Burning Chrome

Citation

Gibson, William. Burning Chrome. New York, NY: Ace Books, 1987. 0441089348.

Abstract

“William Gibson’s dark visions of computer cowboys, bio-enhanced soldiers of fortune, and hi-tech lowlifes have won unprecedented praise. Included here are his most famous short fiction and novellas. Hard-edged. Merciless. Passionate. They are vintage Gibson.”

Annotations

Preface, by Bruce Sterling

Keywords: science fiction, pulp, ideas, culture, literary, baroque, cybernetics, biotech, communications

“If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world science-fiction writers are its court jesters” (ix)

“the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless” (ix)

“Very few feel obliged to take us seriously, yet our ideas permeate the culture, bubbling along invisibly, like background radiation” (ix)

“The Gibson trademarks are already present: a complex synthesis of modern pop culture, high tech, and advanced literary technique” (x)

“a devastating refutation of ‘scientifiction’ in its guise as narrow technolatry. We see here a writer who knows his roots and is gearing up for a radical reformation” (x)

“densely packed, baroque stories repay several readings for their hard-edged, gloomy passion and intensely realized detail” (x)

“brilliant, self-consistent evocation of a credible future” (x)

“a future that is recognizably and painstakingly drawn from the modern condition” (x)

“a new set of starting points: … cybernetics, biotech, and the communications web” (x-xi)

“his characters are a pirate’s crew of losers, hustlers, spin-offs, castoffs, and lunatics” (xi)

“boredom with the Apocalypse” (xi)

“In Gibson we hear the sound of a decade that has finally found its own voice” (xii)

“Eighties culture, with its strange, growing integration of technology and fashion” (xii)

“He has a fondness for the odder and more inventive byways of mainstream lit: Le Carré, Robert Stone, Pynchon, William Burroughs, Jayne Anne Phillips. And he is a devotee of what J. G. Ballard has perceptively called ‘invisible literature’: that permeating flow of scientific reports, government documents, and specialized advertising that shapes our culture below the level of recognition” (xii)

Johnny Mnemonic

Keywords: crude, technical, immaculate procedure, gender, bodies, architecture, information, fragments, knowledge

“If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness” (1)

“I’d had to turn both these twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on a lathe, and then load them myself; I’d had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand-loading cartridges; I’d had to build a lever-action press to seat the primers—all very tricky” (1)

Commentator’s Note: cf. the gun used to kill Shinzo Abe.

“Immaculate procedure” (1)

“The Magnetic Dog Sisters were on the door that night, and I didn’t relish trying to get out past them if things didn’t work out. They were two meters tall and thin as greyhounds. One was black and the other white, white, but aside from that they were as nearly identical as cosmetic surgery could make them. They’d been lovers for and were bad news in a tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male” (2)

“I had hundreds of megabytes stashed in head on an idiot/savant basis, information I had no conscious access to” (2)

“Muscle-boys scattered through the crowd were flexing stock parts at one another and trying on thin, cold grins, some of them so lost under superstructures of muscle graft that their outlines weren’t really human” (2)

“he’d worn the once-famous face of Christian White for twenty years—Christian White of the Aryan Reggae Band, Sony Mao to his generation, and final champion of race rock” (3)

“He was outside, waiting. Looking like your standard tourist tech, in plastic zoris and a silly Hawaiian shirt printed with blowups of his firm’s most popular microprocessor; a mild little guy, the kind most likely to wind up drunk on sake in a bar that puts out miniature rice crackers with seaweed garnish” (6)

“I glanced up, out of some passing reflex, maybe because I’ve never got used to it, to the soaring arcs of light and the shadows of the geodesics above them. Maybe that saved me” (7)

“We left him drifting, rolling languorously in the dark water. Maybe he was dreaming of his war in the Pacific, of the cyber mines he’d swept, nosing gently into their circuitry with the Squid he’d used to pick Ralf’s pathetic password from the chip buried in my head” (12)

“The mall runs forty kilometers from end to end, a ragged overlap of Fuller domes roofing what was once a suburban artery. If they turn off the arcs on a clear day, a gray approximation of sunlight filters through layers of acrylic, a view like the prison sketches of Giovanni Piranesi. The three southernmost kilometers roof Nighttown. Nighttown pays no taxes, no utilities. The neon arcs are dead, and the geodesics have been smoked black by decades of cooking fires. In the nearly total darkness of a Nighttown noon, who notices a few dozen mad children lost in the rafters?” (13-14)

“LO TEK … Low technique, low technology” (14)

“I wondered how they wrote off tooth-bud transplants from Dobermans as low technology. Immunosuppressives don’t exactly grow on trees” (14)

“It had taken time and a certain kind of creativity to assemble that face, and his posture told me he enjoyed living behind it” (15)

“The Lo Teks leech their webs and huddling places to the city’s fabric with thick gobs of epoxy and sleep above the abyss in mesh hammocks. Their country is so attenuated that in places it consists of little more than holds for hands and feet, sawed into geodesic struts” (16)

“We’re an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified” (16-17)

“I followed Dog and Molly through Lo Tek heaven, jury-rigged and jerrybuilt from scraps that even Nighttown didn’t want” (17)

“it came to me that I had no idea at all of what was really happening, or of what was supposed to happen. And that was the nature of my game, because I’d spent most of my life as a blind receptacle to be filled with other people’s knowledge and then drained, spouting synthetic languages I’d never understand. A very technical boy. Sure” (18)

“the Killing Floor began to heave in response. The sound it made was like a world ending, like the wires that hold heaven snapping and coiling across the sky” (19)

“Molly seemed to let something go, something inside, and that was the real start of her mad-dog dance” (20)

“I saw something in his face, an expression that didn’t seem to belong there. It wasn’t fear and it wasn’t anger. I think it was disbelief, stunned incomprehension mingled with pure aesthetic revulsion at what he was seeing, hearing—at what was happening to him” (20)

“She’d killed him with culture shock” (21)

Commentator’s Note: Tourist.

“When I looked out across the Killing Floor, before he came, I saw how hollow was. And I knew I was sick of being a bucket” (21)

“one day I’ll have a surgeon dig all the silicon out of my amygdalae, and I’ll live with my own memories and nobody else’s, the way other people do” (22)

The Gernsback Continuum

Keywords: chrome, history, raygun gothic, baroque, architecture, dreams, industrial design, populism, totalitarianism, subconscious, Jung, Disney, holograms, hieroglyphs, semiotics

“When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye” (23)

“my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot” (23)

“Dialta Downes … a noted pop-art historian. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes THIS WAY LIES MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals” (24)

“Cohen introduced us and explained that Dialta was the prime mover behind the latest Barris-Watford project, an illustrated history of what she called ‘American Streamlined Moderne.’ Cohen called it ‘raygun Gothic.’ Their working title was The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was” (24)

“the more baroque elements of American pop culture” (24)

“those odds and ends of ‘futuristic’ Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing” (24)

“She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present” (25)

“The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers” (25)

“It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future” (25)

“The designers were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future” (26)

“Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way” (26)

“they came across with a kind of sinister totalitarian dignity, like the stadiums Albert Speer built for Hitler. But the rest of it was relentlessly tacky: ephemeral stuff extruded by the collective American subconscious of the Thirties” (26)

“he cruised up and down the coast erecting raygun emplacements in white stucco” (27)

“radiator flanges that were a signature motif of the style, and made them look as though they might generate potent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm” (27)

“‘Think of it,’ Dialta Downes had said, ‘as a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams’” (27)

“I found myself wondering what the inhabitants of that lost future would think of the world I lived in. The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car—no wings for it—and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal” (27)

“haven’t you grasped my blanket solution to the UFO problem?” (28)

“People see these things. Nothing’s there, but people see them anyway. Because they need to, probably. You’ve read Jung, you should know the score” (28)

“How many people survived the Sixties in California without having the odd hallucination? All those nights when you discovered that whole armies of Disney technicians had been employed to weave animated holograms of Egyptian hieroglyphs into the fabric of your jeans” (28)

“She’d have seen the devil, if she hadn’t been brought up on “The Bionic Man’ and all those ‘Star Trek’ reruns. She is clued into the main vein” (28)

“If you want a classier explanation, I’d say you saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture” (29)

“They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne air ships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing” (29-30)

“I had a meal, showered, took a crumbling diet pill that had been kicking around in the bottom of my shaving kit for three years, and headed back to Los Angeles” (30)

“The body could drive, I told myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained and stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind’s eye along late-night highways” (30)

“Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated the diet pill, and the speed-vegetation along the road began to assume the colors of infrared satellite images, glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota’s slipstream” (30)

“I knew, somehow, that the city behind me was Tucson—a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era” (32)

“They were the children of Dialta Downes’s ‘80-that-wasn’t; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we’d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose” (32)

“It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda” (33)

“Really bad media can exorcise your semiotic ghosts” (33)

“Hell of a world we live in, huh?” (35)

“‘But it could be worse, huh?’

‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘or even worse, it could be perfect’” (35)

Fragments of a Hologram Rose

Keywords: sleep, mind, schematics, hieroglyphs, pollution, perception, gender, Lascaux/Gutenberg, holographic, fragments

“That summer Parker had trouble sleeping. There were power droughts; sudden failures of the delta-inducer brought painfully abrupt returns to consciousness” (36)

“Parker, who hadn’t been able to sleep without an inducer for two years” (36)

“The transition from delta to delta-ASP was a dark implosion into other flesh” (37)

“Morning’s recorded dream, fading: through other eyes, dark plume of a Cuban freighter—fading with the horizon it navigates across the mind’s gray screen” (37)

“Let yesterday arrange itself around you in flat schematic images. What you said—what she said—watching her pack—dialing the cab. However you shuffle them they form the same printed circuit, hieroglyphs converging on a central component; you, standing in the rain, screaming at the cabby” (37)

“The rain was sour and acid, nearly the color of piss. The cabby called you an asshole; you still had to pay twice the fare” (37)

“APPARENT SENSORY PERCEPTION” (38)

“Roughly a quarter of all ASP users are unable to comfortably assimilate the subjective body picture of the opposite sex. Over the years some broadcast ASP stars have become increasingly androgynous in an attempt to capture this segment of the audience” (39)

“When Parker was fifteen, his parents indentured him to the American subsidiary of a Japanese plastics combine” (39)

“who explained the finer points of her horoscope between bouts of almost silent weeping” (39)

“The first three quarters of the cassette have been erased; you punch yourself fast-forward through a static haze of wiped tape, where taste and scent blur into a single channel. The audio input is white sound—the no-sound of the first dark sea. . . . (Prolonged input from wiped tape can induce hypnagogic hallucination)” (40)

“If the chaos of the nineties reflects a radical shift in the paradigms of visual literacy, the final shift away from the Lascaux/Gutenberg tradition of a pre-holographic society, what should we expect from this newer technology, with his promise of discrete encoding and subsequent reconstruction of the full range of sensory perception? —Roebuck and Pierhal, Recent American History: A Systems View” (41)

”—and static takes love’s body, wipes it clean and gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that isn’t there. And the tape ends” (42)

“Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he’ll never know—stolen credit cards—a burned-out suburb—planetary conjunctions of a stranger—a tank burning on a highway—a flat packet of drugs—a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain” (42)

“Thinking: We’re each other’s fragments, and was it always this way?” (42)

The Belonging Kind, by John Shirley and William Gibson

Keywords: linguistics, language, fashion, mimesis, personification

“at the community college where he lectured in introductory linguistics” (43)

“about sequencing and options in conversational openings. But he could never talk to strangers in bars or at parties” (43)

“Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer, unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion statement that would put strangers at their ease” (44)

“too perfect a shift in phrasing and inflection … mimetic” (45)

“She moved in perfect accord with the music, striking a series of poses; she went through the entire prescribed sequence, gracefully but not artfully, fitting in perfectly. Always, always fitting in perfectly” (47)

“human fixtures. Functions of the bar. The belonging kind” (49)

“the personification of conformity, this woman who was not a woman, this human wallpaper” (51)

Hinterlands

Keywords: biography, singularity, dream, information, fear, relics, Disney, cargo cult, Freud, Jung, Adler, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, mystic, rules, gestalt, big night

“It took a few seconds for my life to fall together icebergs of biography looming through the fog” (58)

“I just swung there in my hammock and played the game called Toby Halpert’s Place in the Universe. No egotist, I put the sun in the center, the lumiary, the orb of day. Around it I swung tidy planets, our cozy home system. But just here, at a fixed point about an eighth of the way out toward the orbit of Mars, I hung a fat alloy cylinder, like a quarter-scale model of Tsiolkovsky 1, the Worker’s Paradise back at L-5. Tsiolkovsky 1 is fixed at the liberation point between Earth’s gravity and the moon’s, but we need a lightsail to hold us here, twenty tons of aluminum spun into a hexagon, ten kilometers from side to side. That sail towed us out from Earth orbit, and now it’s our anchor. We use it to tack against the photon stream, hanging here beside the thing—the point, the singularity—we call the Highway” (59-60)

“The French call it le métro, the subway, and the Russians call it the river, but subway won’t carry the distance, and river, for Americans, can’t carry quite the same loneliness. Call it the Tovyevski Anomaly Coordinates if you don’t mind bringing Olga into it. Olga Tovyevski, Our Lady of Singularities, Patron Saint of the Highway” (60)

“Heaven, the inner cylinder, the unlikely green heart of this place, is the ripe Disney dream of homecoming, the ravenous car of an information-hungry global economy. A constant stream of raw data goes pulsing home to Earth, a flood of rumors, whispers, hints of transgalactic traffic. I used to lie rigid in my hammock and feel the pressure of all those data, feel them snaking through the lines I imagined behind the bulkhead, lines like sinews, strapped and bulging, ready to spasm, ready to crush me. Then Charmian moved in with me, and after I told her about the fear, she made magic against it and put up her icons of Saint Olga. And the pressure receded, fell away” (62)

“Olga, who was our first hitchhiker, the first one to stick out her thumb on the wavelength of hydrogen, made it home in two years” (64)

“If a religious man—one with a background in film technology—had been watching the point in space where her Alyut had vanished two years before, it might have seemed to him that God had butt-spliced footage of empty space with footage of Olga’s ship. She blipped back into our spacetime like some amateur’s atrocious special effect” (64)

“Olga came home, but she never came back to life behind those blue eyes. They tried, of course, but the more they tried, the more tenuous she became, and, in their hunger to know, they spread her thinner and thinner until she came, in her martyrdom, to fill whole libraries with frozen aisles of precious relics. No saint was ever pared so fine; at the Plesetsk laboratories alone, she was represented by more than two million tissue slides, racked and numbered in the subbasement of a bomb-proof biological complex” (65)

“Big fights over those vines at the biotecture meetings. American ecologists screaming about possible nitrogen shortfalls. The Russians have been touchy about biodesign ever since they had to borrow Americans to help them with the biotic program back at Tsiolkovsky 1” (67)

“The first time you see it, Heaven lives up to its name” (67)

“Hiro claims he knows exactly how many Disney engineers were sworn to secrecy under the National Security Act” (68)

“a live one, one of the ten percent. Our DOA count runs at twenty percent. Suicide. Seventy percent of the meatshots are automatic candidates for Wards; the diaper cases, mumblers, totally gone” (69)

“Heaven was built after a dead Frenchman returned with a twelve-centimeter ring of magnetically coded steel locked in his cold hand, black parody of the lucky kid who wins the free ride on the merry-go-round” (70)

“that ring was the Rosetta stone for cancer. So now it’s cargo cult time for the human race” (70)

“Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians, Skinner rat men, you name it. And every one of those bastards knew in his heart that it was time to play his best hand. As a profession, not just as representatives of a given faction. There they are, Western psychiatry incarnate” (70)

“We’re like intelligent houseflies wandering through an international airport; some of us actually manage to blunder onto flights to London or Rio, maybe even survive the trip and make it back. ‘Hey,’ say the other flies, ‘what’s happening on the other side of that door? What do they know that we don’t?’” (71)

“At the edge of the Highway every human language unravels in your hands-except, perhaps, the language of the shaman, of the cabalist, the language of the mystic intent on mapping hierarchies of demons, angels, saints. But the Highway is governed by rules, and we’ve learned a few of them. That gives us something to cling to” (71)

“One entity per ride … No artificial intelligences … Recording instruments are a waste of space” (71-72)

“Dozens of new schools of physics have sprung up in Saint Olga’s wake, ever more bizarre and more elegant heresies, each one hoping to shoulder its way to the inside track. One by one, they all fall down. In the whispering quiet of Heaven’s nights, you imagine you can hear the paradigms shatter, shards of theory tinkling into brilliant dust as the lifework of some corporate think tank is reduced to the tersest historical footnote, and all in the time it takes your damaged traveler to mutter some fragment in the dark” (72)

“Flies in an airport, hitching rides. Flies are advised not to ask too many questions; flies are advised not to try for the Big Picture. Repeated attempts in that direc tion invariably lead to the slow, relentless flowering of paranoia, your mind projecting huge, dark patterns on the walls of night, patterns that have a way of solidify ing, becoming madness, becoming religion. Smart flies stick with Black Box theory; Black Box is the sanctioned metaphor, the Highway remaining x in every sane equation. We aren’t supposed to worry about what the Highway is, or who put it there. Instead, we concentrate on what we put into the Box and what we get back out of it. There are things we send down the Highway (a woman named Olga, her ship, so many more who’ve followed) and things that come to us (a madwoman, a seashell, artifacts, fragments of alien technologies). The Black Box theorists assure us that our primary concern is to optimize this exchange. We’re out here to see that our species gets its money’s worth. Still, certain things become increasingly evident; one of them is that we aren’t the only flies who’ve found their way into an airport. We’ve collected artifacts from at least half a dozen wildly divergent cultures. ‘More hicks,’ Charmian calls them. We’re like pack rats in the hold of a freighter, trading little pretties with rats from other ports. Dreaming of the bright lights, the big city” (72-73)

“Keep it simple, a matter of In and Out” (73)

“the handler-surrogate gestalt … when the gestalt clicks, Hiro and I meld into something else, something we can never admit to each other, not when it isn’t happening. Our relationship would give a classical Freudian nightmares” (73)

“the Fear found me, really found me, for the first time” (74)

“I’d felt it before, the Fear, but only the fringes, the least edge. Now it was vast, the very hollow of night, an emptiness cold and implacable. It was last words, deep space, every long goodbye in the history of our species. It made me cringe, whining. I was shaking, groveling, crying. They lecture us on it, warn us, try to explain it away as a kind of temporary agoraphobia endemic to our work. But we know what it is; surrogates know and handlers can’t. No explanation has ever even come close” (74-75)

“It’s the Fear. It’s the long finger of Big Night, the darkness that feeds the muttering damned to the gentle white maw of Wards. Olga knew it first, Saint Olga. She tried to hide us from it, clawing at her radio gear, bloodying her hands to destroy her ship’s broadcast capacity, praying Earth would lose her, let her die” (75)

“She wasn’t there. Then I saw the insane frieze of ballpoint scratchings, crabbed symbols, thousands of tiny, crooked oblongs locking and overlapping. Thumb-smudged, pathetic, it covered most of the rear bulkhead” (75)

“her right arm spread out across the white plastic work surface like a medieval drawing” (76)

“I tried to tell her. I said, ‘Please, you’re dead. Forgive us, we came to try to help, Hiro and I. Understand? He knows you, see, Hiro, he’s here in my head. He’s read your dossier, your sexual profile, your favorite colors; he knows your childhood fears, first lover, name of a teacher you liked. And I’ve got just the right pheromones, and I’m a walking arsenal of drugs, something here you’re bound to like. And we can lie Hiro and I; we’re ace liars. Please. You’ve got to see. Perfect strangers, but Hiro and I, for you, we make up the perfect stranger, Leni’” (76)

“Late that night Charmian brought a special kind of darkness down to my cubicle, individual doses sealed in heavy foil. It was nothing like the darkness of Big Night, that sentient, hunting dark that waits to drag the hitchhikers down to Wards, that dark that incubates the Fear” (77)

“They talked about Leni’s diagrams and about her ballpoint sketches of molecular chains that shift on command. Molecules that can function as switches, logic elements, even a kind of wiring, built up in layers into a single very large molecule, a very small computer. We’ll probably never know what she met out there; we’ll probably never know the details of the transaction. We might be sorry if we ever found out. We aren’t the only hinterland tribe, the only ones looking for scraps” (77-78)

“Damn Leni, damn that Frenchman, damn all the ones who bring things home, who bring cancer cures, seashells, things without names—who keep us here waiting, who fill Wards, who bring us the Fear” (78)

“You get high enough out here; you’ll hear the sea, deep down behind the constant conch-shell static of the bonephone. It’s something we carry with us, no matter how far from home” (78)

“We both have the drive, though, that special need, that freak dynamic that lets us keep going back to Heaven. We both got it the same way, lay out there in our little boats for weeks, waiting for the Highway to take us. And when our last flare was gone, we were hauled back here by tugs. Some people just aren’t taken, and nobody knows why. And you’ll never get a second chance. They say it’s too expensive, but what they really mean, as they eye the bandages on your wrists, is that now you’re too valuable, too much use to them as a potential surrogate. Don’t worry about the suicide attempt, they’ll tell you; happens all the time. Perfectly understandable: feeling of profound rejection. But I’d wanted to go, wanted it so bad. Charmian, too. She tried with pills. But they worked on us, twisted us a little, aligned our drives, planted the bonephones, paired us with handlers” (78)

“Olga must have known, must have seen it all, somehow, she was trying to keep us from finding our way out there, where she’d been. She knew that if we found her, we’d have to go” (79)

“Saint Olga smiles out at us from the walls; you can feel her, all those prints from the same publicity shot, torn and taped across the walls of night, her white smile, forever” (79)

Red Star, Winter Orbit, by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson

Keywords: dreams, space, world, isolation, glorious future, frontier

“dreaming of winter and gravity” (80)

“Kosmograd was a dream, Colonel. A dream that failed. Like space. We have no need to be here. We have an entire world to put in order” (87-88)

“Korolev remembered the pathetic flurry of strange American energy schemes in the wake of the Treaty of Vienna. With the Soviet Union firmly in control of the world’s oil flow, the Americans had seemed willing to try anything. Then the Kansas meltdown had permanently soured them on reactors. For more than three decades they’d been gradually sliding into isolationism and industrial decline. Space, he thought ruefully, they should have gone into space. He’d never understood the strange paralysis of will that had seemed to grip their brilliant early efforts. Or perhaps it was simply a failure of imagination, of vision. You see, Americans, he said silently, you really should have tried to join us here in our glorious future, here in Kosmograd” (90-91)

“‘America needs to sell as badly as we need to buy.’ Korolev grimly spooned more chlorella into his mouth, chewed mechanically, and swallowed. ‘The Americans couldn’t reach us even if they desired to. Canaveral is in ruins’” (93)

“Why has it all gone this way, Colonel? Why is it ending now? When I was small I saw all this on television. Our future in space was forever—” (94)

“Perhaps the Americans were right. The Japanese sent machines instead, robots to build their orbital factories. Lunar mining failed for us, but we thought there would at least be a permanent research facility of some kind. It all had to do with purse strings, I suppose. With men who sit at desks and make decisions” (94)

“‘And what shall I tell them in Tokyo, Colonel? Have you a message for the world?’

‘Tell them…’ and every cliché came rushing to him with an absolute rightness that made him want to laugh hysterically: One small step… We came in peace Workers of the world…. ‘You must tell them that I need it,’ he said, pinching his shrunken wrist, ‘in my very bones’” (98)

“You have to want a frontier—want it in your bones, right?” (102)

New Rose Hotel

Keywords: corporation, zaibatsu, intercorporate espionage, edge, coffins, imagination, truth, orgasm, electric night, identities, Europe, dead museum, ghosts

“Fox was point man in the skull wars, a middleman for corporate crossovers. He was a soldier in the secret skirmishes of the zaibatsus, the multinational corporations that control entire economies” (103)

“intercorporate espionage … The Edge, he said, have to find that Edge. He made you hear the capital E. The Edge was Fox’s grail, that essential fraction of sheer human talent, nontransferable, locked in the skulls of the world’s hottest research scientists” (103)

“You can’t put Edge down on paper, Fox said, can’t punch Edge into a diskette” (104)

“a coffin rack on the ragged fringes of Narita International. Plastic capsules a meter high and three long, stacked like surplus Godzilla teeth in a concrete lot off the main road to the airport” (104)

“I remember you [Sandii] dumping your purse out on the bed, later, in some hotel room, pawing through your makeup” (104)

“The coffins of New Rose are racked in recycled scaffolding, steel pipes under bright enamel” (105)

“Fox was quick to see how we could use you, but not sharp enough to credit you with ambition. But then he never lay all night with you on the beach at Kamakura, never listened to your nightmares, never heard an entire imagined childhood shift under those stars, shift and roll over, your child’s mouth opening to reveal some fresh past, and always the one, you swore, that was really and finally the truth” (105)

“Shaking for different futures and better pasts” (105)

“You left me all your things. This gun. Your makeup, all the shadows and blushes capped in plastic” (105)

“Your Cray microcomputer, a gift from Fox, with a shopping list you entered. Sometimes I play that back, watching each item cross the little silver screen” (105)

“And one DNA synthesizer, with in-built computer. Plus software. Expensive, Sandii” (106)

“Hiroshi Yomiuri. Maas Biolabs GmbH had him. Hosaka wanted him. He was hot. Edge and lots of it. Fox followed genetic engineers the way a fan follows players in a favorite game” (106)

“everywhere the Maas security teams, smooth and heavy, a rich, clear syrup of surveillance” (106)

“Inside you I imagined all that neon, the crowds surging around Shinjuku Station, wired electric night. You moved that way, rhythm of a new age, dreamy and far from any nation’s soil” (107)

Commentator’s Note: cf. Neuromancer, orgasms and the matrix.

“Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who’s come here to identify the planet’s dominant form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged” (107)

“The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form” (107)

“Not the Edge lecture again, I said Maas isn’t like that, he said, ignoring me. Maas was small, fast, ruthless. An atavism. Maas was all Edge” (107-108)

“I remember Fox talking about the nature of Hiroshi’s Edge. Radioactive nucleases, monoclonal antibodies, something to do with the linkage of proteins, nucleotides. . . Hot, Fox called them, hot proteins. High-speed links. He said Hiroshi was a freak, the kind who shatters paradigms, inverts a whole field of science, brings on the violent revision of an entire body of knowledge” (108)

“Hosaka wanted Hiroshi, but his Edge was radical enough to worry them” (108)

“all those nights down Shinjuku. Nights you carefully cut from the scattered deck of your past” (109)

“My own past had gone down years before, lost with all hands, no trace. I understood Fox’s late-night habit of emptying his wallet, shuffling through his identification. He’d lay the pieces out in different patterns, rearrange them, wait for a picture to form. I knew what he was looking for. You did the same thing with your childhoods” (109)

“In New Rose, tonight, I choose from your deck of pasts” (109)

“I choose the original version, the famous Yokohama hotel-room text, recited to me that first night in bed. I choose the disgraced father, Hosaka executive. Hosaka. How perfect. And the Dutch mother, the summers in Amsterdam, the soft blanket of pigeons in the Dam Square afternoon” (109)

“Europe was a dead museum” (110)

“I took a new passport, Dutch, from my bag, a Swiss bank chip in the same name, and tucked them into your purse” (110)

“a diskette. No labels. It lay there in the palm of my hand, all that death. Latent, coded, waiting” (110)

“the electric night of a new Asia, the future rising in you like a bright fluid, washing me of everything but the moment. That was your magic, that you lived outside of history, all now” (111)

“I heard you empty your makeup into my bag. I’m Dutch now, you said, I’ll want a new look” (111)

“Money now for everything … that last night with you had left me convinced that it all came to us naturally, in the new order of things, as a function of who and what we were” (112)

“the coffin racks of New Rose are lit all night by floodlights, high on painted metal masts. Nothing here seems to serve its original purpose. Everything is surplus, recycled, even the coffins” (112)

“Hosaka’s leading researchers were pooling quietly in the Medina” (112)

“Fox shook his head. He was a professional, a specialist, and he saw the sudden accumulation of all that prime Hosaka Edge in the Medina as a drastic failure in the zaibatsu’s trade craft” (113)

“there was a certain wild factor in lab work. The edge of Edge, he called it. When a researcher develops a breakthrough, others sometimes find it impossible to duplicate the first researcher’s results. This was even more likely with Hiroshi, whose work went against the conceptual grain of his field” (113-114)

“When Hiroshi shoots the legs out from under genetic engineering, the Medina crowd’s going to be ready” (114)

“Hosaka didn’t freeze our credit, they caused it to evaporate. Fairy gold. One minute we were millionaires in the world’s hardest currency, and the next we were paupers” (114)

“Fox once said you were ectoplasm, a ghost called up by the extremes of economics. Ghost of the new century, congealing on a thousand beds in the world’s Hyatts, the world’s Hilton’s” (114)

“Every door was closed … The surface tension of the underworld had been tripled, and everywhere we’d meet that same taut membrane and be thrown back. No chance to sink, to get out of sight” (115)

“I thought he was telling me that the Medina was burning. Not the Medina. The brains of Hosaka’s best research people. Plague, he was whispering, my businessman, plague and fever and death” (115)

“Someone had reprogrammed the DNA synthesizer, he said … With its in-built computer and its custom software. Expensive, Sandii” (116)

“The diskette in my hand. Rain on the river. I knew, but I couldn’t face it. I put the code for that meningial virus back into your purse and lay down beside you” (116)

The Winter Market

Keywords: Vancouver, net, immortal, construct, recording, engineering, gomi, junk, refuse, art, bodies, cages, dreams, ambition, motive

“It rains a lot, up here; there are winter days when it doesn’t really get light at all, only a bright, indeterminate gray. But then there are days when it’s like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sunlit, suspended mountain” (117)

Commentator’s Note: ah, the Pacific Northwest

“her agents phoned, from deep in the heart of their mirrored pyramid on Beverly Boulevard, to tell me she’d merged with the net, crossed over for good, that Kings of Sleep was going triple-platinum. I’d edited most of Kings, done the brain-map work and gone over it all with the fastwipe module, so I was in line for a share of royalties” (117)

“straight out to the nearest bar and an eight-hour black-out that ended on a concrete ledge two meters above midnight. False Creek water. City lights, that same gray bowl of sky smaller now, illuminated by neon and mercury-vapor arcs. And it was snowing, big flakes but not many, and when they touched black water, they were gone, no trace at all” (117)

“Because she was dead, and I’d let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I’d helped her get that way” (118)

“My father was an audio engineer, a mastering engineer. He went way back, in the business, even before digital. The processes he was concerned with were partly mechanical, with that clunky quasi-Victorian quality you see in twentieth-century technology. He was a lathe operator, basically. People brought him audio recordings and he burned their sounds into grooves on a disk of lacquer. Then the disk was electroplated and used in the construction of a press that would stamp out records, the black things you see in antique stores. And I remember him telling me, once, a few months before he died, that certain frequencies—transients, I think he called them—could easily burn out the head, the cutting head, on a master lathe. These heads were incredibly expensive, so you prevented burnouts with something called an accelerometer. And that was what I was thinking of, as I stood there, my toes out over the water: that head, burning out. Because that was what they did to her. And that was what she wanted. No accelerometer for Lise” (118)

“Rubin, in some way that no one quite understands, is a master, a teacher, what the Japanese call a sensei. What he’s the master of, really, is garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on. Gomi no sensei. Master of junk” (118)

“‘Messing around,’ he calls what he does there, and seems to view it as some extension of boyhood’s perfectly bored backyard afternoons. He wanders through his jammed, littered space, a kind of minihangar cobbled to the water side of the Market, followed by the smarter and more agile of his creations, like some vaguely benign Satan bent on the elaboration of still stranger processes in his ongoing Inferno of gomi” (119)

“Gomi. Where does the gomi stop and the world begin? The Japanese, a century ago, had already run out of gomi space around Tokyo, so they came up with a plan for creating space out of gomi” (119)

“By the year 1969 they had built themselves a little island in Tokyo Bay, out of gomi, and christened it Dream Island. But the city was still pouring out its nine thousand tons per day, so they went on to build New Dream Island, and today they coordinate the whole process, and new Nippons rise out of the Pacific” (119-120)

“Rubin watches this on the news and says nothing at all. He has nothing to say about gomi. It’s his medium, the air he breathes, something he’s swum in all his life” (120)

“she found me again. Came after me two hours later, weaving through the bodies and junk with that terrible grace programmed into the exoskeleton” (121)

“Lise stood there in front of me, propped up in her pencil-thin polycarbon prosthetic” (121)

“I have two rooms in an old condo rack at the corner of Fourth and MacDonald, tenth floor” (121)

Commentator’s Note: Subtle note about future development. No ten-story building on Fourth and MacDonald today.

“One of those diseases. Either one of the old ones they’ve never quite figured out or one of the new ones—the all too obviously environmental kind—that they’ve barely even named yet. She couldn’t move, not without that extra skeleton, and it was jacked straight into her brain, myoelectric interface” (122)

“‘This is a fast-wipe module,’ she said, in a voice I hadn’t heard before, distant, and I thought then that the wizz might be wearing off. ‘What’s it doing here?’

‘I edit,’ I said, closing the door behind me” (122)

“Dry dreams are neural output from levels of consciousness that most people can only access in sleep. But artists, the kind I work with at the Autonomic Pilot, are able to break the surface tension, dive down deep, down and out, out into Jung’s sea, and bring back-well, dreams. Keep it simple. I guess some artists have always done that, in whatever medium, but neuroelectronics lets us access the experience, and the net gets it all out on the wire, so we can package it, sell it, watch how it moves in the market” (123)

“The stuff we get out to the consumer, you see, has been structured, balanced, turned into art. There are still people naive enough to assume that they’ll actually enjoy jacking straight across with someone they love. I think most teenagers try it, once” (123-124)

“You never felt that hunger she had, which was pared down to a dry need, hideous in its singleness of purpose” (124)

“I’d seen enough strangers’ dreams, in the mixing room at the Autonomic Pilot, to know that most people’s inner monsters are foolish things, ludicrous in the calm light of one’s own consciousness” (124)

“Words. Words cannot. Or, maybe, just barely, if I even knew how to begin to describe it, what came up out of her, what she did…” (124)

“There’s a segment on Kings of Sleep; it’s like you’re on a motorcycle at midnight, no lights but somehow you don’t need them, blasting out along a cliff-high stretch of coast highway, so fast that you hang there in a cone of silence, the bike’s thunder lost behind you. Everything, lost behind you . . . . It’s just a blink, on Kings, but it’s one of the thousand things you remember, go back to, incorporate into your own vocabulary of feelings. Amazing. Freedom and death, right there, right there, razor’s edge, forever” (124-125)

“What I got was the big-daddy version of that, raw rush, the king hell killer uncut real thing, exploding eight ways from Sunday into a void that stank of poverty and lovelessness and obscurity. And that was Lise’s ambition, that rush, seen from the inside” (125)

“she was set to be what she is. You had about as much to do with where she’s at today as that fastwipe module did. She’d have found somebody else if she hadn’t found you” (125-126)

“The boxes are filled with carefully sorted gomi: lithium batteries, tantalum capacitors, RF connectors, breadboards, barrier strips, ferroresonant transformers, spools of bus bar wire” (126)

“She had it all in there, Kings, locked up in her head the way her body was locked in that exoskeleton” (126)

“‘You know what your trouble is?’ he says when we’re under the bridge, headed up to Fourth. ‘You’re the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it’s new technology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won’t play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of. Like Lise’” (129)

“‘She wasn’t the first.’ Traffic drums past overhead.

‘No, but she’s sure as hell the first person you ever met who went and translated themself into a hardwired program. You lose any sleep when whatsisname did it, three-four years ago, the French kid, the writer?’

‘I didn’t really think about it, much. A gimmick. PR…’

‘He’s still writing. The weird thing is, he’s going to be writing, unless somebody blows up his mainframe…’

I wince, shake my head. ‘But it’s not him, is it? It’s just a program.’

‘Interesting point. Hard to say. With Lise, though, we find out. She’s not a writer’” (129)

“Vancouver was hardly the center of the world” (129)

“It was like she was born to the form, even though the technology that made that form possible hadn’t even existed when she was born” (130)

“You see something like that and you wonder how many thousands, maybe millions, of phenomenal artists have died mute, down the centuries, people who could never have been poets or painters or saxophone players, but who had this stuff inside, these psychic waveforms waiting for the circuitry required to tap in” (130-131)

“Her imagery was so strong, so extreme, that she never really needed to explain a given effect to me. I took what she put out and worked with it, and jacked it back to her. She’d either say yes or no, and usually it was yes” (131)

“one morning, about six, after a long, long session—when she’d first gotten that eerie cotillion sequence out, the one the kids call the Ghost Dance—she spoke to me” (131)

“You didn’t see it coming, Casey … Cause you’re no good at lateral thinking. You read the handbook. What else did you think she was after? Sex? More wizz? A world tour? She was past all that. That’s what made her so strong. She was past it. That’s why Kings of Sleep’s as big as it is, and why the kids buy it, why they believe it. They know. Those kids back down the Market, warming their butts around the fires and wondering if they’ll find someplace to sleep tonight, they believe it” (133-134)

“She’s big because she was what they are, only more so. She knew, man. No dreams, no hope. You can’t see the cages on those kids, Casey, but more and more they’re twigging to it, that they aren’t going anywhere” (134)

“So she sang it for them, said it that way they can’t, painted them a picture. And she used the money to buy herself a way out, that’s all” (134)

“‘How many people have done it, Rubin? Have any idea?’

‘Not too many. Hard to say, anyway, because a lot of them are probably politicans we think of as being comfortably and reliably dead’” (134)

“‘They say Mitsubishi did it to Weinberg before his immune system finally went tits up. He was head of their hybridoma lab in Okayama. Well, their stock’s still pretty high, in monoclonals, so maybe it’s true. And Langlais, the French kid, the novelist . . .’ He shrugs. ‘Lise didn’t have the money for it. Wouldn’t now, even. But she put herself in the right place at the right time. She was about to croak, she was in Hollywood, and they could already see what Kings was going to do’” (134)

“as if she’d poked her toe into a black hole, drawn by the unthinkable gravitic tug of Big Money” (136)

“Do you ever owe me. I have just spent three weeks editing the dreams and nightmares of one very screwed up person” (137)

“there are moments when I see that anyone could be living there, could own those things, and it all seems sort of interchangeable, my life and yours, my life and anybody’s. . . . I think Rubin sees things that way, too, all the time, but for him it’s a source of strength. He lives in other people’s garbage” (137)

“Once he was showing me a book of twentieth-century art he liked, and there was a picture of an automated sculpture called Dead Birds Fly Again, a thing that whirled real dead birds around and around on a string, and he smiled and nodded, and I could see he felt the artist was a spiritual ancestor of some kind” (137)

“And I know something now. I know that if I hadn’t happened in there, hadn’t seen them, I’d have been able to accept all that came later. Might even have found a way to rejoice on her behalf, or found a way to trust in whatever it is that she’s since become, or had built in her image, a program that pretends to be Lise to the extent that it believes it’s her. I could have believed what Rubin believes, that she was so truly past it, our hitech Saint Joan burning for union with that hardwired godhead in Hollywood, that nothing mattered to her except the hour of her departure. That she threw away that poor sad body with a cry of release, free of the bonds of polycarbon and hated flesh. Well, maybe, after all, she did. Maybe it was that way. I’m sure that’s the way she expected it to be” (139-140)

“no human motive is ever entirely pure” (140)

“She’d gone out that night, I knew, to kiss herself goodbye. To find someone drunk enough to do it for her” (140)

“‘Rubin, if she calls me, is it her?’

He looks at me a long time. ‘God only knows.’ His cup clicks on the table. ‘I mean, Casey, the technology is there, so who, man, really who, is to say?’” (141)

“When you have to edit her next release. Which will almost certainly be soon, because she needs money bad. She’s taking up a lot of ROM on some corporate mainframe, and her share of Kings won’t come close to paying for what they had to do to put her there. And you’re her editor, Casey. I mean, who else?” (141)

Dogfight, by Michael Swanwick and William Gibson

Keywords: brain, computer, projection

“He meant to keep on going, right down to Florida. Work passage on a gunrunner, maybe wind up conscripted into some ratass rebel army down in the war zone” (142)

“He chose a highstack at random and fed the rental agent the line he’d used since his welfare rights were yanked. Nobody ever checked up; the state just counted occupied rooms and paid” (145)

“Hard Anarchy Liberation Front” (145)

“Brainlock” (148)

“Lotta old computer hacks spent their lives programming machines. And you know what? The human brain is not a goddamn bit like a machine, no way. They just don’t program the same” (148)

“He saw a neat row of small consoles, austere and expensive-looking. Custom work. ‘This is the real stuff I got here. Image facilitator. Here’s my fast-wipe module. This is a brainmap one-to-one function analyzer.’ She sang off the names like a litany. ‘Quantum flicker stabilizer. Program splicer. An image assembler…’” (149)

“This is all state of the art, professional projective wetware gear” (149)

“bring out that facilitator. We got us a flyboy” (152)

“You’re not going to win against a combat vet—you listening to me? I’m not even especially good, just an old grunt who was on hype fifteen, maybe twenty times. Ol’ Tiny, he was a pilot. Spent his entire enlistment hyped to the gills. He’s got membrane attenuation real bad. . . you ain’t never going to beat him” (152)

“let me take it to the reader-analyzer at the department, run a few changes on it, translate it into a modern wetlanguage. Edit out all the redundant intermediaries” (153)

“why do you think people buy gold-wire remotes? For the prestige? Shit. Conductivity’s better, cuts a few nanoseconds off the reaction time” (153)

Burning Chrome

Keywords: chrome, Russian program, virus, mimetic, ice, matrix, data, geometries, representation, simstim, Zeiss Ikon, bodies

“It was hot, the night we burned Chrome” (168)

“the Russian program” (168)

“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” (168)

“The program was a mimetic weapon, designed to absorb local color and present itself as a crash-priority override in whatever context it encountered” (168-169)

“Chrome’s data base … Walls of shadow, walls of ice” (169)

“Bobby was a cowboy, and ice was the nature of his game, ice from ICE, Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. The matrix is an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems. Legitimate programmers jack into their employers’ sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing the corporate data” (169)

“Towers and fields of it ranged in the colorless nonspace of the simulation matrix, the electronic consensus-hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data. Legitimate programmers never see the walls of ice they work behind, the walls of shadow that screen their operations from others, from industrial-espionage artists and hustlers like Bobby Quine” (170)

“Bobby was a cowboy. Bobby was 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” (170)

“Bobby Quine and Automatic Jack. Bobby’s the thin, pale dude with the dark glasses, and Jack’s the meanlooking guy with the myoelectric arm” (170)

“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” (171)

“Bodiless, we swerve into Chrome’s castle of ice. And we’re fast, fast. It feels like we’re surfing the crest of the invading program, hanging ten above the seething glitch systems as they mutate. We’re sentient patches of oil swept along down corridors of shadow” (173)

“I see her sometimes when I’m trying to sleep, I see her somewhere out on the edge of all this sprawl of cities and smoke, and it’s like she’s a hologram stuck behind my eyes” (174)

“She was new to the scene, and she had all the miles of malls and plazas to prowl, all the shops and clubs, and Bobby to explain the wild side, the tricky wiring on the dark underside of things” (175)

“he used women as counters in a game” (176)

“he’d set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn’t have, everything he’d had and couldn’t keep” (176)

“Trying to remind myself that this place and the gulfs beyond are only representations, that we aren’t ‘in’ Chrome’s computer, but interfaced with it, while the matrix simulator in Bobby’s loft generates this illusion . . . The core data begin to emerge, exposed, vulnerable. . . . This is the far side of ice, the view of the matrix I’ve never seen before, the view that fifteen million legitimate console operators see daily and take for granted” (177)

“The core data tower around us 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 shadows something at the center of it all: the heart of all Chrome’s expensive darkness, the very heart” (178)

“an ice pattern glowed on Bobby’s monitor screen, a 2-D graphic representation of someone’s computer defenses, lines of neon woven like an Art Deco prayer rug” (178)

“Rikki’s things were spread across my workbench, nylon bags spilling 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 arm off, forgetting that the program I’d brought from the Finn was in the righthand pocket of my jacket, so that I had to fumble it out left-handed” (178)

“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” (179)

“I felt like a punk who’d gone out to buy a switchblade and come home with a small neutron bomb” (179)

“The program in the jeweler’s vise was a Russian military icebreaker, a killer-virus program” (179)

“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” (179)

“hyped out of anything like a normal metabolism on some massive program of serums and hormones” (180)

“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” (180)

“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 Word that eats the mind from the inside out. Like an epileptic spasm that goes on and on until there’s nothing left at all” (182)

“And we’re diving for the floor of Chrome’s shadow castle. Trying to brace myself for the sudden stopping of breath, a sickness and final slackening of the nerves. Fear of that cold Word waiting, down there in the dark” (182)

“Tally Isham smiling up from a dozen photographs, the Girl with the Zeiss Ikon Eyes” (183)

“Tally 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” (183)

“she wanted Ikons. Brand of the stars. Very expensive” (183)

“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. ‘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” (184)

“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” (184)

“the thing they sell in the House of Blue Lights is so popular that it’s almost legal” (187)

“At the heart of darkness, the still center, the glitch systems shred the dark with whirlwinds of light, translucent razors spinning away from us; we hang in the center of a silent slow-motion explosion, ice fragments falling away forever, and Bobby’s voice comes in across light-years of electronic void illusion” (187)

“The Russian program, rising through towers of data, blotting out the playroom colors” (187)

“The matrix folds itself around me like an origami trick. And the loft smells of sweat and burning circuitry” (188)

“the Russian program had melted in its slot” (188)

“So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics” (189)

“‘Hi, Rikki,’ I said, and I was ready when she took them off. Blue, Tally Isham blue. The clear trademark blue they’re famous for, ZEISS IKON ringing each iris in tiny capitals, the letters suspended there like flecks of gold” (189)

“I put the bags down and kissed her and messed up the paintstick, and something came up inside me the way the killer program had risen above Chrome’s data. A sudden stopping of the breath, in a place where no word is” (190)

“The customers are torn between needing someone and wanting to be alone at the same time, which has probably always been the name of that particular game, even before we had the neuroelectronics to enable them to have it both ways” (191)

“sometimes late at night I’ll pass a window with posters of simstim stars, all those beautiful, identical eyes staring back at me out of faces that are nearly as identical, and sometimes the eyes are hers, but none of the faces are, none of them ever are, and I see her far out on the edge of all this sprawl of night and cities, and then she waves goodbye” (191)