Roger Chi | Reading

Part One: Chiba City Blues

The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.
His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven- function force- feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic.
As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause. Then the whore’s giggle rang out, tinged with a certain hysteria.
Case was twenty- four. At twenty- two, he’d been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He’d been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a by- product of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief, he’d worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.
He’d expected to die, then, but they only smiled. Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it. Because– still smiling– they were going to make sure he never worked again. They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin.
In Chiba, he’d watched his New Yen vanish in a two- month round of examinations and consultations. The men in the black clinics, his last hope, had admired the expertise with which he’d been maimed, and then slowly shaken their heads.
Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz- halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart. By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.
Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast- forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.
The expression on her face, then, had been the one he’d seen, hours later, on her sleeping face in a portside coffin, her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in flight.
But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.
Case had rented a coffin here, on a weekly basis, since he’d arrived in Chiba, but he’d never slept in Cheap Hotel. He slept in cheaper places.
Case turned his head and looked up into Wage’s face. It was a tanned and forgettable mask. The eyes were vat- grown sea- green Nikon transplants. Wage wore a suit of gunmetal silk and a simple bracelet of platinum on either wrist. He was flanked by his joeboys, nearly identical young men, their arms and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.
‘That’s fine, man.’ The fletcher vanished into the black jacket. ‘Because you try to fuck around with me, you’ll be taking one of the stupidest chances of your whole life.’ She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double- edged, four- centimetre scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails. She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.
The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese. Not really a Night City crowd. Techs down from the arcologies. He supposed that meant the arena had the approval of some corporate recreational committee. He wondered briefly what it would be like, working all your life for one zaibatsu. Company housing, company hymn, company funeral.
Glancing up at the holograms, he saw that blood laced one figure’s chest. Thick brown sauce trickled down the skewers and over his knuckles.

Part Two: The Shopping Expedition

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred- year- old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta . . .
He knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn’t quite crime, crime not quite art.
‘Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non- space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding . . .’
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3- D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach. And somewhere he was laughing, in a white- painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.
Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.
The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of diskettes from the Finn was a soft- voiced boy called Angelo. His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark- cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous. It was one of the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen. When Angelo smiled, revealing the razor- sharp canines of some large animal, Case was actually relieved. Tooth bud transplants. He’d seen that before.
Vibration beneath his feet as a train hissed past. Sirens dopplered in the distance.
silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl’s waste places.
It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man’s skills, obsessions, knee- jerk responses . . .
‘You have told this to your woman friend?’ Terzibashjian leaned forward between the ultrasuede buckets. ‘In Turkey, women are still women. This one . . .’ The Finn snorted. ‘She’d have you wearing your balls for a bow tie if you looked at her cross- eyed.’
He fumbled through a pocketful of liras, slotting the small dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anachronism of the process. The phone nearest him rang. Automatically, he picked it up. ‘Yeah?’ Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind. ‘Hello, Case.’ A fifty- lira coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of sight across Hilton carpeting. ‘Wintermute, Case. It’s time we talk.’ It was a chip voice. ‘Don’t you want to talk, Case?’ He hung up. On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed.

Part Three: Midnight in the Rue Jules Verne

Freeside. Freeside is many things, not all of them evident to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool.
‘Where were you when it needed doing?’ Case asked Riviera. The man opened his mouth to speak. A small trout swam out, trailing impossible bubbles. It glided past Case’s cheek. ‘In the head,’ Riviera said, and smiled. Case laughed. ‘Good,’ Riviera said, ‘you can laugh. I would have tried to help you, but I’m no good with my hands.’ He held up his palms, which suddenly doubled. Four arms, four hands.
Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity.
‘Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AIs are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hardwired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.’ Again the nonlaugh. ‘See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.’
‘Hot shit, Case. It’s a slow virus. Take six hours, estimated, to crack a military target.’ ‘Or an AI.’ He sighed. ‘Can we run it?’ ‘Sure,’ the construct said, ‘unless you got a morbid fear of dying.’ ‘Sometimes you repeat yourself, man.’ ‘It’s my nature.’
‘Not hungry,’ Case managed. His brain was deep- fried. No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the wrinkled lobes, shot through with greenish- purple flashes of pain.
He could guess the end, the finale. There was an inverted symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl takes him apart. With those hands. Dreamblood soaking the rotten lace.
You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, ’cause once they plant the cutout chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that’s it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren’t in, when it’s all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for . . .’
The drug hit him like an express train, a white- hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x- rays of short- circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch- perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding . . .

Part Four: The Straylight Run

Their names, or work names, were Michèle, Roland, and Pierre. Pierre, Case decided, would play the Bad Cop; Roland would take Case’s side, provide small kindnesses– he found an unopened pack of Yeheyuans when Case refused a Gitane– and generally play counterpoint to Pierre’s cold hostility. Michèle would be the Recording Angel, making occasional adjustments in the direction of the interrogation. One or all of them, he was certain, would be kinked for audio, very likely for simstim, and anything he said or did now was admissible evidence. Evidence, he asked himself, through the grinding come- down, of what?
‘I did, once. Just an idea, back then. But that’s what ol’ Kuang’s all about. This ain’t bore and inject, it’s more like we interface with the ice so slow, the ice doesn’t feel it. The face of the Kuang logics kinda sleazes up to the target and mutates, so it gets to be exactly like the ice fabric. Then we lock on and the main programs cut in, start talking circles ’round the logics in the ice. We go Siamese twin on ’em before they even get restless.’ The Flatline laughed.
And the Yak, they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they’ll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you’ll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders.
‘We cause the brain to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism.’
Wintermute had built something called Armitage into a catatonic fortress named Corto. Had convinced Corto that Armitage was the real thing, and Armitage had walked, talked, schemed, bartered data for capital, fronted for Wintermute in that room in the Chiba Hilton . . . And now Armitage was gone, blown away by the winds of Corto’s madness. But where had Corto been, those years? Falling, burned and blinded, out of a Siberian sky.
But it wasn’t a craziness he understood. Not like Armitage’s madness, which he now imagined he could understand; twist a man far enough, then twist him as far back, in the opposite direction, reverse and twist again. The man broke. Like breaking a length of wire.
Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory.
Why he has to come on like the Finn or somebody, he told me that. It’s not just a mask, it’s like he uses real profiles as valves, gears himself down to communicate with us. Called it a template. Model of personality.’
It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a lifetime’s observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up on. For a few seconds, he knew, she was every bad- ass hero, Sony Mao in the old Shaw videos, Mickey Chiba, the whole lineage back to Lee and Eastwood. She was walking it the way she talked it.
‘Why did he kill her?’ Her unbandaged eye focused on the girl’s face. ‘He couldn’t accept the direction she intended for our family. She commissioned the construction of our artificial intelligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the AIs, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say. Tessier- Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity. Fascinating.
‘Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it! In Night City, you had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the axe. How far you’ve come, to do it now, and what grotesque props . . . Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed, the rarest rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes, magic out of China . . .’ Ratz laughed, trudging along beside him, his pink manipulator swinging jauntily at his side. In spite of the dark, Case could see the baroque steel that laced the bartender’s blackened teeth. ‘But I suppose that is the way of an artiste, no? You needed this world built for you, this beach, this place. To die.’
‘You aren’t anything,’ he said to the sleeping girl. ‘You’re dead and you meant fuck all to me anyway. Hear that, buddy? I know what you’re doing. I’m flatlined. This has all taken about twenty seconds, right? I’m out on my ass in that library and my brain’s dead. And pretty soon it’ll be dead, if you got any sense. You don’t want Wintermute to pull his scam off, is all, so you can just hang me up here. Dixie’ll run Kuang, but his ass is dead and you can second- guess his moves, sure. This Linda shit, yeah, that’s all been you, hasn’t it? Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me into the Chiba construct, but he couldn’t. Said it was too tricky. That was you moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn’t it? That was you put her face on the dead puppet in Ashpool’s room. Molly never saw that. You just edited her simstim signal. ’Cause you think you can hurt me. ’Cause you think I gave a shit. Well, fuck you, whatever you’re called. You won. You win. But none of it means anything to me now, right? Think I care? So why’d you do it to me this way?’ He was shaking again, his voice shrill.
‘To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names .
The ninja relaxed his pull on the fine, braided string, lowering the bow. He crossed the tiles to where the Remington lay and picked it up. ‘This is without subtlety,’ he said, as if to himself. His voice was cool and pleasant. His every move was part of a dance, a dance that never ended, even when his body was still, at rest, but for all the power it suggested, there was also a humility, an open simplicity.
‘No. I saw her death coming. In the patterns you sometimes imagined you could detect in the dance of the street. Those patterns are real. I am complex enough, in my narrow ways, to read those dances. Far better than Wintermute can. I saw her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code of the lock on the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in Julie Deane’s account with a Hong Kong shirtmaker. As clear to me as the shadow of a tumour to a surgeon studying a patient’s scan. When she took your Hitachi to her boy, to try to access it– she had no idea what it carried, still less how she might sell it, and her deepest wish was that you would pursue and punish her– I intervened. My methods are far more subtle than Wintermute’s. I brought her here. Into myself.’
Neon forest, rain sizzling across hot pavement. The smell of frying food. A girl’s hands locked across the small of his back, in the sweating darkness of a portside coffin.

Coda: Departure and Arrival

Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality. Marie- France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer.
Wintermute. Cold and silence, a cybernetic spider slowly spinning webs while Ashpool slept. Spinning his death, the fall of his version of Tessier- Ashpool. A ghost, whispering to a child who was 3Jane, twisting her out of the rigid alignments her rank required.
He left the vodka on the cabinet. He packed his things. She’d bought him a lot of clothes he didn’t really need, but something kept him from just leaving them there. He was closing the last of the expensive calfskin bags when he remembered the shuriken. Pushing the flask aside, he picked it up, her first gift. ‘No,’ he said, and spun, the star leaving his fingers, flash of silver, to bury itself in the face of the wall screen. The screen woke, random patterns flickering feebly from side to side, as though it were trying to rid itself of something that caused it pain. ‘I don’t need you,’ he said.