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 a a 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 worlds 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 Barcelonas 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 BOBBY PULLS A WILSON
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 mothers Barrytown living room.
Shit, he thought, Two-a-Dayll 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.
Hed come home and gotten right down to it, slotted the icebreaker hed rented from Two-a-Day and jacked in. punch-ing for the base hed chosen as his first live target. Figured that was the way to do it; you wanna do it. then do it. Hed 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 heros girl or maybe his partner would run in, slap the trodes off, hit that little red ore stud. So youd make it, make it through.
But Bobby was alone now, his autonomic nervous system overridden by the defenses of a database three thousand kilometers 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.
Hed 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 Newmarks death. His hotdoggers death.
And something leaned in, vastness unutterable, from beyond the most distant edge of anything hed ever known or imagined, and touched him.
::: WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHY ARE THEY DOING THAT TO YOU?
Girlvoice, brownhair, drakes...
: KILLING ME KILLING ME GET IT OFF GET IT OFF
Darkeyes, desertstar, tanshirt, girlhair
::: BUT ITS A TRICK, SEE? YOU ONLY THINK
ITS GOT YOU. LOOK. NOW I FIT HERE AND
YOU ARENT 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 CLOCKING IN
THE 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 arent used to, Conroy said.
A figure in a red jumpsuit made brisk arm signals to the Hondas 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 Hondas wind snapping their pants legs around their ankles. Turner carried a plain gray suitcase molded from ballistic ABS, his only piece of luggage; someone 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 rigs superstructure. One scenario Hosaka showed me, wed get Mitchell out here, clean him up, stick him on Tsushima, and full steam for old Japan. I told em, forget that shit. Maas 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, thats the ticket, right? Plenty of shit Maas wouldnt 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 flechette gun. Biohazard, Conroy said as they edged past. Duck your head here. And watch it, the stairs get slippery.