Mona Lisa Overdrive

by William Gibson

  Someone took her bag. Reached down and took it from her with an ease, a confidence, that suggested he was meant to take it, that he was a functionary performing an accustomed task, like the young women bowing welcome at the doors of Tokyo department stores. And Sally kicked him. Kicked him in the back of the knee, pivoting smoothly, like the Thai boxing girls in Swain’s billiard room, snatching the bag before the back of his skull and the stained concrete met with an audible crack.

  Then Sally was pulling her, the crowd had closed over the prone figure, and the sudden, casual violence might have been a dream, except that Sally was smiling for the first time since they’d left London.

  Feeling entirely dislocated now, Kumiko watched as Sally made a survey of available vehicles, quickly bribed a uniformed dispatcher, intimidated three other prospective fares, and chivied Kumiko into a pockmarked, slabsided hovercraft, painted in diagonal bands of yellow and black. The passenger compartment was barren and remarkably uncomfortable-looking. The driver, if there was one, was invisible beyond a scrawled bulkhead of plastic armor. The nub of a video camera protruded where the bulkhead met the roof, and someone had drawn a crude figure there, a male torso, the camera its phallus. As Sally climbed in, slamming the door behind her, a speaker grated something in what Kumiko assumed was a dialect of English.

  “Manhattan,” Sally said. She took a sheaf of paper currency from her jacket pocket and fanned it below the camera.

  The speaker made interrogatory noises.

  “Midtown. Tell you where when we get there.”

  The cab’s apron bag inflated, the light in the passenger compartment was extinguished, and they were on their way.

  18

  JAIL-TIME

  He was in Gentry’s loft. He was watching Cherry do nurse-things to Gentry. Cherry looked over at him from where she sat on the edge of Gentry’s bed. “How y’doin’, Slick?”

  “Okay … I’m okay.”

  “Remember me asking you before?”

  He was looking down at the face of the man Kid Afrika called the Count. Cherry was fiddling with something on the stretcher’s superstructure, a bag of fluid the color of oatmeal.

  “How y’feel, Slick?”

  “Feel okay.”

  “You’re not okay. You keep for—”

  He was sitting on the floor of Gentry’s loft. His face was wet. Cherry was kneeling beside him, close, her hands on his shoulders.

  “You did time?”

  He nodded.

  “Chemo-penal unit?”

  “Yeah …”

  “Induced Korsakov’s?”

  He—

  “Episodes?” Cherry asked him. He was sitting on the floor in Gentry’s loft. Where was Gentry? “You get episodes like this? Short-term memory goes?”

  How did she know? Where was Gentry?

  “What’s the trigger?”

  “What triggers the syndrome, Slick? What kicks you into jail-time?” He was sitting on the floor in Gentry’s loft and Cherry was practically on top of him.

  “Stress,” he said, wondering how she knew about that. “Where’s Gentry?”

  “I put him to bed.”

  “Why?”

  “He collapsed. When he saw that thing …”

  “What thing?”

  Cherry was pressing a pink derm against his wrist. “Heavy trank,” she said. “Maybe get you out of it …”

  “Out of what?”

  She sighed. “Never mind.”

  He woke up in bed with Cherry Chesterfield. He had all his clothes on, everything but his jacket and his boots. The tip of his erect cock was trapped behind his belt buckle, pressing up against the warm denim over Cherry’s ass.

  “Don’t get any ideas.”

  Winter light through the patchwork window and his breath white when he spoke. “What happened?” Why was it so cold in the room? He remembered Gentry’s scream as the thing lunged for him—

  He sat up straight, fast.

  “Easy,” she said, rolling over. “Lie back. Don’t know what it takes to set you off …”

  “What d’y’ mean?”

  “Lie back. Get under the covers. Wanna freeze?”

  He did as she said. “You were in jail, right? In a chemo-penal unit.”

  “Yeah … How’d you know?”

  “You told me. Last night. You told me stress could trigger a flashback. So that’s what happened. That thing went for your buddy, you jumped for the switch, shut that table down. He fell over, cut his head. I was taking care of that when I noticed you were funny. Figured out you only had consecutive memory for about five minutes at a stretch. Get that in shock cases, sometimes, or concussion …”

  “Where is he? Gentry.”

  “He’s in bed up in his place, plastered with downs. The shape he was in, I figured he could do with about a day’s sleep. Anyway, it gets him out of our hair for a while.”

  Slick closed his eyes and saw the gray thing again, the thing that had gone for Gentry. Man-shaped, sort of, or like an ape. Nothing like the convoluted shapes Gentry’s equipment generated in his search for the Shape.

  “I think the power’s out,” Cherry said. “The light went out in here about six hours ago.”

  He opened his eyes. The cold. Gentry hadn’t made his moves on the console. He groaned.

  He left Cherry to make coffee on the butane cooker and went looking for Little Bird. He found him by the smell of smoke. Little Bird had built a fire in a steel canister and gone to sleep curled around it like a dog. “Hey,” Slick said, nudging the boy with his boot, “get up. We got problems.”

  “Fuckin’ juice’s out,” he mumbled, sitting up in a greasy nylon sleeping bag grimed the exact shade of Factory’s floor.

  “I noticed. That’s problem number one. Number two is we need a truck or a hover or something. We have to get that guy out of here. It’s not working out with Gentry.”

  “But Gentry’s the only one can fix the juice.” Little Bird got to his feet, shivering.

  “Gentry’s sleeping. Who’s got a truck?”

  “Marvie ’n’ them,” Little Bird said, and lapsed into a racking cough.

  “Take Gentry’s bike. Bring it back in the truck. Now.”

  Little Bird recovered from his coughing fit. “No shit?”

  “You know how to ride it, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but Gentry, he’ll get—”

  “You let me worry about that. You know where he keeps that spare key?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Little Bird said shyly. “Say,” he ventured, “what if Marvie ’n’ them don’t wanna gimme that truck?”

  “Give ’em this,” Slick said, pulling the Ziploc full of drugs from the pocket of his jacket. Cherry had taken it after she’d bandaged Gentry’s head. “And give ’em all of it, understand? ’Cause I’m gonna ask ’em later.”

  Cherry’s beeper went off while they were drinking coffee in Slick’s room, huddled side by side on the edge of the bed. He’d been telling her as much as he knew about the Korsakov’s, because she’d asked him. He hadn’t ever really told anybody about it, and it was funny how little he actually knew. He told her about previous flashbacks, then tried to explain how the system worked in jail. The trick was that you retained long-term memory up to the point where they put you on the stuff. That way, they could train you to do something before you started serving your time and you didn’t forget how to do it. Mostly you did stuff that robots could do. They’d trained him to assemble miniature geartrains; when he’d learned to put one together inside five minutes, that was it.

  “And they didn’t do anything else?” she asked.

  “Just those geartrains.”

  “No, I mean like brainlocks.”

  He looked at her. The sore on her lip was almost healed. “If they do that, they don’t tell you,” he said.

  Then the beeper went off in one of her jackets.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said, getting up quickly.

  They found Gentry kneeling besi
de the stretcher with something black in his hands. Cherry snatched the thing before Gentry could move. He stayed where he was, blinking up at her.

  “Takes a lot to keep you under, mister.” She handed Slick the black thing. A retinal camera.

  “We have to find out who he is,” Gentry said. His voice was thick with the downs she’d administered, but Slick sensed that the bad edge of craziness had receded.

  “Hell,” she said, “you don’t even know if these are the eyes he had a year ago.”

  Gentry touched the bandage on his temple. “You saw it too, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Cherry said, “he shut it off.”

  “It was the shock,” Gentry said. “I hadn’t imagined.… There was no real danger. I wasn’t ready.…”

  “You were out of your fucking skull,” Cherry said.

  Gentry got unsteadily to his feet.

  “He’s leaving,” Slick said. “I sent Bird to borrow a truck. I don’t like any of this shit.”

  Cherry stared at him. “Leaving where? I gotta go with him. It’s my job.”

  “I know a place,” Slick lied. “The power’s out, Gentry.”

  “You can’t take him anywhere,” Gentry said.

  “Like hell.”

  “No.” Gentry swayed slightly. “He stays. The jumpers are in place. I won’t disturb him again. Cherry can stay here.”

  “You’re going to have to explain some shit here, Gentry,” Slick said.

  “To begin with,” Gentry said, and pointed at the thing above the Count’s head, “this isn’t an ‘LF’; it’s an aleph.”

  19

  UNDER THE KNIFE

  Hotel again, sinking into the deathmarch of wiz-crash, Prior leading her into the lobby, Japanese tourists already up and clustering around bored-looking guides. And one foot, one foot, one foot after the other, her head so heavy now, like somebody punched a hole in the top, poured in a quarter-kilo of dull lead, and her teeth felt like they belonged to somebody else, too big; she slumped against the side of the elevator when its extra gravity pressed down.

  “Where’s Eddy?”

  “Eddy’s gone, Mona.”

  Got her eyes open wide and she looked at him, seeing the smile was back, bastard. “What?”

  “Eddy’s been bought out. Compensated. He’s on his way to Macau with a line of credit. Nice little gambling junket.”

  “Compensated?”

  “For his investment. In you. For his time.”

  “His time?” The doors slid open on blue-carpeted corridor.

  And something falling through her, cold: Eddy hated gambling.

  “You’re working for us now, Mona. We wouldn’t want you off on your own again.”

  But you did, she thought, you let me go. And you knew where to find me.

  Eddy’s gone.…

  She didn’t remember falling asleep. She was still wearing the dress, Michael’s jacket tucked up around her shoulders like a blanket. She could see the corner of the mountainside building without moving her head, but the bighorn wasn’t there.

  The Angie stims were still sealed in plastic. She took one at random, slit the wrapper with her thumbnail, slotted it, and put the trodes on. She wasn’t thinking; her hands seemed to know what to do, friendly animals that wouldn’t hurt her. One of them touched PLAY and she slid into the Angie-world, pure as any drug, slow saxophone and limo glide through some European city, how the streets revolved around her, around the driverless car, broad avenues, dawn-clean and almost empty, with the touch of fur against her shoulders, and rolling on, down a straight road through flat fields, edged with perfect, identical trees.

  And turning, tires over raked gravel, up a winding drive through parkland where the dew was silver, here an iron deer, there a wet white marble torso … The house was vast, old, unlike any house she’d seen before, but the car swung past it, then passed several smaller buildings, coming at last to the edge of a smooth broad field.

  There were gliders tethered there, translucent membrane drawn taut over fragile-looking frames of polycarbon. They quivered slightly in the morning breeze. Robin Lanier was waiting beside them, handsome, easy Robin in a rough black sweater, who played opposite Angie in almost all of her stims.

  And she was leaving the car now, taking to the field, laughing when her heels sank into the grass. And the rest of the way to Robin with her shoes in her hand, grinning, into his arms and his smell, his eyes.

  A whirl, a dance of editing, condensing the business of boarding the glider on the silver induction rail, and they were flung smoothly down the length of the field, lifting now, banking to catch the wind, and up, up, until the great house was an angular pebble in a swathe of green, green cut by a dull gleam of curving river—

  —and Prior’s hand on STOP, smell of food from the cart beside the bed knotting her stomach, the dull sick ache of wiz-crash in every joint. “Eat,” he said. “We’re leaving soon.” He took the metal cover from one of the plates. “Club sandwich,” he said, “coffee, pastries. Doctor’s orders. Once you’re at the clinic, you won’t be eating for a while.…”

  “Clinic?”

  “Gerald’s place. Baltimore.”

  “Why?”

  “Gerald’s a cosmetic surgeon. You’re having some work done. All of it reversible later, if you want, but we think you’ll be pleased with the results. Very pleased.” The smile. “Anyone ever tell you how much you look like Angie, Mona?”

  She looked up at him, said nothing. Managed to sit up, to drink half a cup of watery black coffee. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the sandwich, but she ate one of the pastries. It tasted like cardboard.

  Baltimore. She wasn’t too sure where that was.

  And somewhere a glider hung forever above a tame green country, fur against her shoulder, and Angie must still be there, still laughing.…

  An hour later, in the lobby, while Prior signed the bill, she saw Eddy’s black gator-clone suitcases go by on a robot baggage cart, and that was when she knew for sure that he was dead.

  Gerald’s office had a sign with big old-fashioned letters, fourth floor of a condo rack in what Prior said was Baltimore. The kind of building where they throw up a framework and commercial tenants bring their own modules, plug-ins. Like a highrise trailer camp, everything snaked with bundled cables, optics, lines for sewage and water. “What’s it say?” she asked Prior.

  “Gerald Chin, Dentist.”

  “You said he was a plastic surgeon.”

  “He is.”

  “Why can’t we just go to a boutique like everybody else?”

  He didn’t answer.

  She couldn’t really feel much now, and part of her knew that she wasn’t as scared as she should be. Maybe that was okay, though, because if she got scared enough she wouldn’t be able to do anything, and definitely she wanted to get out of the whole deal, whatever it was. On the drive over, she’d discovered this lump in the pocket of Michael’s jacket. It had taken her ten minutes to figure out it was a shockrod, like nervous suits carried. It felt like a screwdriver handle with a pair of blunt metal horns where the shaft should be. It probably charged off wall current; she just hoped Michael had kept up the charge. She figured Prior didn’t know it was there. They were legal, most places, because they weren’t supposed to do much permanent damage, but Lanette had known a girl who’d gotten worked over real bad with one and never got much better.

  If Prior didn’t know it was in her pocket, it meant he didn’t know everything, and he had a stake in having her think he did. But then he hadn’t known how much Eddy hated gambling.

  She couldn’t feel much about Eddy, either, except she still figured he was dead. No matter how much they’d given him, he still wouldn’t walk out without those cases. Even if he was going for a whole new wardrobe he’d need to get all dressed up to go shopping for it. Eddy cared about clothes more than almost anything. And those gator cases were special; he’d got ’em off a hotel thief in Orlando, and they were the closest thing he
had to a home. And anyway, now that she thought about it, she couldn’t see him going for a buy-out bid, because what he wanted most in the whole world was to be part of some big deal. Once he was, he figured, people would start to take him seriously.

  So somebody finally took him seriously, she thought, as Prior carried her bag into Gerald’s clinic. But not the way Eddy wanted.

  She looked around at the twenty-year-old plastic furniture, the stacks of stim-star magazines with Jap writing. It looked like a Cleveland haircut place. There was nobody there, nobody behind the reception desk.

  Then Gerald came through a white door, wearing the kind of crinkled foil suit that paramedics wore for traffic accidents. “Lock the door,” he said to Prior, through a blue paper mask that hid his nose, mouth, and chin. “Hello, Mona. If you’ll step this way …” He gestured toward the white door.

  She had her hand around the shockrod now, but she didn’t know how to turn it on.

  She followed Gerald, Prior taking up the rear.

  “Have a seat,” Gerald said. She sat on a white enamel chair. He came close, looked at her eyes. “You need to rest, Mona. You’re exhausted.”

  There was a serrated stud on the shockrod’s handle. Press it? Forward? Back?

  Gerald went to a white box with drawers, got something out.

  “Here,” he said, extending a little tube thing with writing on the side, “this will help you.…” She barely felt the tiny, measured spray; there was a black blot on the aerosol tube, just where her eyes tried to focus, growing.…

  She remembered the old man showing her how you kill a catfish. Catfish has a hole in its skull, covered with skin; you take something stiff and skinny, a wire, even a broomstraw did it, and you just slip it in.…

  She remembered Cleveland, ordinary kind of day before it was time to get working, sitting up in Lanette’s, looking at a magazine. Found this picture of Angie laughing in a restaurant with some other people, everybody pretty but beyond that it was like they had this glow, not really in the photograph but it was there anyway, something you feel. Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow.