Virtual Light

by William Gibson

  Karen Mendelsohn had seemed like the best of a whole string of things Rydell felt he could get used to just fine. Like flying business-class or having a SoCal MexAmeriBank card from Cops in Trouble.

  That first time with her, in the Executive Suites in Knoxville, not having anything with him, he’d tried to show her his certificates of vaccination (required by the Department, else they couldn’t get you insured). She’d just laughed and said German nanotech would take care of all of that. Then she showed Rydell this thing through the transparent top of a gadget like a little battery-powered pressure-cooker. Rydell had heard about them, but he hadn’t ever seen one; he’d also heard they cost about as much as a small car. He’d read somewhere how they always had to be kept at body temperature.

  It looked like it might be moving a little in there. Pale, sort of jellyfish thing. He asked her if it was true they were alive. She told him it wasn’t, exactly, but it was almost, and the rest of it was Bucky balls and subcellular automata. And he wouldn’t even know it was there, but no way was she going to put it in in front of him.

  She’d gone into the bathroom to do that. When she came back out in that underwear, he got to learn where Milan was. And while it was true he wouldn’t have known the thing was there, he did know it was there, but pretty soon he forgot about it, almost.

  They chartered a tilt-rotor to Memphis the next morning and got on Air Magellan to LAX. Business-class mostly meant better gizmos in the seatback in front of you, and Rydell’s immediate favorite was a telepresence set you could tune to servo-mounted mollies on the outside of the plane. Karen hated to use the little VirtuFax she carried around in her purse, so she’d gotten on to her office in L.A. and had them download her morning’s mail into her seatback display. She got down to that fast, talking on the phone, sending faxes, and leaving Rydell to ooh and ah at the views from the mollies.

  The seats were bigger than when he used to fly down to Florida to see his father, the food was better, and the drinks were free. Rydell had three or four of those, fell asleep, and didn’t wake up until somewhere over Arizona.

  The air was funny, at LAX, and the light was different. California was a lot more crowded than he’d expected, and louder. There was a man there from Cops in Trouble, holding up a piece of wrinkled white cardboard that said MENDELSOHN in red marker, only the S was backward. Rydell smiled, introduced himself, and shook hands with him. He seemed to like that; said his name was Sergei. When Karen asked him where the fucking car was, he turned bright red and said it would just take him a minute to get it. Karen said no thanks, they’d walk to the lot with him as soon as their bags turned up, no way was she waiting around in a zoo like this. Sergei nodded. He kept trying to fold up the sign and put it into his jacket pocket, but it was too big. Rydell wondered why she’d suddenly gotten bitchy like that. Tired from the trip, maybe. He winked at Sergei, but that just seemed to make the guy more nervous.

  After their bags came, Karen’s two black leather ones and the softside blue Samsonite Rydell had bought with his new debit-card, he and Sergei carried them out and across a kind of traffic-loop. The air outside was about the same, but hotter. This recording kept saying that the white spaces were for loading and unloading only. There were all kinds of cars jockeying around, babies crying, people leaning on piles of luggage, but Sergei knew where they were going—over to this garage across the way.

  Sergei’s car was long, black, German, and looked like somebody had just cleaned it all over with warm spit and Q-Tips. When Rydell offered to ride shotgun, Sergei got rattled again and hustled him into the back seat with Karen. Which made her laugh, so Rydell felt better.

  As they were pulling out of the garage, Rydell spotted two cops over by these big stainless-steel letters that said METRO. They wore air-conditioned helmets with clear plastic visors. They were poking at an old man with their sticks, though it didn’t look like they had them turned on. The old man’s jeans were out at the knees and he had big patches of tape on both cheekbones, which almost always means cancer. He was so burned, it was hard to tell if he was white or what. A crowd of people was streaming up the stairs behind the old man and the cops, under the METRO sign, and stepping around them.

  ‘Welcome to Los Angeles,’ she said. ‘Be glad you aren’t taking the subway.’

  They had dinner that night in what Karen said was Hollywood, with Aaron Pursley himself, in a Tex-Mex restaurant on North Flores Street. It was the best Tex-Mex food Rydell had ever had. About a month later, he tried to take Sublett there for his birthday, maybe cheer him up with a down-home meal, but the man out front just wouldn’t let them in.

  ‘Full up,’ he said.

  Rydell could see plenty of empty tables through the window. It was early and there was hardly anybody in there. ‘How ’bout those,’ Rydell said, pointing at all the empty tables.

  ‘Reserved,’ the man said.

  Sublett said spicy foods weren’t really such a good idea for him anyway.

  What he’d come to like best, cruising with Gunhead, was getting back up in the hills and canyons, particularly on a night with a good moon.

  Sometimes you saw things up there and couldn’t quite be sure you’d seen them or not. One full-moon night Rydell had slung Gunhead around a curve and frozen a naked woman in the headlights, the way a deer’ll stop, trembling, on a country road. Just a second she was there, long enough for Rydell to think he’d seen that she either wore silver horns or some kind of hat with an upturned crescent, and that she might’ve been Japanese, which struck him right then as the weirdest thing about any of it. Then she saw him—he saw her see him—and smiled. Then she was gone.

  Sublett had seen her, too, but it only kicked him into some kind of motormouthed ecstasy of religious dread, every horror-movie he’d ever seen tumbling over into Reverend Fallon’s rants about witches, devil-worshippers, and the living power of Satan. He’d gone through his week’s supply of gum, talking nonstop, until Rydell had finally told him to shut the fuck up.

  Because now she was gone, he wanted to think about her. How she’d looked, what she might have been doing there, and how it was she’d vanished. With Sublett sulking in the shotgun seat, Rydell had tried to remember just exactly how it was she’d managed to so perfectly and suddenly not be there. And the funny thing was, he sort of remembered it two ways, which was nothing at all like the way he still didn’t really remember shooting Kenneth Turvey, even though he’d heard production assistants and network lawyers go over it so many times he felt like he’d seen it, or at least the Cops in Trouble version (which never aired). One way he remembered it, she’d just sort of gone down the slope beside the road, though whether she was running or floating, he couldn’t say. The other way he remembered, she’d jumped—though that was such a poor word for it—up the slope above the other side of the road, somehow clearing all that dust-silvered moonlit vegetation, and just flat-out impossible gone, forty feet if it was five.

  And did Japanese women ever have that kind of long curly hair? And hadn’t it looked like the shadowed darkness of her bush had been shaved into something like an exclamation point?

  He’d wound up buying Sublett four packs of the special gum at an all-night Russian pharmacy on Wilshire, amazed at what the stuff cost him.

  He’d seen other things, too, up the canyons, particularly when he’d drawn a shift on deep graveyard. Mostly fires, small ones, where fires couldn’t be. And lights in the sky, sometimes, but Sublett was so full of trailer-camp contactee shit that if Rydell saw a light now, driving, he knew better than to mention it.

  But sometimes, when he was up there, he’d think about her. He knew he didn’t know what she was, and in some funny way he didn’t even care if she’d been human or not. But he hadn’t ever felt like she was bad, just different.

  So now he just drove, shooting the shit with Sublett, on the night that would turn out to be his very last night on patrol with IntenSecure. No moon, but a rare clear sky with a few stars showing. Five minutes to th
eir first house check, then they’d be swinging back toward Beverly Hills.

  They were talking about this chain of Japanese gyms called Body Hammer. Body Hammer didn’t offer much in the way of traditional gym culture; in fact they went as far as possible in the opposite direction, catering mostly to kids who liked the idea of being injected with Brazilian fetal tissue and having their skeletons reinforced with what the ads called ‘performance materials.’

  Sublett said it was the Devil’s work.

  Rydell said it was a Tokyo franchise operation.

  Gunhead said: ‘Multiple homicide, hostage-taking in progress, may involve subscriber’s minor children. Benedict Canyon. You have IntenSecure authorization to employ deadly, repeat, deadly force.’

  And the dash lit up like an old-time video arcade.

  The way it had worked out, Rydell hadn’t actually had time to get used to Karen Mendelsohn, business-class seats, or any of that stuff.

  Karen lived, umpteen floors up, in Century City II, aka the Blob, which looked sort of like a streamlined, semi-transparent green tit and was the third-tallest structure in the L.A. Basin. When the light was right, you could see almost clear through it, and make out the three giant struts that held it up, each one so big around you could stuff an ordinary skyscraper up it with room to spare. There were elevators up through these tripod-things, and they ran at an angle; Rydell hadn’t had time to get used to that either.

  The tit had a carefully corroded copper nipple, like one of those Chinese hats, that could’ve covered a couple of football fields. That was where Karen’s apartment was, under there, along with an equally pricey hundred others, a tennis club, bars and restaurants, and a mall you had to pay to join before you could shop there. She was right out on the edge, with big curved windows set into the green wall.

  Everything in there was different shades of white, except for her clothes, which were always black, her suitcases, which were black, too, and the big terry robes she liked to wear, which were the color of dry oatmeal.

  Karen said it was Aggressive Retro Seventies and she was getting a little tired of it. Rydell saw how she could be, but figured it might not be polite to say so.

  The network had gotten him a room in a West Hollywood hotel that looked more like a regular condo-building, but he never did spend much time there. Until the Pooky Bear thing broke in Ohio, he’d mostly been up at Karen’s.

  The discovery of the first thirty-five Pooky Bear victims pretty much put paid to Rydell’s career as a cop in trouble. It hadn’t helped that the officers who’d first reached the scene, Sgt. China Valdez and Cpl. Norma Pierce, were easily the two best-looking women on the whole Cincinnati force (‘balls-out telegenic,’ one of the production assistants had said, though Rydell thought it sounded weird under the circumstances). Then the count began to rise, ultimately going right off any known or established serial-killing scale. Then it was revealed that all the victims were children. Then Sgt. Valdez went post-traumatic in stone bugfuck fashion, walking into a downtown tavern and clipping both kneecaps off a known pedophile—this amazingly repulsive character, nickname of Jellybeans, who had absolutely no connection with the Pooky Bear murders.

  Aaron Pursley was already Learing it back to Cincinnati in a plane that had no metal in it whatsoever, Karen had locked the goggles across her eyes and was talking nonstop to at least six people at once, and Rydell was sitting on the edge of her big white bed, starting to get the idea that something had changed.

  When she finally took the goggles off, she just sat there, staring at a white painting on a white wall.

  ‘They got suspects?’ Rydell asked.

  Karen looked over at him like she’d never seen him before.

  ‘Suspects? They’ve got confessions already…’ It struck Rydell how old she looked right then, and he wondered how old she actually was. She got up and walked out of the room.

  She came back five minutes later in a fresh black outfit. ‘Pack. I can’t have you here now.’ Then she was gone, no kiss, no goodbye, and that was that.

  He got up, put a television on, and saw the Pooky Bear killers for the first time. All three of them. They looked, he thought, pretty much like everybody else, which is how people who do that kind of shit usually do look on television.

  He was sitting there in one of her oatmeal robes when a pair of rentacops let themselves in without knocking. Their uniforms were black and they were wearing the same kind of black high-top SWAT-trainers that Rydell had worn on patrol in Knoxville, the ones with the Kevlar insoles in case somebody snuck up and tried to shoot you in the bottom of the foot.

  One of them was eating an apple. The other one had a stun-stick in his hand.

  ‘Hey, pal,’ the first one said, around a mouthful of apple, ‘we gotta show you out.’

  ‘I had a pair of shoes like that,’ Rydell said. ‘Made in Portland, Oregon. Two hundred ninety-nine dollars out at CostCo.’

  The one with the stick grinned. ‘You gonna get packing now?’

  So Rydell did, picking up anything that wasn’t black, white, or oatmeal and tossing it into his blue Samsonite.

  The rentacop with the stick watched him, while the other one wandered around, finishing his apple.

  ‘Who you guys with?’ Rydell asked.

  ‘IntenSecure,’ said the one with the stick.

  ‘Good outfit?’ Rydell was zipping up his bag.

  The man shrugged.

  ‘Outa Singapore,’ the other one said, wrapping the core of his apple in a crumpled Kleenex he’d taken from his pants pocket. ‘We got all the big buildings, gated communities, like that.’ He carefully tucked the apple-core into the breast-pocket of his crisp black uniform shirt, behind the bronze badge.

  ‘You got money for the Metro?’ Mr. Stick asked Rydell.

  ‘Sure,’ Rydell said, thinking of his debit-card.

  ‘Then you’re better off than the majority of assholes we get to escort out of here,’ the man said.

  A day later, the network pulled the plug on his MexAmeriBank card.

  Hernandez might be wrong about English SWAT-wagons, Rydell found himself thinking, punching the Hotspur Hussar into six-wheel overdrive and feeling Gunhead suck down on pavement like a twin-engined, three-ton leech. He’d never really stomped on that thing before.

  Sublett yelped as the crash-harnesses tightened automatically, yanking him up out of his usual slouch.

  Rydell slung Gunhead up onto a verge covered in dusty ice-plant, doing seventy past a museum-grade Bentley, and on the wrong side at that. Eyeblink of a woman passenger’s horrified face, then Sublett must have managed to slap the red plastic plate that activated the strobes and the siren.

  Straight stretch now. No cars at all. Rydell straddled the centerline and floored it. Sublett was making a weird keening sound that synched eerily with the rising ceramic whine of the twin Kyoceras, and it came to Rydell that the Texan had snapped completely under the pressure of the thing, and was singing in some trailer-camp tongue known only to the benighted followers of the Rev. Fallon.

  But, no, when he glanced that way, he saw Sublett, lips moving, frantically scanning the client-data as it seethed on the dash-screens, his eyes bugging like the silver contacts might pop right out. But while he read, Rydell saw, he was actually loading his worn-out, secondhand Glock, his long white fingers moving in the most matter-of-fact way imaginable, as though he were making a sandwich or folding a newspaper.

  And that was scary.

  ‘Death Star!’ Rydell yelled. It was Sublett’s job to keep the bead in his ear at all times, listening for the satellite-relayed, instantly overriding Word of the Real Cops.

  Sublett turned, snapping the magazine into his Glock, his face so pale that it seemed to reflect the colors of the dash-display as readily as did the blank steel rounds of his eyes.

  ‘The help’s all dead,’ he said, ‘an’ they got the three kids in the nursery.’ He sounded like he was talking about something mildly baffling he was seeing on tel
evision, say a badly altered version of some old, favorite film, drastically recast for some obscure ethnic market-niche. ‘Say they’re gonna kill ’em, Berry.’

  ‘What do the fucking cops say about it?’ Rydell shouted, pounding on the padded figure-eight steering wheel in the purest rage of frustration he’d ever felt.

  Sublett touched a finger to his right ear. He looked like he was about to scream. ‘Down,’ he said.

  Gunhead’s right front fender clipped off somebody’s circa-1943 fully-galvanized Sears rural-route mailbox, no doubt acquired at great cost on Melrose Avenue.

  ‘They can’t be fucking down,’ Rydell said, ‘they’re the police.’

  Sublett tugged the bead from his ear and offered it to Rydell. ‘Static’s all…’

  Rydell looked down at his dash-display. Gunhead’s cursor was a green spear of destiny, whipping along a paler-green canyon road toward a chaste white circle the size of a wedding-ring. In the window immediately to the right, he could read the vital-signs data on the subscriber’s three kids. Their pulse rates were up. In the window below, there was a ridiculously peaceful-looking infrared frame of the subscriber’s front gate. It looked solid. The read-out said it was locked and armed.

  Right then, probably, was when he decided just to go for it.

  A week or so later, when it had all been sorted out, Hernandez was basically sympathetic about the whole thing. Not happy, mind you, because it had happened over his shift, but he did say he couldn’t much blame Rydell under the circumstances.

  IntenSecure had brought in a whole planeload of people from the head office in Singapore, Rydell had heard, to keep it all out of the media and work out some kind of settlement with the subscribers, the Schonbrunns. He had no idea what that settlement might have finally amounted to, but he was just as happy not to know; there was no such program as RentaCops in Trouble, and the Schonbrunns’ front gate alone had probably been worth a couple of dozen of his paychecks.

  IntenSecure could replace that gate, sure, because they’d installed it in the first place. It had been quite a gate, too, some kind of Japanese fiber-reinforced sheeting, thermoset to concrete, and it sure as hell had managed to get most of that Wet Honey Sienna off Gunhead’s front end.