Cyberpunk

by Victoria Blake

  to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.”

  “Yeah? Navy stuff? From the war? Squid’ll read that chip of yours?” She’d

  stopped walking, and I felt her eyes on me behind those twin mirrors.

  “Even the primitive models could measure a magnetic field a billionth the

  strength of geomagnetic force; it’s like pulling a whisper out of a cheering

  stadium.”

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  WILLIAM GIBSON

  “Cops can do that already, with parabolic microphones and lasers.”

  “But your data’s still secure.” Pride in profession. “No government’ll let

  their cops have Squids, not even the security heavies. Too much chance of

  interdepartmental funnies; they’re too likely to Watergate you.”

  “Navy stuff,” she said, and her grin gleamed in the shadows. “Navy stuff. I

  got a friend down here who was in the navy, name’s Jones. I think you’d

  better meet him. He’s a junkie, though. So we’ll have to take him something.”

  “A junkie?”

  “A dolphin.”

  He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin’s point of view he

  might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in

  his galvanized tank. Water slopped over the side, wetting my shoes. He was

  surplus from the last war. A cyborg.

  He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a

  kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and

  prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had been engineered

  to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-

  white hide.

  Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded down the

  side of the tank.

  “What is this place?” I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting chainlink

  and things under tarps. Above the tank hung a clumsy wooden framework,

  crossed and recrossed by rows of dusty Christmas lights.

  “Funland. Zoo and carnival rides. ‘Talk with the War Whale.’ All that.

  Some whale Jones is . . .”

  Jones reared again and fixed me with a sad and ancient eye.

  “How’s he talk?” Suddenly I was anxious to go.

  “That’s the catch. Say ‘Hi,’ Jones.”

  And all the bulbs lit simultaneously. They were flashing red, white, and

  blue.

  RWBRWBRWB

  RWBRWBRWB

  022

  JOHNNY MNEMONIC

  RWBRWBRWB

  RWBRWBRWB

  RWBRWBRWB

  “Good with symbols, see, but the code’s restricted. In the navy they had

  him wired into an audiovisual display.” She drew the narrow package from a

  jacket pocket. “Pure shit, Jones. Want it?” He froze in the water and started

  to sink. I felt a strange panic, remembering that he wasn’t a fish that he could drown. “We want the key to Johnny’s bank, Jones. We want it fast.”

  The lights flickered, died.

  “Go for it, Jones!”

  B

  BBBBBBBBB

  B

  B

  B

  Blue bulbs, cruciform.

  Darkness.

  “Pure! It’s clean. Come on, Jones.”

  WWWWWWWWW

  WWWWWWWWW

  WWWWWWWWW

  WWWWWWWWW

  WWWWWWWWW

  White sodium glare washed her features, stark monochrome, shadows

  cleaving from her cheekbones.

  R RRRRR

  R R

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  WILLIAM GIBSON

  RRRRRRRRR

  R R

  RRRRR R

  The arms of the red swastika were twisted in her silver glasses. “Give it to

  him,” I said. “We’ve got it.”

  Ralfi Face. No imagination.

  Jones heaved half his armored bulk over the edge of his tank, and I thought

  the metal would give way. Molly stabbed him overhand with the Syrette,

  driving the needle between two plates. Propellant hissed. Patterns of light

  exploded, spasming across the frame and then fading to black.

  We left him drifting, rolling languorously in the dark water. Maybe he was

  dreaming of his war in the Pacific, of the cyber mines he’d swept, nosing

  gently into their circuitry with the Squid he’d used to pick Ralfi’s pathetic

  password from the chip buried in my head.

  “I can see them slipping up when he was demobbed, letting him out of the navy

  with that gear intact, but how does a cybernetic dolphin get wired to smack?”

  “The war,” she said. “They all were. Navy did it. How else you get ’em

  working for you?”

  “I’m not sure this profiles as good business,” the pirate said, angling for better money. “Target specs on a comsat that isn’t in the book—”

  “Waste my time and you won’t profile at all,” said Molly, leaning across his

  scarred plastic desk to prod him with her forefinger.

  “So maybe you want to buy your microwaves somewhere else?” He was a

  tough kid, behind his Mao-job. A Nighttowner by birth, probably.

  Her hand blurred down the front of his jacket, completely severing a lapel

  without even rumpling the fabric.

  “So we got a deal or not?”

  “Deal,” he said staring at his ruined lapel with what he must have hoped

  was only polite interest. “Deal.”

  While I checked the two records we’d bought, she extracted the slip of

  paper I’d given her from the zippered wrist pocket of her jacket. She unfolded

  024

  JOHNNY MNEMONIC

  it and read silently, moving her lips. She shrugged. “This is it?”

  “Shoot,” I said, punching the RECORD studs of the two desks

  simultaneously.

  “Christian White,” she recited, “and his Aryan Reggae Band.”

  Faithful Ralfi, a fan to his dying day.

  Transition to idiot/savant mode is always less abrupt than I expect it to be.

  The pirate broadcaster’s front was a failing travel agency in a pastel cube that boasted a desk, three chairs, and a faded poster of a Swiss orbital spa. A pair of toy birds with blown-glass bodies and tin legs were sipping monotonously

  from a Styrofoam cup of water on the ledge beside Molly’s shoulder. As I

  phased into mode, they accelerated gradually until their Day-Glo-feathered

  crowns became solid arcs of color. The LEDs that told seconds on the plastic

  wall clock had become meaningless pulsing grids, and Molly and the Mao-

  faced boy grew hazy, their arms blurring occasionally in insect-quick ghosts of gesture. And then it all faded to cool gray static and an endless tone poem in

  the artificial language.

  I sat and sang dead Ralfi’s stolen program for three hours.

  The mall runs forty kilometers from end to end, a ragged overlap of Fuller

  domes roofing what was once a suburban artery. If they turn off the arcs on a

  clean day, a gray approximation of sunlight filters through layers of acrylic, a view like the prison sketches of Giovanni Piranesi. The three southernmost

  kilometers roof Nighttown. Nighttown pays no taxes, no utilities. The neon

  arcs are dead, and the geodesics have been smoked black by decades of

  cooking fires. In the nearly total darkness of a Nighttown noon, who notices

  a few dozen mad children lost in the rafters?

  We’d been climbing for two hours, up concrete stairs and steel ladders with

  perforated rungs, past
abandoned gantries and dust-covered tools. We’d

  started in what looked like a disused maintenance yard, stacked with

  triangular roofing segments. Everything there had been covered with that

  same uniform layer of spraybomb graffiti: gang names, initials, dates back to

  the turn of the century. The graffiti followed us up, gradually thinning until

  a single name was repeated at intervals. LO TEK. In dripping black capitals.

  “Who’s Lo Tek?”

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  WILLIAM GIBSON

  “Not us, boss.” She climbed a shivering aluminum ladder and vanished

  through a hole in a sheet of corrugated plastic. “‘Low technique, low

  technology.’” The plastic muffled her voice. I followed her up, nursing an

  aching wrist. “Lo Teks, they’d think that shotgun trick of yours was effete.”

  An hour later I dragged myself up through another hole, this one sawed

  crookedly in a sagging sheet of plywood, and met my first Lo Tek.

  “’S okay,” Molly said, her hand brushing my shoulder. “It’s just Dog. Hey, Dog.”

  In the narrow beam of her taped flash, he regarded us with his one eye

  and slowly extruded a thick length of grayish tongue, licking huge canines.

  I wondered how they wrote off tooth-bud transplants from Dobermans as

  low technology. Immunosuppressives don’t exactly grow on trees.

  “Moll.” Dental augmentation impeded his speech. A string of saliva

  dangled from the twisted lower lip. “Heard ya comin’. Long time.” He

  might have been fifteen, but the fangs and the bright mosaic of scars

  combined with the gaping socket to present a mask of total bestiality. It

  had taken time and a certain kind of creativity to assemble that face, and

  his posture told me he enjoyed living behind it. He wore a pair of decaying

  jeans, black with grime and shiny along the creases. His chest and feet

  were bare. He did something with his mouth that approximated a grin.

  “Bein’ followed, you.”

  Far off, in Nighttown, a water vendor cried his trade.

  “Strings jumping, Dog?” She swung her flash to the side, and I saw thin

  cords tied to eyebolts, cords that ran to the edge and vanished.

  “Kill the fuckin’ light!”

  She snapped it off.

  “How come the one who’s followin’ you’s got no light?”

  “Doesn’t need it. That one’s bad news, Dog. Your sentries give him a

  tumble, they’ll come home in easy-to-carry sections.”

  “This a friend friend, Moll?” He sounded uneasy. I heard his feet shift on the worn plywood.

  “No. But he’s mine. And this one,” slapping my shoulders, “he’s a friend.

  Got that?”

  “Sure,” he said, without much enthusiasm, padding to the platform’s edge,

  where the eyebolts were. He began to pluck out some kind of message on the

  taut cords.

  026

  JOHNNY MNEMONIC

  Nighttown spread beneath us like a toy village for rats; tiny windows

  showed candlelight, with only a few harsh, bright squares lit by battery

  lanterns and carbide lamps. I imagined the old men at their endless games of

  dominoes, under warm, fat drops of water that fell from wet wash hung out

  on poles between the plywood shanties. Then I tried to imagine him climbing

  patiently up through the darkness in his zoris and ugly tourist shirt, bland

  and unhurried. How was he tracking us?

  “Good,” said Molly. “He smells us.”

  “Smoke?” Dog dragged a crumpled pack from his pocket and prized out a

  flattened cigarette. I squinted at the trademark while he lit it for me with a

  kitchen match. Yiheyuan filters. Beijing Cigarette Factory. I decided that the

  Lo Teks were black marketeers. Dog and Molly went back to their argument,

  which seemed to revolve around Molly’s desire to use some particular piece

  of Lo Tek real estate.

  “I’ve done you a lot of favors, man. I want that floor. And I want the music.”

  “You’re not Lo Tek . . .”

  This must have been going on for the better part of a twisted kilometer,

  Dog leading us along swaying catwalks and up rope ladders. The Lo Teks

  leech their webs and huddling places to the city’s fabric with thick gobs of

  epoxy and sleep above the abyss in mesh hammocks. Their country is so

  attenuated that in places it consists of little more than holds and feet, sawed into geodesic struts.

  The Killing Floor, she called it. Scrambling after her, my new Eddie Bax

  shoes slipping on worn metal and damp plywood, I wondered how it could be

  any more lethal than the rest of the territory. At the same time I sensed that

  Dog’s protests were ritual and that she already expected to get whatever it

  was she wanted.

  Somewhere beneath us, Jones would be circling his tank, feeling the first

  twinges of junk sickness. The police would be boring the Drome regulars with

  questions about Ralfi. What did he do? Who was he with before he stepped

  outside? And the Yakuza would be settling its ghostly bulk over the city’s

  data banks, probing for faint images of me reflected in numbered accounts,

  securities transactions, bills for utilities. We’re an information economy. They 027

  WILLIAM GIBSON

  teach you that in school. What they don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to

  move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly

  meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be

  retrieved, amplified . . .

  But by now the pirate would have shuttled our message into line for

  blackbox transmissions to the Yakuza comsat. A simple message: call off the

  dogs or we wideband your program.

  The program. I had no idea what it contained. I still don’t. I only sing the

  song, with zero comprehension. It was probably research data, the Yakuza

  being given to advanced forms of industrial espionage. A genteel business,

  stealing from Ono-Sendai as a matter of course and politely holding their

  data for ransom, threatening to blunt the conglomerate’s research edge by

  making the product public.

  But why couldn’t any number play? Wouldn’t they be happier with

  something to sell back to Ono-Sendai, happier than they’d be with one dead

  Johnny from Memory Lane?

  Their program was on its way to an address in Sydney, to a place that held

  letters for clients and didn’t ask questions once you’d paid a small retainer.

  Fourth-class surface mail. I’d erased most of the other copy and recorded our

  message in the resulting gap, leaving just enough of the program to identify it as the real thing.

  My wrist hurt. I wanted to stop, to lie down, to sleep. I knew that I’d lose

  my grip and fall soon, knew that the sharp black shoes I’d bought for my

  evening as Eddie Bax would lose their purchase and carry me down to

  Nighttown. But he rose in my mind like a cheap religious hologram, glowing,

  the enlarged chip in his Hawaiian shirt looming like a reconnaissance shot of

  some doomed urban nucleus.

  So I followed Dog and Molly through Lo Tek heaven, jury-rigged and jerry-

  built from scraps that even Nighttown didn’t want.

  The Killing Floor was eight meters on a side. A giant had threaded steel

  cable back and forth through a junkyard and
drawn it all taut. It creaked

  when it moved, and it moved constantly, swaying and bucking as the gathering

  Lo Teks arranged themselves on the shelf of plywood surrounding it. The

  wood was silver with age, polished with long use, and deeply etched with

  initials, threats, declarations of passion. This was suspended from a separate

  028

  JOHNNY MNEMONIC

  set of cables, which lost themselves in darkness beyond the raw white glare of

  the two ancient floods suspended above the Floor.

  A girl with teeth like Dog’s hit the Floor on all fours. Her breasts were

  tattooed with indigo spirals. Then she was across the Floor, laughing,

  grappling with a boy who was drinking dark liquid from a liter flask.

  Lo Tek fashion ran to scars and tattoos. And teeth. The electricity they

  were tapping to light the Killing Floor seemed to be an exception to their

  overall aesthetic, made in the name of . . . ritual, sport, art? I didn’t know, but I could see that the Floor was something special. It had the look of having

  been assembled over generations.

  I held the useless shotgun under my jacket. Its hardness and heft were

  comforting, even though I had no more shells. And it came to me that I had

  no idea at all of what was really happening, or of what was supposed to

  happen. And that was the nature of my game, because I’d spent most of my

  life as a blind receptacle to be filled with other people’s knowledge and then

  drained, spouting synthetic languages I’d never understand. A very technical

  boy. Sure.

  And then I noticed just how quiet the Lo Teks had become.

  He was there, at the edge of the light, taking in the Killing Floor and the

  gallery of silent Lo Teks with a tourist’s calm. And as our eyes met for the first time with mutual recognition, a memory clicked into place for me, of Paris,

  and the long Mercedes electrics gliding through the rain to Notre Dame;

  mobile greenhouses, Japanese faces behind the glass, and a hundred Nikons

  rising in blind phototropism, flowers of steel and crystal. Behind his eyes, as they found me, those same shutters whirring.

  I looked for Molly Millions, but she was gone.

  The Lo Teks parted to let him step up onto the bench. He bowed, smiling,

  and stepped smoothly out of his sandals, leaving them side by side, perfectly

  aligned, and then he stepped down onto the Killing Floor. He came for me,

  across that shifting trampoline of scrap, as easily as any tourist padding across synthetic pile in any featureless hotel.