Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)

by William Gibson

“Where’s the meat puppet?” “There isn’t any. That’s the most expensive special service of all.”

“What was that all about, in the restaurant? How come you ran?” “ ’Cause, if I’d stayed, I might have killed Riviera.” “Why?” “What he did to me. The show.” “I don’t get it.” “This cost a lot,” she said, extending her right hand as though it held an invisible fruit. The five blades slid out, then retracted smoothly. “Costs to go to Chiba, costs to get the surgery, costs to have them jack your nervous system up so you’ll have the reflexes to go with the gear. . . . You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, ’cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that’s it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren’t in, when it’s all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for. . . .” She cracked her knuckles. “Fine. I was getting my money. Trouble was, the

cut-out and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren’t compatible. So the worktime started bleeding in, and I could remember it. . . . But it was just bad dreams, and not all bad.” She smiled. “Then it started getting strange.” She pulled his cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. “The house found out what I was doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. No way I was ready to give up puppet time.” She inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke, capping it with three perfect rings. “So the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. Berlin, that’s the place for snuff, you know? Big market for mean kicks, Berlin. I never knew who wrote the program they switched me to, but it was based on all the classics.” “They knew you were picking up on this stuff? That you were conscious while you were working?” “I wasn’t conscious. It’s like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain. . . . You can see yourself orgasm, it’s like a little nova right out on the rim of space. But I was starting to remember. Like dreams, you know. And they didn’t tell me. They switched the software and started renting to specialty markets.” She seemed to speak from a distance. “And I knew, but I kept quiet about it. I needed the money. The dreams got worse and worse, and I’d tell myself that at least some of them were just dreams, but by then I’d started to figure that the boss had a whole little clientele going for me....

up. I was into this routine with a customer. . . .” She dug her fingers deep in the foam. “Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood. We weren’t alone. She was all . . .” She tugged at the temperfoam. “Dead. And that fat prick, he was saying, ‘What’s wrong. What’s wrong?’ ’Cause we weren’t finished yet. . . .” She began to shake. “So I guess I gave the Senator what he really wanted, you know?” The shaking stopped. She released the foam and ran her fingers back through her dark hair. “The house put a contract out on me. I had to hide for a while.” Case stared at her. “So Riviera hit a nerve last night,” she said. “I guess it wants me to hate him real bad, so I’ll be psyched up to go in there after him.” “After him?” “He’s already there. Straylight. On the invitation of Lady 3Jane, all that dedication shit. She was there in a private box, kinda . . .” Case remembered the face he’d seen. “You gonna kill him?” She smiled. Cold. “He’s goin...

dry. “You’re Yak, aren’t you, Lupus? Gaijin soldierman for the Yakuza.” “You got an eye, huh?” He withdrew his hand and fumbled for a cigarette. “How come you got all your fingers, then? I thought you had to chop one off every time you screwed up.” “I never screw up.” He lit his cigarette.

The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding. . . .

The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive. His erection was a bar of lead. The faces around them in Emergency were painted doll things, the pink and white of mouth parts moving, moving, words emerging like discrete balloons of sound. He looked at Cath and saw each pore in the tanned skin, eyes flat as dumb glass, a tint of dead metal, a faint bloating, the most minute asymmetries of breast and collarbone, the—something flared white behind his eyes.

He couldn’t feel his legs. He used them like stilts, swaying crazily across the flagstone pavement of Jules Verne, a distant rumbling in his ears, his own blood, razored sheets of light bisecting his skull at a dozen angles.

HE WALKED TILL morning. The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn’t think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener striped diagonally with black and yellow.

“You know that Armitage’s real name is Corto,” Pierre said, his eyes still hidden by the soft plastic flanges of the binoculars. “How do you know that, my friend?” “I guess he mentioned it sometime,” Case said, regretting the slip. “Everybody’s got a couple names. Your name Pierre?”

“We know how you were repaired in Chiba,” Michèle said, “and that may have been Wintermute’s first mistake.” Case stared at her as blankly as he could. The name hadn’t been mentioned before. “The process employed on you resulted in the clinic’s owner applying for seven basic patents. Do you know what that means?”

“No.” “It means that the operator of a black clinic in Chiba City now owns a controlling interest in three major medical research consortiums. This reverses the usual ord...

“You are worse than a fool,” Michèle said, getting to her feet, the pistol in her hand. “You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?”

We will erase Pauley’s construct with a pulse weapon.” “Sense/Net’ll be pissed,” Case said, thinking: and all the evidence in the Hosaka. “They are in some difficulty already, for having owned such a thing.”

That’s a waste of effort, he thought, with the strange lucidity of shock.

“See what th’ ghost say, mon,” Maelcum said. “Computer keeps askin’ for you.”

And your boss, Case, he says go. He says run it and run it now.”

“Lemme take that a sec, Case. . . .” The matrix blurred and phased as the Flatline executed an intricate series of jumps with a speed and accuracy that made Case wince with envy. “Shit, Dixie. . . .” “Hey, boy, I was that good when I was alive. You ain’t seen nothin’. No hands!”

“That’s it, huh? Big green rectangle off left?” “You got it. Corporate core data for Tessier-Ashpool S.A., and that ice is generated by their two friendly AI’s. On par with anything in the military sector, looks to me. That’s king hell ice, Case, black as the grave and slick as glass. Fry your brain soon as look at you. We get any closer now, it’ll have tracers up our ass and out both ears, be tellin’ the boys in the T-A boardroom the size of your shoes and how

long your di...

Case jacked back in. “Christ on a crutch,” the Flatline said, “take a look at this.” The Chinese virus was unfolding around them. Polychrome shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining. Protean, enormous, it towered above them, blotting out the void.

“BOY, THAT IS one mean piece of software. Hottest thing since sliced bread. That goddam thing’s invisible. I just now rented twenty seconds on that little pink box, four jumps left of the T-A ice; had a look at what we look like. We don’t. We’re not there.”

“I checked ol’ Kuang Eleven out again for you, boy. It’s real friendly, long as you’re on the trigger end, jus’ polite an’ helpful as can be. Speaks good English, too. You ever hear of slow virus before?” “No.” “I did, once. Just an idea, back then. But that’s what ol’ Kuang’s

all about. This ain’t bore and inject, it’s more like we interface with the ice so slow, the ice doesn’t feel it. The face of the Kuang logics kinda sleazes up to the target and mutates, so it gets to be exactly like the ice fabric. Then we lock on and the main programs cut in, start talking circles ’round the logics in the ice. We go Siamese twin on ’em before they even get restless.” The Flatline laughed. “Wish you weren’t so damn jolly today, man. That laugh of yours sort of gets me in the spine.” “Too bad,” the Flatline said. “Ol’

dead man needs his laughs.” Case slapped the ...

“The Villa Straylight,” said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, “is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves. . . .”

“The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise.

“I don’t know. You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don’t know, because I can’t know. I am that which knoweth not the word. If you knew, man, and told me, I couldn’t know. It’s hardwired in.

But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impossible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.

“Hey, Case,” she said, barely voicing the words, “you listening? Tell you a story. . . . Had me this boy once. You kinda remind me . . .” She turned and surveyed the corridor. “Johnny, his name was.”

“My Johnny, see, he was smart, real flash boy. Started out as a stash on Memory Lane, chips in his head and people paid to hide data there. Had the Yak after him, night I met him, and I did for their assassin. More luck than anything else, but I did for him. And after that, it was tight and sweet, Case.” Her lips barely moved. He felt her form the words; he didn’t need to hear them spoken aloud. “We had a set-up with a squid, so we could read the traces of everything he’d ever stored. Ran it all out on tape and started twisting selected clients, ex-clients. I was bagman, muscle, watchdog. I was real happy. You ever been happy, Case? He was my boy. We worked together. Partners. I was maybe eight weeks out of the puppet house when I met him. . . .” She paused, edged around a

And the Yak, they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they’ll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you’ll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders.

“Back and forth. Got his arms crossed, head down, like he’s forgotten the gun. Listening for the rat. We got real quiet. Old man takes a step. Rat moves. Rat moves, he takes another step. An hour of that, then he seems to remember his gun. Points it at the floor, grins, and pulls the trigger. Rolled it back up and left. “I crawled under there later. Rat had a hole between its eyes.” She was watching the sealed doorways that opened at intervals along the corridor. “The second one, the one who came for Johnny, he was like that old man. Not old, but he was like that. He killed that way.”

The corridor widened. The sea of rich carpets undulated gently beneath an enormous candelabrum whose lowest crystal pendant reached nearly to the floor. Crystal tinkled as Molly entered the hall. THIRD DOOR LEFT, blinked the readout. She turned left, avoiding the inverted tree of crystal. “I just saw him once. On my way into our place. He was coming out. We lived in a converted factory space, lots of young comers from Sense/Net, like that. Pretty good security to start with, and I’d put in some really heavy stuff to make it really tight. I knew Johnny was up there. But this little guy, he caught my eye, as he was coming out. Didn’t say a word. We just looked at each other and I knew. Plain little guy, plain clothes, no pride in him, humble. He looked at me and got into a pedicab. I knew. Went upstairs and Johnny was sitting in a chair by the window, with his mouth a little open, like he’d just thought of something to say.” The door in front of her was old, a carved slab of Thai teak that seemed to have been sawn in half to fit the low doorway. A primitive mechanical lock with a stainless face had been inset beneath a swirling dragon. She knelt, drew a tight little roll of black chamois from an inside pocket, and selected a needle-thin pick. “Never much found anybody I gave a damn about, after that.”

“Guess you’re kinda like he was,” she said. “Think you’re born to run. Figure what you were into back in Chiba, that was a stripped down version of what you’d be doing anywhere. Bad luck, it’ll do that sometimes, get you down to basics.” She stood, stretched, shook herself. “You know, I figure the one Tessier-Ashpool sent after that Jimmy, the boy who stole the head, he must be pretty much the same as the one the Yak sent to kill Johnny.”

“He told me,” she whispered. “Wintermute. How he played a

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.”

Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese program. The density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering hypnagogic images. Faint kaleidoscopic angles centered in to a silver-black focal point. Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out along translucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones, dice flashing snake eyes.

looked directly at that null point, no outline would form. It took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing, gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint distant lights that bore no relationship to the matrix around it. “That’s the sting,” the construct said. “When Kuang’s good and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we’re ridin’ that through.” “You were right, Dix. There’s some kind of manual override on the hardwiring that keeps Wintermute under control. However much he is under control,” he added. “He,” the construct said. “He. Watch that. It. I keep telling you.” “It’s a code. A word, he said. Somebody has to speak it into a fancy terminal in a certain room, while we take care of whatever’s waiting for us behind that ice.” “Well, you got time to kill, kid,” the Flatline said. “Ol’ Kuang’s slow but steady.” Case jacked out.

“You dead awhile there, mon.” “It happens,” he said. “I’m getting used to it.” “You dealin’ wi’ th’ darkness, mon.” “Only game in town, it looks like.”

“How do you cry, Molly? I see your eyes are walled away. I’m

curious.” His eyes were red-rimmed, his forehead gleaming with sweat. He was very pale. Sick, Case decided. Or drugs. “I don’t cry, much.” “But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?” “I spit,” she said. “The ducts are routed back into my mouth.” “Then you’ve already learned an important lesson, for one so young.”

“We cause the brain to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism.”

His head swayed sideways, recovered. “I understand that the effect is now more easily obtained with an embedded microchip.”

She put his pistol down, picked up her fletcher, dialed the barrel over to single shot, and very carefully put a toxin dart through the center of his closed left eyelid. He jerked once, breath halting in mid-intake. His other eye, brown and fathomless, opened slowly. It was still open when she turned and left the room.

“How you doin’, Case? You back in Garvey with Maelcum? Sure. And jacked into this. I like it, you know? Like I’ve always talked to myself, in my head, when I’ve been in tight spots. Pretend I got some friend, somebody I can trust, and I’ll tell ’em what I really think, what I feel like, and then I’ll pretend they’re telling me what they think about that, and I’ll just go along that way. Having you in is kinda like that. That scene with Ashpool . . .” She gnawed at her lower lip, swinging around a strut, keeping the drone in sight. “I was expecting something maybe a little less gone, you know? I mean, these guys are all batshit in here, like they got luminous messages scrawled across the inside of their foreheads or something. I don’t like the way it looks, I don’t like the way it smells. . . .”

“Mon, you bossman gone ver’ strange.” The Zionite was wearing a blue Sanyo vacuum suit twenty years older than the one Case had rented in Freeside, its helmet under his arm and his dreadlocks bagged in a net cap crocheted from purple cotton yarn. His eyes were slitted with ganja and tension. “Keep callin’ down here wi’ orders, mon, but be some Babylon war. . . .” Maelcum shook his head. “Aerol an’ I talkin’, an’ Aerol talkin’ wi’ Zion. Founders seh cut an’ run.” He ran the back of a large brown hand across his mouth. “Armitage?” Case winced as the betaphenethylamine hangover hit him with its full intensity, unscreened by the matrix or simstim. Brain’s got no nerves in it, he told himself, it can’t really feel this bad. “What do you mean, man? He’s giving you orders? What?” “Mon, Armitage, he tellin’ me set course for Finland, ya know? He tellin’ me there be hope, ya know? Come on my screen wi’ his shirt all blood, mon, an’ be crazy as some dog, talkin’ screamin’ fists an’ Russian an’ th’ blood of th’ betrayers shall be on our hands.” He shook his head again, the dreadcap swaying and bobbing in zero-g, his lips narrowed. “Founders seh the Mute voice be false prophet surely, an’ Aerol an’ I mus’ ’bandon Marcus Garvey and return.” “Armitage, he was wounded? Blood?” “Can’t seh, ya know? But blood, an’ stone crazy, Case.” “Okay,” Case said. “So what about me? You’re going home. What about me, Maelcum?” “Mon,” Maelcum said, “you comin’ wi’ me. I an’ I come Zion wi’ Aerol, Babylo...

Case stared. “I don’t understand you guys at all,” he said. “Don’ ’stan’ you, mon,” the Zionite said, nodding to the beat, “but we mus’ move by Jah love, each one.”

But Case was seeing Armitage’s endless fall around Freeside, through vacuum colder than the steppes. For some reason, he imagined him in his dark Burberry, the trenchcoat’s

rich folds spread out around him like the wings of some huge bat.