Virtual Light

by William Gibson

  He found her attractive, Skinner’s girl, in an odd, foreign way, with her hard white legs and her militant, upthrust tail of dark hair.

  ‘Dreamin’, Scooter?’ Skinner set the basin aside, his hands trembling slightly, and settled his shoulders against musty-looking pillows. The white-painted plywood wall creaked faintly.

  ‘No, Skinner-san. But you promised you would tell me about the first night, when you decided to take the bridge…’ His tone was mild, his words deliberately chosen to irritate, to spur his subject to speech. He activated the notebook’s recording function.

  ‘We didn’t decide anything. I told you that…’

  ‘But somehow it happened.’

  ‘Shit happens. Happened that night. No signals, no leader, no architects. You think it was politics. That particular dance, boy, that’s over.’

  ‘But you have said that the people were “ready.” ’

  ‘But not for anything. That’s what you can’t seem to get, can you? Like the bridge was here, but I’m not saying it was waiting. See the difference?’

  ‘I think—’

  ‘You think shit.’ The notebook sometimes had trouble with Skinner’s idioms. In addition, he tended to slur. An expert system in Osaka had suggested he might have sustained a degree of neural damage, perhaps as the result of using street drugs, or of one or more minor strokes. But Yamazaki believed Skinner had simply been too long in proximity to whatever strange attractor had permitted the bridge to become what it had become. ‘Nobody,’ Skinner said, speaking slowly and deliberately at first, as if for emphasis, ‘was using this bridge for anything. After the Little Grande came through, understand?’

  Yamazaki nodded, watching the characters of Skinner’s translated speech scroll down the notebook.

  ‘Earthquake fucked it good, Scooter. The tunnel on Treasure caved in. Always been unstable there… First they were gonna rebuild, they said, bottom up, but they flat-out didn’t have the money. So they put chain link, razor-wire, concrete up at both ends. Then the Germans came in, maybe two years later, sold ’em on nanomech, how to build the new tunnel. Be cheap, carry cars and a mag-lev. And nobody believed how fast they could do it, once they got it legislated past the Greens. Sure, those Green biotech lobbies, they made ’em actually grow the sections out in Nevada. Like pumpkins, Scooter. Then they hauled ’em out here under bulk-lifters and sank ’em in the Bay. Hooked ’em up. Little tiny machines crawling around in there, hard as diamonds; tied it all together tight, and bam, there’s your tunnel. Bridge just sat there.’

  Yamazaki held his breath, expecting Skinner to lose the thread, as he so often had before—often, Yamazaki suspected, deliberately.

  ‘This one woman, she kept saying plant the whole thing with ivy, Virginia creeper… Somebody else, they said tear it down before another quake did it for ’em. But there it was. In the cities, lot of people, no place to go. Cardboard towns in the park, if you were lucky, and they’d brought those drip-pipes down from Portland, put ’em around the buildings. Leaks enough water on the ground, you don’t want to lay there. That’s a mean town, Portland. Invented that there…’ He coughed. ‘But that one night, people just came. All kinds of stories, after, how it happened. Pissing down rain, too. No body’s idea of riot weather.’

  Yamazaki imagined the two spans of the deserted bridge in the downpour, the crowds accumulating. He watched as they climbed the wire fences, the barricades, in such numbers that the chain link twisted, fell. They had climbed the towers, then, more than thirty falling to their deaths. But when the dawn came, survivors clung there, news helicopters circling them in the gray light like patient dragonflies. He had seen this many times, watching the tapes in Osaka. But Skinner had been there.

  ‘Maybe a thousand people, this end. Another thousand in Oakland. And we just started running. Cops falling back, and what were they protecting, anyway? Mainly the crowd-orders they had, keep people from getting together in the street. They had their choppers up in the rain, shining lights on us. Just made it easier. I had this pair of pointy boots on. Ran up to that ’link, it was maybe fifteen feet tall. Just kicked my toes in there and started climbing. Climb a fence like that easy, boots got a point. Up, man, I was up that thing like I was flying. Coils of razor at the top, but people behind me were pushing up anything; hunks of two-by-four, coats, sleeping-bags. To lay across the wire. And I felt like… weightless…’

  Yamazaki felt that he was somehow close, very close, to the heart of the thing.

  ‘I jumped. Don’t know who jumped first, but I just jumped. Out. Hit pavement. People yelling. They’d crashed the barriers on the Oakland side, by then. Those were lower. We could see their lights as they ran out on the cantilever. The police ’copters and these red highway flares some of the people had. They ran toward Treasure. Nobody out there since the Navy people left… We ran too. Met up somewhere in the middle and this cheer went up…’ Skinner’s eyes were unfocused, distant. ‘After that, they were singing, hymns and shit. Just milling around, singing. Crazy. Me and some others, we were stoked. And we could see the cops, too, coming from both ends. Fuck that.’

  Yamazaki swallowed. ‘And then?’

  ‘We started climbing. The towers. Rungs they welded on those suckers, see, so painters could get up there. We were climbing. Television had their own ’copters out by then, Scooter. We were making it to world news and we didn’t know it. Guess you don’t. Wouldn’t’ve give a shit anyway. Just climbing. But that was going out live. Was gonna make it hard for the cops, later. And, man, people were falling off. Guy in front of me had black tape wrapped ’round his shoes, kept the soles on. Tape all wet, coming loose, his feet kept slipping. Right in front of my face. His foot kept coming back off the rung and I’d get his heel in my eye, I didn’t watch it… Near to the top and both of ’em come off at once.’ Skinner fell silent, as if listening to some distant sound. Yamazaki held his breath.

  ‘How you learn to climb, up here,’ Skinner said, ‘the first thing is, you don’t look down. Second thing is, you keep one hand and one foot on the bridge all the time. This guy, he didn’t know that. And those shoes of his. He just went off, backward. Never made a sound. Sort of… graceful.’

  Yamazaki shivered.

  ‘But I kept climbing. Rain had quit, light was coming. Stayed.’

  ‘How did you feel?’ Yamazaki asked.

  Skinner blinked. ‘Feel?’

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘I saw the city.’

  Yamazaki rode Skinner’s lift down to where stairs began, its yellow upright cup like a piece of picnicware discarded by a giant. All around him, now, the rattle of an evening’s commerce, and from a darkened doorway came the slap of cards, a woman’s laughter, voices raised in Spanish. Sunset pink as wine, through sheets of plastic that snapped like sails in a breeze scented with frying foods, woodsmoke, a sweet oily drift of cannabis. Boys in ragged leather crouched above a game whose counters were painted pebbles.

  Yamazaki stopped. He stood very still, one hand on a wooden railing daubed with hyphens of aerosol silver. Skinner’s story seemed to radiate out, through the thousand things, the unwashed smiles and the smoke of cooking, like concentric rings of sound from some secret bell, pitched too low for the foreign, wishful ear.

  We are come not only past the century’s closing, he thought, the millennium’s turning, but to the end of something else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the signs of closure.

  Modernity was ending.

  Here, on the bridge, it long since had.

  He would walk toward Oakland now, feeling for the new thing’s strange heart.

  11 Pulling tags

  Tuesday, she just wasn’t on. Couldn’t proj. No focus. Bunny Malatesta, the dispatcher, could feel it, his voice a buzz in her ear.

  ‘Chev, don’t take this the wrong way, but you got like the monthlies or something?’

  ‘Fuck off, Bunny.’

  ‘Hey, I just mean you’re not your usual ball of fire today. All I
mean.’

  ‘Gimme a tag.’

  ‘655 Mo, fifteenth, reception.’

  Picked up, made it to 555 Cali, fifty-first floor. Pulled her tag and back down. The day gone gray after morning’s promise.

  ‘456 Montgomery, thirty-third, reception, go freight.’

  Pausing, her hand in the bike’s recognition-loop. ‘How come?’

  ‘Says messengers carvin’ graffiti in the passenger elevators. Go freight or they’ll toss you, be denied access, at which point Allied terminates your employment.’

  She remembered seeing Ringer’s emblem carved into the inspection plate in one of 456’s passenger elevators. Fucking Ringer. He’d defaced more elevators than anyone in history. Carried around a regular toolkit to do it with.

  456 sent her to 1 EC with a carton wider than she was supposed to accept, but that was what racks and bungies were for, and why give the cage-drivers the trade? Bunny buzzed her on her way out and gave her 50 Beale, the cafeteria on the second floor. She guessed that would be a woman’s purse, done up in a plastic bag from the kitchen, and she was right. Brown, sort of lizardskin, with a couple of green sprouts stuck in the corners of the bag. Women left their purses, remembered, called up, got the manager to send for a messenger. Good for a tip, usually. Ringer and some of the others would open them up, go through the contents, find drugs sometimes. She wouldn’t do that. She thought about the sunglasses…

  She couldn’t get a run today. There was no routing in effect at Allied, but sometimes you’d get a run by accident; pick up here, drop off there, then something here. But it was rare. When you worked for Allied you rode harder. Her record was sixteen tags in a day; like doing forty at a different company.

  She took the purse to Fulton at Masonic, got two fivers after the owner checked to see everything was there.

  ‘Restaurant’s supposed to take it to the cops,’ Chevette said. ‘We don’t like to be responsible.’ Blank look from the purse-lady, some kind of secretary. Chevette pocketed the fives.

  ‘298 Alabama,’ Bunny said, as if offering her some pearl of great price. ‘Tone those thighs…’

  Bust her ass out there to get there, then she’d pick up and do it. But she couldn’t get on top of it, today.

  The asshole’s sunglasses…

  ‘For tactical reasons,’ the blonde said, ‘we do not currently advocate the use of violence or sorcery against private individuals.’

  Chevette had just pumped back from Alabama Street, day’s last tag. The woman on the little CNN flatscreen over the door to Bunny’s pit wore something black and stretchy pulled over her face, three triangular holes cut in it. Blue letters at the bottom of the screen read FIONA X—SPOKESPERSON—SOUTH ISLAND LIBERATION FRONT.

  The overlit fluorescent corridor into Allied Messengers smelled of hot styrene, laser printers, abandoned running-shoes, and stale bag lunches, this last tugging Chevette toward memories of some unheated day-care basement in Oregon, winter’s colorless light slanting in through high dim windows. But now the street door banged open behind her, a pair of muddy size-eleven neon sneakers came pounding down the stairs, and Samuel Saladin DuPree, his cheeks speckled with crusty gray commas of road-dirt, stood grinning at her, hugely.

  ‘Happy about something, Sammy Sal?’

  Allied’s best-looking thing on two wheels, no contest whatever, DuPree was six-two of ebon electricity poured over a frame of such elegance and strength that Chevette imagined his bones as polished metal, triple-chromed, a quicksilver armature. Like those old movies with that big guy, the one who went into politics, after he’d got the meat ripped off him. Thinking about Sammy Sal’s bones made most girls want him to jump theirs, but not Chevette. He was gay, they were friends, and Chevette wasn’t too sure how she felt about all that anyway, lately.

  ‘Fact is,’ Sammy Sal said, smearing dirt from his cheek with the back of one long hand, ‘I’ve decided to kill Ringer. And the truth, y’know, it makes you free…’

  ‘Ho,’ Chevette said, ‘you musta pulled a tag over 456 today.’

  ‘I did, dear, do that thing. All the way up, in a dirty freight elevator. A slow dirty freight elevator. And why?’

  ‘’Cause Ringer’s ’graved his tag in their brass, Sal, and their rosewood, too?”

  ‘Eggs-ackly, Chevette, honey.’ Sammy Sal undid the blue and white bandanna around his neck and wiped his face with it. ‘Therefore, his ass dies screaming.’

  ‘… and must begin, now, to systematically sabotage the workplace,’ Fiona X said, ‘or be branded an enemy of the human race.’

  The door to the dispatch-pit, so thickly stapled with scheds, sub-charts, tattered Muni regs, and faxed complaints that Chevette had no idea what the surface underneath might look like, popped open. Bunny extruded his scarred and unevenly shaven head, turtle-like, blinking in the light of the corridor, and glanced up automatically, his gaze attracted by the tone of Fiona X’s sound-bite. His expression blanked at the sight of her mask, the mental channel-zap executed in less time than it had taken him to look her way. ‘You,’ he said, eyes back on Chevette, ‘Chevy. In here.’

  ‘Wait for me, Sammy Sal,’ she said.

  Bunny Malatesta had been a San Francisco bike messenger for thirty years. Would be still, if his knees and back hadn’t given out on him. He was simultaneously the best and the worst thing about messing for Allied. The best because he had a bike-map of the city hung behind his eyes, better than anything a computer could generate. He knew every building, every door, what the security was like. He had the mess game down, Bunny did, and, better still, he knew the lore, all the history, the stories that made you know you were part of something, however crazy it got, that was worth doing. He was a legend himself, Bunny, having Krypto’d the windshields of some seven police cars in the course of his riding career, a record that still stood. But he was the worst for those same reasons and more, because there wasn’t any bullshitting him at all. Any other dispatcher, you could cut yourself a little extra slack. But not Bunny. He just knew.

  Chevette followed him in. He closed the door behind her. The goggles he used for dispatching dangled around his neck, one padded eyepiece patched with cellophane tape. There were no windows in the room and Bunny kept the lights off when he was working. Half a dozen color monitors were arranged in a semicircle in front of a black swivel armchair with Bunny’s pink rubber Sacro-saver backrest strapped to it like some kind of giant bulging larva.

  Bunny rubbed his lower back with the heels of his hands. ‘Disk’s killing me,’ he said, not particularly to Chevette.

  ‘Oughta let Sammy Sal crack it for you,’ she suggested. ‘He’s real good.’

  ‘It’s cracked already, sweetheart. What’s wrong with it in the first place. Now tell me what were you doin’ over the Morrisey last night. And it better be good.’

  ‘Pulling a tag,’ Chevette said, going on automatic, the way she had to if she were going to lie and get away with it. She’d been halfway expecting something like this, but not so soon.

  She watched as Bunny took the goggles off, disconnected them, and put them on top of one of the monitors. ‘So how come you never checked back out? They call us on it, say you went in to make a delivery, they scanned your badges, you never come back out. Look, I tell ’em, I know she’s not there now, guys, ’cause I got her out Alabama Street on a call, okay?’ He was watching her.

  ‘Hey, Bunny,’ Chevette said, ‘it was my last tag, my ride was down in the basement, I saw a freight el on its way down, jumped in. I know I’m supposed to clock out at security, but I thought they’d have somebody on the parking exit, you know? I get up the ramp and there’s nobody, a car’s going out, so I deak under the barrier and I’m in the street. I shoulda gone back around and done the lobby thing?’

  ‘You know it. It’s regs.’

  ‘It was late, you know?’

  Bunny sat down, wincing, in the chair with the Sacro-saver. He cupped each knee in a big-knuckled hand and stared at her. Very un-Bunny. Like so
mething was really bothering him. Not just security grunts pissing because a mess blew the check-out off. ‘How late?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘They wanna know when you left.’

  ‘Maybe ten minutes after I went in. Fifteen tops. Basement in there’s a rat-maze.’

  ‘You went in 6:32:18,’ he said. ‘They got that when they scanned you. The tag, this lawyer, they talked to him, so they know you delivered.’ He still had that look.

  ‘Bunny, what’s the deal? Tell ’em I screwed up, is all.’

  ‘You didn’t go anywhere else? In the hotel?’

  ‘Uh-uh,’ she said, and felt this funny ripple move through her, like she’d crossed some line and couldn’t go back. ‘I gave the guy his package, Bunny.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re worrying about the guy’s package,’ Bunny said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Lookit, Chev,’ he said, ‘security guy calls, that’s one thing. Sorry, boss, won’t let it happen again. But this was somebody up in the company, IntenSecure it’s called, and he called up Wilson direct.’ Allied’s owner. ‘So I gotta make nice with Wilson and Mr. Security, I gotta have Grasso cover for me on the board and naturally he screws everything up…’

  ‘Bunny,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Hey. You’re sorry, I’m sorry, but there’s some big shit rentacop sitting behind a desk and he’s putting fucking Wilson through about what precisely did you do after you gave that lawyer his package. About what kind of employee are you exactly, how long you mess for Allied, any criminal record, any drug use, where you live.’