Upon feeling Michele's bare breasts on his stubble face; Luc could not resist suckling on her bright pink nipples, as he said with a smile, "Well my dear, it is a long story, but one that I think will help you to understand the truth about the world in which Kincaid and I live." Then, as he kissed her neck, lips and then her nipples again, he motioned for her to get up of his spandex encased lap and follow him to his office, which until that time, she had never seen. Once inside, she marveled at the Japanese swords and erotic Geisha prints, the site of which caused her pussy to once again stir, as she sat her naked body down in a leather couch and began to casually sip her coffee as he handed an old framed picture off a shelf and handed it to her as he began his tale of the event that had led him to where he was today. As he told the story, Michele thought back to a few nights prior when it seemed as if the people they had met, and places they had traveled, as young men, occurred only yesterday.
Sitting down next to Michele, on the spacious couch, Luc took a drink from his coffee, stroked her hair and breasts and said, "You see, it was hot that night we burned Chrome. The year was 2010 and the place was Tokyo, before the quake, where, out in the malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to death against the neon, but in Kincaid's loft the only light came from a monitor screen and the green and red LEDs on the face of the matrix simulator. I knew every chip in Kincaid's simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the "Cyberspace Seven," but I'd rebuilt it so many times that you'd have had a hard time finding a square millimeter of factory circuitry in all that silicon."
"We waited side by side in front of the simulator console, watching the time display in the screen's lower left corner."
"Go for it," I said, when it was time, but Kincaid was already there, leaning forward to drive the Russian program into its slot with the heel of his hand. He did it with the tight grace of a kid slamming change into an arcade game, sure of winning and ready to pull down a string of free games."
"A silver tide of phosphenes boiled across my field of vision as the matrix began to unfold in my head, a 3-D chessboard, infinite and perfectly transparent. The Russian program seemed to lurch as we entered the grid."
"If anyone else had been jacked into that part of the matrix, he might have seen a surf of flickering shadow roll out of the little yellow pyramid that represented our computer. The program was a mimetic weapon, designed to absorb local color and present itself as a crash-priority override in whatever context it encountered."
"Congratulations," I heard Kincaid say. "We just became an Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority inspection probe...." That meant we were clearing fiber optic lines with the cybernetic equivalent of a fire siren, but in the simulation matrix we seemed to rush straight for Chrome's data base. I couldn't see it yet, but I already knew those walls were waiting. Walls of shadow, walls of ice."
"Chrome: her pretty child face smooth as steel, with eyes that would have been at home on the bottom of some deep Atlantic trench, cold gray eyes that lived under terrible pressure. They said she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her, rococo custom variations that took years to kill you. They said a lot of things about Chrome, none of them at all reassuring. So I blotted her out with a picture of Rikki. Rikki kneeling in a shaft of dusty sunlight that slanted into the loft through a grid of steel and glass: her faded camouflage fatigues, her translucent rose sandals, the good line of her bare back as she rummaged through a nylon gear bag. She look up, and a half-blond curl falls to tickle her nose. Smiling, buttoning an old shirt of Kincaid's, frayed khaki cotton drawn across her breast."
"She smiled. "Son of a bitch," said Kincaid, "we just told Chrome we're an IRS audit and three Supreme Court subpoenas.... Hang on to your ass, Jack...."
“Jack was my code name then."
"So long, Rikki. Maybe now I see you never."
"And dark, so dark, in the halls of Chrome's ice."
"Kincaid was, and still is, a cowboy, and back then ice was the nature of his game, ice from ICE, Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. The matrix back then was more or less an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems. Legitimate programmers jack into their employees' sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing the corporate data."
"Towers and fields of it ranged in the colorless nonspace of the simulation matrix, the electronic consensus-halucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data. Legitimate programmers never seeing the walls of ice they worked behind, the walls of shadow that screen their operations from others, including industrial-espionage artists and hackers, like Kincaid."
"Like I said, Kincaid was and is a cowboy. Back then Kincaid was also a cracksman, a burglar, casing mankind's extended electronic nervous system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix, monochrome nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold spiral arms of military systems."
"Kincaid was another one of those young-old faces you see drinking in the Gentleman Loser, the chic bar for computer cowboys, rustlers, cybernetic second-story men. We were partners, and it was the beginning of a beautiful and profitable relationship."
"Kincaid and Automatic Jack, that is what we called ourselves. Back then Kincaid was a thin and pale hacker with the dark glasses, while I was the mean-looking guy with the attitude and muscle. As the dealers on the street, which of course the DGSE also knew, was that, in the words of our handler, "Kincaid's software and Jack's hard; Kincaid punches console and Jack runs down all the little things that can give you an edge." Anyway, without that glowing report, that is also what the scene watchers in the Gentleman Loser would've told you, before Kincaid decided to burn Chrome. But they also might've told you that Kincaid was losing his edge, slowing down. He was twenty-eight, Kincaid, and back then, that was considered extremely old for a console cowboy."
"Both of us were good at what we did, we were the DGSE's best, but somehow that one big score just wouldn't come down for us. I knew where to go for the right gear, and Kincaid 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, Kincaid, and I was the kind of guy who was happy to have the rent covered and a clean shirt."
"But Kincaid, back then, before Ukiko, 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 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 past, 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."
"Finn's place had 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 were 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 looked 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 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 program. 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 you a bargain on it, Jack. For old times' sake."
"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 airport corridor."
"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."
"I bought it."
"Later Kincaid and I were bodiless, as we swerved into Chrome's castle of ice. We were so fast that it felt like we were surfing the crest of the invading program, hanging ten above the seething glitch systems as they mutated. In our minds we were sentient patches of oil swept along down corridors of shadow."
"Somewhere outside of the matrix we had bodies, very far away, in a crowded loft roofer with steel and glass. Eventually we crashed her gates disguised as an audit and three subpoenas, but her defenses were specifically geared to cope with that kind of official intrusion. Her most sophisticated ice was structured to fend off warrants, writs, subpoenas. When we breached the first gate, the bulk of her data vanished behind core-command ice, these walls we had originally seen as leagues of corridor, mazes of shadow. Meanwhile, five separate landlines spurted May Day signals to law firms, but the virus had already taken over Parameter ice. The glitch systems then gobbled the distress calls as our mimetic subprograms scan for anything that hasn't been blanked by core command."
"The Russian program then lifted a Tokyo number from the unscreened data, choosing it for frequency of calls, average length of calls, the speed with which Chrome returned those calls."
"Okay," said Kincaid, " we're an incoming scrambler call from a pal of hers in Japan. That should help." Ride 'em, cowboy."
"Just like he does now, back then Kincaid read his future in women; his girls were omens, changes in the weather, and he'd sit all night in the Gentleman Loser, waiting for the season to lay a new down in front of him like a card."
"Later on I was working late in the loft one night, attempting to fix one Kincaid's laptops when he came in with a girl that I hadn't seen before. She then came right over and looked at the images on the screen, then glanced over at the printer, however, she didn't say anything, she just watched, and just like that, like when I met you, right away I had a good feeling about her; it's like that sometimes."
"Automatic Jack, Rikki. My associate," which is what Kincaid said when he introduced us, as he laughed, and then put his arm around her waist. There was something in his tone that night which let me know that I'd be spending the rest of the night in a dingy hotel room."
"Hi," she said. She was tall, nineteen or maybe twenty, and she definitely had the goods, especially with eyes of a color somewhere between dark amber and French coffee. Elsewhere her tight black jeans rolled to midcalf and a narrow plastic belt that matched the rose-colored sandals."
"Even now, when I see her sometimes when I'm trying to sleep, I see her somewhere out on the edge of the European sprawl of cities and smoke, and it's like she's a hologram stuck behind my eyes, in a bright dress she must've worn once, when I knew her, with a skirt that doesn't quite reach her knees, and long and straight legs. Brown hair, streaked with blond, hides her face, as it is blown in a wind from somewhere, as I see her, in my dreams, wave goodbye."
"Kincaid was making a show of rooting through a stack of audio cassettes. "I'm on my way, cowboy," I said, powering down the laptop terminal, as she watched attentively as I put my jacket on."
"Can you fix things?" she asked."
"Anything, anything you want, Automatic Jack'll fix it." I snapped my fingers for her. She took a little simstim deck from her belt and showed me the broken hinge on the cassette cover."
"Tomorrow," I said, "no problem."
"And my oh my, I said to myself, as sleep pulled me down the six flights to the street, what'll Kincaid s luck be like with a fortune cookie like that? If his system had worked then I thought, we'd be striking it rich any night now. In the street I grinned and yawned and waved for a cab."
"Days later the three of us watched Chrome's castle dissolving, with its sheets of ice shadow flickering and fading, eaten by the glitch systems that had spun out from the Russian program, tumbling away from our central logic thrust and infecting the fabric of the ice itself. At the time the glitch systems were cybernetic virus analogs, self-replicating and voracious that mutated constantly, in unison, subverting and absorbing Chrome's defenses."
"Have we already paralyzed her, or is a bell ringing somewhere, a red light blinking? Does she know?" Kincaid wondered, as we proceeded to make our initial run."
"As for the girl, her name was Ryoko, or Rikki Wildside, as Kincaid called her, and for those first few weeks it must have seemed to her that she had it all, the whole teeming show spread out for her, sharp and bright under the neon. She was new to the scene, and she had all the miles of malls and plazas to prowl, all the shops and clubs. Kincaid took it upon himself to explain the wild side, the tricky wiring on the dark underside of things, as well as all the players and their names and their games. He made her feel at home."
"What happened to your cheek?" she asked me one night in the Gentleman Loser, looking at my scar, as the three of us found ourselves drinking at a small table in a corner."
"Hang-gliding," I said, "accident."
"Hang-gliding over a wheat field," said Kincaid, "place called Kiev. Our Jack's just hanging there in the dark, under a Nightwing parafoil, with fifty kilos of radar jammed between his legs, and some Russian asshole accidentally tries to burn his face off with a laser."
"I don't remember how I changed the subject, but I did."
"At the time I was still telling myself that it wasn't Rikki who getting to me, but what Kincaid was doing with her. I'd known him for a long time, since the end of the war, and I knew he had often used women as counters in his game, Kincaid versus fortune, versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep."
"Unlike when he mention your name Michele, with Rikki I didn't like having to listen to him tell me how much he loved her, and knowing he believed it only made it worse. He was a past master at the hard fall and the rapid recovery, and I'd seen it happen a dozen times before. He might as well have had 'next' printed across his sunglasses in green Day-Glo capitals, ready to flash out at the first interesting face that flowed past the tables in the Gentleman Loser."
"I knew what he did to them. He turned them into emblems, signs on the map of his hustler' s life, navigation beacons he could follow through a sea of bars and neon. What else did he have to steer by? He didn't love money, in and of itself , not enough to follow its lights. He wouldn't work for power over other people; he hated the responsibility it brought. He had some basic pride in his skill, but that was never enough to keep him pushing."
"So he made do with women."
It was at that point in the story that the telephone rang, which Luc answered on the first ring. The telephone call was obviously important as he walked over to his desk and began taking notes. Meanwhile, Michele got up and walked around the room to observe and admire the erotic Japanese woodblock prints that adorned the walls, all of which were signed by the artist Akira Sensei. As she wandered nude around the office Michele could not help but wonder the point of the story that Luc was telling her. Obviously, because of her near 30 age difference with Kincaid he likely had many past loves and affairs, but somehow, as Luc seemed to hint, there was something special about Rikki that, even to this day, Kincaid still was still unable to shake from his memory.
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