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THE SKY ABOVE the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep,
you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts.”
Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.
AFTER LUNCH IN Baltimore, Molly dissecting her crab with alarming ease,
As they worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community.
“It was on the Turing Registry. AI. Frog company owned its Rio mainframe.”
How subtle a form could manipulation take?
“And it was like real?” she asked, her mouth full of cheese croissant. “Like simstim?” He said it was. “Real as this,” he added, looking around. “Maybe more.”
He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure. Rage.
the simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place to sleep.
“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?”
“The holographic paradigm is the closest thing you’ve worked out to a representation of human memory, is all. But you’ve never done anything about it. People, I mean.” The Finn stepped forward and canted his streamlined skull to peer up at Case. “Maybe if you had, I wouldn’t be happening.”
“You’re always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I’m here now, you know that?
Patient like a spider. Zen spiders.
illness etched deep in involuntary muscle, distorting the expensive surgery.
“I guess I know, if anybody does, but it would take me twelve hours to explain the various factors in his history and how they interrelate.
If I were gonna subject you to my very own thoughts, let’s call ’em speculations, on the topic, it would take a couple of your lifetimes. Because I’ve given it a lot of thought. And I just don’t know.
“Wonderful,” the Flatline said, “I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.”
“Dub, mon,” Maelcum said. “You’re fucking crazy,” Case told him. “Hear okay, mon. Righteous dub.”
“To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names
Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer.
He walked on, following the music. Maelcum’s Zion dub.
He remembered moments of grace, dealing out on the edge of things, where he’d found that he could sometimes talk faster than he could think.
In the patterns you sometimes imagined you could detect in the dance of the street. Those patterns are real. I am complex enough, in my narrow ways, to read those dances.
