Mona Lisa Overdrive

by Willaim Gibson

  She saw herself place the packet on the white marble ledge, position the charger above it, remove a derm from its bubble and insert it. She saw the red flash of a diode when the charger had drawn off a dose; she saw herself remove the derm, balancing it like a white plastic leech on the tip of her index finger, its moist inner surface glittering with minute beads of DMSO —

  She turned, took three steps to the toilet, and dropped the unopened packet into the bowl. It floated there like a toy raft, the drug still perfectly dry. Perfectly. Her hand shaking, she found a stainless nailfile and knelt on the white tile. She had to close her eyes when she held the packet and drove the tip of the file against the seam, twisting. The file clattered on tile as she touched the flush button and the two halves of the empty packet vanished. She rested her forehead against cool enamel, then forced herself to get up, go to the sink, and carefully wash her hands.

  Because she wanted, now she really knew she wanted, to lick her fingers.

  Later that day, in a gray afternoon, she found a corrugated plastic shipping canister in the garage, carried it up to the bedroom, and began to pack Bobby’s remaining things. There wasn’t much: a pair of leather jeans he hadn’t liked, some shirts he’d either discarded or forgotten, and, in the teak bureau’s bottom drawer, a cyberspace deck. It was an Ono-Sendai, hardly more than a toy. It lay amid a tangle of black leads, a cheap set of stim-trodes, a greasy-looking plastic tube of saline paste.

  She remembered the deck he’d used, the one he’d taken with him, a gray factory-custom Hosaka with unmarked keys. It was a cowboy’s deck; he’d insisted on traveling with it, even though it caused problems during customs checks. Why, she wondered, had he bought the Ono-Sendai? And why had he abandoned it? She was seated on the edge of the bed; she lifted the deck from the drawer and put it on her lap.

  Her father, long ago, in Arizona, had cautioned her against jacking in. You don’t need it, he’d said. And she hadn’t, because she’d dreamed cyberspace, as though the neon gridlines of the matrix waited for her behind her eyelids.

  There’s no there, there. They taught that to children, explaining cyberspace. She remembered a smiling tutor’s lecture in the arcology’s executive crèche, images shifting on a screen: pilots in enormous helmets and clumsy-looking gloves, the neuroelectronically primitive "virtual world" technology linking them more effectively with their planes, pairs of miniature video terminals pumping them a computer-generated flood of combat data, the vibrotactile feedback gloves providing a touch-world of studs and triggers . . . As the technology evolved, the helmets shrank, the video terminals atrophied . . .

  She leaned forward and picked up the trode-set, shook it to free its leads from the tangle.

  No there, there.

  She spread the elastic headband and settled the trodes across her temples — one of the world’s characteristic human gestures, but one she seldom performed. She tapped the Ono-Sendai’s battery-test stud. Green for go. She touched the power stud and the bedroom vanished behind a colorless wall of sensory static. Her head filled with a torrent of white sound.

  Her fingers found a random second stud and she was catapulted through the static wall, into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the bright grid of the matrix ranged around her like an infinite cage.

  "Angela," the house said, its voice quiet but compelling, "I have a call from Hilton Swift . . ."

  "Executive override?" She was eating baked beans and toast at the kitchen counter.

  "No," it said, confidingly.

  "Change your tone," she said, around a mouthful of beans. "Something with an edge of anxiety."

  "Mr. Swift is waiting," the house said nervously.

  "Better," she said, carrying bowl and plate to the washer, "but I want something closer to genuine hysteria . . ."

  "Will you take the call?" The voice was choked with tension.

  "No," she said, "but keep your voice that way, I like it."

  She walked into the living room, counting under her breath. Twelve, thirteen . . .

  "Angela," the house said gently, "I have a call from Hilton Swift — "

  "On executive override," Swift said.

  She made a farting sound with her lips.

  "You know I respect your need to be alone, but I worry about you."

  "I’m fine, Hilton. You needn’t worry. Bye-bye."

  "You stumbled this morning, on the beach. You seemed disoriented. Your nose began to bleed."

  "I had a nosebleed."

  "We want you to have another physical . . ."

  "Great."

  "You accessed the matrix today, Angie. We logged you in the BAMA industrial sector."

  "Is that what it was?"

  "Do you want to talk about it?"

  "There isn’t anything to talk about. I was just screwing around. You want to know, though? I was packing some crap Bobby left here. You’d have approved, Hilton! I found a deck of his and I tried it. I punched a key, sat there looking around, jacked out."

  "I’m sorry, Angie."

  "For what?"

  "For disturbing you. I’ll go now."

  "Hilton, do you know where Bobby is?"

  "No."

  "You telling me Net security hasn’t kept tabs on him?"

  "I’m telling you I don’t know, Angie. That’s the truth."

  "Could you find out, if you wanted to?"

  Another pause. "I don’t know. If I could, I’m not sure that I would."

  "Thanks. Goodbye, Hilton."

  "Goodbye, Angie."

  She sat on the deck that night, in the dark, watching the fleas dance against floodlit sand. Thinking of Brigitte and her warning, of the drug in the jacket and the derm charger in the medicine cabinet. Thinking of cyberspace and the sad confinement she’d felt with the Ono-Sendai, so far from the freedom of the loa.

  Thinking of the other’s dreams, of corridors winding in upon themselves, muted tints of ancient carpet . . . An old man, a head made of jewels, a taut pale face with eyes that were mirrors . . . And a beach in the wind and dark.

  Not this beach, not Malibu.

  And somewhere, in a black California morning, some hour before dawn, amid the corridors, the galleries, the faces of dream, fragments of conversation she half-recalled, waking to pale fog against the windows of the master bedroom, she prized something free and dragged it back through the wall of sleep.

  Rolling over, fumbling through a bedside drawer, finding a Porsche pen, a present from an assistant grip, she inscribed her treasure on the glossy back of an Italian fashion magazine:

  T-A

  "Call Continuity," she told the house, over a third cup of coffee.

  "Hello, Angie," said Continuity.

  "That orbital sequence we did, two years ago. The Belgian’s yacht . . ." She sipped her cooling coffee. "What was the name of the place he wanted to take me? The one Robin decided was too tacky."

  "Freeside," the expert system said.

  "Who’s taped there?"

  "Tally Isham recorded nine sequences in Freeside."

  "It wasn’t too tacky for her?"

  "That was fifteen years ago. It was fashionable."

  "Get me those sequences."

  "Done."

  "Bye."

  "Goodbye, Angie."

  Continuity was writing a book. Robin Lanier had told her about it. She’d asked what it was about. It wasn’t like that, he’d said. It looped back into itself and constantly mutated; Continuity was always writing it. She asked why. But Robin had already lost interest: because Continuity was an AI, and AIs did things like that.

  Her call to Continuity cost her a call from Swift.

  "Angie, about that physical . . ."

  "Haven’t you scheduled it yet? I want to get back to work. I called Continuity this morning. I’m thinking about an orbital sequence. I’m going over some things Tally did; I may get some ideas."

  There was a silence. She wanted to laugh. It was difficult to get a silence out of Swif
t. "You’re sure, Angie? That’s wonderful, but is it really what you want to do?"

  "I’m all better, Hilton. I’m just fine. I want to work. Vacation’s over. Have Porphyre come out here and do my hair before I have to see anyone."

  "You know, Angie," he said, "this makes all of us very happy."

  "Call Porphyre. Set up the physical." Coup-poudre. Who, Hilton? Maybe you?

  He had the resources, she thought, half an hour later, as she paced the fogbound deck. Her addiction hadn’t threatened the Net, hadn’t affected her output. There were no physical side effects. If there had been, Sense/ Net would never have allowed her to begin. The drug’s designer, she thought. The designer would know. And never tell her, even if she could reach him, which she doubted she could. Suppose, she thought, her hands on the rust of the railing, that he hadn’t been the designer? That the molecule had been designed by someone else, to his own ends?

  "Your hairdresser," the house said.

  She went inside.

  Porphyre was waiting, swathed in muted jersey, something from the Paris season. His face, as smooth in repose as polished ebony, split into a delighted smirk when he saw her. "Missy," he scolded, "you look like homemade shit."

  She laughed. Porphyre clucked and tutted, came forward to flick his long fingers at Angie’s bangs with mock revulsion. "Missy was a bad girl. Porphyre told you those drugs were nasty!"

  She looked up at him. He was very tall, and, she knew, enormously strong. Like a greyhound on steroids, someone had once said. His depilated skull displayed a symmetry unknown to nature.

  "You okay?" he asked, in his other voice, the manic brio shut off as if someone had thrown a switch.

  "I’m fine."

  "Did it hurt?"

  "Yeah. It hurt."

  "You know," he said, touching her chin lightly with a fingertip, "nobody could ever see what you got out of that shit. It didn’t seem to get you high . . ."

  "It wasn’t supposed to. It was just like being here, being there, only you didn’t have to — "

  "Feel it as much?"

  "Yes."

  He nodded, slowly. "Then that was some bad shit."

  "Fuck it," she said. "I’m back."

  His smirk returned. "Let’s wash your hair."

  "I washed it yesterday!"

  "What in? No! Don’t tell me!" He shooed her toward the stairwell.

  In the white-tiled bathroom, he massaged something into her scalp.

  "Have you seen Robin lately?"

  He sluiced cool water through her hair. "Mistah Lanier is in London, missy. Mistah Lanier and I aren’t currently on speaking terms. Sit up now." He raised the back of the chair and draped a towel around her neck.

  "Why not?" She felt herself warming to the Net gossip that was Porphyre’s other specialty.

  "Because," the hairdresser said, his tone carefully even as he ran a comb back through her hair, "he had some bad things to say about Angela Mitchell while she was off in Jamaica getting her little head straight."

  It wasn’t what she’d expected. "He did?"

  "Didn’t he just, missy." He began to cut her hair, using the scissors that were one of his professional trademarks; he refused to use a laser pencil, claimed never to have touched one.

  "Are you joking, Porphyre?"

  "No. He wouldn’t say those things to me, but Porphyre hears, Porphyre always hears. He left for London the morning after you got here."

  "And what was it you heard he’d said?"

  "That you’re crazy. On shit or off. That you hear voices. That the Net psychs know."

  Voices . . . "Who told you that?" She tried to turn in the chair.

  "Don’t move your head. There." He went back to his work. "I can’t say. Trust me."

  There were a number of calls, after Porphyre left. Her production crew, eager to say hello.

  "No more calls this afternoon," she told the house. "I’ll run the Tally sequences upstairs."

  She found a bottle of Corona at the rear of the fridge and took it to the master bedroom. The stim unit in the teak headboard was equipped with studio-grade trodes that hadn’t been there when she’d left for Jamaica. Net technicians periodically upgraded equipment in the house. She had a swig of beer, put the bottle on the bedside table, and lay down with the trodes across her forehead. "Okay," she said, "hit me."

  Into Tally-flesh, Tally-breath.

  How did I ever replace you? she wondered, overcome by the former star’s physical being. Do I give people this same pleasure?

  Tally-Angie looking out across a vine-hung chasm that was also a boulevard, glancing up to the inverse horizon, squares of distant tennis courts, Freeside’s "sun" an axial thread of brilliance overhead . . .

  "Fast forward," she told the house.

  Into smooth-pumping muscle and a blur of concrete, Tally hurling her cycle around a low-grav velodrome . . .

  "Fast forward."

  A dining scene, tension of velvet straps across her shoulders, the young man across the table leaning forward to pour more wine . . .

  "Fast forward."

  Linen sheets, a hand between her legs, purple twilight through plate glass, sound of running water . . .

  "Reverse. The restaurant."

  The red wine gurgling into her glass . . .

  "Little more. Hold it. There."

  Tally’s eyes had been focused on the boy’s tanned wrist, not on the bottle.

  "I want a graphic of the visual," she said, pulling off the trodes. She sat up and took a swallow of beer, which mingled weirdly with the ghost-flavor of Tally’s recorded wine.

  The printer downstairs chimed softly as it completed its task. She forced herself to take the stairs slowly, but when she reached the printer, in the kitchen, the image disappointed her.

  "Can you clear this up?" she asked the house. "I want to be able to read the label on the bottle."

  "Justifying image," the house said, "and rotating target object eight degrees."

  The printer hummed softly as the new graphic was extruded. Angie found her treasure before the machine could chime, her dream-sigil in brown ink: T-A.

  They’d had their own vineyards, she thought.

  Tessier-Ashpool S.A., the typeface regal and spidery.

  "Gotcha," she whispered.

  8

  Texas Radio

  Mona could see the sun through a couple of rips in the black plastic they kept taped over the window. She hated the squat too much to stay there when she was awake or straight, and now she was both.

  She got quietly out of bed, wincing when her bare heel brushed the floor, and fumbled for her plastic thongs. The place was dirty; you could probably get tetanus from leaning up against the wall. Made her skin crawl to think about it. Stuff like that didn’t seem to bother Eddy; he was too far gone in his schemes to notice his surroundings much. And he always managed to keep clean, somehow, like a cat. He was cat-clean, never a fleck of dirt under his polished nails. She figured he probably spent most of what she earned on his wardrobe, although it wouldn’t have occurred to her to question the fact. She was sixteen and SINless, Mona, and this older trick had told her once that that was a song, "Sixteen and SINless." Meant she hadn’t been assigned a SIN when she was born, a Single Identification Number, so she’d grown up on the outside of most official systems. She knew that it was supposed to be possible to get a SIN, if you didn’t have one, but it stood to reason you’d have to go into a building somewhere and talk to a suit, and that was a long way from Mona’s idea of a good time or even normal behavior.

  She had a drill for getting dressed in the squat, and she could do it in the dark. You got your thongs on, after giving them a quick knock together to dislodge possible crawlies, and then you walked over to where you knew there was a roll of old fax on a Styrofoam crate beside the window. You peeled off about a meter of fax, maybe a day and a half of Asahi Shimbun, folded and creased it, put it down on the floor. Then you could stand on it, get the plastic bag from beside the crate
, undo the twist of wire that held it shut, and find the clothes you wanted. When you stepped out of the thongs to put your pants on, you knew you’d be stepping on fresh fax. It was an article of faith with Mona that nothing was going to wander across the fax in the time it took her to step into a pair of jeans and get the thongs back on.

  You could put on a shirt or whatever, carefully reseal the bag, and get out of there. Makeup, when required, went on in the corridor outside; there was some mirror left, beside the derelict elevator, a Fuji biofluorescent strip glued above it.

  There was a strong piss smell beside the elevator this morning, so she decided to skip the makeup.

  You never saw anybody in the building, but you heard them sometimes; music through a closed door, or footsteps just gone around a corner at the far end of a corridor. Well, that made sense; Mona had no desire to meet her neighbors either.

  She took the stairs down three flights and into the gaping dark of the underground garage. She had her flashlight in her hand, found her way with six quick little blinks that steered her around stagnant puddles and dangling strands of dead optic cable, up the concrete steps and out into the alley. You could smell the beach, sometimes, in the alley, if the wind was right, but today it just smelled of garbage. The side of the squat towered away above her, so she moved fast, before some asshole decided to drop a bottle or worse. Once she was out on the Avenue, she slowed, but not too much; she was conscious of the cash in her pocket, and full of plans for spending it. Wouldn’t do to get taken off, not when it looked like Eddy had wrangled them some kind of ticket out. She alternated between telling herself it was a sure thing, that they were practically gone, and warning herself not to get her hopes up. She knew Eddy’s sure things: hadn’t Florida been one of them? How it was warm in Florida and the beaches were beautiful and it was full of cute guys with money, just the spot for a little working vacation that had already stretched into the longest month Mona could remember. Well, it was fucking hot in Florida, like a sauna. The only beaches that weren’t private were polluted, dead fish rolling belly-up in the shallows. Maybe the private stretches were the same, but you couldn’t see them, just the chainlink and the guards in shorts and cop shirts standing around. Eddy’d get excited by the weapons the guards carried and describe each one to her in numbing detail. He didn’t have a gun himself, though, not as far as she knew, and Mona figured that was a good thing. Sometimes you couldn’t even smell the dead fish, because there was another smell, a chlorine smell that burned the roof of your mouth, something from the factories up the coast. If there were cute guys, they were still tricks, and the ones down here weren’t exactly offering to pay double.