Burning Chrome

by William Gibson

the promise of pain. It’s there each time. You know what will happen, but you don’t know when, or exactly how. You try to hold on to them; you rock them in the dark. But if you brace for the pain, you can’t function.

And I froze there, crouching in the smell of plastique from the bolts, because that was when the Fear found me, really found me, for the first time. I’d felt it before, the Fear, but only the fringes, the least edge. Now it was vast, the very hollow of night, an emptiness cold and implacable. It was last words, deep space, every long goodbye in the history of our species. It made me cringe, whining. I was shaking, groveling, crying. They lecture us on it, warn us, try to explain it away as a kind of temporary agoraphobia endemic to our work. But we know what it is; surrogates know and handlers can’t. No explanation has ever even come close. It’s the Fear. It’s the long finger of Big Night, the darkness that feeds the muttering damned to the gentle white maw of Wards.

It was nothing like the darkness of Big Night, that sentient, hunting dark that waits to drag the hitchhikers down to Wards, that dark that incubates the Fear.