He brushed the bag aside on his way to the console, punched a function key. The screen lit with the intricate pattern I’d seen there that afternoon. I rubbed sleep from my eyes with my left hand, one thing I can’t do with my right. I’d fallen asleep trying to decide whether to tell him about the program. Maybe I should try to sell it alone, keep the money, go somewhere new, ask Rikki to go with me.
“Whose is it?” I asked.
He stood there in a black cotton jumpsuit, an old leather jacket thrown over his shoulders like a cape. He hadn’t shaved for a few days, and his face looked thinner than usual.
“It’s Chromes,” he said.
My arm convulsed, started clicking, fear translated to the myoelectrics through the carbon studs. I spilled the sandwiches, limp sprouts, and bright yellow dairy-produce slices on the unswept wooden floor.
“You’re stone-crazy,” I said.
“No,” he said, "you think she rumbled it? No way. We’d be dead already. I locked onto her through a triple-blind rental system in Mombasa and an Algerian commsat. She knew somebody was having a look-see, but she couldn’t trace it.”
If Chrome had traced the pass Bobby had made at her ice, we were good as dead. But he was probably right, or she’d have had me blown away on my way back from New York. “Why her, Bobby? Just give me one reason . . .”
Chrome: I’d seen her maybe half a dozen times in the Gentleman Loser. Maybe she was slumming, or checking out the human condition, a condition she didn’t exactly aspire to. A sweet little heartshaped face framed the nastiest pair of eyes you ever saw. She’d looked fourteen for as long as anyone could remember, hyped out of anything like a normal metabolism on some massive program of serums and hormones. She was as ugly a customer as the street ever produced, but she didn’t belong to the street anymore. She was one of the Boys, Chrome, a member in good standing of the local Mob subsidiary. Word was, she’d gotten started as a dealer, back when synthetic pituitary hormones were still proscribed. But she hadn’t had to move hormones for a long time. Now she owned the House of Blue Lights.
“You’re flat-out crazy, Quine. You give me one sane reason for having that stuff on your screen. You ought to dump it, and I mean now . . .”
“Talk in the Loser,” he said, shrugging out of the leather jacket. “Black Myron and Crow Jane. Jane, she’s up on all the sex lines, claims she knows where the money goes. So she’s arguing with Myron that Chrome’s the controlling interest in the Blue Lights, not just some figurehead for the Boys.”
‘“The Boys,’ Bobby,” I said. “That’s the operative word there. You still capable of seeing that? We don’t mess with the Boys, remember? That’s why we’re still walking around.”
“That’s why we’re still poor, partner.” He settled back into the swivel chair in front of the console, unzipped his jumpsuit, and scratched his skinny white chest. “But maybe not for much longer.”
“I think maybe this partnership just got itself permanently dissolved.”
Then he grinned at me. That grin was truly crazy, feral and focused, and I knew that right then he really didn’t give a shit about dying.
“Look,” I said, “I’ve got some money left, you know? Why don’t you take it and get the tube to Miami, catch a hopper to Montego Bay. You need a rest, man. You’ve got to get your act together.”
“My act, Jack,” he said, punching something on the keyboard, “never has been this together before.” The neon prayer rug on the screen shivered and woke as an animation program cut in, ice lines weaving with hypnotic frequency, a living mandala. Bobby kept punching, and the movement slowed; the pattern resolved itself, grew slightly less complex, became an alternation between two distant configurations. A first-class piece of work, and I hadn’t thought he was still that good. “Now,” he said,“there, see it? Wait. There. There again. And there. Easy to miss. That’s it. Cuts in every hour and twenty minutes with a squirt transmission to their commsat. We could live for a year on what she pays them weekly in negative interest.”
“Whose commsat?”
“Zurich. Her bankers. That’s her bankbook, Jack. That’s where the money goes. Crow Jane was right.”
I stood there. My arm forgot to click.
“So how’d you do in New York, partner? You get anything that’ll help me cut ice? We’re going to need whatever we can get.”
I kept my eyes on his, forced myself not to look in the direction of the waldo, the jeweler’s vise. The Russian program was there, under the dustcover.
Wild cards, luck changers.
“Where’s Rikki?” I asked him, crossing to the console, pretending to study the alternating patterns on the screen.
“Friends of hers,” he shrugged, “kids, they’re all into simstim.” He smiled absently. “I’m going to do it for her, man.”
“I’m going out to think about this, Bobby. You want me to come back, you keep your hands off the board.”
“I’m doing it for her,” he said as the door closed behind me. “You know I am.”
And down now, down, the program a roller coaster through this fraying maze of shadow walls, gray cathedral spaces between the bright towers. Headlong speed.
Black ice. Don’t think about it. Black ice.
Too many stories in the Gentleman Loser; black ice is a part of the mythology. Ice that kills. Illegal, but then aren’t we all? Some kind of neural-feedback weapon, and you connect with it only once. Like some hideous Word that eats the mind from the inside out. Like an epileptic spasm that goes on and on until there’s nothing left at all . . .
And we’re diving for the floor of Chrome’s shadow castle.
Trying to brace myself for the sudden stopping of breath, a sickness and final slackening of the nerves. Fear of that cold Word waiting, down there in the dark.
I went out and looked for Rikki, found her in a cafe with a boy with Sendai eyes, half-healed suture lines radiating from his bruised sockets. She had a glossy brochure spread open on the table, Tally Isham smiling up from a dozen photographs, the Girl with the Zeiss Ikon Eyes.
Her little simstim deck was one of the things I’d stacked under my bench the night before, the one I’d fixed for her the day after I’d first seen her. She spent hours jacked into that unit, the contact band across her forehead like a gray plastic tiara. Tally Isham was her favorite, and with the contact band on, she was gone, off somewhere in the recorded sensorium of simstim’s biggest star. Simulated stimuli: the world—all the interesting parts, anyway—as perceived by Tally Isham. Tally raced a black Fokker ground-effect plane across Arizona mesa tops. Tally dived the Truk Island preserves. Tally partied with the superrich on private Greek islands, heartbreaking purity of those tiny white seaports at dawn.
Actually she looked a lot like Tally, same coloring and cheekbones. I thought Rikki’s mouth was stronger. More sass. She didn’t want to be Tally Isham, but she coveted the job. That was her ambition, to be in simstim. Bobby just laughed it off. She talked to me about it, though. “How’d I look with a pair of these?” she’d ask, holding a full-page headshot, Tally Isham’s blue Zeiss Ikons lined up with her own amber-brown. She’d had her corneas done twice, but she still wasn’t twenty-twenty; so she wanted Ikons. Brand of the stars. Very expensive.
“You still window-shopping for eyes?” I asked as I sat down.
“Tiger just got some,” she said. She looked tired, I thought.
Tiger was so pleased with his Sendais that he couldn’t help smiling, but I doubted whether he’d have smiled otherwise. He had the kind of uniform gpod looks you get after your seventh trip to the surgical boutique; he’d probably spend the rest of his life looking vaguely like each new season’s media frontrunner; not too obvious a copy, but nothing too original, either.
“Sendai, right?” I smiled back.
He nodded. I watcljed as hec tried to take me in with his idea of a professional simstim glance. He was pretending that he was recording. I thought he spent too long on my arm. “They’ll be great
on peripherals when the muscles heal,” he said, and 'I saw how carefully he reached for his double espresso. Sendai eyes are notorious for depth-perception defects and warranty hassles, among other things.
“Tiger’s leaving for Hollywood tomorrow.”
"Then maybe Chiba City, right?” I smiled at him. He didn’t smile back. “Got an offer, Tiger? Know an agent?”
“Just checking it out,” he said quietly. Then he got up and left. He said a quick good-bye to Rikki, but not to me.
“That kid’s optic nerves may start to deteriorate inside six months. You know that, Rikki? Those Sendais are illegal in England, Denmark, lots of places. You can’t replace nerves.”
“Hey, Jack, no lectures.” She stole one of my croissants and nibbled at the tip of one of its horns.
“I thought I was your adviser, kid.”
“Yeah. Well, Tiger’s not too swift, but everybody knows about Sendais. They’re all he can afford. So he’s taking a chance. If he gets work, he can replace them.”
“With these?” I tapped the Zeiss Ikon brochure. “Lot of money, Rikki. You know better than to take a gamble like that?”
She nodded. “I want Ikons.”
“If you’re going up to Bobby’s, tell him to sit tight until he hears from me.”
“Sure. It’s business?”
“Business,” I said. But it was craziness.
I drank my coffee, and she ate both my croissants. Then I walked her down to Bobby’s. I made fifteen calls, each one from a different pay phone.
Business. Bad craziness.
All in all, it took us six weeks to set the burn up, six weeks of Bobby telling me how much he loved her. I worked even harder, trying to get away from that.
Most of it was phone calls. My fifteen initial and very oblique inquiries each seemed to breed fifteen more. I was looking for a certain service Bobby and I both imagined as a requisite part of the world’s clandestine economy, but. which probably never had more than five customers at a time. It would be one that never advertised.
We were looking for the world’s heaviest fence, for a nonaligned money laundry capable of drycleaning a megabuck on-line cash transfer and then forgetting about it.
All those calls were a waste, finally, because it was the Finn who put me on to what we needed. I’d gone up to New York to buy a new blackbox rig, because we were going broke paying for all those calls.
I put the problem to him as hypothetically as possible.
“Macao,” he said.
“Macao?”
“The Long Hum family. Stockbrokers.”
He even had the number. You want a fence, ask another fence.
The Long Hum people were so oblique that they made my idea of a subtle approach look like a tactical nuke-out. Bobby had to make two shuttle runs to Hong Kong to get the deal straight. We were running out of capital, and fast. I still don’t know why I decided to go along with it in the first place; I was scared of Chrome, and I’d never been all that hot to get rich.
I tried telling myself that it was a good idea to burn the House of Blue Lights because the place was a creep joint, but I just couldn’t buy it. I didn’t like the Blue Lights, because I’d spent a supremely depressing evening there once, but that was no excuse for going after Chrome. Actually I hallway assumed we were going to die in the attempt. Even with that killer program, the odds weren’t exactly in our favor.
Bobby was lost in writing the set of commands we were going to plug into the dead center of Chrome’s computer. That was going to be my job, because Bobby was going to have his hands full, trying to keep the Russian program from going straight for the kill. It was too complex for us to rewrite, and so he was going to try to hold it back for the two seconds I needed.
I made a deal with a streetfighter named Miles. He was going to follow Rikki, the night of the burn, keep her in sight, and phone me at a certain time. If I wasn’t there, or didn’t answer in just a certain way, I’d told him to grab her and put her on the first tube out. I gave him an envelope to give her, money and a note.
Bobby really hadn’t thought about that, much, how things would go for her if we blew it. He just kept telling me he loved her, where they were going to go together, how they’d spend the money.
“Buy her a pair of Ikons first, man. That’s what she wants. She’s serious about that simstim scene.”
“Hey,” he said, looking up from the keyboard, “she won’t need to work. We’re going to make it, Jack. She’s my luck. She won’t ever have to work again.”
“Your luck,” I said. I wasn’t happy. I couldn’t remember when I had been happy. “You seen your luck around lately?” He hadn’t, but neither had I. We’d both been too busy,
I missed her. Missing her reminded me of my one night in the House of Blue Lights, because I’d gone there out of missing someone else. I’d gotten drunk to begin with, then I’d started hitting vasopressin inhalers. If your main squeeze has just decided to walk out on you, booze and vasopressin are the ultimate in masochistic pharmacology; the juice makes you maudlin and the vasopressin makes you remember, I mean really remember. Clinically they use the stuff to counter senile amnesia, but the street finds its own uses for things. So I’d bought myself an ultra-intense replay of a bad affair; trouble is, you get the bad with the good. Go gunning for transports of animal ecstasy and you get what you said, too, and what she said to that, how she walked away and never looked back.
I don’t remember deciding to go to the Blue Lights, or how I got there, hushed corridors and this really tacky decorative waterfall trickling somewhere, or maybe just a hologram of one. I had a lot of money that night; somebody had given Bobby a big roll for opening a three-second window in someone else’s ice.
I don’t think the crew on the door liked my looks, but I guess my money was okay.
I had more to drink there when I’d done what I went there for. Then I made some crack to the barman about closet necrophiliacs, and that didn’t go down too well. Then this very large character insisted on calling me War Hero, which I didn’t like. I think I showed him some tricks with the arm, before the lights went out, and I woke up two days later in a basic sleeping module somewhere else. A cheap place, not even room to hang yourself. And I sat there on that narrow foam slab and cried.
Some things are worse than being alone. But the thing they sell in the House of Blue Lights is so popular that it’s almost legal.
At the heart of darkness, the still center, the glitch systems shred the dark with whirlwinds of light, translucent razors spinning away from us; we hang in the center of a silent slow-motion explosion, ice fragments falling away forever, and Bobby’s voice comes in across light-years of electronic void illusion—
“Burn the bitch down. I can’t hold the thing back—”
The Russian program, rising through towers of data, blotting out the playroom colors. And I plug Bobby’s homemade command package into the center of Chrome’s cold heart. The squirt transmission cuts in, a pulse of condensed information that shoots straight up, past the thickening tower of darkness, the Russian program, while Bobby struggles to control that crucial second. An unformed arm of shadow twitches from the towering dark, too late.
We’ve done it.
The matrix folds itself around me like an origami trick.
And the loft smells of sweat and burning circuitry.
I thought I heard Chrome scream, a raw metal sound, but I couldn’t have.
Bobby was laughing, tears in his eyes. The elapsed-time figure in the corner of the monitor read 07:24:05. The burn had taken a little under eight minutes.
And I saw that the Russian program had melted in its slot.
We’d given the bulk of Chrome’s Zurich account to a dozen world charities. There was too much there to move, and we knew we had to break her, burn her straight down, or she might come after us. We took less than ten percent for ourselves and shot it through the Long Hum setup in Macao. They took sixty percent of that for themselves and kicke
d what was left back to us through the most convoluted sector of the Hong Kong exchange. It took an hour before our money started to reach the two accounts we’d opened in Zurich.
I watched zeros pile up behind a meaningless figure on the monitor. I was rich.
Then the phone rang. It was Miles. I almost blew the code phrase.
“Hey, Jack, man, I dunno—What’s it all about, with this girl of yours? Kinda funny thing here ...”
“What? Tell me.”
“I been on her, like you said, tight but out of sight. She goes to the Loser, hangs out, then she gets a tube. Goes to the House of Blue Lights—”
“She what?”
“Side door. Employees only. No way I could get past their security. ”
“Is she there now?”
“No, man, I just lost her. It’s insane down here, like the Blue Lights just shut down, looks like for good, seven kinds of alarms going off, everybody running, the heat out in riot gear . . . Now there’s all this stuff going on, insurance guys, real estate types, vans with municipal plates ...”
“Miles, where’d she go?”
“Lost her, Jack.”
“Look, Miles, you keep the money in the envelope, right?”
“You serious? Hey, I’m real sorry. I—”
I hung up.
“Wait’ll we tell her,” Bobby was saying, rubbing a towel across his bare chest.
“You tell her yourself, cowboy. I’m going for a walk.”
So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics. I didn’t think, just put one foot in front of another, but after a while I did think, and it all made sense. She’d needed the money.
I thought about Chrome, too. That we’d killed her, murdered her, as surely as if we’d slit her throat. The night that carried me along through the malls and plazas would be hunting her now, and she had nowhere to go. How many enemies would she have in this crowd alone? How many would move, now they weren’t held back by fear of her money? We’d taken her for everything she had. She was back on the street again. I doubted she’d live till dawn.
Nebula Award Stories - 1983 #18 Page 12