Roger Chi | Reading

Preface by Bruce Sterling

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless.
The triumph of these pieces was their brilliant, self-consistent evocation of a credible future. It is hard to overestimate the difficulty of this effort, which is one that many SF writers have been ducking for years. This intellectual failing accounts for the ominous proliferation of postapocalypse stories, sword-and-sorcery fantasies, and those everpresent space operas in which galactic empires slip conveniently back into barbarism. All these subgenres are products of the writers’ urgent necessity to avoid tangling with a realistic future.
In Gibson’s work we find ourselves in the streets and alleys, in a realm of sweaty, white-knuckled survival, where high tech is a constant subliminal hum, ‘like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.’

Johnny Mnemonic

The Magnetic Dog Sisters were on the door that night, and I didn’t relish trying to get out past them if things didn’t work out. They were two metres tall and thin as greyhounds. One was black and the other white, but aside from that they were as nearly identical as cosmetic surgery could make them. They’d been lovers for years and were bad news in a tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male.
And then the joke-shop thumb tip, heavy as lead, arcs out in a lightning yo-yo trick, and the invisible thread connecting it to the killer’s hand passes laterally through Ralfi’s skull, just above his eyebrows, whips up, and descends, slicing the pear-shaped torso diagonally from shoulder to rib cage. Cuts so fine that no blood flows until synapses misfire and the first tremors surrender the body to gravity.
In the narrow beam of her taped flash, he regarded us with his one eye and slowly extruded a thick length of greyish tongue, licking huge canines. I wondered how they wrote off tooth-bud transplants from Dobermans as low technology. Immunosuppressives don’t exactly grow on trees.
We’re an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified …
And that was the nature of my game, because I’d spent most of my life as a blind receptacle to be filled with other people’s knowledge and then drained, spouting synthetic languages I’d never understand. A very technical boy. Sure.
And we’re all making good money, better money than I made before, because Jones’s Squid can read the traces of anything that anyone ever stored in me, and he gives it to me on the display unit in languages I can understand. So we’re learning a lot about all my former clients. And one day I’ll have a surgeon dig all the silicon out of my amygdalae, and I’ll live with my own memories and nobody else’s, the way other people do. But not for a while.

The Gernsback Continuum

And that was my frame of mind as I made the stations of her convoluted socioarchitectural cross in my red Toyota – as I gradually tuned in to her image of a shadowy America-that-wasn’t, of Coca-Cola plants like beached submarines, and fifth-run movie houses like the temples of some lost sect that had worshipped blue mirrors and geometry. And as I moved among these secret ruins, I found myself wondering what the inhabitants of that lost future would think of the world I lived in. The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car – no wings for it – and the promised super highway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal

The Belonging Kind: by John Shirley and William Gibson

And for the first time, Coretti knew what they were, what they must be. They were the kind you see in bars who seem to have grown there, who seem genuinely at home there. Not drunks, but human fixtures. Functions of the bar. The belonging kind.

Hinterlands

Rule One: One entity per ride; no teams, no couples. Rule Two: No artificial intelligences; whatever’s out there won’t stop for a smart machine, at least not the kind we know how to build. Rule Three: Recording instruments are a waste of space; they always come back blank.
Flies in an airport, hitching rides. Flies are advised to ask too many questions; flies are advised not to try for the Big Picture. Repeated attempts in that direction invariably lead to the slow, relentless flowering of paranoia, your mind projecting huge, dark patterns on the walls of night, patterns that have a way of solidifying, becoming madness, becoming religion. Smart flies stick with Black Box theory; Black Box is the sanctioned metaphor, the Highway remaining x in every sane equation. We aren’t supposed to worry about what the Highway is, or who put it there. Instead, we concentrate on what we put into the Box and what we get back out of it. There are things we send down the Highway (a woman named Olga, her ship, so many more who’ve followed) and things that come to us (a madwoman, a seashell, artifacts, fragments of alien technologies). The Black Box theorists assure us that our primary concern is to optimise this exchange. We’re out here to see that our species gets its money’s worth. Still, certain things become increasingly evident; one of them is that we aren’t the only flies who’ve found their way into an airport. We’ve collected artifacts from at least half a dozen wildly divergent cultures. ‘More hicks,’ Charmian calls them. We’re like pack rats in the hold of a freighter, trading little pretties with rats from other ports. Dreaming of the bright lights, the big city. Keep it simple, a matter of In and Out. Leni Hofmannstahl: Out.

Red Star, Winter Orbit: by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson

Korolev dug a stranded fruit fly from his algae pudding. Its two pairs of wings and bifurcated thorax were mute testimony to Kosmograd’s high radiation levels. The insects had escaped from some forgotten experiment; generations of them had infested the station for decades.

New Rose Hotel

The New Rose Hotel is a coffin rack on the ragged fringes of Narita International. Plastic capsules a metre high and three long, stacked like surplus Godzilla teeth in a concrete lot off the main road to the airport. Each capsule has a television mounted flush with the ceiling.
Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who’s come here to identify the planet’s dominant form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged. The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form.
Djemaa-el-Fna was thick with jugglers, dancers, storytellers, small boys turning lathes with their feet, legless beggars with wooden bowls under animated holograms advertising French software.

The Winter Market

I’ve seen Rubin program his constructions to identify and verbally abuse pedestrians wearing garments by a given season’s hot designer; others attend to more obscure missions, and a few seem constructed solely to deconstruct themselves with as much attendant noise as possible. He’s like a child, Rubin; he’s also worth a lot of money in galleries in Tokyo and Paris.
Gomi. Where does the gomi stop and the world begin? The Japanese, a century ago, had already run out of gomi space around Tokyo, so they came up with a plan for creating space out of gomi. By the year 1969 they had built themselves a little island in Tokyo Bay, out of gomi, and christened it Dream Island. But the city was still pouring out its nine thousand tons per day, so they went on to build New Dream Island, and today they co-ordinate the whole process, and new Nippons rise out of the Pacific.
She couldn’t move, not without that extra skeleton, and it was jacked straight into her brain, myoelectric interface. The fragile-looking polycarbon braces moved her arms and legs, but a more subtle system handled her thin hands, galvanic inlays. I thought of frog legs twitching in a high school lab tape, then hated myself for it.
I was scared, and I’d seen enough strangers’ dreams, in the mixing room at the Autonomic Pilot, to know that most people’s inner monsters are foolish things, ludicrous in the calm light of one’s own consciousness.
You see something like that and you wonder how many thousands, maybe millions, of phenomenal artists have died mute, down the centunes, people who could never have been poets or painters or saxophone players, but who had this stuff inside, these psychic waveforms waiting for the circuitry required to tap in …
‘When you have to edit her next release. Which will almost certainly be soon, because she needs money bad. She’s taking up a lot of ROM on some corporate mainframe, and her share of Kings won’t come close to paying for what they had to do to put her there. And you’re her editor, Casey. I mean, who else?’

Dogfight: by Michael Swanwick and William Gibson

teeth so straight and white they could be used as a credit reference.
‘Hey,’ Nance said. ‘Do you mind?’‘No, I’m just—’ He fiddled with the knobs, came up with some slow, romantic bullshit. ‘There. Come on, stand up. Let’s dance.’‘Hey, you know I can’t—’‘Sure you can, sugarcakes.’ He threw her the huge teddy bear and snatched up a patchwork cotton dress from the floor. He held it by the waist and sleeve, tucking the collar under his chin. It smelled of patchouli, more faintly of sweat. ‘See, I stand over here, you stand over there. We dance. Get it?’ Blinking softly, Nance stood and clutched the bear tightly. They danced then, slowly, staring into each other’s eyes. After a while, she began to cry. But still, she was smiling.

Burning Chrome

Bobby was a cowboy. Bobby was a cracksman, a burglar, casing mankind’s extended electronic nervous system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix, monochrome nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold spiral arms of military systems.
Bobby Quine and Automatic Jack. Bobby’s the thin, pale dude with the dark glasses, and Jack’s the mean-looking guy with the myoelectric arm. Bobby’s software and Jack’s hard; Bobby punches console and Jack runs down all the little things that can give you an edge. Or, anyway, that’s what the scene watchers in the Gentleman Loser would’ve told you, before Bobby decided to burn Chrome. But they also might’ve told you that Bobby was losing his edge, slowing down. He was twenty-eight, Bobby, and that’s old for a console cowboy.
‘I’ll give you a bargain on it, Jack. For old times’ sake.’ I had to smile at that. Getting a bargain from the Finn was like God repealing the law of gravity when you have to carry a heavy suitcase down ten blocks of airport corridor.
I was still telling myself that it wasn’t Rikki who was getting to me, but what Bobby was doing with her. I’d known him for a long time, since the end of the war, and I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus fortune, versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he’d set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn’t have, everything he’d had and couldn’t keep.
I felt like a punk who’d gone out to buy a switchblade and come home with a small neutron bomb. Screwed again, I thought. What good’s a neutron bomb in a streetfight?
Black ice. Don’t think about it. Black ice. Too many stories in the Gentleman Loser; black ice is a part of the mythology. Ice that kills. Illegal, but then aren’t we all? Some kind of neural-feedback weapon, and you connect with it only once. Like some hideous Word that eats the mind from the inside out. Like an epileptic spasm that goes on and on until there’s nothing left at all …
He had the kind of uniform good looks you get after your seventh trip to the surgical boutique;
somebody had given Bobby a big roll for opening a three-second window in someone else’s ice.
We’d given the bulk of Chrome’s Zurich account to a dozen world charities. There was too much there to move, and we knew we had to break her, burn her straight down, or she might come after us. We took less than ten per cent for ourselves and shot it through the Long Hum setup in Macao. They took sixty per cent of that for themselves and kicked what was left back to us through the most convoluted sector of the Hong Kong exchange. It took an hour before our money started to reach the two accounts we’d opened in Zurich.
I picked up the phone and punched the number for her airline. I gave them her real name, her flight number. ‘She’s changing that,’ I said, ‘to Chiba City. That’s right. Japan.’ I thumbed my credit card into the slot and punched my ID code. ‘First class.’ Distant hum as they scanned my credit records. ‘Make that a return ticket.’ But I guess she cashed the return fare, or else she didn’t need it, because she hasn’t come back. And sometimes late at night I’ll pass a window with posters of simstim stars, all those beautiful, identical eyes staring back at me out of faces that are nearly as identical, and sometimes the eyes are hers, but none of the faces are, none of them ever are, and I see her far out on the edge of all this sprawl of night and cities, and then she waves goodbye.