William Gibson Burning Chrome

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

second-story men. We were partners.
Bobby Quine and Automatic Jack. Bobby's the thin, pale dude with the dark
glasses, and Jack's the mean-looking guy with the myoelectric arm. Bobby's
software and Jack's hard; Bobby punches console and
Jack runs down all the little things that can give you an edge. Or, anyway,
that's what the scene watchers in the
Gentleman Loser would've told you, before Bobby de-
cided to burn Chrome. But they also might've told you that Bobby was losing
his edge, slowing down. He was twenty-eight, Bobby, and that's old for a
console cowboy.
Both of us were good at what we did, but somehow that one big score just
wouldn't come down for us. I
knew where to go for the right gear, and Bobby had all his licks down pat.
He'd sit back with a white terry sweatband across his forehead and whip moves
on those keyboards faster than you could follow, punching his way through some
of the fanciest ice in the business, but that was when something happened that
managed to get him totally wired, and that didn't happen often. Not highly
motivated, Bobby, and I was the kind of guy who's happy to have the rent
covered and a clean shirt to wear.
But Bobby had this thing for girls, like they were his private tarot or
something, the way he'd get himself moving. We never talked about it, but when
it started to look like he was losing his touch that summer, he started to
spend more time in the Gentleman Loser. He'd sit at
file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Burning%20Chrome.txt (91 of 105) [1/14/03 11:20:24
PM]
file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Burning%20Chrome.txt a table by the open doors and
watch the crowd slide by, nights when the bugs were at the neon and the air
smelled of perfume and fast food. You could see his sunglasses scanning those
faces as they passed, and he must have decided that Rikki's was the one he was
waiting for, the wild card and the luck changer. The new one.
I went to New York to check out the market, to see what was available in hot
software.
The Finn's place has a defective hologram in the window, METRO HOLOGRAFIX,
over a display of dead flies wearing fur coats of gray dust. The scrap's
waist-
high, inside, drifts of it rising to meet walls that are barely visible behind
nameless junk, behind sagging pressboard shelves stacked with old skin
magazines and yellow-spined years of National Geographic.
"You need a gun," said the Finn. He looks like a recombo DNA project aimed at
tailoring people for high-speed burrowing. "You're in luck. I got the new
Smith and Wesson, the four-oh-eight Tactical. Got this xenon projector slung
under the barrel, see, batteries in the grip, throw you a twelve-inch
high-noon circle in the pitch dark at fifty yards. The light source is so
narrow, it's almost impossible to spot. It's just like voodoo in a
nightfight."
I let my arm clunk down on the table and started the fingers drumming; the
servos in the hand began whining like overworked mosquitoes. I knew that the
Finn really hated the sound.
Page 82
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
"You looking to pawn that?" He prodded the
Duralumin wrist joint with the chewed shaft of a felt-tip pen. "Maybe get
yourself something a little quieter?"
I kept it up. "I don't need any guns, Finn."
"Okay," he said, "okay," and I quit drumming.
"I only got this one item, and I don't even know what it is. He looked
unhappy. "I got it off these bridge-and..
tunnel kids from Jersey last week."
"So when'd you ever buy anything you didn't know what it was, Finn?"
"Wise ass." And he passed me a transparent mailer with something in it that
looked like an audio cassette through the bubble padding. "They had a
passport," he said. "They had credit cards and a watch. And that."
"They had the contents of somebody's pockets, you mean."
He nodded. "The passport was Belgian. It was also bogus, looked to me, so I
put it in the furnace. Put the cards in with it. The watch was okay, a
Porsche, nice watch."
It was obviously some kind of plug-in military pro-
gram. Out of the mailer, it looked like the magazine of a small assault rifle,
coated with nonreflective black plastic. The edges and corners showed bright
metal; it had been knocking around for a while.
"I'll give yo sake." u a bargain on it, Jack. For old times'
I had to smile at that. Getting a bargain from the
Finn was like God repealing the law of gravity when you have to carry a heavy
suitcase down ten blocks of air-
port corridor.
file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Burning%20Chrome.txt (92 of 105) [1/14/03 11:20:24
PM]
file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Burning%20Chrome.txt
"Looks Russian to me," I said. "Probably the emergency sewage controls for
some Leningrad suburb.
Just what I need."
"You know," said the Finn. "I got a pair of shoes older than you are.
Sometimes I think you got about as much class as those yahoos from Jersey.
What do you want me to tell you, it's the keys to the Kremlin? You figure out
what the goddamn thing is. Me, I just sell the stuff."
Ibought it.
Bodiless, we swerve into Chrome's castle of ice. And we're fast, fast. It [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Archiwum