Roger Chi | Reading

Dedication

COUNT ZERO INTERRUPT– On receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero.

1 Smooth-Running Gun

He didn’t see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco façade of a place called the Khush- Oil Hotel. Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. The Dutch surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner hadn’t made it out of Palam International on that first flight, and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support vat.
It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned a square metre of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark- cartilage polysaccharides. They bought eyes and genitals on the open market. The eyes were green.
He flew on. His credit chip was a rectangle of black mirror, edged with gold. People behind counters smiled when they saw it, nodded. Doors opened, closed behind him. Wheels left ferroconcrete, drinks arrived, dinner was served.
Turner had been a soldier in his own right for most of his adult life, although he’d never worn a uniform. A mercenary, his employers vast corporations warring covertly for the control of entire economies. He was a specialist in the extraction of top executives and research people. The multinationals he worked for would never admit that men like Turner existed . . .

2 Marly

The receptionist in the cool grey anteroom of the Galerie Duperey might well have grown there, a lovely and likely poisonous plant, rooted behind a slab of polished marble inlaid with an enamelled keyboard.
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human. A wing of night swept Barcelona’s sky, like the twitch of a vast slow shutter, and Virek and Güdell were gone, and she found herself seated again on the low leather bench, staring at torn sheets of stained cardboard.

5 The Job

She wondered how powerful money could actually be, if one had enough of it, really enough. She supposed that only the Vireks of the world could really know, and very likely they were functionally incapable of knowing; asking Virek would be like interrogating a fish in order to learn more about water. Yes, my dear, it’s wet; yes, my child, it’s certainly warm, scented, scratchy-towelled.
It was wrapped in a single sheet of handmade paper, dark grey, folded and tucked in that mysterious Japanese way that required neither glue nor string, but she knew that once she’d opened it, she’d never get it folded again.

6 Barrytown

He knew her, yeah, how she’d come through the door with a wrapped bottle under her arm, not even take her coat off, just go straight over and jack into the Hitachi, soap her brains out good for six solid hours. Her eyes would unfocus, and sometimes, if it was a really good episode, she’d drool a little. About every twenty minutes she’d manage to remember to take a ladylike nip out of the bottle.
The dumpster was overflowing with a varied hash of industrial scrap. Barrytown had its share of grey-legal manufacturers, part of the ‘shadow economy’ the news faces liked to talk about, but Bobby never paid much attention to news faces. Biz. It was all just biz . . .
The majority approached the Gothick ideal: tall, lean, muscular, but touched by a certain gaunt restlessness, young athletes in the early stages of consumption. The graveyard pallor was mandatory, and Gothick hair was by definition black. Bobby knew that the few who couldn’t warp their bodies to fit the subcultural template were best avoided; a short Gothick was trouble, a fat Gothick homicidal.
If he’d been sussed, after his attempted run, they’d have his chip number by now; using it would spotlight him for anyone tracking him in cyberspace, pick him out in the Barrytown grid like a highway flare in a dark football stadium.
He had his cash money, but you couldn’t pay for food with that. It wasn’t actually illegal to have the stuff, it was just that nobody ever did anything legitimate with it.
In fact, up until he’d started hotdogging, he’d felt like he knew about as much as he needed to. And that was what the Gothicks were like, and that was why the Gothicks would stay here and burn themselves down on dust, or get chopped out by Kasuals, and the process of attrition would produce the percentage of them who’d somehow become the next wave of childbearing, condo-buying Barrytowners, and the whole thing could go round again . . .
He was like a kid who’d grown up beside an ocean, taking it as much for granted as he took the sky, but knowing nothing of currents, shipping routes, or the ins and outs of weather. He’d used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasn’t space, mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline.
The Asahi Shimbun fax was still rolling down behind its little window, and he stepped closer in time to see the first report of the bombing of A Block, Level 3, Covina Concourse Courts, Barrytown, New Jersey . . . Then it was gone, past, and there was a story about the formal funeral of the Cleveland Yakuza boss. Strictly trad. They all carried black umbrellas. He’d lived all his life in 503, A Block.

9 Up the Projects

Delicately, with thumb and forefinger, he drew out a length of some sort of brown, beaded plastic. Minute points of light flashed along its edges and seemed to quiver and shift. ‘Claw,’ he said, and with his other hand thumbed some sort of integral cutter in the sealed blue spool. Now the length of beaded stuff swung free and began to writhe. ‘Good shit,’ he said, bringing the thing into Bobby’s line of sight. ‘New. What they use in Chiba now.’ It was brown, headless, each bead a body segment, each segment edged with pale shining legs. Then, with a conjurer’s flick of his green-gloved wrists, he lay the centipede down the length of the open wound and pinched delicately at the final segment, the one nearest Bobby’s face. As the segment came away, it withdrew a glittering black thread that had served the thing as a nervous system, and as that went, each set of claws locked shut in turn, zipping the slash tight as a new leather jacket. ‘Now, you see,’ said the black man, mopping the last of the brown syrup away with a wet white pad, ‘that wasn’t so bad, was it?’
‘Oh,’ Bobby said, as they rounded a corner, ‘right. Well, did you happen to find a screwdriver in there? Or a credit chip?’‘No chip, baby. But if the screwdriver’s the one with the two hundred and ten New ones screwed into the handle, that’s the price of my new shirt . . .’
‘Legba,’ the man said, ‘master of roads and pathways, the loa of communication . .

10 Alain

‘He’s wearing a broadcast unit,’ the waiter said. ‘He’s armed as well. I was the bellman in Brussels. Give him what he wants. Remember that the money means nothing to you.’ He took her glass and placed it carefully on his tray. ‘And, very likely, it will destroy him.’ When Alain returned, he was smiling. ‘Now, darling,’ he said, reaching for his cigarettes, ‘we can do business.’ Marly smiled back and nodded.

11 On Site

Nathan belonged to the species that had produced Oakey and a thousand others Turner had worked with over the years, maverick techs who liked earning danger money and had proven they could keep their mouths shut.
‘It’s currently quite fashionable to equip top employees with modified insulin-pump subdermals,’ his partner broke in. ‘The subject’s system can be tricked into an artificial reliance on certain synthetic enzyme analogues. Unless the subdermal is recharged at regular intervals, withdrawal from the source – the employer – can result in trauma . . .’
Turner looked at the assortment of things strung across the skinny chest and reached out, flipping a crooked bit of bent gristle suspended from a length of braided string. ‘What the hell is that, Harry?’‘That’s a coon’s pecker,’ Harry said. ‘Coon’s got him a jointed bone in his pecker. Not many as know that.’
‘But you have people? You got a man to go back to?’‘A woman, you want to know,’ she said. ‘Know anything about breeding dogs?’‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think so.’ She squinted at him. ‘We got a kid, too. Ours. She carried it.’‘DNA splice?’ She nodded. ‘That’s expensive,’ he said. ‘You know it; wouldn’t be here if we didn’t need to pay it off. But she’s beautiful.’‘Your woman?’‘Our kid.’

12 Café Blanc

She asked a waiter for a cognac, and shivered, watching the Paris traffic flow past, perpetual river of steel and glass, while all around her, at other tables, strangers ate and smiled, drank and argued, said bitter goodbyes or swore private fealties to an afternoon’s feeling.
Irony, she told herself: as I luxuriate in the discovery that I am no special sponge for sorrow, but merely another fallible animal in this stone maze of a city, I come simultaneously to see that I am the focus of some vast device fuelled by an obscure desire.
‘You are a philosopher.’‘I’m a tool, Paco. I’m the most recent tip for a very old machine in the hands of a very old man, who wishes to penetrate something and has so far failed to do so. Your employer fumbles through a thousand tools and somehow chooses me . . .’‘You are a poet as well!’
‘Would you like a brandy, Paco? Or perhaps some coffee?’‘The French,’ he said, with great conviction, ‘know nothing about coffee.’

13 With Both Hands

‘We’re talking a professional priesthood here, you want to call it that. Otherwise, just imagine a couple of major dudes – console cowboys, among other things – who make it their business to get things done for people. “To serve with both hands” is an expression we have, sort of means they work both ends. White and black, got me?’
Heavy icebreakers are kind of funny to deal in, even for the big boys. You know why? Because ice, all the really hard stuff, the walls around every major store of data in the matrix, is always the product of an AI, an artificial intelligence.
So when a really powerful icebreaker shows up on the black market, there are already a couple of very dicey factors in play. Like, for starts, where did the product come from? Nine times out of ten, it came from an AI, and AIs are constantly screened, mainly by the Turing people, to make sure they don’t get too smart. So maybe you’ll get the Turing machine after your ass, because maybe an AI somewhere wants to augment its private cashflow. Some AI’s have citizenship, right?
Another thing you have to watch out for, maybe it’s a military icebreaker, and that’s bad heat, too, or maybe it’s taken a walk out of some zaibatsu’s industrial espionage arm, and you don’t want that either. You takin’ this shit in, Bobby?’
‘Still, an icebreaker that’ll really cut is worth mega, I mean beaucoup. So maybe you’re Mr Big in the market, someone offers you this thing, and you don’t want to just tell ’em to take a walk. So you buy it. You buy it, real quiet, but you don’t slot it, no. What do you do with it? You take it home, have your tech fix it up so that it looks real average. Like you have it set up in a format like this,’ and he tapped a stack of software in front of him, ‘and you take it to your joeboy, who owes you some favours, as usual . . .’
What he does, he picks a base out in the Midwest that’s full of tax-dodge programs and yen-laundry flowcharts for some whorehouse in Kansas City, and everybody who didn’t just fall off a tree knows that the motherfucker is eyeball-deep in ice, black ice, totally lethal feedback programs.
‘Hey,’ Bobby said, ‘lemme get this straight—’‘I’m giving it to you straight, white boy! He picked out that base, then he ran down his list of hotdoggers, ambitious punks from over in Barrytown, wilsons dumb enough to run a program they’d never seen before against a base that some joker like Two-a-Day fingered for them and told them was an easy make. And who’s he pick? He picks somebody new to the game, natch, somebody who doesn’t even know where he lives, doesn’t even have his number, and he says, here, my man, you take this home and make yourself some money. You get anything good, I’ll fence it for you!’ Beauvoir’s eyes were wide; he wasn’t smiling.
Another way it might have gone, the way it nearly did go, something could’ve been funny with the icebreaker, the ice could’ve fried you dead, and one of those cowboys would’ve had to break into your momma’s place and get that software back before anybody found your body.’
‘I thought you had,’ Lucas said, jacking some kind of small deck into the console that formed the base of the tank. ‘Count Zero. Count zero interrupt. Old programmer talk.’ He passed the deck to Beauvoir, who began to tap commands into it. Complex geometric forms began to click into place in the tank, aligned with the nearly invisible planes of a three-dimensional grid. Beauvoir was sketching in the cyberspace co-ordinates for Barrytown, Bobby saw.
Liquid flowers of milky white blossomed from the floor of the tank; Bobby, craning forward, saw that they seemed to consist of thousands of tiny spheres or bubbles, and then they aligned perfectly with the cubical grid and coalesced, forming a top-heavy, asymmetrical structure, a thing like a rectilinear mushroom. The surfaces, facets, were white, perfectly blank. The image in the tank was no longer than Bobby’s open hand. but to anyone jacked into a deck it would have been enormous. The thing unfolded a pair of horns; these lengthened, curved, became pincers that arced out to grasp the pyramid. He saw the tips sink smoothly through the flickering orange planes of the enemy ice.

14 Night Flight

The microsoft Conroy had sent filled his head with its own universe of constantly shifting factors: airspeed, altitude, attitude, angle of attack, g-forces, headings. The plane’s weapon delivery information was a constant subliminal litany of target designators, bomb fall lines, search circles, range and release cues, weapons counts. Conroy had tagged the microsoft with a simple message outlining the plane’s time of arrival and confirming the arrangement for space for a single passenger.
To Mitchell, it had been prison and fortress, his home for nine years. Somewhere near its core he had perfected the hybridoma techniques that had eluded other researchers for almost a century; working with human cancer cells and a neglected, nearly forgotten model of DNA synthesis, he had produced the immortal hybrid cells that were the basic production tools of the new technology, minute biochemical factories endlessly reproducing the engineered molecules that were linked and built up into biochips.
The man’s life, from Turner’s vantage, seemed marked out by a certain inevitability; he was brilliant, a brilliance that had been detected early on, highly motivated, gifted at the kind of blandly ruthless in-company manipulation required by someone who aspired to become a top research scientist. If anyone was destined to rise through laboratory-corporate hierarchies, Turner decided, it would be Mitchell.
Turner looked at her. She was twenty, four years his junior, and earned roughly nine times his annual salary in a given week. She was blonde, her hair cropped short for the series role, deeply tanned, and looked as if she was illuminated from within by sunlamps. The blue eyes were inhumanly perfect optical instruments, grown in vats in Japan. She was both actress and camera, her eyes worth several million New Yen, and in the hierarchy of Sense/Net stars, she barely rated.

15 Box

The clans are trans-generational, and there’s usually a fair bit of medicine involved: cryogenics, genetic manipulation, various ways to combat ageing. The death of a given clan member, even a founding member, usually wouldn’t bring the clan, as a business entity, to a crisis point. There’s always someone to step in, someone waiting. The difference between a clan and a corporation, however, is that you don’t need to literally marry into a corporation . . .’

16 Legba

people who were genuinely dangerous might not need to exhibit the fact at all, and that the ability to conceal a threat made them even more dangerous.
Lucas’s car was an amazing stretch of gold-flecked black bodywork and mirror-finished brass, studded with a collection of baroque gadgets whose purpose Bobby only had time to guess at.
He looked at Lucas, who was loosening his black tie. ‘How do you drive it?’‘Sit down somewhere. You drive it like this: Ahmed, get our asses to New York, lower east.’ The car slid smoothly away from the kerb as Bobby dropped to his knees on a soft pile of rugs.
The Sprawl’s patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas of a few city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continuously from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly urban variety of lightning.
Five years tends to find a cowboy either rich or brain-dead, or else financing a stable of younger cracksmen and strictly into the managerial side.
The Wig worked the Africans for a week, incidentally bringing about the collapse of at least three governments and causing untold human suffering.
The Finn suddenly seemed tired, and old, very old. He looked to Bobby like a big, mummified rat animated by springs and hidden wires. He took a wristwatch with a cracked face and a single greasy leather strap from his pocket and consulted it.

17 The Squirrel Wood

At regular intervals they passed the stumps of wooden poles that had once supported telephone wires, overgrown now with bramble and honeysuckle, the wires pulled down seventy years earlier for copper, the creosote poles chopped down for fuel . . . Bees grazed in flowering grass at the roadside . . .
‘Where you going to go, then?’‘The Sprawl.’‘Why?’‘Because I’ve got money there. I’ve got credit lines in four different names, no way to link ’em back to me. Because I’ve got a lot of other connections I may be able to use. And because it’s always cover, the Sprawl. So damned much of it, you know?’
Turner found that if he half-closed his eyes, from his seat on the wooden porch-swing, he could almost see an apple tree that was no longer there, a tree that had once supported a length of silvery-grey hemp rope and an ancient automobile tyre. There were fire-flies then as well, and Rudy’s heels thumping a bare hard skid of earth as he pumped himself out on the swing’s arc, legs kicking, and Turner lay on his back in the grass, watching the stars . . .
‘He hates the city,’ she said. ‘Says it all comes in online anyway, so why do you need to go there?’

18 Names of the Dead

He said that Virek would be forced, by evolutionary pressures, to make some sort of “jump”. “Jump” was his word.’‘Evolutionary pressures?’‘Yes,’ Andrea said, carrying the skewered prawns to the hibachi, ‘he talks about corporations as though they were animals of some kind.’
She remembered the brass knob in the Galerie Duperey, how it had squirmed so indescribably in her fingers as it drew her into Virek’s model of the Park Güell. Was he always there, she wondered, in Gaudí’s park, in an afternoon that never ended? Señor is wealthy. Señor enjoys any number of means of manifestation. She shivered in the warm evening air, moved closer to Andrea.
‘And if I were to lose it? Would Señor register the loss? Or would there be another bag, another four million?’ She reached for the shoulder strap and stood. ‘There would be another bag, certainly, although it requires some effort on our part to assemble that amount of cash. And, no, Señor would not “register” its loss, in the sense you mean, but I would be disciplined even for the pointless loss of a lesser sum. The very rich have the common characteristic of taking care with their money, you will find.’

19 Hypermart

He saw Lucas for the last time in front of a big old department store on Madison Avenue. That was how he remembered him, after that, a big black man in a sharp black suit, about to step into his long black car, one black, softly polished shoe already on the lush carpet of Ahmed’s interior, the other still on the crumbling concrete of the kerb.

21 Highway Time

‘Angie,’ he said, ‘when Rudy scanned you, he found something in your head.’ She stopped chewing. ‘He didn’t know what it was. Something someone put there, maybe when you were a lot younger. Do you know what I mean?’ She nodded. ‘Do you know who put it there?’‘Yes.’‘Your father?’‘Yes.’‘Do you know why?’‘Because I was sick.’‘How were you sick?’‘I wasn’t smart enough.’
‘Stuck. What it is, I think there’s a jump some people have to make, sometimes, and if they don’t do it, then they’re stuck good . . . And Rudy never did it.’
‘My daddy he’s a handsome devil Got a chain ’bout nine miles long. And from every link A heart does dangle Of another maid He’s loved and wronged.’

22 Jammer’s

Now and ever was, fast-forward, Jammer’s deck jacked up so high above the neon hotcores, a topography of data he didn’t know. Big stuff, mountain-high, sharp and corporate in the non-place that was cyberspace.
He sat at one of the tables and pretended he was Count Zero, top console artist in the Sprawl, waiting for some dudes to show and talk about a deal, some run they needed done and nobody but the Count was even remotely up for it. ‘Sure,’ he said, to the empty nightclub, his eyes hooded, ‘I’ll cut it for you . . . If you got the money . . .’ They paled when he named his price.

23 Closer

Tally Isham had been a constant in the stim industry for as long as Marly remembered, an ageless Golden Girl who’d come in on the first wave of the new medium. Now Marly found herself locked into Tally’s tanned, lithe, tremendously comfortable sensorium. Tally Isham glowed, breathed deeply and easily, her elegant bones riding in the embrace of a musculature that seemed never to have known tension. Accessing her stim recordings was like falling into a bath of perfect health, feeling the spring in the star’s high arches and the jut of her breasts against the silky white Egyptian cotton of her simple blouse. She was leaning against a pocked white balustrade above the tiny harbour of a Greek island town, a cascade of flowering trees falling away below her down a hillside built from whitewashed stone and narrow, twisting stairs. A boat sounded in the harbour.
She had vague recollections of stories in the media, something to do with the newest generation of computers, some ominous-sounding process in which immortal hybrid cancers spewed out tailored molecules that became units of circuitry.
Two hours to departure. Whatever Virek might say, she was sure that his machine was already busy, infiltrating the shuttle’s crew or roster of passengers, the substitutions lubricated by a film of money . . . There would be last-minute illnesses, changes in plans, accidents . . .

25 Kasual/Gothick

Most phone programs were equipped with cosmetic video subprograms written to bring the video image of the owner into greater accordance with the more widespread paradigms of personal beauty, erasing blemishes and subtly moulding facial outlines to meet idealised statistical norms.

26 The Wig

And Marly slid back into a landscape built all of boxes, vast wooden Cornell constructions where the solid residues of love and memory were displayed behind rain-streaked sheets of dusty glass, and the figure of the mysterious Boxmaker fled before her down avenues paved with mosaics of human teeth, Marly’s Paris boots clicking blindly over symbols outlined in dull gold crowns. The Boxmaker was male and wore Alain’s green jacket, and feared her above all things. ‘I’m sorry,’ she cried, running after him, ‘I’m sorry . . .’
‘I did,’ she said, ‘for a number of days. As for nationality, I would guess Herr Virek is the sole citizen of a nation consisting of Herr Virek . . .’

27 Stations of the Breath

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘We’re halfway home.’ It was a meaningless thing to say, he thought, helping her out of the seat; neither of them had homes at all.
he watched their reflections in the opposite window. A tall man, gaunt now and unshaven, hunched back in defeat with a hollow-eyed girl curled beside him.
Uncounted living-spaces carved out of the shells of commercial buildings that dated from a day when commerce had required clerical workers to be present physically at a central location.

28 Jaylene Slide

‘Honey,’ Jammer said, ‘you’ll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.’

29 Boxmaker

There were dozens of the arms, manipulators, tipped with pliers, hexdrivers, knives, a subminiature circular saw, a dentist’s drill . . . They bristled from the alloy thorax of what must once have been a construction remote, the sort of unmanned, semi-autonomous device she knew from childhood videos of the high frontier. But this one was welded into the apex of the dome, its sides fused with the fabric of the Place, and hundreds of cables and optic lines snaked across the geodesics to enter it.

34 A Chain ’Bout Nine Miles Long

‘I want to stay with you,’ she said to Turner. ‘I liked Jackie, but then she . . .’‘Never mind,’ Turner said. ‘I know.’ I don’t know anything, he screamed silently. ‘I’ll keep in touch . . .’ I’ll never see you again. ‘But there’s something I’d better tell you, now. Your father’s dead.’ He killed himself. ‘The Maas security people killed him; he held them off while you got the ultralight off the mesa.’

36 The Squirrel Wood

When his mother had cried, she’d said that Rudy had been a good man, that he’d saved her life, saved her once from being young and stupid, and once from a real bad man . . .