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THE SKY ABOVE the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.
His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.
THE JAPANESE HAD already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known.
He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.
They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin.
Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.
Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.
Genetic materials and hormones trickled down to Ninsei along an intricate ladder of fronts and blinds.
Ew.
JULIUS DEANE WAS one hundred and thirty-five years old, his metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums and hormones.
Neo-Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in scarlet-lacquered steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete floor. Its hands were holograms that altered to match the convolutions of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct time. The room was stacked with white fiberglass shipping modules that gave off the tang of preserved ginger.
Awesome use of imagery. Fascinating visual image is painted. Huge fan, in partular, of the references to very different artists.
His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM
This aged like milk
