"So anyway, as I was saying, when Rikki showed up, Kincaid needed one in the worst way. He was fading fast, and the smart money was already whispering that the edge was off his game. He needed that one big score, and soon, because he didn't know any other kind of life, and all his clocks were set for hustler's time, calibrated in risk and adrenaline and that supernatural dawn calm that comes when every move's proved right and a sweet lump of someone elses credit clicks into your own account."
"Eventually it was time for him to make his bundle and get out; so Rikki got set up higher and farther away than any of the others ever had, even though--and I felt like screaming it at him--she was right there, alive, totally real, human, hungry, resilient, bored, beautiful, excited, all the things she was..."
"Then he went out one afternoon, about a week before I made the trip to New York to see Finn. Went out and left us, me and Rikki, there in the loft, waiting for a thunder storm. Half the skylight was shadowed by a dome they'd never finished, and the other half showed sky, looking up at that sky, stupid with the hot afternoon, the humidity, and she touched me, and touched my shoulder. Her nails were lacquered black, not pointed, but tapered oblongs, the lacquer only a shade darker than the carbon-fiber laminated pants sheathed my legs. She then went down my waist, her black nails tracing a weld in the crease, then down to my hand where her soft fingers spread out to lock over mine, with the palm of her other hand resting against my straining cock, whereupon we made love even as it rained all afternoon, raindrops drumming on the steel and soot-stained glass above Kincaid's bed."
As Luc reminisced about making love to Rikki, he pulled from his desk two pictures of the beautiful Japanese woman, one of her in a traditional kimono, while the other was of her in a tight leather body suit and stilleto heals. As she gazed at the photographs, Michele looked up to see Luc close his eyes in fond remembrance as he continued telling his tale.
"Days later ice walls flicked away like supersonic butterflies made of shade. Beyond them, the matrix's illusion of infinite space. It was like watching a tape of a prefab building going up; only the tape's reversed and run at high speed, and these walls are torn wings. At the time I was trying to remind myself that this place and the gulfs beyond were only representations, that we aren't in Chrome's computer, but instead were simply interfaced with it, while the matrix simulator in Kincaid's loft generated the illusion ... Eventually the core data began to emerge, exposed, vulnerable.... This was the far side of ice, presenting me with the view of the matrix that I had never seen before, a view that fifteen million legitimate console operators now see daily and take for granted."
"The core data tower around us was like vertical freight trains, color-coded for access. Bright primaries, impossibly bright in that transparent void, linked by countless horizontals in nursery blues and pinks, but ice still shadowed something at the center of it all: that being the heart of all Chrome's expensive darkness, the very heart ..."
"Two weeks later it was late afternoon when I got back from my shopping expedition to New York. Not much sun through the skylight, but an ice pattern allowed on Kincaid's monitor screen, a 2-D graphic representation of someone's computer defenses, lines of neon woven like an Art Deco prayer rug. I turned the console off, and the screen went completely dark. Rikki's things were spread across my workbench, including her passport, but I'd never tried to move in those nylon bags without ending up spilling her clothes and makeup, a pair of bright red cowboy boots, audio cassettes, glossy Japanese magazines about simstim stars. I stacked it all under the bench and then took my jacket off, forgetting that the program I'd brought from the Finn was in the right-hand pocket of my jacket, so that I had to fumble it out left-handed and then get it into the padded jaws of the jeweler's vise."
"The waldo looked like an old audio turntable, the kind that played disc records, with the vise set up under a transparent dust cover. The arm itself was just over a centimeter long, swinging out on what would've been the tone arm on one of those turntables. But I don't look at that when I've clipped the leads to my ocilator. I then ran a tool check and picked up the laser. It felt a little heavy; so I scaled my weight-sensor input down to a quarter-kilo per gram and got to work. At 40 x the side of the program looked like a trailer truck. It took eight hours to crack: three hours with the waldo and the laser and four dozen taps, two hours on the phone to a contact in Colorado, and three hours to run down a lexicon disc that could translate eight-year- old technical Russian. Then Cyrillic alphanumerics started reeling down the monitor, twisting themselves into English halfway down. There were a lot of gaps, where the lexicon ran up against specialized military acronyms in the readout I'd bought from my man in Colorado, but it did give me some idea of what I'd bought from the Finn."
"At this point I felt like a punk who'd gone out to buy a switch blade and come home with a small neutron bomb. Screwed again, I thought. What good's a neutron bomb in a streetfight? The thing under the dust cover was right out of my league. I didn't even know where to unload it, where to look for a buyer. Someone had, but he was dead, someone with a Porsche watch and a fake Belgian passport, but I'd never tried to move in those circles. The Finn's muggers from the 'burbs had knocked over someone who had some highly arcane connections. The program in the jeweler's vise was a Russian military icebreaker, a killer-virus program."
"It was dawn when Kincaid finally came in alone. I'd fallen asleep with a bag of takeout sandwiches in my lap. "You want to eat?" I asked him, not really awake, holding out my sandwiches. I'd been dreaming of the Program, of its waves of hungry glitch systems and mimetic subprograms; in the dream it was an animal of some kind, shapeless and flowing.
"No thanks," Kincaid said, as brushed the bag aside on his way to the console, punched a function key, after which the screen lit with the intricate pattern I'd seen that afternoon, as I rubbed sleep from my eyes. I'd fallen asleep earlier trying to decide whether to tell him about the program, or maybe I thought, I should instead try to sell it alone, keep the money, go somewhere new, asking Rikki to go with me."
"Whose is it?" I asked."
"However, instead of a quick reply, Kincaid just stood there in a black cotton jump suit, an old leather jacket thrown over his shoulders like a cape. He hadn't shaved for a few days, and his face looked thinner than usual."
"It's Chrome's," he said."
"You're stone crazy," I said. "No," he said, "you think she rumbled it? No way. We'd be dead already. I locked on to her through a triple-blind rental system in Mombasa and an Algerian comsat. She knew somebody was having a look-see, but she couldn't trace it."
If Chrome had traced the pass Kincaid had made at her ice, we were good as dead, but he was probably right, or she'd have had me blown away on my way back from New York.
"Why her, Kincaid? Just give me one reason.... " Chrome: I'd seen her maybe half a dozen times in the Gentleman Loser. Maybe she was slumming, or checking out the human condition, a condition she didn't exactly aspire to. A sweet little heart-shaped face framing the nastiest pair of eyes you ever saw. She'd looked fourteen for as long as anyone could remember, hyped out of anything like a normal metabolism on some massive program of serums and hormones. She was as ugly a customer as the street ever produced, but she didn't belong to the street anymore. She was one of the Boys, Chrome, a member in good standing of the local Mob subsidiary. Word was, she'd gotten started as a dealer, back when synthetic pituitary hormones were still proscribed. But she hadn't had to move hormones for a long time. Now she owned the House of Blue Lights."
"You're flat-out crazy, Kincaid. You give me one sane reason for having that shit on your screen. You ought to dump it, and I mean now...."
"Talk in the Loser, " he said, shrugging out of the leather jacket. "Black Myron and Crow Jane. Jane, she's up on all the sex lines, claims she knows where the money goes. So she's arguing with Myron that Chrome's the controlling interest in the Blue Light, not just some figurehead for the Boys."
" 'The Boys,' Kincaid," I said. "That's the operative word there. You're still capable of seeing that? We don't mess with the Boys, remember? That's why we're still walking around."
"That's why we're still poor, partner," he said, after which settled back into the swivel chair in front of the console, unzipped his jump suit, and scratched his chest. "But maybe not for much longer."
"I think maybe this partnership just got itself permanently dissolved." I yelled.
"Then he grinned at me. The grin was truly crazy, feral and focused, and I knew that right then he really didn't give a shit about dying."
"Look," I said, "I've got some money left, you know? Why don't you take it and get the tube to Miami, catch a hopper to Montego Bay. You need a rest, man. You've got to get your act together."
"My act, my trusted friend," he said, punching something on the keyboard, "has never has been this together before."
"As he spoke, the neon prayer rug on the screen shivered and woke as an animation program cut in, ice lines weaving with hypnotic frequency, a living mandala. Then, as Kincaid kept punching, the movement slowed; and the pattern resolved itself as it grew slightly less complex, and eventually became an alternation between two distant configurations. I had to admit that it was a first-class piece of work, but even then I really hadn't thought he was still that good."
"Now." he said, "there, see it? Wait. There. There again. And there. Easy to miss. That's it. Cuts in every hour and twenty minutes with a squirt transmission to their comsat. We could live for a year on what she pays them in negative interest."
"Whose Comsat?" I asked."
"Zurich. Her bankers. 'That's her bankbook. That's where the money goes. Crow Jane was right. So how'd you do in New York, partner? You get anything that'll help me cut ice? We're going to need whatever we can get."
"I kept my eyes on his, forced myself not to look in the direction of the waldo, the jeweler's vise. The Russian program was there, under the dust cover."
"Wild cards, luck changers."
"Where's Rikki?" I asked him, crossing to the console, pretending to study the alternating patterns on the screen."
"Friends of hers," he shrugged, "kids, they're all into simstim. He smiled absently. I 'm going to do it for her, man."
"I'm going out to think about this, Kincaid. You want me to come back, you keep your hands off the board."
"I'm doing it for her," he said as the door closed behind me. "You know I am."
"And down now, down, the program a roller coaster through this fraying maze of shadow walls, gray cathedral spaces between the bright towers. Headlong speed."
"Black ice. Don t think about it. Black ice."
"Too many stories in the Gentleman Loser; black ice is a part of the mythology. Ice that kills. Illegal, but then aren't we all? Some kind of neural-feedback weapon, and you connect with it only once. Like some hideous worm that eats the mind from the inside out. Like an epileptic spasm that goes on and on until there's nothing left at all..."
"And we're diving for the floor of Chrome's shadow, castle." I asked."
"Trying to brace myself for the sudden stopping of breath, a sickness and final slackening of the nerves. Fear of that cold worm waiting, down there in the dark."
"I went out and looked for Rikki, found her in a café with a boy with Sendai eyes, half-healed suture lines radiating from his bruised sockets. She had a glossy brochure spread open on the table, Tally Isham smiling Ikon Eyes."
"Her little simstim deck was one of the things I'd stacked under by bench the night before, the one I'd fixed for her the day after I'd first seen her. She spent hours jacked into that unit, the contact band across her forehead like a gray plastic tiara. Ta!ly Isham was her favorite, and with the contact band on, she was gone, off somewhere in the recorded sensorium of simstim's biggest star. Simulated stimuli: the world--all the interesting parts, anyway--as perceived by Tally Isham. Tally raced a black Fokker ground-effect plane across Arizona mesa tops. Tally dived the Truk Island preserves. Tally partied with the super rich on private Greek islands, heartbreaking purity of those tiny white seaports at dawn."
"Actually she looked a lot like Tally, same coloring and cheekbones. I thought Rikki's mouth was stronger. More sass. She didn't want to be Tally Isham, but she coveted the job. That was her ambition, to be in simstim. Kincaid just laughed it off. she talked to me about it, though. "How'd I look with a pair of these?" she'd ask, holding a full-page headshot, Tally Isham's blue Zeiss Ikons lined up with her own amber-brown. She'd had her corneas done twice, but she still wasn't 20-20; so she wanted Ikons. Brand of the stars. Very expensive."
"You still window-shopping for eyes?" I asked as I sat down."
"Tiger just got some," she said. She looked tired, I thought."
"Tiger was so pleased with his Sendais that he couldn't help smiling, but I doubted whether he'd have smiled otherwise. he had the kind of uniform good looks you get after your seventh trip to the surgical boutique; he'd probably spend the rest of his life looking vaguely like each new season's media front-runner; not too obviously a copy, but nothing too original, either."
"Sendai, right?" I smiled back."
"He nodded. I watched as he tried to take me in with his idea of a professional simstim glance. He was pretending that he was recording. I thought he spent too long on my arm, which I had injured in the war. "They'll be great on peripherals when the muscles heal," he said, and I saw how carefully he reached for his double espresso. Sendai eyes are notorious for depth-perception defects and warranty hassles, among other things."
"Tiger's leaving for Hollywood tomorrow."
"Then maybe Chiba City, right?" I smiled at him. He didn't smile back. "Got an offer, Tiger? Know an agent?"
"Just checking it out," he said quietly. Then he got up and left. He said a quick goodbye to Rikki, but not to me."
"That kid's optic nerves may start to deteriorate inside six months. You know that, Rikki? Those Sendais are illegal in England, Denmark, lots of places. You can't replace nerves."
"Hey, Jack, no lectures." She stole one of my croissants and nibbled at the top of one of its horns."
"I thought I was your adviser, kid."
"Yeah. Well, Tiger's not too swift, but everybody knows about Sendais. They're all he can afford. So he's taking a chance. If he gets work, he can replace them."
"With these?" I tapped the Zeiss Ikon brochure."
"Lot of money, Rikki. You know better than to take a gamble like that."
"She nodded. "I want Ikons."
"If you're going up to Kincaid's, tell him to sit tight until he hears from me."
"Sure. It's business?"
"Business," I said. But it was craziness."
"I drank my coffee, and she ate both my croissants. Then I walked her down to Kincaid's. I made fifteen calls, each one from a different pay phone."
"Business. Bad craziness."
"All in all, it took us six weeks to set the burn up, six weeks of Kincaid telling how much he loved her. I worked even harder, trying to get away from that."
"Most of it was it was phone calls. My fifteen initial and very oblique inquiries each seemed to breed fifteen more. I was looking for a certain service Kincaid and I both imagined as a requisite part of the world s clandestine economy, but which probably never had more than five customers at a time. It would be one that never advertised."
"We were looking for the world's heaviest fence, for a non-aligned money laundry capable of dry-cleaning a megabuck online cash transfer and then forgetting about it."
"All those calls were a waste, finally, because it was the Finn who put me on to what we needed. I'd gone up to New York to buy a new blackbox rig, because we were going broke paying for all those calls."
"I put the problem to him as hypothetically as possible."
"Macao," he said."
"Macao?"
"The Long Hum family. Stockbrokers."
"He even had the number. You want a fence, ask another fence."
"The Long Hum people were so oblique that they made my idea of a subtle approach look like a tactical nuke-out. Kincaid had to make two shuttle runs to Hong Kong to get the deal straight. We were running out of capital, and fast. I still don't know why I decided to go along in the first place; I was scared of Chrome, and I'd never been all that hot to get rich."
"I tried telling myself that it was good idea to burn the House of Blue lights because the place was a creep joint, but I couldn't buy it. I didn't like the Blue Lights, because I'd spent a supremely depressing evening there once, but that was no excuse for going after Chrome, Actually I halfway assumed we were going to die in the attempt. Even with that killer program, the odds weren't exactly in our favor."
However, before Luc could finish his story the telephone rang again, and, as he looked down at the number, he suggested to Michele that she go ahead of him and take her shower and get herself dressed in the outfit hanging in his closet, a special one that Luc had purchased for her day with him that, Luc knew, Michele would definitely love to wear. The reason for this was that on the telephone was Kincaid's boss. Their boss had decided to approve Michele's spy training at Roissy, which it was hoped would start as soon as possible. After hanging up the telephone, Luc called Kincaid and assured him that all was well with Michele and that she seemed quite excited about being a member of their trio. Kincaid then asked Luc to fill him in on all the details of the Countess' Africa party, which the Countess was hosting at the Paris Zoo.
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