Mona Lisa Overdrive

by Willaim Gibson

  He’d headed south then, without knowing it, and found Factory.

  "I’ll never have another chance," Gentry said. Slick stared at the taut face, the eyes wide with desperation. "I’ll never see it . . ."

  And Slick remembered the time Gentry’d hit him, how he’d looked down at the wrench and felt . . . Well, Cherry wasn’t right about them, but there was something else there, he didn’t know what to call it. He snatched the trode-net with his left hand and shoved Gentry hard in the chest with his right. "Shut up! Shut the fuck up!" Gentry fell back against the steel table’s edge.

  Slick cursed him softly as he fumbled the delicate net of contact dermatrodes across his forehead and temples.

  Jacked in.

  His boots crunched gravel.

  Opened his eyes and looked down; the gravel drive smooth in the dawn, cleaner than anything in Dog Solitude. He looked up and saw where it curved away, and beyond green and spreading trees the pitched slate roof of a house half the size of Factory. There were statues near him in the long wet grass. A deer made of iron, and a broken figure of a man’s body carved from white stone, no head or arms or legs. Birds were singing and that was the only sound.

  He started walking up the drive, toward the gray house, because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. When he got to the head of the drive, he could see past the house to smaller buildings and a broad flat field of grass where gliders where staked against the wind.

  Fairytale, he thought, looking up at the mansion’s broad stone brow, the leaded diamond panes; like some vid he’d seen when he was little. Were there really people who lived in places like this? But it ‘s not a place, he reminded himself, it only feels like it is.

  "Gentry," he said, "get my ass out of this, okay?"

  He studied the backs of his hands. Scars, ingrained grime, black half-moons of grease under his broken nails. The grease got in and made them soft, so they broke easy.

  He started to feel stupid, standing there. Maybe somebody was watching him from the house. "Fuck it," he said, and started up the broad flagstone walk, unconsciously hitching his stride into the swagger he’d learned in the Deacon Blues.

  The door had this thing fastened to a central panel: a hand, small and graceful, holding a sphere the size of a poolball, all cast in iron. Hinged at the wrist so you could raise it and bring it down. He did. Hard. Twice, then twice again. Nothing happened. The doorknob was brass, floral detail worn almost invisible by years of use. It turned easily. He opened the door.

  He blinked at a wealth of color and texture; surfaces of dark polished wood, black and white marble, rugs with a thousand soft colors that glowed like church windows, polished silver, mirrors . . . He grinned at the soft shock of it, his eyes pulled from one new sight to another, so many things, objects he had no name for . . .

  "You looking for anyone in particular, Jack?"

  The man stood in front of a vast fireplace, wearing tight black jeans and a white T-shirt. His feet were bare and he held a fat glass bulb of liquor in his right hand. Slick blinked at him.

  "Shit," Slick said, "you’re him . . ."

  The man swirled the brown stuff up around the edges of the glass and took a swallow. "I expected Afrika to pull something like this eventually," he said, "but somehow, buddy, you don’t look like his style of help."

  "You’re the Count."

  "Yeah," he said, "I’m the Count. Who the fuck are you?"

  "Slick. Slick Henry."

  He laughed. "Want some cognac, Slick Henry?" He gestured with the glass toward a piece of polished wooden furniture where ornate bottles stood in a row, each one with a little silver tag hung around it on a chain.

  Slick shook his head.

  The man shrugged. "Can’t get drunk on it anyway . . . Pardon my saying so, Slick, but you look like shit. Am I correct in guessing that you are not a part of Kid Afrika’s operation? And if not, just what exactly are you doing here?"

  "Gentry sent me."

  "Gentry who?"

  "You’re the guy on the stretcher, right?"

  "The guy on the stretcher is me. Where, exactly, right this minute, is that stretcher, Slick?"

  "Gentry’s."

  "Where’s that?"

  "Factory."

  "And where is that? "

  "Dog Solitude."

  "And how did I happen to get there, wherever that is?"

  "Kid Afrika, he brought you. Brought you with this girl name of Cherry, right? See, I owed him a favor, so he wanted me to put you up awhile, you an’ Cherry, and she’s taking care of you."

  "You called me Count, Slick . . ."

  "Cherry said Kid called you that once."

  "Tell me, Slick, did the Kid seem worried when he brought me?"

  "Cherry thought he got scared, back in Cleveland."

  "I’m sure he did. Who’s this Gentry? A friend of yours?"

  "Factory’s his place. I live there too . . ."

  "This Gentry, is he a cowboy, Slick? A console jockey? I mean, if you’re here, he must be technical, right?"

  Now it was Slick’s turn to shrug. "Gentry’s, like, he’s an artist, kind of. Has these theories. Hard to explain. He rigged a set of splitters to that thing on the stretcher, what you’re jacked into. First he tried to get an image on a holo rig, but there was just this monkey thing, sort of shadow, so he talked me into . . ."

  "Jesus . . . Well, never mind. This factory you’re talking about, it’s out in the sticks somewhere? It’s relatively isolated?"

  Slick nodded.

  "And this Cherry, she’s some kind of hired nurse?"

  "Yeah. Had a med-tech’s ticket, she said."

  "And nobody’s come looking for me yet?"

  "No."

  "That’s good, Slick. Because if anyone does, other than my lying rat-bastard friend Kid Afrika, you folks could find yourselves in serious trouble."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. Listen to me, okay? I want you to remember this. If any company shows up at this factory of yours, your only hope in hell is to get me jacked into the matrix. You got that?"

  "How come you’re the Count? I mean, what’s it mean?"

  "Bobby. My name’s Bobby. Count was my handle once, that’s all. You think you’ll remember what I told you?"

  Slick nodded again.

  "Good." He put his glass down on the thing with all the fancy bottles. "Listen," he said. From the open door came the sound of tires over gravel. "Know who that is, Slick? That’s Angela Mitchell."

  Slick turned. Bobby the Count was looking out at the drive.

  "Angie Mitchell? The stim star? She’s in this thing too?"

  "In a manner of speaking, Slick, in a manner of speaking . . ."

  Slick saw the long black car slide by. "Hey," he began, "Count, I mean Bobby, what d — "

  "Easy," Gentry was saying, "just sit back. Easy. Easy . . ."

  25

  Back East

  While Kelly and his assistants were assembling her wardrobe for the trip, she felt as though the house itself were stirring around her, preparing for one of its many brief periods of vacancy.

  She could hear their voices, from where she sat in the living room, their laughter. One of the assistants was a girl in a blue polycarbon exo that allowed her to carry the Hermés wardrobe cases as though they were weightless blocks of foam, the humming skeleton suit padding softly down the stairs on its blunt dinosaur feet. Blue skeleton, leather coffins.

  Now Porphyre stood in the doorway. "Missy ready?" He wore a long, loose coat cut from tissue-thin black leather; rhinestone spurs glittered above the heels of black patent boots.

  "Porphyre," she said, "you’re in mufti. We have an entrance to make, in New York."

  "The cameras are for you."

  "Yes," she said, "for my reinsertion."

  "Porphyre will keep well in the rear."

  "I’ve never known you to worry about upstaging anyone."

  He grinned, exposing sculpted teeth, streamlined teeth, an ava
nt-garde dentist’s fantasy of what teeth might be like in a faster, more elegant species.

  "Danielle Stark will be flying with us." She heard the sound of the approaching helicopter. "She’s meeting us at LAX."

  "We’ll strangle her," he said, his tone confidential, as he helped her on with the blue fox Kelly had selected. "If we promise to hint to the fax that the motive was sexual, she might even decide to play along . . ."

  "You’re horrid."

  "Danielle is a horror, missy."

  "Look who’s talking."

  "Ah," said the hairdresser, narrowing his eyes, "but my soul is a child’s."

  Now the helicopter was landing.

  Danielle Stark, associated with stim versions of both Vogue-Nippon and Vogue-Europa, was widely rumored to be in her late eighties. If it were true, Angie thought, covertly inspecting the journalist’s figure as the three of them boarded the Lear, Danielle and Porphyre would be on par for overall surgical modification. Apparently in her willowy early thirties, her only obvious augments were a pair of pale blue Zeiss implants. A young French fashion reporter had once referred to these as "modishly outdated"; the reporter, Net legend said, had never worked again.

  And soon, Angie knew, Danielle would want to talk drugs, celebrity drugs, the cornflower eyes schoolgirl-wide to take it all in.

  Under Porphyre’s daunting gaze, Danielle managed to contain herself until they were in cruise mode somewhere over Utah.

  "I was hoping," she began, "that I wouldn’t have to be the one to bring it up."

  "Danielle," Angie countered, "I am sorry. How thoughtless." She touched the veneered face of the Hosaka flight kitchen, which purred softly and began to dispense tiny plates of tea-smoked duck, gulf oysters on black-pepper toast, crayfish flan, sesame pancakes . . . Porphyre, taking Angie’s cue, produced a bottle of chilled Chablis — Danielle’s favorite, Angie now recalled. Someone — Swift? — had also remembered.

  "Drugs," Danielle said, fifteen minutes later, finishing the last of the duck.

  "Don’t worry," Porphyre assured her. "When you get to New York, they have anything you want."

  Danielle smiled. "You’re so amusing. Do you know I’ve a copy of your birth certificate? I know your real name." She looked at him meaningfully, still smiling.

  "‘sticks and stones,’ " he said, topping up her glass.

  "Interesting notation regarding congenital defects." She sipped her wine.

  "Congenital, genital . . . We all change so much these days, don’t we? Who’s been doing your hair, dear?" He leaned forward. "Your saving grace, Danielle, is that you make the rest of your kind look vaguely human."

  Danielle smiled.

  The interview itself went smoothly enough; Danielle was too skilled an interviewer to allow her feints to cross the pain threshold, where they might rally serious resistance. But when she brushed a fingertip back across her temple, depressing a subdermal switch that deactivated her recording gear, Angie tensed for the real onslaught.

  "Thank you," Danielle said. "The rest of the flight, of course, is off the record."

  "Why don’t you just have another bottle or two and turn in?" Porphyre asked.

  "What I don’t see, dear," Danielle said, ignoring him, "is why you bothered . . ."

  "Why I bothered, Danielle?"

  "Going to that tedious clinic at all. You’ve said it didn’t affect your work. You’ve also said there was no ‘high,’ not in the usual sense." She giggled. "Though you do maintain that it was such a terribly addictive substance. Why did you decide to quit?"

  "It was terribly expensive . . ."

  "In your case, surely, that’s academic."

  True, Angie thought, though a week of it did cost something in the vicinity of your annual salary.

  "I suppose I began to resent paying to feel normal. Or a poor approximation of normal."

  "Did you build up a tolerance?"

  "No."

  "How odd."

  "Not really. These designers provide substances that supposedly bypass the traditional drawbacks."

  "Ah. But what about the new drawbacks, the now drawbacks?" Danielle poured herself more wine. "I’ve heard another version of all this, of course."

  "You have?"

  "Of course I have. What it was, who made it, why you quit."

  "Yes?"

  "It was an antipsychotic, produced in Sense/Net’s own labs. You quit taking it because you’d rather be crazy."

  Porphyre gently took the glass from Danielle’s hand as her lids fluttered heavily over the brilliant blue eyes. "Nightie-night, dear," he said. Danielle’s eyes closed and she began to snore gently.

  "Porphyre, what —?"

  "I dosed her wine," he said. "She won’t know the difference, missy. She won’t remember anything she didn’t record . . ." He grinned broadly. "You really didn’t want to have to listen to this bitch all the way back, did you?"

  "But she’ll know, Porphyre!"

  "No, she won’t. We’ll tell her she killed three bottles by herself and made a disgusting mess in the washroom. And she’ll feel like it, too." He giggled.

  Danielle Stark was still snoring, quite loudly now, in one of the two swing-down bunks in the rear of the cabin.

  "Porphyre," Angie said, "do you think she might’ve been right?"

  The hairdresser gazed at her with his gorgeous, inhuman eyes. "And you wouldn’t have known?"

  "I don’t know . . ."

  He sighed. "Missy worries too much. You’re free now. Enjoy it."

  "I do hear voices, Porphyre."

  "Don’t we all, missy?"

  "No," she said, "not like mine. Do you know anything about African religions, Porphyre?"

  He smirked. "I’m not African."

  "But when you were a child . . ."

  "When I was a child," Porphyre said, "I was white."

  "Oh . . ."

  He laughed. "Religions, missy?"

  "Before I came to the Net, I had friends. In New Jersey. They were black and . . . religious."

  He smirked again and rolled his eyes. "Hoodoo sign, missy? Chickenbone and pennyroyal oil?"

  "You know it isn’t like that."

  "And if I do?"

  "Don’t tease me, Porphyre. I need you."

  "Missy has me. And yes, I know what you mean. And those are your voices?"

  "They were. After I began to use the dust, they went away . . ."

  "And now?"

  "They’re gone." But the impulse was past now, and she cringed from trying to tell him about Grande Brigitte and the drug in the jacket.

  "Good," he said. "That’s good, missy."

  The Lear began its descent over Ohio. Porphyre was staring at the bulkhead, still as a statue. Angie looked out at the cloud-country below as it rose toward them, remembering the game she’d played on airplanes as a child, sending an imaginary Angie out to romp through cloud-canyons and over fluffy peaks grown magically solid. Those planes had belonged to Maas-Neotek, she supposed. From the Maas corporate jets she’d gone on to Net Lears. She knew commercial airliners only as locations for her stims: New York to Paris on the maiden flight of JAL’s restored Concorde, with Robin and a hand-picked party of Net people.

  Descending. Were they over New Jersey yet? Did the children swarming the rooftop playgrounds of Beauvoir’s arcology hear the Lear’s engine? Did the sound of her passage sweep faintly over the condos of Bobby’s childhood? How unthinkably intricate the world was, in sheer detail of mechanism, when Sense/Net’s corporate will shook tiny bones in the ears of unknown, unknowing children . . .

  "Porphyre knows certain things," he said, very softly. "But Porphyre needs time to think, missy . . ."

  They were banking for the final approach.

  26

  Kuromaku

  And Sally was silent, on the street and in the cab, all the long cold way back to their hotel.

  Sally and Swain were being blackmailed by Sally’s enemy "up the well." Sally was being forced to kidnap Ang
ie Mitchell. The thought of someone’s abducting the Sense/Net star struck Kumiko as singularly unreal, as if someone were plotting to assassinate a figure out of myth.

  The Finn had implied that Angie herself was already involved, in some mysterious way, but he had used words and idioms Kumiko hadn’t understood. Something in cyberspace; people forming pacts with a thing or things there. The Finn had known a boy who became Angie’s lover; but wasn’t Robin Lanier her lover? Kumiko’s mother had allowed her to run several of the Angie and Robin stims. The boy had been a cowboy, a data thief, like Tick in London . . .

  And what of the enemy, the blackmailer? She was mad, Finn said, and her madness had brought about the decline of her family’s fortunes. She lived alone, in her ancestral home, the house called Straylight. What had Sally done to earn her enmity? Had she really killed this woman’s father? And who were the others, the others . . .

  And had Sally learned what she’d wanted to learn, in visiting the Finn? Kumiko had waited, finally, for some pronouncement from the armored shrine, but the exchange had wound down to nothing, to a gaijin ritual of joking good-byes.

  In the hotel lobby, Petal was waiting in a blue velour armchair. Dressed for travel, his bulk encased in three-piece gray wool, he rose from the chair like some strange balloon as they entered, eyes mild as ever behind steel-rimmed glasses.

  "Hello," he said, and coughed. "Swain’s sent me after you. Only to mind the girl, you see."

  "Take her back," Sally said. "Now. Tonight."

  "Sally! No!" But Sally’s hand was already locked firmly around Kumiko’s upper arm, pulling her toward the entrance to the darkened lounge off the lobby.

  "Wait there," Sally snapped at Petal. "Listen to me," she said, tugging Kumiko around a corner, into shadow. "You’re going back. I can’t keep you here now."