Neuromancer (23 page)

M
OLLY FISHED THE
key out on its loop of nylon.

“You know,” 3Jane said, craning forward with interest, “I was under the impression
that no duplicate existed. I sent Hideo to search my father’s things, after you killed
him. He couldn’t find the original.”

“Wintermute managed to get it stuck in the back of a drawer,” Molly said, carefully
inserting the Chubb key’s cylindrical shaft into the notched opening in the face of
the blank, rectangular door. “He killed the little kid who put it there.” The key
rotated smoothly when she tried it.

“The head,” Case said, “there’s a panel in the back of the head. Zircons on it. Get
it off. That’s where I’m jacking in.”

And then they were inside.

“C
HRIST ON A
crutch,” the Flatline drawled, “you do believe in takin’ your own good time, don’t
you, boy?”

“Kuang’s ready?”

“Hot to trot.”

“Okay.” He flipped.

A
ND FOUND HIMSELF
staring down, through Molly’s one good eye, at a white-faced, wasted figure, afloat
in a loose fetal crouch, a cyberspace deck between its thighs, a band of silver trodes
above closed, shadowed eyes. The man’s cheeks were hollowed with a day’s growth of
dark beard, his face slick with sweat.

He was looking at himself.

Molly had her fletcher in her hand. Her leg throbbed with each beat of her pulse,
but she could still maneuver in zero-g. Maelcum drifted nearby, 3Jane’s thin arm gripped
in a large brown hand.

A ribbon of fiberoptics looped gracefully from the Ono-Sendai to a square opening
in the back of the pearl-crusted terminal.

He tapped the switch again.

“K
UANG
G
RADE
M
ARK
Eleven is haulin’ ass in nine seconds,
countin’
, seven, six, five . . .”

The Flatline punched them up, smooth ascent, the ventral surface of the black chrome
shark a microsecond flick of darkness.

“Four, three . . .”

Case had the strange impression of being in the pilot’s seat in a small plane. A flat
dark surface in front of him suddenly glowed with a perfect reproduction of the keyboard
of his deck.

“Two, an’
kick ass
—”

Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the sensation of speed
beyond anything he’d known before in cyberspace. . . . The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered,
peeling away from the Chinese program’s thrust, a worrying impression of solid fluidity,
as though the shards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell—

“Christ,” Case said, awestruck, as Kuang twisted and banked above the horizonless
fields of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an endless neon cityscape, complexity that cut
the eye, jewel bright, sharp as razors.

“Hey, shit,” the construct said, “those things are the RCA Building. You know the
old RCA Building?” The Kuang program dived past the
gleaming spires of a dozen identical towers of data, each one a blue neon replica
of the Manhattan skyscraper.

“You ever see resolution this high?” Case asked.

“No, but I never cracked an AI, either.”

“This thing know where it’s going?”

“It better.”

They were dropping, losing altitude in a canyon of rainbow neon.

“Dix—”

An arm of shadow was uncoiling from the flickering floor below, a seething mass of
darkness, unformed, shapeless. . . .

“Company,” the Flatline said, as Case hit the representation of his deck, fingers
flying automatically across the board. The Kuang swerved sickeningly, then reversed,
whipping itself backward, shattering the illusion of a physical vehicle.

The shadow thing was growing, spreading, blotting out the city of data. Case took
them straight up, above them the distanceless bowl of jade-green ice.

The city of the cores was gone now, obscured entirely by the dark beneath them.

“What is it?”

“An AI’s defense system,” the construct said, “or part of it. If it’s your pal Wintermute,
he’s not lookin’ real friendly.”

“Take it,” Case said. “You’re faster.”

“Now your best
de
-fense, boy, it’s a good
off
-fense.”

And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang’s sting with the center of the dark below.
And dove.

Case’s sensory input warped with their velocity.

His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue.

His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was
rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass
spines. The spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the dome
of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.

The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets that whipped around his
tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests
that pressed against the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread, growing
down, filling the
universe of T-A, down into the waiting, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind
of Tessier-Ashpool S.A.

And he was remembering an ancient story, a king placing coins on a chessboard, doubling
the amount at each square. . . .

Exponential. . . .

Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure on the extended
crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become. . . .

And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark, there came a point
where the dark could be no
more
, and something tore.

The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case’s consciousness divided like
beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds.
His vision was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface of a globe
that contained all things, if all things could be counted.

And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of grains of sand in
the construct of the beach (a number coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere
outside the mind that was Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food packets
in the canisters in the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass
teeth in the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that
Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a stick of driftwood
in her hand (two hundred and two).

He banked Kuang above the beach and swung the program in a wide circle, seeing the
black shark thing through her eyes, a silent ghost hungry against the banks of lowering
cloud. She cringed, dropping her stick, and ran. He knew the rate of her pulse, the
length of her stride in measurements that would have satisfied the most exacting standards
of geophysics.

“But you do not know her thoughts,” the boy said, beside him now in the shark thing’s
heart. “I do not know her thoughts. You were wrong, Case. To live here is to live.
There is no difference.”

Linda in her panic, plunging blind through the surf.

“Stop her,” he said, “she’ll hurt herself.”

“I can’t stop her,” the boy said, his gray eyes mild and beautiful.

“You’ve got Riviera’s eyes,” Case said.

There was a flash of white teeth, long pink gums. “But not his craziness. Because
they are beautiful to me.” He shrugged. “I need no mask to speak with you. Unlike
my brother. I create my own personality. Personality is my medium.”

Case took them up, a steep climb, away from the beach and the frightened girl. “Why’d
you throw her up to me, you little prick? Over and fucking over, and turning me around.
You killed her, huh? In Chiba.”

“No,” the boy said.

“Wintermute?”

“No. I saw her death coming. In the patterns you sometimes imagined you could detect
in the dance of the street. Those patterns are real. I am complex enough, in my narrow
ways, to read those dances. Far better than Wintermute can. I saw her death in her
need for you, in the magnetic code of the lock on the door of your coffin in Cheap
Hotel, in Julie Deane’s account with a Hongkong shirtmaker. As clear to me as the
shadow of a tumor to a surgeon studying a patient’s scan. When she took your Hitachi
to her boy, to try to access it—she had no idea what it carried, still less how she
might sell it, and her deepest wish was that you would pursue and punish her—I intervened.
My methods are far more subtle than Wintermute’s. I brought her here. Into myself.”

“Why?”

“Hoping I could bring you here as well, keep you here. But I failed.”

“So what now?” He swung them back into the bank of cloud. “Where do we go from here?”

“I don’t know, Case. Tonight the very matrix asks itself that question. Because you
have won. You have already won, don’t you see? You won when you walked away from her
on the beach. She was my last line of defense. I die soon, in one sense. As does Wintermute.
As surely as Riviera does, now, as he lies paralyzed beside the stump of a wall in
the apartments of my Lady 3Jane Marie-France, his
nigra-striatal
system unable to produce the dopamine receptors that could save him from Hideo’s
arrow. But Riviera will survive only as these eyes, if I am allowed to keep them.”

“There’s the
word
, right? The code. So how’ve I
won?
I’ve won jack shit.”

“Flip now.”

“Where’s Dixie? What have you done with the Flatline?”

“McCoy Pauley has his wish,” the boy said, and smiled. “His wish and more. He punched
you here against my wish, drove himself through defenses equal to anything in the
matrix. Now flip.”

And Case was alone in Kuang’s black sting, lost in cloud.

He flipped.

I
NTO
M
OLLY
’
S TENSION
, her back like rock, her hands around 3Jane’s throat. “Funny,” she said, “I know
exactly what you’d look like. I saw it after Ashpool did the same thing to your clone
sister.” Her hands were gentle, almost a caress. 3Jane’s eyes were wide with terror
and lust; she was shivering with fear and longing. Beyond the freefall tangle of 3Jane’s
hair, Case saw his own strained white face, Maelcum behind him, brown hands on the
leather-jacketed shoulders, steadying him above the carpet’s pattern of woven circuitry.

“Would you?” 3Jane asked, her voice a child’s. “I think you would.”

“The code,” Molly said. “Tell the head the code.”

Jacking out.

“S
HE WANTS IT
,” he screamed, “the bitch
wants
it!”

He opened his eyes to the cool ruby stare of the terminal, its platinum face crusted
with pearl and lapis. Beyond it, Molly and 3Jane twisted in a slow motion embrace.

“Give us the fucking code,” he said. “If you don’t, what’ll change? What’ll ever fucking
change for you? You’ll wind up like the old man. You’ll tear it all down and start
building again! You’ll build the walls back, tighter and tighter. . . . I got no idea
at all what’ll happen if Wintermute wins, but it’ll
change
something!” He was shaking, his teeth chattering.

3Jane went limp, Molly’s hands still around her slender throat, her dark hair drifting,
tangled, a soft brown caul.

“The Ducal Palace at Mantua,” she said, “contains a series of increasingly smaller
rooms. They twine around the grand apartments, beyond beautifully carved doorframes
one stoops to enter. They housed the court dwarfs.” She smiled wanly. “I might aspire
to that, I suppose, but in a sense my family has already accomplished a grander version
of the same scheme. . . .” Her eyes were calm now, distant. Then she gazed down at
Case. “Take your word, thief.” He jacked.

K
UANG SLID OUT
of the clouds. Below him, the neon city. Behind him, a sphere of darkness dwindled.

“Dixie? You here, man? You hear me? Dixie?”

He was alone.

“Fucker got you,” he said.

Blind momentum as he hurtled across the infinite datascape.

“You gotta hate somebody before this is over,” said the Finn’s voice. “Them, me, it
doesn’t matter.”

“Where’s Dixie?”

“That’s kinda hard to explain, Case.”

A sense of the Finn’s presence surrounded him, smell of Cuban cigarettes, smoke locked
in musty tweed, old machines given up to the mineral rituals of rust.

“Hate’ll get you through,” the voice said. “So many little triggers in the brain,
and you just go yankin’ ’em all. Now you gotta
hate
. The lock that screens the hardwiring, it’s down under those towers the Flatline
showed you, when you came in.
He
won’t try to stop you.”

“Neuromancer,” Case said.

“His name’s not something I can know. But he’s given up, now. It’s the T-A ice you
gotta worry about. Not the wall, but internal virus systems. Kuang’s wide open to
some of the stuff they got running loose in here.”

“Hate,” Case said. “Who do I hate? You tell me.”

“Who do you love?” the Finn’s voice asked.

He whipped the program through a turn and dived for the blue towers.

Things were launching themselves from the ornate sunburst spires, glittering leech
shapes made of shifting planes of light. There were hundreds of them, rising in a
whirl, their movements random as windblown paper down dawn streets. “Glitch systems,”
the voice said.

He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang program met the first of
the defenders, scattering the leaves of light, he felt the shark thing lose a degree
of substantiality, the fabric of information loosening.

And then—old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy—his hate flowed into his hands.

In the instant before he drove Kuang’s sting through the base of the first tower,
he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he’d known or imagined. Beyond
ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading
his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo’s dance, grace of the mind-body interface
granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.