Мы электронные духи, группа свободомыслящих повстанцев. Киберпанки. Мы живем в киберпространстве, мы везде, мы не знаем границ. И это наш манифест. Манифест киберпанка.
I. Киберпанк
1. Мы те самые, Другие. Технологические крысы, плывущие в океане информации.
2. Мы - это скромный школьник, сидящий за последней партой в дальнем углу класса.
3. Мы - это подросток, которого все считают странным.
4. Мы - это студент, взламывающий компьютерные системы и пытающийся достичь предела своих возможностей.
5. Мы - это взрослый человек, сидящий на скамейке в парке с лэптопом на коленях и программирующий новую виртуальную реальность.
6. Нам принадлежат гаражи, напичканные электроникой. Паяльник на рабочем столе и разобранный на части радиоприемник, подвал, в котором стоят компьютеры, жужжат принтеры и гудят модемы - все это тоже наше.
7. Мы видим реальность в ином свете. Мы видим больше, чем обыкновенные люди. Они видят только то, что снаружи. Мы видим то, что внутри. Реалисты со взглядом романтиков - вот кто мы такие.
8. Мы странные люди, о которых практически ничего неизвестно. Люди, индульгирующие в своих собственных мыслях, день за днем сидящие за компьютером, ищущие необходимую информацию в сети. Мы редко выходим из дома. Мы делаем это время от времени лишь для того, чтобы сходить в соседнюю лачугу или бар, где мы встречаемся со своими немногочисленными друзьями. Иногда мы выходим из дома, чтобы встретиться с очередным клиентом, или наркодилером... или просто совершить прогулку.
9. У нас мало друзей, лишь несколько человек, с которыми мы ходим на вечеринки. Всех остальных мы знаем только в сети. Наши настоящие друзья там, на другом конце провода. Мы знаем их по каналам ретрансляции диалогов IRC, по группам новостей и по другим системам, в которых мы работаем.
10. Нам наплевать на то, что о нас думают другие. Нам наплевать на то, как мы выглядим и что говорят люди в наше отсутствие.
11. Большинство из нас любит жить скрытно, оставаться в тени и общаться друг с другом лишь по необходимости.
12. Некоторые из нас любят быть на виду, они любят славу. Их знает весь андеграунд. Их имена на слуху. Но всех нас объединяет одно - все мы Киберпанки.
13. Общество не понимает нас. Мы выглядим <таинственными> и <сумасшедшими> в глазах обыкновенных людей, живущих в далеке от информации и свободы мысли. Общество не признает нас - общество, живущее, думающее и дышащее одним единственным способом - как все.
14. Оно запрещает нам думать о том, что мы свободные люди. Свободомыслие запрещено.
15. У каждого Киберпанка есть индивидуальность, он не марионетка. Киберпанки - это люди, начиная от самых обыкновенных и никому не известных, до гениев-техноманьяков, музыкантов, играющих электронную музыку и исследователей-самоучек.
16. Киберпанк больше не является жанром художественной литературы. Это уже не субкультура. Киберпанк - это новая отдельная культура, дитя новой эры. Культура, которая объединяет наши взгляды и интересы. Мы составляем единое целое. Мы киберпанки.
II. Общество
1. Общество, окружающее нас, связывает друг с другом людей и предметы, превращает их в единую массу и медленно затягивает в зыбучие пески времени.
2. И хотя в это трудно поверить, всем уже очевидно, что мы живем в больном обществе. Так называемые реформы, которыми повсеместно хвастаются наши правительства, - это лишь незначительные сдвиги, в то время как можно совершать целые прыжки.
3. Люди боятся нового и неизвестного. Они предпочитают старые, проверенные истины. Они боятся перемен. Они боятся потерять то, что у них уже есть.
4. Их страх настолько силен, что превратился в оружие. Их страх запрещает свободомыслие. И в этом их главная ошибка.
5. Люди должны оставить свой страх позади и двинуться вперед. Какой смысл все время держать синицу в руках, если можно поймать журавля. Все, что нужно сделать - это протянуть руки и почувствовать новое; дать свободу помыслам, идеям и словам.
6. Новые поколения веками воспитывались в духе своих прародителей. Идеалом считается то, чему следует большинство. Индивидуальность забыта. Люди думают одинаково, используя клише, заученные с самого детства. А когда какой-нибудь ребенок отваживается бросить вызов власти, его наказывают и приводят в качестве плохого примера. <Вот что случается с теми, кто выражает свое мнение и игнорирует мнение учителя>.
7. Наше общество больно и нуждается в лечении. Лекарством является смена системы...
III. Система
1. Система. С многовековым прошлым, существующая на принципах, которым нет места в сегодняшнем мире. Система, которая практически не изменилась со времени своего появления.
2. Это неправильная Система.
3. Чтобы управлять нами, Система должна обманным путем навязывать свои правила. Правительство хочет, чтобы мы слепо следовали его указаниям. Мы живем в информационных сумерках. Когда люди получают информацию, отличную от информации правительства, они не могут отличить правду от лжи. Поэтому ложь становится правдой - правдой, лежащей в основе всего. Таким образом правители управляют нами при помощи лжи, а обыкновенные люди не могут различить правду и слепо следуют за правительством, полностью доверяя ему.
4. Мы боремся за свободу информации. Мы боремся за свободу за свободу слова и печати. За свободу выражать наши мысли, не опасаясь преследования Системы.
5. Даже в самых цивилизованных и <демократических> странах, Система распространяет дезинформацию. Даже в странах, претендующих на звание колыбели свободы слова. Дезинформация - основное оружие Системы. Оружие, которое она успешно использует.
6. Именно Сеть помогает нам свободно распространять информацию. Сеть, не имеющая границ и не знающая предела.
7. Все, что принадлежит нам, принадлежит и вам. Все, что принадлежит вам, принадлежит и нам.
8. Каждый может использовать информацию. Ограничений не существует.
9. Шифрование информации - это наше оружие. Зашифрованные революционные послания могут беспрепятственно распространятся по Сети, и правительство может только догадываться об их содержании.
10. Сеть - это наше королевство, в сети мы короли.
11. Законы. Мир меняется, но законы остаются прежними. Система не меняется, лишь кое-какие детали приводятся в соответствие с новым временем, однако в целом все остается на своих местах.
12. Нам нужны новые законы. Законы, соответствующие времени, в котором мы живем, и миру, который нас окружает. Не законы, построенные на опыте прошлого. Законы, построенные для сегодняшнего дня, законы, соответствующие дню завтрашнему.
IV. Видение будущего
1. Некоторые люди не задумываются над тем, что происходит в мире. Они заботятся только о себе, о своем микрокосмосе.
2. Такие люди могут видеть только мрачное будущее, будущее их личной жизни, которой они живут в данный момент.
3. Другие обеспокоены будущими событиями. Их интересует все, что будет происходить в будущем в глобальном масштабе.
4. Их взгляд на жизнь более оптимистичен. В их глазах будущее выглядит чище и прекраснее. Они могут представить себе человека, ставшего более значительным, и мир, ставший более мудрым.
5. Мы находимся где-то посередине. Для нас важно то, что происходит сейчас и то, что произойдет завтра.
6. Наши взгляды устремлены в Сеть. И Сеть разрастается с каждым днем.
7. Вскоре весь мир будет опутан Сетью: от военных систем до домашних компьютеров.
8. Но сеть - это колыбель анархии.
9. Ее нельзя контролировать и в этом ее сила.
10. Каждый человек будет зависеть от Сети.
11. Вся информация будет курсировать по сети, запертая в хаосе нулей и единиц.
12. Тот, кто контролирует Сеть, контролирует информацию.
13. Мы будем жить в смешении прошлого и настоящего.
14. Плохое идет от человека, а хорошее идет от технологии.
15. Сеть будет контролировать маленького человека, а мы будем контролировать Сеть.
16. Если не будешь контролировать сам, будут контролировать тебя.
17. Информация - это сила!
V. Где мы?
1. Где мы?
2. Мы все живем в больном мире, где ненависть - это оружие, а свобода - мечта.
3. Мир развивается слишком медленно. Киберпанку очень трудно жить в вечно недоделанном мире, смотреть на окружающих и видеть как плохо они строят свой мир.
4. Мы идем вперед, они тянут нас назад. Общество сдерживает нас. Да, оно сдерживает свободу мысли. Своими безжалостными образовательными программами в школах и университетах. Они тренируют в детях одинаковое видение мира. Любые возражения пресекаются и наказываются.
5. Наши дети обучаются в этой древней и не изменившейся системе. Системе, которая не допускает свободомыслия и требует четкого соблюдения правил...
6. В каком бы мире мы жили сейчас, если бы люди двигались вперед прыжками, а не ползли.
7. Киберпанк, тебе очень трудно жить в этом мире.
8. Кажется, что время остановилось.
9. Мы оказались в нужном месте, но не в нужное время.
10. Все вокруг слишком банально, люди не меняются. Как будто общество хочет вернуться в прошлое.
11. Некоторые люди, пытающиеся найти свой мир, мир Киберпанка, находят его и строят собственными руками. Строят в своих мыслях, в меняющейся реальности. Поэтому они живут в виртуальном мире. В выдуманном мире, находящемся вне пределов вселенной.
12. Некоторые люди привыкают к реальному миру, такому, какой он есть на самом деле. Они продолжают жить в нем, но они не любят его. У них нет другого выбора, но они верят в то, что мир вырвется из объятий пустоты и двинется вперед.
13. Все, что мы пытаемся сделать - это изменить ситуацию. Мы пытаемся приспособить сегодняшний мир к нашим нуждам и взглядам. Максимально используем его возможности и не обращаем внимания на всякий хлам. Там, где нам не под силу что-либо изменить, мы можем просто жить, жить как Киберпанки. Не имеет значения то, насколько трудной будет наша жизнь. Когда общество наносит удар, мы всегда отвечаем.
14. Мы строим собственные миры в Киберпространстве.
15. Среди нулей и единиц, среди битов информации.
16. Мы строим свое сообщество. Сообщество Киберпанков.
Кибрпанк!
Борись за свои права!
Мы электронные духи, группа свободомыслящих повстанцев. Киберпанки. Мы живем в киберпространстве, мы везде, мы не знаем границ. И это наш манифест. Манифест киберпанка.
Хотя этот перевод был Антоши, я до сих пор не забуду его слова по 106.8 FM, Сальников Тебя многие слушали, и досих пор живут по ТЕРРИТОРИИ ВЗЛОМА... Спасибо! Научил!
14 февраля 1997 г.
(перевод Сальникова А.М.)
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Метки: галерея машин и концепт кары |
HiFi термины - словарь |
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Владимир Васильев - Техник Большого Киева |
Владимир Васильев.
"Техник Большого Киева."
(Фэнтези-овердрайв.)
- Выше! Выше! - закричала Джейн, и
дракон вильнул вверх, едва не
врезавшись в высоковольтную линию.
Провода задрожали от воздушной волны.
- Почему ты летишь так низко? Почему
не поднимешься?
- Мы проходим под их радаром, -
проворчал Меланхтон. - Ты
когда-нибудь слышала о радарах?
На горизонте выделялся темным пятном
драконостроительный завод.
Майкл Суэнвик. "Дочь железного дракона".
1. Гуальятири - Музкол.
Двери подошедшего к перрону поезда с шипением разошлись и
Пард ступил на выщербленный край платформы. Из вещей при нем
была только маленькая кожаная сумка.
Пард всегда был не слишком привередливым живым. Наверное,
потому, что ему приходилось очень много ездить.
"Драконостроительный завод! - подумал он, вспоминая недавнее
чтение. - Надо же такое выдумать!"
Книгу Пард оставил в поезде, но запомнил название, чтоб потом
как-нибудь найти и дочитать.
Хмурый эльф, изучающий расписание поездов, мельком взглянул
на него. Пард прошел мимо, неслышно ступая. Прорезиненная
подошва ботинок страстно вжималась в асфальт, словно любила
его сильнее всего на свете. Но она любила и мраморные полы, и
открытую землю, которой становилось в Большом Киеве все
меньше.
Эльф остался на перроне; Пард, забросив сумочку на плечо,
спустился на улицу. Поезд убедился, что никто больше не
собирается войти или выйти, закрыл двери, коротко свистнул и
тронулся. Путь его лежал дальше, в сторону Ровно и Житомира.
Это был хорошо прирученный поезд, хватило времени убедиться в
этом. Пард ехал целых десять часов, с самого юга Большого
Киева, оттуда, где гигантский мегаполис выходит кое-где к
самому Черному морю.
Внизу, на улице, Пард огляделся. Широкая привокзальная
площадь была почти пустой, если не считать нескольких
продавцов дорожной еды да праздношатающегося носильщика.
Сколько Пард себя помнил, на всех вокзалах, где ему удалось
побывать, вот так же безучастно слонялся одинокий носильщик -
чаще всего здоровый черный орк, или ушастый гоблин с
мускулистыми руками. Работа носильщику доставалась редко.
Пард свернул налево, ко входу в подземку. Но не спустился,
хотя гном у турникетов заметил его даже сквозь прозрачные
двери и ждуще потянулся навстречу. Прошел мимо, дальше, к
галерее. Поднялся, прошел по галерее, где обитало гулкое эхо.
Он продолжал ступать бесшумно, и эхо так и не проснулось.
Спустя десять минут Пард был уже на площади Победы. Справа, за
тушей универмага, высилась гостиница "Лыбидь".
Но и тут он не задержался, пересек широкую дорогу, не
утруждаясь спуском в подземный переход, и почти сразу свернул
налево, во дворы. Старые-старые дома глядели на него
подслеповатыми и еще, наверное, стеклянными окнами.
На улице с ржавыми металлическими полосами в булыжнике Пард
огляделся. Полос под ногами было четыре. Для чего они служили
- Пард не знал, хотя видел такие же неоднократно на юге, и в
Николаеве, и в Одессе. Да и на вокзале видел, вдоль перронов.
Поезда носились прямо над этими полосами, над парой.
Улица была тихой и уютной. Все те же маленькие домишки
выстроились в неровную шеренгу вдоль дороги. Кое-где
виднелись разноцветные вывески. Под одну из них Пард и
свернул. Спустился по отполированным до гладкости ступеням и
оказался в таверне.
Внутри было сумрачно; рассеянный свет лился всего от двух
светильников из десяти. Тяжелые столы льнули к расписанным
стенам. Хозяин, дородный человек в фартуке, сразу поспешил
навстречу.
- Добрый день, сударь! Чего желаете?
Говорил хозяин вежливо, но не подобострастно, и это Парду
понравилось.
- Жилья. Ну, и, понятно, стола на все это время.
- Пожалуйста! Цены у нас внятные, никто не жалуется, и
обслуживание на высоте. Как долго вы пробудете в Центре?
- Еще не знаю. Может быть, я здесь останусь навсегда. Я
заплачу пока за неделю, ладно?
- Как угодно! Сейчас я приготовлю комнату, а вы садитесь,
садитесь, уважаемый.
И в сторону:
- Эй, Гринь! Обед подай посетителю!
И снова Парду:
- У вас будет какой-нибудь специальный заказ? Сегодня у нас
отбивные с жареным картофелем и крабовый салат. Ну, и по
мелочи всякое...
- Все из консервов? - скорее утвердительно, чем вопросительно
уточнил Пард.
Хозяин только руками развел. М-да. В самом деле - ну откуда
здесь, в самом Центре Большого Киева свежатина? Впрочем,
здесь ее как раз можно найти, но за такие деньги, что и
думать не хотелось.
- Подавайте, - вздохнул Пард. - И отбивные, и мелочи.
Мелочей хватило, чтоб уставить весь стол. Пища оказалась на
удивление вкусной - в этой таверне действительно умели
готовить. Даже из консервов.
Комнату Парду выделили на третьем этаже. Дальнюю, угловую.
Обстановку составляли только изрядно продавленная кровать да
колченогий стул. Зато из окна виднелся купол цирка.
Пард не знал что такое "цирк". Просто это здание всегда
называли цирком.
Комната Парду понравилась, точно так же как и местная стряпня.
Из второго окна открывался вид на улицу, ту самую, где в
булыжник неведомо кто неведомо когда уложил несколько
стальных полос. Неведомо с какой целью. Пард лениво поглазел
на редких прохожих и повалился на кровать, застеленную
коричневым пледом.
Хорошее место. Судер не зря порекомендовал Парду эту таверну,
а Пард не зря внял рекомендации Судера. Вряд ли удалось бы
найти что-нибудь приличное так близко к Центру и за такие
деньги. В "Лыбиди" - пожалуйста, но там комната стоит
столько, что лучше и не вспоминать. По карману только
богатеям.
Пард не был бедным живым. Скорее, наоборот. Но тратить такие
деньги на жилье, какие драли в "Лыбиди", считал пустым
расточительством.
Повалившись в уютную ложбину на кровати, Пард расслабился.
Сонное настроение всегда нападало на него в тавернах.
Особенно после плотного обеда.
Он сам не заметил, как провалился в шаткий дневной сон.
Спустившись к ужину, он нашел таверну наполовину заполненной.
Дородный хозяин кивнул ему, словно старому знакомому и сразу
крикнул Гриню, чтоб накрывал ужин. Пард устроился за тем же
столом, что и в обед. Неподалеку от него сосредоточенно
поглощали размороженную индейку два гнома, рыжий и чернявый,
оба в кожаных куртках с бляшками. Коротко стриженные бороды
поблескивали от жира, а челюсти под мясистыми носами работали
с мерностью роторных экскаваторов. Судя по груде костей в
центре стола, это была уже не первая индейка. И пятилитровых
бочонков из-под подольского пива рядом с гномами стояло уже
два. Третий, еще не опорожненный, пристроился подле индейки.
То один гном, то второй подносил к изящному деревянному крану
в виде разинувшего пасть дракона объемистую кружку и
надавливал на драконий гребень. Струя подольского с
клокотанием вырывалась из разинутой пасти, отчего Парду
казалось, что несчастный дракон блюет. Интересно, какому
умнику пришло в голову делать кран в виде зверя? Пусть даже и
несуществующего.
Пард вежливо кивнул гномам, приложив руку к сердцу. Те
кивнули в ответ, тоже вполне вежливо и доброжелательно,
насколько это можно было сделать в индюшачьей ножкой в зубах.
Ему тоже подали индейку с горошком и сыром. И пиво.
Подольское, темное. Такое всегда продавали на Контрактовой
площади, у гостинного двора. Сколько раз Пард с Можаем или
Яром сворачивали в знакомую арку, пересекал площадь и
оказывались у приземистой пивной с потемневшей вывеской над
дубовой дверью: "Старый Подол". На Подоле всегда жило много
гномов, на Подоле и под Владимирской горой. И на Печерске
еще, где под асфальтом улиц сетью раскинулись такие обширные
подземелья, что ахнул бы любой знаток недр, любой
техник-спелеолог.
Гномы же присматривали за порядком в метро, заодно взимая
плату с пассажиров, хотя особых хлопот наука и техника
подземки им не доставляли. Поезда ходили сами, длинные
эскалаторы центральных станций тоже действовали сами, как и
любая техника в пределах Большого Киева, на станциях
шевелились машины-уборщики, и Пард сомневался, что за ними
нужен особый надзор.
Машины в Большом Киеве все делали сами. Потому что были
частью техники, непостижимой для большинства киевлян вещи, и
будь ты хоть гномом из метро, хоть эльфом из Дарницких
парков или Голосеевки, хоть гоблином или первым на Оболони
виргом, никогда техника не послушает тебя.
Если ты не техник. Если тебе неподвластны формулы.
Пард вздохнул, и принялся за индейку с горошком и сыром. От
сытного ужина и крепкого пива его снова начало клонить в сон,
а на ночь глядя идти за научным оборудованием Пард не
собирался. С утра. Все с утра.
В номер он заказал еще пива, и не слишком сопротивлялся
сладкой дремоте, что наползала на сознание. Лень было даже
раздеваться.
И еще. Если за ним все же следят - пусть поломают голову над
его бездействием.
2. Музкол - Чимборасо.
Когда Пард проснулся, за окном только-только занимался
рассвет. В доме было тихо, как в заброшенной нежилой шахте.
"Не нужно было днем спать", - лениво подумал Пард.
Сон испарился окончательно и бесповоротно. Пард выполз из
кроватной ложбины и подошел к окну. В смутном сером сумраке
шевелились полуразмытые тени.
"Прогуляться, что ли..."
Пард еще сомневался. Таверна, небось закрыта на семьдесят
замков, да, небось, половина из них - научные, без нужной
формулы не откроешь. А формулы там мудреные, не просто
металлический ключ с бородками. Пард видел замки, реагирующие
на прикосновение пальца одного-единственного человека, на
голос или на внешность, а то и на все сразу. Короче, если в
науке и технике ты не силен, замок такой не открыть ни в
жизнь.
Пард оделся, секунду постоял над сумкой, и решил оружия не
брать. Все-таки Киев, самый Центр... Не Кавказ, все таки. А
случись что - так и оружие не поможет.
Он закрыл дверь на ключ - обыкновенный, тот, что дал ему
хозяин, защемив дверью клочок бумаги, хорошо заметный любому
балбесу, и едва различимый волосок, который обнаружил бы
только прожженный профессионал. Дверь встала на место
бесшумно, словно петли смазали перед самым приездом Парда.
Пард на секунду замер на самом пороге, вздохнул, и, проклиная
свою мнительность, побрел по коридору. У другой двери, той,
что вела на просторный балкон, Пард задержался. Осторожно
протянул руку и толкнул дверь.
Она открылась совершенно бесшумно.
Пард с сомнением покачал головой.
Дверь в курительную тоже не издала ни звука. И дверь в
боковое крыло. А двери в другие комнаты Пард проверять уже не
стал. Скорее всего, в таверне просто кто-то следит за
простейшей техникой вроде дверных петель.
Спокойствие так и не пришло, и Пард сердился на себя. Сколько
раз он убеждался: девяносто девять из ста мелочей, которые он
заставлял себя проделывать, оказывались в итоге бесполезной
тратой времени и сил. Но всегда оставалась та самая важная,
сотая мелочь, которая часто спасала все дело. И не реже -
жизнь. Хотя с самого начала казалась столь же бесполезной,
как и предыдущие девяносто девять.
В зале таверны горел единственный светильник - длинная
люминесцентная лампа дневного света. Такими охотно
пользовались и техники, и ученые высших степеней. Хозяин
таверны либо прибегал к услугам кого-нибудь из посвященных,
либо ему была известна формула замены ламп и стартеров. Пард,
например, знал эту формулу, как и еще несколько десятков
таких же простейших.
Входная дверь, конечно, оказалась запертой. Но устройство
замка позволяло отпереть ее изнутри, и потом захлопнуть
снаружи. Тоже одна из простейших формул. Правда, потом Пард
не смог бы самостоятельно попасть внутрь, но он рассчитывал
вернуться спустя несколько часов, когда обслуга уже
проснется.
На улице было не по-апрельски прохладно. Пард поежился и
поплотнее запахнулся в куртку.
Было тихо, только на проспекте урчали ночные грузовики,
транзитом несущиеся с юга на Брест-Литву, да еще слышался
далекий пересвист поездов на вокзале.
Пард свернул налево и еще раз налево, ко Львовской площади.
Улица взбиралась вверх по склону холма. Если идти никуда не
сворачивая, Пард в конце концов попал бы на Большую
Житомирскую, но сейчас туда идти было совершенно незачем.
Поэтому Пард дошел только до метро. Заспанный гном в
форменной тужурке "Шкляр-Метрополитен" как раз отпирал замки,
прячущиеся в серых металлических накладках на прозрачных
дверях из научной пластмассы.
- В метро? - спросил гном с надеждой. Кажется, ему смертельно
хотелось пива, а купить было просто не на что.
- В метро, - подтвердил Пард.
- Полгривны, - гном протянул руку. Пард кинул монетку в
морщинистую, похожую на совковую лопату, ладонь.
- Проходи, вон там, у кабинки...
Пард направился к крайнему турникету, где был отключен хитрый
научный механизм, не позволяющий пройти без монетки.
Гном за дверьми пронзительно свистнул. От крайнего ларька с
напитками и легкой закуской, на вид - закрытого и темного,
тут же отделилась фигура продавца. В руке у продавца, как и
следовало ожидать, виднелась продолговатая бутылка.
"Да, - подумал Пард. - Вот и решай, если с деньгой напряг:
либо всухую езжай на метро, либо хлебни пивка и тащись пешком."
Бутылка пива в центре Большого Киева стоила ровно полгривны.
На Площади Льва Толстого Пард пересел на оболонскую ветку.
Здесь станции были старше, чем на печерской линии, и казались
почему-то неизмеримо более мрачными. Четыре перегона - и
лишенный интонаций голос поезда сообщил:
"Автовокзал. Следующая - Голосеевский парк, проход к
эльфийским дендрариям и пересадка на линию
"Теремки-Васильков".
"Надо же! - изумился Пард. - Теремковская уже до Голосеевки
докопалась! Растет метро!"
На "Автовокзале" Пард вышел и поднялся на Московскую площадь.
Поток утренних грузовиков с юга по широкой размашистой дуге
огибал бетонно-стеклянное здание автовокзала. На автовокзале
уже копошился народ - большею частью люди и орки из Белой
Церкви с мешками самовыращенной картошки да ранние Донецкие
гномы.
Пард сменял в ближайшей палатке гривну на четыре четвертака и
направился к телефонам. Седобородый гном в серой телогрейке с
надписью "Донецк Шахтер" проводил Парда уважительным
взглядом. Похоже, он не знал формулы телефонных звонков, хотя
был явно старше Парда, короткоживущего человека.
Сняв трубку, Пард пробежался пальцами по клавиатурному блоку.
"Введите номер", - милостиво позволил телефон.
Пард ввел.
"Секундочку, контрольный прозвон".
Научная автоматика телефона проверяла, истинный номер ввел
Пард или же наобум наколотил десяток цифр.
"Абонент отвечает, опустите пожалуйста двадцать пять копеек в
паз".
Пард послушно сунул четвертак в жадно щелкнувший
монетоприемник.
"Соединение", - теперь и в трубке щелкнуло.
- Алле, - сказал Пард, как того требовала формула телефонного
разговора. - Будьте добры, Гонзу Аранзабала. Спрашивает
Пард...
- Это я, старик, - перебил Гонза. - Как добрался?
- Прекрасно, - Пард расслабился. Все условности формулы
теперь были выполнены, и по телефону можно было просто
говорить, так, будто они с Гонзой встретились лично. - Я
готов. Давай номер ячейки, начну сегодня же.
- Номер шестьсот сорок семь, южный сектор. Код ты знаешь.
- Знаю. Привет Липе.
- Передам обязательно. Послезавтра, как обычно, на Петровке.
- Народ-то все еще собирается? - спросил Пард задумчиво.
- А куда ему, народу, деваться? - Гонза смешно хрюкнул, как
умели только чистокровные гоблины. - Король опять из своего
Тирасполя приперся. Приторговывает помалу "Днестровским"...
Пытает Можая... Наташка уже рычать на него начала!
Пард ностальгически вздохнул.
- Ладно. Шестьсот сорок семь, южный сектор.
- Правильно.
- Я пошел.
Он уже отнял трубку от уха, когда услышал, что Гонза сказал:
- Эй, Пард!
Трубка вернулась к уху.
- Чего?
- Удачи.
Пард хмыкнул. И повесил трубку.
"Телефонные коммуникации Пушкар благодарят вас за
использование городской техники", - высветил телефон на
экранчике.
Пард не обратил на это внимания. Кто в здравом уме станет
разговаривать с телефоном? Техник или ученый - не станет.
Потому что телефонам приказывают, но не разговаривают с ними.
А чуждый формулам и технике - просто не сумеет приказать.
Точнее, телефон такому не подчинится.
Твердо ступая, Пард направился к южному входу, туда где
мигала мерцающая даже в ярком свете наступившего утра
надпись: "Камеры хранения". И ниже - "Южный сектор".
Еще один четвертак пошел на оплату входа - щуплый половинчик
(что среди половинчиков, любителей хорошо покушать,
редкость), не отрываясь от журнала, махнул рукой:
- Шестая сотня там...
- Спасибо, - вежливо поблагодарил Пард и, скосив глаза,
прочел название журнала: "ТВ-Парк".
"Половинчик, а читает эльфийские издания, - Пард вздохнул. -
Ну и времена настали! И, кстати, строго говоря, шестьсот
сорок седьмая ячейка - в седьмой сотне, а не в шестой."
Половинчику на тонкости счетной науки, именуемой
"математика", было явно наплевать. "Шестьсот" - значит шестая
сотня. Впрочем, здесь считать могли и с нуля, что было
по-научному неверно, зато очень удобно на практике.
Следующий четвертак сожрала ячейка, после того, как опознала
и сравнила введенный Пардом код на отпирание. Поскольку Пард
делал все строго по нужной формуле, ячейка послушно
отворилась.
Внутри стояла сумка с портативным компьютером, мощный фонарь,
пистолет и обоймы к нему, сотовый телефон.
И все.
Пард хмыкнул. Вполне хватит, чтобы техник средней руки выжил
в Большом Киеве. В любой его части, даже в Центре.
Фонарь Пард сунул в сумку, рядом пристроил свернутый в
плотное кольцо шнур, посредством которого компьютер или
другую научную вещь можно было подключить к источнику техники
- гнезду. А уж гнездо легко было отыскать в любой комнате
любого дома, безразлично обитаемый дом или нет. Без такогоо
шнура конкретно этот портативный компьютер некоторое время
работал, поскольку внутри у него был свой маленький источник
техники, но любой маленький источник нужно было постоянно
подкармливать из других источников, неисчерпаемых, тех, что
находятся в домах. Тогда маленький внутренний источник
наполнялся техникой и снова мог некоторое время питать
компьютер.
Пистолет, обоймы и телефон Пард рассовал по карманам куртки.
Итак, теперь он на славу экипирован. Можно начинать.
Он заглянул в пустую камеру еще раз, и обнаружил то, чего и
ожидал: маленький клочок бумаги с аккуратно напечатанной
строкой.
"Linraen Sotiefandale, эльф, гост. "Славутич", нр. 1207"
Пард хмыкнул. Понятно. Отвлекающий маневр, пустышка. Нужно
оставить какое-нибудь бессмысленное, но на вид таинственное
сообщение этому Линраэну, а живущий где-нибудь по соседству
Гонза поглядит, кто этим заинтересуется. Сам Гонза, понятно,
останется в тени.
Пард запомнил имя эльфа, номер комнаты в "Славутиче", и
вернулся ко входу в метро, но спускаться не стал, хотя гном у
турникетов глядел на него с легкой надеждой и легкой грустью.
"Кажется, все гномы в Центре с утра страдают похмельем и
безденежем", - подумал Пард мимоходом.
- Простите, любезный, - послышался скрипучий, как с плохой
наукой машина, голос.
Пард медленно обернулся, держа сумку с компьютером в левой
руке, а правую ненавязчиво сунул под полу куртки. К карману с
пистолетом.
Позади стоял давешний донецкий гном в телогрейке. Этот
похмельем отнюдь не страдал, маленькие его глазки живо
поблескивали.
- Простите, любезный, - повторил гном. - Вы ведь техник?
- Ну, допустим, - ответил Пард озадаченно. Гном разговаривал
чересчур вежливо, и это почему-то настораживало.
- Нам нужен техник, нашей общине. Донецк-Луганск, работа
нетрудная, оборудование угледобычи. А платим хорошо.
- Я слабо разбираюсь в формулах угледобычи, - честно
признался Пард.
- У нас есть формулы... В книгах. И файлотеке. Вы разберетесь.
- А сколько платите? - спросил Пард с неожиданно вспыхнувшим
даже для себя интересом. - Учтите, я дорого стою. Очень
дорого.
- Ну... - тут гном замялся. Видно было, что он изо всех сил
соображает сколько же предложить, да так, чтоб и наемник
сразу не охладел, и община внакладе не осталась. - Ну...
Сотни две-три в неделю. Как?
Пард отрицательно покачал головой:
- Мало, уважаемый. Я за сегодняшнее утро заработал больше. Да
и потратил тоже.
Откровенно говоря, сегодня Пард потратил всего-то чуть больше
гривны, но вчера за жилье заплатил действительно больше, чем
сейчас предлагал гном. А тому всю правду знать совсем
необязательно - все равно ведь Пард не пошел бы к шахтерам на
работу.
В глазах гнома отразилась легкая печаль - наверное, донецкой
общине и впрямь очень нужен был техник, но много платить они,
конечно же, не могли.
- Да и нанят я уже - давно и надолго. Простите, - закруглился
Пард и собрался отвернуться.
- А вы не можете кого-нибудь из начинающих техников
порекомендовать? - без особой надежды спросил гном-шахтер.
- Кто бы согласился на наши деньги?
Пард честно задумался. Кого порекомендовать? Может, Алвисида?
Но как его найти? Поди догадайся, где его сейчас носит.
Последний раз Алвисид мелькнул полгода назад в Одессе. Всего
полгода. Целых полгода.
- Я не тороплю, - гном суетливо сунул руку в карман
телогрейки, отчего Пард непроизвольно напрягся. Но гном
достал всего лишь кожаный бумажник - довольно дорогой,
особенно если сопоставить его с телогрейкой.
- Вот, возьмите. Обращаться можно в любое время.
Пард взглянул на протянутую визитку - кусочек пластика с
нанесенным адресом общины и именем гнома. Гнома звали Далес
Нундаль; адрес был, конечно же, донецкий. Визитка явно стоила
недешево. Странная община, имеют визитки, и даже рискуют
раздавать их первым встречным, а техника приличного нанять
позволить себе не могут.
- Хорошо, - пообещал Пард, пряча визитку в карман. Тот, что
оттягивала вороненая сталь пистолета.
Тут к платформам автовокзала подкатил высокий двухэтажный
автобус, сверкающий зеленоватой эмалью. Над лобовыми стеклами
виднелась надпись: "Киев-Донецк-Луганск". Автобус был
абсолютно пуст. Перед левым лобовым стеклом медленно и
величаво поворачивался руль .
- До встречи! - гном попрощался и заспешил к автобусу. У
дверей, пока еще закрытых, уже толпились желающие уехать. От
здания автовокзала медленно и величаво выступал половинчик с
кондукторской сумкой на животе.
Пард пожал плечами и вновь обернулся к дороге.
Странная встреча. Уж не прощупывают ли его? Надо будет
переправить визитку Гонзе, пусть проверят этих
угледобытчиков. И заодно просветят саму визитку на предмет
каких-нибудь фокусов научной нанотехнологии. Пард слышал,
некая группа шустрых техников в Харькове сильно поднаторела в
микросистемах, да и из Большого Лондона некоторые хитрые
вещицы стали встречаться все чаще и чаще.
Странно было осознавать, что наука не стоит на месте.
Непривычно.
Хотя, именно поэтому Пард и объявился в Центре Большого Киева.
Поэтому, и за этим.
Машину он остановил довольно быстро - низкий седан модели
"Черкассы". Пард отворил дверцу и сел внутрь. На переднее
сидение. Посреди пульта мерцал экран, очень похожий на
матрицу переносного компьютера. На экране наличествовала
бородатая физиономия. Сначала Пард принял его за человека, но
когда физиономия произнесла первое слово и обнаружилось, что
борода скрывает выступающие из нижней челюсти клыки, он
понял: перед ним вирг.
- Утречко доброе, - поздоровался вирг. - Куда направляемся?
- Площадь Победы, к цирку.
- Пятерка, - сказал вирг.
- Годится, - Пард улыбнулся.
- Опустите деньги, - попросил вирг ровным голосом, но
выговаривая слова быстро-быстро, - у меня еще десяток машин
на канале.
Пард достал пятигривновую купюру и сунул в узкую щель рядом с
экраном. Физиономия на экране удовлетворенно кивнула; на
пульте погас индикатор блокировки управляющих и вспыхнул
индикатор удаленного контроля.
"Интересно, - отстраненно подумал Пард. - Сколько жителей
Большого Киева способны понять то, что сейчас произошло?"
Наверняка не очень много. И практически все они - техники в
той или иной мере. Возможно, вот этот хозяин-вирг понимает.
Но столь же возможно, что и не понимает, а просто заучил
некую последовательность действий и выполняет ее изо дня в
день. Вряд ли эту машину-легковушку приручил он лично. Хотя,
кто знает? Среди виргов немало магистров приручения, да и
простые техники встречаются толковые.
Пятерка канула в недрах дорожного сейфа. Вирг, разблокировав
управление, тут же отключился. Получив разрешение на старт,
машина сверилась с маршрутизатором, запустила двигатель и
влилась в не слишком плотный поток транспорта на дороге к
мосту, в сторону бульвара Дружбы Народов.
За мостом Пард пересел за руль, выключил удаленный контроль,
обнулил маршрутизатор и перехватил управление машиной на
себя. Машина пискнула, но, почувствовав уверенную руку,
подчинилась без излишней истерики.
Вместо того, чтобы свернуть налево, к стадиону и Крещатику,
Пард повел присмиревшую легковушку прямо. К мосту Патона.
На мост Пард выскочил на приличной скорости. Грузовики, урча,
равномерно ползли по среднему ряду. Пард их обгонял, и вообще
держался в левом ряду, у осевой. То и дело он поглядывал в
зеркало, но хвоста не заметил. Да скорее всего хвоста и не
было. Но Пард все равно поглядывал - еще одна мелочь из числа
девяносто девяти...
На левом берегу Пард влился в сложную развязку, сразу за
мостом, и остановил притихшие "Черкассы" у гостиницы
"Славутич".
Здесь тоже драли приличные деньги, хотя и не столь безумные,
как в "Лыбиди". Впрочем, его напарник, гоблин Гонза
Аранзабал, платил за гостиницу из собственного кармана. Да и
вообще, вопреки распространенному мнению о гоблинской расе,
любил комфорт и удобства.
У длинной под красное дерево стойки дежурил одинокий
портье-ламис с выражением неодолимой скуки на физиономии.
Пард вытащил пять гривен и изобразил на собственной
физиономии готовность задать вопрос. Портье тут же изобразил
готовность ответить - пятерку он заметил бы даже с закрытыми
глазами. Наверное, гостиничная обслуга чует деньги нюхом.
- В каком номере живет эльф Линраэн, уважаемый?
Портье изобразил на лице задумчивость. Для такой информации
пятерки было явно маловато, а Пард не желал швырять деньги на
ветер.
- Я могу ему оставить письмо?
Портье оживился: такой вариант его вполне устраивал.
- Да, конечно.
И положил на стойку лист специальной писчей бумаги. Пард
достал простенькую ручку "Бик" и размашисто начертал на
листе.
"Lin, ta addulimae ess' potto halix. Nuy Kiev ess' Big Ural
Stalker, toyo saedinna Dekabristov, 67. Alae Pard Zamarippa
kighart' noo."
И столь же размашисто расписался. Потом сложил лист особым
образом, так что получился аккуратный прямоугольный конверт,
лизнул покрытый специальным клеем край листа и намертво
запечатал. Сверху разборчиво указал имя адресата: "Linraen
Sotiefandale" и, улыбаясь, протянул конверт вместе с пятеркой
портье. Тот с улыбкой принял и чуть заметно склонил голову.
Пард сделал ему ручкой и, беззаботно посвистывая, вышел
наружу. "Черкассы" послушно ждали его у подъезда.
Машины любили Парда. И слушались. Почти всегда.
Отъехав от "Славутича", Пард двинул вдоль русановских
набережных. На Русановке жили в основном речные эльфы, их
здесь было больше, чем кого бы то ни было. Стройные, похожие
на свечи, многоэтажки являли миру громадные окна. Большей
частью многоэтажки пустовали, но кое-где выделялись окна
жилых квартир. И чистыми стеклами, и разноцветными
занавесочками.
Около Левобережной Пард вышел из машины. На площади
вытянулись торговые ряды; притворяясь, будто собирается
что-нибудь купить, Пард неторопливо пошел вдоль внешнего
ряда, лениво разглядывая прилавки. В момент его приближения
продавцы оживлялись, но почему-то никто не пытался
расхваливать свой товар. Видно, Пард выглядел как-то
по-особому. Неместным он выглядел. Даже заговорить с ним не
решались.
Покрутившись на площади, Пард вернулся к машине. Нет хвоста.
Нет. Ну и ладно.
- Эй, шади! Ты спешишь?
Пард медленно обернулся. Шади, значит.
Словом "шади" черные орки и орки-полукровки называли
чистокровных людей. И это было обидное слово. Поэтому Пард
ни секунды не колебался.
Он быстро и сноровисто вытащил из кармана пистолет, в
полуобороте щелкнул затвором и выстрелил. Один из двух орков,
стоявших у него за спиной, переломился пополам и свалился на
асфальт. Второй присел от неожиданности, зачарованно глядя,
как под телом его товарища медленно расползается лужица
густо-коричневой крови.
- Ты, кажется, что-то сказал? - холодно спросил Пард. Орк в
ужасе попятился.
- Нет... Нет... Это он, он сказал...
Пард криво усмехнулся. Злорадно. Но орка никто не тянул за
язык. Обратился бы по-доброму, по-живому - не схлопотал бы
пулю в брюхо. Пускай и на орочьем наречии, но только не как
к шади, а как к ахташу. А нет - лежи на асфальте и жди смерти.
Ведь смерть никогда не медлит.
На площади с полминуты было тихо; но в конце концов к Парду
потеряли интерес. И торговцы, и прохожие. Стычки на улицах в
Большом Киеве не такая уж и редкость. Пард объявился в чужом
районе. И всем ясно дал понять: к нему лучше не соваться.
Кажется, местная шпана это осознала. Когда Пард отъезжал,
"Черкассы" проводили осторожными взглядами.
Пард мысленно поставил еще одну галочку в мысленном же списке
первоочередных дел.
Машину он бросил у Андреевского спуска. Не забыв,
естественно, оживить маршрутизатор и включить удаленку. На
экране тотчас возник негодующий вирг-хозяин, но Пард сунул в
щель-приемник еще одну пятигривновую купюру, и пока тот
соображал что к чему, вылез наружу. Смачно хлопнул дверцей.
Машина тихонько пискнула.
- Бывай, - сказал ей Пард и шлепнул ладонью по крыше. Он
думал, что "Черкассы" опять пискнут, но они не издали ни
звука: рванули по Владимирской так, что задымилась резина.
Пард засмеялся. И пошел следом. Но уже на Большой Житомирской
свернул направо.
Через полчаса Пард вошел в свою комнату.
Сторожевой клочок бумаги был на месте. А вот волоска на месте
не оказалось.
За ним все-таки следили.
3. Чимборасо - Торо.
Вечером в таверну заглянул очень выразительный посетитель. В
зале он пробыл всего пару минут, и хорошо, что Пард заметил
его сразу же, едва тот зашел.
Это был рослый вирг; на правом глазу у него чернела повязка.
Вирг не остановился на пороге, как это делают все, кто
впервые приходит в какую-нибудь таверну. Он сразу подошел к
столику, где, словно оцепенев, сидел пожилой человек. Еще не
старик, но уже очень близко подобравшийся к размытой черте,
за которой начинается старость короткоживущего. И еще: его
чересчур темная кожа выдавала слабую примесь чужой крови,
скорее всего орочьей. Пард на него не обращал ни малейшего
внимания, но помнил, что вчера он сидел за тем же столиком,
что и сегодня.
Вирг присел рядом. Темнокожий человек коротко кивнул в
сторону Парда.
Целую минуту вирг глядел в другой угол. Но в конце концов все
же взглянул прямо на Парда. В глаза.
То, что Пард сразу перехватил его взгляд, могло удивить
вирга. Но Пард не заметил удивления - лицо, перечеркнутое
наискось темной повязкой, осталось бесстрастным. А потом вирг
встал и так же стремительно покинул таверну.
Парду показалось, что в зале облегченно вздохнули сразу все.
Кроме самого Парда, который не знал одноглазого вирга.
Когда Гринь, парень-работник, прибирал посуду, Пард негромко
спросил:
- Кто это был, а?
Гринь вздрогнул и звякнул тарелками. Потом в некотором
замешательстве уставился на Парда.
- Спросите об этом лучше у хозяина, уважаемый...
Без научного микроскопа было видно, что Гринь боится. И не
просто боится, а очень, очень боится сегодняшнего гостя. До
такой степени, что даже имя его вслух произносить не хочет.
- Ладно, - сказал Пард равнодушно (впрочем, равнодушие его
было наигранное). - Спрошу.
Допив пиво, Пард поискал взглядом хозяина. Хозяин, хмурый
донельзя, общался с двумя мрачными типами; один из них тоже
был виргом, только с глазами у этого оказался полнейший
порядок. Похоже, эта парочка прошла в зал через заднюю дверь
и кухню. Удалились они, по-крайней мере, на кухню и больше не
показывались.
Хозяин подошел к Парду сам.
- Послушайте, уважаемый...
Настроения хозяину не добавил ни один из сегодняшних визитов.
Явно.
- Если бы живые Жерсона не сказали мне, что вас за
сегодняшнее не тронут, я бы попросил вас выселиться. У меня
приличное заведение, а не притон для убийц. И тому же Жерсону
я исправно плачу. Но Жерсон сказал, что тот орк был сам
виноват, а второго вы не тронули. Подробности мне ни к чему,
но я не люблю, когда люди Жерсона приходят ко мне лишний раз.
И уж тем более мне не по нраву, что Жерсон впервые заявился
лично.
- Жерсон, - уточнил Пард с прежним напускным равнодушием, -
это тот здоровый одноглазый вирг?
Хозяин поморщился.
- Честно говоря, Жерсон может рассердиться и за меньшее. А
всем, на кого сердится Жерсон я изо всех сил не завидую. Это
мои последние слова о... ну, вы понимаете.
- Хорошо, - пообещал Пард вполне искренне. - Я постараюсь
больше никого не убивать. Но если мне придется туго... вы
меня тоже поймите.
Парду незачем было убивать теперь. Уже - незачем. Жерсон даже
пожаловал лично, чтоб на Парда взглянуть...
Хозяин молча развернулся и ушел к стойке. Спина его выражала
неудовольствие, и не требовалась бог весть какая догадливост,
чтоб это сообразить.
Имя "Жерсон" Пард запомнил накрепко. Он даже надеяться не
мог, что пришлым техником так быстро заинтересуется столь
крупная рыба. А чтоб представить вес и влияние Жерсона в
Центре Большого Киева, не нужно было обладать особенным
воображением.
Прекрасно выспавшись в эту ночь, с утра Пард отыскал в
комнате источник техники и подключил к нему компьютер. Потом
с помощью специального переходника, подключил к компьютеру
телефон. Свой, сотовый, потому что отдельная линия телефонной
станции вряд ли когда-нибудь прорастет в комнате небольшой
таверны.
Он особо ни на что не надеялся. Найти Техника Большого Киева
в сети - дело практически безнадежное. Пард просто хотел
оставить след. Как и в случае с невежливыми орками. Только
след. Чтоб Техник Большого Киева заметил. Внимание, так
сказать обратил. Еще одна галочка в мысленном списке.
Пард очень старался оставить след, при этом сохраняя
видимость, что никакого следа он оставить не желает.
@big kiev list%
В ответ на запрос головной сервер Большого Киева вывалил на
Парда немерянный лист пользователей Киевских сетей. Ясен
пень, что Техник Большого Киева там не значился.
@search user%
#enter names, pls%
@big kiev technician%
Компьютер на миг притих, скачивая ответ на запрос.
#access not allowed%
#enter you password, pls%
Паролей Пард, понятно, никаких не знал. Но верил, что у
Техника Большого Киева развешено достаточно следящих
программ, чтоб сразу засечь попытку поиска.
Если честно, то на входе у Парда сидел такой виргодав, что за
собственную анонимность можно было не опасаться. Любой
сканирующий доступ отрубался на корню. Изящное решение, плод
непредсказуемой фантазии Пустовойтова, старого приятеля.
Сканирующий свалился по линии спустя полторы минуты. И не
тупорылый АОН, определитель городского телефонного номера,
вещь в принципе тривиальная. Это оказалась координатная сетка
с отчетом по каждому узелку и сочленению, продукт изощренных
техников Большого Киева, специалистов по компьютерам.
Программу, наверное, приручить было труднее трудного, но асы
Большого Киева могли многое. И умели не меньше. Пард раньше
имел дело с программами, прирученными в Большом Киеве.
На редкость послушные программы.
Но Пустовойтов тоже был не под DOS'ом форматирован.
Прирученные им охранки были исполнены в лучших традициях
броневых программных щитов.
Едва сканирующий подцепился к линии сотового телефона Парда,
компьютер выдал в сеть сложный пакет, который во-вторых
обрубил линию, а во-первых выдал многомерное эхо. После этого
номер звонящего не обнаружил бы и самый вышколенный АОН
Большого Киева.
Пустовойтов был прекрасным мастером, и если бы не чрезмерное
пристрастие к пиву Центра Большой Праги, давно бы уже
находился среди лучших техников Центра Большой Москвы. А так
- сидел потихоньку в Перово и дрессировал с Дубовым несложные
программки всяким уродам на продажу, а для хорошо проверенных
клиентов приручал маленькие шедевры клавиатуры, винта и
экрана.
В общем, когда сторожевой сканирующий попытался отследить
номер, с которого запрашивали Техника Большого Киева, получил
он в качестве номера всяческую кашу из служебных символов. И
сильно этим озадачился.
А к этому моменту сотовый телефон Парда давно разразился
короткими гудками, а сам Пард радостно потер ладони друг о
друга.
Четвертая галочка. Четвертая. Дело продвигается!
С воодушевлением позавтракав, Пард прихватил пистолет и
телефон, и отправился на профилактическую прогулку.
Определенной цели он не преследовал - просто нельзя было
показать, что теперь Пард просто пассивно ждет. Ждет действий
со стороны соперников. А что может быть лучше прогулки без
всякой цели? Когда соперник ломает голову; а тому, кто
гуляет, остается только втихую посмеиваться?
Неторопливо, поглядывая на витрины работающих лавочек, Пард
дефилировал по бульвару Шевченко. Вверх, к Бессарабке. Редкие
прохожие бросали на Парда беглые, скользящие взгляды; Пард
отвечал тем же.
Напротив ботанического сада стояла и громко общалась целая
толпа молодых эльфов - почему-то даже громко разговаривающие
эльфы не кажутся шумными. Эльфам Пард улыбнулся; все, как
один и выглядели молодыми, но поди разберись сколько им на
самом деле лет? Вот этой девчонке, например, совсем юной с
виду? Может, двадцать. Может тридцать. А может и пятьсот,
эльфы всегда жили дольше представителей других рас. Как
правило - дольше.
Девчонка ответила Парду загадочной улыбкой, а голоса эльфов
вскоре затихли вдали, поглотились шумом Большого Киева -
урчанием катящих по бульвару машин, шагами киевлян, криками
птиц, что темной крапчатой стаей кружились над садом.
Увидев вывеску "Дюрандаль: Компьютеры на заказ", Пард, не
раздумывая, толкнул прозрачную дверь - не то стеклянную, не
то пластиковую. Навстречу сразу же шагнул вышколенный эльф.
- Добрый день, сударь! Я могу чем-нибудь помочь...
- Простите, - вежливо спросил Пард первое, что пришло в
голову. - Нельзя ли от вас позвонить?
Эльф подозрительно смерил взглядом Парда. Видимо, одежда того
плохо вязалась с подобной просьбой.
- Позвонить? Пожалуйста. Аппарат вон та...
- Спасибо, - перебил Пард и немедленно извлек из кармана
трубку сотового телефона. Щелкнул гибкий усик выдвинутой
антенны.
Лицо эльфа вытянулось, и подозрительность мгновенно
улетучилась.
Пард наугад набрал номер Можая. Поднял Гремлин и сонно
сообщил, что хозяина нет, и до завтра не будет, что передать?
Пард ответил - ничего - и отключился. Эльф минуту назад
тактично отошел в сторонку и теперь бесцельно елозил
манипулятором по крысодрому, уставившись в экран работающего
компьютера.
"Кстати, - подумал Пард. - Я ведь хотел дискет купить, еще в
Николаеве."
Выбрав коробку "Олех", Пард расплатился; уже с минуту эльф
приветливо улыбался. Пригласил заходить еще. Пард на всякий
случай пообещал - любой техник все равно часто появляется в
компьютерных салонах.
Дойдя до Бессарабки Пард свернул налево, на Крещатик. Высокие
старые дома недвижимо застыли вдоль широкой мостовой. Сколько
им лет - Пард даже боялся представить. Самые первые эльфы
помнили их уже выросшими. Наверное, именно с них начинался
Большой Киев.
На Крещатике все и всегда было дорого. От пива в
цилиндрических ларечках до офисов на первых этажах зданий.
Нигде Пард больше не сталкивался с такой разнообразной и
пышной рекламой, как здесь. Рекламировалось все: эльфийские
драгоценности, оружие, машины, компьютеры, кухня
половинчиков, одежда, лекарства, девочки любой расы, напитки,
часы - все, что можно было вообразить и пожелать.
Кроме одного. Формул. Научных и технических формул. Главной
ценности в Большом Киеве. Да и за его пределами, насколько
Пард мог судить по нескольким поездкам в Москву, в самый
Центр.
Большая Москва, кстати, размерами превосходила Киев. Хотя
Киев был куда старше.
Орк-подросток навел на Парда объектив "Полароида"; Пард
машинально потянулся к карману с пистолетом, но тут же
расслабился, в душе ругнувшись на рефлексы. Не хватало еще
застрелить пацана, подрабатывающего уличной фотографией.
- Вот, сударь, глядите! Чудесный снимок! Всего гривна! - орк
протягивал Парду квадратик, выползший из аппарата.
- Чудесный, говоришь? - Пард мельком взглянул на фотографию.
Она пока была черной, еще не проявившейся. - Откуда ты
знаешь? Тут ни хрена не видно.
- Снимок действительно чудесный, господин! Я не делаю плохих
кадров, не сомневайтесь.
На светлеющей фотографии начали смутно проступать
полуразмытые силуэты, одному из которых суждено было стать
Пардом, некоторым - прохожими; фоном снимку служили несущиеся
по дороге машины и невозмутимые громады домов на Крещатике.
Пард достал гривну и обменял ее на пластиковый квадратик,
изображение на котором становился все четче и красочнее.
Вскоре стало видно, что у Парда закрыты глаза. Похоже, он
моргнул в момент съемки.
- Так тебя! - ругнулся Пард, но орка с "Полароидом" уже и
след простыл. - Мастер, тля!
Посреди бела дня Парда обули на целую гривну. В самом Центре
Киева.
Но, если разобраться, то где лучшие мастера обуть беспечного
обывателя, если не здесь?
Прохожие равнодушно обтекали вставшего посреди тротуара
Парда.
- Ладно, - буркнул Пард сквозь зубы. - Будем считать это
платным уроком.
Напротив "Днепра" Пард выцедил кружку пива в небольшой
забегаловке, где ошивались в основном половинчики. Пиво было
вкусное. Половинчики - равнодушными. На Парда никто не
обращал внимания.
Сделав вид, что кого-то ждет, Пард купил свежую газету
"Вечерний Киев" и принялся с ленцой ее просматривать, не
забывая иногда зыркать по сторонам.
Минут через десять он вычислил неприметного живого, уже в
третий раз неторопливо прошедшего мимо забегаловки по
тротуару. Похоже, человека; точнее - человечка. Вид у
человечка был рассеянный, но Пард сразу почуял в нем шпика. И
закрылся газетой.
Просидев с полчаса, он расплатился, поозирался у выхода для
порядка - шпика, едва Пард встал из-за столика, как ветром
сдуло. Куда он нырнул?
Ага, вон туда, скорее всего.
У подземного перехода стекленела крошечная закусочная с
бутербродами и сосисками. За мутным полупрозрачным пластиком
расплывались чьи-то силуэты. Вот этот, пожалуй, и есть тот
шпик. Спиной стоит, делает вид, что до Парда ему вовсе нет
дела...
Пард быстро спустился в переход, бегом перебежал на
противоположную сторону и свернул за угол, к "Ледышке". Две
хорошенькие девчушки, караулившие клиента-толстосума,
проводили его удивленными взглядами. Взбежав по ступеням,
Пард спрятался за колоннами.
Спустя несколько минут шпик бесшумно взбежал по тем же
ступеням. Парда он не видел.
А вот дальше он поступил совсем не так, как ожидал Пард.
Шпик развернулся и исчез в переходе. На противоположной
стороне он не появлялся, по крайней мере Пард не заметил,
чтобы он выходил.
Выждав, Пард достал пистолет, сунул его под полу куртки и
спустился в переход.
Там было пусто.
4. Торо - Ильимани.
Недели две Пард валял дурака - шлялся по Центру, бесцельно,
но со значительным видом. Заглянул на Петровку, попил с
Гонзой и Королем "Днестровского", покутил с Можаем на Подоле.
Отдал визитку донецкого гнома на экспертизу. Дважды он
замечал слежку, во второй раз за ним в отдалении следовал
старый знакомый, тот самый шпик, что канул неизвестно куда в
переходе на Крещатике. Следили за Пардом осторожно и
ненавязчиво. И ничего не мешали делать.
Через день Пард звонил Гонзе и сообщал, что новостей нет.
Сотовый телефон могли прослушивать, поэтому Пард ни о чем
серьезном не говорил.
В таверне с ним начали здороваться завсегдатаи - те самые
гномы в кожаных куртках с бляшками, мрачный полувирг
Зеппелин, хольфинг по кличке Мина, девчонки-орки с рынка на
соседней улице, каждый день ужинавшие именно здесь. Хозяин
после визита Жерсона несколько оттаял и снова стал относиться
к Парду благожелательно, тем более, что Пард без напоминаний
заплатил за вторую неделю.
Больше всего Пард общался с гномами. Те ежевечерне съедали по
индейке и выпивали пару бочонков пива. На почве пива Пард с
ними и сошелся.
Рыжего гнома звали Бюскермолен, чернявого - Роелофсен. Всю
жизнь оба занимались охотой на дикие машины, в основном на
грузовики. Оба родились в Карпатах, в том районе Большого
Киева, который издавна звался Львовом. Бюскермолену было сто
двенадцать лет, Роелофсену - семьдесят восемь. Оба оказались
по-гномьи рассудительны и по-житейски мудры. Именно от них
Пард узнал о предстоящей большой охоте.
Сам Вольво, знаменитейший в Киеве и за его пределами охотник
на грузовики и магистр приручения, затевал очередной отлов
дизельных дикарей. Как всегда - с размахом и тщательной
подготовкой, свойственной всем долгоживущим. Бюскермолен и
Роелофсен специально приехали из Львова, где им пришлось
провести последние полгода. Вольво брал только опытных и
тертых жизнью в основную команду. Грузовики все-таки не
шутка... Оба гнома успели заработать прекрасную репутацию в
среде профессиональных охотников, и их Вольво просто
пригласил однажды в свою постоянную команду.
Как выяснилось, многие участники будущей охоты жили здесь же,
в таверне, рядом с Пардом. Тот же полувирг Зеппелин,
загонщик, или хольфинг Мина - специалист-сапер. Гномы сначала
решили, что Пард тоже охотник, но ему пришлось разочаровать
новых знакомых. Впрочем, тем было по большому счету все
равно чем занимается Пард.
Вскоре хольфингов стало двое: к Мине присоединился его
закадычный приятель по прозвищу Беленький.
Хольфинги-полугномы почему-то всегда пользовались прозвищами
вместо имен. С более высокими сородичами-охотниками они
вальяжно раскланивались; Парду просто кивали.
Пард не возражал.
На остальных обитателей таверны охотники обращали мало
внимания. Пард оказался единственным посторонним, с кем они
разговаривали. Их общество вполне устраивало Парда: охотникам
не было дела до его затей, а притвориться охотником вряд ли
удалось бы даже самому искушенному шпику.
В среду утром таверну всколыхнула новость: с утра Вольво
собрался наведаться и поговорить со своей командой лично.
Гномы за завтраком даже пива выпили меньше чем обыкновенно
выпивали.
На завтрак Пард ходил редко - чаще всего он спал чуть не до
полудня. Но по такому поводу встал пораньше и спустился в
зал. Бюскермолен, Роелофсен, Мина, Беленький, Зеппелин, двое
людей-охотников и бойкий половинчик азартно обсуждали
предполагаемые планы мастера Вольво. Гномы и хольфинги стояли
за выезд на Вышгородское шоссе; люди и половинчик полагали,
что мастер направит взор в сторону Броваров или Борисполя;
Зеппелин по обыкновению отмалчивался.
Пард, кивнув народу, уселся с краю обширного стола. Охотники
продолжали шумно спорить, причем Парду показалось, что им не
так уж и важно куда именно отправится Вольво. Им просто
нравилось спорить о любимом деле.
Они и спорили. Спустя несколько минут кому-то пришло в голову
спросить мнение Парда, как независимого живого. Пард пожал
плечами и поинтересовался - зачем куда-то ездить, если
грузовиков полно и здесь, на Брест-Литовском? Охотники
оживились, обрадовались, и наперебой стали объяснять, что в
Центре охота запрещена, потому что движение на том же
Брест-Литовском сразу нарушится, и одна жизнь знает, что
тогда произойдет. Охотится следует за пределами Центра - на
широких внешних шоссе, где по бокам гладкой дороги тянутся
ряды приземистых коттеджей и боковые улицы тоже куда шире,
чем в Центре. Там есть шанс столкнуть грузовик с трассы,
погонять его по закоулкам и в конце-концов взять. Либо загнав
в тупик, либо высадив в его кабину парочку
смельчаков-машиноловов, специалистов по приручению. Самого
Вольво, к примеру, или его ближайших подручных, вот, Бюса или
Роела.
В лице Парда эти суровые живые, привыкшие иметь дело с
могучими машинами, нашли благодарного слушателя. Пард никогда
раньше не видел настоящей охоты на серьезную машину, так
мелочь всякую иногда добывали николаевские кустари-умельцы,
но до серьезной добычи дело никогда не доходило.
Вольво появился около одиннадцати, когда споры пошли уже чуть
ли не по третьему кругу. Высокого вирга приветствовали зычным
"Хуммм!!" и дружным ревом, да так, что с высокого потолка
посыпалась труха и пыль. Даже хозяин таверны и Гринь-работник
вплели голоса в первое приветствие. Вольво тут же был посажен
за лучший стол, Гринь, натужно сопя, прикатил бочонок
подольского, охотники со стульями моментально подтянулись, и
скоро за столом уже сидела плотная толпа - вирги, гномы,
хольфинги, люди, орки и полуорки... Половинчик - и тот один
был. Только ни единого эльфа Пард не заметил.
Да и вообще они в эту таверну заходили крайне редко.
Пард остался у облюбованного за неделю с лишним стола. В
конце концов, он здесь совсем по другому поводу. Охота -
вещь интересная, что и говорить... Да только Пард не охотник.
Он техник, если еще его новые приятели-гномы не догадались.
Впрочем, техник тоже нужен на охоте. Но мастер Вольво кого
попало не пригласит. Наверняка у него есть на примете сильные
технари, прошедшие не одну охоту.
- Эй, Пард! - утробный бас Бюскермолена вырвал Парда из
раздумий. - Давай сюда!
И добавил на своем наречии, обращаясь к
полугномам-хольфингам:
- Also! Beweg dich, mach Platz! Guck nur mal, wie man sich da
breitgemacht hat!
Пард вопросительно взглянул на рыжего гнома. Потом встал,
поднял стул за резную спинку, твердым шагом подошел к столу,
втиснул стул в образовавшуюся щель и сел между Бюскермоленом
и Миной.
Вольво пристально оглядел Парда, и подал твердую, словно
пластмассовую, ладонь.
- Я - Олесь Вольво, магистр приручения. Полагаю, ты обо мне
слыхал.
- Слыхал, - подтвердил Пард, отвечая на рукопожатие. Как он и
ожидал, хватка у Вольво была железная. - Не очень много, но
слыхал.
- Представь, и я о тебе слыхал, - неожиданно сказал Вольво.
Пард вопросительно приподнял брови.
- Обо мне? От кого?
- От Жерсона.
Пард растерялся. Что общего у Вольво, мастера-охотника с
крупным киевским бандитом? Ах, да, они же вирги... Живые этой
расы всегда поддерживали друг друга, даже если один был
голытьба привокзальная, а другой - делец с Крещатика.
Впрочем, среди привокзальной голытьбы поразительно мало
виргов. Можно сказать, вообще нет...
- От Жерсона? - переспросил Пард, чтоб выиграть время.
- От Жерсона.
Длинные клыки выступали у Вольво из-под нижней губы. Все
вирги из-за этого выглядели свирепо. Взгляд упрямо цеплялся
за них; Пард пересилил себя и взглянул Вольво в глаза. Глаза
у того были маленькие, глубоко посаженные и колючие. Шапка
прямых и жестких черных волос покрывала голову вирга, словно
шоферский шлем.
- И что он обо мне говорил? - спросил Пард вяло.
- Говорил, что ты смелый живой. Мне нужны смелые на охоте.
- Я не охотник.
Вольво улыбнулся, отчего стали видны не только нижние, но и
верхние клыки. Какой-нибудь впечатлительный
половинчик-домосед точно упал бы от этого зрелища в обморок.
- Я тоже не всегда был охотником. Да и сейчас я не всегда
охотник.
Пард пожал плечами.
- А чем я могу быть полезен?
- Ты ведь техник? Или даже ученый?
- Только техник, - неохотно признался Пард.
Неохотно. Старательно играя, как актер на сцене. Ему было
нужно, чтобы в таверне прозвучало слово "техник"
применительно к нему, Парду, и было нужно, чтоб у всех
осталось впечатление, будто он предпочел бы это скрыть, да не
получилось.
- Какая же охота без техников? У меня их двое, кроме меня
самого. И вечно у всех работы по уши. Как насчет найма?
- А вдруг я плохой техник? Никуда, вдруг, не годный?
- Никуда не годный техник за две сотни гривен в две секунды
нанялся бы не то что к донецким гномам, а даже на рудники в
Норильск. Без колебаний.
Пард вздохнул. Вольво был неплохо осведомлен о его
похождениях на этой неделе.
- Ты, конечно же, стоишь куда больше двух сотен в неделю, так
ведь? Иначе ты бы уже давно сидел в шахте за пультом.
- Ну, допустим.
- Пять сотен, - сказал Вольво. - На первый раз. Отличишься -
плату удвою.
Пард задумался. Охота займет от силы два-три дня. А вероятнее
всего - вообще один, прихватив ночь. Пять сотен за день. Да
плюс такая реклама, что весь Центр всколыхнется. Предложение
Вольво - редчайшая удача, но опять же Парду нужно было для
виду поломаться и изобразить раздумья.
- А проверка? Не возьмешь же ты меня на охоту без всякой
проверки?
- Не возьму, - подтвердил Вольво. - А за проверкой дело не
станет.
И повысил голос:
- Тим!
За соседним столом вскинулся молодой вирг в круглых очках и
с аккуратной бородкой; лет тридцати, не больше. Он преданно
уставился на Вольво.
- Принеси-ка комп.
Молодой вирг молниеносно исчез за дверью и так же молниеносно
вернулся.
На стол лег плоский черный брикет портативного компьютера.
Порывистым быстрым движением Вольво откинул экран-матрицу.
- Знакомая вещь?
Пард кивнул:
- Конечно.
Щелчок; экран компьютера засветился, по нему пробежала череда
строчек.
"Шустрая штуковина! - Пард приятно поразился быстроте
загрузки. - Раза в два шустрее моей."
- Это "Рух-про", восьмерка. Работал на таких?
- Нет, - честно сознался Пард. - Я таких и не видел еще ни
разу. Но он ведь совместим со стандартными формулами? Просто,
быстрее работает, да?
- Точно! - подтвердил Вольво.
Гномы, хольфинги - все живые, охотники и не охотники, затаив
дыхание, следили за происходящим.
- Итак! - Вольво щелкнул пальцами. - Позавчера из Мариуполя
вышла колонна грузовых "Кенсуортов". Найди их.
Пард задумчиво потянул "Рух" на себя. Найти...
- А сеть? Как я войду в сеть? Здесь что, радиомодем?
Вольво снова улыбнулся.
- Нет. Формулу инфрапорта знаешь?
- Знаю, - растерялся Пард. - А где здесь передатчик?
Вольво указал пальцем на стойку, за которой хлопотал хозяин.
- Там.
Незаметный глазок инфракрасного линк-порта прятался не то
где-то среди бутылок, не то в недрах шкафов.
Пальцы Парда исполнили привычный танец на клавиатуре.
Инфрапорт ожил, нащупал невидимым лучом передатчик, и
послушно слинковался с базовой киевской сетью.
@big kiev liist% - запросил Пард.
#incorrect request% - равнодушно отозвалась сеть.
Пард взглянул на экран, тихо выругался, убил в слове "liist"
лишнюю "i" и повторил запрос.
#enter names, pls% - отозвалась сеть.
Пард подумал и запросил все о грузовых перевозках в пределах
Большого Киева. Вклинившись в статистику южного сектора,
нашел мариупольские файлы и выяснил сколько "Кенсуортов"
позавчера ушло в рейс. Оказалось, восемь: один во Львов, на
родину гномов-приятелей, а остальные в Центр. Эти семь и были
нужны Парду.
Он пофиксил бортовые номера, благо они все шли подряд, и стал
по очереди запрашивать дорожные серверы, сверяясь с картой
основных трасс Большого Киева. Везде, где колонна проходила
мимо станций слежения и контроля, "Кенсуорты" оставляли
невидимый и неощутимый след.
Но Пард был техником. И он умел идти даже по невидимым
следам.
След терялся сразу за Черкассами.
- Готово, - сказал он Вольво, отодвигая компьютер. - Семь
"Кенсуортов" из Мариуполя, номера вот, на экране. Сейчас они
где-то между Черкассами и Золотоношей, на перегоне. Полагаю,
завтра к утру будут в Центре. Подойдут, ясное дело, со
стороны Борисполя.
Половинчик, участник вчерашнего спора о месте охоты, пихнул
Мину под ребра и победно взглянул на Бюскермолена.
- И ты еще сомневался, подойдешь мне или нет? - спросил
Вольво. - Весьма впечатляющая работа! Формулы удаленного
доступа для тебя явно не внове...
Пард неопределенно пожал плечами. Впрочем, он сам был доволен
своей работой.
- Считай, что ты нанят. Сегодня познакомлю тебя с остальной
командой загонщиков. А завтра с утра - в дело. Бюс, не
забудьте его разбудить! Людей ведь свежатиной не корми, дай
до полудня поспать...
Пард улыбнулся в ответ на жутковатый оскал вирга.
"И как ему эти зубищи не мешают?" - совершенно не к месту
подумал Пард.
- Добро, мастер. Постараюсь не проспать.
- Ну и замечательно. Тогда к делу. Основная группа - саперы,
Бюс, Роел, Саграда и Михай - у аэропорта, на стоянке. Там
будут ждать Банник и Лазука на джипах, Тип-Топыч и Ас на
ручных грузовиках; это группа сопровождения. Зеппелин - ты
дальше на трассе, в случае чего будешь идти перед колонной и
не пускать ее в боковые. "Цундап" твой еще скрипит, не
развалился?
- Не скрипит, мастер. Он научился воровать смазку в гаражах...
Компания за столом дружно взорвалась смехом; видно "Цундап"
Зеппелина был всеобщим и давним любимцем.
- Ну и прекрасно! - Вольво впервые отхлебнул из бокала, все
время стоявшего у его правого локтя. Бокал был серебряный. -
Начнем у поворота на Васильков, как всегда...
Вольво просидел в таверне до шести вечера. Пард постепенно
утратил интерес к спорам за столом, потому что спорили о
вещах малопонятных, таких как "ведущий колонны", "жесткая
дистанция" и "аварийный график". Если в техники-загонщики
Пард еще кое-как годился, да и то под чьим-нибудь
руководством, то работа оперативной группы представлялась ему
полнейшей загадкой.
В шесть Вольво встал из-за стола.
- Эй, Пард! Пойдем, познакомлю тебя с коллегами...
У таверны к тротуару приткнулся приземистый "Днепр". За рулем
скучал сонный орк. Странно, но его Пард прекрасно знал.
- Вася! - воскликнул Пард. - Ты что, в Центре теперь?
Черный орк Вася по кличке "Секс" встрепенулся. Сколько раз
Пард куролесил с ним в Одессе! На машинах и без...
- Урод! - поздоровалс
|
|
Васильев Владимир. "Техник Большого Киева" |
Комментарии к высказываниям гномов.
Консультант по гномьим языкам - Татьяна Васильева.
-----------------------
- Also! Beweg dich, mach Platz! Guck nur mal, wie man sich da
breitgemacht hat!
- Давай, давай, потеснись! Расселись, понимаешь...
---------------------------
- Pass auf, Kerl, wir beginnen! Reg die Pfoten!
- Начинаем, братец... Шевели лапами.
------------------------------
"Drossle den Motor ab!"
"Заглуши двигатель!"
---------------------------
- Durch's Fenster! Durch's Fenster, Roel! So schlage doch es zum
Teufel ein!
- В окно! В окно, Роел! Да вышибай ты его ко всем чертям!
---------------------------
"Buskermolen poliert die Fresse."
"Бюскермолен даст по морде".
---------------------------
- Ich tue alles, Chef. Falle im Kampf.
- Я все сделаю, шеф. Костьми лягу.
----------------------------
- Jawohl, Chef. Ich habe verstanden!
- Хорошо, шеф. Я понял.
---------------------------
Verzeih uns, Leben!
Прости, жизнь!
---------------------------
- Bis bald also, Tangaren!
- До встречи, тангары.
---------------------------
- Hilf uns, Vater-Tangar!
- Помоги нам, отец-тангар...
----------------------------
- Trockne dich, Meer, Himmelsfeuer aus! Trockne aus,
Himmelsfeuer, alle Meere in der Welt! Die ublichen Lebendigen
brauchen nicht so viel Wasser zugleich! Ich hasse Wasser!!!
- Высуши тебя, море, небесный огонь! Высуши небесный
огонь все моря на свете! Нормальным живым ни к чему столько
воды сразу! Ненавижу воду!!!
-------------------------------
- Hmmm! Vorsicht! Sahte, Kerl! Es ist Buskermolen hier,
aber kein Sandbeutel doch!
- Хехх! Полегче, полегче, приятель! Здесь Бюскермолен, а не
мешок с песком, все-таки...я
|
Метки: васильев владимир. "техник большого киева" |
Владимир Васильев - Город-призрак |
Владимир Васильев.
Город-призрак.
Фантастическая повесть.
Глава 1.
К полуночи Алик начал клевать носом, "Жигуленок" то и дело вилял к
обочине. Шоссе стремительно рвалось под колеса - гладкое, как
олимпийский каток, и почти прямое. Андрей вздрагивал на заднем
сиденьи и тихо ругался.
- Все, - тряхнул головой Алик, притормаживая. Машина облегченно
фыркнула, прокатилась еще метров сорок, тихо шурша протекторами по
шершавому асфальту, и затихла на кромке дороги.
- Засыпаю, - виновато сказал Алик. - Извини.
Андрей заворочался.
- Ладно, спим...
Он вел машину весь день. Алик же выдержал всего четыре часа.
Правда, вчера Алик из-за руля не вылезал, а выспаться ночью не
удалось ни тому, ни другому.
Шоссе в полуночный час оставалось совершенно пустынным. Встречные
автомобили перестали попадаться сразу с наступлением сумерек;
попутные - чуть позже, часам к десяти. Это было странно, шоссе ведь
отличное, настоящий автобан, да и местность достаточно
оживленная... Но - мало ли?
Алик откинул спинки передних сидений, Андрей поджал ноги. Малыш,
устраиваясь, что-то тихонько насвистывал и Андрей с улыбкой
поглядывал на напарника.
Вокруг таилась зыбкая ночная тишина, а когда Алик погасил в кабине
свет, в окна заглянули звезды.
- Есть хочешь? - лениво и сонно спросил Андрей. Алик только вяло
отмахнулся, свернулся калачиком и почти сразу же уснул, уютно
посапывая. Андрей вздохнул, вытянул ноги, чувствуя как дремота
обволакивает и его, и подумал, что маловато за сегодня проехали.
Они гнали потрепанный "Жигуленок" на восток - к финишу традиционного
майского авторалли "ПРЫЖОК", от которого их отделяли (если верить
спидометру и карте) две с половиной тысячи километров. Экипаж номер
восемь, Андрей Шаманов и Алексей Загородний по прозвищу Малыш, ну
и, понятен, стальной их брат, ВАЗ-2107, семьдесят шесть лошадок,
полторы тысячи кубиков, проверенная родная колымага, на которой они
выиграли две гонки в прошлом году.
По графику заночевать планировали в Белорецке, крохотном сонном
городишке, приткнувшимся к великолепному трансазиатскому шоссе.
Прибыть в него Андрей с Аликом рассчитывали часов около восьми, но
дорога мерно тянулась навстречу, а городка все не было и не было.
Стемнело, время шло, а впереди по-прежнему виднелась лишь широкая
асфальтовая лента и еще - степь, колышущееся море ковыля от
горизонта до горизонта.
Усталость взяла свое, заснули прямо в машине, справедливо решив,
что утро рассеет все сомнения, путь сверится с картой и вновь
станет ясным и понятным, ралли пойдет своим чередом и лидерства они
не уступят. А сейчас спать, спать, расслабиться, провалиться в
сладкую призрачную негу, когда не нужно вертеть баранку и жать на
акселератор, втискивая покорный "Жигуль" в прихотливые изгибы
трассы. Вытравить из тела противную свинцовую тяжесть, снова
ощутить свои мышцы полными сил и готовыми к борьбе.
Андрей не мог сказать наверняка, но ему показалось, что за время
сна ни одна машина не проехала мимо них.
Первым проснулся Алик. "Жигуленок" ожил, зафырчал и послушно
рванулся вперед. Как истый раллист Алик не умел медленно ездить,
шум мотора быстро перешел в привычный надсадный рев, а за окном
замелькали придорожные кусты. У ручья гонщики задержались, чтобы
умыться и вновь почувствовать себя людьми - бодрыми и совсем не
сонными. А после дорога снова стремительно ныряла под колеса и
убегала назад, в лобовом стекле отражалось солнце и нескончаемой
казалась тонюсенькая асфальтовая ниточка, рассекающая степь надвое.
Андрей, вручив Алику бутерброд, хмуро изучал карту.
- Ч-чертовщина! - прошипел Андрей. Алик беспокойно косился через
плечо, хотя легче было просто глянуть в зеркало.
- Ерунда какая-то, Малыш! По спидометру мы уже давно должны
проехать Актюбинск. И движение по трассе просто обязано быть
плотным. А я уже забыл как выглядят машины со стороны.
- Остановить? - с готовностью спросил Алик.
- Зачем? - не понял Капитан.
- Посмотришь на нашу клячу со стороны! Ха-ха!
Малыш от души веселился. Усмехнулся и Андрей.
- Тоже мне, Петросян... Лучше бы за дорогой следил.
Алик лихо вписался в плавный поворот и "Жигуль" мощно пошел в гору.
- Чего за ней следить? - пожал плечами Малыш. - Ровная, ей-богу, как
стекло. Дави себе на газ и все.
Взобравшись на холм машина покатилась еще быстрее; стрелка
спидометра дрожала в правом углу шкалы, то и дело задевая за
ограничитель, а впереди раскинулся город, ясно видимый с высоты.
Огромный, как степи вокруг, и серый, как стадо мышей. И, наверное,
более пустой, чем покинутый муравейник, потому что на дороге между
ними и городом транспорта по-прежнему совсем не было. По мере того
как они подъезжали, крепло ощущение заброшенности и опустошенности.
Вывеска-указатель с названием города насквозь проржавела и сильно
покосилась, чуть не падая. Дома на окраине дышали затхлостью и
пустотой, глядя в мир побитыми пыльными окнами. Гладкое покрытие
шоссе сменилось старым растрескавшимся асфальтом, пропускавшим
сквозь себя буйную майскую зелень. Машину сразу стало трясти и Алик
теперь вовсю ворочал рулем, выискивая путь получше. Андрей
ошарашенно озирался, стиснув в руках бесполезную карту.
Города-призраки на ней не значились.
- Куда это нас занесло, Кэптейн? - поинтересовался Алик без особой
надежды на ответ. - Может, это Бедуиния?
"Жигуленок" катил безлюдными захламленными улицами мимо безлюдных
захламленных домов. На тротуарах попадались сдвинутые с проезжей
части автомобили - ржавые, облупленные или просто здорово помятые.
Слева тянулась размытая рельсовая колея. О названиях улиц
оставалось лишь догадываться, попадались только таблички с номерами
домов. Числа были четырехзначные.
Алик, изредка отрываясь от дороги, поглядывал на капитана.
- Шеф, скажи, что мы спим. Ну!
Андрей хмурился. За спиной оставались все новые и новые кварталы, а
картина совершенно не менялась. Все та же заброшенность и пустота.
- Малыш, может, ты вчера не туда свернул?
Алик уверенно помотал головой:
- Не-а, шеф. Трассу от проселка я, слава богу, отличаю. Да и не
было вчера развилок, я помню. Собственно... гм... - Алик запнулся.
- Что? - поднял голову Андрей. Резко, настороженно.
Алик с непонятным выражением лица остановил машину и повернулся к
нему.
- Последние два часа, как только стемнело... А, может, раньше?.. В
общем, от шоссе не ответвилась ни одна дорога. Даже самая
захудалая.
- Ну?
Алик пожал плечами:
- Так же не бывает, Капитан! К трассе всегда стекаются десятки
дорог, от простой колеи до...
- Интересно, - перебил Андрей, - сегодня, кажется, наблюдалось то же
самое?
Алик напрягся.
- Кажется...
Они посидели молча, поглядывая то друг на друга, то за окно. Алик,
вздохнув, направил "Жигуль" дальше, вглубь города. Деревья на
улицах не росли, даже трава, взламывавшая покрытие мостовой и
тротуаров на окраине, исчезла - только асфальт, бетонные и
кирпичные коробки домов, ржавое железо и битые стекла под колесами.
И всего этого очень много.
Минута тянулась за минутой и скоро Алик не выдержал.
- Черт! Может, у него вообще конца нет? Давай осмотримся, кэп.
"Жигуленок" замер посреди улицы. Вокруг высились относительно
нетронутые семиэтажки. Андрей выбрался из машины; сухой хруст
закрываемой дверцы гулко растекся окрест. Алик уже стоял рядом и
озирался. Было тихо, как ночью в запертом кинотеатре. Метрах в
пятнадцати впереди, слева чернела высокая арка, открывая ход во
двор в сплошной стене домов.
До того, как его покинули, дворик, наверняка, был зеленым и уютным.
Вдоль низеньких деревянных заборчиков бесформенными пузырями
буйствовали давно не стриженные кусты, царапали глаз безобразные
лавочки, некрашенные и потемневшие от дождей. Песок детского
городка от ржавчины стал совсем рыжим, а почти все бельевые веревки
прогнили, лопнули и валялись на земле длинными темными змеями;
кое-где к ним цеплялись лохмотья, бывшие когда-то выстиранным
бельем. И еще: под ногами шуршал многолетний ковер из опавших
листьев, асфальт прятался глубоко под ним.
Андрей и Алик застыли, пораженные. Потрепанные фасады домов и
ржавые автомобили не тронули их так, как этот опустевший дворик.
- Мистика, - проворчал Андрей, - не верю!
Алик оглянулся и потянул его за руку к ближайшему подъезду.
Внутри царил сумрак, на ступенях и перилах скопилось много
сероватой пыли, а в углах под потолком пауки свили настоящие
белесые джунгли. А вот двери в квартиры выглядели, наоборот, вполне
жилыми. Все были заперты. Открытые попались на пятом этаже, но
капитан решил попытать счастья на верхних, сверху-то больше шансов
что-нибудь рассмотреть. Внушительный амбарный замок запирал
некрашенный люк на чердак, зато две квартиры из трех оказались
открытыми. Дверь под номером "34" послушно пропустила их внутрь.
Обстановка хранила следы долгого запустения - уже знакомая пыль и
паутинные джунгли. Мебель вполне обыкновенная, только все книги в
шкафу и пара газет на столе были, почему-то, на польском языке.
Пока Андрей рассматривал их, Алик отворил дверь на балкон. Петли
при этом жалобно заскрипели и по квартире метнулось глухое,
мгновенно застрявшее в пыльной рыхлости эхо.
Вид сверху открылся солидный. Алик машинально вцепился в ажурное
ограждение балкончика, капитан отпихнул в сторону ржавый велосипед
и пристроился рядом.
Город тянулся сколько хватало взгляда и терялся в туманной дымке
где-то у горизонта. Слева, километрах в двух, на шпиле высокого,
похожего чем-то на Московский Университет, здания трепыхался
незнакомый бело-зеленый флаг, а рядом поднимался легкий дымок,
словно там жгли костер. Все это гонщики разглядывали минуты две.
- Ну, - протянул Андрей, - что скажешь, Малыш?
Малыш не нашел, что сказать.
- По-моему стоит поинтересоваться во-он тем дымком.
Алик пожал плечами:
- Может, это просто пожар. Жара-то какая...
- Может, - согласился Андрей. - А, может, и нет.
- Резонно, - кивнул Малыш. - Пошли?
Капитан еще с минуту обозревал местность, а Алик тем временем
слонялся по квартире в надежде отыскать подсказку.
- Что-то мне здесь не нравится! - с сомнением пробормотал он. - Такое
чувство, будто чего-то не хватает.
Андрей молча направился к выходу, Малыш вяло взялся за телефон,
найденный на кухне.
- Работает! - изумился он. Перед этим Алик безуспешно пробовал
включить телевизор и зажечь свет.
Андрей замер на пороге. В повисшей тишине отчетливо раздавалось
стройное гудение зуммера.
Алик вопросительно глянул на Капитана.
- Набирай, чего уж там... - махнул рукой тот.
- Ноль-два? - ехидно спросил Малыш.
Андрей буркнул: "Остряк!", отобрал у него аппарат и наугад набрал
пятерку.
Послышались короткие гудки - отбой.
Алик выразительно указал на аппарат: крохотный белый
прямоугольничек хранил номер этого абонента - 2754118.
Андрей примирительно фыркнул, накрутил 275, а затем первое, что
взбрело на ум.
Им ответил женский голос:
- Да-а?
Андрей от неожиданности нажал на рычаг.
- Ч-черт!
И тут снаружи донеслось далекое рычание мотора. Андрей метнулся на
балкон - по улице, вдали, полз бронетранспортер. А посреди дороги
прямо напротив балкона стоял их "Жигуленок .
- Вниз! - скомандовал капитан. - Поживее!
Алик внял. Из подъезда он выскочил первым и одновременно с этим
раздались выстрелы, четыре подряд. Стреляли, как будто, в соседнем
квартале. Гонщики нырнули в полутьму арки. Алик сунулся было на
улицу, но Андрей поймал его за ремень.
- Потише!
Он осторожно выглянул, одновременно отпихивая Малыша назад.
Броневик приближался. Кроме того, перекресток бегом пересекли
несколько человек, одетых в темное и явно вооруженных.
- По-моему, пора смываться! - предположил шепотом Малыш. Он все же
изловчился и выглянул.
- Согласен!
Мгновение - и они юркнули в свой "Жигуленок".
- Эй! Стойте!
Стекло в ближнем окне первого этажа вылетело вместе с рамой, на
асфальт боком вывалился исцарапанный и запыхавшийся человек. Одного
взгляда хватило, чтобы понять: его преследуют.
- Быстрее! - распахнул дверцу Алик. Андрей молча завел двигатель,
нога его застыла на акселераторе. Незнакомец прыжком втиснулся на
заднее сидение. Капитан лихо развернулся, почти на месте, так что
истошно завизжали шины и сама собой захлопнулась дверца.
"Жигуленок" всхрапнул и рванулся вперед как подстегнутый. Алик
успел заметить в выбитом незнакомцем окне несколько размытых лиц, и
Андрей круто свернул направо. Вслед сухо пролаяла автоматная
очередь, перекрывая рев мотора; воздух рассек на части веселый звон
разбитого стекла. Мимо проносились дома, а сзади уже маячил на
редкость быстроходный бронетранспортер. Незнакомец тяжело дышал и
кусал губы.
Впереди, кварталах в двух, на дорогу выкатился еще один
бронетранспортер и, взревев, устремился навстречу. Андрей вновь с
жутким визгом развернулся и шмыгнул в переулок. Алик вцепился в
поручень на панели, а незнакомца швыряло вместе с походным
сундучком.
- Могешь! - похвалил Малыш Капитана. Тот молча ворочал рулем,
пристально всматриваясь в дорогу.
- Влево! - вдруг сказал незнакомец, мучительно скривившись. Андрей
рефлекторно свернул, и вовремя - из-за угла показались два
мотоциклиста, сразу севшие им на хвост. Незнакомец озабоченно
пялился в заднее стекло: преследователи маячили сзади, не отставая.
И вдруг, приоткрыв на ходу дверцу, что-то выбросил на дорогу.
Позади сильно ухнуло, улицу заволокло клочьями светлого дыма;
мотоциклисты из него так и не появились.
- Все, - бесцветно сообщил незнакомец, - последняя граната.
Алик обернулся и увидел, как сквозь дым позади прорвался броневик.
"Жигуленок" еще раз свернул и помчался по пустынному проспекту.
Незнакомец продолжал хмуриться.
- Сейчас надо будет свернуть налево, в проулок.
- Зачем? - не отрывая глаз от дороги спросил Андрей. - По прямой они
нас не догонят...
- У них рации и полно броневиков! Все равно выследят и загонят в
тупик. Вот, сюда!
Но здесь путь преграждали сразу три бронетранспортера.
- Ч-черт! Назад!
Андрей вернулся на проспект и погнал машину дальше.
- Куда?
- Я скажу, - ответил незнакомец. Сзади натужно гудели двигатели
преследователей. Алик с похоронным видом пристегнулся и скептически
спросил:
- У вас что, принято на бэтэрах разъезжать?
Незнакомец оторвался от стекла, глянул в затылок Алику (тот,
задавая вопрос, даже не обернулся), но смолчал.
- Вправо, - скомандовал абориген чуть погодя и "Жигуленок" ушел в
узкую улочку. Впереди, метрах в ста, она упиралась в дом.
- Что такое? - опешил Капитан. - Это же тупик!
Назад возвращаться времени уже не оставалось - подоспели броневики.
- Давай-давай, в самый конец! Уйдем пешком, все равно на колесах не
оторваться, они уже весь сектор на ноги подняли!
Машина затормозила у самой стены.
- Живее! - незнакомец взял командование на себя; Алик с Андреем
молча повиновались. Уже знакомо, боком, вожак вломился в окно, туда
же юркнули гонщики. Дверь, дальше - лестница, коридор; и тут сзади
ахнуло так, что содрогнулся дом. Пробегая мимо окна Алик выглянул и
невольно вздрогнул - на месте верного "Жигуленка" теперь зияла
черная смердящая воронка, по улице бежали люди, а за ними лениво
полз броневик.
Алик очнулся и кинулся вслед за товарищами.
Они долго уходили по крышам, Андрей тихо ругался, понимая, что
квартал оцеплен, а незнакомец все бегал, минуя чердаки, пока Алик
не взвыл от досады. Но тот знал, что делал - преследователи еще
пыхтели на высоте, а они втроем спустились по пожарной лестнице на
выщербленный забор, оставили за спиной какие-то ужасные
трущобы-задворки, гаражи и просочились, как тараканы, в подвал в
самом центре квартала.
В подвале было темно, как в ящике с углем, но незнакомец несся
вперед, словно запаздывающая электричка. Алик с Андреем, вовсю
распахнув глаза и вытянув руки далеко вперед, изо всех сил
старались от него не отстать.
- Сюда-сюда, - нетерпеливо сопел незнакомец.
Они пробрались в крохотную комнатку. Из узкой щели под потолком
прорывался слабый намек на свет, ровно столько, чтобы тьма
перестала быть кромешней. В углу стоял шкаф.
- Сюда, - прошептал незнакомец и бесшумно распахнул створки.
Шкаф был пуст. Алик озадаченно уставился на незнакомца.
- Помогите, - не успокаивался тот, пытаясь подцепить днище. Андрей
послушно помог. Под квадратной деревянной крышкой обнаружился
канализационный люк. Тяжелый чугунный блин они мигом сдвинули.
- Вниз! Быстро!
Алик сиганул вниз и в полете похолодел. Прыгнул он совершенно
бездумно, повинуясь властному голосу незнакомца, и не задумался о
глубине. Пролетев метра четыре он обрушился на крепкие деревянные
ящики, и, шипя и проклиная все на свете, откатился в сторону. Почти
сразу же мягко спустился Андрей. Абориген задержался - закрыл двери
шкафа, опустил днище, поставил на место люк и, цепляясь за ржавые
гнутые скобы в стене, присоединился к гонщикам. Луч света,
вырвавшийся из его фонарика, резанул по глазам и осветил маленькое,
похожее на склеп, помещение. В центре виднелась беспорядочная груда
дерева - посадочная площадка Алика. Один-единственный коридор
уходил куда-то вправо, под землю.
- С богом! - вздохнул незнакомец и предупредил:- идти часа три.
Под ногами шмыгнула крупная жирная крыса; Андрей брезгливо поморщился:
- Кажется, ралли мы завершили, Малыш.
Алик только вздохнул: жаль "Жигуля"...
Коридор однообразно тянулся навстречу, иногда слегка изгибаясь.
- Вспомнил! - остановился вдруг Малыш. - Вспомнил! Незнакомец
оторвался шагов на десять вперед. - Что вспомнил? - уныло спросил
Андрей. - Знаешь, Капитан, чего не хватало в той квартире? - Ну и
чего же? Алик вдруг понизил голос: - Там не было ни одного зеркала!
- Ну и что? Алик замялся: - Ничего...Но так ведь не бывает! -
Догоняй! - проворчал Капитан и подтолкнул его вперед.
Глава 2.
По стенам убежища бродили причудливые черные тени, варево
многообещающе булькало в закопченном котелке, уютно потрескивал
костер и только теперь Андрей позволил себе расслабиться. Новый
знакомый хлопотал над ужином.
- Меня зовут Вилли. Вилли Квайл.
- Алик, - тут же встрепенулся Малыш.
- Андрей, - представился Капитан. - Может расскажешь, куда это нас
занесло?
Вилли хмыкнул:
- В самое логово нонки - Скул-риджент, кварталы со сто семнадцатого
по двести восемьдесят первый.
- Понятно, - буркнул Андрей. - Врубаешься, Алик?
Алик тупо переводил взгляд с Вилли на Капитана.
- Извини, Вилли, - миролюбиво объяснил Малыш, - мы в городе только с
утра и поэтому эти твои кварталы для нас пустой звук.
Вилли выпрямился, но изумления в его глазах было очень немного.
- Так вы совсем свеженькие! Поздравляю! - он покачал головой, -
Держались молодцом. Я уж было решил, что вы либо люди Старого, либо
откуда-то из Верховий.
- Вилли, черт тебя побери! Скажи по-человечески, где мы?
Квайл положил ложку и сел. Костер тихо гудел и его извечная песня
успокаивала.
- А занесло вас, ребятки, в Город-призрак. - Вилли замолчал.
Андрей с трудом удержался, чтобы опять не сказать "Понятно". Ведь
все было как раз наоборот - совершенно непонятно.
- Раз вы оттуда, - Вилли неопределенно махнул рукой, - то, наверное,
знаете легенду Летучем Голландце?
Это уже что-то - гонщики кивнули.
- Вот. Город - нечто подобное. Бродит по белу свету и заманивает
людей.
Алик поднял бровь:
- Бродячий город? Забавно!
- Как это город может бродить? - не поверил Андрей.
Вилли попробовал объяснить:
- Вообще-то он, конечно, никуда не бродит. Просто иногда вдруг
появляется в разных местах. По всей планете. И тогда в него
забредают люди.
- Ну, допустим, - смирился Капитан, - пусть так. А как выбрести
обратно в нормальный мир?
Вилли всплеснул руками:
- В том-то и дело, что никак. Отсюда невозможно выбраться. Это
город-ловушка.
Алик потряс головой.
- То есть как это - нельзя? А если я выйду на улицу и пойду все
время прямо? А?
- Во-первых, тебя скорее всего отловят нонки. Или просто бандюги
какие-нибудь. А во-вторых, даже если бы никто тебя и не тронул, иди
хоть тысячу лет - Город бесконечен, как Вселенная. В это трудно
поверить, но это так. Вряд ли он безграничен в обычном смысле -
по-моему, некоторые его места просто замыкаются друг на друга.
Можно всю жизнь идти прямо и в итоге кружить в полусотне знакомых
районов. Но одно я могу сказать точно: путей наружу отсюда нет. Это
железно.
- Интересно, - пробормотал Андрей. - Ладно, а кто же здесь живет?
- Люди, - пожал плечами Вилли, - те, кто попал в западню из внешнего
мира.
- А ты давно попал?
- Я здесь родился.
- Даже так?
- А что? Жизнь есть жизнь. Привыкнете - поймете. Вообще-то нас,
родившихся в Городе, почти не осталось. - Квайл вдруг ощерился.
- Нонки? - предположил Алик.
- Да!
- Кто они?
- Сволочи! - лаконично ответил Вилли.
- А конкретнее?
- Конкретнее? Какая-то женская религиозная секта, проникшая в Город
лет двести назад. Теперь они держат под контролем почти двадцать
районов и продолжают захватывать новые.
- Что же они с вами не поделили?
Вилли замялся.
- Это трудно объяснить... Те, кто здесь родился до прихода нонки
очень хорошо знают Город. А знание дает власть. Другое дело, что
они к власти стремятся, а мы, Квайлы, нет...
- Постой, - перебил его Алик, - ты сказал, что родившиеся до прихода
нонки хорошо знают Город?
- Да.
- И ты тоже?
- Да. А что?
- Ты родился до прихода нонки?
Капитан понял, чего добивается Алик.
- Да, незадолго, - ответил Квайл.
- Но они же пришли двести лет назад! - Алик торжествовал.
Вилли понял и усмехнулся.
- Это тоже один из фокусов Города. Сколько, вы думаете, мне лет?
- Ну-у... - протянул Алик, - тридцать.
Вилли вздохнул.
- Двести семьдесят два.
Алик вытаращился на него.
- Чего?!
Вилли спокойно сказал:
- Живущие в Городе очень медленно стареют. А родившиеся здесь,
по-моему, не стареют вообще. Лет эдак после двадцати пяти. Но нас,
детей Города, всегда было очень мало, не больше сотни. А теперь
осталось человек пять от силы.
Экс-гонщики переваривали обрушившуюся на них информацию.
Квайл продолжал размышлять вслух:
- Я знаю достаточно хорошо около трехсот районов Города. Род Квайл,
мой родственник с севера, считает, что это меньше одного процента
реальной территории Города. Роду скоро тысяча лет, и он
рассказывает, что иногда возникают новые районы - вероятно, Город
растет, как гриб. Не знаю, не уверен, я еще слишком молод, чтобы
анализировать собственные наблюдения.
Ужин яростно клокотал в котелке, напоминая о себе; Вилли поднялся.
- Ладно, постепенно все уложится и у вас в голове. А пока смиритесь
с тем, что жить отныне придется в Городе. Довольно долго, кстати.
Так что можете не спешить, не принято. И еще: здесь никто серьезно
не болеет. Насморк да механические травмы, вот и все. Понятно?
Приятного аппетита!
Потом они спали. Алик думал, что не заснет после всех странностей,
однако сразу же провалился в зыбкое фиолетовое небытие. До сих пор
он видел либо обычные сны, либо вовсе ничего не видел. А тут перед
глазами сплошная фиолетовая пелена. Фиолетовый сон, ничего не
значащий и не несущий. Алик проснулся со странным чувством: очень
хотелось громко и длинно выругаться, но что-то удерживало. Он
приподнялся на локтях и сел. Рядом сразу же вскинулся Квайл.
- А... это ты... - Вилли вытер рукавом лоб. - Фу! Извини, последнее
время я всегда был один, привык реагировать на любое движение.
Он уставился на еле тлеющий костер и, словно раздумывая, произнес:
- Скоро утро. Пожалуй, стоит двинуть к югу, в Верховья.
Алик разбудил Капитана. Вчерашнюю похлебку Вилли оставил среди
угольков костра, она до сих пор хранила тепло.
После скорого завтрака Квайл прибрал в убежище - уволок все три
матраса куда-то в темноту, котелок и ложки вымыл в ручье, невесть
откуда и куда текущем в этом подземелье, кострище разбросал и
тщательно затоптал оставшиеся искры. Когда глаза привыкли к
темноте, стали видны сотни тускло-синих точек на потолке и стенах;
света они вроде бы и не давали, но тем не менее Алик с Андреем
различали все вокруг себя метров на пятнадцать-двадцать. Квайл
вернулся с маленькой заплечной сумкой и небольшим автоматом.
- Извините, из оружия я здесь прятал только эту хлопушку, так что
вы покамест остаетесь с пустыми руками. Впрочем, - поспешил
успокоить он, - по дороге подстрелим пару нонки, будет и вам
что-нибудь.
Алика передернуло, но он, как и Капитан, смолчал.
- Пошли, - махнул рукой Вилли и они двинулись во влажные сумерки
тоннеля.
На поверхность выбрались спустя приблизительно час из подвала,
набитого бурым, неприятным на ощупь углем. Старая заброшенная
котельная торчала в центре просторного, окруженного однотипными
шестнадцатиэтажками, двора. Квайл с минуту наблюдал из окна и,
успокоившись, поманил спутников за собой.
Алик уже начал привыкать к запустению. Капитан все еще хмурился.
Вилли направлялся к угловому подъезду с южной стороны, видимо хотел
осмотреться с высоты. Вообще, Капитан быстро сообразил: здесь
принято сначала осмотреться, наметить путь, а потом уж идти. И так,
циклами, раз за разом - осмотрелся, наметил, прошел, осмотрелся,
наметил, прошел...
С крыши шестнадцатиэтажки видно было куда больше, чем с седьмого
этажа, но существенной разницы Капитан не уловил. Город
распластался внизу, словно огромный невиданный кристалл; четко
виднелись границы соседних кварталов. Справа, над большим
стадионом, кружила стая крупных темных птиц. Квайл протянул
Капитану бинокль и указал на еле видимое здание вдали, то самое, с
бело-зеленым флагом на шпиле. Флаг выглядел сейчас как неясная
точка.
- Это штаб-квартира нонки, - сказал Квайл, - советую держаться оттуда
подальше.
Андрей передал бинокль Малышу и тяжело вздохнул.
- У! Кто это? - спросил вдруг Алик. Смотрел он совсем в другую
сторону. Квайл отобрал у него оптику, глянул и невнятно зашипел,
словно выругался.
Алик шепнул Капитану:
- Там какие-то люди, здорово потрепанные.
Вилли продолжал смотреть туда; смотрел он долго и внимательно.
Потом опустил бинокль и обернулся к спутникам.
- Кажется, в Верховья мы сегодня не поедем. Это люди Берта Квайла,
моего двоюродного брата. У них явно неприятности.
Вилли поспешно направился к ходу вниз, в подъезд, где принялся
наугад толкаться в двери.
- Ищите телефон, - посоветовал он Капитану и Малышу.
Нашел Алик, на десятом этаже. Квайл уверенно набрал номер, Капитан
с Малышом осматривались. Пыли в этой квартире скопилось меньше, чем
в семиэтажке, но хватало и здесь. Книг в комнатах почти не было
всего несколько, все по судомодельному спорту.
Минут через пять к Капитану приблизился Алик.
- Кэп! - шепнул он. Здесь тоже нет ни одного зеркала! Даже в
ванной.
Андрей вопросительно уставился на друга.
- Ну и что?
Алик разозлился.
- Что - что?! Не бывает так! Не бывает дорог без ответвлений и
жилья без зеркал!
- Как видишь, бывает, - перебил Андрей и повернулся к Вилли. Тот как
раз заканчивал разговор:
-...угол сто седьмого и сто пятьдесят третьего. Приезжайте, нас
трое.
Трубка с легким стуком легла на аппарат.
- Послушай, - спросил Андрей. - А как получается, что телефон
работает? Или кто-то из вас следит за АТС?
- Город следит, - коротко ответил Вилли. - Пошли.
- Не понимаю, - пожал плечами Капитан. - Объясни.
Вилли остановился и сонно взглянул на него. Секунду поразмыслил.
- Город следит. Как - не знаю. Но некоторые телефоны работают.
Точно так же, как кое-где есть свет или работает водопровод. Это
может прекратиться в каком-то одном месте, но это же и значит, что
в тот же миг заработало в другом.
- И как долго это обычно длится?
- Несколько лет. Десять. Иногда больше. Пошли, время.
Они спустились вниз, еще раз пересекли двор, нырнули в широкий
проход и остановились на углу квартала. Шестнадцатиэтажное здание
взметнулось высоко вверх, казалось, оно падает прямо на них,
наверное, иллюзию создавали облака, торопливо бегущие по небу и
исчезающие за краем крыши шестнадцатиэтажки. Угол нависал над
людьми, как нос гигантского ледокола; вместо названия виднелись
белые таблички "0107" и "0153".
Алик отшатнулся и потряс головой. Дом сразу перестал "падать".
Стены неподвижно застыли и уходили ввысь строго перпендикулярно
асфальту.
Минут через пятнадцать из арки на противоположной стороне
перекрестка показались четверо. Один заметно хромал, у другого
перед грудью висела наспех забинтованная рука. Хромой держал
маленький автомат, такой же как у Квайла, раненый в руку был без
оружия, остальные двое имели обыкновенные "Калашники". Вся четверка
выглядела изрядно потрепанной - царапины на лице и руках, рваная
потертая одежда... Компенсаторы автоматов чернели нагаром, Андрей
мог поклясться, что стволы еще горячие.
Вилли мрачно разглядывал их. Передний, высокий плотный парень лет
двадцати пяти, мучительно закашлялся и сказал:
- Берта взяли...
Вилли молчал.
Подошли остальные. Андрей и Алик безмолвно стояли за спиной Квайла.
- Где? - наконец спросил Квайл.
- В Грэтте. Часа полтора назад. Мы пытались отбить, но...
- Знаю, - буркнул Вилли, - нонки не ходят в одиночку.
Высокий виновато понурил голову, словно извиняясь.
Вилли задумчиво оглядел всех, оценил что-то одному ему понятное, и
решил:
- Заглянем-ка мы на Зеленую Базу.
Высокий кивнул и осведомился:
- Транспорт?
Квайл не замедлил с ответом:
- Пригони бэтэр из Конуса. Вон, их, - он указал на Алика с Андреем, -
их бери, и вперед. Мы здесь будем, в 407-й, десятый этаж. - Вилли
кивнул на дом и отвернулся.
Алик с Капитаном переглянулись. Им уже приказывают! Но перечить не
стали.
Высокий качнул головой - пошли, мол! Капитану дали "Калашник" и два
магазина в придачу к примкнутому. Он привычным движением забросил
оружие за спину, привычным, несмотря на годы, минувшие после
службы. Алик лишь вздохнул, когда Капитан отдал ему тяжелые рожки,
из которых выглядывали желтенькие цилиндрики патронов.
Вилли и трое с ним скрылись во дворе; высокий дождался, пока его
нагонят экс-гонщики и зашагал влево по 107-му проспекту.
- Меня зовут Богдан, - на ходу бросил он, - если короче - просто Би.
Все так и зовут.
- Алик.
- Андрей.
- Я вас что-то не видел раньше в Команде Вилли Квайла.
Капитан спокойно объяснил:
- Мы второй день в Городе.
Би внимательно присмотрелся к ним.
- Из России?
- Да.
- Я тоже, - вздохнул он. - Уже четырнадцать лет здесь.
- Ну и как? - поинтересовался Капитан.
Би склонил голову набок и приподнял брови.
- Да так... Но в общем нормально. Не хуже, чем ТАМ. И уж во всяком
случае, гораздо интереснее.
Они свернули и двинулись по улице под номером 6219. Богдан шел
быстро; вскоре стандартные коробки многоэтажек остались позади. и
они оказались в районе, похожем на киевский Подол.
- А что скажешь о нонки?
Би нахмурился.
- Нонки? Гм... Хорошо организованная банда. Женская. Чего они
добиваются - не знаю. По-моему, ищут некие предметы, религиозного,
если не ошибаюсь, содержания. Вылавливают всех новичков. И еще - не
то строят, не то достраивают что-то у себя на Базе. Именно поэтому
охотятся на Квайлов, Детей Города, имеющих огромный опыт жизни в
нем и знающих очень много. Из этого делаю вывод - они не могут
отыскать необходимые для завершения строительства вещи, а те
спрятаны где-то в Городе.
Вдалеке послышался характерный треск мотоциклетных моторов. Богдан
метнулся через улицу в подъезд, Алик и Капитан бросились за ним. Би
прислушался, смешно наклоняя голову, прикрыл дверь.
Вскоре по дороге проехали два мотоциклиста в черных комбинезонах и
таких же черных шлемах. На перекрестке они притормозили, спешились
и свернули на поперечную улицу. Шли оба очень медленно, словно
что-то выискивали.
Богдан жестом поманил Капитана за собой, Алик остался в подъезде.
Когда они скрылись в квартире на первом этаже, Малыш выглянул -
улица оставалась пустынной, виднелись лишь два мотоцикла, застывшие
на мостовой у перекрестка, да проржавевшая легковушка, смятая в
гармошку и сдвинутая вплотную к стене дома, выглядевшая на пустом
тротуаре сиротливо и одиноко.
Би с Капитаном через открытое окно попали во двор. Андрей в
очередной раз подивился знанию местности горожанами, потому что Би
легко вскочил на балкон, потом миновал квартиру, и вид при этом
сохранял совершенно отстраненный, какой, вероятно, имел сам
Капитан, когда отправлялся дома за почтой. Андрей уже начал
привыкать к тому, что квартиры в Городе являются частью пути.
Раньше города были для него только улицами и дворами, дома
оставались чем-то запретным. Здесь же дома, подъезды, квартиры -
все это стало частью дорог, которыми пользовались все. По крайней
мере, во многих квартирах первого этажа встречались хоженные,
тропинки в скопившейся пыли, от дверей к окнам и на балконы. Дома
можно было и не обходить, а просто проколоть насквозь.
Они поднялись на второй этаж; Би с опаской взглянул наружу и
пробормотал слегка удивленно:
- Что за черт?
Улица была пуста, хотя именно сюда свернули мотоциклисты. Капитан
осторожно спросил:
- Подождем?
Би продолжал изучать улицу.
Алик тем временем все выглядывал из подъезда. Когда на лестнице
вверху послышались крадущиеся шаги он решил, что это возвращаются
спутники.
Малыш обернулся и вздрогнул. Совсем рядом, направив прямо в грудь
маленький "Узи", стоял один из мотоциклистов.
- Привет, квайлин.
Алик ждать не стал: ногой мягко отбросил в сторону кусок
отвалившейся штукатурки. Ударившись о стену тот зашуршал,
мотоциклист тут же повел автоматом вправо, и Алик, собрав себя в
крохотную жесткую точку на ступне, пнул его в грудь. Мотоциклист
выронил "Узи" и сочно шмякнулся о дверь, нелепо взмахнул руками.
Дверь со скрипом распахнулась, человек в черном рухнул через порог,
а Малыш, подцепив оружие за ремень, кинулся прочь из подъезда. О
втором мотоциклисте он в тот момент совершенно забыл и вдруг
полетел кубарем, споткнувшись о подставленную ногу. Трофейный
автомат с размаху лязгнул об асфальт. Второй человек в черном стал
над ним, "Узи" глядел вниз; Алик, растянувшись на краю тротуара, не
двигался и не пытался встать. Человек указал на автомат:
- Дай сюда!
Гермошлем искажал голос, но Алик решил, что звучит он чересчур
звонко. Протянув оружие, Алик замер. Человек нагнулся, собираясь
взять автомат, и на секунду отвел глаза от Малыша. Малыш мигом
подцепил его за ногу и опрокинул на асфальт рядом с собой. Очередь
из "Узи" бесполезно ушла в небо. Алик проворно перекатился и
вскочил на колени. Следующая очередь всковырнула мостовую на месте,
где он только что лежал. Вставать не было времени: Алик с колен
провел высокую "минутную стрелку". Автомат загремел по мостовой,
мотоциклист взвыл, согнулся и прижал к груди ушибленные пальцы. И
только когда из подъезда бегом вырвался Богдан, а следом Андрей,
Алик окончательно успокоился.
- Все в порядке, Капитан! Я тут мимоходом добыл нам оружие, - и
бросил ему один из трофейных "Узи".
Би склонился над лежащим, сноровисто связал ему руки и потащил в
подъезд. Капитан догнал Алика, направившегося туда же и
доверительно хлопнул его по плечу:
- Молодчага, Малыш!
Алик зарделся от удовольствия. На трассе получить похвалу от
Капитана удавалось нечасто.
Первый мотоциклист все еще неподвижно валялся у входа в квартиру.
Сейчас Алик заметил, что в падении шлем с него слетел и с немалым
удивлением убедился, что это молодая белокурая девушка. Сопоставить
ее с мрачной фигурой автоматчика, совсем недавно угрожавшего ему,
никак не удавалось. Малыш завороженно смотрел на нее, а сзади уже
возник Би, опуская рядом вторую девушку, такую же молодую и
белокурую.
- Ну, Малыш, поздравляю! Неплохое начало для новичка - в одиночку,
без оружия, против двух нонки. Совсем неплохо! Ей-ей!
Нонки. Женская секта. Или женская банда. Те, кто вчера полдня
преследовал их с Квайлом. Малыш никак не мог поверить в это - две
хрупкие миловидные девчонки лет двадцати. И в то же время они -
нонки. "Нонки" - слово, произносимое всеми, кого они успели
встретить в Городе, со страшной ненавистью.
- Чертовщина... - прошептал Алик и ткнулся лицом в плечо Капитану.
Глава 3.
Моторы мотоциклов звучали очень странно - не то трещали с
присвистом, не то хрустели. Ни Алик, ни Андрей никогда раньше не
слышали подобных звуков. Впереди несся Богдан, именно несся, ибо
бешеный полет сквозь город, когда встречный ветер норовит оторвать
тебя от мотоцикла, а мотоцикл от асфальта, иначе никак не назовешь.
Ту девушку, что оставалась без сознания, привязали к Богдану, чтоб
не свалилась. Вторую втиснули между Капитаном и Аликом,
пристроившимся на втором мотоцикле сзади. почти на стоп-сигнале.
Андрей пытался не отставать от Богдана. Малыш придерживал девушку
за плечи, слегка вьющиеся волосы нонки хлестали его по лицу.
В Конус они попали спустя полчаса. Просторный двор, до отказа
набитый всевозможным металлическим хламом, напоминал захудалую
сельскую МТС. За воротами Би свернул влево, минуя вереницу не то
боксов, не то ангаров. Вскоре он притормозил; остановился и
Капитан. Алик соскочил, помог сойти нонки, и пошел отвязывать
вторую пленницу от Богдана. Андрей заглушил двигатель и задумчиво
поглядел на руль - зеркало заднего вида отсутствовало на обеих
машинах. Случайно ли?
Би тем временем отпер ворота и возился у стоящего в боксе
бронетранспортера, темно-зеленого восьмиколесного монстра, похожего
на гигантского поросенка.
- Кэп! - крикнул Би Андрею, услышав, что Алик так его называет, -
грузите нонки в бэтэр и спрячьте в боксе мотоциклы!
Андрей взял за локоть девчонку, понуро стоящую рядом, и повел ее к
броневику. Алик без напряга нес вторую. Он подождал пока Капитан
загонит свою в люк; тут нонки на руках у Малыша слабо застонала и
открыла глаза. Алик немедленно скорчил зверскую рожу и девушка
вздрогнула. Вообще, то, что она очнулась, было даже хорошо. Алик
слабо представлял, как сумеет втянуть расслабленное податливое тело
в узкий люк бэтэра. Поэтому он сразу поставил ее на ноги и указал
на "поросенка". Она послушно полезла внутрь; перед тем, как
скрыться, длинно и напряженно посмотрела на Алика, словно хотела о
чем-то его спросить, но не решалась. Очень хотелось показать ей
язык, но Алик удержался от подобного ребячества.
Богдан уже завел машину; из бокса рвались сизые клубы выхлопа.
Бэтэр взревел и нехотя выполз во двор. Капитан не торопясь закрыл
ворота, запер замок и швырнул ключ Богдану, а сам нырнул в
десантный люк позади башни. Алик устроился справа от Богдана,
выглядывая в маленькое наклонное оконце. Нонки рядышком сидели
посреди отсека, руки у них по-прежнему" оставались связанными за
спиной.
Бэтэр урчал и резво несся по улицам. Пока Андрей осматривался, Би
успел вырулить из лабиринта ангаров, но выбрал почему-то не ту
дорогу, по которой они только что пронеслись на мотоциклах. Капитан
припал к боковому триплексу - Город его завораживал, чем - он не
понимал, но эти пустые улицы и дома действовали на него как море на
старого, списанного на берег боцмана. Би гнал бэтэр очень быстро,
иногда используя тротуары. Раз они наткнулись на старую угрюмую
баррикаду, пришлось объезжать ее кривыми, похожими на татарские
кварталы, задворками.
Час пролетел очень быстро. Богдан затормозил у подъезда, где Алик с
Андреем и Вилли Квайлом уже побывали утром.
Квайл ждал их внизу.
*** *** ***
Зеленая База оказалась насмерть замаскированной крепостью. С виду -
квартал как квартал, но стоило туда углубиться, как сразу
чувствовалось неладное. Андрей позже понял: дворы были совершенно
пусты. Голый асфальт, будто на плацу, ни лавочек, ни обычных в этом
районе низких ажурных оградок, зато неимоверное количество каменных
домиков, трансформаторных будок и колодцев, похожих на
канализационные, только побольше диаметром. И еще - дома были без
балконов. Но это все внутри, а снаружи - квартал как квартал.
За километр от него Квайл сунул руку в обширный карман на груди и
извлек продолговатый, смахивающий на карманный приемник, предмет с
двумя антеннами, и Алик, сидевший рядом, услыхал тоненький писк,
более всего походивший на сигналы радиомаяка. Во дворе они
подъехали к одной из трансформаторных будок. Малыш ожидал, что
Квайл пойдет отпирать замаскированные ворота, но те распахнулись
сами, и Алик с Капитаном убедились, что ЭТО изнутри так же похоже
на трансформаторную будку, как ананас на велосипед.
Это оказалось ни больше, ни меньше - лифтом. Простым грузовым
лифтом. Они спустились на несколько уровней и Би повел бэтэр по
широкому прямому тоннелю. За двести метров пути прошли серию шлюзов
и наконец попали в большой зал, где бэтэров стояло больше, чем
обычно бывает пчел в улье.
- Приехали, - буднично хлопнул себя по коленям Вилли. Прибор с
рожками висел у него на шее рядом с биноклем.
База поразила и Алика, и Капитана. Огромное многоярусное
сооружение, напичканное оружием и электроникой, полное отсеков,
кают и залов. Если бы космический линкор каким-нибудь непостижимым
образом брякнулся оземь и врос в окруживший его Город - получилось
бы нечто подобное.
Нонки заперли в небольшой комнате, пустой унылой. Люди Квайла,
видимо, часто здесь отсиживались, потому что сразу разбрелись по
каютам, расположенным недалеко от набитого экранами и аппаратурой
зала, куда скрылся Вилли. На двери этого зала висела невзрачная
серая табличка с надписью "Вахта 2Р". Пахло казармой, военщиной и
пылью.
Богдан показал Капитану на комнату напротив своей:
- Туда, туда! Устраивайтесь пока. Придется здесь некоторое время
покуковать.
Малыш вздохнул и несильно пихнул Андрея под бок:
- Пошли, Кэптейн. Мы пока что чужие на этом празднике жизни. Нечего
и голову ломать.
Богдан обернулся и скороговоркой выпалил, будто извиняясь:
- Да ничего, мужики, скоро освоитесь. Просто нонки словно озверели,
пришлось лечь на дно. Такое иногда случается.
Он поглядел на них и, улыбнувшись, потрепал Малыша по плечу.
- Советую выспаться хорошенько. Ну, отдыхайте!
Би повернулся и шагнул к своей комнатке. Перед тем как захлопнуть
дверь он замедлился на миг и тихо сказал:
- Вы очень понравились Квайлу, ребята. Держитесь за него.
Щелкнул, закрываясь, замок и экс-гонщики остались одни.
*** *** ***
Алик проснулся когда с хрустом распахнулась дверь каюты. На пороге
стоял Богдан.
- Ну, как? - поинтересовался он.
Алик пожал плечами:
- Кажется, выспался...
Капитан промолчал.
- Пошли, - Богдан развернулся и вышел. Алик с удовольствием
потянулся и направился следом; Капитан позевал немного и поплелся
за ним.
Они пришли в зал, похожий на центральный пульт большой
электростанции или автоматического завода. Кругом пестрели экраны,
датчики, индикаторы и кнопки. На экранах просматривались подходы к
границам Базы. В кресле у пульта сидел Вилли Квайл и мрачно поедал
консервы, ловко орудуя длинным пиратским ножом. Остальные
занимались тем же; и Алику с Капитаном вручили по банке.
- Слушай, Вилли, - прищурился Алик и склонил голову набок, - а где вы
жратву берете?
Вилли на секунду перестал жевать и вопросительно уставился на
Малыша.
- Как где? В Городе, конечно. Там же пропасть складов - и еда, и
оружие... Нужно просто уметь искать.
- Но когда-нибудь все съедят и износят, так ведь, долгожители? Что
тогда?
Вилли отодвинул пеструю банку и положил нож на пульт.
- А тебе не страшно, что мы весь воздух выдышим, прости за корявую
фразу? Все никогда не съедят. Город есть Город - он непостоянен и
не терпит пустоты. Новые склады найдутся там, где вчера их не было
и в помине, Между двумя соседними улицами однажды ты сможешь найти
целый район - новенький, с иголочки. Это Город, Малыш. Тут особые
законы. Нужно только стать здесь СВОИМ. И еще - уметь искать. Если
Город разглядит в тебе СВОЕГО, можешь больше ничего не бояться.
Разве только нонки.
Алик хмыкнул и взялся за консервы - банка была уже открыта.
- Ну-ну... Непонятно, но здорово. Приятного аппетита, Кэп!
Андрей сокрушенно покачал головой и тоже принялся за тушенку.
Похоже, она была здесь национальным блюдом.
Пока Алик с Капитаном спали, явно что-то произошло. Команда Вилли
тихо переговаривалась у пульта. По экранам бродили невнятные тени.
Андрей присмотрелся внимательней и подошел ближе.
Нонки!! Черные комбинезоны он узнал сразу. Много: десятка два, не
меньше. В отдалении на пыльном тротуаре замерли три бэтэра.
Ребристые следы убегали за край экрана. Камера глядела на это
откуда-то сверху, должно быть с края плоской крыши одного из
"домов".
Андрей оглянулся на Вилли: тот, мрачно уставившись на монитор,
подкручивал пузатый цветной верньер на пульте.
- Что происходит? - поинтересовался Алик, выглядывающий из-за спины
Капитана.
Вилли, не отрываясь от экрана, ответил сквозь зубы:
- Я тоже хотел бы это знать!
"Вход в Базу ищут, что ли?" - подумал Малыш без особой уверенности.
Квайл исподлобья наблюдал за изысками нонки; те возились вблизи
бэтэров нарочито не кроясь. И вдруг - залп!! Половина экранов
взорвалась фиолетовыми брызгами, так, что кольнуло глаза. Алик
чертыхнулся и полез за темными очками, с которыми никогда не
расставался. Датчики донесли сочный раскатистый звук взрыва, потом
зазвенели стекла.
Цветные пятна долго плясали перед глазами, постепенно тускнея.
- Вилли! Снайпер на связи! - обыденно сообщил Богдан. Квайл натянул
на уши гарнитуру, даже не поправив микрофон-бусину у губ.
Зрение быстро восстановилось, Алик с воодушевлением пялился на
уцелевшие мониторы. Нонки вновь закопошились.
Богдан тихонько пояснил Алику и Капитану:
- Снайпер - это наш человек, стрелок-одиночка. Квайлы души в нем не
чают. Сколько он нонки-разведчиц перебил - не счесть. Они потому и
боятся в районе базы лишний раз появиться.
- Да уж... - саркастически заметил Алик, взглянув на
бессмысленно-молочные экраны поврежденных мониторов. - Боятся...
Нонки сгрудились вокруг бэтэров, замышляя очередную пакость.
- Ну, бывают, конечно, случаи. Вроде этого... - ничуть не смутился
Богдан.
Квайл говорил со Снайпером недолго - минуты две. Неловко стянул с
головы гарнитуру, медленно обернулся к остальным. Лицо его было
угрюмым, как у разорившегося банкира.
- Плохо дело... Нонки раздобыли схемы коммуникаций Зеленой Базы...
Словно в подтверждение пропала картинка еще на нескольких
мониторах, свидетельствуя о кончине наружных камер-датчиков.
Прочный и надежный мир Вилли рушился на глазах. Всегда, когда
становилось горячо, он и его команда скрывались на Базе, уверенные
в свой неуязвимости. Теперь нонки имели схему и достаточно сил.
Захват Базы стал лишь вопросом времени. Ведь в сущности, что нужно?
Подавить все камеры слежения и зоны автоматического огня, постричь
антенны дистанционки, взорвать чего помощнее в нужном месте и все.
База строилась с расчетом на достаточное число защитников. А
команда Квайла насчитывала ныне семь человек.
Неужели в команде предатель? Иначе - откуда у нонки схема?
Квайл стиснул кулаки.
Схема всегда - ВСЕГДА! - хранилась на Базе. В таком месте, где
никто не стал бы ее искать. Да и понять, что это именно схема, мало
кто смог бы.
Кто? Раньше команда состояла из трех десятков бойцов. Плюс Снайпер,
конечно. Нонки давили их настырно, холодно и методично. Хастли, его
братья, Ваулин, потом Берт Квайл... Кто же? Или существует еще одна
схема?
- Уходить надо... - негромко предложил Богдан.
Вилли поднял на него свинцовый взгляд.
"Этот? Нет, не могу поверить".
Действительно, пора уходить. Мысли прыгали, нестройные, обрывочные.
"Может, эти двое? - подумал он об Алике и Капитане. - Играют в
новичков, а сами..."
- Гасите всю электронику! - скомандовал Квайл и щелкнул несколькими
тумблерами на пульте, отключая основные генераторы.
Тотчас мигнули и погасли все мониторы, став одинаково матовыми;
враз оборвались наружные звуки; отключился почти весь свет, лишь
редкие аварийные лампы скупо выхватывали из воцарившегося полумрака
гладкие стены, да низкий потолок. Но вскоре и они гасли, сразу
после того, как люди уходили прочь.
"Вахта 2Р" осталась далеко позади.
Квайл шел первым, торопливо впечатывая толстые подошвы ботинок в
ворсистый пол коридора.
- Стоп! - вспомнил вдруг Капитан. - А нонки-пленницы?
Вилли удивленно замер.
- Что - пленницы?
- Они же заперты. И руки у них связаны, - тихо сказал Андрей.
- Ну и хрен с ними, - отмахнулся Вилли. - Некогда.
Он собрался идти дальше.
- Это не по-людски, Вилли. Их же завалить может, - так же тихо
добавил Андрей.
Он ожидал, что Квайл снова возразит, но тот вдруг швырнул ему
связку плоских ключей.
- Ждать вас никто не будет, - предупредил Вилли. - Выход в секторе
"G", второй шлюз. Изнутри откроется без проблем, мы снимем
блокировку.
Его подозрения против этих двоих укрепились.
Алик переглянулся с Капитаном - в одиночку в Городе? Без поддержки
Квайла и его людей? Они уже успели понять, что тут небезопасно и
новичку вряд ли стоит уповать на везение.
- Я подожду их, - сказал вдруг Богдан. - Земляки все таки...
- Как знаешь, - сухо ответил Квайл. - Сбор у Снайпера завтра.
Богдан кивнул. Вилли и троица из его команды быстро исчезли в
полутьме коридора.
- Шевелитесь, - посоветовал Богдан. Одобрения в его голосе не нашел
бы и самый отпетый оптимист.
Гонщики заторопились назад, к центральному пульту и жилым каютам.
- Дались они вам... - недовольно буркнул Би им в спины.
Нонки неподвижно сидели у стены в своей комнате-тюрьме. Капитан
бесцеремонно поставил их на ноги, схватив за воротники
комбинезонов. Алик приподнял брови - на отсутствие или недостаток
силы Андрей никогда не жаловался, но такого Малыш не ожидал.
Впрочем, девчонки на вид хрупкие...
- Пошли! - скомандовал Кэп.
Выскользнули за дверь. Обстрел продолжался: пол под ногами то и
дело слабо вздрагивал, а потом, после короткой паузы, доносился
едва различимый гул. Коридор бесконечной кишкой тянулся навстречу.
Наконец они оказались у массивной герметичной двери во всю стену.
Богдан ждал их, усевшись на пол под кнопкой-пускателем.
Одна из нонки вдруг отрывисто сказала:
- Город найдет силы отомстить вам, квайлины!
- Заткнись, - огрызнулся Би, вдавливая пускатель до отказа. Дверь
бесшумно и величаво скользнула в сторону. Открылся тесный тамбур,
упирающийся в точно такую же дверь с жирной буквой "G" в рост
человека; ярко-красная эмаль искристо поблескивала. Дверь, в
которую они только что вошли, неслышно затворилась. Алик обернулся
- с этой, стороны на ней красовалась выведенная эмалью буква "К".
Спустя несколько секунд вторая дверь уползла в сторону, пропуская
их в сектор "G". Богдан сразу же повернул налево.
А в это время нонки, пробив очередным залпом стену рабочего
коридора, стали просачиваться в крепость.
Зеленая База, верный бастион Квайлов, впервые за много лет
пропустила в себя их упрямого врага.
Глава 4.
Би, Алик и Капитан выбрали на поверхность миновав уже знакомую
трансформаторную будку. Или другую, но в точности такую же. Нонки
громили беззащитную Базу на противоположном краю, а здесь было тихо
и на вид - спокойно. Вилли и его спутники давно успели раствориться
в окрестных кварталах.
- Ну, и что теперь с ними делать? - спросил Богдан неприязненно
зыркая на нонки. Девушки не менее неприязненно глядели на всех
троих.
"А ведь они близнецы"... - удивился Алик. Раньше он этого не понял.
Странно.
- Отпустим, - предложил Капитан.
Би взглянул на него, как садовник на плодожорку.
- Ты спятил? Они же всю банду нам на хвост повесят.
Капитан хотел пожать плечами, но не успел. Зло затрещала автоматная
очередь. Алик, не раздумывая, бросился на пыльный асфальт; на зубах
сразу заскрипело. Андрей замешкался, но тоже залег невредимым. А
вот Би, схватившись за бедро, неловко повалился рядом. Из-под
ладони обильно сочилась кровь, на асфальте под ним быстро
расползалось темное пятно.
Одна из нонки-пленниц резко ударила Богдана ногой, вторым ударом
вышибив из рук автомат. Би отчаянно заругался.
- Не двигаться! - послышался громкий отчетливый крик. Теперь Алик
понял откуда стреляли: справа, с крыши очередной лже-будки, шлюза
соседнего сектора.
В арку с гулом ворвался серо-зеленый бронетранспортер, из него
горохом посыпались нонки с автоматами.
- Лицом вниз, руки, за голову!
- А пошли вы... - отозвался Богдан и тут же получил по голове
вороненой сталью.
Алик с Капитаном повиновались.
- Шелли! - в один голос воскликнули девушки-близнецы. Потом кто-то
засмеялся.
С полминуты нонки радостно переговаривались. Выходило, что близнецы
были важными персонами, по крайней мере такое складывалось
впечатление.
Капитан, приподняв локоть, пытался осмотреться, елозя небритой
щекой по асфальту. В итоге ничего он так и не рассмотрел, только
получил сапогом между лопаток.
- Вяжи их! - скомандовала одна из двойняшек, Алик узнал по голосу.
Теперь уже Андрея, Богдана и Малыша грузили, плененных, в бэтэр.
Вчерашняя ситуация перевернулась с ног на голову, отразилась в
кривом зеркале.
Раненого в ногу Богдана никто и не думал перевязывать. Кровь так и
сочилась из раны, окрашивая плотную ткань защитного комбинезона в
черный цвет.
Ехали недолго - минут сорок. Алик видел небо в приоткрытый люк;
иногда - верхние этажи домов. Ощущение реальности покинуло его,
казалось, что все происходит в горячечном бреду.
Из бэтэра их вытащили на руках, предпочитая не давать свободы
вовсе, хотя Алик с Капитаном втайне надеялись на это. Би не
надеялся - он слишком хорошо знал нонки.
Первое, что увидел Алик по прибытии - бело-зеленый флаг на длинном,
как зимняя ночь, шпиле. Нонки привезли их на свою штаб-квартиру в
Скул-риджент. Здание мало походило на Зеленую Базу, но некоторое
сходство все же угадывалось. Витающий везде оружейный дух?
Подспудная готовность к немедленному выстрелу? В общем, нечто
милитаристское.
Освободили от пут их только в камере. Богдана сразу же куда-то
увели, а Капитан с Аликом остались стоять посреди небольшой
комнатушки, малые длина и ширина которой компенсировались непомерно
большой высотой. Более всего комната походила на шахту грузового
лифта в четырехэтажном доме. Никаких окон; светильник на высоте
трех метров в углу, пара низких нар у стен да тонкая книга на полу.
Дверь закрылась плотно, лишь едва заметная щель волоском темнела на
фоне кофейного пластика.
Алик с Андреем мрачно переглянулись. Разом, словно по команде,
сели. Капитан протянул руку к одинокой книге на полу. Малыш с
интересом воззрился на него.
- Чушь какая-то, - сказал Капитан брезгливо спустя несколько
секунд. - Закорючки.
Алик взглянул - ничуть не понятнее клинописи. А на ребус, вроде,
непохоже.
- Картинок нет? - с надеждой спросил он. Впрочем, иронии в голосе
тоже хватало.
Капитан невозмутимо пролистал - ни одной. Только схема в самом
конце: правильный пятиугольник (ну, прям, знак качества...),
поделенный на четыре неравные части двумя пересекающимися линиями и
буква "W", совпадающая рожками и углом с перекрестием и малыми
крыльями линий. Все это здорово смахивало на задачку из учебника
геометрии.
Капитан вздохнул и нехотя отбросил книгу к стене.
Дверь тотчас мягко ушла вглубь стены, ни дать, ни взять, как у
"Икаруса"-междугородки; на пороге возникла невысокая нонки с
внушительной кобурой ни боку.
- На каком языке читаете? - отрывисто спросила она. Лицо ее при
этом, не выражало ничего кроме презрения.
Алик с Андреем снова переглянулись. Издевается, что ли?
- На том же, что и говорим, - буркнул Малыш неприветливо.
Нонки уставилась не него, словно бармен на посетителя, который
отказался от выпивки за счет заведения в новогоднюю ночь.
- Говорят здесь все на одном, я спрашиваю, на каком читаете? На
английском? Испанском?
- На русском, - тихо и спокойно сказал Андрей.
Охранница обернулась и крикнула в темнеющий проем двери:
- Русскую копию!
Нагнулась, подобрала валяющуюся у стены книгу с закорючками.
Алик вежливо осведомился:
- Простите, а эта копия на каком?
Нонки, не оборачиваясь, ответила:
- На тамильском.
И вышла. Почти сразу же в камеру впорхнула нонки помоложе и рангом
явно пониже. Преклонив одно колено она бережно опустила на пол
точно такую же книгу, только вместо непонятных завитушек на обложке
четко выделялась золоченая надпись: "Завет".
- Приобщитесь к Учению, квайлины, - негромко промолвила нонки. - И не
смейте швырять эту священную книгу. Второй раз вам этого не
простят.
Когда дверь за ней плотно затворилась Капитан осторожно взял книгу
в руки.
На следующие два часа мир для Алика и Андрея перестал существовать.
Они погрузились в чтение, проглатывая страницу за страницей и не
замечая ничего вокруг.
Это была история Мира в странной интерпретации. Есть Мир и есть
предначертание, - говорилось в книге. - Когда оно исполняется, Мир
становится другим, более сложным. И так раз за разом, словно по
лестнице, одолевая ступень за ступенью.
А еще есть те, кто исполняет предначертанное. Имя им - нонки.
Вначале была Точка. Когда Свершилось, стала Черта. Когда в другой
раз Свершилось, стало Пятно. Когда в третий раз Свершилось, стал
Город. Когда снова Свершится - Город станет чем то иным, чему нет
еще названия; и там будет такой же "Завет", но будет в нем больше
на одну главу. Главу, где будет изложено предначертание для
Того-Что-Будет-После-Города. И так все выше и выше, дальше и
дальше, ибо нет конца Миру и Изменениям.
Каждое предначертание так или иначе связано с Отражениями. Нонки
чтили отражения и поклонялись им. Поэтому в их иерархии наивысшее
место занимала мать близнецов, а также и сами близнецы.
В этом месте Алик единственный раз оторвался от текста, чтобы
значительно шепнуть Капитану одно-единственное слово:
- Зеркала!
Предначертание для Города сводилось к тому, что однажды придут
Те-Кто-Несет-Отражения, и если они сумеют отразить Свет четырежды,
Город уйдет Вверх.
На этом книга обрывалась. И они не нашли слова "Конец".
Некоторое время пленники молчали. "Завет" бережно опустили на пол в
центре комнаты.
- Черт возьми! - Алик все еще оставался под впечатлением
прочитанного. - Вот почему у них нет зеркал!
Капитан задумчиво покачал головой:
- Не путай причину со следствием, Малыш. У них почему-то нет
зеркал, и поэтому они поклоняются Отражениям.
- Пусть так, - поморщился Алик. - То-то они штурм учинили из-за своих
близнецов-двойняшек...
Капитан вскользь глянул на "Библию" нонки.
- Странная секта. Под стать Городу. Но тогда непонятно: при чем
здесь Квайлы?
- Может, они знают где искать зеркала?
Андрей с сомнением прищурился.
- Во-первых, эти самые Отражения могут оказаться вовсе не
зеркалами, а чем угодно. А во-вторых: зачем Квайлам что-то
скрывать?
Малыш пожал плечами:
- Мало ли? Кто знает - что будет после Города?
- Может, Квайлы знают? И это их не устраивает?
Андр
|
Метки: владимир васильев - город-призрак |
Владимир Васильев - Ведьмак из Большого Киева |
Владимир Васильев.
Ведьмак из Большого Киева.
Рассказ.
Потом говорили, что он вошел на территорию с юга, через Одинцовский
шлюз. Высокий, сухощавый, и совершенно лысый человек с пластиковым
шмотником за плечами и притороченным к боку помповым ружьем. Одет он
был в истертые джинсы, черную кожаную куртку и грубые гномьи ботинки
на подошве-танкетке. В одежде преобладали блеклые тона, даже шмотник
был не яркий, как обычно, а переходного цвета от хаки к коричневому,
и, вдобавок, от долгого употребления шмотник покрылся неравномерными
размытыми пятнами, похожими на камуфляжные. На лишенной волос голове
пришлого - не выбритой, а изначально голой и гладкой, словно плафон
осветительной лампы - цвела причудливая татуировка: приземистый
карьерный экскаватор тянул чудовищный ковш через весь затылок почти к
левому уху, где присел над небольшим техническим пультом живой - не
то человек, не то эльф, не разобрать. Под распахнутой на груди
курткой виднелся на плетенке из тоненьких цветных проводков ведьмачий
медальон-датчик.
В другое время его попытались бы вежливо выставить - кто любит
ведьмаков? Никто. Ни в Большом Киеве, ни в Большой Москве. Ни вирги
их не любят, ни гномы, ни хольфинги. Не говоря уж об эльфах. Даже
люди не любят - а ведьмаки ведь обычно всегда из людей. Истребители
странного сами неизбежно становятся странными, а странности никому не
нравятся.
Территория ЗАТО Снеженск-4, потерянная где-то на узкой границе между
двумя гигантскими мегаполисами, представляла из себя отдельный район,
не приросший ни к Киеву, ни к Москве. Обнесенный высоченным
периметром, преодолевать который живые если когда и умели, то теперь
разучились совершенно. Официальными пропускными пунктами пользоваться
перестали тоже в незапамятные времена - даже самые старые эльфы
территории не помнили времен, когда хитроумная машинерия шлюзов
соглашалась выпустить обитателей Снеженска-4 и впустить их обратно.
Посторонних, понятно, машинерия никогда не впускала, за исключением
ученых да техников, знакомых с нужными формулами.
И еще - ведьмаков. Истребителей чудовищ.
В принципе, любую дикую машину можно было назвать чудовищем. Ибо все
дикое живому опасно. Но иногда в городских кварталах возникали особые
машины - машины-убийцы. Машины, жадные до живой плоти. Автомобили
со смятыми бамперами, поджидающие неосторожных прохожих на обочине.
Неповоротливые, но исполненные неживой хитрости строительные агрегаты
с омытыми кровью ковшами и траками. Их невозможно было приручить -
пасовали даже магистры с киевской Выставки и московской Академии.
Бывало, эта нечисть опустошала целые районы.
И главное - чудовищ становилось все больше.
О ведьмаках было известно до смешного мало. Говорят, что они выходили
с точно такой же ЗАТО-территории не то на востоке, не то на
юго-востоке, называющейся Арзамас-16. Туда вообще ни один посторонний
проникнуть не мог, будь он сто раз ученый или даже Техник Всего Мира.
Выходили, и отправлялись бродить по свету, за плату избавляя живых от
машинной напасти. Мрачными и неразговорчивыми, корыстными и жестокими
- такими знали их живые Большого Киева и Большой Москвы. Но когда
приходит Зло - приходится терпеть Странность. Некоторое время.
Неприятности Снеженска-4 начались лет семьдесят-восемьдесят назад.
Один за другим перестали действовать подземные транспортные потоки, и
подпитка территориальных складов прервалась. Голод не настал, но
теперь приходилось считать каждую банку тушенки, которые раньше
валялись где попало, вплоть до самых захудалых лавчонок. Собственных
ресурсов территории перестало хватать. Техник Снеженска-4, седой эльф
Сейдхе, обратился к правительству Большого Киева, но те развели
руками: а как, собственно, помочь? Перебрасывать припасы через
периметр? Да киевлян просто не подпустит к контрольной полосе
охранная техника. Большая Москва ответила точно так же, правда еще
намекнула на то, что Снеженск-4 вряд ли сумеет предложить взамен
что-либо ценное. Территория жила впроголодь и вскудь целых шестьдесят
лет, пока проходящий мимо Одинцовского шлюза московский бродяга не
подозвал к себе пятилетнего ребенка-человека, что играл у пропускного
пункта.
Ребенок беспрепятственно прошел за пределы территории, был ласково
поглажен по голове странником, награжден шоколадкой "Рот Фронта" и
так же беспрепятственно вернулся; а бродяга пошел себе дальше на юг,
к границе Большого Киева.
Родители мальчишки чуть с ума не сошли, выспрашивая где тот взял
настоящую московскую шоколадку - таких в Снеженске-4 никто не видел
шесть десятилетий. Когда несчастный пацан, размазывая сопли, в сотый
раз повторял перед Сейдхе и старостами кварталов историю с проходом
шлюза, и добрым дядей Рот Фронтом ему, естественно не верили. Пока
Сейдхе не предложил провести его через коридор шлюза еще разок. Тут в
плач ударилась мать - детям заказывали даже приближаться к пропускным
пунктам, хотя, бывало, ребятня игралась неподалеку. Просто любой
житель Снеженска-4 с молодых ногтей привык, что за периметром нет
НИЧЕГО. Вообще. Периметр - это граница. Его бессмысленно даже
пытаться преодолеть. Убежденность родителей волей-неволей
передавалась детям, и хоть они и осмеливались нарушать запреты, очень
часто шастая у самых пропускных пунктов, наружу никто не пытался
выйти на памяти нынешних территориалов ни единого разу.
До случая с шоколадкой.
Техника Сейдхе поддержали все старосты. Голосящую мать скрутили;
отец, стиснув зубы, покорился сам. Пацана-экспериментатора привели к
Одинцовскому шлюзу, и на глазах у нескольких десятков живых тот без
всякого ущерба для себя вышел за периметр. И вернулся.
Тогда Сейдхе распорядился привести снеженского дурачка, полуорка
Чкудаха, обыкновенно околачивающегося у единственной бани.
Привели.
- Видишь? - спросил Сейдхе, поднося к носу полуорка злополучную
шоколадку.
Чкудах часто-часто закивал, не сводя глаз с яркой обертки.
- Хочешь? - еще жестче спросил Сейдхе.
Чкудах пустил слюни.
- Бери, - разрешил эльф и расчетливым движением швырнул шоколадку
наружу. Через пункт.
Чкудах сунулся в узкий коридорчик шлюза и осел на самой его середине.
Когда его баграми втянули назад, никто не сомневался, что полуорк
мертв.
Вспыхнувшая было надежда, что охранные машины периметра уснули, враз
погасла.
И тогда Сейдхе вторично погнал через шлюз ребенка. Мать лишилась
сознания, отец сделался белым, как мелованная бумага.
Пацан принес шоколадку, и снова остался жив.
Сейдхе поразмышлял минут пять, и приказал привести еще пятерых детей.
Сирот. Четверых мальчишек и девочку: двух людей, черного орка,
хольфинга и вирга-метиса, от четырех до пятнадцати лет. Всех без
исключения шлюз пропустил.
- Что ж... - грустно сказал Сейдхе, окидывая взглядом толпу
территориалов. - Осталось только доказать, что взрослых шлюз
по-прежнему убивает.
И направился ко входу в узкий коридорчик.
Эльфа похоронили в этот же день. В этот же день выбрали нового
Техника. И принялись размышлять - как может помочь территории
неожиданное знание.
Во-первых, дети были слишком малы, чтобы осознанно помочь. Даже
старшие из них - тридцатилетние эльфы - мало отличались от пятилетних
людей. И по силе, и по сообразительности. Долгоживущие медленно
взрослеют. Дети людей успевают обогнать приятелей по играм несколько
раз, прежде чем становятся взрослыми. Но не в возрасте дело - дело в
том, что добраться до ближайшего склада и доставить хоть что-нибудь в
состоянии только взрослый живой. В самом деле, даже если добредет
пятилетний карапуз-человек или орк-двадцатилетка до склада, сколько
он в состоянии с собой унести? Банку консервов? Да он игрушку скорее
ухватит, или кулек с печеньем. А ведь на склад еще нужно попасть,
открыть замки... Плюс, вокруг может ошиваться какая угодно шваль,
безразлично - вооруженная или нет. Против малышей и прыщавый
подросток - гигант. Так что дойти и отыскать то, что нужно - еще
полдела. Нужно еще вернуться.
Задача казалась неразрешимой.
Разрешилась она еще спустя несколько лет, когда население Снеженска-4
сократилось вдвое. Прирост ресурсов территории падал и падал, и стало
очевидным, что скоро Снеженск-4 опустеет.
Именно в этот момент Техник сумел понять одну из ключевых формул
снеженского комбината и открыл секрет синтеза сырья - вещества,
которое высоко ценилось как в Большом Киеве, так и в Большой Москве.
Для синтеза требовалось оборудование - а оно в лабораториях комбината
имелось - и особые камешки. Камешки можно было собирать в пределах
периметра; но Техник сразу понял, что надолго их запаса не хватит.
Первые же опыты увенчались успехом, сырье было синтезировано.
Немедленно связались с Москвой, и заключили первую сделку: несколько
прирученных грузовиков примчались к площадке перед Степинским шлюзом
и чуть ли не весь световой день москвичи и территориалы перетаскивали
на позаимствованных из клуба шторах груды консервов и банок с
солениями, пакеты с галетами и переносные источники техники для
портативных приборов.
За год синтез съел все камешки на территории. Подчистую. Тогда-то и
вспомнили о способности детей проходить через шлюзы. И пошло:
поисковые группы из малышей шастали вокруг территории и помалу
стаскивали внутрь заветные камешки. Дети, сущие несмышленыши и
карапузы в одночасье сделались спасением Снеженска-4.
Целых двенадцать лет все шло, как по маслу: Снеженск-4 наладил обмен
и с Большим Киевом, и с Большим Минском, а как-то раз проявились даже
усатые кавказцы с совершенно неимоверным количеством мандаринов в
картонных ящиках.
Пока не очнулся Рип.
Никто уже не помнил, почему Рипа назвали Рипом. Никто и не пытался
вспомнить. Рип являлся, скорее всего, боевым мнемороботом, но понимал
это единственный живой в Снеженске-4 - Техник.
Пропал ребенок, причем не ходивший в этот день за периметр. Его
искали в жилых районах и на комбинате, но тщетно. Вскоре пропал
другой. Третий.
А спустя месяц дети рассказали, как из-за комбинатского цеха выскочил
металлический паук и утянул эльфийку Майен куда-то в бетонные джунгли
и переплетение арматурин. Остальные дети с визгом разбежались.
В первые месяцы взрослые паука-Рипа видели всего дважды, и оба раза
днем. Сначала Рип появлялся лишь изредка, но потом стало ясно, что он
растет и требует все больше и больше пищи. Дети стали пропадать прямо
из жилищ; если взрослые пытались помешать - Рип их убивал.
На территорию наползла тень отчаяния. Взрослые не отпускали детей из
жилищ; к пропускным пунктам водили под охраной и ждали до тех пор,
пока они не вернутся. Но это не помогло: сначала Рип напал на
возвращающихся со сбора детей, легко разогнал охрану и
беспрепятственно утащил жертву. Потом попробовал нападать за
пределами периметра, но по какой-то причине после первой же попытки
отказался от этого. И продолжал разбойничать на территории.
Снеженцы пытались просить помощи у Москвы и Киева, но чем те могли
помочь? Попытались устроить облаву своими силами - потеряли трех
живых, а Рипа даже не оцарапали, хотя палили по нему в сотню стволов.
Где прятался Рип тоже оставалось загадкой. Свои стремительные и
непредсказуемые рейды он совершал то днем, то ночью, но чаще всего -
под самое утро, на рассвете; и свидетелей его бесчинств больше
почему-то не оставалось. Наверное, Рип их убивал. Во всяком случае,
помимо пропавших детей территориалы несколько раз натыкались на
трупы, и смотреть на них было весьма неприятно. Погиб мастер-гном
Думерник, погиб певец из людей Гнат, нашли обезображенные до
неузнаваемости останки и только по серебряным часам-луковице
опознали, что это староста Петровки хольфинг Ван Реты по прозвищу
Балагур. Накануне у Балагура пропала двенадцатилетняя дочь...
Видимо, ведьмак пришел глубокой ночью и заперся в заброшенной каморке
охраны на пропускном пункте. Там он продремал до рассвета, а едва
развиднелось - отправился вглубь территории. Ближние к периметру
кварталы обычно пустовали - постоянно там никто не жил, а искать там
изначально было нечего. Средоточием жизни Снеженска-4 всегда
оставался самый центр: кварталы лучших домов, с некоторых пор
опустевшие магазины, да вычищенные подчистую склады комбината. Сам
комбинат мало кого интересовал, а уж теперь, с появлением Рипа его
обходили чем дальше, тем лучше.
Не став размениваться на пустопорожние разговоры, ведьмак пошел прямо
к Технику Снеженска-4 Альмелиду. В такую рань территориалы еще не
решались высунуться из жилищ, спешно превращенных в убежища.
Розоватые отблески лежали на слоях уличной пыли, и казалось, что это
не пыль, не грязь, а увядшие и опавшие мечты жителей территории о
безбедной жизни. Гномьи ботинки ведьмака впечатывали в мечты рифленые
оттиски.
Жилище Техника ведьмак определил безошибочно - чутьем, что ли?
Толкнул решетчатую калитку, прошагал по квадратным гранитным плитам к
ступеням, ведущим на крыльцо. Меж плит пробивалась чахлая травка.
У стеклянных дверей на уровне глаз ведьмака красовалась массивная
металлическая табличка: "Снеженское промышленное техническое
предприятие".
Двери были заперты на массивный висячий замок.
"Несложная техника, - подумал ведьмак. - Неужели Рипу это может
помешать?"
На стук явился заспанный молоденький техник без штанов и в куртке на
голое тело. И еще в тапочках. Увидев лысую голову с татуировкой
(ведьмак специально повернулся боком к двери), техник-засоня чуть не
выронил пижонскую зеркально-сверкающую "Беретту".
- Открывай, - потребовал ведьмак.
Техник отупело застыл перед дверьми. У него были трогательно
оттопыренные уши.
- А... Я сейчас...
И, теряя тапочки, припустил куда-то вглубь холла. К телефону,
наверное.
Техник - Техник, а не техник - появился на удивление быстро, и при
этом он был тщательно и аккуратно одет. Только не выбрит, что слегка
портило впечатление. По его команде засоня, надевший-таки штаны и
кеды, отомкнул замок и приоткрыл одну створку.
- Входи, - мрачно процедил Техник. - В другое время, ведьмак, я бы
тебя вытолкал с территории взашей. А сейчас - входи.
- В другое время я бы и не пришел, - ведьмак пожал плечами. И бочком
протиснулся в щель, чуть не касаясь техника-засони.
Его привели в маленький кабинет на втором этаже. Лифтом Техник
почему-то решил не пользоваться - пошел пешком. Сначала влево, по
длинному коридору, потом по узкой лесенке, и снова по коридору.
Все убранство кабинета составлял накрытый зеленым сукном стол для
совещаний, несколько стульев подле него, да кафедра в углу. Ведьмак
подумал, что в хорошие времена тут чаще резались в карты, чем
проводили совещания. По знаку Техника, помощник раскрыл окно. Свежий
воздух потек в кабинет, вытесняя затхлость и пляшущую в лучах
рассвета пыль.
- Итак, ведьмак... Я тебя слушаю.
- А сесть мне предложат? - без всякой развязности поинтересовался
ведьмак.
Техник вяло махнул рукой в сторону стульев, а сам остался стоять.
Ведьмак сел, водрузив локоть на сукно. На спинку стула он опирался
скорее боком, чем спиной, поскольку за спиной висел шмотник.
- У вас трудности, - сказал ведьмак. Фразы получались короткими,
рубленными, как автоматные очереди опытного солдата. - Я - ведьмак. Я
могу помочь.
- Чем?
- Я выслежу и убью Рипа.
- Разве это возможно? - голос Техника полнился глухой неистребимой
тоской.
- Возможно. Машины тоже смертны. Ты же Техник.
Техник тускло воззрился на ведьмака.
- А что тебе известно?
Ведьмак снова пожал плечами:
- На комбинате активировался Рип. Зарядился, разведал окрестности. И
начал охоту. Он, вероятно, ворует детей. Значит, это Рип-эспер. Он
убивает свидетелей, значит, это боевой эспер. Судя по тому, что он
нападает не только ночью, но и днем, это боевой эспер-универсал. Я не
завидую вам, Техник. Пройдет месяц или два, и он уведет всех детей, а
вас передушит. Вы ведь не сможете сбежать, а убить его вам не под
силу. Вы ведь пытались, не так ли?
Техник угрюмо вперился в лицо собеседника.
- Откуда ты, прости жизнь, все это знаешь?
На этот раз ведьмак не стал пожимать плечами.
- Я - ведьмак, - уклончиво ответил он.
Хотел добавить еще: "У нас свои методы", но сдержался.
Техник некоторое время размышлял.
- А ты сумеешь? - спросил он глухо.
Ведьмак не рассмеялся, хотя Техник того ожидал.
- Я - ведьмак, - повторил он. Только и всего.
Помощник-засоня, не дыша, стоял у окна и уши его, казалось,
оттопырились еще сильнее.
- Ладно, - Техник тяжело оперся о спинку ближайшего стула. -
Допустим. Но ведьмаки не работают бесплатно. Так ведь?
- Так, - согласился ведьмак.
- И сколько же тебе нужно? И в чем - в рублях, в гривнах?
Только теперь ведьмак позволил себе улыбнуться.
- На вашу территорию смешно приходить за деньгами. Что деньги? У вас
есть гораздо более ценная вещь.
Кажется, Техник догадался.
- Так-так-так... - процедил он. - Что же именно?
- Сырье, - простодушно ответил ведьмак. - То, что в Киеве зовется
"компотом", а в Москве...
- Я знаю, как зовется сырье в Москве, - перебил Техник. - Сколько?
- Все, что у вас есть, - простодушно ответил ведьмак, но взгляд его в
этот момент отнюдь не был простодушен. - И имейте в виду: я прекрасно
осведомлен об объемах вашей торговли с Киевом, Москвой и Минском. Так
что я представляю сколько вы вырабатываете сырья.
- Что-о-о? - Техник негодующе выпрямился. - Ты в своем уме, ведьмак?
Ты знаешь, сколько это стоит?
- Знаю, - с удовольствием признался ведьмак. - И меня неимоверно
согревает это знание.
Техник последовательно перешел от негодования к недоумению, а потом
даже к тени веселья:
- Но ведь если мы отдадим все сырье тебе, мы не сможем заплатить
Киеву и Москве...
- В ближайшую неделю у вас не намечается поставок Москве, - перебил
ведьмак. - Только Киев. И только концерн Халькдаффа.
Теперь Техник глядел на ведьмака с ненавистью. Потому что ведьмак
говорил истинную правду. Непонятно только было, откуда ему столько
известно о закрытой территории Снеженск-4, ведь раньше он здесь
никогда не бывал.
- Хорошо, - процедил Техник, сдерживая злость. - Мы не сможем
расплатиться с Халькдаффом, и вынуждены будем голодать, пока снова не
синтезируем нужное количество сырья. А это почти полтора месяца.
Реально даже больше, потому что голодные живые - никудышные
работники.
- Ваши проблемы, Техник. Я сказал.
- Убирайся, - Техник указал на дверь. - Убирайся, подонок.
- Ладно, - неожиданно легко согласился ведьмак. - Я ухожу.
Он встал, будто бы ненароком глянув в окно.
- Кстати, Техник, - обратился он к Технику. - Ты видишь это солнце?
Ты видишь цвет неба? О чем это говорит, а? Знаешь?
Техник молчал.
- О засухе это говорит. О жаре и засухе, - пояснил ведьмак. -
Улавливаешь, Техник? Рип станет воровать по нескольку детей в сутки.
Месяца два и, в Снеженске не останется никого моложе двенадцати лет -
я имею в виду людей, конечно. О предельном возрасте остальных рас
можешь догадаться сам. Кто станет таскать вам из-за периметра
пенсирит? Рип? А уж о том, какие работники из живых, у которых
отобрали детей я и вовсе молчу...
- Убирайся! - проорал Техник.
Ведьмак послушно направился к двери.
- Я еще вернусь, - пообещал он. - А ты подумай пока. И со старостами
посоветуйся...
Дорогу в выходу ведьмак, конечно же, запомнил.
Уже к вечеру у одного из старост пропала девятилетняя внучка. За
несколько часов летней ночи Рип разгромил несколько жилищ - почему-то
он выбирал жилища матерей-одиночек. Детские кроватки оказывались
пустыми. А Рипа на этот раз никто даже не увидел.
Днем ведьмак демонстративно разгуливал по территории, избегая
приближаться к живым. Ночью - пропадал неизвестно где.
Спустя три дня и три ночи после разговора ведьмака с Техником
Снеженска-4, два хмурых вирга кинули камешек в окно каморки при
шлюзе.
- Эй! Почтенный!
Ведьмак показался в коридоре, о котором даже думать боялся любой
взрослый территориал.
- Ну?
- Живые поговорить хотят.
- О чем?
Вирги переглядывались и переминались в полусотне метров от шлюза.
- Ну... Вы, вроде как, с Рипом справиться горазды... Так это... Мы б
заплатили. Сколько нужно.
- Меня не интересуют деньги. А плату я назвал вашему Технику, но он
меня прогнал. Разговаривайте с ним. Позовет - приду. А так...
И он скрылся в каморке.
Вирги еще некоторое время потоптались напротив шлюза и убрались
восвояси.
Через несколько часов перед жилищем Техника собралась несметная
толпа. Практически все население Снеженска-4 в полном составе,
потому что никто не хотел оставлять детей без присмотра. Старосты
районов еще накануне направились к Технику и не выходили из его
кабинета до сих пор. Если бы кто-нибудь осмелился покинуть жилище
ночью, он мог бы удостовериться, что свет в окошке кабинета не гас ни
на секунду.
Ведьмака позвали к Технику ближе к вечеру. Одинокий и гордый, он
шагал сквозь толпу, глядящую на него со смесью ненависти и надежды.
Каждый готов был убить его, и не мог, потому что ведьмак олицетворял
собой возможное спасение.
На этот раз пришлось подниматься на третий этаж, в кабинет
существенно больших размеров. И стол здесь был побольше. Без сукна.
Тут явно никто не играл в карты - тут принимались решения и
постигались формулы.
Они сидели за этим столом - Техник, пятеро старост, и еще трое живых,
ведьмак не знал кто они.
Все так же молча и бесстрастно ведьмак вошел в кабинет, секунду
помедлил, и сел на стул у самого окна. Теперь он казался всем
присутствующим просто темным силуэтом на фоне светлого
прямоугольника.
- Я слушаю, - сказал он, прищурив глаза.
Поднялся один из старост, сухонький орк, выглядящий старым даже для
орка.
- Меня зовут Хавиар Сотера. Я староста Куманского. Как называть тебя,
ведьмак?
- Ведьмаком. Впрочем, если вам обязательно нужно имя, можете звать
меня Геральт.
- Геральт, - проникновенно обратился к нему Сотера. - Неужели ты
начисто лишен сострадания? У нас пропадают дети, а ты сидишь в
стороне, и просто ждешь...
На лице Геральта не отразилось ничего - ни смущения, ни досады.
- Любезный староста! Ведьмаков обучают отнюдь не состраданию.
Ведьмаков обучают убивать чудовищ. За плату, потому что ведьмаку
тоже нужно на что-то жить. Покупать снаряжение для работы, одежду,
пищу. Или вы думаете меня кто-то покормит? Подарит штаны? Кто на
этой территории предложил мне хотя бы кружку воды, а? Так уж
сложилось, что у вас есть то, что мне позарез необходимо прямо
сейчас. И в нужном количестве. Неужели это "что-то" вам дороже
собственных детей и собственных жизней?
- Если мы все умрем от голода, это вряд ли спасет нас и наших детей.
- От голода? - ведьмак состроил презрительную гримасу. - Бросьте,
староста. У каждого живого в жилище припрятано достаточно консервов,
чтобы дотянуть до выработки новой порции сырья. В конце концов,
можете договориться о поставке в кредит. На выгодных условиях.
- С нами не работают в кредит, - хмуро бросил другой староста - эльф
неопределенного, как и все эльфы, возраста.
- А нечего было надувать Москву, - отрезал ведьмак. - Слово в этом
мире ценится превыше всего, и вы это знали с самого рождения.
- Ну, оставь нам хотя бы половину! - взмолился Хавиар Сотера. -
Остальное мы отдадим позже!
- С вами? В кредит? Увольте, я не глупее московских дельцов. Ведьмаки
берут плату только вперед, и вы это знаете с самого рождения.
- Не по-живому это... - укоризненно пробормотал третий староста,
дородный румяный половинчик.
- Я не живой, - напомнил ведьмак. - Я - ведьмак.
- Чтоб тебе провалиться, - пожелал кто-то.
Подобными штучками расстроить ведьмака было попросту невозможно.
- Решайтесь, господа. Решайтесь. Может быть, другого шанса у вас и не
случится - говорят, на окраине Киева бульдозеры бушуют в одном из
районов. Там мне заплатят охотно, причем столько, сколько скажу.
- Надо соглашаться, - раздраженно вставил Техник. - Протянем
как-нибудь. Откажем - нас прихлопнут собственные территориалы.
- Действительно, - поддакнул ведьмак. - Сколько детей за трое суток?
Двадцать два?
- Двадцать три.
- Ах, да! Дочь уважаемого старосты Куманского. Прелестная девчушка.
Была.
Орк после этих слов вскочил, с грохотом опрокинув стул.
- Ты чудовище, ведьмак! Ты ничем не лучше Рипа, шахнуш тодд!
На серое, словно весенний снег, лицо орка страшно было смотреть. Все
отводили взгляды.
- Лучше, - заверил ведьмак. - Со мной можно договориться, с Рипом -
нет. Он не успокоится, пока не передушит всех. И учтите, взрослые для
боевого эспера - куда менее сытная пища, чем дети. А потом Рип
переберется еще куда-нибудь, и таким образом на вашу совесть лягут
новые жертвы.
- А не на твою, ведьмак? - с бессильной злостью спросил Техник.
- У ведьмаков нет совести. И не может быть. В силу того, что они -
ведьмаки. Что же касается сострадания, любезный Сотера, - ведьмак
повернулся и чуть заметно поклонился орку, - то я предлагал свою
помощь еще когда ваша внучка ковыляла по детской и ловила за юбку
мамашу. Так что решайте сами - кто лишен сострадания, а кто не лишен.
- Жизнь с ним, - пробурчал Техник. - Пусть идет и убивает Рипа.
Отдадим ему все, что у нас есть, и пусть убирается навсегда.
Техник медленно оглядел всех присутствующих.
- Есть возражения? Нет?
Он закрыл лицо ладонями, и глухо произнес:
- Мы согласны, ведьмак. Действуй.
Ведьмак покачал головой и укоризненно поцокал языком:
- Ай-яй-яй! Кажется, вы меня не поняли, любезные. Я ведь говорил -
ведьмаки берут плату вперед. Ведьмак - это не дядя Рот Фронт,
страдающий благотворительностью. Я отправлюсь убивать Рипа не раньше,
чем вынесу сырье за периметр.
- Шахнуш тодд, ведьмак! - возмутился староста-эльф. - А кто
гарантирует, что ты не пошлешь нас всех к гоблинским мамашам и не
уберешься палец о палец не ударив?
- Слово ведьмака гарантирует. Наше слово, в отличие от вашего,
ценится и в Большом Киеве, и в Большой Москве. Кто-нибудь из
присутствующих за свои долгие жизни слыхал, чтобы ведьмак кого-нибудь
обманул и не выполнил работу? Слыхал?
Ответом ему была звенящая тишина, нарушенная в конце концов
придыхательным шепотом Сотера:
- Не-е-е-е-ттт...
- Я не собираюсь нарушать слово. Меня убьют раньше, чем я доберусь до
границы Киева. Потому что ведьмачье слово и мне, и остальным
ведьмакам принесет в будущем не в пример больше, чем я заработаю
сегодня. Расплачивайтесь. Время идет.
Старосты дружно посмотрели на Техника. Техник встал.
- Идем.
На этот раз пришлось спуститься в подвал. Самолично отомкнув
многочисленные железные двери и одну решетку, Техник привел ведьмака
в... лабораторию. Точно, лабораторию.
Около минуты Техник Альмелид возился у сейфа, отпирая многочисленные
замки. Потом вынул из сейфа никелированный контейнер, выполненный в
виде чемодана
- Вот. Здесь все.
Чемодан был заперт на кодовый замок.
- Коды, - потребовал ведьмак.
Техник едва слышно продиктовал коды; ведьмак молча вращал дискретные
верньеры с нанесенными циферками.
Раздался характерный щелчок, и мелодичный сигнал. Крышка чемодана
чуть заметно приподнялась.
Ведьмак осторожно откинул ее. Открылась портативная клавиатура,
крохотный плоский экранчик и шесть ниш с доверху наполненными чем-то
масляно-ртутным цилиндрами.
Ведьмак утопил POWER.
Осветился экранчик, загрузилась система.
READY - сообщили ему.
DIAGS - велел ведьмак.
По экрану пробежала череда цифр, потом возник шестистолбцовый график.
Все шесть столбцов стояли на одном уровне - у отметки FULL.
Ведьмак довольно кивнул каким-то своим мыслям, потянулся к
медальону-датчику и поднес его, не снимая с шеи, к крайнему слева
цилиндру. Медальон налился зыбким розоватым светом.
- Отлично! - ведьмак спрятал медальон назад под куртку, погасил
систему и запер чемодан. Коды он ввел в карманный твайджер и тут же
кому-то передал.
Когда ведьмак покидал лабораторию, за высокой ширмой на столе он
заметил десятка два подобных чемоданов; все они были открыты, и все
цилиндры в пазах были пусты.
Он поднялся на первый этаж в сопровождении Техника и его помощника.
Вышел на крыльцо, с которого староста Сотера как раз вещал
территориалам, что ведьмак получил плату и готов убить Рипа. Едва
ведьмак показался в дверях, толпа коротко охнула и затихла, а
староста умолк. В полной тишине ведьмак шел, прямо, не сворачивая, и
толпа расступалась перед ним, словно перед прокаженным. С чемоданом в
руке и шмотником за плечами, с помповым ружьем на левом боку, он шел
сквозь ненависть и надежду, сам не испытывая ни того, ни другого.
Толпа направилась за ним по пятам. Через весь Снеженск-4. К
Одинцовскому шлюзу. На последних метрах перед коридором ведьмак
услышал далекий гул моторов.
Живые Снеженска остановились, как всегда, метрах в пятидесяти от
периметра. Ведьмак обернулся в том самом месте, где любого
территориала настигла бы неизбежная смерть - в самом центре коридора.
Он не увидел толпы. Он лишь ощутил сотни взглядов, устремленные на
него. А потом повернулся и вышел наружу. За периметр.
К площади перед шлюзом Снеженска-4 как раз подкатили лимузин,
легковушка и джип. "Кинбурн", "Черкассы" и "Хортица". Ведьмак по
инерции сделал еще несколько шагов и замер посреди площади.
Внутри периметра почти к самому шлюзу осмелилось подойти лишь
несколько живых - старосты, Техник да еще парочка виргов, видимо, те
самые, которые вызывали ведьмака утром.
Из лимузина выбрались несколько эльфов, и при виде одного из них,
Техник и старосты издали дружный выдох:
- Халькдафф!
Ведьмак направился прямо к Халькдаффу. Не дойдя пары-тройки шагов, он
опустил чемодан прямо на асфальт, ввел коды и продемонстрировал
содержимое. Халькдафф сдержанно кивнул. Тогда ведьмак закрыл
чемоданчик и поставил его перед эльфом. А сам повернулся и направился
к пропускному пункту.
У входа в коридор он почему-то замешкался, и всем вдруг стало
понятно, что он не собирается возвращаться за периметр. Техник,
старосты и территориалы Снеженска-4 ощутили, что ненависть в их душах
окончательно вытесняет надежду.
- Эй, снеженцы! - громко сказал ведьмак, стаскивая с плеч шмотник и
распуская шнуровку. - Я спешу. И сейчас уеду...
- А как же ведьмачье слово? - хрипло выкрикнул орк Сотера. - Будь ты
проклят, ведьмак!
- Вы достаточно проклинали меня, - спокойно ответил ведьмак. - Так
что не трудитесь понапрасну. А что до Рипа - так мне незачем его
убивать. Рип мертв.
Ведьмак закончил распускать шнуровку и вытряхнул прямо на асфальт
перед коридором что-то сверкающее хромированными тягами.
Металлического паука с тусклым узором на брюшке мнемонакопителя и
парой парализаторов-хелицер. Паук был, безусловно, мертв. С лязгом
встретился он с асфальтом, и застыл омерзительной и все еще пугающей
кучей металла, пластика и керамики.
- Я убил его в первую же ночь, Техник, - почему-то обращаясь к
Технику сказал ведьмак. - Условия сделки выполнены.
- А дети? - недоуменно спросил староста-половинчик, колыхая румяными
щеками.
"Скоро жирок-то сойдет с тебя", - невпопад подумал ведьмак и ответил:
- Детей похищал я. Вы ведь отказались заплатить сразу. А как иначе я
мог заставить вас заплатить?
- Они мертвы?
Ведьмак криво усмехнулся, не произнеся ни слова.
Надежды в настроении территориалов не осталось вовсе. Осталась только
ненависть и гнев. С неживым криком орк Хавиар Сотера попытался
кинуться на ведьмака, забыв о поджидающей посреди коридора смерти, но
его удержали соседи.
А ведьмак, подцепив ботинком мертвого Рипа, пинком отправил его через
весь пропускной пункт на территорию.
- Держите. А мне пора.
Он развернулся; в эту же секунду все три автомобиля с тихим урчанием
рванулись с места и унеслись прочь.
- Эй, Геральт! - неожиданно спокойно окликнул ведьмака Техник.
Ведьмак задержался.
- Ты не такое же чудовище, каких убиваешь. Ты хуже.
Ничего не отразилось на лице ведьмака. Ничего. Чудовище-экскаватор на
его лысине все так же тянуло ковш к живому с пультом в руках.
- Я не так долго живу, как ты, Техник. Но эти слова я слышу чаще, чем
ты ходишь в сортир. Прощай.
- Прощай. Надеюсь, в ближайшем будущем ты сдохнешь.
Ведьмак, не ответив, зашагал прочь. Он уходил прочь от Снеженска-4,
превращаясь сначала в крохотную фигурку, а потом и вовсе в едва
различимую точку на горизонте.
Километров через семь он приблизился к нескольким домикам, прячущимся
среди деревьев. Вынул из похудевшего шмотника шляпу и надел, чтобы
скрыть приметную ведьмачью лысину. Нашарил в кармане ключ, отпер
дверь. Встретил его радостный детский хор:
- Дядя Рот Фронт! Дядя Рот Фронт вернулся!
Ого облепили дети - люди, эльфы, орки, вирги, гномы, хольфинги,
половинчики, метисы и даже один чистокровный ламис. Совсем малыши, и
постарше. Мальчишки и девчонки. Они хватали его за руки и за одежду,
и смотрели так преданно, как смотрят только на внезапно посещающих
детство сказочных персонажей.
- Все! - объявил им ведьмак. - Ваши папы и мамы убили чудище. Можете
возвращаться!
Невообразимый визг и гвалт наполнил комнату. Любимые игрушки
разбирались, старшие ловили за руки малышей и выводили их наружу.
Детишками не нужно было объяснять куда идти. Они и сами это знали,
потому что не раз бывали за периметром. Парами, взявшись за руки они
уходили к территории Снеженск-4.
А ведьмак подумал, что пройдет еще немного времени и уже от этого
самого подросшего будущего он наверняка получит новую порцию
проклятий.
- И не забудьте рассказать кто вам помогал! - крикнул он вслед.
- Дядя Рот Фронт! - донес ветер.
И развеял.
(c) 31 марта - 1 апреля 1999
Москва, Перово.
|
Метки: владимир васильев - ведьмак из большого киева |
William Gibson "Count Zero", 1986 |
William Gibson "Count Zero", 1986
Count Zero
THEY sent A SLAMHOUND on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted
it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up
with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scram-
bling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs
and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized
hexogene and flaked TNT.
He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the
pink stucco facade 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 meter of skin for
him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysac-
charides They bought eyes and genitals on the open market
The eyes were green.
He spent most of those three months in a ROM-generated
simstim construct of an idealized New England boyhood of
the previous century. The Dutchman's visits were gray dawn
dreams, nightmares that faded as the sky lightened beyond his
secondfloor bedroom window You could smell the lilacs,
late at night. He read Conan Doyle by the light of a sixty-watt
bulb behind a parchment shade printed with clipper ships He
masturbated in the smell of clean cotton sheets and thought
about cheerleaders. The Dutchman opened a door in his back
brain and came strolling in to ask questions, but in the
morning his mother called him down to Wheaties, eggs and
bacon, coffee with milk and sugar.
And one morning he woke in a strange bed, the Dutchman
standing beside a window spilling tropical green and a sun-
light that hurt his eyes. "You can go home now, Turner
We're done with you You're good as new
He was good as new. How good was that? He didn't know.
He took the things the Dutchman gave him and flew out of
Singapore Home was the next airport Hyatt.
And the next. And ever was.
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, dnnks arrived, dinner was served.
[n Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a
blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a
blue plastic canister without breaking stride. When he amved
at the counter at the end of the comdor, he changed his
ticket.
He flew to Mexico.
And woke to the rattle of steel buckets on tile, wet swish of
brooms, a woman's body warm against his own
The room was a tall cave. Bare white plaster reflected
sound with too much clarity; somewhere beyond the clatter of
the maids in the morning courtyard was the pounding of surf.
The sheets bunched between his fingers were coarse cham-
bray, softened by countless washings.
He remembered sunlight through a broad expanse of tinted
window. An airport bar, Puerto Vallarta. He'd had to walk
twenty meters from the plane, eyes screwed shut against the
sun. He remembered a dead bat pressed flat as a dry leaf on
runway concrete.
He remembered riding a bus, a mountain road, and the reek
of internal combustion, the borders of the windshield plas-
tered with postcard holograms of blue and pink saints. He'd
ignored the steep scenery in favor of a sphere of pink lucite
and the jittery dance of mercury at its core. The knob crowned
the bent steel stem of the transmission lever, slightly larger
than a baseball. It had been cast around a crouching spider
blown from clear glass, hollow, half filled with quicksilver.
Mercury jumped and slid when the driver slapped the bus
through switchback curves, swayed and shivered in the straight-
aways. The knob was ridiculous, handmade, baleful; it was
there to welcome him back to Mexico.
Among the dozen~odd microsofts the Dutchman had given
him was one that would allow a limited fluency in Spanish,
but in Vallarta he'd fumbled behind his left ear and inserted a
dustplug instead, hiding the socket and plug beneath a square
of flesh-tone micropore. A passenger near the back of the bus
had a radio. A voice had periodically interrupted the brassy
pop to recite a kind of litany, strings of ten-digit figures,
the
day's winning numbers in the national lottery.
The woman beside him stirred in her sleep.
He raised himself on one elbow to look at her A stranger's
face, but not the one his life in hotels had taught him to
expect. He would have expected a routine beauty, bred out of
cheap elective surgery and the relentless Darwinism of fash-
ion, an archetype cooked down from the major media faces of
the previous five years.
Something Midwestern in the bone of the jaw, archaic and
Amencan. The blue sheets were nicked across her hips, the
sunlight angling in through hardwood louvers to stripe her
long thighs with diagonals of gold. The faces he woke with in
the world's hotels were like God's own hood ornaments.
Women's sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed
straight out to the void. But this one was different. Already.
somehow, there was meaning attached to it. Meaning and a
name.
He sat up, swinging his legs off the bed. His soles regis-
tered the grit of beach-sand on cool tile. There was a faint,
pervasive smell of insecticide. Naked, head throbbing, he
stood. He made his legs move. Walked, tried the first of two
doors, finding white tile, more white plaster, a bulbous chrome
shower head hung from rust-spotted iron pipe The sink's taps
offered identical trickles of blood-warm water. An antique
wristwatch lay beside a plastic tumbler, a mechanical Rolex
on a pale leather strap.
The bathroom's shuttered windows weie unglazed, strung
with a fine green mesh of plastic. He peered out between
hardwood slats, wincing at the hot clean sun, and saw a dry
fountain of flower-painted tiles and the rusted carcass of a
VW Rabbit
Allison. That was her name.
She wore frayed khaki shorts and one of his white T-shirts.
Her legs were very brown. The clockwork Rolex, with its
dull stainless case, went around her left wrist on its pigskin
strap. They went walking, down the curve of beach, toward
Barre de Navidad. They kept to the narrow strip of firm wet
sand above the line of surf.
Already they had a history together; he remembered her at
a stall that morning in the little town's iron-roofed mercado,
how she'd held the huge clay mug of boiled coffee in both
hands. Mopping eggs and salsa from the cracked white plate
with a tortilla, he'd watched flies circling fingers of sunlight
that found their way through a patchwork of palm frond and
corrugated siding. Some talk about her job with some legal
firm in L.A., how she lived alone in one of the ramshackle
pontoon towns tethered off Redondo. He'd told her he was in
personnel. Or had been, anyway. "Maybe I'm looking for a
new line of work
But talk seemed secondary to what there was between
them, and now a frigate bird hung overhead, tacking against
the breeze, slid sideways, wheeled, and was gone. They both
shivered with the freedom of it, the mindless glide of the
thing. She squeezed his hand.
A blue figure came marching up the beach toward them, a
military policeman headed for town, spitshined black boots
unreal against the soft bright beach. As the man passed,
his face dark and immobile beneath mirrored glasses, Turner
noted the carbine-format Steiner-Optic laser with Fabrique
Nationale sights. The blue fatigues were spotless, creased like
knives.
Turner had been a soldier in his own nght for most of his
adult life, although he'd never worn a uniform. A mercenary,
his employers vast corporations warring covertly for the con-
trol 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.
You worked your way through most of a bottle of Her-
radura last night," she said.
He nodded. Her hand, in his, was warm and dry. He was
watching the spread of her toes with each step, the nails
painted with chipped pink gloss.
The breakers rolled in, their edges transparent as green
glass.
The spray beaded on her tan.
After their first day together, life fell into a simple pattern
They had breakfast in the mercado. at a stall with a concrete
counter worn smooth as polished marble. They spent the
morning swimming, until the sun drove them back into the
shuttered coolness of the hotel, where they made love under
the slow wooden blades of the ceiling fan, then slept. In the
afternoons they explored the maze of narrow streets behind
the Avenida, or went hiking in the hills. They dined in
beachfront restaurants and drank on the patios of the white
hotels. Moonlight curled in the edge of the surf
And gradually, without words, she taught him a new style
of passion. He was accustomed to being served, serviced
anonymously by skilled professionals. Now, in the white
cave, he knelt on tile. He lowered his head, licking her, salt
Pacific mixed with her own wet, her inner thighs cool against
his cheeks. Palms cradling her hips, he held her, raised her
like a chalice, lips pressing tight, while his tongue sought the
locus, the point, the frequency that would bring her home
Then, grinning, he'd mount, enter, and find his own way
there.
Sometimes, then, he'd talk, long spirals of unfocused nar-
rative that spun out to join the sound of the sea. She said very
little, but he'd learned to value what little she did say, and,
always, she held him. And listened.
A week passed, then another. He woke to their final day
together in that same cool room, finding her beside him. Over
breakfast he imagined he felt a change in her, a tension.
They sunbathed, swam, and in the familiar bed he forgot
the faint edge of anxiety.
In the afternoon, she suggested they walk down the beach,
toward Barre, the way they'd gone that first morning.
Turner extracted the dustplug from the socket behind his
ear and inserted a sliver of microsoft The structure of Span-
ish settled through him like a tower of glass, invisible gates
hinged on present and future, conditional, preterite perfect.
Leaving her in the room, he crossed the Avenida and entered
the market. He bought a straw basket, cans of cold beer,
sandwiches, and fruit. On his way back, he bought a new pair
of sunglasses from the vendor in the Avenida.
His tan was dark and even The angular patchwork left by
the Dutchman's grafts was gone, and she had taught him the
unity of his body Mornings, when he met the green eyes in
the bathroom mirror, they were his own, and the Dutchman
no longer troubled his dreams with bad jokes and a dry
cough. Sometimes, still, he dreamed fragments of India, a
country he barely knew, bright splinters, Chandni Chauk, the
smell of dust and fried breads
The walls of the ruined hotel stood a quarter of the way
down the bay's arc. The surf here was stronger, each wave a
detonation.
Now she tugged him toward it, something new at the
corners of her eyes, a tightness. Gulls scattered as they came
hand in hand up the beach to gaze into shadow beyond empty
doorways. The sand had subsided, allowing the structure's
fa~ade to cave in, walls gone, leaving the floors of the three
levels hung like huge shingles from bent, rusted tendons of
finger-thick steel, each one faced with a different color and
pattern of tile
HOTEL PLAYA DEL M was worked in childlike seashell capi-
tals above one concrete arch. "Mar," he said, completing it,
though he'd removed the microsoft.
"It's over," she said, stepping beneath the arch, into
shadow.
"What's over?" He followed, the straw basket rubbing
against his hip. The sand here was cold, dry, loose between
his toes.
"Over. Done with. This place. No time here, no future."
He stared at her, glanced past her to where rusted bed-
springs were tangled at the junction of two crumbling walls.
"It smells like piss," he said. ``Let's swim.
The sea took the chill away, but a distance hung between
them now. They sat on a blanket from Turner's room and ate,
silently. The shadow of the ruin lengthened. The wind moved
her sun-streaked hair.
"You make me think about horses," he said finally
"Well," she said, as though she spoke from the depths of
exhaustion, "they've only been extinct for thirty years."
"No," he said, "their hair. The hair on their necks, when
they ran."
"Manes," she said, and there were tears in her eyes.
"Fuck it." Her shoulders began to heave. She took a deep
breath She tossed her empty Carta Blanca can down the
beach. "It, me, what's it matter?" Her arms around him
again. "Oh, come on, Turner Come on"
And as she lay back, pulling him with her, he noticed
something, a boat, reduced by distance to a white hyphen,
where the water met the sky.
When he sat up, pulling on his cut-off jeans, he saw the
yacht It was much closer now, a graceful sweep of white
riding low in the water. Deep water. The beach must fall
away almost vertically, here, judging by the strength of the
surf. That would be why the line of hotels ended where it did,
back a long the beach, and why the ruin hadn't survived. The
waves had licked away its foundation.
"Give me the basket
She was buttoning her blouse. He'd bought it for her in one
of the tired little shops along the Avenida Electric blue
Mexican cotton, badly made. The clothing they bought in the
shops seldom lasted more than a day or two. "I said give me
the basket."
She did. He dug through the remains of their afternoon,
finding his binoculars beneath a plastic bag of pineapple
slices drenched in lime and dusted with cayenne. He pulled
them out, a compact pair of 6 X 30 combat glasses. He
snapped the integral covers from the objectives and the pad-
ded eyepieces, and studied the streamlined ideograms of the
Hosaka logo. A yellow inflatable rounded the stern and swung
toward the beach.
``Turner, I''
"Get up." Bundling the blanket and her towel into the
basket. He took a last warm can of Carta Blanca from the
basket and put it beside the binoculars. He stood, pulling her
quickly to her feet, and forced the basket into her hands.
"Maybe I'm wrong," he said. "If I am, get out of here. Cut
for that second stand of palms." He pointed. "Don't go back
to the hotel. Get on a bus, Manzanillo or Vallarta. Go home~~
He could hear the purr of the outboard now
He saw the tears start, but she made no sound at all as she
turned and ran, up past the ruin, clutching the basket, stum-
bling in a drift of sand. She didn't look back.
He turned, then, and looked toward the yacht. The inflat-
able was bouncing through the surf. The yacht was named
Tsushima, and he'd last seen her in Hiroshima Bay. He'd
seen the red Shinto gate at ltsukushima from her deck.
He didn't need the glasses to know that the inflatable's
passenger would be Conroy, the pilot one of Hosaka's ninjas.
He sat down cross-legged in the cooling sand and opened his
last can of Mexican beer.
He looked back at the line of white hotels, his hands inert
on one of Tsushima's teak railings Behind the hotels, the
little town's three holograms glowed: Banamex, Aeronaves,
and the cathedral's six-meter Virgin.
Conroy stood beside him. "Crash job," Conroy said. "You
know how it is." Conroy's voice was flat and uninflected, as
though he'd modeled it after a cheap voice chip. His face was
broad and white, dead white. His eyes were dark-ringed and
hooded, beneath a peroxide thatch combed back from a wide
forehead. He wore a black polo shirt and black slacks. "In-
side," he said, turning. Turner followed, ducking to enter the
cabin door. White screens, pale flawless pineTokyo's aus-
tere corporate chic.
Conroy settled himself on a low, rectangular cushion of
slate-gray ultrasuede. Turner stood, his hands slack at his
sides. Conroy took a knurled silver inhaler from the low
enamel table between them. "Choline enhancer?"
"No."
Conroy jammed the inhaler into one nostril and snorted.
"You want some sushi?" He put the inhaler back on the
table. "We caught a couple of red snapper about an hour
ago"
Turner stood where he was, staring at Conroy.
"Christopher Mitchell," Conroy said. "Maas Biolabs. Their
head hybridoma man. He's coming over to Hosaka."
"Never heard of him."
"Bullshit. How about a drink?"
Turner shook his head.
Silicon's on the way out, Turner. Mitchell's the man who
made biochips work, and Maas is sitting on the major patents.
You know that. He's the man for monoclonals. He wants out
YOU
and me, Turner, we're going to shift him."
"I think I'm retired, Conroy. I was having a good time,
back there."
"That's what the psych team in Tokyo say. I mean, it's not
exactly your first time out of the box, is it? She's a field
psychologist, on retainer to Hosaka."
A muscle in Turner's thigh began to jump.
"They say you're ready, Turner. They were a little wor-
ried, after New Delhi. so they wanted to check it out. Little
therapy on the side. Never hurts, does it?"
2
MARY
SHE'D WORN HER BEST for the interview, but it was raining in
Brussels and she had no money for a cab. She walked from
the Eurotrans station.
Her hand, in the pocket of her good jacketa Sally Stanley
but almost a year oldwas a white knot around the crumpled
telefax. She no longer needed it, having memorized the ad-
dress, but it seemed she could no more release it than break
the trance that held her here now, staring into the window of
an expensive shop that sold menswear, her focus phasing
between sedate flannel dress shirts and the reflection of her
own dark eyes.
Surely the eyes alone would be enough to cost her the job.
No need for the wet hair she now wished she'd let Andrea
cut. The eyes displayed a pain and an inertia that anyone
could read, and most certainly these things would soon
be revealed to Herr Josef Virek, least likely of potential
employers.
When the telefax had been delivered, she'd insisted on
regarding it as some cruel prank, another nuisance call. She'd
had enough of those, thanks to the media, so many that
Andrea had ordered a special program for the apartment's
phone, one that filtered out incoming calls from any number
that wasn't listed in her permanent directory. But that, An-
drea had insisted, must have been the reason for the telefax.
How else could anyone reach her?
But Marly had shaken her head and huddled deeper into
Andrea's old terry robe. Why would Virek, enormously weal-
thy, collector and patron, wish to hire the disgraced former
operator of a tiny Paris gallery?
Then it had been Andrea's time for head-shaking, in her
impatience with the new, the disgraced Marly Krushkhova,
who spent entire days in the apartment now, who sometimes
didn't bother to dress. The attempted sale, in Paris, of a
single forgery, was hardly the novelty Marly imagined it to
have been, she said. If the press hadn't been quite so anxious
to show up the disgusting Gnass for the fool he most as-
suredly was, she continued, the business would hardly have
been news. Gnass was wealthy enough, gross enough, to
make for a weekend's scandal. Andrea smiled. "If you had
been less attractive, you would have gotten far less attention."
Marly shook her head.
"And the forgery was Alain's. You were innocent. Have
you forgotten that?"
Marly went into the bathroom, still huddled in the thread-
bare robe, without answering.
Beneath her friend's wish to comfort, to help, Marly could
already sense the impatience of someone forced to share a
very small space with an unhappy, nonpaying guest.
And Andrea had had to loan her the fare for the Eurotrans.
With a conscious, painful effort of will, she broke from the
circle of her thoughts and merged with the dense but sedate
flow of serious Belgian shoppers.
A girl in bright tights and a boyfriend's oversized loden
jacket brushed past, scrubbed and smiling. At the next inter-
section, Marly noticed an outlet for a fashion line she'd
favored in her own student days. The clothes looked impossi-
bly young.
In her white and secret fist, the telefax.
Galerie Duperey, 14 Rue au Beurre, Bruxelles
Josef Virek.
The receptionist in the cool gray 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 enameled keyboard. She raised lustrous eyes as
Marly approached. Marly imagined the click and whirr of
shutters, her bedraggled image whisked away to some far
corner of Josef Virek's empire.
`Marly Krushkhova," she said, fighting the urge to pro-
duce the compacted wad of telefax, smooth it pathetically on
the cool and flawless marble. "For Herr Virek."
"Fraulein Krushkhova," the receptionist said, "Herr Virek
is unable to be in Brussels today."
Marly stared at the perfect lips, simultaneously aware of
the pain the words caused her and the sharp pleasure she was
learning to take in disappointment. "I see."
"However, he has chosen to conduct the interview via a
sensory link. If you will please enter the third door on your
left .
The room was bare and white. On two walls hung un-
framed sheets of what looked like rain-stained cardboard,
stabbed through repeatedly with a variety of instruments.
Katatonenkunst. Conservative. The sort of work one sold to
committees sent round by the boards of Dutch commercial
banks.
She sat down on a low bench covered in leather and finally
allowed herself to release the telefax. She was alone, but
assumed that she was being observed somehow.
"Fraulein Krushkhova." A young man in a technician's
dark green smock stood in the doorway opposite the one
through which she'd entered. "In a moment, please, you will
cross the room and step through this door. Please grasp the
knob slowly, firmly, and in a manner that affords maximum
contact with the flesh of your palm. Step through carefully.
There should be a minimum of spatial disorientation."
She blinked at him "I beg"
"The sensory link," he said, and withdrew, the door clos-
ing behind him.
She rose, tried to tug some shape into the damp lapels of
her jacket, touched her hair, thought better of it, took a deep
breath, and crossed to the door. The receptionist's phrase had
prepared her for the only kind of link she knew, a simstim
signal routed via Bell Europa. She'd assumed she'd wear a
helmet studded with dermatrodes, that Virek would use a
passive viewer as a human camera.
But Virek's wealth was on another scale of magnitude
entirely.
As her fingers closed around the cool brass knob, it seemed
to squirm, sliding along a touch spectrum of texture and
temperature in the first second of contact.
Then it became metal again, green-painted iron, sweeping
out and down, along a line of perspective, an old railing she
grasped now in wonder.
A few drops of rain blew into her face.
Smell of rain and wet earth.
A confusion of small details, her own memory of a drunken
art school picnic warring with the perfection of Virek's
illusion.
Below her lay the unmistakable panorama of Barcelona,
smoke hazing the strange spires of the Church of the Sagrada
Familia. She caught the railing with her other hand as well,
fighting vertigo. She knew this place She was in the Guell
Park, Antonio Gaudi's tatty fairyland, on its barren rise be-
hind the center of the city. To her left, a giant lizard of
crazy-quilt ceramic was frozen in midslide down a ramp of
rough stone. Its fountain-grin watered a bed of tired flowers.
"You are disoriented. Please forgive me."
Josef Virek was perched below her on one of the park's
serpentine benches, his wide shoulders hunched in a soft
topeoat. His features had been vaguely familiar to her all her
she remembered, for some reason, a photograph of
life. Now
Virek and the king of England. He smiled at her. His head
was large and beautifully shaped beneath a brush of stiff dark
gray hair. His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he
sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce. His eyes, very
large behind the round, rimless glasses that were a trademark,
were pale blue and strangely soft.
"Please." He patted the bench's random mosaic of shat-
ftered pottery with a narrow hand. "You must forgive my
reliance on technology. I have been confined for over a
decade to a vat. In some hideous industrial suburb of Stock-
holm. Or perhaps of hell. I am not a well man, Marly. Sit
beside me."
Taking a deep breath, she descended the stone steps and
crossed the cobbles "Herr Virek," she said, "I saw you
lecture in Munich, two years ago. A critique of Faessler and
his autisuches Theater. You seemed well then
"Faessler?" Virek's tanned forehead wrinkled. "You saw
a double. A hologram perhaps. Many things, Marly, are
perpetrated in my name. Aspects of my wealth have become
autonomous, by degrees; at times they even war with one
I another. Rebellion in the fiscal extremities. However, for
reasons so complex as to be entirely occult, the fact of my
illness has never been made public."
She took her place beside him and peered down at the dirty
pavement between the scuffed toes of her black Paris boots.
She saw a chip of pale gravel, a rusted paper clip, the small
dusty corpse of a bee or hornet. "It's amazingly detailed.
"Yes," he said, "the new Maas biochips. You should
know," he continued, "that what I know of your private life
is very nearly as detailed. More than you yourself do, in sox~~e
instances."
"You do?" It was easiest, she found, to focus on the city,
picking out landmarks remembered from a half-dozen student
holidays. There, just there, would be the Ramblas, parrots
and flowers, the taverns serving dark beer and squid.
"Yes I know that it was your lover who convinced you
that you had found a lost Cornell original .
Many shut her eyes.
"He commissioned the forgery, hiring two talented student-
artisans and an established historian who found himself in
certain personal difficulties . . . He paid them with money
he'd already extracted from your gallery, as you have no
doubt guessed. You are crying .
Marly nodded. A cool forefinger tapped her wrist.
"I bought Gnass. I bought the police off the case. The
press weren't worth buying; they rarely are And now, per-
haps, your slight notoriety may work to your advantage."
"Herr Virek, I"
"A moment, please. Paco! Come here, child."
Marly opened her eyes and saw a child of perhaps six
years, tightly gotten up in dark suit coat and knickers, pale
stockings, high-buttoned black patent boots. Brown hair fell
across his forehead in a smooth wing. He held something in
his hands, a box of some kind.
"Gaudi began the park in 1900," Virek said "Paco wears
the period costume. Come here, child. Show us your marvel."
"Sefior," Paco lisped, bowing, and stepped forward to
exhibit the thing he held.
Marly stared. Box of plain wood, glass-fronted. Objects.
"Cornell," she said, her tears forgotten. "Cornell?" She
turned to Virek.
"Of course not. The object set into that length of bone is a
Braun biomonitor. This is the work of a living artist."
"There are more? More boxes?"
"I have found seven. Over a period of three years. The
Virek Collection, you see, is a sort of black hole. The unnatu-
ral density of my wealth drags irresistibly at the rarest works
of the human spirit. An autonomous process, and one I
ordinarily take little interest in
But Marly was lost in the box, in its evocation of impossi-
ble distances, of loss and yearning. It was somber, gentle,
and somehow childlike. It contained seven objects.
The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely
from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuit
boards, faced with mazes of gold A smooth white sphere of
baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A finger-
length segment of what she assumed was bone from a human
wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a
small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the
surface of the skinbut the thing's face was seared and
blackened.
The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries
of human experience.
"Gracias, Paco."
Box and boy were gone.
She gaped.
"Ah. Forgive me, I have forgotten that these transitions are
too abrupt for you. Now, however, we must discuss your
assignment .
"Herr Virek," she said, "what is `Paco'?"
"A subprogram."
``I see.''
"I have hired you to find the maker of the box
"But, Herr Virek, with your resources"
"Of which you are now one, child. Do you not wish to be
employed? When the business of Gnass having been stung
with a forged Cornell came to my attention, I saw that you
might be of use in this matter." He shrugged. "Credit me
with a certain talent for obtaining desired results."
"Certainly, Herr Virek! And, yes, I do wish to work!"
"Very well You will be paid a salary. You will be given
access to certain lines of credit, although, should you need to
purchase, let us say. substantial amounts of real estate"
"Real estate?"
"Or a corporation, or spacecraft. In that event, you will
require my indirect authorization. Which you will almost
certainly be given Otherwise, you will have a free hand I
suggest, however, that you work on a scale with which you
yourself are comfortable. Otherwise, you run the risk of
losing touch with your intuition, and intuition, in a case such
as this, is of crucial importance." The famous smile glittered
for her once more.
She took a deep breath. "Herr Virek, what if I fail? How
long do I have to locate this artist?"
"The rest of your life," he said.
Forgive me," she found herself saying, to her horror,
"but I understood you to say that you live in aa vat?"
"Yes, Marly. And from that rather terminal perspective, I
should advise you to strive to live hourly in your own flesh.
Not in the past, if you understand me. I speak as one who can
no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body
having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers. I
imagine that a more fortunate man, or a poorer one, would
have been allowed to die at last, or be coded at the core of
some bit of hardware. But I seem constrained, by a byzantine
net of circumstance that requires, I understand, something
like a tenth of my annual income. Making me, I suppose, the
world's most expensive invalid. I was touched, Marly, at
your affairs of the heart. I envy you the ordered flesh from
which they unfold."
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 Gdell were gone, and she
found herself seated again on the low leather bench, staring at
torn sheets of stained cardboard.
3
~I~y
`3IJIi~
A WI[~IiN
IT WAS sUCH an easy thing, death. He saw that now: It just
happened. You screwed up by a fraction and there it was, some-
thing chill and odorless, ballooning out from the four stupid
corners of the room, your mother's Barrytown living room.
Shit, he thought, Two-a-Day'll laugh his ass off, first time
out and I pull a wilson.
The only sound in the room was the faint steady burr of his
teeth vibrating, supersonic palsy as the feedback ate into his
nervous system. He watched his frozen hand as it trembled
delicately, centimeters from the red plastic stud that could
break the connection that was killing him
Shit.
He'd come home and gotten right down to it, slotted the
icebreaker he'd rented from Two-a-Day and jacked in. punch-
ing for the base he'd chosen as his first live target. Figured
that was the way to do it; you wanna do it. then do it. He'd
only had the little Ono-Sendai deck for a month, but he
already knew he wanted to be more than just some Barrytown
hotdogger. Bobby Newmark, aka Count Zero, but it was
already over. Shows never ended this way, not right at the
beginning. In a show, the cowboy hero's girl or maybe his
partner would run in, slap the trodes off, hit that little red
ore
stud. So you'd make it, make it through.
But Bobby was alone now, his autonomic nervous system
overridden by the defenses of a database three thousand kilo-
meters from Barrytown, and he knew it. There was some
magic chemistry in that impending darkness, something that
let him glimpse the infinite desirability of that room, with its
carpet-colored carpet and curtain-colored curtains, its dingy
foam sofa-suite, the angular chrome frame supporting the
components of a six-year-old Hitachi entertainment module.
He'd carefully closed those curtains in preparation for his
run, but now, somehow, he seemed to see out anyway, where
the condos of Barrytown crested back in their concrete wave
to break against the darker towers of the Projects. That condo
wave bristled with a fine insect fur of antennas and chicken-
wired dishes, strung with lines of drying clothes. His mother
liked to bitch about that; she had a dryer. He remembered her
knuckles white on the imitation bronze of the balcony railing,
dry wrinkles where her wrist was bent. He remembered a
dead boy carried out of Big Playground on an alloy stretcher,
bundled in plastic the same color as a cop car. Fell and hit his
head. Fell. Head. Wilson.
His heart stopped. It seemed to him that it fell sideways,
kicked like an animal in a cartoon.
Sixteenth second of Bobby Newmark's death. His hotdog-
ger's death.
And something leaned in, vastness unutterable, from beyond
the most distant edge of anything he'd ever known or imag-
ined, and touched him.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING~ WHY ARE THEY DOING THAT TO YOU'
Girlvoice, brownhair, darkeyes
KILLING ME KiLLING ME GET if OFF GET if OFF
Darkeyes, desertstar, tanshirt, girlhair
BUT IT'S A TRICK, SEE? YOU ONLY THINK
IT'S GOT YOU. LOOK. NOW I FIT HERE AND
YOU AREN'T CARRYING THE LOOP.
And his heart rolled right over, on its back, and kicked his
lunch up with its red cartoon legs, galvanic frog-leg spasm
hurling him from the chair and tearing the trodes from his
forehead. His bladder let go when his head clipped the corner
of the Hitachi, and someone was saying fuck fuck fuck into
the dust smell of carpet. Girlvoice gone, no desertstar, flash
impression of cool wind and waterworn stone
Then his head exploded. He saw it very clearly, from
somewhere far away. Like a phosphorus grenade.
White.
Light.
4
J[WKINI~
Thn BLACK HONDA hovered twenty meters above the octagonal
deck of the derelict oil rig. It was nearing dawn, and Turner
could make out the faded outline of a biohazard trefoil mark-
ing the helicopter pad.
"You got a biohazard down there, Conroy?"
"None you aren't used to," Conroy said.
A figure in a red jumpsuit made brisk arm signals to the
Honda's pilot. Propwash flung scraps of packing waste into
the sea as they landed. Conroy slapped the release plate on
his harness and leaned across Turner to unseal the hatch The
roar of the engines battered them as the hatch slid open.
Conroy was jabbing him in the shoulder, making urgent
lifting motions with an upturned palm. He pointed to the
pilot.
Turner scrambled out and dropped, the prop a blur of
thunder, then Conroy was crouching beside him. They cleared
the faded trefoil with the bent-legged crab scuttle common to
helicopter pads. the Honda's wind snapping their pants legs
around their ankles. Turner camed a plain gray suitcase
molded from ballistic ABS, his only piece of luggage; some-
one had packed it for him, at the hotel, and it had been
waiting on Tsushima. A sudden change in pitch told him the
Honda was rising. It went whining away toward the coast,
showing no lights. As the sound faded, Turner heard the cries
of gulls and the slap and slide of the Pacific.
"Someone tried to set up a data haven here once," Conroy
said. "International waters. Back then nobody lived in orbit,
so it made sense for a few years. . ." He started for a rusted
forest of beams supporting the rig's superstructure. "One
scenario Hosaka showed me, we'd get Mitchell out here,
clean him up, stick him on Tsushima, and full steam for old
Japan. I told `em, forget that shit. Mans gets on to it and they
can come down on this thing with anything they want. I told
`em, that compound they got down in the D.F, that's the
ticket, right? Plenty of shit Mans wouldn't pull there, not in
the fucking middle of Mexico City . .
A figure stepped from the shadows, head distorted by the
bulbous goggles of an image-amplification rig. It waved them
on with the blunt, clustered muzzles of a Lansing fldchette
gun. "Biohazard," Conroy said as they edged past. "Duck
your head here. And watch it, the stairs get slippery
The rig smelled of rust and disuse and brine. There were no
windows. The discolored cream walls were blotched with
spreading scabs of rust. Battery-powered fluorescent lanterns
were slung, every few meters, from beams overhead, casting
a hideous green-tinged light, at once intense and naggingly
uneven. At least a dozen figures were at work, in this central
room; they moved with the relaxed precision of good techni-
cians. Professionals, Turner thought; their eyes seldom met
and there was little talking. It was cold, very cold, and Conroy
had given him a huge parka covered with tabs and zippers.
A bearded man in a sheepskin bomber jacket was securing
bundled lengths of fiber-optic line to a dented bulkhead with
silver tape. Conroy was locked in a whispered argument with
a black woman who wore a parka like Turner's. The bearded
tech looked up from his work and saw Turner. "Shee-it," he
said, still on his knees, "I figured it was a big one, but I
guess it's gonna be a rough one, too." He stood, wiping his
palms automatically on his jeans. Like the rest of the techs,
he wore micropore surgical gloves. "You're Turner." He
grinned, glanced quickly in Conroy's direction, and pulled a
black plastic flask from a jacket pocket. "Take some chill
off. You remember me. Worked on that job in Marrakech.
IBM boy went over to Mitsu-G. Wired the charges on that
bus you `n' the Frenchman drove into that hotel lobby."
Turner took the flask, snapped its lid, and tipped it. Bour-
bon. It stung deep and sour, warmth spreading from the
region of his sternum. "Thanks." He returned the flask and
the man pocketed it.
"Onkey," the man said. "Name's Oakey? You remember?"
"Sure," Turner lied, "Marrakech."
"Wild Turkey," Onkey said. "Flew in through Schipol, I
hit the duty-free. Your partner there," another glance at
Conroy, "he's none too relaxed, is he? I mean, not like
Marrakech, right?"
Turner nodded.
"You need anything," Oakey said, "lemme know."
"Like what?"
`Nother drink, or I got some Peruvian flake, the kind
that's real yellow." Oakey grinned again.
"Thanks," Turner said, seeing Conroy turn from the black
woman. Onkey saw, too, kneeling quickly and tearing off a
fresh length of silver tape.
"Who was that?" Conroy asked, after leading Turner through
a narrow door with decayed black gasket seals at its edges
Conroy spun the wheel that dogged the door shut, someone
had oiled it recently.
"Name's Onkey," Turner said, taking in the new room.
Smaller. Two of the lanterns, folding tables, chairs, all new
On the tables, instrumentation of some kind, under black
plastic dustcovers.
"Friend of yours?"
"No," Turner said. "He worked for me once." He went
to the nearest table and flipped back a dustcover. "What's
this?" The console had the blank, half-finished look of a
factory prototype.
"Maas-Neotek cyberspace deck
Turner raised his eyebrows. "Yours?"
"We got two. One's on site. From Hosaka. Fastest thing in
the matrix, evidently, and Hosaka can't even de-engineer the
chips to copy them. Whole other technology."
"They got them from Mitchell?"
"They aren't saying. The fact they'd let go of `em just to
give our jockeys an edge is some indication of how badly
they want the man."
"Who's on console, Conroy?"
"Jaylene Slide. I was talking to her just now." He jerked
his head in the direction of the door. "The site man's out of
L.A., kid called Ramirez."
"They any good?" Turner replaced the dustcover.
"Better be, for what they'll cost. Jaylene's gotten herself a
hot rep the past two years, and Ramirez is her understudy.
Shit' `Conroy shrugged' `you know these cowboys. Fuck-
ing crazy
`Where'd you get them? Where'd you get Gakey for that
matter?"
Conroy smiled. "From your agent, Turner."
Turner stared at Conroy, then nodded. Turning, he lifted
the edge of the next dustcover. Cases, plastic and styrofoam,
stacked neatly on the cold metal of the table. He touched a
blue plastic rectangle stamped with a silver monogram: S&W.
"Your agent," Conroy said, as Turner snapped the case
open. The pistol lay there in its molded bed of pale blue
foam, a massive revolver with an ugly housing that bulged
beneath the squat barrel. "S&W Tactical. .408. with a xenon
projector," Conroy said. "What he said you'd want."
Turner took the gun in his hand and thumbed the batterytest
stud for the projector. A red LED in the walnut grip pulsed
twice. He swung the cylinder out. "Ammunition?"
"On the table. Hand-loads, explosive tips."
Turner found a transparent cube of amber plastic, opened it
with his left hand, and extracted a cartridge. "Why did they
pick me for this, Conroy?" He examined the cartridge, then
inserted it carefully into one of the cylinder's six chambers.
"I dont know," Conroy said. "Felt like they had you
slotted from go, whenever they heard from Mitchell . .
Turner spun the cylinder rapidly and snapped it back into
the frame. "I said, `Why did they pick me for this, Conroy?'
He raised the pistol with both hands and extended his arms,
pointing it directly at Conroy's face. "Gun like this, some-
times you can see right down the bore, if the light's right, see
if there's a bullet there."
Conroy shook his head, very slightly.
"Ormaybeyoucanseeitinoneoftheothercham~~ .
"No," Conroy said, very softly, "no way."
"Maybe the shrinks screwed up, Conroy. How about that?"
"No," Conmy said, his face blank. "They didn't, and you
won't."
Turner pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked on an empty
chamber. Conmy blinked once, opened his mouth, closed it,
watched as Turner lowered the Smith & Wesson. A single
bead of sweat rolled down from Conroy's hairline and lost
itself in an eyebrow.
"Well?" Turner asked, the gun at his side.
Conmy shrugged. "Don't do that shit," he said.
"They want me that badT'
Conroy nodded. "It's your show. Turner."
"Where's Mitchell?" He opened the cylinder again and
began to load the five remaining chambers.
"Arizona. About fifty kilos from the Sonora line, in a
mesatop research arcology. Maas Biolabs North America.
They own everything around there, right down to the border,
and the mesa's smack in the middle of the footprints of four
recon satellites. Mucho tight."
"And how are we supposed to get in?"
"We aren't. Mitchell's coming out, on his own. We wait
for him, pick him up, get his ass to Hosaka intact" Conroy
hooked a forefinger behind the open collar of his black shirt
and drew out a length of black nylon cord, then a small black
nylon envelope with a Velcro fastener. He opened it carefully
and extracted an object, which he offered to Turner on his
open palm "Here. This is what he `sent
Turner put the gun down on the nearest table and took the
thing from Conroy. It was like a swollen gray microsoft. one
end routine neurojack, the other a strange, rounded formation
unlike anything he'd seen. "What is it?"
"It's biosoft. Jaylene jacked it and said she thought it was
output from an Al. It's sort of a dossier on Mitchell, with a
message to Hosaka tacked on the end. You better jack it
yourself; you wanna get the picture fast . .
Turner glanced up from the gray thing "How'd it grab
Jaylene?"
"She said you better be lying down when you do it She
didn't seem to like it much."
Machine dreams hold a special vertigo. Turner lay down on
a virgin slab of green temperfoam in the makeshift dorm and
jacked Mitchell's dossier. It came on slow; he had time to
close his eyes.
Ten seconds later, his eyes were open. He clutched the
green foam and fought his nausea. Again, he closed his
eyes. . . . It came on, again, gradually, a flickering, nonlin-
ear flood of fact and sensory data, a kind of narrative con-
veyed in surreal jump cuts and juxtapositions. It was vaguely
like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence
at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, at-
tack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except
that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation,
but rather with lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol
system. The data had never been intended for human input.
Eyes open, he pulled the thing from his socket and held it,
his palm slick with sweat. It was like waking from a night-
mare. Not a screamer, where impacted fears took on simple,
terrible shapes, but the sort of dream, infinitely more disturb-
ing, where everything is perfectly and horribly normal, and
where everything is utterly wrong
The intimacy of the thing was hideous He fought down
waves of raw transference, bringing all his will to bear on
crushing a feeling that was akin to love, the obsessive tender-
ness a watcher comes to feel for the subject of prolonged
surveillance. Days or hours later, he knew, the most minute
details of Mitchell's academic record might bob to the surface
of his mind, or the name of a mistress, the scent of her heavy
red hair in the sunlight through
He sat up quickly, the plastic soles of his shoes smacking
the rusted deck. He still wore the parka, and the Smith &
Wesson, in a side pocket, swung painfully against his hip.
It would pass. Mitchell's psychic odor would fade, as
surely as the Spanish grammar in the lexicon evaporated after
each use. What he had experienced was a Maas security
dossier compiled by a sentient computer, nothing more He
replaced the biosoft in Conroy's little black wallet, smoothed
the Velcro seal with his thumb, and put the cord around his
neck.
He became aware of the sound of waves lapping the flanks
of the rig.
"Hey, boss," someone said, from beyond the brown mili-
tary blanket that screened the entrance to the dorm area,
"Conroy says it's time for you to inspect the troops, then you
and him depart for other parts." Oakey's bearded face slid
from behind the blanket "Otherwise, I wouldn't wake you
up, right?"
"I wasn't sleeping," Turner said, and stood, fingers reflex-
ively kneading the skin around the implanted socket.
"Too bad," Oakey said. "I got derms'll put you under all
the way, one hour on the button, then kick in some kind of
righteous upper, get you up and on the case, no lie
Turner shook his head. "Take me to Conroy"
S
TII[
MAIU..Y CHECKED iwro a small hotel with green plants in heavy
brass pots, the corridors tiled like worn marble chessboards.
The elevator was a scrolled gilt cage with rosewood panels
smelling of lemon oil and small cigars.
Her room was on the fifth floor. A single tall window
overlooked the avenue, the kind of window you could actu-
ally open. When the smiling bellman had gone, she collapsed
into an armchair whose plush fabric contrasted comfortably
with the muted Belgian carpet. She undid the zips on her old
Paris boots for the last time, kicked them off, and stared at
the dozen glossy carrier bags the bellman had arranged on the
bed. Tomorrow, she thought, she'd buy luggage. And a
toothbrush.
"I'm in shock," she said to the bags on the bed. "I must
take care. Nothing seems real now." She looked down and
saw that her hose were both out at the toe. She shook her
head. Her new purse lay on the white marble table beside the
bed; it was black, cut from cowhide tanned thick and soft as
Flemish butter. It had cost more than she would have owed
Andrea for her share of a month's rent, but that was also true
of a single night's stay in this hotel. The purse contained her
passport and the credit chip she'd been issued in the Galerie
Duperey, drawn on an account held in her name by an orbital
branch of the Nederlands Algemeen Bank.
She went into the bathroom and worked the smooth brass
levers of the big white tub. Hot, aerated water hissed out
through a Japanese filtration device. The hotel provided pack-
ets of bath salts, tubes of creams and scented oils. She
emptied a tube of oil into the filling tub and began to remove
her clothes, feeling a pang of loss when she tossed the Sally
Stanley behind her. Until an hour before, the year-old jacket
had been her favorite garment and perhaps the single most
expensive thing she'd ever owned. Now it was something for
the cleaners to take away; perhaps it would find its way to
one of the city's flea markets, the sort of place where she'd
hunted bargains as an art-school girl.
The mirrors misted and ran, as the room filled with scented
steam, blurring the reflection of her nakedness. Was it really
this easy? Had Virek's slim gold credit chip checked her out
of her misery and into this hotel, where the towels were white
and thick and scratchy? She was aware of a certain spiritual
vertigo, as though she trembled at the edge of some precipice.
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-toweled. She stepped into the tub and lay
down.
Tomorrow she would have her hair cut. In Paris.
Andrea's phone rang sixteen times before Marly remem-
bered the special program. It would still be in place, and this
expensive little Brussels hotel would not be listed. She leaned
out to replace the handset on the marble-topped table and it
chimed once, softly.
"A courier has delivered a parcel, from the Galerie
Duperey."
When the bellmana younger man this time, dark and
possibly Spanishhad gone, she took the package to the
window and turned it over in her hands It was wrapped in a
single sheet of handmade paper, dark gray, 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. The name and address of the Galerie were
embossed in one corner, and her name and the name of her
hotel were handwritten across the center in perfect italic
script.
She unfolded the paper and found herself holding a new
Braun holoprojector and a flat envelope of clear plastic. The
envelope contained seven numbered tabs of holofiche. Beyond
the miniature iron balcony, the sun was going down, painting
the Old Town gold. She heard car horns and the cries of
children. She closed the window and crossed to a writing
desk. The Braun was a smooth black rectangle powered by
solar cells. She checked the charge, then took the first holo-
fiche from the envelope and slotted it.
The box she'd seen in Virek's simulation of the Guell Park
blossomed above the Braun, glowing with the crystal resolu-
tion of the finest museum-grade holograms. Bone and circuit-
gold, dead lace, and a dull white marble rolled from clay.
Marly shook her head. How could anyone have arranged
these bits, this garbage, in such a way that it caught at the
heart, snagged in the soul like a fishhook? But then she
nodded. It could be done, she knew; it had been done many
years ago by a man named Cornell, who'd also made boxes.
Then she glanced to the left, where the elegant gray paper
lay on the desktop. She'd chosen this hotel at random, when
she'd grown tired of shopping. She'd told no one she was
here, and certainly no one from the Galerie Duperey.
`C
I~AIfY11JWN
HE STAYED OUT FOR something like eight hours, by the clock
on his mother's Hitachi. Came to staring at Its dusty face, some
hard thing wedged under his thigh. The Ono-Sendai. He
rolled over. Stale puke smell.
Then he was in the shower, not sure quite how he'd gotten
there, spinning the taps with his clothes still on. He clawed
and dug and pulled at his face. It felt like a rubber mask.
"Something happened." Something bad, big, he wasn't
sure what.
His wet clothes gradually mounded up on the tile floor of
the shower. Finally he stepped out, went to the sink and
flicked wet hair back from his eyes, peered at the face in the
mirror. Bobby Newmark, no problem.
"No, Bobby, problem. Gotta problem .
Towel around his shoulders, dripping water, he followed
the narrow hallway to his bedroom, a tiny, wedge-shaped
space at the very back of the condo. His holoporn unit lit as
he stepped in, half a dozen girls grinning, eyeing him with
evident delight. They seemed to be standing beyond the walls
of the room, in hazy vistas of powder-blue space, their white
smiles and taut young bodies bright as neon. Two of them
edged forward and began to touch themselves.
"Stop it," he said.
The projection unit shut itself down at his command; the
dreamgirls vanished. The thing had originally belonged to
Ling Warren's older brother; the girls' hair and clothes were
dated and vaguely ridiculous. You could talk with them and
get them to do things with themselves and each other. Bobby
remembered being thirteen and in love with Brandi, the one
with the blue rubber pants. Now he valued the projections
mainly for the illusion of space they could provide in the
makeshift bedroom.
"Something fucking happened," he said, pulling on black
jeans and an almost-clean shirt. He shook his head. "What?
Fucking what?" Some kind of power surge on the line? Some
flukey action down at the Fission Authority? Maybe the base
he'd tried to invade had suffered some strange breakdown, or
been attacked from another qu~er... But he was left with
the sense of having met someone, someone who . . . He'd
unconsciously extended his right hand, fingers spread, be-
seechingly. "Fuck," he said. The fingers balled into a fist.
Then it came back: first, the sense of the big thing, the really
big thing, reaching for him across cyberspace, and then the
girl-impression. Someone brown, slender, crouching some-
where in a strange bright dark full of stars and wind. But it
slid away as his mind went for it.
Hungry, he got into sandals and headed back toward the
kitchen, rubbing at his hair with a damp towel. On his way
through the living room, he noticed the ON telltale of the
Ono-Sendai glaring at him from the carpet. "0 shit." He
stood there and sucked at his teeth. It was still jacked in. Was
it possible that it was still linked with the base he'd tried to
run? Could they tell he wasn't dead? He had no idea. One
thing he did know, though, was that they'd have his number
and good. He hadn't bothered with the cutouts and frills that
would've kept them from running a backtrack.
They had his address.
Hunger forgotten, he spun into the bathroom and rooted
through the soggy clothing until he found his credit chip.
He had two hundred and ten New Yen stashed in the
hollow plastic handle of a multibit screwdriver. Screwdriver
and credit chip secure in his jeans, he pulled on his oldest,
heaviest pair of boots, then clawed unwashed clothing from
beneath the bed. He came up with a black canvas jacket with
at least a dozen pockets, one of them a single huge pouch
across the small of the back, a kind of integral rucksack.
There was a Japanese gravity knife with orange handles be-
neath his pillow; that went into a narrow pocket on the
jacket's left sleeve, near the cuff.
The dreamgirls clicked in as he was leaving: "Bobby,
Bobb-y, come back and play. .
In his living room, he yanked the Ono-Sendai's jack from
the face of the Hitachi, coiling the fiber-optic lead and tuck-
ing it into a pocket. He did the same with the trode set, then
slid the Ono-Sendai into the jacket's pack-pocket.
The curtains were still drawn. He felt a surge of some new
exhilaration. He was leaving. He had to leave. Already he'd
forgotten the pathetic fondness that his brush with death had
generated. He parted the curtains carefully, a thumb-wide
gap, and peered out.
It was late afternoon. In a few hours, the first lights would
start blinking on in the dark bulks of the Projects. Big Play-
ground swept away like a concrete sea; the Projects rose
beyond the opposite shore, vast rectilinear structures softened
by a random overlay of retrofitted greenhouse balconies,
catfish tanks, solar heating systems, and the ubiquitous
chicken-
wire dishes.
Two-a-Day would be up there now, sleeping, in a world
Bobby had never seen, the world of a mincome aicology.
Two-a-Day caine down to do business, mostly with the hot-
doggers in Barrytown, and then he climbed back up. It had
always looked good to Bobby, up there, so much happening
on the balcon
|
Метки: william gibson "count zero" 1986 |
После того как мы сожгли ХРОМ - William Gibson "Burning Chrome" |
William Gibson "Burning Chrome"
1986
The Gernsback Continuum
Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to be-
come an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse,
it's peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome,
confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was
that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but
it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters
have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid un-
folding themselves into the gleaming eighty lane
monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented
Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to
New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wave-
length of probability. I've worked hard for that. Tele-
vision helped a lot.
I suppose it started in London, in that bogus Greek
taverna in Battersea Park Road, with lunch on Cohen's
corporate tab. Dead steam-table food and it took them
thirty minutes to find an ice bucket for the retsina.
Cohen works for Barris-Watford, who publish big,
trendy "trade" paperbacks: illustrated histories of the
neon sign, the pinball machine, the windup toys of Oc-
cupied Japan. I'd gone over to shoot a series of shoe
ads; California girls with tanned legs and frisky Day-
Gb jogging shoes had capered for me down the
escalators of St. John's Wood and across the platforms
of Tooting Bec. A lean and hungry young agency had
decided that the mystery of London Transport would
sell waffle-tread nylon runners. They decide; I shoot.
And Cohen, whom I knew vaguely from the old days in
New York, had invited me to lunch the day before I was
due out of Heathrow. He brought along a very fash-
ionably dressed young woman named Dialta Downes,
who was virtually chinless and evidently a noted pop-art
historian. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside
Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes THIS
WAY LIES MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals.
Cohen introduced us and explained that Dialta was
the prime mover behind the latest Barris-Watford pro-
ject, an illustrated history of what she called "Ameri-
can Streamlined Moderne." Cohen called it "raygun
Gothic." Their working title was The Airstream
Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.
There's a British obsession with the more baroque
elements of American pop culture, something like the
weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of the West Germans
or the aberrant French hunger for old Jerry Lewis films.
In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a
uniquely American form of architecture that most
Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn't sure
what she was talking about, but gradually it began to
dawn on me. I found myself remembering Sunday
morning television in the Fifties.
Sometimes they'd run old eroded newsreels as filler
on the local station. You'd sit there with a peanut butter
sandwich and a glass of milk, and a static-ridden
Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A
Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers
would putter around with this big old Nash with wings,
and you'd see it rumbling furiously down some deserted
Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off,
but it flew away to Dialta Downes's never-never land,
true home of a generation of completely uninhibited
technophiles. She was talking about those odds and
ends of "futuristic" Thirties and Forties architecture
you pass daily in American cities without noticing; the
movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious en-
ergy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the
chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of tran-
sient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a
dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she
wanted me to photograph them for her.
The Thirties had seen the first generation of Ameri-
can industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil
sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners your
basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of
decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some
pencil sharpeners looked as though they'd been put to-
gether in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change
was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell,
you'd find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made
a certain kind of sense, because the most successful
American designers had been recruited from the ranks
of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a
series of elaborate props for playing at living in the
future.
Over coffee, Cohen produced a fat manila envelope
full of glossies. I saw the winged statues that guard the
Hoover Dam, forty-foot concrete hood ornaments lean-
ing steadfastly into an imaginary hurricane. I saw a
dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson's Wax
Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing
Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the
employees of Johnson's Wax must have felt as though
they were walking into one of Paul's spray-paint pulp
utopias. Wright's building looked as though it had been
designed for people who wore white togas and Lucite
sandals. I hesitated over one sketch of a particularly
grandiose prop-driven airliner, all wing, like a fat sym-
metrical boomerang with windows in unlikely places.
Labeled arrows indicated the locations of the grand
ballroom and two squash courts. It was dated 1936.
"This thing couldn't have flown. . . ?" I looked at
Dialta Downes.
"Oh, no, quite impossible, even with those twelve
giant props; but they loved the look, don't you see?
New York to London in less than two days, first-class
dining rooms, private cabins, sun decks, dancing to jazz
in the evening... The designers were populists, you see;
they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What
the public wanted was the future."
I'd been in Burbank for three days, trying to suffuse a
really dull-looking rocker with charisma, when I got the
package from Cohen. It is possible to photograph what
isn't there; it's damned hard to do, and consequently a
very marketable talent. While I'm not bad at it, I'm not
exactly the best, either, and this poor guy strained my
Nikon's credibility. I got out, depressed because I do
like to do a good job, but not totally depressed, because
I did make sure I'd gotten the check for the job, and I
decided to restore myself with the sublime artiness of
the Barris-Watford assignment. Cohen had sent me
some books on Thirties design, more photos of stream-
lined buildings, and a list of Dialta Downes's fifty
favorite examples of the style in California.
Architectural photography can involve a lot of wait-
ing; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you
wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want,
or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal
itself in a certain way. While I was waiting, I thought
myself in Dialta Downes's America. When I isolated a
few of the factory buildings on the ground glass of the
Hasselblad, they came across with a kind of sinister
totalitarian dignity, like the stadiums Albert Speer built
for Hitler. But the rest of it was relentlessly tacky:
ephemeral stuff extruded by the collective American
subconscious of the Thirties, tending mostly to survive
along depressing strips lined with dusty motels, mattress
wholesalers, and small used-car lots. I went for the gas
stations in a big way.
During the high point of the Downes Age, they put
Ming the Merciless in charge of designing California gas
stations. Favoring the architecture of his native Mongo,
he cruised up and down the coast erecting raygun
emplacements in white stucco. Lots of them featured
superfluous central towers ringed with those strange
radiator flanges that were a signature motif of the style,
and made them look as though they might generate po-
tent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm, if you
could only find the switch that turned them on. I shot
one in San Jose an hour before the bulldozers arrived
and drove right through the structural truth of plaster
and lathing and cheap concrete.
"Think of it," Dialta Downes had said, "as a kind
of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An
architecture of broken dreams."
And that was my frame of mind as I made the sta-
tions 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 worshiped blue
mirrors and geometry. And as I moved among these
secret ruins, I found myself wondering what the in-
habitants of that lost future would think of the world I
lived in. The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-
stream 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 superhighway to drive it down, so that the
sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and
pitted the miracle crystal. . .
And one day, on the outskirts of Bolinas, when I
was setting up to shoot a particularly lavish example of
Ming's martial architecture, I penetrated a fine mem-
brane, a membrane of probability...
Every so gently, I went over the Edge
And looked up to see a twelve-engined thing like a
bloated boomerang, all wing, thrumming its way east
with an elephantine grace, so low that I could count the
rivets in its dull silver skin, and hear maybe the echo
of jazz.
I took it to Kihn.
Merv Kihn, free-lance journalist with an extensive
line in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactees,
bush-league Loch Ness monsters, and the Top Ten con-
spiracy theories in the loonier reaches of the American
mass mind.
"It's good," said Kihn, polishing his yellow
Polaroid shooting glasses on the hem of his Hawaiian
shirt, "but it's not mental; lacks the true quill."
But I saw it, Mervyn." We were seated poolside in
brilliant Arizona sunlight. He was in Tucson waiting for
a group of retired Las Vegas civil servants whose leader
received messages from Them on her microwave oven.
I'd driven all night and was feeling it.
"Of course you did. Of course you saw it. You've
read my stuff; haven't you grasped my blanket solution
to the UFO problem? It's simple, plain and country sim-
ple: people" he settled the glasses carefully on his long
hawk nose and fixed me with his best basilisk glare
"see . . . things. People see these things. Nothing's
there, but people see them anyway. Because they need
to, probably. You've read Jung. you should know the
score... .In your case, it's so obvious: You admit you
were thinking about this crackpot architecture, having
fantasies. .. .Look, I'm sure you've taken your share of
drugs, right? How many people survived the Sixties in
California without having the odd hallucination? All
those nights when you discovered that whole armies of
Disney technicians had been employed to weave
animated holograms of Egyptian hieroglyphs into the
fabric of your jeans, say, or the times when "
"But it wasn't like that."
"Of course not. It wasn't like that at all; it was `in a
setting of clear reality,' right? Everything normal, and
then there's the monster, the mandala, the neon cigar.
In your case, a giant Tom Swift airplane. It happens all
the time. You aren't even crazy. You know that, don't
you?" He fished a beer out of the battered foam cooler
beside his deck chair.
"Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I
interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who'd been assaulted
bya bar hade."
``A what?"
"A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar
hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying
saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps on cousin
Wayne's vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two
cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up
behind its ears." He burped. -
"It assaulted her? How?"
"You don't want to know; you're obviously im-
pressionable. `It was cold' " he lapsed into his bad
southern accent " `and metallic.' It made electronic
noises. Now that is the real thing, the straight goods
from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a
witch. There's just no place for her to function in this
society. She'd have seen the devil, if she hadn't been
brought up on `The Bionic Man' and all those `Star
Trek' reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she
knows that it happened to her. I got out ten minutes
before the heavy UFO boys showed up with the
polygraph."
I must have looked pained, because he set his beer
down carefully beside the cooler and sat up.
"If you want a classier explanation, I'd say you
saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for in-
stance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that
permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens
that look like Fifties' comic art. They're semiotic phan-
toms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off
and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne air-
ships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.
But you saw a different kind of ghost, that's all. That
plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You
picked up on that, somehow. The important thing is not
to worry about it."
I did worry about it, though.
Kihn combed his thinning blond hair and went off
to hear what They had had to say over the radar range
lately, and I drew the curtains in my room and lay down
in air-conditioned darkness to worry about it. I was still
worrying about it when I woke up. Kihn had left a note
on my door; he was flying up north in a chartered plane
to check out a cattle-mutilation rumor ("muties," he
called them; another of his journalistic specialties).
I had a meal, showered, took a crumbling diet pill
that had been kicking around in the bottom of my shav-
ing kit for three years, and headed back to Los Angeles.
The speed limited my vision to the tunnel of the
Toyota's headlights. The body could drive, I told
myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained and
stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing
of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous
vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind's
eye along late-night highways. But the mind had its own
ideas, and Kihn's opinion of what I was already think-
ing of as my "sighting" rattled endlessly through my
head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts.
Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind
of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated
the diet pill, and the speed-vegetation along the road
began to assume the colors of infrared satellite images,
glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota's slipstream.
I pulled over, then, and a half-dozen aluminum
beer cans winked goodnight as I killed the headlights. I
wondered what time it was in London, and tried to
imagine Dialta Downes having breakfast in her Hamp-
stead flat, surrounded by streamlined chrome figurines
and books on American culture.
Desert nights in that country are enormous; the
moon is closer. I watched the moon for a long time and
decided that Kihn was right. The main thing was not to
worry. All across the continent, daily, people who were
more normal than I'd ever aspired to be saw giant birds,
Bigfeet, flying oil refineries; they kept Kihn busy and
solvent. Why should I be upset by a glimpse of the 1930s
pop imagination loose over Bolinas? I decided to go to
sleep, with nothing worse to worry about than rattle-
snakes and cannibal hippies, safe amid the friendly
roadside garbage of my own familiar continuum. In the
morning I'd drive down to Nogales and photograph the
old brothels, something I'd intended to do for years.
The diet pill had given up.
The light woke me, and then the.voices.
The light came from somewhere behind me and
threw shifting shadows inside the car. The voices were
calm, indistinct, male and female, engaged in conversa-
tion.
My neck was stiff and my eyeballs felt gritty in their
sockets. My leg had gone to sleep, pressed against the
steering wheel. I fumbled for my glasses in the pocket of
my work shirt and finally got them on.
Then I looked behind me and saw the city.
The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one
of them contained sketches of an idealized city that
drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared
everything, soaring up through an architect's perfect
clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city
was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire
stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to
a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy
radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could
hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those
towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires,
crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads
of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant
wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of
the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose
gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance),
mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were
gyrocopters...
I closed my eyes tight and swung around in the seat.
When I opened them, I willed myself to see the mileage
meter, the pale road dust on the black plastic
dashboard, the overflowing ashtray.
"Amphetamine psychosis," I said. I opened my
eyes. The dash was still there, the dust, the crushed
filtertips. Very carefully, without moving my head, I
turned the headlights on.
And saw them.
They were blond. They were standing beside their
car, an aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rud-
der jutting up from its spine and smooth black tires like
a child's toy. He had his arm around her waist and was
gesturing toward the city. They were both in white:
loose clothing, bare legs, spotless white sun shoes.
Neither of them seemed aware of the beams of my
headlights. He was saying something wise and strong,
and she was nodding, and suddenly I was frightened,
frightened in an entirely different way. Sanity had
ceased to be an issue; I knew, somehow, that the city
behind me was Tucson a dream Tucson thrown up out
of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real, en-
tirely real. But the couple in front of me lived in it, and
they frightened me.
They were the children of Dialta Downes's `80-
that-wasn't; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were
white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They
were American. Dialta had said that the Future had
come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But
not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on
and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution,
the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was
possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly
content with themselves and their world. And in the
Dream, it was their world.
Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept
the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them throng-
ing the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their
bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit
avenues and silver cars.
It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth prop-
aganda.
I put the car in gear and drove forward slowly, until
the bumper was within three feet of them. They still
hadn't seen me. I rolled the window down and listened
to what the man was saying. His words were bright and
hollow as the pitch in some Chamber of Commerce
brochure, and I knew that he believed in them abso-
lutely.
"John," I heard the woman say, "we've forgotten
to take our food pills." She clicked two bright wafers
from a thing on her belt and passed one to him. I backed
onto the highway and headed for Los Angeles, wincing
and shaking my head.
I phoned Kihn from a gas station. A new one, in bad
Spanish Modern. He was back from his expedition and
didn't seem to mind the call.
"Yeah, that is a weird one. Did you try to get any
pictures? Not that they ever come out, but it adds an in-
teresting frisson to your story, not having the pictures
turnout.
But what should I do?
"Watch lots of television, particularly game shows
and soaps. Go to porn movies. Ever see Nazi Love
Motel? They've got it on cable, here. Really awful. Just
what you need."
What was he talking about?
"Quit yelling and listen to me. I'm letting you in on
a trade secret: Really bad media can exorcise your
semiotic ghosts. If it keeps the saucer people off my
back, it can keep these Art Deco futuroids off yours.
Try it. What have you got to lose?"
Then he begged off, pleading an early-morning
date with the Elect.
"The who?"
"These oldsters from Vegas; the ones with the
microwaves. ~
I considered putting a collect call through to Lon-
don, getting Cohen at Barris-Watford and telling him
his photographer was checked out for a protracted
season in the Twilight Zone. In the end, I let a machine
mix me a really impossible cup of black coffee and
climbed back into the Toyota for the haul to Los
Angeles.
Los Angeles was a bad idea, and I spent two weeks
there. It was prime Downes country; too much of the
Dream there, and too many fragments of the Dream
waiting to snare me. I nearly wrecked the car on a
stretch of overpass near Disneyland, when the road
fanned out like an origami trick and left me swerving
through a dozen minilanes of whizzing chrome tear-
drops with shark fins. Even worse, Hollywood was full
of people who looked too much like the couple I'd seen
in Arizona. I hired an Italian director who was making
ends meet doing darkroom work and installing patio
decks around swimming pools until his ship came in; he
made prints of all the negatives I'd accumulated on the
Downes job. I didn't want to look at the stuff myself. It
didn't seem to bother Leonardo, though, and when he
was finished I checked the prints, riffling through them
like a deck of cards, sealed them up, and sent them air
freight to London. Then I took a taxi to a theater that
was showing Nazi Love Motel, and kept my eyes shut all
the way.
Cohen's congratulatory wire was forwarded to me
in San Francisco a week later. Dialta had loved the pic-
tures. He admired the way I'd ``really gotten into it,''
and looked forward to working with me again. That
afternoon I spotted a flying wing over Castro Street, but
there was something tenuous about it, as though it were
only half there. I rushed into the nearest newsstand and
gathered up as much as I could find on the petroleum
crisis and the nuclear energy hazard. I'd just decided to
buy a plane ticket for New York.
"Hell of a world we live in, huh?" The proprietor
was a thin black man with bad teeth and an obvious wig.
I nodded, fishing in my jeans for change, anxious to
find a park bench where I could submerge myself in
hard evidence of the human near-dystopia we live in.
"But it could be worse, huh?"
"That's right," I said, "or even worse, it could be
perfect."
He watched me as I headed down the street with my
little bundle of condensed catasttophe.
Fragments of a Hologram Rose
That summer Parker had trouble sleeping.
There were power droughts; sudden failures of the
delta-inducer brought painfully abrupt returns to con-
sciousness.
To avoid these, he used patch cords, miniature
alligator clips, and black tape to wire the inducer to a
battery-operated ASP deck. Power loss in the inducer
would trigger the deck's playback circuit.
He bought an ASP cassette that began with the sub-
ject asleep on a quiet beach. It had been recorded by a
young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an abnormally
acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados
for the sole purpose of taking a nap and his morning's
exercise on a brilliant stretch of private beach. The
microfiche laminate in the cassette's transparent case
explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha
to delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn't been
able to sleep without an inducer for two years, won-
dered if this was possible.
He had been able to sit through the whole thing
only once, though by now he knew every sensation of
the first five subjective minutes. He thought the most in-
teresting part of the sequence was a slight editing slip at
the start of the elaborate breathing routine: a swift
glance down the white beach that picked out the figure
of a guard patrolling a chain link fence, a black machine
pistol slung over his arm.
While Parker slept, power drained from the city's
grids.
The transition from delta to delta-ASP was a dark
implosion into other flesh. Familiarity cushioned the
shock. He felt the cool sand under his shoulders. The
cuffs of his tattered jeans flapped against his bare
ankles in the morning breeze. Soon the boy would wake
fully and begin his Ardha-Matsyendra~something; with
other hands Parker groped in darkness for the ASP
deck.
Three in the morning.
Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a
flashlight when you pour the boiling water.
Morning's recorded dream, fading: through other
eyes, dark plume of a Cuban freighter fading with the
horizon it navigates across the mind's gray screen.
Three in the morning.
Let yesterday arrange itself around you in flat
schematic images. What you said what she said
watching her pack dialing the cab. However you
shuffle them they form the same printed circuit, hiero-
glyphs converging on a central component; you, stand-
ing in the rain, screaming at the cabby.
The rain was sour and acid, nearly the color of piss.
The cabby called you an asshole; you still had to pay
twice the fare. She had three pieces of luggage. In his
respirator and goggles, the man looked like an ant. He
pedaled away in the rain. She didn't look back.
The last you saw of her was a giant ant, giving you
the finger.
Parker saw his first ASP unit in a Texas shantytown
called Judy's Jungle. It was a massive console cased in
cheap plastic chrome. A ten-dollar bill fed into the slot
bought you five minutes of free-fall gymnastics in a
Swiss orbital spa, trampolining through twenty-meter
perihelions with a sixteen-year-old Vogue model
heady stuff for the Jungle, where it was simpler to
buy a gun than a hot bath.
He was in New York with forged papers a year
later, when two leading firms had the first portable
decks in major department stores in time for Christmas.
The ASP porn theaters that had boomed briefly in
California never recovered.
Holography went too, and the block-wide Fuller
domes that had been the holo temples of Parker's
childhood became multilevel supermarkets, or housed
dusty amusement arcades where you still might find the
old consoles, under faded neon pulsing APPARENT SEN-
SORY PERCEPTION through a blue haze of cigarette
smoke.
Now Parker is thirty and writes continuity for
broadcast ASP, programming the eye movements of the
industry's human cameras.
The brown-out continues.
In the bedroom, Parker prods the bru~hed-alu-
minum face of his Sendai Sleep-Master. Its pilot light
flickers, then lapses into darkness. Coffee in hand, he
crosses the carpet to the closet she emptied the day
before. The flashlight's beam probes the bare shelves
for evidence of love, finding a broken leather sandal
strap, an ASP cassette, and a postcard. The postcard is
a white light reflection holo&ram of a rose.
At the kitchen sink, he feeds the sandal strap to the
disposal unit. Sluggish in the brown-out, it complains,
but swallows and digests. Holding it carefully between
thumb and forefinger, he lowers the hologram toward
the hidden rotating jaws. The unit emits a thin scream as
steel teeth slash laminated plastic and the rose is shred-
ded into a thousand fragments.
Later he sits on the unmade bed, smoking. Her cas-
sette is in the deck ready for playback. Some women's
tapes disorient him, but he doubts this is the reason he
now hesitates to start the machine.
Roughly a quarter of all ASP users are unable to
comfortably assimilate the subjective body picture of
the opposite sex. Over the years some broadcast ASP
stars have become increasingly androgynous in an at-
tempt to capture this segment of the audience.
But Angela's own tapes have never intimidated him
before. (But what if she has recorded a lover?) No, that
can't be it it's simply that the cassette is an entirely
unknown quantity.
When Parker was fifteen, his parents indentured him to
the American subsidiary of a Japanese plastics combine.
At the time, he felt fortunate; the ratio of applicants to
indentured trainees was enormous. For three years he
lived with his cadre in a dormitory, singing the company
hymns in formation each morning and usually manag-
ing to go over the compound fence at least once a month
for girls or the holodrome.
The indenture would have terminated on his twen-
tieth birthday, leaving him eligible for full employee
status. A week before his nineteenth birthday, with two
stolen credit cards and a change of clothes, he went over
the fence for the last time. He arrived in California three
days before the chaotic New Secessionist regime col-
lapsed. In San Francisco, warring splinter groups hit
and ran in the streets. One or another of four different
"provisional" city governments had done such an effi-
cient job of stockpiling food that almost none was
available at street level.
Parker spent the last night of the revolution in a
burned-out Tucson suburb, making love to a thin
teenager from New Jersey who explained the finer
points of her horoscope between bouts of almost silent
weeping that seemed to have nothing at all to do with
anything he did or said.
Years later he realized that he no longer had any
idea of his original motive in breaking his indenture.
* * *
The first three quarters of the cassette have been erased;
you punch yourself fast-forward through a static haze
of wiped tape, where taste and scent blur into a single
channel. The audio input is white sound the no-sound
of the first dark sea. . . .(Prolonged input from wiped
tape can induce hypnagogic hallucination.)
Parker crouched in the roadside New Mexico brush at
midnight, watching a tank burn on the highway. Flame
lit the broken white line he had followed from Tucson.
The explosion had been visible two miles away, a white
sheet of heat lightning that had turned the pale branches
of a bare tree against the night sky into a photographic
negative of themselves: carbon branches against mag-
nesium sky.
Many of the refugees were armed.
Texas owed the shantytowns that steamed in the
warm Gulf rains to the uneasy neutrality she had main-
tained in the face of the Coast's attempted secession.
The towns were built of plywood, cardboard,
plastic sheets that billowed in the wind, and the bodies
of dead vehicles. They had names like Jump City and
Sugaree, and loosely defined governments and ter-
ritories that shifted constantly in the covert winds of a
black-market economy.
Federal and state troops sent in to sweep the outlaw
towns seldom found anything. But after each search, a
few men would fail to report back. Some had sold their
weapons and burned their uniforms, and others had
come too close to the contraband they had been sent to
find.
After three months, Parker wanted out, but goods
were the only safe passage through the army cordons.
His chance came only by accident: Late one afternoon,
skirting the pall of greasy cooking smoke that hung low
over the Jungle, he stumbled and nearly fell on the body
of a woman in a dry creek bed. Flies rose up in an angry
cloud, then settled again, ignoring him. She had a
leather jacket, and at night Parker was usually cold. He
began to search the creek bed for a length of brush-
wood.
In the jacket's back, lust below her left shoulder
blade, was a round hole that would have admitted the
shaft of a pencil. The jacket's lining had been red once,
but now it was black, stiff and shining with dried blood.
With the jacket swaying on the end of his stick, he went
looking for water.
j-Ie never washed the jacket; in its left pocket he
found nearly an ounce of cocaine, carefully wrapped in
plastic and transparent surgical tape. The right pocket
held fifteen ampules of Megacillin-D and a ten-inch
horn-handled switchblade. The antibiotic was worth
twice its weight in cocaine.
He drove the knife hilt-deep into a rotten stump
passed over by the Jungle's wood-gatherers and hung
the jacket there, the flies circling it as he walked away.
That night, in a bar with a corrugated iron roof,
waiting for one of the "lawyers" who worked passages
through the cordon, he tried his first ASP machine. It
was huge, all chrome and neon, and the owner was very
proud of it; he had helped hijack the truck himself.
If the chaos of the nineties reflects a radical shift
in the paradigms of visual literacy, the final shift
away from the Lascaux/Gutenberg tradition of a
pre-holographic society, what should we expect
from this newer technology, with his promise of
discrete encoding and subsequent reconstruction
of the full range of sensory perception?
Roebuck and Pierhal, Recent
American History: A Systems
View.
Fast-forward through the humming no-time of wiped
tape into her body. European sunlight. Streets of a
strange city.
Athens. Greek-letter signs and the smell of dust...
and the smell of dust.
Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman
hasn't met you yet; you're hardly out of Texas) at the
gray monument, horses there in stone, where pigeons
whirl up and circle
and static takes love's body, wipes it clean and
gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that
isn't there. And the tape ends.
The inducer's light is burning now.
Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand
fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this
quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will
reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta,
he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments
revealing a whole he'll never know stolen credit
cards a burned- out suburb planetary conjunctions
of a stranger a tank burning on a highway a flat
packet of drugs a switchblade honed on concrete, thin
as pain.
Thinking: We're each other's fragments, and was it
always this way? That instant of a European trip,
deserted in the gray sea of wiped tape is she closer
now, or more real, for his having been there?
She had helped him get his papers, found him his
first job in ASP. Was that their history? No, history was
the black face of the delta-inducer, the empty closet,
and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the
perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at
the pedal-cab driver, and her refusal to look back
through the contaminated rain.
But each fragment reveals the rose from a different
angle, he remembered, but delta swept over him before
he could ask himself what that might mean.
The Belonging Kind
by John Shirley and William Gibson
It might have been in Club Justine, or Jimbo's, or Sad
Jack's, or the Rafters; Coretti could never be sure where
he'd first seen her. At any time, she might have been in
any one of those bars. She swam through the submarine
half-life of bottles and glassware and the slow swirl of
cigarette smoke . . . she moved through her natural ele-
ment, one bar after another.
Now, Coretti remembered their first meeting as if
he saw it through the wrong end of a powerful tele-
scope, small and clear and very far away.
He had noticed her first in the Backdoor Lounge. It
was called the Backdoor because you entered through a
narrow back alley. The alley's walls crawled with graf-
fiti, its caged lights ticked with moths. Flakes from its
white-painted bricks crunched underfoot. And then you
pushed through into a dim space inhabited by a faintly
confusing sense of the half-dozen other bars that had
tried and failed in the same room under different
managements. Coretti sometimes went there because he
liked the weary smile of the black bartender, and
because the few customers rarely tried to get chummy.
He wasn't very good at conversation with stran-
gers, not at parties and not in bars.
He was fine at the community college where he
lectured in introductory linguistics; he could talk with
the head of his department about sequencing and op-
tions in conversational openings. But he could never
talk to strangers in bars or at parties. He didn't go to
many parties. He went to a lot of bars.
Coretti didn't know how to dress. Clothing was a
language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer,
unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion state-
ment that would put strangers at their ease. His ex-wife
told him he dressed like a Martian; that he didn't look
as though he belonged anywhere in the city. He hadn't
liked her saying that, because it was true.
He hadn't ever had a girl like the one who sat with
her back arched slightly in the undersea light that
splashed along the bar in the Backdoor. The same light
was screwed into the lenses of the bartender's glasses,
wound into the necks of the rows of bottles, splashed
dully across the mirror. In that light her dress was the
green of young corn, like a husk half stripped away,
showing back and cleavage and lots of thigh through the
slits up the side. Her hair was coppery that night. And,
that night, her eyes were green.
He pushed resolutely between the empty chrome-
and-Formica tables until he reached the bar, where he
ordered a straight bourbon. He took off his duffle coat,
and wound up holding it on his lap when he sat down
one stool away from her. Great, he screamed to himself,
she'll think you're hiding an erection. And he was
startled to realize that he had one to hide. He studied
himself in the mirror behind the bar, a thirtyish man
with thinning dark hair and a pale, narrow face on a
long neck, too long for the open collar of the nylon shirt
printed with engravings of 1910 automobiles in three
vivid colors. He wore a tie with broad maroon and black
diagonals, too narrow, he supposed, for what he now
saw as the grotesquely long points of his collar. Or it
was the wrong color. Something.
Beside him, in the dark clarity of the mirror, the
green-eyed woman looked like Irma La Douce. But
looking closer, studying her face, he shivered. A face
like an animal's. A beautiful face, but simple, cunning,
two-dimensional. When she senses you're looking at
her, Coretti thought, she'll give you the smile, disdain-
ful amusement or whatever you'd expect.
Coretti blurted, "May I, um, buy you a drink?"
At moments like these, Coretti was possessed by an
agonizingly stiff, schoolmasterish linguistic tic. Um. He
winced. Um.
"You would, um, like to buy me a drink? Why,
how kind of you," she said, astonishing him. "That
would be very nice." Distantly, he noticed that her reply
was as stilted and insecure as his own. She added, "A
Tom Collins, on this occasion, would be lovely."
On this occasion? Lovely? Rattled, Coretti ordered
two drinks and paid.
A big woman in jeans and an embroidered cowboy
shirt bellied up to the bar beside him and asked the
bartender for change. "Well, hey," she said. Then she
strutted to the jukebox and punched for Conway and
Loretta's "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly."
Coretti turned to the woman in green, and murmured
haltingly:
"Do you enjoy country-and-western music?" Do
you enjoy... ? He groaned secretly at his phrasing, and
tried to smile.
"Yes indeed," she answered, the faintest twang
edging her voice, "I sure do."
The cowgirl sat down beside him and asked her,
winking, "This li'l terror here givin' you a hard time?"
And the animal-eyed lady in green replied, "Oh,
hell no, honey, I got my eye on `im." And laughed. Just
the right amount of laugh. The part of Coretti that was
dialectologist stirred uneasily; too perfect a shift in
phrasing and inflection. An actress? A talented mimic?
The word mimetic rose suddenly in his mind, but he
pushed it aside to study her reflection in the mirror; the
rows of bottles occluded her breasts like a gown of
glass.
"The name's Coretti," he said, his verbal
poltergeist shifting abruptly to a totally unconvincing
tough-guy mode, "Michael Coretti."
"A pleasure," she said, too softly for the other
woman to hear, and again she had slipped into the lame
parody of Emily Post.
"Conway and Loretta," said the cowgirl, to no one
in particular.
"Antoinette," said the woman in green, and in-
clined her head. She finished her drink, pretended to
glance at a watch, said thank-you-for-the-drink too
damn politely, and left.
Ten minutes later Coretti was following her down
Third Avenue. He had never followed anyone in his life
and it both frightened and excited him. Forty feet
seemed a discreet distance, but what should he do if she
happened to glance over her shoulder?
Third Avenue isn't a dark street, and it was there,
in the light of a streetlamp, like a stage light, that she
began to change. The street was deserted.
She was crossing the street. She stepped off the
curb and it began. It began with tints in her hair at
first he thought they were reflections. But there was no
neon there to cast the blobs of color that appeared,
color sliding and merging like oil slicks. Then the colors
bled away and in three seconds she was white-blond. He
was sure it was a trick of the light until her dress began
to writhe, twisting across her body like shrink-wrap
plastic. Part of it fell away entirely and lay in curling
shreds on the pavement, shed like the skin of some fabu-
lous animal. When Coretti passed, it was green foam,
fizzing, dissolving, gone. He looked back up at her and
the dress was another dress, green satin, shifting with
reflections. Her shoes had changed too. Her shoulders
were bare except for thin straps that crossed at the small
of her back. Her hair had become short, spiky.
He found that he was leaning against a jeweler's
plate-glass window, his breath coming ragged and harsh
with the damp of the autumn evening. He heard the
disco's heartbeat from two blocks away. As she neared
it, her movements began subtly to take on a new
rhythm a shift in emphasis in the sway of her hips, in
the way she put her heels down on the sidewalk. The
doorman let her pass with a vague nod. He stopped Cor-
etti and stared at his driver's license and frowned at his
duffle coat. Coretti anxiously scanned the wash of lights
at the top of a milky plastic stairway beyond the door-
man. She had vanished there, into robotic flashing and
redundant thunder.
Grudgingly the man let him pass, and he pounded
up the stairs, his haste disturbing the lights beneath the
translucent plastic steps.
Coretti had never been in a disco before; he found
himself in an environment designed for complete satis-
faction-in-distraction. He waded nervously through the
motion and the fashions and the mechanical urban
chants booming from the huge speakers. He sought her
almost blindly on the pose-clotted dance floot, amid
strobe lights.
And found her at the bar, drinking a tall, lurid
cooler and listening to a young man who wore a loose
shirt of pale silk and very tight black pants. She nodded
at what Coretti took to be appropriate intervals. Coretti
ordered by pointing at a bottle of bourbon. She drank
five of the tall drinks and then followed the young man
to the dance floor.
She moved in perfect accord with the music, strik-
ing a series of poses; she went through the entire
prescribed sequence, gracefully but not artfully, fitting
in perfectly. Always, always fitting in perfectly. Her
companion danced mechanically, moving through the
ritual with effort.
When the dance ended, she turned abruptly and
dived into the thick of the crowd. The shifting throng
closed about her like something molten.
Coretti plunged in after her, his eyes never leaving
her and he was the only one to follow her change. By
the time she reached the stair, she was auburn-haired
and wore a long blue dress. A white flower blossomed in
her hair, behind her right ear; her hair was longer and
straighter now. Her breasts had become slightly larger,
and her hips a shade heavier. She took the stairs two at a
time, and he was afraid for her then. All those drinks.
But the alcohol seemed to have had no effect on her
at all.
Never taking his eyes from her, Coretti followed,
his heartbeat outspeeding the disco-throb at his back,
sure that at any moment she would turn, glare at him,
call for help.
Two blocks down Third she turned in at Lotha-
rio's. There was something different in her step now.
Lothario's was a quiet complex of rooms hung with
ferns and Art Deco mirrors. There were fake Tiffany
lamps hanging from the ceiling, alternating with
wooden-bladed fans that rotated too slowly to stir the
wisps of smoke drifting through the consciously mellow
drone of conversation. After the disco, Lothario's was
familiar and comforting. A jazz pianist in pinstriped
shirt sleeves and loosely knotted tie competed softly
with talk and laughter from a dozen tables.
She was at the bar; the stools were only half taken,
but Coretti chose a wall table, in the shadow of a
miniature palm, and ordered bourbon.
He drank the bourbon and ordered another. He
couldn't feel the alcohol much tonight.
She sat beside a young man, yet another young man
with the usual set of bland, regular features. He wore a
yellow golf shirt and pressed jeans. Her hip was touch-
ing his, just a little. They didn't seem to be speaking,
but Coretti felt they were somehow communing. They
were leaning toward one another slightly, silent. Coretti
felt odd. He went to the rest room and splashed his face
with water. Coining back, he managed to pass within
three feet of them. Their lips didn't move till he was
within earshot.
They took turns murmuring realistic palaver:
saw l~is earlier films, but "
"But he's rather self-indulgent, don't you think?"
"Sure, but in the sense that..
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. Func-
tions of the bar. The belonging kind.
Something in him yearned for a confrontation. He
reached his table, but found himself unable to sit down.
He turned, took a deep breath, and walked woodenly
toward the bar. He wanted to tap her on her smooth
shoulder and ask who she was, and exactly what she
was, and point out the cold irony of the fact that it was
he, Coretti, the Martian dresser, ~he eavesdropper, the
outsider, the one whose clothes and conversation never
fit, who had at last guessed their secret.
But his nerve broke and he merely took a seat
beside her and ordered bourbon.
"But don't you think," she asked her companion,
"that it's all relative?"
The two seats beyond her companion were quickly
taken by a couple who were talking politics. Antoinette
and Golf Shirt took up the political theme seamlessly.
recycling, speaking just loudly enough to be overheard.
Her face, as she spoke, was expressionless. A bird trill-
ing on a limb.
She sat so easily on her stool, as if it were a nest.
Golf Shirt paid for the drinks. He always had the exact
change, unless he wanted to leave a tip. Coretti watched
them work their way methodically through six cocktails
each, like insects feeding on nectar. But their voices
never grew louder, their cheeks didn't redden, and when
at last they stood, they moved without a trace of
drunkenness a weakness, thought Coretti, a gap in
their camouflage.
They paid him absolutely no attention while he
followed them through three successive bars.
As they entered Waylon's, they metamorphosed so
quickly that Coretti had trouble following the stages of
the change. It was one of those places with toilet doors
marked Pointers and Setters, and a little imitation pine
plaque over the jars of beef jerky and pickled sausages:
We've got a deal with the bank. They don't serve beer
and we don't cash checks.
She was plump in Waylon's, and there were dark
hollows under her eyes. There were coffee stains on her
polyester pantsuit. Her companion wore jeans, a T-
shirt, and a red baseball cap with a red-and-white Peter-
bilt patch. Coretti risked losing them when he spent a
frantic minute in "Pointers," blinking in confusion at a
hand-lettered cardboard sign that said, We aim to
please You aim too, please.
Third Avenue lost itself near the waterfront in a
petrified snarl of brickwork. In the last block, bright
vomit marked the pavement at intervals, and old men
dozed in front of black-and-white TVs, sealed forever
behind the fogged plate glass of faded hotels.
The bar they found there had no name. An ace of
diamonds was gradually flaking away on the unwashed
window, and the bartender had a face like a closed fist.
An FM transistor in ivory plastic keened easy-listening
rock to the uneven ranks of deserted tables. They drank
beer and shots. They were old now, two ciphers who
drank and smoked in the light of bare bulbs, coughing
over a pack of crumpled Camels she produced from the
pocket of a dirty tan raincoat.
At 2:25 they were in the rooftop lounge of the new
hotel complex that rose above the waterfront. She wore
an evening dress and he wore a dark suit. They drank
cognac and pretended to admire the city lights. They
each had three cognacs while Coretti watched them over
two ounces of Wild Turkey in a Waterford crystal
highball glass.
They drank until last call. Coretti followed them
into the elevator. They smiled politely but otherwise ig-
nored him. There were two cabs in front of the hotel;
they took one, Coretti the other.
"Follow that cab," said Coretti huskily, thrusting
his last twenty at the aging hippie driver.
"Sure, man, sure. . . ." The driver dogged the
other cab for six blocks, to another, more modest hotel.
They got out and went in. Coretti slowly climbed out of
his cab, breathing hard.
He ached with jealousy: for the personification of
conformity, this woman who was not a woman, this
human wallpaper. Coretti gazed at the hotel and lost
his nerve. He turned away.
He walked home. Sixteen blocks. At some point he
realized that he wasn't drunk. Not drunk at all.
In the morning he phoned in to cancel his early class.
But his hangover never quite came. His mouth wasn't
desiccated, and staring at himself in the bathroom mir-
ror he saw that his eyes weren't bloodshot.
In the afternoon he slept, and dreamed of sheep-
faced people reflected in mirrors behind rows of bottles.
That night he went out to dinner, alone and ate
nothing. The food looked back at him, somehow. He
stirred it about to make it look as if he'd eaten a little,
paid, and went to a bar. And another. And another bar,
looking for her. He was using his credit card now,
though he was already badly in the hole under Visa. If
he saw her, he didn't recognize her.
Sometimes he watched the hotel he'd seen her go
into. He looked carefully at each of the couples who
came and went. Not that he'd be able to spot her from
her looks alone but there should be a feeling, some
kind of intuitive recognition. He watched the couples
and he was never sure.
In the following weeks he systematically visited
every boozy watering hole in the city. Armed at first
with a city map and five torn Yellow Pages, he gradually
progressed to the more obscure establishments, places
with unlisted numbers. Some had no phone at all. He
joined dubious private clubs, discovered unlicensed
after-hours retreats where you brought your own, and
sat nervously in dark rooms devoted to areas of fringe
sexuality he had not known existed.
But he continued on what became his nightly cir-
cuit. He always began at the Backdoor. She was never
there, or in the next place, or the next. The bartenders
knew him and they liked to see him come in, because he
brought drinks continuously, and never seemed to get
drunk. So he stared at the other customers a bit so
what?
Coretti lost his job.
He'd missed classes too many times. He'd taken to
watching the hotel when he could, even in the daytime.
He'd been seen in too many bars. He never seemed to
change his clothes. He refused night classes. He would
let a lecture trail off in the middle as he turned to gaze
vacantly out the window.
He was secretly pleased at being fired. They had
looked at him oddly at faculty lunches when he couldn't
eat his food. And now he had more time for the search.
Coretti found her at 2:15 on a Wednesday morn-
ing, in a gay bar called the Barn. Paneled in rough wood
and hung with halters and rusting farm equipment, the
place was shrill with perfume and laughter and beer. She
was everyone's giggling sister, in a blue-sequined dress,
a green feather in her coiffed brown hair. Through a
sweeping sense of almost cellular relief, Coretti was
aware of a kind of admiration, a strange pride he now
felt in her and her kind. Here, too, she belonged. She
was a representative type, a fag-hag who posed no
threat to the queens or their butchboys. Her companion
had become an ageless man with carefully silvered
temples, an angora sweater, and a trench coat.
They drank and drank, and went laughing
laughing just the right sort of laughter out into the
rain. A cab was waiting, its wipers duplicating the beat
of Coretti's heart.
Jockeying clumsily across the wet sidewalk, Coretti
scurried into the cab, dreading their reaction.
Coretti was in the back seat, beside her.
The man with silver temples spoke to the driver.
The driver muttered into his hand mike, changed gears,
and they flowed away into the rain and the darkened
streets. The cityscape made no impression on Coretti,
who, looking inwardly, was seeing the cab stop, the gray
man and the laughing woman pushing him out and
pointing, smiling, to the gate of a mental hospital. Or:
the cab stopping, the couple turning, sadly shaking their
heads. And a dozen times he seemed to see the cab stop-
ping in an empty side street where they methodically
throttled him. Coretti left dead in the rain. Because he
was an outsider.
But they arrived at Coretti's hotel.
In the dim glow of the cab's dome light he watched
closely as the man reached into his coat for the fare.
Coretti could see the coat's lining clearly and it was one
piece with the angora sweater. No wallet bulged there,
and no pocket. But a kind of slit widened. It opened as
the man's fingers poised over it, and it disgorged
money. Three bills, folded, were extruded smoothly
from the slit. The money was slightly damp. It dried, as
the man unfolded it, like the wings of a moth just
emerging from the chrysalis.
"Keep the change," said the belonging man, climb-
ing out of the cab. Antoinette slid out and Coretti
followed, his mind seeing only the slit. The slit wet,
edged with red, like a gill.
The lobby was deserted and the desk clerk bent
over a crossword. The couple drifted silently across the
lobby and into the elevator, Coretti close behind. Once
he tried to catch her eye, but she ignored him. And
once, as the elevator rose seven floors above Coretti's
own, she bent over and sniffed at the chrome wall
ashtray, like a dog snuffling at the ground.
Hotels, late at night, are never still. The corridors
are never entirely silent. There are countless barely audi-
ble sighs, the rustling of sheets, and muffled voices
speaking fragments out of sleep. But in the ninth-floor
corridor, Coretti seemed to move through a perfect
vacuum, soundless, his shoes making no sound at all on
the colorless carpet and even the beating of his out-
sider's heart sucked away into the vague pattern that
decorated the wallpaper.
He tried to count the small plastic ovals screwed on
the doors, each with its own three figures, but the cor-
ridor seemed to go on forever. At last the man halted
before a door, a door veneered like all the rest with im-
itation rosewood, and put his hand over the lock, his
palm flat against the metal. Something scraped softly
and then the mechanism clicked and the door swung
open. As the man withdrew his hand, Coretti saw a
grayish-pink, key-shaped sliver of bone retract wetly
into the pale flesh.
No light burned in that room, but the city's dim
neon aura filtered in through venetian blinds and al-
lowed him to see the faces of the dozen or more people
who sat perched on the bed and the couch and the arm-
chairs and the stools in the kitchenette. At first he
thought that their eyes were open, but then he realized
that the dull pupils were sealed beneath nictitating mem-
branes, third eyelids that reflected the faint shades of
neon from the window. They wore whatever the last bar
had called for; shapeless Salvation Army overcoats sat
beside bright suburban leisurewear, evening gowns
beside dusty factory clothes, biker's leather by brushed
Harris tweed. With sleep, all spurious humanity had
vanished.
They were roosting.
His couple seated themselves on the edge of the
Formica countertop in the kitchenette, and Coretti
hesitated in the middle of the empty carpet. Light-years
of that carpet seemed to separate him from the others,
but something called to him across the distance, promis-
ing rest and peace and belonging. And still he hesitated,
shaking with an indecision that seemed to rise from the
genetic core of his body's every cell.
Until they opened their eyes, all of them simul-
taneously, the membranes sliding sideways to reveal the
alien calm of dwellers in the ocean's darkest trench.
Coretti screamed, and ran away, and fled along
corridors and down echoing concrete stairwells to cool
rain and the nearly empty streets.
Coretti never returned to his room on the third
floor of that hotel. A bored house detective collected the
linguistics texts, the single suitcase of clothing, and they
were eventually sold at auction. Coretti took a room in a
boardinghouse run by a grim Baptist teetotaler who led
her roomers in prayer at the start of every overcooked
evening meal. She didn't mind that Coretti never joined
them for those meals; he explained that he was given
free meals at work. He lied freely and skillfully. He
never drank at the boardinghouse, and he never came
home drunk. Mr. Coretti was a little odd, but always
paid his rent on time. And he was very
|
|
Gibson William. "Neuromancer screenplay" (english) |
William Gibson
Neuromancer
Dedication:
for Deb
who made it possible
with love
PART ONE. CHIBA CITY BLUES
1
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned
to a dead channel.
"It's not like I'm using," Case heard someone say, as he
shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the
Chat. "It's like my body's developed this massive drug defi-
ciency." It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo
was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there
for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.
Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monoto-
nously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw
Case and smiled, his teeth a web work of East European steel
and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the
unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval
uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with
precise rows of tribal scars. "Wage was in here early, with two
Joe boys," Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his
good hand. "Maybe some business with you, Case?"
Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged
him.
The bartender's smile widened. 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. "You are too much the artiste, Herr Case." Ratz
grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his
overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. "You are
the artiste of the slightly funny deal."
"Sure," Case said, and sipped his beer. "Somebody's gotta
be funny around here. Sure the fuck isn't you."
The whore's giggle went up an octave.
"Isn't you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he's
a close personal friend of mine."
She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible
spitting sound, her lips barely moving. But she left.
"Jesus," Case said, "what kind a creep joint you running here?
Man can't have a drink."
"Ha," Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag,
"Zone shows a percentage. You I let work here for entertain-
ment value."
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.
Ratz grunted. "An angel passed."
"The Chinese," bellowed a drunken Australian, "Chinese
bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a
nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate...."
"Now that," Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly
rising in him like bile, "that is so much bullshit."
The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than
the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were
the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly,
and still they couldn't repair the damage he'd suffered in that
Memphis hotel.
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading
nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the
corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in
his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless
void.... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the
Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cow-
boy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the
dreams came on in the Japanese night like live wire voodoo
and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the
dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands
clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fin-
gers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.
"I saw your girl last night," Ratz said, passing Case his
second Kirin.
"I don't have one," he said, and drank.
"Miss Linda Lee."
Case shook his head.
"No girl? Nothing? Only biz, friend artiste? Dedication to
commerce?" The bartender's small brown eyes were nested
deep in wrinkled flesh. "I think I liked you better, with her.
You laughed more. Now, some night, you get maybe too ar-
tistic, you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts."
"You're breaking my heart, Ratz." He finished his beer,
paid and left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rain-
stained khaki nylon of his windbreaker. Threading his way
through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat.
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
byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cy-
berspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness
into the con sensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief
he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who pro-
vided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls
of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.
He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd
never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something
for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam.
He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it
mattered now. 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.
Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning
out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.
The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.
For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyber-
space, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy
hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt
for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of
his own flesh.
His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat
sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through
the closed circuit of the world's black markets like the seashells
of the Trobriand islanders. It was difficult to transact legitimate
business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already
illegal.
In Japan, he'd known with a clenched and absolute certainty,
he'd find his cure. In Chiba. Either in a registered clinic or in
the shadow land of black medicine. Synonymous with implants,
nerve-splicing, and micro bionics, Chiba was a magnet for the
Sprawl's techno-criminal subcultures.
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.
Two blocks west of the Chat, in a teashop called the Jarre
de The, Case washed down the night's first pill with a double
espresso. It was a flat pink octagon, a potent species of Bra-
zilian dex he bought from one of Zone's girls.
The Jarre was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in
red neon.
At first, finding himself alone in Chiba, with little money
and less hope of finding a cure, he'd gone into a kind of terminal
overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had
seemed to belong to someone else. In the first month, he'd
killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before
would have seemed ludicrous. Ninsei wore him down until the
street itself came to seem the externalization of some death
wish, some secret poison he hadn't known he carried.
Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar-
winism, 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.
Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the
accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace,
the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.
Alone at a table in the Jarre de The, with the octagon coming
on, pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, suddenly aware
of each tingling hair on his arms and chest, Case knew that at
some point he'd started to play a game with himself, a very
ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire. He no longer
carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions. He ran
the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and he had a reputation
for being able to get whatever you wanted. A part of him knew
that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his
customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him
basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time. And
that was the part of him, smug in its expectation of death, that
most hated the thought of Linda Lee.
He'd found her, one rainy night, in an arcade.
Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigar-
ette smoke, holograms of Wizard's Castle, Tank War Europa,
the New York skyline.... And now he remembered her that
way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to
a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Castle burned,
forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank
War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck
sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon. He was riding
high that night, with a brick of Wage's ketamine on its way
to Yokohama and the money already in his pocket. He'd come
in out of the warm rain that sizzled across the Ninsei pavement
and somehow she'd been singled out for him, one face out of
the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she
played. The expression on her face, then, had been the one
he'd seen, hours later, on her sleeping face in a port side coffin,
her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in
flight.
Crossing the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal
he'd made, he saw her glance up. Gray eyes rimmed with
smudged black paintstick. Eyes of some animal pinned in the
headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
Their night together stretching into a morning, into tickets
at the hover port and his first trip across the Bay. The rain kept
up, falling along Harajuku, beading on her plastic jacket, the
children of Tokyo trooping past the famous boutiques in white
loafers and cling wrap capes, until she'd stood with him in the
midnight clatter of a pachinko parlor and held his hand like a
child.
It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved
through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of
reflexive need. He'd watched her personality fragment, calving
like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen
the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. He'd watched
her track the next hit with a concentration that reminded him
of the mantises they sold in stalls along Shiga, beside tanks of
blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo.
He stared at the black ring of grounds in his empty cup. It
was vibrating with the speed he'd taken. The brown laminate
of the table top was dull with a patina of tiny scratches. With
the dex mounting through his spine he saw the countless random
impacts required to create a surface like that. The Jarre was
decorated in a dated, nameless style from the previous century,
an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese plas-
tics, but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though
the bad nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked
the mirrors and the once glossy plastics, leaving each surface
fogged with something that could never be wiped away.
"Hey. Case, good buddy...."
He looked up, met gray eyes ringed with paintstick. She
was wearing faded French orbital fatigues and new white sneak-
ers.
"I been lookin' for you, man." She took a seat opposite
him, her elbows on the table. The sleeves of the blue zip suit
had been ripped out at the shoulders; he automatically checked
her arms for signs of terms or the needle. "Want a cigarette?"
She dug a crumpled pack of Yeheyuan filters from an ankle
pocket and offered him one. He took it, let her light it with a
red plastic tube. "You sleep in' okay, Case? You look tired."
Her accent put her south along the Sprawl, toward Atlanta.
The skin below her eyes was pale and unhealthy-looking, but
the flesh was still smooth and firm. She was twenty. New lines
of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the
corners of her mouth. Her dark hair was drawn back, held by
a band of printed silk. The pattern might have represented
microcircuits, or a city map.
"Not if I remember to take my pills," he said, as a tangible
wave of longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the
wavelength of amphetamine. He remembered the smell of her
skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her
locked across the small of his back.
All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.
"Wage," she said, narrowing her eyes. "He wants to see
you with a hole in your face." She lit her own cigarette.
"Who says? Ratz? You been talking to Ratz?"
"No. Mona. Her new squeeze is one of Wage's boys."
"I don't owe him enough. He does me, he's out the money
anyway." He shrugged.
"Too many people owe him now, Case. Maybe you get to
be the example. You seriously better watch it."
"Sure. How about you, Linda? You got anywhere to sleep?"
"Sleep." She shook her head. "Sure, Case." She shivered,
hunched forward over the table. Her face was filmed with
sweat.
"Here," he said, and dug in the pocket of his windbreaker,
coming up with a crumpled fifty. He smoothed it automatically,
under the table, folded it in quarters, and passed it to her.
"You need that, honey. You better give it to Wage." There
was something in the gray eyes now that he couldn't read,
something he'd never seen there before.
"I owe Wage a lot more than that. Take it. I got more
coming," he lied, as he watched his New Yen vanish into a
zippered pocket.
"You get your money, Case, you find Wage quick."
"I'll see you, Linda," he said, getting up.
"Sure." A millimeter of white showed beneath each of her
pupils. Sanpaku. "You watch your back, man."
He nodded, anxious to be gone.
He looked back as the plastic door swung shut behind him,
saw her eyes reflected in a cage of red neon.
Friday night on Ninsei.
He passed yakitori stands and massage parlors, a franchised
coffee shop called Beautiful Girl, the electronic thunder of an
arcade. He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited sarariman
by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the
back of the man's right hand.
Was it authentic? lf that's for real, he thought, he's in for
trouble. If it wasn't, served him right. M-G employees above
a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors
that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like
that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a
black clinic.
The sarariman had been Japanese, but the Ninsei crowd was
a gaijin crowd. Groups of sailors up from the port, tense solitary
tourists hunting pleasures no guidebook listed, Sprawl heavies
showing off grafts and implants, and a dozen distinct species.
of hustler, all swarming the street in an intricate dance of desire
and commerce.
There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City
tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea
that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of
historical park, a reminder of humble origins. But he also
saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies
require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its in-
habitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for
technology itself.
Was Linda right, he wondered, staring up at the lights?
Would Wage have him killed to make an example? It didn't
make much sense, but then Wage dealt primarily in proscribed
biologicals, and they said you had to be crazy to do that.
But Linda said Wage wanted him dead. Case's primary
insight into the dynamics of street dealing was that neither the
buyer nor the seller really needed him. A middleman's business
is to make himself a necessary evil. The dubious niche Case
had carved for himself in the criminal ecology of Night City
had beep cut out with lies, scooped out a night at a time with
betrayal. Now, sensing that its walls were starting to crumble,
he felt the edge of a strange euphoria.
The week before, he'd delayed transfer of a synthetic glan-
dular extract, retailing it for a wider margin than usual. He
knew Wage hadn't liked that. Wage was his primary supplier,
nine years in Chiba and one of the few gaijin dealers who'd
Mao aged to forge links with the rigidly strati fled criminal es-
tablishment beyond Night City's borders. Genetic materials and
hormones trickled down to Ninsei along an intricate ladder of
fronts and blinds. Somehow Wage had managed to trace some-
thing back, once, and now he enjoyed steady connections in a
dozen cities.
Case found himself staring through a shop window. The
place sold small bright objects to the sailors. Watches, flic-
knives, lighters, pocket VTRs, Sims Tim decks, weighted man-
riki chains, and shuriken. The shuriken had always fascinated
him, steel stars with knife-sharp points. Some were chromed,
others black, others treated with a rainbow surface like oil on
water. But the chrome stars held his gaze. They were mounted
against scarlet ultra suede with nearly invisible loops of nylon
fish line, their centers stamped with dragons or yin yang sym-
bols. They caught the street's neon and twisted it, and it came
to Case that these were the stars under which he voyaged, his
destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.
"Julie," he said to his stars. "Time to see old Julie. He'll
know."
Julius Deane was one hundred and thirty-five years old, his
metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums
and hormones. His primary hedge against aging was a yearly
pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons re-set the code
of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba. Then he'd fly
to Hongkong and order the year's suits and shirts. Sexless and
inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in
his devotion to esoteric forms of tailor-worship. Case had never
seen him wear the same suit twice, although his wardrobe
seemed to consist entirely of meticulous reconstructions of gar-
ments of the previous century. He affected prescription lenses,
framed in spidery gold, ground from thin slabs of pink synthetic
quartz and beveled like the mirrors in a Victorian doll house.
His offices were located in a warehouse behind Ninsei, part
of which seemed to have been sparsely decorated, years before,
with a random collection of European furniture, as though
Deane had once intended to use the place as his home. Neo-
Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room
where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps
perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in
scarlet-lacquered steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between
the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete
floor. Its hands were holograms that altered to match the con-
volutions of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct
time. The room was stacked with white fiberglass shipping
modules that gave off the tang of preserved ginger.
"You seem to be clean, old son," said Deane's disembodied
voice. "Do come in."
Magnetic bolts thudded out of position around the massive
imitation-rosewood door to the left of the bookcases. JULIUS
DEANE IMPORT EXPORT was lettered across the plastic in
peeling self-adhesive capitals. If the furniture scattered in
Deane's makeshift foyer suggested the end of the past century,
the office itself seemed to belong to its start.
Deane's seamless pink face regarded Case from a pool of
light cast by an ancient brass lamp with a rectangular shade of
dark green glass. The importer was securely fenced behind a
vast desk of painted steel, flanked on either side by tall, draw-
er Ed cabinets made of some sort of pale wood. The sort of
thing, Case supposed, that had once been used to store written
records of some kind. The desktop was littered with cassettes,
scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of some sort of
clockwork typewriter, a machine Deane never seemed to get
around to reassembling.
"What brings you around, boyo?" Deane asked, offering
Case a narrow bonbon wrapped in blue-and-white checked pa-
per. "Try one. Tins Ting Djahe, the very best." Case refused
the ginger, took a seat in a yawing wooden swivel chair, and
ran a thumb down the faded seam of one black jeans-leg. "Julie
I hear Wage wants to kill me."
"Ah. Well then. And where did you hear this, if I may?"
"People."
"People," Deane said, around a ginger bonbon. "What sort
of people? Friends?"
Case nodded.
"Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?"
"I do owe him a little money, Deane. He say anything to
you?"
"Haven't been in touch, of late." Then he sighed. "If I did
know, of course, I might not be in a position to tell you. Things
being what they are, you understand."
"Things?"
"He's an important connection Case."
"Yeah. He want to kill me, Juiie?"
"Not that I know of." Deane shrugged. They might have
been discussing the price of ginger. "If it proves to be an
unfounded rumor, old son, you come back in a week or so and
I'll let you in on a little something out of Singapore."
"Out of the Nan Hai Hotel, Bencoolen Street?"
"Loose lips, old son!" Deane grinned. The steel desk was
jammed with a fortune in debugging gear.
"Be seeing you, Julie. I'll say hello to Wage."
Deane's fingers came up to brush the perfect knot in his
pale silk tie.
He was less than a block from Deane's office when it hit,
the sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass,
and very close.
The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something
Case took for granted. The trick lay in not letting it get out of
control. But that could be quite a trick, behind a stack of
octagons. He fought the adrenaline surge and composed his
narrow features in a mask of bored vacancy, pretending to let
the crowd carry him along. When he saw a darkened display
window, he managed to pause by it. The place was a surgical
boutique, closed for renovations. With his hands in the pockets
of his jacket, he stared through the glass at a flat lozenge of
vat grown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation jade.
The color of its skin reminded him of Zone's whores; it was
tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a subcutaneous
chip. Why bother with the surgery, he found himself thinking,
while sweat coursed down his ribs, when you could just carry
the thing around in your pocket?
Without moving his head, he raised his eyes and studied
the reflection of the passing crowd.
There.
Behind sailors in short-sleeved khaki. Dark hair, mirrored
glasses, dark clothing, slender. . .
And gone.
Then Case was running, bent low, dodging between bodies.
"Rent me a gun, Shin?"
The boy smiled. "Two hour." They stood together in the
smell of fresh raw seafood at the rear of a Shiga sushi stall.
"You come back, two hour."
"I need one now, man. Got anything right now?"
Shin rummaged behind empty two-liter cans that had once
been filled with powdered horseradish. He produced a slender
package wrapped in gray plastic. "Taser. One hour, twenty
New Yen. Thirty deposit."
"Shit. I don't need that. I need a gun. Like I maybe wanna
shoot somebody, understand?"
The waiter shrugged, replacing the taser behind the horse-
radish cans. "Two hour."
He went into the shop without bothering to glance at the
display of shuriken. He'd never thrown one in his life.
He bought two packs of Yeheyuans with a Mitsubishi Bank
chip that gave his name as Charles Derek May. It beat Truman
Starr, the best he'd been able to do for a passport.
The Japanese woman behind the terminal looked like she
had a few years on old Deane, none of them with the benefit
of science. He took his slender roll of New Yen out of his
pocket and showed it to her. "I want to buy a weapon."
She gestured in the direction of a case filled with knives.
"No," he said, "I don't like knives."
She brought an oblong box from beneath the counter. The
lid was yellow cardboard, stamped with a crude image of a
coiled cobra with a swollen hood. Inside were eight identical
tissue-wrapped cylinders. He watched while mottled brown
fingers stripped the paper from one. She held the thing up for
him to examine, a dull steel tube with a leather thong at one
end and a small bronze pyramid at the other. She gripped the
tube with one hand, the pyramid between her other thumb and
forefinger, and pulled. Three oiled, telescoping segments of
tightly wound coil spring slid out and locked. "Cobra," she said.
Beyond the neon shudder of Ninsei, the sky was that mean
shade of gray. The air had gotten worse; it seemed to have
teeth tonight, and half the crowd wore filtration masks. Case
had spent ten minutes in a urinal, trying to discover a convenient
way to conceal his cobra; finally he'd settled for tucking the
handle into the waistband of his jeans, with the tube slanting
across his stomach. The pyramidal striking tip rode between
his ribcage and the lining of his windbreaker. The thing felt
like it might clatter to the pavement with his next step, but it
made him feel better.
The Chat wasn't really a dealing bar, but on weeknights it
attracted a related clientele. Fridays and Saturdays were dif-
ferent. The regulars were still there, most of them, but they
faded behind an influx of sailors and the specialists who preyed
on diem. As Case pushed through the doors, he looked for
Ratz, but the bartender wasn't in sight. Lonny Zone, the bar's
resident pimp, was observing with glazed fatherly interest as
one of his girls went to work on a young sailor. Zone was
addicted to a brand of hypnotic the Japanese called Cloud
Dancers. Catching the pimp's eye, Case beckoned him to the
bar. Zone came drifting through the crowd in slow motion, his
long face slack and placid.
"You seen Wage tonight, Lonny?"
Zone regarded him with his usual calm. He shook his head.
"You sure, man?"
"Maybe in the Namban. Maybe two hours ago."
"Got some Joeboys with him? One of 'em thin, dark hair,
maybe a black jacket?"
"No," Zone said at last, his smooth forehead creased to
indicate the effort it cost him to recall so much pointless detail.
"Big boys. Graftees." Zone's eyes showed very little white and
less iris; under the drooping lids, his pupils were dilated and
enormous. He stared into Case's face for a long time, then
lowered his gaze. He saw the bulge of the steel whip. "Cobra,"
he said, and raised an eyebrow. "You wanna fuck somebody
up?"
"See you, Lonny." Case left the bar.
His tail was back. He was sure of it. He felt a stab of elation
the octagons and adrenaline mingling with something else.
You're enjoying this, he thought; you're crazy.
Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was
like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself
in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and
it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the
matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish
cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed
drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all
around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made
flesh in the mazes of the black market....
Go it, Case, he told himself. Suck 'em in. Last thing they'll
expect. He was half a block from the games arcade where he'd
first met Linda Lee.
He bolted across Ninsei, scattering a pack of strolling sail-
ors. One of them screamed after him in Spanish. Then he was
through the entrance, the sound crashing over him like surf,
subsonics throbbing in the pit of his stomach. Someone scored
a ten-megaton hit on Tank War Europa, a simulated air burst
drowning the arcade in white sound as a lurid hologram fireball
mushroomed overhead. He cut to the right and loped up a flight
of unpainted chip board stairs. He'd come here once with Wage,
to discuss a deal in proscribed hormonal triggers with a man
called Matsuga. He remembered the hallway, its stained mat-
ting, the row of identical doors leading to tiny office cubicles.
One door was open now. A Japanese girl in a sleeveless black
t-shirt glanced up from a white terminal, behind her head a
travel poster of Greece, Aegian blue splashed with streamlined
ideograms.
"Get your security up here," Case told her.
Then he sprinted down the corridor, out of her sight. The
last two doors were closed and, he assumed, locked. He spun
and slammed the sole of his nylon running shoe into the blue-
lacquered composition door at the far end. It popped, cheap
hardware falling from the splintered frame. Darkness there, the
white curve of a terminal housing. Then he was on the door
to its right, both hands around the transparent plastic knob,
leaning in with everything he had. Something snapped, and he
was inside. This was where he and Wage had met with Mat-
suga, but whatever front company Matsuga had operated was
long gone. No terminal, nothing. Light from the alley behind
the arcade, filtering in through soot blown plastic. He made out
a snake like loop of fiber optics protruding from a wall socket,
a pile of discarded food containers, and the blade less nacelle
of an electric fan.
The window was a single pane of cheap plastic. He shrugged
out of his jacket, bundled it around his right hand, and punched.
It split, requiring two more blows to free it from the frame.
Over the muted chaos of the games, an alarm began to cycle,
triggered either by the broken window or by the girl at the head
of the corridor.
Case turned, pulled his jacket on, and flicked the cobra to
full extension.
With the door closed, he was counting on his tail to assume
he'd gone through the one he'd kicked half off its hinges. The
cobra's bronze pyramid began to bob gently, the spring-steel
shaft amplifying his pulse.
Nothing happened. There was only the surging of the alarm,
the crashing of the games, his heart hammering. When the fear
came, it was like some half-forgotten friend. Not the cold
rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear.
He'd lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he'd
almost forgotten what real fear was.
This cubicle was the sort of place where people died. He
might die here. They might have guns....
A crash, from the far end of the corridor. A man's voice,
shouting something in Japanese. A scream, shrill terror. An-
other crash.
And footsteps, unhurried, coming closer.
Passing his closed door. Pausing for the space of three rapid
beats of his heart. And returning. One, two, three. A bootheel
scraped the matting.
The last of his octagon-induced bravado collapsed. He
snapped the cobra into its handle and scrambled for the window,
blind with fear, his nerves screaming. He was up, out, and
falling, all before he was conscious of what he'd done. The
impact with pavement drove dull rods of pain through his shins.
A narrow wedge of light from a half-open service hatch
framed a heap of discarded fiber optics and the chassis of a
junked console. He'd fallen face forward on a slab of soggy
chip board, he rolled over, into the shadow of the console. The
cubicle's window was a square of faint light. The alarm still
oscillated, louder here, the rear wall dulling the roar of the
games.
A head appeared, framed in the window, back lit by the
fluorescents in the corridor, then vanished. It returned, but he
still couldn't read the features. Glint of silver across the eyes.
"Shit," someone said, a woman, in the accent of the northern
Sprawl.
The head was gone. Case lay under the console for a long
count of twenty, then stood up. The steel cobra was still in his
hand, and it took him a few seconds to remember what it was.
He limped away down the alley, nursing his left ankle.
Shin's pistol was a fifty-year-old Vietnamese imitation of
a South American copy of a Walther PPK, double-action on
the first shot, with a very rough pull. It was chambered for .22
long rifle, and Case would've preferred lead azide explosives
to the simple Chinese hollow points Shin had sold him. Still
it was a handgun and nine rounds of ammunition, and as he
made his way down Shiga from the sushi stall he cradled it in
his jacket pocket. The grips were bright red plastic molded in
a raised dragon motif, something to run your thumb across
in the dark. He'd consigned the cobra to a dump canister on
Ninsei and dry-swallowed another octagon.
The pill lit his circuits and he rode the rush down Shiga to
Ninsei, then over to Baiitsu. His tail, he'd decided, was gone
and that was fine. He had calls to make, biz to transact, and
it wouldn't wait. A block down Baiitsu, toward the port, stood
a featureless ten-story office building in ugly yellow brick. Its
windows were dark now, but a faint glow from the roof was
visible if you craned your neck. An unlit neon sign near the
main entrance offered CHEAP HOTEL under a cluster of ideo-
grams. If the place had another name, Case didn't know it; it
was always referred to as Cheap Hotel. You reached it through
an alley off Baiitsu, where an elevator waited at the foot of a
transparent shaft. The elevator, like Cheap Hotel, was an af-
terthought, lashed to the building with bamboo and epoxy. Case
climbed into the plastic cage and used his key, an unmarked
length of rigid magnetic tape.
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.
The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the sides
of the cage was scratched and thumb-smudged. As it passed the
fifth floor, he saw the lights of Ninsei. He drummed his fingers
against the pistol grip as the cage slowed with a gradual hiss.
As always, it came to a full stop with a violent jolt, but he
was ready for it. He stepped out into the courtyard that served
the place as some combination of lobby and lawn.
Centered in the square carpet of green plastic turf, a lapanese
teenager sat behind a C-shaped console, reading a textbook.
The white fiberglass coffins were racked in a framework of
industrial scaffolding. Six tiers of coffins, ten coffins on a side.
Case nodded in the boy's direction and limped across the plastic
grass to the nearest ladder. The compound was roofed with
cheap laminated matting that rattled in a strong wind and leaked
when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to open
without a key.
The expansion-grate catwalk vibrated with his weight as he
edged his way along the third tier to Number 92. The coffins
were three meters long, the oval hatches a meter wide and just
under a meter and a half tall. He fed his key into the slot and
waited for verification from the house computer. Magnetic bolts
thudded reassuringly and the hatch rose vertically with a creak
of springs. Fluorescents flickered on as he crawled in, pulling
the hatch shut behind him and slapping the panel that activated
the manual latch.
There was nothing in Number 92 but a standard Hitachi
pocket computer and a small white styrofoam cooler chest. The
cooler contained the remains of three ten-kilo slabs of dry ice
carefully wrapped in paper to delay evaporation, and a spun
aluminum lab flask. Crouching on the brown temper foam slab
that was both floor and bed, Case took Shin's .22 from his
pocket and put it on top of the cooler. Then he took off his
jacket. The coffin's terminal was molded into one concave wall,
opposite a panel listing house rules in seven languages. Case
took the pink handset from its cradle and punched a Hongkong
number from memory. He let it ring five times, then hung up.
His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi
wasn't taking calls.
He punched a Tokyo number in Shinjuku.
A woman answered, something in Japanese.
"Snake Man there?"
"Very good to hear from you," said Snake Man, coming in
on an extension. "I've been expecting your call."
"I got the music you wanted." Glancing at the cooler.
"I'm very glad to hear that. We have a cash flow problem.
Can you front?"
"Oh, man, I really need the money bad...."
Snake Man hung up.
"You shit " Case said to the humming receiver. He stared
at the cheap little pistol.
"Iffy," he said, "it's all looking very iffy tonight."
Case walked into the Chat an hour before dawn, both hands
in the pockets of his jacket; one held the rented pistol, the other
the aluminum flask.
Ratz was at a rear table, drinking Apollonaris water from
a beer pitcher, his hundred and twenty kilos of doughy flesh
tilted against the wall on a creaking chair. A Brazilian kid
called Kurt was on the bar, tending a thin crowd of mostly
silent drunks. Ratz's plastic arm buzzed as he raised the pitcher
and drank. His shaven head was filmed with sweat. "You look
bad, friend artiste," he said, flashing the wet ruin of his teeth.
"I'm doing just fine," said Case, and grinned like a skull.
"Super fine." He sagged into the chair opposite Ratz, hands
still in his pockets.
"And you wander back and forth in this portable bombshelter
built of booze and ups, sure. Proof against the grosser emotions,
yes?"
"Why don't you get off my case, Ratz? You seen Wage?"
"Proof against fear and being alone," the bartender contin-
ued. "Listen to the fear. Maybe it's your friend."
"You hear anything about a fight in the arcade tonight, Ratz?
Somebody hurt?"
"Crazy cut a security man." He shrugged. "A girl, they
say."
"I gotta talk to Wage, Ratz, I. . ."
"Ah." Ratz's mouth narrowed, compressed into a single
line. He was looking past Case, toward the entrance. "I think
you are about to."
Case had a sudden flash of the shuriken in their window.
The speed sang in his head. The pistol in his hand was slippery
with sweat.
"Herr Wage," Ratz said, slowly extending his pink manip-
ulator as if he expected it to be shaken. "How great a pleasure.
Too seldom do you honor us."
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 Joe boys, nearly identical young men, their arms
and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.
"How you doing, Case?"
"Gentlemen," said Ratz, picking up the table's heaped ash-
tray in his pink plastic claw, "I want no trouble here." The
ashtray was made of thick, shatterproof plastic, and advertised
Tsingtao beer. Ratz crushed it smoothly, butts and shards of
green plastic cascading onto the table top. "You understand?"
"Hey, sweetheart," said one of the Joe boys, "you wanna try
that thing on me?"
"Don't bother aiming for the legs, Kurt," Ratz said, his tone
conversational. Case glanced across the room and saw the Bra-
zilian standing on the bar, aiming a Smith & Wesson riot gun
at the trio. The thing's barrel, made of paper-thin alloy wrapped
with a kilometer of glass filament, was wide enough to swallow
a fist. The skeletal magazine revealed five fat orange cartridges,
subsonic sandbag jellies.
"Technically nonlethal," said Ratz.
"Hey, Ratz," Case said, "I owe you one."
The bartender shrugged. "Nothing, you owe me. These,"
and he glowered at Wage and the Joe boys, "should know better.
You don't take anybody off in the Chatsubo."
Wage coughed. "So who's talking about taking anybody
off? We just wanna talk business. Case and me, we work
together."
Case pulled the .22 out of his pocket and level led it at
Wage's crotch. "I hear you wanna do me." Ratz's pink claw
closed around the pistol and Case let his hand go limp.
"Look, Case, you tell me what the fuck is going on with
you, you wig or something? What's this shit I'm trying to kill
you?" Wage turned to the boy on his left. "You two go back
to the Namban. Wait for me."
Case watched as they crossed the bar, which was now en-
tirely deserted except for Kurt and a drunken sailor in khakis,
who was curled at the foot of a barstool. The barrel of the
Smith & Wesson tracked the two to the door, then swung back
to cover Wage. The magazine of Case's pistol clattered on the
table. Ratz held the gun in his claw and pumped the round out
of the chamber.
"Who told you I was going to hit you, Case?" Wage asked.
Linda.
"Who told you, man? Somebody trying to set you up?"
The sailor moaned and vomited explosively.
"Get him out of here," Ratz called to Kurt, who was sitting
on the edge of the bar now, the Smith & Wesson across his
lap, lighting a cigarette.
Case felt the weight of the night come down on him like a
bag of wet sand settling behind his eyes. He took the flask out
of his pocket and handed it to Wage. "All I got. Pituitaries.
Get you five hundred if you move it fast. Had the rest of my
roll in some RAM, but that's gone by now."
"You okay, Case?" The flask had already vanished behind
a gunmetal lapel. "I mean, fine, this'll square us, but you look
bad. Like hammered shit. You better go somewhere and sleep."
"Yeah." He stood up and felt the Chat sway around him.
"Well, I had this fifty, but I gave it to somebody." He giggled.
He picked up the .22's magazine and the one loose cartridge
and dropped them into one pocket, then put the pistol in the
other. "I gotta see Shin, get my deposit back."
"Go home," said Ratz, shifting on the creaking chair with
something like embarrassment. "Artiste. Go home."
He felt them watching as he crossed the room and shouldered
his way past the plastic doors.
"Bitch," he said to the rose tint over Shiga. Down on Ninsei
the holograms were vanishing like ghosts, and most of the neon
was already cold and dead. He sipped thick black coffee from
a street vendor's foam thimble and watched the sun come up.
"You fly away, honey. Towns like this are for people who like
the way down." But that wasn't it, really, and he was finding
it increasingly hard to maintain the sense of betrayal. She just
wanted a ticket home, and the RAM in his Hitachi would buy
it for her, if she could find the right fence. And that business
with the fifty; she'd almost turned it down, knowing she was
about to rip him for the rest of what he had.
When he climbed out of the elevator, the same boy was on
the desk. Different textbook. "Good buddy," Case called across
the plastic turf, "you don't need to tell me. I know already.
Pretty lady came to visit, said she had my key. Nice little tip
for you, say fifty New ones?" The boy put down his book.
"Woman," Case said, and drew a line across his forehead with
his thumb. "Silk." He smiled broadly. The boy smiled back,
nodded. "Thanks, ass hole," Case said.
On the catwalk, he had trouble with the lock. She'd messed
it up somehow when she'd fiddled it, he thought. Beginner.
He knew where to rent a black box that would open anything
in Cheap Hotel. Fluorescents came on as he crawled in.
"Close the hatch real slow, friend. You still got that Saturday
night special you rented from the waiter?"
She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the coffin.
She had her knees up, resting her wrists on them, the pepper box
muzzle of a flechette pistol emerged from her hands.
"That you in the arcade?" He pulled the hatch down.
"Where's Linda?"
"Hit that latch switch."
He did.
"That your girl? Linda?"
He nodded.
"She's gone. Took your Hitachi. Real nervous kid. What
about the gun, man?" She wore mirrored glasses. Her clothes
were black, the heels of black boots deep in the temper foam.
"I took it back to Shin, got my deposit. Sold his bullets
back to him for half what I paid. You want the money?"
"No."
"Want some dry ice? All I got, right now."
"What got into you tonight? Why'd you pull that scene at
the arcade? I had to mess up this rentacop came after me with
nun chucks. "
"Linda said you were gonna kill me."
"Linda said? I never saw her before I came up here."
"You aren't with Wage?"
She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were sur-
gically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to
grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by
dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers curled around the
fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished burgundy.
The nails looked artificial. "I think you screwed up, Case. I
showed up and you just fit me right into your reality picture."
"So what do you want, lady?" He sagged back against the
hatch.
"You. One live body, brains still somewhat intact. Molly,
Case. My name's Molly. I'm collecting you for the man I work
for. Just wants to talk, is all. Nobody wants to hurt you "
"That's good."
"'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's just
the way I'm wired." She wore tight black glove leather jeans
and a bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric that seemed
to absorb light. "If I put this dart gun away, will you be easy,
Case? You look like you like to take stupid chances."
"Hey, I'm very easy. I'm a pushover, no problem."
"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-
centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the
burgundy nails.
She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.
2
After a year of coffins, the room on the twenty-fifth floor
of the Chiba Hilton seemed enormous. It was ten meters by
eight, half of a suite. A white Braun coffee maker steamed on
a low table by the sliding glass panels that opened onto a narrow
balcony.
"Get some coffee in you. Look like you need it." She took
off her black jacket, the fletcher hung beneath her arm in a
black nylon shoulder rig. She wore a sleeveless gray pullover
with plain steel zips across each shoulder. Bulletproof, Case
decided, slopping coffee into a bright red mug. His arms and
legs felt like they were made out of wood.
"Case." He looked up, seeing the man for the first time.
"My name is Armitage." The dark robe was open to the waist,
the broad chest hairless and muscular, the stomach flat and
hard. Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach. "Sun's
up, Case. This is your lucky day, boy."
Case whipped his arm sideways and the man easily ducked
the scalding coffee. Brown stain running down the imitation
rice paper wall. He saw the angular gold ring through the left
lobe. Special Forces. The man smiled.
"Get your coffee, Case," Molly said. "You're okay, but
you're not going anywhere 'til Armitage has his say." She sat
cross legged on a silk futon and began to fieldstrip the fletcher
without bothering to look at it. Twin mirrors tracking as he
crossed to the table and refilled his cup.
"Too young to remember the war, aren't you, Case?" Ar-
mitage ran a large hand back through his cropped brown hair.
A heavy gold bracelet flashed on his wrist. "Leningrad, Kiev,
Siberia. We invented you in Siberia, Case."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Screaming Fist, Case. You've heard the name."
"Some kind of run, wasn't it? Tried to burn this Russian
nexus with virus programs. Yeah, I heard about it. And nobody
got out."
He sensed abrupt tension. Armitagc walkcd to the window
and looked out over Tokyo Bay. "That isn't true. One unit
made it back to Helsinki, Case."
Case shrugged, sipped coffee.
"You're a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs
you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming
Fist. For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic
module was a Nightwing micro light, a pilot, a matrix deck, a
jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The Mole series
was the first generation of real intrusion programs."
"Icebreakers," Case said, over the rim of the red mug.
"Ice from ICE, intrusion countermeasures electronics."
"Problem is, mister, I'm no jockey now, so I think I'll just
be going...."
"I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your
kind."
"You got zip to do with me and my kind, buddy. You're
rich enough to hire expensive razor girls to haul my ass up here,
is all. I'm never gonna punch any deck again, not for you or
anybody else." He crossed to the window and looked down.
"That's where I live now."
"Our profile says you're trying to con the street into killing
you when you're not looking."
"Profile?"
"We've built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each
of your aliases and ran the skim through some military software.
You're suicidal, Casc. The model gives you a month on the
outside. And our medical projection says you'll need a new
pancreas inside a year."
"'We.'" He met the faded blue eyes. "'We' who?"
"What would you say if I told you we could correct your
neural damage, Case'?" Armitage suddenly looked to Case as
if he were carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously
heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream, and that
soon he'd wake. Armitage wouldn't speak again. Case's dreams
always ended in these freeze frames, and now this one was
over.
"What would you say, Case?"
Case looked out over the Bay and shivered.
"I'd say you were full of shit."
Arrnitage nodded.
"Then I'd ask what your terms were."
"Not very different than what you're used to, Case."
"Let the man get some sleep, Armitage," Molly said from
her futon, the components of the fletcher spread on the silk
like some expensive puzzle. "He's coming apart at the seams."
"Terms," Case said, "and now. Right now."
He was still shivering. He couldn't stop shivering.
The clinic was nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster
of sleek pavilions separated by small formal gardens. He re-
membered the place from the round he'd made his first month
in Chiba.
"Scared, Case. You're real scared." It was Sunday afternoon
and he stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard. White boulders,
a stand of green bamboo, black gravel raked into smooth waves.
A gardener, a thing like a large metal crab, was tending the
bamboo.
"It'll work, Case. You got no idea, the kind of stuff Ar-
mitage has. Like he's gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing
you with the program he's giving them to tell them how to do
it. He'll put them three years ahead of the competition. You
got any idea what that's worth?" She hooked thumbs in the
belt loops of her leather jeans and rocked backward on the
lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots. The narrow toes
were sheathed in bright Mexican silver. The lenses were empty
quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.
"You're street samurai," he said. "How long you work for
him?"
"Couple of months."
"What about before that?"
"For somebody else. Working girl, you know?"
He nodded.
"Funny, Case."
"What's funny?"
"It's like I know you. That profile he's got. I know how
you're wired."
"You don't know me, sister."
"You're okay, Case. What got you, it's just called bad luck."
"How about him? He okay, Molly?" The robot crab moved
toward them, picking its way over the waves of gravel. Its
bronze carapace might have been a thousand years old. When
it was within a meter of her boots, it fired a burst of light, then
froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained.
"What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet
ass." The crab had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked
it with a smooth precision, the silver boot-tip clanging on the
carapace. The thing fell on its back, but the bronze limbs soon
righted it.
Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry
of the gravel waves with the toes of his shoes. He began to
search his pockets for cigarettes. "In your shirt," she said.
"You want to answer my question?" He fished a wrinkled
Yeheyuan from the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab
of German steel that looked as though it belonged on an op-
erating table.
"Well, I'll tell you, the man's definitely on to something.
He's got big money now, and he's never had it before, and he
gets more all the time." Case noticed a certain tension around
her mouth. "Or maybe, maybe something's on to him...."
She shrugged.
"What's that mean?"
"I don't know, exactly. I know I don't know who or what
we're really working for."
He stared at the twin mirrors. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday
morning, he'd gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours .
Then he'd taken a long and pointless walk along the port's
security perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the
chain link. If she'd followed him, she'd done a good job of it.
He'd avoided Night City. He'd waited in the coffin for Ar-
mitage's call. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this
girl with a gymnast's body and conjurer's hands.
"If you'll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to
meet you." The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the
clinic without waiting to see if Case would follow.
Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine.
Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image
fading down corridors of television sky.
Voices.
Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves,
pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given....
Hold still. Don't move.
And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone,
a hundred faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and
whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond chain link
and the prison of the skull.
Goddamn don't you move.
Where the sky faded from hissing static to the non color of
the matrix, and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars.
"Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!"
She was straddling his chest, a blue plastic syrette in one
hand. "You don't lie still, I'll slit your fucking throat. You're
still full of endorphin inhibitors."
He woke and found her stretched beside him in the dark.
His neck was brittle, made of twigs. There was a steady
pulse of pain midway down his spine. Images formed and
reformed: a flickering montage of the Sprawl's towers and
ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward him in the
shade beneath a bridge or overpass....
"Case? It's Wednesday, Case." She moved, rolling over,
reaching across him. A breast brushed his upper arm. He heard
her tear the foil seal from a bottle of water and drink. "Here."
She put the bottle in his hand. "I can see in the dark, Case.
Micro channel image-amps in my glasses."
"My back hurts."
"That's where they replaced your fluid. Changed your blood
too. Blood 'cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal.
And some new tissue patched into your liver. The nerve stuff
I dun no. Lot of injections. They didn't have to open anything
up for the main show." She settled back beside him. "It's
2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a readout chipped into my optic nerve."
He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle. Gagged, coughed,
lukewarm water spraying his chest and thighs.
"I gotta punch deck, ' he heard himself say. He was groping
for his clothes. "I gotta know...."
She laughed. Small strong hands gripped his upper arms.
"Sorry, hotshot. Eight day wait. Your nervous system would
fall out on the floor if you jacked in now. Doctor's orders.
Besides, they figure it worked. Check you in a day or so." He
lay down again.
"Where are we?"
"Home. Cheap Hotel."
"Where's Armitage?"
"Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something. We're
out of here soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the
Sprawl." She touched his shoulder. "Roll over. I give a good
massage."
He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his
fingers against the walls of the coffin. She settled over the
small of his back, kneeling on the temper foam, the leather
jeans cool against his skin. Her fingers brushed his neck.
"How come you're not at the Hilton?"
She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs
and gently encircling his
|
Метки: gibson william. "neuromancer screenplay" (english) |
Neuromancer |
Neuromancer
screenplay by
William Gibson
screenplay dates range between 18/5/90 and 21/5/90
taken from paper to data by Greg Beams.
The screen is black. Ultra-violet print scrolls out the following information:
By the year 2015 cash transactions had become virtually obsolete. Worldwide commerce and communication was run through the MATRIX, a vast international network of unified computer systems.
A consortium of powerful multi-national corporations maintained control of the Matrix through their private police organisation, SENSE/NET SECURITY INC.
Corporate interests were protected at all costs.
INT. TOWNHOUSE - NIGHT
A MAN and WOMAN sleep peacefully in the sunken bedroom of an upscale Boston townhouse in the near future. The plush decor is tasteful, but indulgent. Sharper Image meets 2015. A small digital hologram floats in mid air beside the bed; 2:05 a.m.
CAMERA BOOMS DOWN
Revealing the man, CASE, in C.U....Early thirties. Fine features. There is a tension about him even at rest. LINDA LEE, the young woman curled up beside him has a soft natural beauty that's enhanced by the innocence of sleep.
Case's eyes flash open...He senses something wrong.
There is a subtle CLICK from across the open living room.
Suddenly there's a deafening EXPLOSION as the front door is blown off its hinges. A black hexagon the size of a baseball is lobbed into the room.
CASE
Reacts instantly, pulling Linda Lee to the floor.
THE HEXAGON
Ignites with a flash of white-hot magnesium fire. It emits a continuous blinding flare that permeates the room.
CASE
Blinded by the flare, frantically pulls open a bedside drawer and fumbles for his gun.
THE DOOR
Two heavily armed SENSE/NET POLICEMEN kick their way through the smoking remains of the door. Pitch black welders' goggles protect their eyes from the glare as they charge into the room.
CASE
Is mercilessly beaten to his knees by the policemen's electrified shock staves.
LINDA LEE
Makes a break for it, but she's backhanded by Policeman #1 and recoils against the wall.
ANGLE ON THE DOOR
A gaunt, foreboding looking MAN in a long great coat now enters. His pale clean shaven head and angular features give him a skull like appearance as he gazes through the blue-white glare with obsidian goggles. He regards the semi-conscious Case for a moment then nods to his men.
Two Policemen sweep glassware of an oversized coffee table, slam Case down on top of it and slap plastic restraints on his wrists and ankles.
The other Policemen begin a destructive search of the townhouse.
The PALE MAN looms over Case like the Angel of Death, a dark form framed against flickering shafts of incendiary light. His voice is an icy whisper.
PALE MAN
Nice place, Mr. Case. Industrial espionage must be paying well these days.
Case speaks through bloody lips.
CASE
Let's see your warrant.
PALE MAN
(chuckles)
Oh, we're not arresting you. The law books haven't quite caught up with your technology. Breaking
into the computer matrix by cerebral projection... that's a little tough to prosecute, don't you think?
On the other side of the room, a Policeman smashes open a false front bookshelf revealing an impressive array of customised gear. A tiara-like headset rests on a bust of Socrates.
SENSE/NET POLICEMAN
Lieutenant...
PALE MAN
That's it, gentlemen.
The police begin to destroy the gear with the enthusiasm of prohibitionists at a moonshine still.
CASE
I've got money...
PALE MAN
Not anymore. You've burned at least three multinational corporations, Mr. Case. You're getting a little too good at your craft, my friend. That's bad for business. Bad for everybody.
The Pale Man withdraws a glittering hypodermic from a silver case.
CASE
What's that?
PALE MAN
Your retirement plan.
He jams the needle into the artery on cases forearm and drives the plunger home.
Case's body convulses as the mycotoxin surges through his veins.
The Pale Man turns to Linda Lee.
PALE MAN (CONT.)
He'll be hallucinating for... oh, about fifteen hours.
He pats her on the cheek
PALE MAN (CONT.)
What's left after that is all yours.
HIGH ANGLE
CAMERA BOOMS DOWN onto the spread eagled Case, surrounded by his enemies. He screams as the mycotoxin hits his nervous system like a runaway freight train. His dilated eyes flash open, staring into a hallucinatory hell. BOOM DOWN continues straight through the glistening black hole of his pupil and on into a chilling inner void.
SMASH CUT TO:
MAIN TITLE SEQUENCE
DISSOLVE TO:
EXT. CHIBA CITY, JAPAN - NIGHT
A crowded commercial ghetto in the Ginzu district of Japan; a garish strip of bars, liquor stores, and cometic surgery parlours. The ragtag crowd of hustlers and tourists wear rough trade street fashions with the added kink of punk influenced elective surgery...notched ears and *idless eyeballs...added strictly for shock value. The holographic adverts hanging like neon ghosts in the night sky remind us this is the future. A grim future indeed.
SUPERIMPOSE:
CHIBA CITY, JAPAN
ONE YEAR LATER
INT. CHATSUBO BAR
We are hit by a solid wall of ROCK MUSIC and BAR NOISE. The Chatsubo is one of the roughest dives on the Ginzu and the only place in town where you're likely to meet an American or European as an Oriental. RATZ, a broad-shouldered, leather faced Bartender with an articulated prosthetic arm serves the crush of patrons as he casually passes through holograms for Tsing Toa and Kirin Beer.
Case sits at a table in the far corner talking to two Japanese businessmen. He looks the worse for wear, rumpled, unshaven and ten pounds lighter. It's been a rough year.
He chain smokes through Yeheyuan cigarettes as he speaks to the ancient DR. KIYOTO through his rotund interpreter MR. TENSHU. A grubby folder containing CAT Scan transparencies lies open on the tabletop before them.
TENSHU
Dr. Kiyoto say scan reveal many secrets. You suffer serious damage to nervous system. Someone play bad trick on you.
CASE
Yeah, I know all that. I used to be a wire man, understand? Plugged straight into the matrix.
Tenshu translates and Kiyoto replies.
TENSHU
No longer possible for your mind to enter matrix. Nervous system incompatible for computer. You try again, you fry like egg.
CASE
Everyone says Dr. Kiyoto is the best nerve splicer in all the black clinics.
TENSHU
Nerve splice very risky. Dr Kiyoto now
******
Dr. Kiyoto makes further comment in Japanese.
TENSHU (CONT.)
He say he admires your bone structure. You make beautiful woman. We correct nature's mistake.
Kiyoto smiles at Case, flashing huge synthetic ultra white teeth framed by horrible grey gums.
CASE
(downs his drink)
Tell him no thanks. I got lousy legs.
Case rises and heads for the bar. Ratz pours him a shot of Japanese vodka as he pulls up a stool.
RATZ
Ah, Herr Case. And how is the artiste tonight?
CASE
Fine, Ratz. Thanks.
A boozy tattooed hooker looks up from her drink, impressed.
HOOKER
Oh, you're an artist? I love artists.
RATZ
He was once the artiste of light-fingered microchippery, my dear. Need your credit rating changed? Interested in a few corporate secrets? Case was the man. Now he is the artiste of the slightly funny deal. Isn't that right, Herr Case?
CASE
Sure. Someone's gotta be funny around here.
Case pops two tiny blue pills and washes them down with the vodka. Ratz refills his glass.
RATZ
I saw your girl yesterday.
CASE
I don't have a girl.
RATZ
No girl? Only biz, my dear artiste?
Case lights a cigarette.
RATZ (CONT.)
Too bad. I likes you better with her. Now, sometime you get maybe to artistic; you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts.
CASE
You're pleasant tonight.
RATZ
(bows)
Always...By the way, you know that girlfriend you don't have?
CASE
Yeah.
Ratz nods. Case turns, following his gaze.
Linda Lee stands in the doorway, dressed in French fatigues and sneakers. There's still a warmth and beauty about her that shines through the hard edge of a year of disappointments in Chiba City.
Case makes his way through the crowd. He's gentle with her... there's still a love between them.
LINDA LEE
Hello, Case.
CASE
I thought you already left.
LINDA LEE
Flight's in the morning. You should be on it, too. There's nothing for us here, Case. There never was.
To Case, it's an old battle not worth fighting.
CASE
Why did you come here tonight, Linda?
LINDA LEE
People are talking. They say the Yakuza has a contract out on you.
CASE
I hear that shit once a week. Don't worry. Jo Jo Bao loves me.
LINDA LEE
This time it's different. Someone ripped of a shipment of hallucinogens. Five grams of liquid ketamine. It was supposed to be Jo Jo's score.
CASE
(pauses)
Where did you here that?
LINDA LEE
Too many places. You're playing tag wish some kind of death wish, Case.
(beat)
I'm sorry but I'm not sticking around for the funeral.
She hesitates...then kisses him on the cheek, turns and disappears into the night.
Case takes a last pull on his cigarette, then observes his hand. His fingers are shaking. He flicks the butt away.
EXT. JULIUS DEANE IMPORT-EXPORT
A dingy commercial building wedged between a strip joint and a digital tape store. Case takes the rickety stairway up three steps at a time. He bursts through a door under the worn sign: "Julius Deane Import-Export"
A dark rosewood office crowded with expensive European furniture, and stacks of white fibreglass shipping modules. Several CATS lounge about in the shadows.
DEANE, an obese but extremely well groomed man, sits quietly at his desk just outside the small circle of light thrown by a brass lamp. One of his cats is perched casually on his shoulder. A thick Cuban cigar smoulders between his stubby fingers.
Case storms into the room, sending hissing cats scrambling out of the way.
CASE
You stupid, stupid, son of a bitch. That was supposed to be a clean score! You've got me fencing Yakuza goods on Yakuza turf...
C.U. - DEANE'S HAND
A large white ash tumbles from Deane's cigars. His hand remains motionless.
ON CASE
As he reacts. We hear the soft sound of a cat licking.
DOLLY
With Case as he rushes to the desk and flips the lamp shade up onto...
DEANE'S FACE
Illuminated for the first time. The cat perched on his shoulder is lapping at a crimson knife wound bisecting his windpipe.
CASE
Steps back, horrified.
THE DESK
Deane's right hand is frozen on the blood splattered keyboard of his compact computer terminal. The small screen is scrolling off a single cryptic word repeated ad infinitum:
Wintermute
Wintermute
Wintermute
CASE
Hastily flips the light off and crosses to the window.
CASE'S P.O.V.
Two stocky JAPANESE MEN stand just beyond the orange glow of a quartz halogen street light, gazing back up at Case. Yakuza. They start across the street, heading for the building.
CASE
Releases the curtain and runs a hand through his tousled hair.
CASE
Shit...
He looks back at Julius Deane.
CASE (CONT.)
We've been set up, old buddy.
Case rummages through Deane's coat rack until he finds an old fashioned .38 in an ancient cracked leather shoulder holster. He flips the barrel open. There's only one round in the chamber. It'll have to do.
Case jams the gun in his belt and pushes a button on Deane's desk. A section of panelled wall pops open, revealing a hidden exit. He takes a last look at his former partner.
CASE
So long, Julie. Don't forget to feed the cats.
NINSEI STREETS
Case rushes through the Saturday night street crowd, past Yakitori stands and massage parlours.
A Japanese ELVIS IMPERSONATOR sends his eerie rendition of "Heartbreak Hotel" echoing down the Ninsei. Case checks his back.
The two Yakuza heavies are searching the crowd half a block away. A third gangster the size of a boxcar joins them.
Case backs into the doorway of a surgery parlour as he checks the other direction.
A dangerous looking WOMAN IN BLACK wearing mirror shades is heading towards Case. She reaches inside her black leather jacket and loosens her shoulder holster as she scans the crowd.
Case ducks just past a group of RUSSIAN SAILORS, and cuts across the street, just past a MESSENGER on a motorised tricycle.
The Yakuza spot him and push their way through the crowd.
Case ducks into the garishly decorated doorway of an arcade.
INT. ARCADE.
A deafening cacophony of ARCADE SOUNDS echoes throughout the darkened room as lifelike holograms do battle under the guidance of customers at gaming consoles. As Case enters, a holographic fireball from Tank War Europa briefly illuminates the room.
The three Yakuzas burst through the doors and begin to search the room.
Case grabs an Armed Guard by the shoulder.
CASE
There's going to be trouble. Get your security over here...
The guard is suddenly jerked out of Case's grasp from the impact of an azide slug imploding his chest.
Case ducks back as three more SHOTS shatter the side of a console. The GUNFIRE is lost in the noise of the arcade.
Yakuza #1, his gun smoking, cautiously circles the aisle.
Case crouches in the darkness. From just behind the game console, he can see a pair of feet...slowly approaching. He cocks his gun, timing the approach carefully...then springs.
THE AISLE
A KID in oversized biker boots drops his popcorn as Case leaps out.
CASE
Pulls his shot at the last second, firing into the air.
YAKUZA #1
Pops up out of the darkness behind him, gun blazing.
THE KID
Beside Case is blown off his feet, shattering a holo projector.
CASE
Cuts through the maze of games, ducking lead. He loses the hit man at the back of the arcade, then checks the .38...empty.
A red dot appears on Case's chest. He looks up.
THE BIG YAKUZA
Looking like a Sumo wrestler stuffed into an ill-fitting suit. The laser-site on his modified Uzi casts the quavering dot on Case's chest.
The Big Yak smiles. His gold earring bearing the symbol of the Yakuza twinkles eerily in the darkness.
The kisses his thumb and makes the ritual gesture of death to Case.
LOW ANGLE - SLO MO
As another holographic blast erupts from Tank War Europa, the WOMAN IN BLACK leaps through the ghostly atomic fire, launching herself straight at the Big Yakuza.
She executes an amazing flying kick, snapping her body around to connect with the Yakuza's jaw. He goes down like a felled Sequoia.
Yakuza #3 appears fining at the Woman in Black. Case tackles him. They struggle for control of his gun. The crowd finally reacts to the real violence in the midst of their illusionary battles.
The Big Yakuza begins to rise, spitting out teeth and pissed off.
Case spots him, swings #3's gun hand around and squeezes the trigger.
The Big Yakuza takes a hit in the heart and crumbles.
Still gripping #3's hand, Case savagely elbows him in the face. Once. Twice. Three times. He goes down.
Suddenly machine pistol fire strafes the console behind Case. The monitor explodes with a hail of glass shards.
****** (Something to do with 'firing his machine pistol')
Case runs for all he's worth, heading for a window across the room. He barrel rolls straight through glass and neon as a fusillade of bullets explode around him.
EXT. STREET
Case hits the cement and rolls, knocking over a couple of leather clad HOOKERS in the process. He disappears into the crowd as the Hookers scream expletives at him.
INT. CHATSUBO BAR
The doors blow open as JO JO BAO, the twenty-five year old Yakuza Lieutenant of Chiba City, enters escorted by four heavily armed BODYGUARDS. The cold expressionless mask of Bao's face suggests the brutality required to climb so far in the Yakuza ranks at such an early age. His startling aqua blue eyes are an obvious affectation from the black clinic tanks.
As the entourage cuts its way across the crowded floor, a ripple of tension spreads throughout the room.
Ratz casts a wary glance to his sideman, FRITZ.
Fritz gently lifts a wire bore scattergun from its resting place out of sight under the bar.
Ratz shakes his head "no" and motions for Fritz to stand by.
Jo Jo sits down before Ratz, flanked by his men.
RATZ
Arigatou, Bao-san. Rare to see you out this time of night.
Bao's English is excellent.
JO JO BAO
I'm afraid I could not sleep. Worry makes me restless.
RATZ
Is that so?
JO JO BAO
Yes. I'm worried for your friend. The man they call Case.
Ratz looks from one bodyguard's icy stare to the other.
RATZ
Not my friend. My customer.
JO JO BAO
Of course. Forgive me.
Bao extends his pinky finger, which is encased in a decorative gold sleeve. With a twist, he disengages the sleeve, revealing that his finger has been amputated at the knuckle. Bao casually taps a line of yellow powder out of his finger/vial onto the bar.
JO JO BAO (CONT.)
"Your customer"...Case is a difficult man to find when he wants to be.
Bao applies a match to the powder, which ignites like a fuse. He then expertly inhales the resulting curl of dirty yellow smoke, then offers Ratz a pull.
RATZ
Ah...No thanks. I can try to get in touch with him for you. Can't promise anything, you understand.
JO JO BAO
I would greatly appreciate this. You see there is a small matter that must be settled between Case and I.
One of Bao's bodyguards suddenly lashes out with a wickedly curved dagger, burying it in the counter top.
C.U. THE DAGGER
The gleaming blade had pinned a human ear to the worn wood. By the elaborate gold earring we recognise that this once belonged to the Big Yakuza in the arcade.
EXT. CHEAP HOTEL - NIGHT
Camera suddenly BOOMS UP to the rooftop of a shabby ten story office building. Up here, in some of the last available space in the crowded city, a cheap hotel has been erected out of prefab fibreglass "coffins" racked in a framework of industrial scaffolding and catwalks. A weakly flickering neon sign offers the words CHEAP HOTEL under a cluster of Japanese ideograms.
INT. CHEAP HOTEL
Linda Lee has just finished packing a small suitcase in the cramped quarters of the white fibreglass module. The rooms moulded to maximise the efficiency of the living space; concave area for microwave and cooler, convex area for a temperfoam bed slab for computer terminal and telephone.
Linda peels off a photograph taped to the wall of her and Case in better days... mugging for the camera during a break in a game of Jai Alai. She decides to leave it for him.
The telephone rings. As Linda picks it up the computer screen is illuminated with a C.U. of Ratz.
LINDA LEE
Hello?
INTERCUT CHATSUBO BAR
Ratz speaks into a grimy mobile phone before a wall mounted lens. In the B.G. we see his small audience of Yakuza heavies.
RATZ
Is Case there?
LINDA
No. Who's this?
RATZ
A friend. I have a very important message. Are you listening?
LINDA
Yes, but I...
RATZ
Jo Jo Bao says Case should bring the goods the Yakitori Stand at the arena in one hour. Jo Jo gets the goods or Case gets orchids. He'll understand.
There is a click as the phone disconnects. The screen goes blank.
Linda Lee looks back at the photograph of the man she used to love. She snaps her suitcase shut and starts for the door... But she stops short and finally makes a decision.
Linda crosses to the cooler and rummages about inside. She discovers a 9mm automatic hidden by a row of beer bottles. Searching further, she finds a plastic container behind the ice cube trays. Inside, packed in dry ice, is a glass tube filled with an amber fluid. Ketamine.
Linda stops and considers the gravity of what she is about to do. She closes the container and stuffs it into her canvas shoulder bag.
EXT. BULLET TRAIN PLATFORM - NIGHT
The sleek train is a blur of motion as it clears frame... revealing Case, exhausted and dishevelled from his run in with the Yakuza. He checks his surroundings warily, then exits the platform. As he approaches the dingy stairway, his attention is drawn to a holographic travel advert floating overhead.
CLOSER - HOLOGRAM
It displays a beautiful cylindrical satellite hanging in space like a twinkling child's toy. The word FREESIDE pulses beneath the image in capital letters that mimic printed Japanese, followed by the copy line, "Why wait?".
A crack of lightning briefly illuminates a night sky choked with storm clouds. A light rain begins to fall. Case moves on.
EXT. CHEAP HOTEL
Case turns his collar up against the rain as he checks his lock for signs of a break-in. He slots a key card and the portal pops open.
INT. CHEAP HOTEL
Slipping through the small entry, case shrugs off his wet jacket and reaches for the lights.
OFFSCREEN VOICE
Hold it.
Case turns to find himself looking down the four barrelled muzzle of a Fletcher; a lethal looking hand gun that shoots dart cartridges ranging from tranquillisers to micro-explosives.
The Woman In Black sits at the far end of the coffin training the Fletcher on Case with a rock steady hand. The gun's pepper box muzzle rotates once, clicking a barrel in place.
WOMAN
No lights. I can see just fine the way I am, thanks.
C.U. THE WOMAN
Her mirror shades are actually surgically inset silver lenses that cover her eye sockets. Her fine features and smooth pale skin are framed by a rough shag of jet black hair. There's a cold beauty about her... marred by a street tough edge.
WOMAN
Now close the door.
WOMAN'S P.O.V.
Her lenses provide light boosters... enhancing the scene in a pale green hue as Case closes the portal.
CASE
That was you at the arcade.
WOMAN
I just wanted to put the Big Yak down, not kill him. I've got enough problems without Yak heat.
ANOTHER ANGLE
The room's only light source is the dim glow of the computer monitor.
******************************
Unfortunately, the next page is missing from the bootleg. I can establish, though, that Case learns that Armitage has a job for him, and that the Woman In Black is, in fact, Molly. The best pointer for the scenes may in fact be the novel.
******************************
MOLLY
His name's Armitage. He's very anxious to meet you.
CASE
Why should I want to meet him.
MOLLY
Because you've exceeded your shelf life, Case. Word on the street is you're a dead man walking. Nice time for an employment opportunity. Travel to exotic locales.
CASE
What's my end?
MOLLY
You want to hear the pitch, you gotta meet the man.
Case considers this for a beat, then reaches for his jacket.
CASE
This better be good.
Molly holsters her gun and rises.
Case now notices Linda's suitcase lying by the temperfoam slab, with a note on top of it. He scans the note... adrenalin surges through his body.
MOLLY
What is it?
CASE
... a friend of mine's gonna get herself killed. I need my clip.
MOLLY
Sorry. That's not gonna happen.
CASE
Then, fuck you. I'm gone.
Case reaches for the door.
The fletcher is instantly in Molly's hand and firing.
Three blue steel darts puncture the fibreglass portal and stand
quivering inches from Case's hand.
Case turns and glares at Molly. She considers the situation.
MOLLY (CONT.)
(holsters gun)
Alright. We check your friend out first. But I want you to
remember something.
Molly snaps her hand open, palms up. With a barely audible click ten double edged scalpel blades slide from their housings beneath her black lacquered nails. Surgical implants.
MOLLY
You mess with me, you'll be playing Jai Alai with Jesus.
EXT. ARENA
An inflated dome behind a portside warehouse, taut grey fabric reinforced with a net of thin steel cables. The roar of the crowd briefly rises above the night sounds of Chiba City.
INT. ARENA
Linda Lee makes her way across a crowded transom as the predominantly Japanese CROWD exchange fistfuls of new yen, placing their bets. She pauses to ask an old woman directions.
Behind her, the towering puppets of holographic light duplicate the movements of the contestants in the ring; two MEN in the midst of a savage knife fight. Their combat style combines street fighting, fencing and kickboxing.
INT. ARENA HALL
The dimly lit outer hall is lined with massive cement pylons that anchor the arena's support cables. As Jo Jo Bao and his four leg breakers make their way through the crowd, the BEGGARS and SOUVENIR HUSTLERS shrink back. These are men not to be trifled with.
EXT. ARENA
Case and Molly bolt out of a three wheeled taxi and rush to the ticket window.
INT. ARENA - THE RING
The two combatants whirl in their deadly cockfight, their bodies glistening with sweat. The crowd ROARS as first blood is drawn.
C.U. - YAKATORI SKEWER
The brown sauce dripping down Jo Jo Bao's fingers. He takes a bite.
WIDER - YAKATORI STAND
The stand is positioned near an ugly cinderblock dead end at the last curve in the shadowy hall. Sensing danger, the few remaining patrons abandon their position in line, leaving the stand to Bao and his men.
INT. HALL
Linda Lee enters the hall, checking her watch. She hurries past the clutching hands of the beggars, and the sing song cries of the merchants.
INT. ARENA - STANDS
Case and Molly race across the transom as the crowd SCREAMS for blood. Behind them, the God-like holograms battle beneath the quilted dome in a column of drifting cigarette smoke and light.
INT. YAKATORI STAND
Bao turns. Pull focus to Linda Lee framed in the arch of the hallway. She stands there frozen, like a deer trapped in the road... Then steadies herself, and starts toward Bao and his men.
INT. HALL
Case and Molly run full speed around the bend.
INT. YAKATORI STAND
Linda Lee stands before the grim faced Yakuzas. She reaches into her shoulder bag and produces the plastic container. Bao watches silently as one of his men withdraws the ketamine.
INT. ARENA
The combatants' blades clash. Sparks fly.
The crowd chants for the kill, blood-madness in their eyes.
INT. YAKATORI STAND
Bao's synthetic ice-blue eyes reveal nothing as he inspects the fragile tube of amber fluid. He looks back up at Linda Lee... then lets the tube drop, shattering on the cement floor.
The ketamine itself means nothing. Bao has a score to settle.
INT. RING
One combatant lashes out. Blood flows.
INT. YAKATORI STAND
A double hinged butterfly knife flickers open in Jo Jo Bao's hand.
LINDA LEE
Reacts as the bodyguards grab her from either side.
THE CROWD
**** Faces contorted in anger
MOLLY AND CASE
Arrive at the dead end.
CASE'S P.O.V.
Linda Lee stands 20 yards away, flanked by Bao's bodyguards. Bao SCREAMING something in Japanese. His knife flashes.
THE RING - THE COMBATANTS
A blade flashes - the killing blow. The crowd shrieks.
ON CASE
Sprinting up the hallway.
CASE
(screams)
No!
THE YAKUZAS
Turn, drawing their guns.
MOLLY
Pushes Case to the ground as she dives to one side, firing her Fletcher.
LINDA LEE
Staggers back, silhouetted by strobing muzzle flashes as the men around her open fire.
CASE
Crouches beside a cement pylon as bullets explode around him.
MOLLY
Fires, scrambling for cover. She pulls out Case's clip.
MOLLY
Case!
CASE
Catches his clip, jams it into the gun and rushes the stand like a madman, firing blindly.
MOLLY
Her Fletcher whines as she fires a storm of explosive darts into the midst of the Yakuzas.
THE STAND - HAND HELD
Case charges, blazing away. Yakuzas are cut down in the searing crossfire.
LINDA LEE
Turns, her eyes wide with terror... takes two steps toward Case. A thin curtain of blood suddenly appears, running down her throat.
She crumbles into Case's arms.
BAO
Fires.
CASE
Blood blossoms from his shoulder. Still holding Linda Lee, he empties his gun at Bao.
BAO
Riddled with bullets, is blown back into the Yakitori stand. Glass, wood, hot grease and fire fly through the air as the Yakuza Lieutenant's body bounces off the cinderblock wall, and rebounds on the unyielding cement floor.
CASE
Sinks to his knees cradling the lifeless body of Linda Lee in his arms. Police SIRENS wail in the distance... growing closer.
MOLLY
Snaps a new clip in her Fletcher, scanning the wreckage of sprawled bodies with a professional eye... no survivors.
She takes Case by the shoulder as we hear SHOUTS and a shrill police WHISTLE O.C.
MOLLY
She's dead man. C'mon.
Case does not respond.
MOLLY (CONT.)
She's dead!
Molly pulls Case to his feet as the post-fight crowd begins to emerge from the arena. They react with SCREAMS and confusion to the scene of bloodshed.
Camera BOOMS UP. COPS and SECURITY MEN arrive, pushing their way through the swirling crush of bodies. Case and Molly slip away in the confusion.
SLOW DISSOLVE
TO BLACK
E.C.U. COFFEE CUP
Black coffee poured into a china cup.
INT. HOTEL ROOM - DAY
Case sits in an oversized chair framed against a large picture window in a luxurious suite. Outside a slate grey sky hangs over the jumble of Chiba City. A light rain patters against the glass.
Case looks wasted... washed out. His arm is supported by a web-like nylon sling. He sips his coffee in silence.
Molly pours a cup for her employer.
ARMITAGE is a powerfully built man in his early forties. His dark robe frames a broad muscular chest and a flat stomach. His white blonde hair is close cropped in an almost military style.
ARMITAGE
Are you sure you're up to this, Mr. Case? We could reconvene tomorrow.
CASE
You've got an expensive razor girl on me for a reason. I'd like to hear what it is.
ARMITAGE
Very well.
Armitage slots a laser disc the size of a quarter into a remote control. The picture window behind Case is instantly transformed into a wall sized screen displaying news footage of chaos in the London stock market.
ARMITAGE (CONT.)
What you're seeing here is the London stock market crash of last September. This was the first in a series of setbacks for the international banking community.
Molly pours herself some coffee and sits down near Case. Her Fletcher hangs loosely on her side in a black nylon shoulder holster.
Armitage switches the scene to a space shuttle manufacturing plant.
ARMITAGE (CONT.)
The collapse of Aerospace International...
He switches to a corporate conference room where a hearing is in progress.
ARMITAGE (CONT.)
The corporate plundering of Yeshoto Industries... At first these seemed like unrelated incidents, but a pattern is emerging that suggests otherwise.
CASE
What does this have to do with me?
ARMITAGE
(turns off screen)
Our analysis of the London stock crash suggest that it was manipulated from within the international computer matrix. Cyberspace, Mr. Case... A realm I believe you're familiar with.
CASE
(shrugs)
Put the Sense/Net Police on it. The matrix is their turf.
ARMITAGE
Sense/Net's corporately financed. Too corrupt to be trusted. You of all people should know that.
Armitage sits down across from Case
ARMITAGE (CONT.)
If someone is infiltrating the matrix on a global scale no political or economic system is safe. I'm assembling a team of specialists, Mr. Case. We need a man who can enter the matrix and trace this saboteur.
CASE
My days of punching deck are over. For you or anybody else.
ARMITAGE
What would you say if I told you we could correct your neural damage?
CASE
I'd say you were full of shit.
Armitage nods.
CASE (CONT.)
Then I'd ask you what your terms are.
ARMITAGE
First, let's get something straight. We ran a psych construct on you that lists self destruction as your favourite pastime. If you want to kill yourself, Mr. Case, there's much more entertaining ways than working for me.
CASE
It's the people close to me that tend to die... and I get the feeling you and I are going to be real buddies.
(beat)
Terms?
ARMITAGE
We'll match your rate just prior to your... accident. One half in advance.
CASE
Who's running the show, Armitage? This a government sting?
ARMITAGE
Questions make me nervous. Part of our arrangement will be that you don't ask too many.
Armitage rises.
ARMITAGE (CONT.)
One more thing, Mr. Case... Be prepared to travel light.
EXT. THE SPRAWL - DAWN
Urban development gone mad... A city built upon a city with old Atlanta at the core. Bristling with air and ground traffic. A Herring passenger jet slowly spirals as it drops straight down into the dense cityscape.
SUPER:
BOSTON-ATLANTA METROPOLITAN AXIS:
THE SPRAWL
EXT. HOSPITAL GROUNDS - DAY
An exclusive clinic comprised of sleek pavilions, separated by small formal gardens.
Case cracks open a drink container and hands it to Molly. He opens a second one for himself. Two white robed DOCTORS pass by, preoccupied with their charts.
CASE
Since when do sprawl doctors know more about nerve rehab than the Japanese?
MOLLY
Since Armitage sold them a program on it. Put them years ahead of the competition.
As they walk through the garden, they pass a gleaming crab-like robot pruning a tree with its long delicate claws.
CASE
He's a resourceful guy, your boss. How long you work for him?
MOLLY
Couple of months.
CASE
What about before that?
MOLLY
For someone else. Bodyguard. Courier... Whatever.
CASE
Then you don't really know who he is, do you?
MOLLY
I know who he isn't. Not C.I.A. Not Sense/Net. But... money comes in. Doors open. He's onto something.
CASE
Maybe something's onto him.
MOLLY
What's that supposed to mean?
A MALE NURSE approaches Case.
NURSE
Mr. Smith?
CASE
Yeah.
(turns back to Molly)
It means there is no Santa Claus, Molly. So cover your ass. Just cover your ass.
Case follows the nurse into the building.
INT. OPERATING ROOM
A high tech sterile environment.
An ANESTHESIOLOGIST in a cobalt blue smock and surgical mask attaches one blue derm to Case's neck and one to his wrist.
ANESTHESIOLOGIST
Count backwards from ten, please.
CASE
Ten... nine...
CASE'S P.O.V. - SLOW MO
A SURGEON picks up a laser scalpel, a device resembling a tuning fork with a laser beam crackling between its open prongs. The surgeon now folds back one of the prongs and turns toward Case.
CASE
(slowing down)
Eight... seven... six.
C.U. CASE
His eyelids droop... picture and sound slow down.
CASE
Five... four...
CASE'S P.O.V. - -SLOW MO
The Surgeons converge on Case, towering over him. The room around him then melts into dreamy soft focus as the crackling laser scalpel descends.
E.C.U. - CASE'S EYES
Half closed.
CASE
Three... two...
CASE'S P.O.V. - SLOW MO
The Surgeons have become the Pale Man and his Sense/Net storm troopers. The scalpel is now the glistening hypodermic... descending... contact.
The screen explodes in WHITE-OUT.
C.U. CASE
His face tenses... but in passion, not pain... slowly turning to reveal Linda Lee holding him tightly... lost in their lovemaking.
E.C.U. THE LASER SCALPEL
Burning a straight line across a horizon of flesh.
CASE
His face tenses... again slowly turning to reveal Linda Lee in his arms, but now her eyes are as cold and blank as a lifeless doll... Her throat darkly glistening crimson.
E.C.U. THE LASER SCALPEL
Its beam FLARES into camera as it slices.
C.U. CASE
Screams...
The CAMERA BOOMS UP to reveal him tied to the coffee table, surrounded by his enemies.
Screams....
Clutching her lifeless body in his arms as he sinks to his knees in defeat.
C.U. CASE
His eyes flash open as he gasps a breath. Awake...
WIDER - DARKENED ROOM
Case lies in rumpled sheets, his face bathed in sweat. He can hardly move.
Molly looks down at him... a shadow against a moonlit window, her hair glistening as blue black as a raven's wing.
MOLLY
(softly)
Easy. You're still full of endorphins.
Case coughs. Molly supports his head and helps him sip some water.
MOLLY (CONT.)
You've been calling her name.
CASE
What?
MOLLY.
Your girl, Linda Lee. You've been calling her name.
She wrings out a wet cloth. Applies it to his forehead.
MOLLY (CONT.)
She must have really loved you.
Case gazes into the darkness. His voice is a weak whisper.
CASE
It got her killed.
Molly straightens up his covers.
MOLLY
Sure Case... Love kills and we're all the walking wounded.
She gently lays a hand over Case's eyes.
MOLLY (CONT.)
Now close your eyes... You're asleep and you don't even know it.
When Molly takes her hand away, indeed, his eyes remain shut.
C.U. MOLLY - MORNING
She hits a padded bar hard... Flips up out of frame.
WIDER
Molly is in the midst of a workout on a customised rig that's part "Sinsemi" karate pads, part uneven parallel bars. She flies through her routine with animal grace and the focused discipline of a professional athlete.
The rig stands in the middle of a sparsely furnished high ceilinged loft. Shafts of soft morning light are filtered through a row of dusty windows.
Case sits up in the foreground.
He's lying on a futon in the middle of the worn wooden floor. He rises pulling a sheet around his naked shoulders... but he's stopped cold as a splitting headache hits home.
CASE
(gasps)
Holy shit...
MOLLY
(flips down off rig)
Hey... you're not supposed to be up.
Molly guides Case to a stool at the kitchen counter. He looks around the room, red-rimmed eyes adjusting to the light.
CASE
How long have I been out?
MOLLY
Almost two days.
Case gazes down at the narrow bandages across his main arteries.
CASE
I gotta know... did it work>
MOLLY
We'll find out soon enough. If you don't pull the splices out.
Case snaps the cap off a bottle of bourbon and pours a drink.
CASE
How soon is soon enough?
MOLLY
Couple of days. They'll examine you.
Case slugs down the bourbon.
MOLLY (CONT.)
That's not going to help.
CASE
The way I feel, believe me, it'll help.
MOLLY
Not anymore. You got a new pancreas. Armitage's got you kinked so you can't get stoned.
CASE
What the fuck... are you serious?
MOLLY
(pours him another)
Go ahead...
Case tosses it down... no kick at all.
CASE
That's cute. Very fucking cute. What else did this guy do to me when he had me opened up like a goddamn fillet?
Extending one scalpel-blade, Molly picks at a cluster of grapes.
MOLLY
(half-smile)
Oh, I dunno... He was saying maybe that you're a little too ballsy.
Molly flicks her blade, severing two grapes from the bunch. Nasty image.
CASE
No...
Case checks beneath his sheet.
Armitage now enters carrying two large cardboard boxes bearing Japanese logo.
ARMITAGE
I'll think you'll find everything in working order. Molly's just having a little fun.
CASE
I don't call this fun, pal. You're playing God with my body.
ARMITAGE
You're a substance abuser, Case. Your pancreas was shot. Wouldn't have lasted out the year. We did you a favour and liberated you from a dangerous dependency in the bargain.
CASE
Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.
ARMITAGE
Good, because you've got a new one.
Armitage sets the boxes down in a corner with several others.
ARMITAGE (CONT.)
There are fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of your main arteries. They're dissolving, Case... slowly, but they're definitely dissolving. You have just long enough to do the job.
CASE
You son of a bitch...
Case lurches up from the counter, sending the bourbon smashing to the floor. Molly restrains him.
MOLLY
Easy...
ARMITAGE
Play it straight with me and you've got nothing to worry about. When it's over, I inject you with the antitoxin.
CASE
Why'd you do it, Armitage?
ARMITAGE
The disturbance in cyberspace... It's an A.I.
CASE
(bitter chuckle)
Right. And no one would take on an A.I.... If they had a choice.
MOLLY
What's an A.I.
ARMITAGE
An Artificial Intelligence. A computer system that's developed the capacity for sentient thought. They're dangerous and totally unpredictable.
CASE
First sign of free will, Sense/Net usually slags 'em.
ARMITAGE
This one's different. No one can trace it. It's out there somewhere in the matrix and it's growing stronger... infecting other computer systems like a virus.
CASE
Anything rated higher than a P.C.'s got a hard-wired suicide switch. It'll self-destruct.
ARMITAGE
It hasn't yet.
Case lights a cigarette.
CASE
I've heard about rogue A.I.'s, but there's only one guy who actually went up against one.
ARMITAGE
Dixie McCoy
CASE
Right. Best cowboy that ever punched deck. The old man taught me most of what I know.
ARMITAGE
I've arranged for him to work with us.
CASE
That's gonna be tough because Dixie McCoy's dead. The A.I. flatlined him.
ARMITAGE
I know.
(beat)
You ever work with ghosts, Case?
CASE
What are you talking about?
ARMITAGE
Sense/Net taped a full spectrum personality construct on McCoy six months before his death. Everything Dixie was -- everything Dixie still knows exists as a digitised construct.
(beat)
Of course a tape can get misplaced in a library the size of Sense/Net's.
Armitage tosses a matte black cartridge on the kitchen counter. Its the size and shape of the clip on an assault rifle. Warning decals and security codes frame the label on the front of the cartridge:
Charles "Dixie" McCoy
Case gingerly picks it up.
CASE
Working with a dead man. Shit, I've done about everything else.
ARMITAGE
You'll be ready for a trial run in two days. If your splices hold, you'll use McCoy to trace the A.I.'s coordinates.
CASE
And then?
ARMITAGE
Then we rendezvous with the final member of our team. For now, that's all you need to know.
CASE
It's just that sometimes I wonder what team I'm playin' on.
Armitage turns to Molly.
ARMITAGE
We have work to do.
Molly and Armitage exit.
Pull focus from Case to Armitage's empty glass in the foreground. Case holds it up to the light.
C.U. THE GLASS
Subtle fingerprints are visible.
EXT. LOFT - NIGHT
A full moon shines down on the weathered brick building in this core section of old Atlanta.
INT. LOFT
Case lies sleeplessly, staring at the mysterious grouping of boxes that Armitage has left lying on the moonlit floor. He rises.
As Case unstacks the boxes he discovers a glossy pamphlet advertising the luxury satellite, Freeside, with the familiar copyline: "Freeside... Why wait?"
Beneath it is an 8x10 fashionably dressed cabaret artist. It bears the heading, "The Holographic Cabaret of Peter Riviera." Ghostly images of skulls and jewels dance about Riviera.
Case sets the papers aside and runs his hand over the smooth surface of a box bearing cryptic instructions in Japanese. He tears it open and brushes back the clear plastic packing bubbles.
He gently lifts a beautiful Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 computer deck out of the box and sets it in a square of dusty moonlight thrown across the worn wooden floor. It's a more compact version of the jerry-rigged deck in Case's old townhouse. He runs his hands over the smooth lines of the two tiered keyboard... the sleek joystick.
MOLLY (O.S.)
You touch that thing like it's a woman.
Case looks up to see Molly silhouetted in her bedroom doorway, wearing only a cotton body stocking. Her Fletcher hangs from her shoulder in its open harness.
CASE
I'm going in.
MOLLY
You're not ready yet. They said two days.
CASE
I'm not jacking with Armitage and his quacks breathing down my neck.
MOLLY
If the splices aren't good, you could fry.
Case considers this for a moment.
CASE
I'll show you how to tell what's going on. If things go south, you unplug me.
MOLLY
What is it with you? Why is it so important? It's a buzz, right? Like getting high.
CASE
On a good run... yeah.
MOLLY
So you're a wire junkie.
Case sets the computer deck aside.
CASE
When I was fifteen Sense/Net iced my old man's credit record over some computer error. Once that goes down, that's it. He lost his business... everything. It destroyed him. I had to hustle arcade games for chump change. Dixie McCoy found me, figured I was a natural. He taught me the wires for a piece of the action.
MOLLY
A regular Fagan.
CASE
Sure. I finally pulled a run on my old man's credit file when I was seventeen... only it was too late for him.
MOLLY
Too late?
CASE
Suicide. I just needed to set the record straight.
Case is silent for a moment then turns and begins to tear open another box.
CASE (CONT.)
I've been running the matrix ever since.
Molly finally sits down beside him... the starts to help Case unpack the equipment.
INT. LOFT - C.U. CYBERSPACE EQUIPMENT
An impressive display of high tech computer gear is arranged in a semi-circle on the floor around the futon.
Case sits in a lotus position in the midst of the gear as Molly paces the room. Trails of micro thin wires run from the electrodes (derms) no his headband to the chrome plated jack he holds in his hand.
CASE
The first fun's bound to be rough. It that read out fluctuates more than ten points... just pull this out. But if the EEG flatlines, don't touch anything.
MOLLY
Won't that mean you're dead?
CASE
Technically, yeah, but people have made it back after as long as three minutes.
MOLLY
Dixie McCoy didn't.
CASE
The point is, if you unplug me when I'm flatlines, I'm history. I got no way back.
MOLLY
Okay fine. Let's get this over with.
Case gives Molly a reassuring smile.
CASE
Take it easy. This is what I'm good at.
C.U. THE JACK
Case slides it home with a metallic SNAP.
Crackle to WHITE OUT
CASE'S P.O.V. - CYBERSPACE
We are suddenly roaring through an impossible corridor of light with no top or bottom... Our speed constantly increasing. Luminescent geometric shapes tumble by like a shimmering power storm. We have entered an unearthly dimension of sheer power and energy as Case's subconscious mind is catapulted into CYBERSPACE
THE LOFT -CASE
Breaks into a sweat... His eyes closed in deep concentration. He remains in the louts position, his hands lying on padded supports just above the keyboard. His fingers flex weakly. He's in poor contact with his physical self.
C.U. CASE - CYBERSPACE
His translucent image distorts radically as he's torn through the GLOWING corridor, fighting for some control.
THE LOFT
The READOUTS begin to fluctuate.
Molly sees that Case's body is beginning to tremble. Something's going wrong.
CASE'S P.O.V. - CYBERSPACE
Still accelerating down the terrifying corridor of light. The ride grows rougher with the increasing velocity. He's losing control.
THE LOFT - C.U. KEYBOARD
Case's fingers still move slightly... still no contact
C.U. READOUTS
Fluctuations increasing...
CYBERSPACE
A monolithic WALL of pulsing yellow and black hazard stripes lies directly ahead... a glowing computer graphic barricade. It's crowned by the imposing Sense/Net logo and the warning... "Security Clearance Required."
CYBERSPACE - CASE
His image streaking... vibrating. He's in excruciating pain.
CASE'S P.O.V. - THE WALL
Case is rushing towards a head on collision. Tendrils of energy crackle across the surface of the barricade like an electrified fence. The words "Access Prohibited" strobe out in red towering letters.
LOFT - C.U. KEYBOARD
Case's hands finally come to life. His shaking fingers punch out a series of digits.
CYBERSPACE - CASE'S P.O.V. - THE WALL
Case's program shots out like a lightning bolt, blowing a hole through the Sense/Net barricade a split second before impact. We rocket straight through the tiny portal.
EXT. SENSE/NET BUILDING - NIGHT
A foreboding mirrored fortress in downtown New Atlanta, bristling with antenna and satellite dishes. It looks like a cross between a futuristic broadcasting station and a police headquarters, which is exactly what it is.
From somewhere inside a high pitched klaxon pulses out its shrill alarm.
INT. SENSE/NET MONITORING ROOM
The alarm continues as Sense/Net personnel scramble to their terminals. Overhead screen display Case's infiltration into the matrix in simplified computer graphics.
CLOSER
A Sense/Net technician speaks into his headset
TECHNICIAN
We have a bogey at access C-27. Bogey at C-27.
A voice crackles in response.
VOICE
Trajectory?
INT. CYBERSPACE - CASE'S P.O.V.
Case shoots through the narrow wormhole in the barricade at hair raising speed.
He finally bursts through into...
THE MATRIX
A transparent 3-D chessboard opens up before us, extending into infinity... Breathtakingly beautiful... Huge glowing geometric computer CONSTRUCTS float by, each bearing the specific corporations they represent... Suspended in nothingness like synthetic planets in an over-populated universe.
NOTE: The computer CONSTRUCTS are three dimensional geometric representations of the inner workings of computer systems. They exist in Cyberspace in the form of pure light and energy. Complex symbols and data are constantly changing within their glowing ectoskeletons. Although separate and apart from the actual hardware in the physical universe, computer activity can be observed and manipulated from within the matrix.
INT. SENSE/NET MONITORING ROOM
The blip representing Case disappears from the monitor.
OPERATOR
We've lost contact. sir. He's entered the matrix.
THE MATRIX C.U. SUBLIMINAL CASE
(NOTE: Although Case's physical body always remains at his deck, his spiritual being manifests itself on his trips into the matrix. A true "out of body" experience.)
Case floats blissfully through the phosphorescent environment in the lotus position that matches that of his body in the physical plane. His eyes are filled with wonder. He's achieved his "normal" appearance in the matrix; a translucent ghost of himself... shimmering with mild iridescence. His every moment creates subtle time lapse after-images the catch up his prime image in a graceful dance.
CASE'S P.O.V. - THE MATRIX
A burning scarlet pyramid bearing the title Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority floats by majestically, its surface alive with a constant changing flow of data...
The monolithic green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America hang above the horizon like a luminous cityscape twinkling with countless transactions.
And in the distance are the everpresent gridlines that define the limitless perspectives of the matrix.
We hear distant echoing LAUGHTER.
THE LOFT
Case sits before his console bathed in sweat... Eyes closes... Laughing like a man who's beat the devil.
MOLLY
Watches... wondering what he can possibly be experiencing. the readouts are modulating smoothly.
INT. SENSE/NET CONFERENCE ROOM
The Sense/Net technician sits surrounded by three larger than life holographic projections is taking place with the chairman's live images, each disembodied head projected above a separate pedestal.
A wall-sized screen displays playback of Case's infiltration of the matrix.
Bigelow, the most imposing of the three chairmen question the nervous operator.
BIGELOW
Is this all you've got on him?
TECHNICIAN
Yes sir. Whoever he is, he's good.
A figure seated in shadows at the rear of the room now speaks.
FIGURE
If he was so good he wouldn't have crashed a security checkpoint. I doubt he'll make the same mistake again.
BIGELOW
I thought we eradicated these wire jockeys. These... what do they call themselves, Duprey?
The FIGURE now swivels in his chair to face Bigelow's hologram. He is the PALE MAN, the Sense/Net operative that injected Case with the microtoxin. His name is Lt. Roland Duprey.
DUPREY
Cowboys, sir. I retired the last one personally over a year ago.
SUVANI YAMIR, a Mideastern Chairman, interjects.
YAMIR
Then how do you explain this?
DUPREY
I don't know yet. My people are doing everything that they can to trace it.
The third chairman, an aristocratic Frenchman named Lord Frederick Tessier addresses the gathering.
TESSIER
Do you realise what a security breach would mean right now? If our mysterious guest discovers that an Artificial Intelligence is running loose in the matrix infiltrating other computer systems, it could cause a worldwide panic.
BIGELOW
Find this cowboy, Duprey. Do whatever you have to to stop him.
DUPREY
What about the A.I.?
TESSIER
That is our problem, Lieutenant. Please concern yourself with the matter at hand.
Duprey rises.
BIGELOW
One more thing, Duprey...
Duprey turns.
BIGELOW
You fuck this up, I'll have your cerebral cortex degoused. You'll need a playback unit to remember how to pee. Am I making myself clear?
Duprey regards his superiors with thinly veiled disdain.
DUPREY
Don't worry, gentlemen. I'll keep your fat out of the fire.
EXT. MATRIX
Case's ghostly image still floats in a lotus position, dwarfed by the gigantic glowing constructs suspended in the distance.
INT. LOFT - C.U. DECK
As Case presses a button, the cartridge labelled "Dixie McCoy" automatically descends into the deck.
EXT. THE MATRIX
A disembodied CAT scan of a HUMAN HEAD suddenly appears before Case in a nimbus of gently modulating light. The brain and circulatory systems are visible in fluorescent pinks and blues like a 3-D x-ray. Its eyeballs are rolled back in its skull like two boiled eggs, showing no pupils at all.
Beneath this eerie medical jack-o-lantern is a two dimensional name plate in glowing green letters. It reads Charles "Dixie" McCoy and bears a narrow voice print band with a digital time code read out.
CASE
Dixie. Dixie McCoy? Is that you, man?
As McCoy speaks, a series of overlapping sign waves appear beneath him in his voice print band,, fluctuating with the modulations of his voice.
MCCOY
Hey, bro.
CASE
It's Case. Remember me?
Dixie's eyes roll down, revealing shocking pink irises with cobalt blue pupils. He seems to be just waking up.
MCCOY
Case... Yeah, Miami Joeboy, quick study. How you doing, kid?
CASE
Fine, Dixie. Fine.
MCCOY
Last I heard you cracked Sukura International. I couldn't believe it.
CASE
Yeah. That was me.
MCCOY
Jesus Christ, Kid. Nobody's ever cracked Sukura.
CASE
As far as they know, that's absolutely true.
MCCOY
(chuckles)
Ya learned good. So, what's happening?
CASE
That's a good question. What's the last thing you remember?
Long beat.
MCCOY
Nothin'. Not a goddamn thing. What the fuck...
CASE
Dixie, you know how a ROM construct works?
MCCOY
Sure, Kid. It's a firmware construct.
CASE
Okay, Dix. You _are_ a ROM construct.
Dixie's image is obscured by static as his "face" registers confusion.
CASE (CONT.)
Dixie?
There is no reply.
CASE
You're a ROM construct... Understand?
Dixie is briefly visible, then becomes totally obscured by electronic snow. His voice is a distant echo.
DIXIE
(processed)
It's cold. Why's it so goddamn cold.
The image disappears completely.
CASE (CONT.)
Dixie?
Silence... Then Dixie suddenly appears in perfect clarity.
DIXIE
What you're telling me is that I'm dead. Right?
CASE
(pauses)
Right...
DIXIE
I can't feel nothing because I am nothing.
(eerie laughter)
Just playback. A ghost in the machine.
CASE
You're Dixie McCoy's construct. That makes you something special.
DIXIE
Don't patronise me, you fuck. I was skating figure eights in this matrix while you were still peeing in your chinos.
(beat)
Hey, Kid... you expecting company?
CASE
What?
MCCOY
Later...
Dixie disappears.
There is an ominous rumbling in the matrix.
CASE
Dixie?
Case now notices an unusual glimmer off in the matrix.
He begins to "type"... looking like a mimist at an invisible keyboard.
INT. LOFT - KEYBOARD
Case types.
INT. MATRIX
Case's question prints out in mid-air as he types it.
Analysis: Object travelling 120 degrees longitude.
The computer's answer instantly appears.
Energy probe. Point of origin unknown.
INT. SENSE/NET MONITORING ROOM
As Duprey walks purposefully up the aisle he's stopped by a concerned technician.
TECHNICIAN
Lieutenant... we have some unusual activity in C sector.
DUPREY
Is that our bogey?
TECHNICIAN
No, it's inorganic. Could be your phantom A.I..
Duprey snaps his fingers.
TECHNICIAN (CONT.)
Sir?
DUPREY
I do believe one of our problems is about to cancel out the other one.
INT. MATRIX
The glowing sphere suddenly picks up speed... Veers directly at Case. The rumbling grows louder with its approach.
INT. LOFT
Case quickly taps out new coordinates.
INT. MATRIX
His position shifts, but the sphere responds instantly. It's nearly upon him, crackling with deadly energy.
INT. LOFT - DECK
?
INT. MATRIX
Case peels off and flies towards an Air Tram International construct. The sphere bares down on him like a heat seeking missile.
RAILWAY CONSTRUCT
Case flashes into the si spoked construct just as the sphere crashes into it.
INT. LOFT
The deck shorts out, SPARKING and POPPING with the electrical overload. Case's body stiffens.
Molly tries to pull out the jack, but receives a crackling jolt the second her hand comes down in contact with the chrome.
INT. CONSTRUCT
Case flies through narrow intersecting tunnels as the entire construct shatters around him in a deadly display of phosphorescent fireworks.
INT. LOFT
Molly lashes out with her steel claws, severing Case's wires. He's ripped back into his body just in time to se the sparking Hosaka monitor implode with a flash of light.
The printer begins shooting out hard copies at high speed until the entire system suddenly shuts down.
MOLLY
You okay?
CASE
...Yeah, but the Hosaka's history.
As Case inspects the print outs, he's stopped cold... One word is repeated down each scorched page:
Wintermute
Wintermute
Wintermute
EXT. STREET CORNER - THE SPRAWL - DAY
Case buys a pack of cigarettes and a paper at a busy corner newsstand.
The headlines read - "Systems Crash at Air Tram International - Railways Shut Down."
A Sense/Net van slowly turns the corner... invisible eyes watching from behind the tinted bulletproof glass.
Case eases back against a row of pay phones as the van passes. He lights a cigarette.
Suddenly the pay phone beside him RINGS. Case stares at the phone as the rings continue, then finally picks it up.
A synthetic CHIP VOICE comes over the line, reverberating with unearthly harmonics.
VOICE
Hello, Case
Case is too stunned to speak... then,
CASE
Who is this?
VOICE
Wintermute.
(beat)
Sorry I missed you last night.
There's faint background sounds... a WAILING COSMIC WIND... barely audible voices echoing off some orbital link.
VOICE (CONT.)
I've been waiting for you, Case. It's time we talked.
Case hangs up. He flicks the cigarette away, unnerved, then walks along the length of the bank of phones.
Each phone RINGS as he passes, but only once.
EXT. LOFT - DAY
Case enters the building
INT. THE LOFT
Case enters to find Armitage pacing the floor. A wiry pony tailed man, bare chested except for a black leather vest, sits crouched over Case's deck, working on the wired circuitry. He looks like a Grateful Dead roadie who's done one too many tours.
ARMITAGE
You ran without us.
CASE
I cannot tell a lie. Sorry.
ARMITAGE
Sorry, bullshit. We haven't even begun and you're already jeopardising this operation.
CASE
What's he doing to my gear?
The man glances up from his work.
MAN
_Your_ gear. Hah! I spent weeks customising this stuff. It looks like you've been playin' with it in the bathtub, man.
ARMI
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HEADCRASH 2.0 |
hc_2.0/brbethke/-1
Rough Draft 6.17.99
HEADCRASH 2.0
A novel by Bruce Bethke
Ashley Grayson Literary Agency
1342 18th Street
San Pedro, CA 90732
Voice: (310) 548-4672
Fax: (310) 831-0036
Email: agrayson1@aol.com
hc_2.0/brbethke/0
DISCLAIMER
This book is a work of fiction. The governmental agencies depicted in this novel are intended to represent no
agencies or offices now in existence or expected to exist in the foreseeable future. In particular, this novel
concerns the actions of the Federal Department of Investigation, which should not be construed as a literary
stand-in for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The real agency is the FBI: this book concerns the FDI. The
characters in this book are entirely fictitious and their words and actions should not be construed as a reflection
on the behavior or character of the heroic men and women of American law enforcement. Above all, under no
circumstances should the inquisitive reader attempt to substitute the letters FBI for FDI in any Internet URL or
Web page address that may be depicted in this book.
Well, okay, if you really want to try it, it's your ass...
hc_2.0/brbethke/1
CONFIDENTIAL E-MEMO
TO: ALL FDI REGIONAL & FIELD OFFICES
FROM: DIRECTOR, INTERNET SECURITY DIVISION
DATE: 15 JUNE 2010
RE: UNSOLVED CASE REMINDER
PRIORITY: URGENT
All officers and special agents are reminded to be on
the lookout for JACK BURROUGHS (aka MAX_KOOL), still
wanted in connection with repeated serious violations
of the Corporate Data Privacy, Internet Non-Violence
and Decency, and Federal Embarassing Data Secrecy acts
committed during the period of May - June 2005. Subject
is a Caucasian-American male, at present age 28, and an
accomplished computer expert with a long record of
antisocial attitudes and behaviors. His last known
location was Hawaii, although this intelligence is now
more than three years old and is no longer deemed 100-
percent reliable.
Any suspected sighting of Burroughs should be reported
immediately to the FDI National Computer Crime Center
at http://www.fdi.gov/compcrim.htm.
DO NOT, REPEAT, DO NOT forward leads or information to
the National Infrastructure Protection Agency! Dammit
people, this is an FDI case, and we will crack it
without any more help from those smug bastards at NIPA!
That's all we need is for Director Jackson to come
hc_2.0/brbethke/2
walking into the next Senate appropriations hearing
with... oh my, this thing is transcribing everything I
say, isn't it? Um... strike that. Begin new paragraph,
emphasis on, all caps.
DO NOT, REPEAT, DO NOT ATTEMPT A SOLO ARREST!
Burroughs is a known associate of JOSEPH LEMAT (aka
Gunnar Savage) and INGE ANDERSSON (aka Don Vermicelli),
the notorious international arms smugglers, con
artists, and Internet marketing consults. LeMat and
Andersson are also wanted on outstanding state,
federal, and Interpol warrants too numerous to mention
here: for a complete list updated weekly see http://
www.fdi.gov/mostwant/tenlist.htm. Agents encountering
LeMat and Andersson are advised that these two are
considered heavily armed and extremely dangerous, and
that no arrest should be attempted without tank backup
and air support.
For what it’s worth, there are persistent rumors on
alt.conspiracy.nutcase that Burroughs, LeMat, and
Andersson have either joined or been executed by SCARW,
the Secret Cabal that Actually Rules the World. Our
liaison at OSS assures us no such organization actually
exists, for if it did, Secret Cabal that Actually Rules
the Earth would make for a far better acronym.
Finally, a special advisory to all FDI personnel within
driving distance of Quantico: c'mon, people, we're a
multi-billion-dollar Federal agency. Let's coordinate
the department picnic this year, okay? Last year we
wound up with enough potato salad to feed Georgetown
and not one bottle of ketchup. Surely there is room for
improvement, no?
Regards,
DIR-INTSEC
hc_2.0/brbethke/3
1
TABULA RASA
When I was about five years old and first learning to ride a
bicycle, my father gave me some advice. He said, "Son, never
worry about where you've been. It's where you're going that
knocks your front teeth out."
With that thought firmly fixed in mind---it's either that or
Dad's one other piece of worthwhile advice, which was, "Never bet
on a horse named Lucky"---we can discard all that has gone before,
and begin in one bright, shining, omniscient and retrospective
moment:
- June 23, 2010 -
The Earth hangs like a big blue aggie marble in the silent
vastness of space, a fragile island of life and liquid water in
the cold, unforgiving, and for all practical purposes infinite
cosmos.
But that's not my problem.
In London it's already one o'clock in the morning of the next
day, and a pack of knuckle-dragging Aryan skinheads have just
finished kicking the tar out of an aging Pakistani shopkeeper in a
hc_2.0/brbethke/4
deserted tube station. As he lies there on the cold concrete
platform, coughing sticky bubbles of bright blood and drifting in
and out of consciousness, he wonders: What's wrong with the
security cameras? Where are the Police? He doesn't know that two
vagrants have built a fire under a Thames River bridge, in the
process accidentally melting through a main fibre-optic trunk
line and knocking out all police surveillance west of Bermondsey.
But again, that's not my problem.
In central Brazil it's 10 P.M., and the panic-stricken
Voortanga'en colony in the Amazonian rain forest has once again
turned its main bioreceptor towards Gamma Virginis. At last, from
the home world, comes the message the colonists have waited more
than a thousand years anxious to hear: the Colonial Office has
reviewed their report on the dangerous bipedal anthropoids
running riot on this world, and funding for a relief expedition
has been authorized. As the signal fades into the background hiss
of interstellar hydrogen, the colonists spread their stillia and
exude a collective aspiration of relief. (As if, being a lungless
group-mind, they could do anything else.) Now it's just a matter
of hanging on for the five or six millennia it will take their war
fleet to arrive, then---payback!
But amazingly enough, this is also not my problem.
In Dallas it's 7 P.M., and the President of the United States
is sitting in a blast-shielded lavatory in the basement of the
Texas White House, fondling the briefcase that contains his
missile launch codes and wondering what's the point of having all
hc_2.0/brbethke/5
these nuclear weapons if he never gets to use them. In Pasadena
it's 5 P.M., and the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab has once again
intercepted the Voortanga'en transmission and misclassified it as
unintelligible random noise. In the Gulf of Alaska it's 4 P.M.,
and a pod of bottlenose dolphins are urgently but unsuccessfully
trying to explain to the fisherhumans who've kidnapped their
relatives that mackerel are hard to find these days and they need
more time to come up with the ransom.
But again, all of these things are not my problem.
Instead, let us focus in on a few tiny bits of volcanic rock
jutting out of the blue Pacific, just east of the International
Date Line and a hair south of the Tropic of Skin Cancer. To be
specific, let's look down on Maui---on the south coast, at the end
of Highway 31, where the Wailea Shores run into the Puu Olai lava
fields. There---Ahihi Bay---that tiny brown speck, floating on a
red-and-white-striped surfboard, about two hundred yards
offshore: that's me. And if you were to break open the glove
compartment of my car on the beach, and dig through the avalanche
of fast-food napkins, misfolded roadmaps, and paper-wrapped
beverage straws, you'd find a wallet full of carefully forged ID
cards that claim my name is Bob Sanders.
But instead of pursuing this topic further at this time,
please allow me to redirect your attention to another point about
a quarter-mile due south. There, that long, dark, ominous shape,
knifing slowly through the shallow water. That is a fifteen-footlong
tiger shark.
hc_2.0/brbethke/6
And it's about 3 P.M., local time, and in just slightly over
two minutes, that shark is very definitely going to become my
problem.
Let the realtime begin.
#
It was a beautiful day for daydreaming.
And a piss-poor one for surfing.
Not surprising, that. The two activities are pretty much
mutually exclusive. I mean, usually the business of surfing is
way intense. Like, totally Zen. I mean like, you start with the
daydreaming thing while you’ve got your stick up there on the lip
of a serious curl, and next thing you know you are playing harbor
dredge and sucking up a major faceful of kelp and sand.
But not on this day.
No, this day could have been spec’d out by the Tourism Board.
An air temp in the mid 80's; a warm and gentle offshore breeze
sifting slowly through the palm trees on the beach and whispering
softly of hibiscus and plumeria; a low and gentle swell rolling
into the bay from the northwest, with just enough energy to make
the little breakers run in laughing ripples and long, rolling
sweeps along the gently curving picture-postcard-perfect white
sand shoreline.
And not one damned wave worth the effort of pretending to
ride.
I didn’t mind. Honest.
The Serious Surfer Dudes would have minded. That, and they
hc_2.0/brbethke/7
would have given me an extra ration of crap for being out at all.
"A day like this," one of them would be sure to say, "is fit only
for kooks and haoles." And then some sun-bronzed dolt with the
body of a Greek god and the brains of a meatloaf would be almost
sure to quote the legendary Mark Foo at
me:
"If you want to feel the
ultimate thrill, you have
to be willing to pay the
ultimate price."
But of course the Serious Surfers Dudes weren't there that
day, because they all thought Foo's "ultimate price" was a cryptic
reference to tickets on Air Aloha, and they'd all packed their
quivers and jetted off to Oahu, to chase monster curls on the
North Shore. Whereas the legendary Mark Foo had actually meant
something quite different...
Which is why the legendary Mark Foo's ashes are now scattered
on the waters of the equally legendary Waimea Bay, and why yours
truly, the totally non-legendary Bob Sanders, is content to kook
around a nearly deserted Ahihi Bay, just splashing his bare brown
toes in the sweet blue Pacific and soaking up that gorgeous
Hawaiian summer sun. For as Surfboy Sanders has been known to
say, at least three times weekly:
"A bad day of surfing still beats Hell out of a
good day at work."
Haole
An old Hawaiian word which
originally meant simply foreigner, but
which now has a perjorative value
comparable to the Japanese gaijin or
Ebonic whitey.
hc_2.0/brbethke/8
Damn right. I liked being Bob Sanders. And on this
particular lazy, sunny, summer afternoon, I was deeply into the
mode of soaking up sun and thinking about why.
There was my new job, for starters. It was a nice, mindless,
undemanding gig at a totally unimportant third-rate tourist
hotel. Plenty of free time to flirt with the local wahines, or
more importantly, surf. Three or four decent sticks in my quiver
(depending on whether you counted my Aipa Stinger as a functional
surfboard or a novel wall decoration), including this really
really nice Merrick Thruster I happened to be sitting on at the
moment, which I'd bought for a moldly old Don Ho song off some
schmuck mainlander who'd come out here and suddenly realized he
wanted a brand-new Parmenter Keelfin. (And then he bought one, at
Kahului prices, yike! Not that it helped his surfing any: he'd
have done just as well with an old balsa longboard, or for that
matter, with a redwood picnic table with the legs sawn off.)
But I digress.
It was a good day for digressing.
Ergo, I continued with the smug inventory of my new life.
Sickeningly positive attitude? Check. Obnoxiously healthy diet?
Check. Zero consumer debt? Cash only, tee hee. The sort of
broad chest and deep-fried dark brown skin that'd get me
suspicious looks and poor service in any Denny’s restaurant back
home in---where was that miserable, frigid place I'd originally
come from? Minnesnowta?
I dunno. It was all starting to look like freeze-frames from
hc_2.0/brbethke/9
someone else's life, now. For here, in this perfect moment, this
boy Sanders is possessed of a deep, clear, nearly Zen happiness.
When I am on my board, on the water, I am brother to the wind, the
waves, the sea--
And the sharks. Mustn't forget the sharks. The really big
ones churn the water when they pass. If you spend a lot of time
in the ocean, and you're really tuned in to it, and you happen to
be sitting on a floating chip of urethane foam with your bare feet
dangling in the water, you can actually feel the subtle change in
temperature gradient when a big one swims by underneath you.
At a little after 3 P.M., on the sunny afternoon of June 23,
2010, I felt it.
hc_2.0/brbethke/10
What To DoIf You Believe You Are
Intruding on the Personal
Space of a Shark.
Step Don’t panic! Sharks are naturally inquisitive, and
your newfound aquatic friend may simply be
curious. So don’t shout or thrash the water.
Instead, slowly and calmly grasp your surfboard
with both hands, then tuck your feet up under
your butt, just as tight as they can possibly go.
Next, look down into the water around you, and
try to determine which species you are dealing
with. Great Whites have gotten a bad rap over the
years and are neither as numerous nor as vicious
as some uninformed people would have you
believe. Whitetips are almost close to completely
harmless. Reef Grays can be unpredictable, but
they are also territorial, and if you can locate their
“home turf” and vacate it, they generally won’t
follow you.
Hint: Remember, most shallow-water sharks are
pretty well-camouflaged from the top. So if you
are having trouble spotting the shark proper, try
looking for its shadow on the sandy bottom.
Step
1.
2.
Step We hope your shark encounter will be fun and
educational and leave you with a lasting appreciation
for these magnificent creatures. But if it does
go less than perfectly, remember: direct pressure
almost always stops arterial bleeding.
3.
Published as a public service by:
People for Ethical Shark Treatment
www.chompchomp.org
hc_2.0/brbethke/11
The dorsal fin broke the surface about twenty yards away from
me. It was circling me slowly, propelling itself with lazy
strokes of its long, tapered tail. The shark didn't seem to be
motivated to eat me immediately, which was good, but it wasn't
going on its fishy way, either, which would have been better. I
had plenty of time to size it up.
Length? About fifteen feet, which made it a monster. Color?
A mottled brownish-gray. Head shape? Wide, with a blunt snout...
Oh, sweet bungee-jumping Jesus. It was a tiger shark.
Tiger sharks suck.
Okay, if you want to get technical about it, remoras suck;
tigers bite. And what, the casually interested observer might
ask, do they bite?
People for Ethical Shark Treatment
CONFIDENTIAL MEMO
TO: Don Beckham, President, PEST
FROM: Rob DuPre, Chair, Fund-Raising
DATE: 3/16/05
RE: Kaneohe Shark Petting Zoo
Don, look, I know we’ve been through this
a million times, and I know I’ve been
voted down. And yes, I understand that the
tourists go gah-gah over licensed Disney
characters.
But seriously: Captain Hook as the mascot
for our shark petting zoo? I mean, call
it a hunch, but I think we’re talking
major wrong message here.
Worried,
RD
hc_2.0/brbethke/12
Name it. Fish, sea turtles, porpoises, aquatic birds;
basically anything smaller and slower-moving than the shark, and
sometimes anything larger, too. I once saw a fibreglas catamaran
hull a tiger had decided to try for taste. Left a big hole.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention.
They're especially fond of surfer al fresco.
#
- INDEX, in the space of heartbeats -
Q. Do you often see tiger sharks on the surface in the daytime?
A. No, they typically stay in deep water during daylight hours
and only come into the shallows to feed at night. Which,
incidentally, is why you should never go for a midnight
skinny-dip anywhere except Waikiki, where the washed-off
tanning oil from the tourists forms big cholesterol slicks
and puts Mr. Tiger there right off his diet.
Q. If you do run into a tiger shark, how can you keep it from
attacking?
A. Frankly, the best defense is prevention. Don't thrash the
water; don't appear helpless or unaware; don't wear flashy
jewelry, expensive watches, or show large amounts of cash -
wait a minute, that's how to avoid getting mugged. Then
again, all these rules do apply to tiger sharks. Except for
the bit about cash, of course.
Q. If a tiger shark is exhibiting aggressive behavior towards
you, what's the best way to discourage it?
hc_2.0/brbethke/13
A. The U.S. Navy has had great success with proximity fuses and
one-kilo bricks of DuPont C4.
Q. What if you happen to be fresh out of high explosives?
A. In a pinch, low explosives will do.
Q. Is it absolutely necessary to kill the shark?
A. No. In point of fact, many subspecies are now classed as
endangered and are protected by international treaty and
law, and it would be a serious crime to kill such a shark.
For, as a number of courts in California have ruled, just
because an animal is trying to gnaw your leg off, that is not
sufficient excuse to permit injuring a member of a protected
species.
Q. Oh. So if you don't want to - or can't - kill the shark, what
then?
A. You could try talking calmly to it, reasoning with it, or
giving it a nice tummy-rub.
Q. Will that work?
A. No.
#
Ding!
(My imagination supplies this sound. It is the sound of an
oven timer going off, and signals the start of dinner. All this
flashing back and indexing of advice and such rot had taken the
merest matter of seconds, as the shark completed one last long
circle around me. Then...)
Ding!
hc_2.0/brbethke/14
And I was the target of a fifteen-foot-long organic torpedo.
With teeth.
They say your life flashes before your eyes in moments like
this. What I saw instead was an old rerun of Flipper, the one
where he saves Chip and Sandy by butting the shark in the gills. I
mean, hey, I had to see something, and as Jack Burroughs I'd never
had a life. As Bob Sanders I did have a life, and a pretty darn
good one at that, but it hadn't been long enough to make even a
coming-attractions trailer, much less a movie.
Somewhere in there, far too late, my forebrain finally got a
wake-up call through to my voluntary nervous system and I lunged
forward, to drive my arms deep into the water and start paddling
like a palmetto bug in a bucket of pool chlorine. A small wave
stole up behind me, then, and added a touch of desperately needed
speed, but the shark saw my movement and readjusted its attack
vector. I suppose if I'd been really thinking I could have tried
something tricksy, like slipping off my ankle leash, bailing off
the board, and hoping that the shark was homing in on it, not me.
But there wasn't even that much time to think.
The onrushing monster broached the surface about thirty feet
away, just exactly like a happy baby humpback whale. I saw those
ancient, pitiless, gimlet eyes staring at me; watched in
sickening horror as that gaping maw opened wide and the beast
closed those final, deadly, yards---
Hydroplaning on its pectoral fins? What the Hell?
I stopped paddling. Sat up straight on my board, staring at
hc_2.0/brbethke/15
that incredibly weird sight. The shark's mouth was continuing to
open wider, as its head rose higher out of the water, and it
dumped its forward velocity into a great, sloshing, bow wave...
Five feet away from me the shark came to a dead stop, nose
pointed straight up at the sky, tail almost touching the sandy
bottom, bobbing gently on the swell. I sidled over the bow wave
as it surged past, then backpaddled to slow my forward momentum,
and put my feet down to kill my drift. From the back edge of its
gills forward, the shark's head was completely out of the water.
And still, the mouth continued to open wider. The upper jaw
began to bend, too, in blatant defiance of known anatomy, until at
last the mouth was an impossible, flat, perfectly circular
opening, lined with a fringe of jagged teeth.
The gills vented water, then snapped shut. There was a kiss
of compressed air, a high-pitched electrical whine, and the
sticky, sucky, whoopee-cushion sound of complicated rubber
gaskets unsealing. A human head popped up in the shark's mouth.
It looked at me.
It spoke.
"Hey, aren't you Max Kool, the guy who wrote Silicon Jungle?"
Oh please, God. Not him. Not here. Not now...
hc_2.0/brbethke/16
2
HOTWIRE REDUX
The human head in the shark’s mouth cocked slightly to one
side: probably squinting at me, although it was hard to tell
through those mirrorshades. The sunglasses seemed to be held in
place by tiny silver bolts threaded through eyebrow and cheekbone
piercings, and the top of the head sported a mohawk’s crest of
either hair or well-chewed saltwater taffy, in a shade of orange
not often found in nature. The mohawk was counterbalanced by a
thin wisp of greenish-purple billy goat's beard on the chin.
Ah. Male, then, unless female facial hair was back in
fashion on the mainland. The hair and beard were both somewhat
matted down by the cramped and damp quarters inside the
microsub-disguised-as-a-shark, and whatever stealth value the
ship may have once possessed was no doubt entirely negated by the
sheer mass of metal the guy had piercing his ears, lips, eyebrows,
and nose. There were two parallel lines of fake IC chips studded
along the sides of his head, halfway between ear and mohawk; the
chipsets were joined by a complicated tracery of pale blue tattoos
that I abruptly realized were supposed to resemble printed
circuits, and which trailed off down the back of the guy's neck.
hc_2.0/brbethke/17
Okay, I could name the fashion modality. TotalTekno is what
the trendy magazines called it. Me, I thought Frankenstein: The
Next Generation got the concept better.
We bobbed over another swell or two together, while I tried
to sort out what I was feeling. Relief? No. Apprehension? No.
It was more of an itchy, emotional rash, which I vaguely
remembered from my previous life as a corporate drone...
Oh yes, that was it. Annoyance.
The head in the fish grew impatient. "Come on, don't play
coy with me. I've had people watching you for weeks. You are Max
Kool! Or should I say---" He paused, for painfully obvious
dramatic effect.
"Jack Burroughs!"
I shook my head. "So solly. No habla Inglis."
The face frowned. "Save it, chum. I've found your little
autobiography out on the Net. Everyone has. Not much of a
disappearance there, eh Jack? I mean, why not post your bleedin'
pager number while you were at it?"
I shook my head again, and cupped a hand around my left ear.
"Vas? Ich kann nicht sie verstehen."
"And that name, for chrissakes. A. A. Milne, innit? 'Winnie
the Pooh lived in the Hundred Acre Wood, under the name of
Sanders.' Was that your idea?"
I gave up trying to act ignorant, and resorted to the sort of
ignorance that comes to me naturally. "Hello, Hotwire." I blew
out a heavy, resigned sigh that lifted the damp hair off my
hc_2.0/brbethke/18
forehead. "That's the real you, isn't it?"
The face split into a broad grin, with just the faintest
tinny chiming of lip jewelry. "In the flesh and sand, Jack! But
hey, I go by the handle of Firmware now!"
I nodded. Firmware. It figured. I sighed again. "How long
has it been? Four years? And now you've come all this way, and
spent all this time," I paused, to bob over the crest of another
small wave, and cop another look at his shark-sub, "and all that
money, just to track me down again. Why?"
Firmware's grin subsided into a sly smile. "Would you
believe, I'm here to rescue you?"
I leaned back, and spread my arms in a gesture that took in
the sea, the surf, and sun and everything. "Do I look like I want
to be rescued?"
Firmware kept smiling. "Then how about I'm Silicon Orpheus,
here to bring Max Kool back from the dead?"
I pursed my lips, and shook my head. "Don't bother. Won't
happen. Max Kool is dead, and he plans to stay that way."
"Are you sure?"
I looked Firmware right square in the mirrorshades and
nodded with all the conviction I could muster. "Yes, absolutely.
Max Kool was a major pain in the ass, and being him made a
shambles of my realtime life. I don't miss him one bit."
"Not even a little?"
"Nope."
hc_2.0/brbethke/19
"But surely there are times, late at night, when you lie
awake in the stale night heat and realize that it's midnight
somewhere, and the Net is calling out to you in a seductive
whisper as it speaks in dreams of lambent fire---"
I splashed some water in his face to snap him out of it. He
sputtered and shook his head. When I had his attention again, I
asked, "You write that line yourself?"
He nodded quickly. "Yes!"
"Thought so. It sucked."
His smile switched off with an audible ping. "Well,
actually---"
"Look," I said, interrupting. "Hotwire, or Firmware, or
VegeMatic, or whatever the hell you want to call yourself these
days; I did it, and it was fun, but now it's over. I've been
offline for four years, and I'm happy. I don't even own a pocket
calculator now."
Firmware looked crestfallen. Literally. "But Jack---"
"This," I grabbed the rails of my Merrick Thruster, "this is
what I'm about, now. I surf reality."
Firmware shook his head. "But---"
"I mean, listen to me. I can talk normal now. No more of
those nested parentheticals inside parentheticals---"
"Those were cool," Firmware demurred. "It was like trying to
solve an algebraic expression, to figure out what the Hell you
were saying."
I shook my head. "I don't do that no more."
hc_2.0/brbethke/20
He looked at me, raw shock playing on the portions of his
face that were visible. "What about your infonuggets?"
I shook my head again. "Don't need
'em, dude."
Firmware stared at me, and his mouth
fell open in a pained gasp. "Aw, man, those were your trademark!"
He looked at me a moment longer, then set his fuzzy little chin in
some sort of resolve. "That settles it. I have got to bring the
old Jack Burroughs back! Man, the world needs you!"
I pulled together all the contempt I had handy and dumped it
all into one devastatingly Stallonesque sneer. "Buddy, as far as
I’m concerned the world can go fuck itself, in alphabetical order,
starting with---"
Actually, I didn't have all that much contempt bottled up,
and it petered out halfway through the idea.
"---the Amazon basin," I finished, rather lamely.
Firmware looked up at me. From the rapid twitching of the
skin around his eyes, I guessed he was blinking. "That made
absolutely no sense," he observed.
I shrugged. "Yeah, well..."
"Look, Jack," he said, "as a friend, I've got to tell you,
this exile has not been kind to you. You've lost your edge."
I shrugged again. "But I'm happy."
"A happy doormat it still a doormat. Look, what you need is
a challenge."
"I'm well-adjusted," I pointed out.
InfoNuggets
Okay, so I lied to Firmware. Sue me.
hc_2.0/brbethke/21
"So's a hamster when he's in his exercise wheel. But you, my
friend, are destined for something bigger."
"My diet is ninety-percent papaya and avocado," I protested.
Firmware paused, and considered me. "Jack?" he said, and
there was something in the way he smiled at me then that made my
blood run cold and all the little vestigial hairs on the small of
my back stand at rigid attention. Oh no, he couldn't; he
wouldn't---"
"What," he said, still smiling like a real-estate agent, "if
I were to tell you that I really came all this way for just one
reason: to make you an offer---"
"That I can't refuse?" I blurted out. "Been there, done
that, read my lips: No! There, I just refused."
Firmware cocked his head in the other direction, and from the
torsional stress around his cheekbone piercings I guessed he was
narrowing his eyes. "Don't be so hasty, Jack. There's something
else you need to know. Cyberpunk is mainstream, now."
I shuddered. "Oh? And here I heard it was dead."
"Dead, mainstream: what's the diff? I mean, when Days of Our
Lives can run a six-week subplot about Fernando using VR goggles
to spy on Victoria while she's having an affair with Lance---"
"Okay," I said, fighting down a series of dry heaves. "I get
the picture."
"No, you don't," he said, still in that slimey voice. "Like
I said, cyberpunk is mainstream now---and Max Kool is famous!"
A cold chill shot through me, which was pretty remarkable
hc_2.0/brbethke/22
when you consider that it was 80-plus degrees and the ocean was
like salty bathwater. "Really?" I said nervously. "I thought he
was notorious."
"Famous, notorious: again, what's the diff?" Firmware
smiled, and shook his head. "Y'know, so many people downloaded
that little online autobio of yours that Darvon Schnitzel even
reviewed it for Kirkus."
That, I must confess, got me right square in the ego. "No
kidding? What did he say?"
"That it was either brilliantly post-deconstructionist or
just plain awful, he couldn't decide."
My ego experienced explosive detumescence. I scratched my
head. "Post-deconstructionist?"
Firmware shrugged. "I think it's kind of like
post-literate, only different."
We bobbed over another swell together, while my ego fell back
to regroup and Firmware pondered semiotic literary theory.
"My point," he said at last, "is that Max Kool has become the
quintessential post-modern cybercounterculture antihero. There
are people out there who say that you are the guy who took down
BritTel for that week last January, and you did it with just two
trunk calls and an Oscar Mayer weiner whistle."
I finished sorting through his stack of verbal qualifiers
and started to laugh. "Oh, I get it now. You wanted me to admit
I was involved in that mess. But, hey, even if I was---which I
was not---I’m not nearly stupid enough to claim credit for it."
hc_2.0/brbethke/23
Firmware chuckled with me. "Of course not. The whole idea
is patently absurd. Anyone who's ever had to use BritTel knows
what a tottering wreck the thing is; they probably just lost
another backbone packet switcher and didn't want to have to admit
to how crappy their hardware infrastructure is, so they cooked up
that story about being attacked by 'a rogue gang of international
cyberterrorists.'"
Firmware's expression took a sudden sharp turn towards the
deadly serious. "But, Jack: if those are the sorts of rumors that
are being made up about you, don't you think it's time you go back
and tell the whole world the truth?"
I thought it over for---oh, two seconds, at least. "No.
Never. Bad idea."
"Not even if it means becoming the King of Heaven?"
Well, well, whadaya know: Firmware had succeeded in
surprising me after all, and even in getting me to smile for a
picosecond. "What, that place still exists? Geez, I expected the
NetCops to shut it down years ago."
Firmware went back to his disturbing real-estate agent's
smile, as we bobbed over another small swell, and I took a quick
look out to sea. Hmm, there, and maybe three hundred yards off...
"Oh, the NetCops found Heaven, all right," Firmware said
lightly. "But they're not quite as dim as you seem to think.
Instead of shutting the site down, they put a counter on the gate
and started keeping track of who was going in and out.
Eventually, they even planted informants in the joint."
hc_2.0/brbethke/24
My general muddle of emotions took a sudden wrenching twist
towards the paranoiac. Heaven was the illegal online virtual
reality nightclub where I'd first met Firmware, back when I was
Max_Kool and he was calling himself Hotwire. Did what he was
telling me now mean that back then...?
"At first," Firmware prattled on, not noticing my reaction,
"the NetCops stuck to taking notes, and turning up the occasional
clod of interesting dirt. For example, did you know that
Rapmastah MC Ruthless is actually the son of the founder of the
New Jersey Aryan Christian Militia?"
I didn't answer. My thoughts were whirling like a bullfrog
in a blender.
Firmware timed out on waiting for a response from me, and
went on. "Well, that's not important now. The important thing
is, everything was rolling along just fine, nothing remarkable,
until the day your little autobiography file hit the Net. Then..."
Firmware paused, and grinned.
"Then, we're talking batshit berserk! Forty thousand hits
the first hour! People waiting in the queue for two days just to
get in and be seen there! By the end of the week your favorite
pirate chat room was number one with a bullet on the Peter's
Picks, Flyman's Finds, VirWorld TopTen, and Websight Hot Hundred
lists! The InfoMall sysops were going stark drooling bug-eyed
nuts!"
I finished my turmoil of thinking and reached something that
felt somewhat like a decision. With a quick splash or two I
hc_2.0/brbethke/25
flipped the nose of my board around and pointed it right down the
shark's throat. Seen from the front at eye level, a Merrick
Thruster can look pretty intimidating, provided you don't know it
weighs just six pounds and is mostly plastic foam.
"Who are you?" I demanded, in my best clench-jawed guttural
growl. "A NetCop?"
Firmware's smile faltered slightly, as he tried to shy away
from the point of the board. "No, Jack. Honest. I'm one of your
biggest fans."
I puffed up my chest and brought my hands forward, as if
ready to dig them into the water and deliver a sudden, lethal,
pelvic thrust. "Who do you work for?
The FDI? The CIA?"
Firmware gulped, and what was left
of his smile vanished. "Really?" he
asked. I nodded, with the fierce and deadly serious glare I
usually saved for tourist kids I caught throwing ice in the
jacuzzi. Then I leaned forward, glowering like Michael Dorn, and
tensed my pecs. Firmware's already-pale face finished blanching
the rest of the way to dead-fish-belly white, and he tried to lick
his lips but got a tongue stud caught on a lip loop.
"Megasoft Edutainment," he said at last, when he finally got
his mouth hardware sorted out. "I'm Byron Cuivre-Boule, the
Marketing Communications Manager."
My chest deflated like a punctured whoopee cushion and my
hands dropped limply to my sides. "Huh?"
Lethal Thrust
What, and risk dinging the nose of my
board? Are you nuts?
hc_2.0/brbethke/26
"The InfoMall didn't know how to handle all the Net traffic
Heaven was generating. So they sold it to us."
I repeated my earlier observation, this time with wrinkled
nose. "Huh? Sold? But---but that was a pirate room!"
From wherever it'd gone, Firmware's horribly ingratiating
smile popped back with a vengeance. "YES! And do you know what
kind of demographic it drew?!"
I was still sputtering fragments. "But--- how---"
Firmware shook his head in a friendly, genial, paternal,
Brian Dennehy sort of way. "Shouldn't go leaving your VRML source
code lying around where just anyone can find it, Jack. It was a
piece of cake of us to reverse-engineer Heaven and turn it into
something marketable."
I downsized my vocabulary to blubbering. "Bu---"
"Not to mention copyrightable, and licensable. And now,
thanks to you, my friend, Megasoft Edutainment Group has
exclusive rights to the family recreational franchise for the
21st Century!"
All the emotion I had left went into one word. "WHAT?"
"VR HEAVEN DOT COMTM!" Firmware crowed. "The ultimate
synthesis of prepackaged theme park reality and multimedia
entertainment! We are opening up VR Heaven Dot Com nightclubs in
every major shopping mall on the planet! You can pop-in through
the Net; you can drop in for food and adult beverages and rent
your VR gear there. It's a nightclub where the fun never stops,
because it's always midnight somewhere, and you can forget cover
hc_2.0/brbethke/27
charges, because we bill by the minute just for soaking up the
ambience! And Jack, we owe it all to you!"
He paused, grinning at me expectantly.
I looked away, out to sea, as we rose and fell on another
swell. There, and barely a hundred yards off, now.
I turned to look at Firmware again. He was still grinning at
me. Not a clue...
"So," I said, smiling gently. "Then you're here to give me
my royalty check?"
Firmware's smile switched off with an audible click. "Er,
not exactly. There were some, uh, issues with the IPO. And the
shareholders, Jack, well---"
"Then tell you what: why don’t you just fuck off?"
I imagine stunned steers in slaughterhouses have about the
same facial expression as Firmware had in that moment. I flipped
the nose of my board around with a quick splash and aimed for the
beach.
A second or five later, Firmware began to recover. "Hey,
it’s not like you and Bret and Captain Crash copyrighted your code
or anything."
"It was an illegal room, dipshit."
"And you didn’t exactly stick around to defend your
intellectual property rights."
"We were on the run from the law, asshole." I wasted a
glance on him. His face was showing the early warning signs of
panic.
hc_2.0/brbethke/28
"Now, just hold on a minute, Jack. You haven’t heard my
offer." He looked down; all sorts of mechanical noises started to
come from inside the shark as he apparently tried to power it up
again. I took a look out to sea, as we crested the next swell.
There, definitely, at fifty yards and closing.
Firmware's voice shot up an excited octave. "All we want you
to do is lurk! I told you, cyberpunk is mainstream now, and Max
Kool is a legend! There are at least fifteen half-assed copies of
you running around the Net these days, but if we can get out word
that the original Max Kool hangs exclusively at VR HeavenTM---"
One last look behind me; thirty yards. I levered forward and
stretched out prone on my board.
"It's a classic whisper campaign, Jack! First we spread more
wild rumors about you, to build your rep! Then in two months you
come out of hiding to judge the Gunnar LeMat Look-Alike Contest
and Memorial Splatball Tournament at VR HeavenTM\San Francisco!
We stage an arrest for the international newsmedia; you get sprung
on bail and skip the country. Then we set you up on a villa in
the south of France, just like Michael Jackson!"
I cleared my mind, put my arms in the water, and focused on
what my hands and inner ears were telling me. No, not this
wave...
"Then, we're talking product endorsements! Infommercials!
A made-for-cable movie of your life! There is a goddam fortune
out there, just waiting for the original Max Kool, and all you
have to do is step up to the plate!"
hc_2.0/brbethke/29
Another sort of noise came out of the shark then; a bubbling
hiss I guessed as a venting ballast tank. For a moment I wondered
if Firmware knew something so retro as how to swim.
Then I caught the incoming message from my fingers and toes:
an upwelling of cold water; a shift in balance. Ah yes, this was
the one good wave I'd been waiting for all day. I threw my arms
and shoulders into a strong, deep, butterfly stroke.
"Jack!" Firmware screamed, somewhere rapidly receding behind
me. "We can get you on talk shows! World-wide chat sessions!
Why, the t-shirt rights alone could be worth millions!"
With a deep, throaty, rumble, the wave rolled up behind me,
and I bounced up to kneeling position and kept stroking. I felt
the lift, the power, the increasing speed. Iopened my eyes and
got to my feet.
"Jaaaaaaaaack!" Firmware's voice was little more than an
anguished wail in the distance now. "You can meet beautiful
women!"
Sigh.
If I were an active duty Christian, I probably would have
looked over my shoulder then and shouted out something really
pithy, like, "Get thee behind me!" But instead, I’d become a
devoted practitioner of Beachboy Zen.
Catch a wave, and you're sitting on top of the world.
hc_2.0/brbethke/30
3
BETWEEN A ROCK AND A WORKPLACE
Life is full of difficult decisions. This wasn't one of
them. I rode the wave until it broke, and then---well, I could
either kick out, paddle back, and pick up where I left off with
Firmware, or else I could bail for the beach and call it a day.
I bailed.
What the hell, I was supposed to be working the four-tomidnight
shift at the hotel this week, anyway. No harm in going
in to work a little---shudder!---early. And besides, that run-in
with Firmware had me feeling just a touch uneasy.
Okay, acid-dipped-raw-nerve-endings raw honesty time. It
had my stomach doing double-axels with a backflip.
I mean, yeah, sure, I could accept, in an intellectual sor
|
Метки: headcrash 2.0 |
Cyberpunk 1 |
Cyberpunk 1
a1980 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.
CYBERPUNK
by Bruce Bethke
First published in AMAZINGa Science Fiction Stories, Volume 57,
Number 4, November 1983
The snoozer went off at seven and I was out of my sleepsack, powered up,
and on-line in nanos. That’s as far as I got. Soon’s I booted and got—
CRACKERS/BUDDYBOO/8ER
—on the tube I shut down fast. Damn! Rayno had been on line before me,
like always, and that message meant somebody else had gotten into our Net—
and that meant trouble by the busload! I couldn’t do anything more on term, so I
zipped into my jumper, combed my hair, and went downstairs.
Mom and Dad were at breakfast when I slid into the kitchen. “Good
Morning, Mikey!” said Mom with a smile. “You were up so late last night I
thought I wouldn’t see you before you caught your bus.”
“Had a tough program to crack,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “now you can sit down and have a decent breakfast.” She
turned around to pull some Sara Lees out of the microwave and plunk them
down on the table.
“If you’d do your schoolwork when you’re supposed to you wouldn’t have
to stay up all night,” growled Dad from behind his caffix and faxsheet. I sloshed
some juice in a glass and poured it down, stuffed a Sara Lee into my mouth, and
stood to go.
“What?” asked Mom. “That’s all the breakfast you’re going to have?”
“Haven’t got time,” I said. “I gotta get to school early to see if the program
checks.” Dad growled something more and Mom spoke to quiet him, but I didn’t
hear much ‘cause I was out the door.
I caught the transys for school, just in case they were watching. Two blocks
down the line I got off and transferred going back the other way, and a coupla
transfers later I wound up whipping into Buddy’s All-Night Burgers. Rayno was
in our booth, glaring into his caffix. It was 7:55 and I’d beat Georgie and Lisa
there.
“What’s on line?” I asked as I dropped into my seat, across from Rayno. He
just looked up at me through his eyebrows and I knew better than to ask again.
At eight Lisa came in. Lisa is Rayno’s girl, or at least she hopes she is. I can
see why: Rayno’s seventeen—two years older than the rest of us—he wears flash
plastic and his hair in The Wedge (Dad blew a chip when I said I wanted my hair
cut like that) and he’s so cool he won’t even touch her, even when she’s begging
for it. She plunked down in her seat next to Rayno and he didn’t blink.
Cyberpunk 2
a1980 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.
Georgie still wasn’t there at 8:05. Rayno checked his watch again, then
finally looked up from his caffix. “The compiler’s been cracked,” he said. Lisa
and I both swore. We’d worked up our own little code to keep our Net private. I
mean, our Olders would just blow boards if they ever found out what we were
really up to. And now somebody’d broken our code.
“Georgie’s old man?” I asked.
“Looks that way.” I swore again. Georgie and I started the Net by linking
our smartterms with some stuff we stored in his old man’s home business system.
Now my Dad wouldn’t know an opsys if he crashed on one, but Georgie’s old
man—he’s a greentooth. A tech-type. He’d found one of ours once before and
tried to take it apart to see what it did. We’d just skinned out that time.
“Any idea how far in he got?” Lisa asked. Rayno looked through her, at the
front door. Georgie’d just come in.
“We’re gonna find out,” Rayno said.
Georgie was coming in smiling, but when he saw that look in Rayno’s eyes
he sat down next to me like the seat was booby-trapped.
“Good Morning Georgie,” said Rayno, smiling like a shark.
“I didn’t glitch!” Georgie whined. “I didn’t tell him a thing!”
“Then how the Hell did he do it?”
“You know how he is, he’s weird! He likes puzzles!” Georgie looked to me
for backup. “That’s how come I was late. He was trying to weasel me, but I
didn’t tell him a thing! I think he only got it partway open. He didn’t ask about
the Net!”
Rayno actually sat back, pointed at us all, and smiled. “You kids just don’t
know how lucky you are. I was in the Net last night and flagged somebody who
didn’t know the secures was poking Georgie’s compiler. I made some changes.
By the time your old man figures them out, well...”
I sighed relief. See what I mean about being cool? Rayno had us outlooped
all the time!
Rayno slammed his fist down on the table. “But Dammit Georgie, you gotta
keep a closer watch on him!”
Then Rayno smiled and bought us all drinks and pie all the way around. Lisa
had a cherry Coke, and Georgie and I had caffix just like Rayno. God, that stuff
tastes awful! The cups were cleared away, and Rayno unzipped his jumper and
reached inside.
“Now kids,” he said quietly, “it’s time for some serious fun.” He whipped
out his microterm. “School’s off!”
I still drop a bit when I see that microterm—Geez, it’s a beauty! It’s a
Zeilemann Nova 300, but we’ve spent so much time reworking it, it’s practically
custom from the motherboard up. Hi-baud, rammed, rammed, ported, with the
wafer display folds down to about the size of a vid casette; I’d give an ear to
have one like it. We’d used Georgie’s old man’s chipburner to tuck some special
Cyberpunk 3
a1980 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.
tricks in ROM and there wasn’t a system in CityNet it couldn’t talk to.
Rayno ordered up a smartcab and we piled out of Buddy’s. No more riding
the transys for us, we were going in style! We charged the smartcab off to some
law company and cruised all over Eastside.
Riding the boulevards got stale after awhile, so we rerouted to the library.
We do a lot of our fun at the library, ‘cause nobody ever bothers us there.
Nobody ever goes there. We sent the smartcab, still on the law company
account, off to Westside. Getting past the guards and the librarians was just a
matter of flashing some ID and then we zipped off into the stacks.
Now, you’ve got to ID away your life to get on the libsys terms—which isn’t
worth half a scare when your ID is all fudged like ours is—and they watch real
careful. But they move their terms around a lot, so they’ve got ports on line all
over the building. We found an unused port, and me and Georgie kept watch
while Rayno plugged in his microterm and got on line.
“Get me into the Net,” he said, handing me the term. We don’t have a
stored opsys yet for Netting, so Rayno gives me the fast and tricky jobs.
Through the dataphones I got us out of the libsys and into CityNet. Now,
Olders will never understand. They still think a computer has got to be a brain in
a single box. I can get the same results with opsys stored in a hundred places,
once I tie them together. Nearly every computer has got a dataphone port,
CityNet is a great linking system, and Rayno’s microterm has the smarts to do
the job clean and fast so nobody flags on us. I pulled the compiler out of
Georgie’s old man’s computer and got into our Net. Then I handed the term back
to Rayno.
“Well, let’s do some fun. Any requests?” Georgie wanted something to get
even with his old man, and I had a new routine cooking, but Lisa’s eyes lit up
‘cause Rayno handed the term to her, first.
“I wanna burn Lewis,” she said.
“Oh fritz!” Georgie complained. “You did that last week!”
“Well, he gave me another F on a theme.”
“I never get F’s. If you’d read books once in a—”
“Georgie,” Rayno said softly, “Lisa’s on line.” That settled that. Lisa’s eyes
were absolutely glowing.
Lisa got back into CityNet and charged a couple hundred overdue books to
Lewis’s libsys account. Then she ordered a complete fax sheet of Encyclopedia
Britannica printed out at his office. I got next turn.
Georgie and Lisa kept watch while I accessed. Rayno was looking over my
shoulder. “Something new this week?”
“Airline reservations. I was with my Dad two weeks ago when he set up a
business trip, and I flagged on maybe getting some fun. I scanned the ticket clerk
real careful and picked up the access code.”
“Okay, show me what you can do.”
Cyberpunk 4
a1980 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.
Accessing was so easy that I just wiped a couple of reservations first, to see
if there were any bells and whistles.
None. No checks, no lockwords, no confirm codes. I erased a couple dozen
people without crashing down or locking up. “Geez,” I said, “There’s no deep
secures at all!”
“I been telling you. Olders are even dumber than they look. Georgie? Lisa?
C’mon over here and see what we’re running!”
Georgie was real curious and asked a lot of questions, but Lisa just looked
bored and snapped her gum and tried to stand closer to Rayno. Then Rayno said,
“Time to get off Sesame Street. Purge a flight.”
I did. It was simple as a save. I punched a few keys, entered, and an entire
plane disappeared from all the reservation files. Boy, they’d be surprised when
they showed up at the airport. I started purging down the line, but Rayno
interrupted.
“Maybe there’s no bells and whistles, but wipe out a whole block of flights
and it’ll stand out. Watch this.” He took the term from me and cooked up a
routine in RAM to do a global and wipe out every flight that departed at an :07
for the next year. “Now that’s how you do these things without waving a flag.”
“That’s sharp,” Georgie chipped in, to me. “Mike, you’re a genius! Where
do you get these ideas?” Rayno got a real funny look in his eyes.
“My turn,” Rayno said, exiting the airline system.
“What’s next in the stack?” Lisa asked him.
“Yeah, I mean, after garbaging the airlines . . .” Georgie didn’t realize he
was supposed to shut up.
“Georgie! Mike!” Rayno hissed. “Keep watch!” Soft, he added, “It’s time
for The Big One.”
“You sure?” I asked. “Rayno, I don’t think we’re ready.”
“We’re ready.”
Georgie got whiney. “We’re gonna get in big trouble—”
“Wimp,” spat Rayno. Georgie shut up.
We’d been working on The Big One for over two months, but I still didn’t
feel real solid about it. It almost made a clean if/then/else; if The Big One
worked/then we’d be rich/else . . . it was the else I didn’t have down.
Georgie and me scanned while Rayno got down to business. He got back
into CityNet, called the cracker opsys out of OurNet, and poked it into
Merchant’s Bank & Trust. I’d gotten into them the hard way, but never messed
with their accounts; just did it to see if I could do it. My data’d been sitting in
their system for about three weeks now and nobody’d noticed. Rayno thought it
would be really funny to use one bank computer to crack the secures on other
bank computers.
While he was peeking and poking I heard walking nearby and took a closer
look. It was just some old waster looking for a quiet place to sleep. Rayno was
Cyberpunk 5
a1980 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.
finished linking by the time I got back. “Okay kids,” he said, “this is it.” He
looked around to make sure we were all watching him, then held up the term and
stabbed the RETURN key. That was it. I stared hard at the display, waiting to
see what else was gonna be. Rayno figured it’d take about ninety seconds.
The Big One, y’see, was Rayno’s idea. He’d heard about some kids in
Sherman Oaks who almost got away with a five million dollar electronic fund
transfer; they hadn’t hit a hangup moving the five mil around until they tried to
dump it into a personal savings account with a $40 balance. That’s when all the
flags went up.
Rayno’s cool; Rayno’s smart. We weren’t going to be greedy, we were just
going to EFT fifty K. And it wasn’t going to look real strange, ‘cause it got
strained through some legitimate accounts before we used it to open twenty
dummies.
If it worked.
The display blanked, flickered, and showed:
TRANSACTION COMPLETED. HAVE A NICE DAY.
I started to shout, but remembered I was in a library. Georgie looked less
terrified. Lisa looked like she was going to attack Rayno.
Rayno just cracked his little half smile, and started exiting. “Funtime’s over,
kids.”
“I didn’t get a turn,” Georgie mumbled.
Rayno was out of all the nets and powering down. He turned, slow, and
looked at Georgie through those eyebrows of his. “You are still on The List.”
Georgie swallowed it ‘cause there was nothing else he could do. Rayno
folded up the microterm and tucked it back inside his jumper.
We got a smartcab outside the library and went off to someplace Lisa picked
for lunch. Georgie got this idea about garbaging up the smartcab’s brain so that
the next customer would have a real state fair ride, but Rayno wouldn’t let him
do it. Rayno didn’t talk to him during lunch, either.
After lunch I talked them into heading up to Martin’s Micros. That’s one of
my favorite places to hang out. Martin’s the only Older I know who can really
work a computer without blowing out his headchips, and he never talks down to
me, and he never tells me to keep my hands off anything. In fact, Martin’s been
real happy to see all of us, ever since Rayno bought that $3000 vidgraphics art
animation package for Lisa’s birthday.
Martin was sitting at his term when we came in. “Oh, hi Mike! Rayno! Lisa!
Georgie!” We all nodded. “Nice to see you again. What can I do for you today?”
“Just looking,” Rayno said.
“Well, that’s free.” Martin turned back to his term and punched a few more
IN keys. “Damn!” he said to the term.
“What’s the problem?” Lisa asked.
“The problem is me,” Martin said. “I got this software package I’m
Cyberpunk 6
a1980 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.
supposed to be writing, but it keeps bombing out and I don’t know what’s
wrong.”
Rayno asked, “What’s it supposed to do?”
“Oh, it’s a real estate system. Y’know, the whole future-values-in-currentdollars
bit. Depreciation, inflation, amortization, tax credits—”
“Put that in our tang,” said. “What numbers crunch?”
Martin started to explain, and Rayno said to me, “This looks like your kind
of work.” Martin hauled his three hundred pounds of fat out of the chair, and
looked relieved as I dropped down in front of the term. I scanned the parameters,
looked over Martin’s program, and processed a bit. Martin’d only made a few
mistakes. Anybody could have. I dumped Martin’s program and started loading
the right one in off the top of my head.
“Will you look at that?” Martin said.
I didn’t answer ‘cause I was thinking in assembly. In ten minutes I had it in,
compiled, and running test sets. It worked perfect, of course.
“I just can’t believe you kids,” Martin said. “You can program easier than I
can talk.”
“Nothing to it,” I said.
“Maybe not for you. I knew a kid grew up speaking Arabic, used to say the
same thing.” He shook his head, tugged his beard, looked me in the face, and
smiled. “Anyhow, thanks loads, Mike. I don’t know how to . . .” He snapped his
fingers. “Say, I just got something in the other day, I bet you’d be really
interested in.” He took me over to the display case, pulled it out, and set it on the
counter. “The latest word in microterms. The Zeilemann Starfire 600.”
I dropped a bit! Then I ballsed up enough to touch it. I flipped up the wafer
display, ran my fingers over the touch pads, and I just wanted it so bad! “It’s
smart,” Martin said. “Rammed, rammed, and ported.”
Rayno was looking at the specs with that cold look in his eye. “My 300 is
still faster,” he said.
“It should be,” Martin said. “You customized it half to death. But the 600 is
nearly as fast, and it’s stock, and it lists for $1400. I figure you must have spent
nearly 3K upgrading yours.”
“Can I try it out?” I asked. Martin plugged me into his system, and I booted
and got on line. It worked great! Quiet, accurate; so maybe it wasn’t as fast as
Rayno’s—I couldn’t tell the difference. “Rayno, this thing is the max!” I looked
at Martin. “Can we work out some kind of. . . ?” Martin looked back to his
terminal, where the real estate program was still running tests without a glitch.
“I been thinking about that, Mike. You’re a minor, so I can’t legally employ
you.” He tugged on his beard and rolled his tongue around his mouth. “But I’m
hitting that real estate client for some pretty heavy bread on consulting fees, and
it doesn’t seem real fair to me that you . . . Tell you what. Maybe I can’t hire
you, but I sure can buy software you write. You be my consultant on, oh . . .
Cyberpunk 7
a1980 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.
seven more projects like this, and we’ll call it a deal? Sound okay to you?”
Before I could shout yes, Rayno pushed in between me and Martin. “I’ll buy
it. List.” He pulled out a charge card from his jumper pocket. Martin’s jaw
dropped. “Well, what’re you waiting for? My plastic’s good.
“List? But I owe Mike one,” Martin protested.
“List. You don’t owe us nothing.”
Martin swallowed. “Okay Rayno.” He took the card and ran a credcheck on
it. “It’s clean,” Martin said, surprised. He punched up the sale and started
laughing. “I don’t know where you kids get this kind of money!”
“We rob banks,” Rayno said. Martin laughed, and Rayno laughed, and we
all laughed. Rayno picked up the term and walked out of the store. As soon as
we got outside he handed it to me.
“Thanks Rayno, but . . . but I coulda made the deal myself.”
“Happy Birthday, Mike.”
“Rayno, my birthday is in August.”
“Let’s get one thing straight. You work for me.”
It was near school endtime, so we routed back to Buddy’s. On the way, in
the smartcab, Georgie took my Starfire, gently opened the case, and scanned the
boards. “We could double the baud speed real easy.”
“Leave it stock,” Rayno said.
We split up at Buddy’s, and I took the transys home. I was lucky, ‘cause
Mom and Dad weren’t home and I could zip right upstairs and hide the Starfire
in my closet. I wish I had cool parents like Rayno does. They never ask him any
dumb questions.
Mom came home at her usual time, and asked how school was. I didn’t have
to say much, ‘cause just then the stove said dinner was ready and she started
setting the table. Dad came in five minutes later and we started eating.
We got the phone call halfway through dinner. I was the one who jumped up
and answered it. It was Georgie’s old man, and he wanted to talk to my Dad. I
gave him the phone and tried to overhear, but he took it in the next room and
talked real quiet. I got unhungry. I never liked tofu, anyway.
Dad didn’t stay quiet for long. “He what?! Well thank you for telling me!
I’m going to get to the bottom of this right now!” He hung up.
“Who was that, David?” Mom asked.
“That was Mr. Hansen. Georgie’s father. Mike and Georgie were hanging
around with that punk Rayno again!” He snapped around to look at me. I’d
almost made it out the kitchen door. “Michael! Were you in school today?”
I tried to talk cool. I think the tofu had my throat all clogged up.
“Yeah…yeah, I was.”
“Then how come Mr. Hansen saw you coming out of the downtown
library?”
I was stuck. “I—I was down there doing some special research.”
Cyberpunk 8
a1980 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.
“For what class? C’mon Michael, what were you studying?”
It was too many inputs. I was locking up.
“David,” Mom said, “Aren’t you being a bit hasty? I’m sure there’s a good
explanation.”
“Martha, Mr. Hansen found something in his computer that Georgie and
Michael put there. He thinks they’ve been messing with banks.”
“Our Mikey? It must be some kind of bad joke.”
“You don’t know how serious this is! Michael Arthur Harris! What have
you been doing sitting up all night with that terminal? What was that system in
Hansen’s computer? Answer me! What have you been doing?!”
My eyes felt hot. “None of your business! Keep your nose out of things
you’ll never understand, you obsolete old relic!”
“That does it! I don’t know what’s wrong with you damn kids, but I know
that thing isn’t helping!” He stormed up to my room. I tried to get ahead of him
all the way up the steps and just got my hands stepped on. Mom came fluttering
up behind as he yanked all the plugs on my terminal.
“Now David,” Mom said. “Don’t you think you’re being a bit harsh? He
needs that for his homework, don’t you, Mikey?”
“You can’t make excuses for him this time, Martha! I mean it! This goes in
the basement, and tomorrow I’m calling the cable company and getting his line
ripped out! If he has anything to do on computer he can damn well use the
terminal in the den, where I can watch him!” He stomped out, carrying my
smartterm. I slammed the door and locked it. “Go ahead and sulk! It won’t do
you any good!”
I threw some pillows around ‘til I didn’t feel like breaking anything
anymore, then I hauled the Starfire out of the closet. I’d watched over Dad’s
shoulders enough to know his account numbers and access codes, so I got on line
and got down to business. I was finished in half an hour.
I tied into Dad’s terminal. He was using it, like I figured he would be,
scanning school records. Fine. He wouldn’t find out anything; we’d figured out
how to fix school records months ago. I crashed in and gave him a new message
on his vid display.
“Dad,” it said, “there’s going to be some changes around here.”
It took a few seconds to sink in. I got up and made sure the door was locked
real solid. I still got half a scare when he came pounding up the stairs, though. I
didn’t know he could be so loud.
“MICHAEL!!” He slammed into the door. “Open this! Now!”
“No.”
“If you don’t open this door before I count to ten, I’m going to bust it down!
One!”
“Before you do that—”
“Two!”
Cyberpunk 9
a1980 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.
“Better call your bank!”
“Three!”
“B320-5127-OlR.” That was his checking account access code. He silenced
a couple seconds.
“Young man, I don’t know what you think you’re trying to pull—”
“I’m not trying anything. I did it already.”
Mom came up the stairs and said, “What’s going on, David?”
“Shut up, Martha!” He was talking real quiet, now. “What did you do,
Michael?”
“Outlooped you. Disappeared you. Buried you.”
“You mean, you got into the bank computer and erased my checking
account?”
“Savings and mortgage on the condo, too.”
“Oh my God . . .”
Mom said, “He’s just angry, David. Give him time to cool off. Mikey, you
wouldn’t really do that, would you?”
“Then I accessed DynaRand,” I said. “Wiped your job. Your pension. I got
mto your plastic, too.”
“He couldn’t have, David. Could he?”
“Michael!” He hit the door. “I’m going to wring your scrawny neck!”
“Wait!” I shouted back. “I copied all your files before I purged! There’s a
way to recover!”
He let up hammering on the door, and struggled to talk calm. “Give me the
copies right now and I’ll just forget that this happened.”
“I can’t. I mean, I did backups in other computers. And I secured the files
and hid them where only I know how to access.”
There was quiet. No, in a nano I realised it wasn’t quiet, it was Mom and
Dad talking real soft. I eared up to the door but all I caught was Mom saying
‘why not?’ and Dad saying, ‘but what if he is telling the truth?’
“Okay Michael,” Dad said at last. “What do you want?”
I locked up. It was an embarasser; what did I want? I hadn’t thought that far
ahead. Me, caught without a program! I dropped half a laugh, then tried to think.
I mean, there was nothing they could get me I couldn’t get myself, or with
Rayno’s help. Rayno! I wanted to get in touch with him, is what I wanted. I’d
pulled this whole thing off without Rayno!
I decided then it’d probably be better if my Olders didn’t know about the
Starfire, so I told Dad first thing I wanted was my smartterm back. It took a long
time for him to clump down to the basement and get it. He stopped at his term in
the den, first, to scan if I’d really purged him. He was real subdued when he
brought my smartterm back up.
I kept processing, but by the time he got back I still hadn’t come up with
anything more than I wanted them to leave me alone and stop telling me what to
Cyberpunk 10
a1980 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.
do. I got the smartterm into my room without being pulped, locked the door, got
on line, and gave Dad his job back. Then I tried to flag Rayno and Georgie, but
couldn’t, so I left messages for when they booted. I stayed up half the night
playing a war, just to make sure Dad didn’t try anything.
I booted and scanned first thing the next morning, but Rayno and Georgie
still hadn’t come on. So I went down and had an utter silent breakfast and sent
Mom and Dad off to work. I offed school and spent the whole day finishing the
war and working on some tricks and treats programs. We had another utter silent
meal when Mom and Dad came home, and after supper I flagged Rayno had
been in the Net and left a remark on when to find him.
I finally got him on line around eight, and he said Georgie was getting
trashed and probably heading for permanent downtime.
Then I told Rayno all about how I outlooped my old man, but he didn’t
seem real buzzed about it. He said he had something cooking and couldn’t meet
me at Buddy’s that night to talk about it, either. So we got off line, and I started
another war and then went to sleep.
The snoozer said 5:25 when I woke up, and I couldn’t logic how come I was
awake ‘til I started making sense out of my ears. Dad was taking apart the hinges
on my door!
“Dad! You cut that out or I’ll purge you clean! There won’t be backups this
time!”
“Try it,” he growled.
I jumped out of my sleepsack, powered up, booted and—no boot. I tried
again. I could get on line in my smartterm, but I couldn’t port out. “I cut your
cable down in the basement,” he said.
I grabbed the Starfire out of my closet and zipped it inside my jumper, but
before I could do the window, the door and Dad both fell in. Mom came in right
behind, popped open my dresser, and started stuffing socks and underwear in a
suitcase.
“Now you’re fritzed!” I told Dad. “I’ll never give you back your files!” He
grabbed my arm.
“Michael, there’s something I think you should see.” He dragged me down
to his den and pulled some bundles of old paper trash out of his desk. “These are
receipts. This is what obsolete old relics like me use because we don’t trust
computer bookkeeping. I checked with work and the bank; everything that goes
on in the computer has to be verified with paper. You can’t change anything for
more than 24 hours.”
“Twenty-four hours? “ I laughed. “Then you’re still fritzed! I can still wipe
you out any day, from any term in CityNet’”
“I know.”
Mom came into the den, carrying the suitcase and kleenexing her eyes.
“Mikey, you’ve got to understand that we love you, and this is for your own
Cyberpunk 11
a1980 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.
good.” They dragged me down to the airport and stuffed me in a private lear
with a bunch of old gestapos.
#
I’ve had a few weeks now to get used to the Von Schlager Military
Academy. They tell me I’m a bright kid and with good behavior, there’s really
no reason at all why I shouldn’t graduate in five years. I am getting tired, though,
of all the older cadets telling me how soft I’ve got it now that they’ve installed
indoor plumbing.
Of course, I’m free to walk out any time I want. It’s only three hundred
miles to Fort McKenzie, where the road ends
Sometimes at night, after lights out, I’ll pull out my Starfire and run my
fingers over the touchpads. That’s all I can do, since they turn off power in the
barracks at night. I’ll lie there in the dark, thinking about Lisa, and Georgie, and
Buddy’s All-Night Burgers, and all the fun we used to pull off. But mostly I’ll
think about Rayno, and what great plans he cooks up.
I can’t wait to see how he gets me out of this one.
|
Метки: cyberpunk 1 |
Cyberpunk 1.0 |
Cyberpunk 1.0
(BETA)
A novel by
Bruce Bethke
©1998 Bruce Bethke
All Rights Reserved
This version ©1998 Bruce Bethke. All Rights Reserved.
Portions of this work have been previously published in different formats. This
work incorporates material copyrighted in 1980, 1982, 1988, and 1989 by
Bruce Bethke.
Inquiries regarding publication and/or subsidiary rights to this material should
be directed to:
Ashley D. Grayson
Ashley Grayson Literary Agency
1342 18th Street
San Pedro, CA 90732
(310) 548-4672
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons, living, dead, or
undead (“We prefer the term transmortal”), is purely accidental.
Cyberpunk 1.0 1
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
0/ 0/ : Warmstart
Okay, so it’s morning. Sparrows are arguing in the dwarf maples
outside my bedroom window. Metallic coughs and sputters echo down
the street; old man Xiang must have scored some pirate gasoline and
tried to start his Mercedes again. Skateboard wheels grind and clatter on
cracked pavement. Boombox music Doppler-shifts as a squad of middle
school AnnoyBoys roll past.
Ah, the sounds of Spring.
Closer by, I flag soft noises filtering up from the kitchen: Mr.
HotBrew wheezing through another load of caffix. The pop and crinkle
of yummy shrinkwrap being split and peeled. Solid thunk of the
microwave oven door slamming closed, chaining into the bleats, chimes
and choppy vosynthed th-an-k-yo-us of someone doing the program job
on breakfast.
Someone? Mom, for sure. Like, nuking embalmed meadow muffins
is her domestic duty. Dad only cooks raw things that can be immolated
on the hibachi. I listen closer, hear her cheerful mindless morning babble
and him making with the occasional simian grunt in acknol, or maybe
they aren’t even talking to each other. Once Mom gives the appliances a
start they can do a pretty fair sim of a no-brain conversation all by
themselves.
I roll over. Brush the long black hair back from my face. Get my left
eye open and find the bedside clock.
6:53.
Okay, so it’s not morning. Not official, not yet. School day rules:
true morning doesn’t start until0/ 7:0/0/ :0/0/ , exact. I scrunch the covers up
around my cheeks, snuggle a little deeper in the comfty warm, work at
getting both eyes open.
Jerky little holo of a space shuttle comes out from behind the left
Cyberpunk 1.0 2
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
edge of the clock. Chick. Chick. Chick. Stubby white wings flash as the
ugly blunt thing banks to pass in front. Chick. Chick. Numbers change.
6:54.
I hate that clock.
I mean, when I was a twelve, I thought that clock was total derzky.
Cooler than utter cool. The penultimax: A foot-high lump of jagged
blue-filled Lucite, numbers gleaming like molten silver poured on a
glacier, orbited forever by a Classic Shuttle. Every five minutes the
cargo doors open and a satellite does the deploy. Every hour on the hour
the ‘nauts come out for a little space spindance.
Shuttle swings around the right side of the clock. Chick. Chick.
Stupid thing. Not even a decent interfill routine, just a little white brick
moving in one-second jerks. A couple months back me and Georgie
tried to hack the video PROMs, reprogram it to do the Challenger every
hour on the hour. Turned out the imager wasn’t a holosynth at all, just a
glob of brainless plastic and a couple hundred laser diodes squirting
canned stillframes.
Chick. The shuttle vanishes behind the right edge of the clock. Gone
for thirty seconds.
I lie there, looking at the clock, and mindlock once more on just how
Dad the thing truly is. I mean, I can almost see the motivationals
hanging off it like slimey, sticky strings: “Is good for you, Mikey. Think
space, Mikey. Science is future, honorable son. Being gifted is not
enough; you must study ‘til eyes bleed, claw way through Examination
Hell, and perhaps one day if you are extra special good just maybe you
get to go Up!”
Yeah, up. To the High Pacific. Get a Brown Nose in nemawashi—
the Nipponese art of kissing butt—and become a deck wiper on the
Nakamura industrial platform. Or maybe the PanEuros will decide they
need some good public relations, let us and the Soviets kill a few more
people trying to get to Mars again. Boy oh boy.
When you’re 13.75 years old and almost a sophomore in high
school, you start to think about these things.
Cyberpunk 1.0 3
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
Outside my window, old man Xiang’s car door creaks open with a
rusty squeal, slams shut with a sharp krummp. The sparrows explode in a
flutter of stubby wings and terrified cheeping, fly off chased by a boiling
stream of Chinese obscenities. I hear a deep grunt and the scrape of
shoes on pavement as he gets behind the car, starts pushing.
Shuttle comes back out from behind the clock. Chick. Chick. Cargo
doors pop open, in prep for the 6:55 satellite deploy. I roll over, pull a
pillow onto my head, try to find another minute or two of sleep.
No good. There’s light seeping in; not much, but enough to show
that I’m lying between Voyager sheets and pillowcases. Wearing dorky
NASA Commander AmericaTM cosmo-jammies (only ‘cause all my other
nightclothes are in the wash, honest). Close my eyes, and I can still see
Mom and Dad smiling stupid at me as I tear open the Christmas wrap,
recognize the dumb fake roboto and cyberlightpipe pattern and start to
gag, then scratch my true response and give them what they want to
hear: “Geez, Mom, these are real neat!” Almost said far out and groovy,
but figured that’d tip them off.
Rayno explained it to me real good once, how Olders brains are
stuck in a kind of wishful self-sim’d past. Like, his bio-dad used to build
model privatecars. Whenever his mom kicked him out for the weekend
he’d go over to his bio-dad’s, get bored to death and halfway back again
hearing about Chryslers, Lincolns. Wasn’t ‘til he was fifteen years old
that he finally met his bio-grandfather, learned that the family’s true last
privatecar was a brainless little 3-cylinder Latka.
Chime. Downstairs, the microwave announces that breakfast is
ready. The oven door opens with a sproing. Mom says something
cheerful as she slaps the foodpods on the table; Dad rustles his faxsheets
and grumbles something low in reply. I make a tunnel out of my pillow,
peek at the clock. 6:57.
Nope. Still isn’t morning.
Anyway, that’s where Rayno’s bio-dad’s brain got stuck. Georgie’s
old man scrounges parts, rebuilds obsolete American computers, never
stops ranting about how great they really were and it’s all Management
Cyberpunk 1.0 4
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
and Wall Street’s fault that the domestic industry is dead. My Dad’s too
busy to build/rebuild anything, what with his job and his first wife’s
grownup kids, so he buys me space shuttle clocks. Flying model Saturn-
Five’s. Apollo Hi-Lites video singles. A full-bandwidth membership in
AstraNet and a Nitachi telescope.
A telescope? Hey, this is Dad we’re talking about! No mere hunk of
glass could be half expensive enough for the trophy son of David
Richard Harris, Fuji-DynaRand’s Fuku Shacho of Marketing
(American). He bought me a zillion-power CCD-retinated fused-silicate
photon amplification device with all the optional everythings. Set it on
this monster tripod out on the deck—looks like Mung the Magnificent’s
fritzin’ Interplanetary Death Cannon—and every night when he’s in
town and not working late we have to go out there, burn our ten minutes
of Quality Time shivering in the cold and damp and trying to spot
something educational.
Of course, being Dad, he’s also got to shut off the programmables
and insist on using the dumb manual controls. Meaning most nights we
wind up looking at cloud projos, comm satellites, wreckage from the
Freedom, and other stuff that might be stars or planets but he’s never
real sure which. Then he swings the ‘scope around to point at the Fuji-
DynaRand platform, hanging there fat and low in geosync like a big
green ‘n’ gold corporate logo—which, thanks to a gigundo holo laser on
the platform, is just exactly what it does look like through the ‘scope—
and he launches into the standard lecture about why I should want to Go
Up.
Smile? Yup, I can feel a true smile coming on. No doubt about it,
I’m going to wake up this morning with a smile, ‘cause right now I’m
thinking deep about Dad, and the Death Cannon, and Dad’s library of
standard lectures. Last winter, when he was out of town for a week, me
and Georgie started putzing with the telescope’s brainbox. Discovered
we could run a lightfiber from my bedroom to the deck, patch the Death
Cannon straight into MoJo —my Miko-Gyoja 260/0/ /ex supermicro—and
auto-aim the thing just by clicking on stuff from the encyclopedia. Pipe
Cyberpunk 1.0 5
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
the images to any screen in the HouseSys, or better yet, compress ‘em,
save ‘em, and look at them “later.”
When I showed Dad what we’d done, his reaction was classic. First,
that little vein on the side of his forehead started throbbing. Then, his
face shifted down to this deep magenta beet-look, and I thought sure he
was gonna blow all his new heartgaskets.
And then, running on pure improv and with absolute no rehearsal at
all, he proceeded to coredump a truly marvelous all-new version of his
famous lecture, That’s What’s Wrong With You Damned Kids. Brilliant
performance. There are fathers and there are bio-parents; there are
Olders and even a few dads; but only my old man can be so total, utter
Dad.
Solid proof that I’m a mutant, you ask me.
A burst of static. A crackle, a buzz or two, and then the clock speaks
up in that stupid pseudo space-radio voice it uses: “Good morning,
captain. Rise and shine. --crackle— It’s oh-seven-hundred —pssht—
and you are go for throttle up.” I cop a glance at the clock, flag that the
cargo doors are open and seven little ‘nauts are out, spinning on their
head buckets.
Okay, it’s true morning, at last, official. No avoiding it any longer. I
roll over onto my back, flip the pillow off my face, hear it land
somewhere with a flumpf but it doesn’t sound like it’s hit anything
breakable. I brush the hair back from my face again, take a deep breath:
standard morning smells are percolating up the stairs. De-licious hot
microwaved plastic. Yummy bitter fresh-brewed caffix. True inspiring
yeasty reek of irradiated sugar-glazed pastryoid. I sit up in bed, yawn,
open both eyes at the same time, and finally, turn to my desk.
MoJo is black, silent. Dead.
In a nano I’m total awake. Covers fly everywhere as I roll off the
bed, hit the floor barefoot, kick aside the dirty clothes and bounce to my
desk. Already in my head I’m pleading as my fingers zip over the cables,
testing, tugging, tweaking. Geez, don’t let this be the Sikh Ambush virus
again! I’m just about to crack open MoJo’s CityLink box when I flag the
Cyberpunk 1.0 6
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
Gyoja Gerbil is tottering, vague and dim, across the flatscreen. He turns
slow, mouths some silent words, then bows deep and whacks the gong
with his walking stick. No sound. A faint, dark dialog box pops open and
my morning news start to scroll in, utter quiet and almost unreadable.
Oh. That’s right; I forgot. I was up late last night, studying Death
Cannon coordinates F0/140/ A22 15FF—Meghan Gianelli’s bedroom
window—and I turned the sound and contrast way down. Sighing relief,
I spin them back up to normal, plop down in my chair, and re-exec the
boot script.
The Gyoja Gerbil winks out a mo, winks back in, and bows again.
“Good morning, Mikhail Harris,” he starts over. Inward, I shudder. Only
Mom and my Miko-Gyoja 260/0/ /ex still call me Mikhail. Mom I can’t do
anything about, but one of these days me and Georgie are going to have
to reburn the boot ROMs and grease the gerbil.
“Now checking CityNet mail for you,” the Gyoja says. He closes his
eyes, like he’s concentrating; I bite my lip and tough it out. Just six more
ROM commands to execute before the rodent surrenders control. Just six
more, unless...
The Gyoja Gerbil frowns, freezes. A flashing red-border dialog box
pops open; a hardware interrupt, generated by the CityLink deep security
program. Warning! it says. Possible buffer contamination! I acknol the
alert, bang into the hex monitor, dump out the contents of the flytrap and
look it over.
No big deal. Two Dark Avenger viruses, one Holland Girl, an idiotsimple
Gobbler and a mess of raw data that’s probably an adfax that got
sent to me by mistake. Typical CityNet wildlife. For a mo, I hesitate.
Maybe...?
Nah. Nice that the rodent was interrupted, but I don’t dare try to
look for a way around him with a copy of Dark Avenger in the CityLink.
I flush the buffer, and a nano later the Gyoja has seized control again.
“Now checking CityNet mail for you,” he says.
Huh? That’s odd. The samurai rat doesn’t repeat himself, usual. I
lean close, watch real careful.
Cyberpunk 1.0 7
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
“I have found these messages waiting for you, Honorable Harrissan,”
he says, and he opens a window between his hands like he’s
pulling open a scroll. I start to read the first line.
The top of the window slips out of the gerbil’s grip, slams shut on
his right hand. Arterial blood jets bright red as little hairy fingers are
lopped off neat, go tumbling down to the bottom of the screen.
What?
“Now checking CityNet mail for you,” he says again, then freezes.
Jerks back to the start. “Now checking—” Freeze. Restart. “Now ch—”
Freeze.
I pounce on the keyboard, start banging out interrupts. Oh no, it is
the Sikh Ambush virus! Break. Nothing. Ctrl-C. Nothing. Option E.
Nothing.
“Now—,” he starts. Freeze.
Ctrl-Alt-right fist.
“Ch--ch--ch--”
Desperate and frantic, I take a deep breath, then stab my thumb
down on the warmstart reboot button. The Gyoja Gerbil’s head explodes,
blood and brains and teeth spraying truly gross all over the flatscreen.
Golly. It’s never done that before.
Feeling just a little stunned, I sag back in my chair, put my chin in
my left hand, and start wondering just what the Hell kind of virus I
picked up this time. And why my flytrap didn’t catch it. And what it’s
going to do to MoJo. I don’t have to wonder for long; two little cartoon
men in white uniforms—nobody out of any of my programs, I’m sure—
shuffle out onto the screen, one pushing a garbage can on squeaky
wheels, the other carrying a big shovel. They stop, shake their heads and
tsk-tsk at the mess, then shovel what’s left of the gerbil into the trash can
and amble off. The flatscreen blanks.
I give it five seconds. Ten seconds. I’m reaching for the manual
reset button when a new character darts out onto the screen. This one’s a
robopunk—a real techno looking ‘bot with a blue chrome mohawk—and
he stops centerscreen, looks around furtive, then whips out a can of
Cyberpunk 1.0 8
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
spray paint and leaves me a hot green message:
CRACKERS BUDDY-BOO 8ER
Oh, shiite.
The ‘bot vanishes. The message hangs there a mo, doing the slow
fade. “Damn,” I say, quiet. Then a little more aggressive. “Damn!” I
look around as if afraid someone’s looking over my shoulder, turn back
to MoJo, and kick the leg of my desk. “Oh, damn!” The message
finishes its fade and I jerk into action, bouncing up out of my chair,
punching power switches, yanking cables. CityLink box switched off
and unplugged. NetLine yanked, on both ends. HouseFiber unplugged.
“Damn, damn, damn!” I hesitate a mo over MoJo’s master power
switch. It’s been almost two years since the last time I shut him off utter
cold.
I scowl, and hit the switch. Then I yank the power cord for good
measure.
It wasn’t a virus, it was a message from Rayno. He caught
somebody else poking around in OurNet. And if that’s true/true, I’m in
trouble so deep I need a snorkel.
Cyberpunk 1.0 9
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
Chapter 0/ 1
Soon as I’d finished with the total disconnect, I tore off my cosmojammies
and threw them in the corner, grabbed my blue spatterzag
jumpsuit off the floor and zipped it on, then dug out my blitz yellow
hightops from under the bed and laced them up loose. Subroutining off
to the bathroom for a mo to flush my bladder buffer and run a brush
across my teeth, I popped back into my bedroom, threw my video slate
and a couple textbook ROMs into my backpack, and hit the stairs flying.
Mom and Dad were still at breakfast when I bounced into the
kitchen. “Good Morning, Mikhail,” said Mom with a smile. “You were
up so late last night I thought I wouldn’t see you before you caught your
tram.”
“Had a tough program to crack,” I lied.
“Well,” she said, “now you can sit down and have a decent
breakfast.” She turned around to pull another pod of steaming
muffinoids out of the microwave and slap them down on the table.
“If you’d do your schoolwork when you’re supposed to, you
wouldn’t have to cram at the end of the semester,” Dad growled from
behind his caffix and faxsheet. I sloshed some juice in a plastic glass,
gulped it down, and started for the door.
“What?” Mom asked. “That’s all the breakfast you’re going to
have?”
“Haven’t got time,” I said. “Gotta get to school early to see if the
program checks.” Bobbing around her, I faked a dribble, lobbed the
empty glass into the sink. Two points.
She looked at me, shook her head, and took a slow step forward like
she was going to block me. “You’re not going to school dressed like
that, I hope?”
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“Aw, Mom.” Ducking back around the table, I grabbed a muffin—
rice bran, sawdust and rabbit raisin, I think.
“I mean, look at you, you’re nothing but a mass of wrinkles. Where
did you find that jumpsuit anyway, in the laundry hamper?”
“No, Mom.” Faking a step back towards the hall door, I stuffed the
muffin into my backpack and velcroed the pouch.
She followed the feint. “And what about your hair? I don’t mind if
you wear it long, but honestly Mikhail, it looks like there’s something
nesting in it.”
Dad lowered his faxsheet long enough to peer over the top edge.
“Kid needs a flea bath and a haircut, if you ask me.” Oh, perfect, Dad.
Just the exact reaction I wanted. That’s why I got the horsemane style!
Mom turned on Dad and spoke to quiet him—ragging on me before
school is her job—but I didn’t hear the rest ‘cause I’d seen my opening,
taken it, and was already out the door and halfway across the porch.
“Don’t forget to boot Muffy!” Mom yelled after me.
Hand on the outside doorknob, I stopped, turned around. “Yes,
mother.” Taking a quick scan around, I spotted Mom’s Mutt lying in the
corner, curled up around the battery charger. Oh, I wanted to boot that
dog all right! But then, foot cocked, I remembered Muffy was a lot
heavier than it looked and decided I didn’t need the pain. So I bent over,
lifted the dog’s stubby little tail, and unplugged the power feed.
“Arf,” Muffy said. It stood up and began twitching through its servo
diagnostics. I gave the charger cord a sharp yank, watched it retract.
“Arf,” Muffy said again, and it began toddling towards the kitchen. I
turned around, gave one last fleeting thought to the cheery mind image
of Muffy being drop-kicked into the mock oranges, and then zipped out
the door.
I caught the transys for school, just in case Mom and Dad were
watching. Two blocks down the line I got off and caught the northbound
tram, and then I started off on a big loop that kept me off the routes
Mom and Dad used to get to work and took me back past home and in
the complete opposite direction from school. Half an hour and six
Cyberpunk 1.0 11
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transfers later I came whipping into Buddy’s All-Nite Burgers. Rayno
was sitting in our booth, glaring into his caffix. It was0/ 7:55:23 and I’d
beat Georgie and Lisa there.
“What’s on line?” I asked as I dropped into my seat, across from
Rayno. He just looked up at me, eyes piercing blue through his fine,
white-blond eyebrows, and I knew better than to ask again.
I sat down. I shut up. Whatever it was had to be important, to make
it worth dumping MoJo like that, but there was no point trying to talk to
Rayno when he was clammed, so I locked eyes on him. He went back to
looking at his caffix, taking the occasional sip. For a mo I had this crazy
idea he was being too derzky to talk just ‘cause he wanted me to flag his
new hair. This week it was bleached Utter Aryan White, side-shaved,
and stiffed out into The Wedge. Geez, it did look sharp!
Of course it did. Rayno always looked sharp. Rayno was seventeen,
and a junior. He wore scruff black leather and flash plastic; he kept his
style current to the nanosecond and cranked to the max. Rayno was
derzky realitized.
But after a minute or so I realized he wasn’t being derzky, he was
being too pissed to talk. Which was reassuring, in a way, given how
worried he had me, but watching it got old real fast so I craned my neck,
looked over the booth divider, gave Buddy’s the quick scan. Nope,
nobody else interesting in the place. Somebody back in the kitchen must
have flagged me when I stuck my head up, though, ‘cause as soon as I
was back down solid in my seat the little trademark snatch of fifties
music swooped by, stereo shifting to a focus at the wall end of the table,
and the foot-high holo of Buddy McFry came jitterbugging out from
behind the napkin dispenser.
“Good morning and welcome to Buddy’s!” the holo said, all bright
and enthusiastic, looking just dweeby as could be in his peaked cap,
white shirt, pegged chinos and penny loafers. “Today’s breakfast special
is two genuine high-cholesterol eggs fried in bacon fat, two strips of real
hickory-smoked bacon, and a cup of our world famous double-caffeine
coffee! Sure, it’s unhealthy and ecologically unsound, but don’t you
Cyberpunk 1.0 12
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deserve a little guilty pleasure today?” The holo grinned, danced to a
stop; pulled a pencil out from behind his ear and a pad out of his back
pocket, set pencil point to paper, and froze. The pseudosax hit a peak
and the music stopped.
The holo wasn’t true interactive, of course. It was just waiting for
me to say something that it could compress, stick in the fryboy’s
voicemail queue. I checked my watch. Ten. Eleven. Twelve...
At fifteen seconds, the program timed out. The music started up
again. The holo lifted the pencil off the order pad and shook his head.
“Well I can see that you’re not interested in today’s special. Would you
like to see a menu, or are you ready to order now?” Again, the music
peaked and died. The little dork froze, grinning.
This time it took twenty seconds to time out, and then the holo
stayed frozen. Instead, a realtime voice from an actual human came
through, raspy. “Look kid, you sit in the booth, there’s a two-dollar
minimum. So you gonna order or what?”
Rayno cracked out of his big silence. “We are waiting for the rest of
our party,” he said, in a great low and sullen. “We will order then. In the
meantime, don’t ‘bug’ us, ‘man’.”
There was a lag of a coupla seconds, then the music started up again.
“Oh, you need more time to think?” the holo said cheerful, as it started
to dance back towards the napkin dispenser. “Okay, I’ll be back—”
Rayno closed his eyes, tilted his head back, raised his voice. “And
lose the goddam holo!” Buddy McFry vanished. Rayno went back to
scowling at his caffix.
I decided to see how long it’d take him to time out.
At0/ 8:0/0/ :20/ Lisa zagged in, her lank blonde hair swinging in lazy
circles, her feet moving in that slow, twitchy walk that meant she had
her earcorks in and tuned for music. She was wearing her mirrored
contacts today, which gave her eyes a truly appropriate utter vacant
look; Lisa is Rayno’s girl, or at least she hopes she is. I can see why.
Rayno’s seventeen, and a junior—a year older than Georgie, two years
and a grade up on Lisa. And where Georgie tends to fat and a touch of
Cyberpunk 1.0 13
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
dweebism, like most true cyberpunks (and little Mikey Harris just ain’t
in the game, no matter how gifted his headworks are supposed to be),
Rayno is the Master Controller of our little gang and he has looks and
style to burn.
So, no surprise Lisa’s got it locked for him. Every move she makes
says she’s begging for it, but he’s too robo, too tough to notice. He
dances with himself; he won’t even touch her. She bopped over to the
booth and slid into her seat next to Rayno, trying hard to get a thigh
under his hand. He just put both hands on his caffix cup and didn’t give
her so much as a blink.
For a flicker, Lisa looked miserable. There she was, wearing her best
white tatterblouse and no bra, and she couldn’t even get Rayno to look at
her. I’m not so good at robo yet so I copped a quick, guilty peek down
her cleavage, but it’s certified Boolean true/true she wasn’t flashing that
skin for me. Basic rules of the game: Sharp haircut beats 160/ IQ.
Those who can’t play, heckle. I opened my mouth to tell her she’d
make more progress on Rayno if she had a cleavage to show off, first,
but killed my words in the output queue. Her fingernails were getting
long and nasty and that green nailpolish looked toxic.
Then the DJ in her head zapped out another tune and her miserable
look flickered off. She went back to face dancing. Never even noticed it
when the little trademark sample of fifties music swooped by and Buddy
McFry came dancing on out from behind the napkin dispenser.
“Good morning and welcome to Buddy’s!” the holo started.
“We are still waiting for our fourth,” Rayno growled, low and
sullen. You’d of thought he said I love you forever, the way Lisa’s eyes
lit up. Buddy McFry zapped off in mid-step.
Rayno went back to glaring into his caffix. Lisa took over the job of
locking eyes on him. I watched her watch him watch his caffix for a
while, Rayno looking like a warped black mantis in her mirrored pinball
eyes, and couldn’t decide if I should yawn or puke, she was being so
uncool and glandular.
Georgie still wasn’t there at 8:0/ 5:0/0/ . Rayno checked his watch one
Cyberpunk 1.0 14
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more time, then finally looked up. “Hellgate’s been cracked,” he said,
soft.
I swore. Georgie and I’d spent a lot of time working up a truly
wicked secure for Hellgate. It was the sole entry point to OurNet, and we
had some real strong reasons for wanting to keep that little piece of the
virtual universe ultra-private.
Not from other cyberkids. They were just minor-league nuisances.
We could deal with them. It was our parents we were worried about:
They would truly smoke their motherboards if they ever found out what
we were really up to, and now a parent—or somebody with no finesse,
anyway—was messing with OurNet.
“Georgie’s old man?” I asked.
“Looks that way.”
I swore again. It figured. Most of OurNet was virtual; not real
hardware at all. The only absolute physical piece, and therefore the only
real vulnerable point, was Hellgate.
Which also happened to be Georgie’s old man’s Honeywell-Bull
office system.
For a mo I felt hot, angry. Why couldn’t Georgie’s old man keep his
big nose out of our business? He’s the one who gave me and Georgie a
partition of the Bull in the first place! He’s the one who kept saying that
when he was a kid he was a hacker or a phreaker or whatever the
chipheads who were too lame to be NuWavers called themselves, and
‘cause of that he understands us and wants to guide us. For chrissakes,
he was the one who had us crack the copy protect on MegaCAD so he
could sell it bootleg!
Isn’t that just like an Older? To tell you something is your private
space, then go snooping through your drawers when he thinks you’re not
looking? It’s just so utter Dad.
I was still working through the fuming mad and clenching teeth
routine when Lisa quit face dancing and spoke. Surprise. She wasn’t
brain-dead after all, she just looked that way.
“Any idea oh, how far in he got?” When Lisa has her earcorks in she
Cyberpunk 1.0 15
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
talks in beat.
Rayno looked through her, at the front door. Georgie’d just walked
in. “We’re gonna find out,” Rayno said. Georgie was coming in smiling,
but when he flicked his hornrimmed videoshades to transparent and saw
that look in Rayno’s eyes, his legs snapped into slow and feeble mode.
Dragging his reluctant chubby carcass up to the booth, he unzipped his
Weathered EarthTones windbreaker, pushed his videoshades back up his
nose (they tended to slide down), and sat down next to me like the seat
might be booby-trapped. “Good Morning Georgie,” Rayno said, smiling
like a shark.
“I didn’t glitch,” Georgie whined. “I didn’t tell him anything.”
“Then how the Hell did he do it?”
“You know how he is, he’s weird. He likes puzzles.” Georgie ran a
hand through his frizzy brown hair and looked to me for backup, but I
didn’t particularly want to get between Rayno and somebody he was
pissed at. “That’s how come I was late. He was trying to weasel more
out of me, but I didn’t tell him a thing. I think he never made it out the
back side of Hellgate. He didn’t ask about the Big One.”
Rayno actually sat back, pointed at us all, and smiled sly and toothy.
“You kids.” He looked down, shook his head, let out a little half laugh
like it was real funny. “Oh, you kids. You just don’t know how lucky
you are. I was in OurNet late last night and flagged somebody who
didn’t know the passwords was dicking around with the gatekeeper. I put
in a new blind alley in Hellgate and ringed it with killer crashpoints. By
the time your old man figures out how to get through them, well...”
I sighed relief. See what I mean about being derzky? All the dark
looks and danger words were just for style. We’d been outlooped again;
Rayno had total control all along.
BAM! He slammed a fist down on the table. “But dammit, Georgie!”
Rayno lunged halfway across the table, grabbed Georgie by the lapels
and sent his videoshades flying, pushed a tight fist right under his nose.
“From now on, you keep a closer watch on your old man!” For a few
flickers there Georgie looked genuine terrified, like he thought Rayno
Cyberpunk 1.0 16
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
was going to rip his throat out with his bare teeth or something.
I guess that was the effect Rayno wanted to achieve. He let Georgie
sweat a mo more, then relaxed, smiled, pushed Georgie back into his
seat and began straightening his windbreaker, brushing imaginary dust
off his shoulders, picking up his shades and putting them back on his
face.
The little trademark sample of fifties music swooped in, stereo
shifting to a focus at the wall end of the table. The foot-high holo of
Buddy McFry came jitterbugging out from behind the napkin dispenser.
“Good morning and welcome to Buddy’s!” it said, all bright and
enthusiastic. Lisa unsnapped a teardrop crystal prism from one of her
necklaces, held it in front of the laser diode, and Buddy McFry shattered
into a couple hundred polychromic body fragments, all twitching in
perfect sync. We waited ‘til the holo stopped jabbering, then Rayno
bought us drinks and raisin pie all the way around. Lisa asked for a
Cherry Coke, saying it was symbolic and she hoped to move up to
straight cola soon. Georgie and I ordered caffix, just like Rayno.
God, that stuff tastes awful. I added about a ton of sugar and
CreamesseTM and wound up not drinking it anyway. We talked and
laughed and joked through breakfast—I dunno, not really about
anything, just having a good time. Then the cups and plates were cleared
away, and Rayno looked around, smiled wicked, and started to give his
black jacket the slow unzip.
Lisa’s eyes got big as saucers. I swear, by the time he stopped with
the zipper and started with the slow reach inside she was drooling.
“Kids,” he said quiet, “it is time for some serious fun.” One last
furtive look around, and then he whipped out—
His Zeilemann Nova 30/0/ microportable. “Summer vacation starts
now!”
I still drop a bit when I think about that computer—Geez, it was a
beauty! The standard Nova is a pretty hot box to start with, but we’d
spent so much time reworking Rayno’s it was practically custom from
the motherboard up. Not at all like those stupid DynaBooks they give
Cyberpunk 1.0 17
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
you in school—those things are basically dumb color flatscreens with
ROM jacks and scrolling buttons—no, Rayno’s Nova was one truly ace
box. Hi-baud, rammed and rommed, total ported; with the wafer display
and keyboard wings it folded down to about the size of a vidcassette. I’d
have given an ear to have one like it. We’d kludged up a full set of metal
and lightpipe jacks for it and used Georgie’s old man’s chipburner to
tuck some special tricks in ROM, and there wasn’t a system in the city it
couldn’t talk to. About the only thing it didn’t have was a Cellular
CityLink.
But hey, with PhoneCo jacks everywhere, who needs that? Lisa
undid one of her necklaces—the one that was really a twisted-pair
modem wire—Rayno plugged the wire into the booth jack and faxed for
a smartcab, and we piled out of Buddy’s. No more riding the transys for
us; we were going in style! The smartcab rolled up, fat little tires hissing
on the pavement, electric motor thrumming, and we hopped in. (Lisa got
herself squeezed tight against Rayno, of course, and I got stuck in the
jump seat, as usual.) Georgie cracked open the maintenance panel on the
smartcab’s dim little brainbox. Lisa took off another one of her
necklaces—the one that was really a lightfiber—and handed it Rayno,
and he hacked deep into the smartcab’s brain and charged the ride off to
some law company. With the radio blasting out some good loud
‘lectrocrack music—WZAZ, same station as was playing in Lisa’s
head—we cruised all over Eastside, hanging out the windows and
howling like crispy-fried chemheads.
Taking a swing by Lincoln Park, we did a good laugh on the
McPunks hanging out in front of You Know Where. (Sure, we might
look something like them, but there’s this thing called status, y’know?
We are punks with brains.) Then, on a dare, Rayno locked up the
windows and redirected us through Lowertown, and we did another good
laugh on all the boxpeople, MediMaints, and Class 2 Minimum Services
citizens hanging out down there. Almost bagged an old black wino who
was lying in the street, too, but Lisa swore he was dead already.
Cyberpunk 1.0 18
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Chapter 0/ 2
Riding the boulevards got stale after awhile, so we rerouted to the
library. We do a lot of our fun at the library, ‘cause nobody ever bothers
us there. Nobody ever goes there. We sent the smartcab, still on the law
company account, to hunt for a nonexistent pickup on Westside, and
walked up the steps. Getting past the guards and the librarians was just a
matter of flashing some ID, and then we zipped off into the stacks.
Now, you’ve got to ID away your life to use an actual libsys
terminal—which isn’t worth half a real scare when you have fudged ID,
like we do—and they have this Big Brother program, tracks and
analyzes everything everybody does online down to the least significant
bit. But Big Brother has trouble getting a solid location on anything that
isn’t a legit libsys terminal, and the librarians move their terms around a
lot, so they’ve got open lightpipe ports all over the building. We found
an unused, unwatched node up in the dusty old third-floor State History
room, and me and Georgie kept watch while Lisa undid her third
necklace—the one that was really a braided wideband lightpipe —and
Rayno got hooked up and jacked in.
Why go to all this trouble to find a lightpipe port? Why not just use
a common garden-variety PhoneCo jack—say, the cellular fax port in
the smartcab, for instance? Well, we could, but there’s this thing called
bandwidth. If the libsys hooks you into the Great Data River, then
connecting through the PhoneCo is like pissing through a pipette. Slow,
and I’m told, excruciating painful.
Rayno finished patching in the last of the fibers and booted up.
“Link me up,” he said, handing me the Nova. We don’t have a stored
exefile yet for linking, so Rayno gives me the fast and tricky jobs.
Through the data river I got us out of the libsys and into CityNet.
Cyberpunk 1.0 19
©1982, 1998 Bruce Bethke
Now, Olders will never understand. They’re still hooked on the
hardware paradigm; sequential programs, running on single brains in
big boxes, and maybe if you’re a real forward-thinking Older you’ll use
a network to transmit the results to another big single brain.
Me, I can get the same effect from a hundred little parallel tasks all
running in background in a hundred different places, once I tie them
together. It’s this bandwidth thing again; the secret is to get onto a wide
enough part of a good net, and then there’s only a couple nanosecond
difference between running tasks on parallel processors inside the same
box and running them on discrete computers miles apart. Long as your
programs can talk to each other now and then...
Nearly every computer in the world has a datalink port. CityNet is a
great communications system. The pirate commware in Rayno’s Nova
let me setup my links clean and fast so nobody flags us. Put it all
together; 256 trojan horse programs buried all over CityNet, with a
secret code to let them communicate—don’t think of OurNet as a
network as in NovaLAN, think network as in spies—
And you wind up with a virtual machine 25 miles across. If you lose
a few nanoseconds owing to the speed of light, no big deal. Just throw
another hundred processors at the problem.
Meaning, from the libs
|
Метки: cyberpunk 1.0 |
Манифест кибер панка... от Кристиана по которму я вырос. |
Мы электронные духи, группа свободомыслящих повстанцев. Киберпанки. Мы живем в киберпространстве, мы везде, мы не знаем границ. И это наш манифест. Манифест киберпанка.
I. Киберпанк
1. Мы те самые, Другие. Технологические крысы, плывущие в океане информации.
2. Мы - это скромный школьник, сидящий за последней партой в дальнем углу класса.
3. Мы - это подросток, которого все считают странным.
4. Мы - это студент, взламывающий компьютерные системы и пытающийся достичь предела своих возможностей.
5. Мы - это взрослый человек, сидящий на скамейке в парке с лэптопом на коленях и программирующий новую виртуальную реальность.
6. Нам принадлежат гаражи, напичканные электроникой. Паяльник на рабочем столе и разобранный на части радиоприемник, подвал, в котором стоят компьютеры, жужжат принтеры и гудят модемы - все это тоже наше.
7. Мы видим реальность в ином свете. Мы видим больше, чем обыкновенные люди. Они видят только то, что снаружи. Мы видим то, что внутри. Реалисты со взглядом романтиков - вот кто мы такие.
8. Мы странные люди, о которых практически ничего неизвестно. Люди, индульгирующие в своих собственных мыслях, день за днем сидящие за компьютером, ищущие необходимую информацию в сети. Мы редко выходим из дома. Мы делаем это время от времени лишь для того, чтобы сходить в соседнюю лачугу или бар, где мы встречаемся со своими немногочисленными друзьями. Иногда мы выходим из дома, чтобы встретиться с очередным клиентом, или наркодилером... или просто совершить прогулку.
9. У нас мало друзей, лишь несколько человек, с которыми мы ходим на вечеринки. Всех остальных мы знаем только в сети. Наши настоящие друзья там, на другом конце провода. Мы знаем их по каналам ретрансляции диалогов IRC, по группам новостей и по другим системам, в которых мы работаем.
10. Нам наплевать на то, что о нас думают другие. Нам наплевать на то, как мы выглядим и что говорят люди в наше отсутствие.
11. Большинство из нас любит жить скрытно, оставаться в тени и общаться друг с другом лишь по необходимости.
12. Некоторые из нас любят быть на виду, они любят славу. Их знает весь андеграунд. Их имена на слуху. Но всех нас объединяет одно - все мы Киберпанки.
13. Общество не понимает нас. Мы выглядим <таинственными> и <сумасшедшими> в глазах обыкновенных людей, живущих в далеке от информации и свободы мысли. Общество не признает нас - общество, живущее, думающее и дышащее одним единственным способом - как все.
14. Оно запрещает нам думать о том, что мы свободные люди. Свободомыслие запрещено.
15. У каждого Киберпанка есть индивидуальность, он не марионетка. Киберпанки - это люди, начиная от самых обыкновенных и никому не известных, до гениев-техноманьяков, музыкантов, играющих электронную музыку и исследователей-самоучек.
16. Киберпанк больше не является жанром художественной литературы. Это уже не субкультура. Киберпанк - это новая отдельная культура, дитя новой эры. Культура, которая объединяет наши взгляды и интересы. Мы составляем единое целое. Мы киберпанки.
II. Общество
1. Общество, окружающее нас, связывает друг с другом людей и предметы, превращает их в единую массу и медленно затягивает в зыбучие пески времени.
2. И хотя в это трудно поверить, всем уже очевидно, что мы живем в больном обществе. Так называемые реформы, которыми повсеместно хвастаются наши правительства, - это лишь незначительные сдвиги, в то время как можно совершать целые прыжки.
3. Люди боятся нового и неизвестного. Они предпочитают старые, проверенные истины. Они боятся перемен. Они боятся потерять то, что у них уже есть.
4. Их страх настолько силен, что превратился в оружие. Их страх запрещает свободомыслие. И в этом их главная ошибка.
5. Люди должны оставить свой страх позади и двинуться вперед. Какой смысл все время держать синицу в руках, если можно поймать журавля. Все, что нужно сделать - это протянуть руки и почувствовать новое; дать свободу помыслам, идеям и словам.
6. Новые поколения веками воспитывались в духе своих прародителей. Идеалом считается то, чему следует большинство. Индивидуальность забыта. Люди думают одинаково, используя клише, заученные с самого детства. А когда какой-нибудь ребенок отваживается бросить вызов власти, его наказывают и приводят в качестве плохого примера. <Вот что случается с теми, кто выражает свое мнение и игнорирует мнение учителя>.
7. Наше общество больно и нуждается в лечении. Лекарством является смена системы...
III. Система
1. Система. С многовековым прошлым, существующая на принципах, которым нет места в сегодняшнем мире. Система, которая практически не изменилась со времени своего появления.
2. Это неправильная Система.
3. Чтобы управлять нами, Система должна обманным путем навязывать свои правила. Правительство хочет, чтобы мы слепо следовали его указаниям. Мы живем в информационных сумерках. Когда люди получают информацию, отличную от информации правительства, они не могут отличить правду от лжи. Поэтому ложь становится правдой - правдой, лежащей в основе всего. Таким образом правители управляют нами при помощи лжи, а обыкновенные люди не могут различить правду и слепо следуют за правительством, полностью доверяя ему.
4. Мы боремся за свободу информации. Мы боремся за свободу за свободу слова и печати. За свободу выражать наши мысли, не опасаясь преследования Системы.
5. Даже в самых цивилизованных и <демократических> странах, Система распространяет дезинформацию. Даже в странах, претендующих на звание колыбели свободы слова. Дезинформация - основное оружие Системы. Оружие, которое она успешно использует.
6. Именно Сеть помогает нам свободно распространять информацию. Сеть, не имеющая границ и не знающая предела.
7. Все, что принадлежит нам, принадлежит и вам. Все, что принадлежит вам, принадлежит и нам.
8. Каждый может использовать информацию. Ограничений не существует.
9. Шифрование информации - это наше оружие. Зашифрованные революционные послания могут беспрепятственно распространятся по Сети, и правительство может только догадываться об их содержании.
10. Сеть - это наше королевство, в сети мы короли.
11. Законы. Мир меняется, но законы остаются прежними. Система не меняется, лишь кое-какие детали приводятся в соответствие с новым временем, однако в целом все остается на своих местах.
12. Нам нужны новые законы. Законы, соответствующие времени, в котором мы живем, и миру, который нас окружает. Не законы, построенные на опыте прошлого. Законы, построенные для сегодняшнего дня, законы, соответствующие дню завтрашнему.
IV. Видение будущего
1. Некоторые люди не задумываются над тем, что происходит в мире. Они заботятся только о себе, о своем микрокосмосе.
2. Такие люди могут видеть только мрачное будущее, будущее их личной жизни, которой они живут в данный момент.
3. Другие обеспокоены будущими событиями. Их интересует все, что будет происходить в будущем в глобальном масштабе.
4. Их взгляд на жизнь более оптимистичен. В их глазах будущее выглядит чище и прекраснее. Они могут представить себе человека, ставшего более значительным, и мир, ставший более мудрым.
5. Мы находимся где-то посередине. Для нас важно то, что происходит сейчас и то, что произойдет завтра.
6. Наши взгляды устремлены в Сеть. И Сеть разрастается с каждым днем.
7. Вскоре весь мир будет опутан Сетью: от военных систем до домашних компьютеров.
8. Но сеть - это колыбель анархии.
9. Ее нельзя контролировать и в этом ее сила.
10. Каждый человек будет зависеть от Сети.
11. Вся информация будет курсировать по сети, запертая в хаосе нулей и единиц.
12. Тот, кто контролирует Сеть, контролирует информацию.
13. Мы будем жить в смешении прошлого и настоящего.
14. Плохое идет от человека, а хорошее идет от технологии.
15. Сеть будет контролировать маленького человека, а мы будем контролировать Сеть.
16. Если не будешь контролировать сам, будут контролировать тебя.
17. Информация - это сила!
V. Где мы?
1. Где мы?
2. Мы все живем в больном мире, где ненависть - это оружие, а свобода - мечта.
3. Мир развивается слишком медленно. Киберпанку очень трудно жить в вечно недоделанном мире, смотреть на окружающих и видеть как плохо они строят свой мир.
4. Мы идем вперед, они тянут нас назад. Общество сдерживает нас. Да, оно сдерживает свободу мысли. Своими безжалостными образовательными программами в школах и университетах. Они тренируют в детях одинаковое видение мира. Любые возражения пресекаются и наказываются.
5. Наши дети обучаются в этой древней и не изменившейся системе. Системе, которая не допускает свободомыслия и требует четкого соблюдения правил...
6. В каком бы мире мы жили сейчас, если бы люди двигались вперед прыжками, а не ползли.
7. Киберпанк, тебе очень трудно жить в этом мире.
8. Кажется, что время остановилось.
9. Мы оказались в нужном месте, но не в нужное время.
10. Все вокруг слишком банально, люди не меняются. Как будто общество хочет вернуться в прошлое.
11. Некоторые люди, пытающиеся найти свой мир, мир Киберпанка, находят его и строят собственными руками. Строят в своих мыслях, в меняющейся реальности. Поэтому они живут в виртуальном мире. В выдуманном мире, находящемся вне пределов вселенной.
12. Некоторые люди привыкают к реальному миру, такому, какой он есть на самом деле. Они продолжают жить в нем, но они не любят его. У них нет другого выбора, но они верят в то, что мир вырвется из объятий пустоты и двинется вперед.
13. Все, что мы пытаемся сделать - это изменить ситуацию. Мы пытаемся приспособить сегодняшний мир к нашим нуждам и взглядам. Максимально используем его возможности и не обращаем внимания на всякий хлам. Там, где нам не под силу что-либо изменить, мы можем просто жить, жить как Киберпанки. Не имеет значения то, насколько трудной будет наша жизнь. Когда общество наносит удар, мы всегда отвечаем.
14. Мы строим собственные миры в Киберпространстве.
15. Среди нулей и единиц, среди битов информации.
16. Мы строим свое сообщество. Сообщество Киберпанков.
Кибрпанк!
Борись за свои права!
Мы электронные духи, группа свободомыслящих повстанцев. Киберпанки. Мы живем в киберпространстве, мы везде, мы не знаем границ. И это наш манифест. Манифест киберпанка.
Хотя этот перевод был Антоши, я до сих пор не забуду его слова по 106.8 FM, Сальников Тебя многие слушали, и досих пор живут по ТЕРРИТОРИИ ВЗЛОМА... Спасибо! Научил!
14 февраля 1997 г.
(перевод Сальникова А.М.)
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Метки: киберпанк сальникова а.м. манифест киберпанка сальников 106.8 fm борись |
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