Count Zero

by William Gibson

  “Sure, I worked for him before,” Lynch said, pausing at the base of the slide. An ancient-looking leather belt rode low on his hips, its heavy buckle a tarnished silver death’s-head with a dorsal crest of blunt, pyramidal spikes. “Marrakech— that was before my time.”

  “Connie, too, Lynch?”

  “How’s that?”

  “Conroy. You work for him before? More to the point— are you working for him now?” Turner came slowly, deliberately down the gravel as he spoke; it crunched and slid beneath his deck shoes, uneasy footing. He could see the delicate little fletcher holstered beneath Lynch’s denim vest.

  Lynch licked dry lips, held his ground. “That’s Sut’s contact. I haven’t met him.”

  “Conroy has this problem, Lynch. Can’t delegate responsibility. He likes to have his own man from the start, someone to watch the watchers. Always. You the one, Lynch?”

  Lynch shook his head, the absolute minimum of movement required to convey the negative. Turner was close enough to smell his sweat above the tarry odor of the desert plants.

  “I’ve seen Conroy blow two extractions that way,” Turner said. “Lizards and broken glass, Lynch? You feel like dying here?” Turner raised his fist in front of Lynch’s face and slowly extended the index finger, pointing straight up. “We’re in their footprint. If a plant of Conroy’s bleeps the least fucking pulse out of here, they’ll be on to us.”

  “If they aren’t already.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sut’s your man,” Lynch said. “Not me, and I can’t see it being Webber.” Black-rimmed, broken nails came up to scratch abstractedly at his beard. “Now, did you get me back here exclusively for this little talk, or do you still wanna see our canful of Japs?”

  “Let’s see it.”

  Lynch. Lynch was the one.

  Once, in Mexico, years before, Turner had chartered a portable vacation module, solar-powered and French-built, its seven-meter body like a wingless housefly sculpted in polished alloy, its eyes twin hemispheres of tinted, photosensitive plastic; he sat behind them as an aged twin-prop Russian cargo lifter lumbered down the coast with the module in its jaws, barely clearing the crowns of the tallest palms. Deposited on a remote beach of black sand, Turner spent three days of pampered solitude in the narrow, teak-lined cabin, microwaving food from the freezer and showering, frugally but regularly, in cool fresh water. The module’s rectangular banks of cells would swivel, tracking the sun, and he’d learned to tell time by their position.

  Hosaka’s portable neurosurgery resembled an eyeless version of that French module, perhaps two meters longer and painted a dull brown. Sections of perforated angle iron had been freshly braised at intervals along the lower half of the hull, and supported simple spring suspensions for ten fat, heavily nubbed red rubber bicycle tires.

  “They’re asleep,” Lynch said. “It bobs around when they move, so you can tell. We’ll have the wheels off when the time comes, but for now we like being able to keep track of them.”

  Turner walked slowly around the brown pod, noting the glossy black sewage tube that ran to a small rectangular tank nearby.

  “Had to dump that, last night. Jesus.” Lynch shook his head. “They got food and some water.”

  Turner put his ear to the hull.

  “It’s proofed,” Lynch said.

  Turner glanced up at the steel roof above them. The surgery was screened from above by a good ten meters of rusting roof. Sheet steel, and hot enough now to fry an egg. He nodded. That hot rectangle would be a permanent factor in the Maas infrared scan.

  “Bats,” Webber said, handing him the Smith & Wesson in a black nylon shoulder rig. The dusk was full of sounds that seemed to come from inner space, metallic squeaks and the cackling of bugs, cries of unseen birds. Turner shoved gun and holster into a pocket on the parka. “You wanna piss, go up by that mesquite. But watch out for the thorns.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “New Mexico,” the woman said, her face like carved wood in the remaining light. She turned and walked away, heading for the angle of walls that sheltered the tarps. He could make out Sutcliffe and a young black man there. They were eating from dull foil envelopes. Ramirez, the on-site console jockey, Jaylene Slide’s partner. Out of Los Angeles.

  Turner looked up at the bowl of sky, limitless, the map of stars. Strange how it’s bigger this way, he thought, and from orbit it’s just a gulf, formless, and scale lost all meaning. And tonight he wouldn’t sleep, he knew, and the Big Dipper would whirl round for him and dive for the horizon, pulling its tail with it.

  A wave of nausea and dislocation hit him as images from the biosoft dossier swam unbidden through his mind.

  8

  PARIS

  ANDREA LIVED IN THE Quartier des Ternes, where her ancient building, like the others in her street, awaited sandblasting by the city’s relentless renovators. Beyond the dark entrance, one of Fuji Electric’s biofluorescent strips glowed dimly above a dilapidated wall of small wooden hutches, some with their slotted doors still intact. Marly knew that postmen had once made daily deposits of mail through those slots; there was something romantic about the idea, although the hutches, with their yellowing business cards announcing the occupations of long-vanished tenants, had always depressed her. The walls of the hallway were stapled with bulging loops of cable and fiber optics, each strand a potential nightmare for some hapless utilities repairman. At the far end, through an open door paneled with dusty pebble glass, was a disused courtyard, its cobbles shiny with damp.

  The concierge was sitting in the courtyard as Marly entered the building, on a white plastic crate that had once held bottles of Evian water. He was patiently oiling each link of an old bicycle’s black chain. He glanced up as she began to climb the first flight of stairs, but registered no particular interest.

  The stairs were made of marble, worn dull and concave by generations of tenants. Andrea’s apartment was on the fourth floor. Two rooms, kitchen, and bath. Marly had come here when she’d closed her gallery for the last time, when it was no longer possible to sleep in the makeshift bedroom she’d shared with Alain, the little room behind the storeroom. Now the building brought her depression circling in again, but the feel of her new outfit and the tidy click of her bootheels on marble kept it at a distance. She wore an oversized leather coat a few shades lighter than her handbag, a wool skirt, and a silk blouse from Paris Isetan. She’d had her hair cut that morning on Faubourg St. Honoré, by a Burmese girl with a West German laser pencil; an expensive cut, subtle without being too conservative.

  She touched the round plate bolted in the center of Andrea’s door, heard it peep once, softly, as it read the whorls and ridges of her fingertips. “It’s me, Andrea,” she said to the tiny microphone. A series of clanks and tickings as her friend unbolted the door.

  Andrea stood there, dripping wet, in the old terry robe. She took in Marly’s new look, then smiled. “Did you get your job, or have you robbed a bank?” Marly stepped in, kissing her friend’s wet cheek. “It feels a bit of both,” she said, and laughed.

  “Coffee,” said Andrea, “make us coffee. Grandes crèmes. I must rinse my hair. And yours is beautiful . . .” She went into the bathroom and Marly heard a spray of water across porcelain.

  “I’ve brought you a present,” Marly said, but Andrea couldn’t hear her. She went into the kitchen and filled the kettle, lit the stove with the old-fashioned spark gun, and began to search the crowded shelves for coffee.

  “Yes,” Andrea was saying, “I do see it.” She was peering into the hologram of the box Marly had first seen in Virek’s construct of Gaudi’s park. “It’s your sort of thing.” She touched a stud and the Braun’s illusion winked out. Beyond the room’s single window, the sky was stippled with a few wisps of cirrus. “Too grim for me, too serious. Like the things you showed at your gallery. But that can only mean that Herr Virek has chosen well; you will solve his mystery for him. If I were you, considering the wage, I
might take my own good time about it.” Andrea wore Marly’s gift, an expensive, beautifully detailed man’s dress shirt, in gray Flemish flannel. It was the sort of thing she liked most, and her delight in it was obvious. It set off her pale hair, and was very nearly the color of her eyes.

  “He’s quite horrible, Virek, I think . . .” Marly hesitated.

  “Quite likely,” Andrea said, taking another sip of coffee.

  “Do you expect anyone that wealthy to be a nice, normal sort?”

  “I felt, at one point, that he wasn’t quite human. Felt that very strongly.”

  “But he isn’t, Marly. You were talking with a projection, a special effect . . .”

  “Still . . .” She made a gesture of helplessness, which immediately made her feel annoyed with herself.

  “Still, he is very, very wealthy, and he’s paying you a great deal to do something that you may be uniquely suited to do.” Andrea smiled and readjusted a finely turned charcoal cuff. “You don’t have a great deal of choice, do you?”

  “I know. I suppose that’s what’s making me uneasy.”

  “Well,” Andrea said, “I thought I might put off telling you a bit longer, but I have something else that may make you feel uneasy. If ‘uneasy’ is the word.”

  “Yes?”

  “I considered not telling you at all, but I’m sure he’ll get to you eventually. He smells money, I suppose.”

  Marly put her empty cup down carefully on the cluttered little rattan table.

  “He’s quite acute that way,” Andrea said.

  “When?”

  “Yesterday. It began, I think, about an hour after you would have had your interview with Virek. He called me at work. He left a message here, with the concierge. If I were to remove the screen program”—she gestured toward the phone—“I think he’d ring within thirty minutes.”

  Remembering the concierge’s eyes, the ticking of the bicycle chain.

  “He wants to talk, he said,” Andrea said. “Only to talk. Do you want to talk with him, Marly?”

  “No,” she said, and her voice was a little girl’s voice, high and ridiculous. Then, “Did he leave a number?” Andrea sighed, slowly shook her head, and then said, “Yes, of course he did.”

  9

  UP THE PROJECTS

  THE DARK WAS FULL of honeycomb patterns the color of blood. Everything was warm. And soft, too, mostly soft.

  “What a mess,” one of the angels said, her voice far off but low and rich and very clear.

  “We should’ve clipped him out of Leon’s,” the other angel said. “They aren’t gonna like this upstairs.”

  “Must’ve had something in this big pocket here, see? They slashed it for him, getting it out.”

  “Not all they slashed, sister. Jesus. Here.”

  The patterns swung and swam as something moved his head. Cool palm against his cheek.

  “Don’t get any on your shirt,” the first angel said.

  “Two-a-Day ain’t gonna like this. Why you figure he freaked like that and ran?”

  It pissed him off, because he wanted to sleep. He was asleep, for sure, but somehow Marsha’s jack-dreams were bleeding into his head so that he tumbled through broken sequences of People of Importance. The soap had been running continuously since before he was born, the plot a multiheaded narrative tapeworm that coiled back in to devour itself every few months, then sprouted new heads hungry for tension and thrust. He could see it writhing in its totality, the way Marsha could never see it, an elongated spiral of Sense/Net DNA, cheap brittle ectoplasm spun out to uncounted hungry dreamers. Marsha, now, she had it from the POV of Michele Morgan Magnum, the female lead, hereditary corporate head of Magnum AG. But today’s episode kept veering weirdly away from Michele’s frantically complex romantic entanglements, which Bobby had anyway never bothered to keep track of, and jerking itself into detailed socioarchitectural descriptions of Soleri-style mincome arcologies. Some of the detail, even to Bobby, seemed suspect; he doubted, for instance, that there really were entire levels devoted to the sale of ice-blue shaved-velour lounge suites with diamond-buckled knees, or that there were other levels, perpetually dark, inhabited exclusively by starving babies. This last, he seemed to recall, had been an article of faith to Marsha, who regarded the Projects with superstitious horror, as though they were some looming vertical hell to which she might one day be forced to ascend. Other segments of the jack-dream reminded him of the Knowledge channel Sense/Net piped in free with every stim subscription; there were elaborate animated diagrams of the Projects’ interior structure, and droning lectures in voice-over on the life-styles of various types of residents. These, when he was able to focus on them, seemed even less convincing than the flashes of ice-blue velour and feral babies creeping silently through the dark. He watched a cheerful young mother slice pizza with a huge industrial waterknife in the kitchen corner of a spotless one-room. An entire wall opened onto a shallow balcony and a rectangle of cartoon-blue sky. The woman was black without being black, it seemed to Bobby, like a very, very dark and youthfully maternal version of one of the porno dolls on the unit in his bedroom. And had, it looked like, the identical small but cartoon-perfect breasts. (At this point, to add to his dull confusion, an astonishingly loud and very unNet voice said, “Now I call that a definite sign of life, Jackie. If the prognosis ain’t lookin’ up yet, at least somethin’ is.”) And then went spinning back into the all-glitz universe of Michele Morgan Magnum, who was desperately struggling to prevent Magnum AG’s takeover by the sinister Shikoku-based Nakamura industrial clan, represented in this case by (plot complication) Michele’s main squeeze for the season, wealthy (but somehow grindingly in need of additional billions) New Soviet boy-politician Vasily Suslov, who looked and dressed remarkably like the Gothicks in Leon’s.

  The episode seemed to be reaching some sort of climax—an antique BMW fuel-cell conversion had just been strafed by servo-piloted miniature West German helicopters on the street below Covina Concourse Courts, Michele Morgan Magnum was pistol-whipping her treacherous personal secretary with a nickel-plated Nambu, and Suslov, who Bobby was coming increasingly to identify with, was casually preparing to get his ass out of town with a gorgeous female bodyguard who was Japanese but reminded Bobby intensely of another one of the dreamgirls on his holoporn unit—when someone screamed.

  Bobby had never heard anyone scream that way, and there was something horribly familiar about the voice. But before he could start to worry about it, those blood-red honeycombs came swirling in again and made him miss the end of People of Importance. Still, some part of him thought, as red went to black, he could always ask Marsha how it came out.

  “Open your eyes, man. That’s it. Light too bright for you?”

  It was, but it didn’t change. White, white, he remembered his head exploding years away, pure white grenade in that cool-wind desert dark. His eyes were open, but he couldn’t see. Just white.

  “Now, I’d leave you down, ordinarily, boy in your condition, but the people paying me for this say get a jump on, so I’m wakin’ you up before I’m done. You wonderin’ why you can’t see shit, right? Just light, that’s all you can see, that’s right. What we got here is a neural cutout. Now, between you and me, this thing come out of a sex shop, but there’s no reason not to use it in medicine if we want to. And we do want to, because you’re still hurtin’ bad, and anyway, it keeps you still while I get on with it.” The voice was calm and methodical. “Now, your big problem, that was your back, but I took care of that with a stapler and a few feet of claw. You don’t get any plastic work here, you understand, but the honeys’ll think those scars are real interesting. What I’m doin’ now is I’m cleanin’ this one on your chest, then I’ll zip a little claw down that and we’re all done, except you better move easy for a couple of days or you’ll pull a staple. I got a couple of derms on you, and I’ll stick on a few more. Meantime, I’m going to click your sensorium up to audio and full visual so you can get into being here. Don�
��t mind the blood; it’s all yours but there isn’t any more comin’.”

  White curdled to gray cloud, objects taking form with the slow deliberation of a dust vision. He was flat against a padded ceiling, staring straight down at a blood-stained white doll that had no head at all, only a greenish blue surgical lamp that seemed to sprout from its shoulders. A black man in a stained green smock was spraying something yellow into a shallow gash that ran diagonally from just above the doll’s pelvic bone to just below its left nipple. He knew the man was black because his head was bare, bare and shaven, slick with sweat; his hands were covered in tight green gloves and all that Bobby could see of him was the gleaming crown of his head. There were pink and blue dermadisks stuck to the skin on either side of the doll’s neck. The edges of the wound seemed to have been painted with something that looked like chocolate syrup, and the yellow spray made a hissing sound as it escaped from its little silver tube.

  Then Bobby got the picture, and the universe reversed itself sickeningly. The lamp was suspended from the ceiling, the ceiling was mirrored, and he was the doll. He seemed to snap back on a long elastic cord, back through the red honeycombs, to the dream room where the black girl sliced pizza for her children. The waterknife made no sound at all, microscopic grit suspended in a needle-stream of high-speed water. The thing was intended to cut glass and alloy, Bobby knew, not to slice microwaved pizza, and he wanted to scream at her because he was terrified she’d take off her thumb without even feeling it.

  But he couldn’t scream, couldn’t move or make a sound at all. She lovingly sliced the last piece, toed the kickplate that shut the knife down, transferred the sliced pizza to a plain white ceramic platter, then turned toward the rectangle of blue beyond the balcony, where her children were—no, Bobby said, way down in himself, no way. Because the things that wheeled and plunged for her weren’t hang-gliding kids, but babies, the monstrous babies of Marsha’s dream, and the tattered wings a confusion of pink bone, metal, patched taut membranes of scrap plastic . . . He saw their teeth . . .