Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)

by William Gibson

waiting game for years. Didn’t have any real power, then, but he could use the Villa’s security and custodial systems to keep track of where everything was, how things moved, where they went. He saw somebody lose this key twenty years ago, and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here. Then he killed him, the boy who’d brought it here. Kid was eight.” She closed her white fingers over the key. “So nobody would find it.” She took a length of black nylon cord from the suit’s kangaroo pocket and threaded it through the round hole above CHUBB. Knotting it, she hung it around her neck. “They were always fucking him over with how old-fashioned they were, he said, all their nineteenth-century stuff. He looked just like the Finn, on the screen in that meat puppet hole. Almost thought he was the Finn, if I wasn’t careful.” Her readout flared the time, alphanumerics superimposed over the gray steel chests. “He said if they’d turned into what they’d wanted to, he could’ve gotten out a long time ago. But they didn’t. Screwed up. Freaks like 3Jane. That’s what he called her, but he talked like he liked her.”