remembered. Each one of those Saved souls had its own individual face, like it actually represented somebody, and a few of them reminded him of famous people. But it still looked like it had been painted by either a fifteen-year-old or an old lady.

One of those little Russian hold-outs that chambered some godawful overheated caliber originally intended for killing the engine blocks of tanks. The Russians, never too safety-minded, had the market in Saturday-night specials.

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Rydell looked around. That ol’ Rapture was big at Nightmare Folk Art, he decided. Those kind of Christians, his father had always maintained, were just pathetic. There the Millennium had up, come, and gone, no Rapture to speak of, and here they were, still beating that same drum. Sublett and his folks down in their trailer-camp in Texas, watching old movies for Reverend Fallon—at least that had some kind of spin on it.

She didn’t sound like she was from anywhere south of anywhere, much, and there was a visible tension strung through her, like wires.

“I don’t suppose you’ve read Faulkner?” She raised one hand to brush at something invisible, something hanging in front of her face. There it was again. “Nope.” “No, I didn’t think so. I’m hoping to find someone who can help to convey that very darkness, Mr. Rydell. The mind of the South. A fever dream of sensuality.” Rydell blinked. “But you don’t convey that to me. I’m sorry.” It looked like the invisible cobweb had come back. Rydell looked at the rentacop, but he didn’t seem to be listening to any of this. Hell, he seemed to be asleep. “Lady,” Rydell said carefully, “I think you’re crazier than a sack full of assholes.” Her eyebrows shot up. “There,” she said. “There what?” “Color, Mr. Rydell. Fire. The brooding verbal polychromes of an almost unthinkably advanced decay.”

One of those big articulated German cargo-rigs went by, the kind that burned canola oil. Rydell hated those things. The exhaust smelled like fried chicken.

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. Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars. Dreams of commerce, their locations generally corresponding with the decks that had once carried vehicular traffic; while above them, rising to the very peaks of the cable towers, lifted the intricately suspended barrio, with its unnumbered population and its zones of more private fantasy.

He’d first seen it by night, three weeks before. He’d stood in fog, amid sellers of fruit and vegetables, their goods spread out on blankets. He’d stared back into the cavern-mouth, heart pounding. Steam was rising from the pots of soup-vendors, beneath a jagged arc of scavenged neon. Everything ran together, blurring, melting in the fog. Telepresence had only hinted at the magic and singularity of the thing, and he’d walked slowly forward, into that neon maw and all that patchwork carnival of scavenged surfaces, in perfect awe. Fairyland. Rain-silvered plywood, broken marble from the walls of forgotten banks, corrugated plastic, polished brass, sequins, painted canvas, mirrors, chrome gone dull and peeling in the salt air. So many things, too much for his reeling eye, and he’d known that his journey had not been in vain. In all the world, surely, there was no more magnificent a Thomasson.

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“That’s a nice car out there,” Rydell said, nodding in the direction of the carport and spooning cornflakes into his mouth. “My daughter Rosa’s car. Been in the shop, man.” Rydell chewed, swallowed. “Brakes or something?” “The fucking waterfall. Supposed to be these little animals, they come out of the bushes and sort of look at it, the waterfall, you know?” Hernandez leaned back against the counter, flexing his toes into the nubby sandals. “Some kind of, like, Costa Rican animals, you know? Ecology theme. She’s real green. Made us take out what was left of the lawn, put in all these groundcover things look like gray spiders. But the shop can’t get those fucking animals to show, man. We got a warranty and everything, but it’s, you know, been a pain in the ass.” He shook his head. Rydell finished his cornflakes.

Separated at Birth was a police program you used in missing persons cases. You scanned a photo of the person you wanted, got back the names of half a dozen celebrities who looked vaguely like the subject, then went around asking people if they’d seen anybody lately who reminded them of A, B, C … The weird thing was, it worked better than just showing them a picture of the subject. The instructor at the Academy in Knoxville had told Rydell’s class that that was because it tapped into the part of the brain that kept track of celebrities. Rydell had imagined that as some kind of movie-star lobe. Did people really have those?

American cars were the only cars in the world that still bothered to physically display the instrumentation. Maybe that was why there weren’t very many of them. Like those Harleys with chain-drives.

Yamazaki had spent one entire morning attempting to diagram the sewage-collection arrangements for the group of dwellings he thought of as comprising Skinner’s “neighborhood.” Widespread use of transparent five-inch hose had made this quite exciting, like some game devised for children, as he’d tried to follow the course of a given bolus of waste from one dwelling down past the next. The hoses swooped down through the superstructure in graceful random arcs, bundled like ganglia, to meet below the lower deck in a thousand-gallon holding tank. When this was full to capacity, Skinner had explained, a mercury-switch in a float-ball triggered a jet-pump, forcing the accumulated sewage into a three-foot pipe that carried it into the municipal system. He’d made a note to consider this junction as an interface between the bridge’s program and the program of the city, but extracting Skinner’s story of the bridge was obviously more important. Convinced that Skinner somehow held the key to the bridge’s existential meaning, Yamazaki had abandoned his physical survey of secondary construction in order to spend as much time as possible in the old man’s company. Each night, in his borrowed apartment, he would send the day’s accumulation of material to Osaka University’s Department of Sociology.

Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography? 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. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. 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.

“How you learn to climb, up here,” Skinner said, “the first thing is, you don’t look down. Second thing is, you keep one hand and one foot on the bridge all the time. This guy, he didn’t know that. And those shoes of his … He just went off, backward. Never made a sound. Sort of … graceful.” Yamazaki shivered.

She couldn’t get a run today. There was no routing in effect at Allied, but sometimes you’d get a run by accident; pick up here, drop off there, then something here. But it was rare. When you worked for Allied you rode harder. Her record was sixteen tags in a day; like doing forty at a different company.

The overlit fluorescent corridor into Allied Messengers smelled of hot styrene, laser printers, abandoned running-shoes, and stale bag lunches, this last tugging Chevette toward memories of some unheated day-care basement in Oregon, winter’s colorless light slanting in through high dim windows.

But now the street door banged open behind her, a pair of muddy size-eleven neon sneakers came pounding down the stairs, and Samuel Saladin DuPree, his cheeks spackled with crusty gray commas of road-dirt, stood grinning at her, hugely. “Happy about something, Sammy Sal?” Allied’s best-looking thing on two wheels, no contest whatever, DuPree was six-two of ebon electricity poured over a frame of such elegance and strength that Chevette imagined his bones as polished metal, triple-chromed, a quicksilver armature. Like those old movies with that big guy, the one who went into politics, after he’d get the meat ripped off him. Thinking about Sammy Sal’s bones made most girls want him to jump theirs, but not Chevette. He was gay, they were friends, and Chevette wasn’t too sure how she felt about all that anyway, lately. “Fact is,” Sammy Sal said, smearing dirt from his cheek with the back of one long hand, “I’ve decided to kill Ringer. And the truth, y’know, it makes you free …” “Ho,” Chevette said, “you musta pulled a tag over 456 today.” “I did, dear, do that thing. All the way up, in a dirty freight elevator. A slow dirty freight elevator. And why?” “ ’Cause Ringer’s ’graved his tag in their brass, Sal, and their rosewood, too?” “Eggs-ackly, Chevette, honey.” Sammy Sal undid the blue and white bandanna around his neck and wiped his face with it. “Therefore, his ass dies screaming.”

Bunny Malatesta had been a San Francisco bike messenger for thirty years. Would be still, if his knees and back hadn’t given out on him. He was simultaneously the best and the worst thing about messing for Allied. The best because he had a bike-map of the city hung behind his eyes, better than anything a computer could generate. 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. He was a legend himself, Bunny, having Krypto’d the windshields of some seven police cars in the course of his riding career, a record that still stood. But he was the worst for those same reasons and more, because there wasn’t any bullshitting him at all. Any other dispatcher, you could cut yourself a little extra slack. But not Bunny. He just knew. Chevette followed him in. He closed the door behind her. The goggles he used for dispatching dangled around his neck, one padded eyepiece patched with cellophane tape. There were no windows in the room and Bunny kept the lights off when he was working. Half a dozen color monitors were arranged in a semicircle in front of a black swivel armchair with Bunny’s pink rubber Sacro-saver backrest strapped to it like some kind of giant bulging larva.

Svobodov was nearly as tall as Warbaby, but it all seemed to be sinew and big knobs of bone. He had long, pale hair, combed straight back from his rocky forehead, eyebrows to match, and skin that was tight and shiny, like he’d stood too long in front of a fire. Orlovsky was thin and dark, with a widow’s peak, lots of hair on the backs of his fingers, and those glasses that looked like they’d been sawn in half. They both had that eye thing, the one that pinned you and held you and sank right in, heavy and inert as lead.

But this Lt. Svobodov, he had the talent beaucoup, and his partner, Lt. Orlovsky, had his own version going, nearly as effective and he did it over the sawn-off tops of those glasses. Guy looked sort of like a werewolf anyway, which helped. Rydell continued to check out the San Francisco Homicide look. Which seemed to be old tan raincoats over black flak vests over white shirts and ties. The shirts were button-down oxfords and the ties were the stripey kind, like you were supposed to belong to a club or something. Cuffs on their trousers and great big pebble-grain wingtips with cleated Vibram soles. About the only people who wore shirts and ties and shoes like that were immigrants, people who wanted it as American as it got. But layering it up with a bullet-proof and a worn-out London Fog, he figured that was some kind of statement. The streamlined plastic butt of an H&K didn’t exactly hurt, either, and Rydell could see one peeking out of Svobodov’s open flak vest. Couldn’t remember the model number, but it looked like the one with the magazine down the top of the barrel. Shot that caseless ammo looked like wax crayons, plastic propellant molded around alloy flechettes like big nails.

“Marl-bor-ro,” Svobodov said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and pointing to the lettering in front of the filter. “When we were kids, Warbaby, Marlboro, she was money.” “Arkady,” Warbaby said, as though with enormous patience, “when we were kids, man, money was money.”

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

Rydell remembered the time he’d gone over to “Big George” Kechakmadze’s house for a barbecue and the man had tried to sign him up for the National Rifle Association. “You get a lot of Russians on the force, up here?” “Up here? All over.” “Kinda funny how many of those guys go into police work.” “Think about it, man. Had ’em a whole police state, over there. Maybe they just got a feel for it.”

Funny, that. @greatdismal

He’d been dreaming about Mrs. Armbruster’s class, fifth grade at Oliver North Elementary. They were about to be let out because LearningNet said there was too much Kansas City flu around to keep the kids in Virginia and Tennessee in school that week. They were all wearing these molded white paper masks the nurses had left on their seats that morning. Mrs. Armbruster had just explained the meaning of the word pandemic. Poppy Markoff, who sat next to him and already had tits out to here, had told Mrs. Armbruster that her daddy said the KC flu could kill you in the time it took to walk out to the bus. Mrs. Armbruster, wearing her own mask, the micropore kind from the drugstore, started in about the word panic, tying that into pandemic because of the root, but that was where Rydell woke up.

Billy Holiday was probably a guy like Elvis, Chevette thought, with spangles on his suit, but like when he was younger and not all fat.

Then this wooden cross seemed to pop up, in the headlights, about twelve feet high, with TUNE IN across the horizontal and TO HIS IMMORTAL DOWNLINK coming down the upright, and this dusty old portable tv nailed up where Jesus’ head ought to have been. Somebody’d taken a .22 to the screen, it looked like.

“Watch television?” She was awake now. “Well,” Rydell said, “Fallonites believe God’s sort of just there. On television, I mean.” “God’s on television?” “Yeah. Kind of like in the background or something. Sublett’s mother, she’s in the church herself, but Sublett’s kind of lapsed.” “So they watch tv and pray, or what?” “Well, I think it’s more like kind of a meditation, you know? What they mostly watch is all these old movies, and they figure if they watch enough of them, long enough, the spirit will sort of enter into them.” “We had Revealed Aryan Nazarenes, up in Oregon,” she said. “First Church of Jesus, Survivalist. As soon shoot you as look at you.”

There was a flat type of hologram of Rev. Fallon, looking as much like a possum as ever, but a possum that had gotten a tan and maybe had plastic surgery.

He wrung his long pale hands. “Then they caught me watching Videodrome. You ever see, uh, Deborah Harry, Rydell?” Sublett sighed and sort of quivered.

This was a figure, too, and just as big, but all made up of television, these moving images winding and writhing together, and barely, it seemed, able to hold the form they took: something that might either have been a man or a woman. It hurt his eyes, to try to look too close at any one part of it. It was like trying to watch a million channels at once, and this noise was rushing off it like a waterfall off rocks, a sort of hiss that somehow wasn’t a sound at all.