Burning Chrome

by William Gibson

Where do you go when the world’s wealthiest criminal order is feeling for you with calm, distant fingers? Where do you hide from the Yakuza, so powerful that it owns comsats and at least three shuttles?

He’s a junkie, though. So we’ll have to take him something.” “A junkie?” “A dolphin.”

Hmm.. Reminded me of John C. Lilly

We’re an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified . .

After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism.

The designers were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.”

It is possible to photograph what isn’t there; it’s damned hard to do, and consequently a very marketable talent.

I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties’ comic art.

Really bad media can exorcise your semiotic ghosts.

One or another of four different “provisional” city governments had done such an efficient job of stockpiling food that almost none was available at street level.

Heaven is supposed to be a surprise to the newly arrived.

“My father tells me you drank like a hero, Colonel, in the old days.”

The Edge was Fox’s grail, that essential fraction of sheer human talent, nontransferable, locked in the skulls of the world’s hottest research scientists.

The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form.

He said Hiroshi was a freak, the kind who shatters paradigms, inverts a whole field of science, brings on the violent revision of an entire body of knowledge.

I found a heroin lab that had been converted to the extraction of pheromones.

There are still people naive enough to assume that they’ll actually enjoy jacking straight across with someone they love.

“You’re the kind who always reads the handbook.

You see something like that and you wonder how many thousands, maybe millions, of phenomenal artists have died mute, down the centuries, people who could never have been poets or painters or saxophone players, but who had this stuff inside, these psychic waveforms waiting for the circuitry required to tap in. .

The burritos tasted like cardboard, but I decided I liked them because they were so aggressively normal.

“This is the real stuff I got here. Image facilitator. Here’s my fast-wipe module. This is a brainmap one-to-one function analyzer.”

It was beautiful; so perfect, so true it made the room seem an illusion.

“Baby, you got the fucking world! Take a look around you—six ounces of blond Lebanese hash! Little anchovy fish in tins. Unlimited medical coverage, if you need it.”

He was twenty-eight, Bobby, and that’s old for a console cowboy.

If his system worked, we’d be striking it rich any night now.

I don’t think the crew on the door liked my looks, but I guess my money was okay.