Cyberpunk

INTRODUCTION

By Victoria Blake

As American SF lies in a reptilian torpor, its small, squishy cousin, Fantasy, creeps gecko-like across the bookstands, Bruce Sterling wrote in the first issue of Cheap Truth, a one-page, double-sided bright coal of a fan-zine first published in 1983. Dreaming of dragon-hood, Fantasy has puffed itself up with air like a Mojave chuckwalla. SF's collapse ha[s] formed a vacuum that forces Fantasy into a painful and explosive bloat . . . Short stories, crippled with the bends, expand into whole hideous trilogies as hollow as nickel gumballs.

These were fighting words, aimed directly at the bulls-eye of publishers, editors, critics, authors, and readers in the smokestack publishing-industrial complex. There was, Sterling wrote in Cheap Truth issue five, a crying need to re-think, re-tool, and adapt to the modern era. SF has one critical advantage: it is still a pop industry that is close to its audience. It is not yet wheezing in the iron lung of English departments or begging for government Medicare through arts grants. . . . SF has always preached the inevitability of change. Physician, heal thyself.

The physician, in this case, was the collection of early 80s writers that Cheap Truth showcased as carriers of the flame—Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, William Gibson, et al—and the challenge was to find a new voice for a new kind of reader in a new kind of world. This year's Nebula Ballot looked like a list of stuff that Mom and Dad said it was okay to read, a pseudonymous Lewis Shiner wrote in Cheap Truth. I mean, this is the kind of writing that Mom and Dad grew up on, full of ‘Golly's' and blushes and grins. And aren't those dolphins cute? . . . They'd rather hear that somebody ‘muttered an oath' or came out with some made-up word like ‘Ifni!' than be told that they really said ‘shit' or ‘shove it up your ass, motherfucker.'

Nobody had ever read anything like what the cyberpunks were writing—stories and novels that were the bastard child of science fiction, with a common-man perspective, a love of tech and drugs, and an affinity for street culture. That most cyberpunk was written by white males didn't seem to ruffle any feathers. Cyberpunk was new, it was vital, it was irreverent. Most importantly, cyberpunk rocked.

When Sterling and his gang of pranksters shuttered Cheap Truth in 1985, a mere eighteen issues after launch, he declared that the movement was over, it had become too big, and that much of the original freedom was lost. People know who I am, he wrote, and they get all hot and bothered by personalities, instead of ideas and issues. CT can no longer claim the ‘honesty of complete desperation.' That first fine flower of red-hot hysteria is simply gone. In other words, The Movement had been changed by its acceptance into the smokestack machine. (Cheap Truth had been mentioned in an issue of Rolling Stone, evidence of it being swallowed whole.) When, in 1986, Sterling published Mirrorshades, the first and some say only true cyberpunk anthology, the movement was consolidated into a particular table of contents, a closed club whose membership was limited to the original cyberpunk writers. In 1991, Lewis Shiner renounced cyberpunk in a New York Times op-ed. When Time ran a cover story about cyberpunks, the cyberpunks themselves were outraged. Counter culture had been embraced by culture. I hereby declare the revolution over, Sterling wrote in the final issue of Cheap Truth. Long live the provisional government.

Thirty years later, cyberpunk is both very much dead and very much alive. It is dead in the sense that the Reagan years are over, the Cold War is done, straight video has been replaced by CGI, and the achievement of the Xerox machine, once the very pinnacle of technological advancement available to the masses, is being outdone by 3-D printers. But it is very much alive in that cyberpunk was never really about a specific technology or a specific moment in time. It was, and it is, an aesthetic position as much as a collection of themes, an attitude toward mass culture and pop culture, an identity, a way of living, breathing, and grokking our weird and wired world.

Anthology editing is a tricky business. On the one hand, the anthology editor must revere, must even do a little bit of worshipping at the foot of the statue. On the other hand, the editor must be removed enough to see the subject with clear eyes, and to offer an unimpassioned editorial read. But she must also bring just enough of herself to the selection to make the anthology as a whole useful, interesting, unique, timeless, and, hopefully, fun.

In putting together this collection, I have tried to do four things. The first—spurred by the worshipper within me—is to pay homage to cyberpunk beginnings. To that end, this collection contains reprints of cyberpunk gems that are now difficult to find—Mozart in Mirrorshades by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner is one of my personal favorites—and it showcases stories by the founding or first-generation cyberpunk authors—Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Greg Bear, and Paul Di Filippo among them—that weren't in the original collections.

Second, the critic in me wanted to offer an as-complete-as-possible look at cyberpunk themes and topics. Some of my favorites include the low-life of the Low Teks in William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic, the imbedded digital brains of David Marusek's Getting to Know You, the drugs and outlaws of Gwyneth Jones's Blue Clay Blues, the multi-mind madness of John Shirley's Wolves of the Plateau, the body augmentation of James Patrick Kelly's Mr. Boy, and the environmental meltdown of Paul Di Filippo's Life in the Anthropocene.

One story from this group deserves a special explanation: Down and Out in the Year 2000, by Kim Stanley Robinson, occupies a unique position in the cyberpunk cannon as perhaps the solitary story to critique the cyberpunk reverence for the street. I was living in Washington DC in the summer of 1985, Robinson wrote me in an email, after I requested some information about the genesis of the story, hanging out in Dupont Circle park and the smaller park outside our apartment. Watching the people there, I began to think that the cyberpunks were white middle-class people like me, and they had no idea; ‘street smart' was just a trendy phrase, a literary or Hollywood idea. So I wrote the story to express that feeling.

Third, the iconoclast in me wanted to move past traditional cyberpunk, and beyond the cast of known cyberpunk characters, to take a look at how the movement has developed since the end of the Cold War, and to pull the veil back on what the future might hold. Cory Doctorow, arguably the new Chairman of Tech, ends the collection by celebrating the heroic sysadmins, a rarely lauded group. Cat Rambo, not usually associated with cyberpunk, beautifully describes how relationships are changed by technology. New-comer Benjamin Parzybok, author of the novel Couch, contributed an original story notable for its authentic re-imagining of low life in the slums, a different kind of low life entirely from that described by the 80s cyberpunk. Jonathan Lethem's Interview with the Crab thrilled me when I read it the first time, and it continues to astound me with its craft. I've never heard Lethem described as a cyberpunk, but my favorite of his novels, Gun, with Occasional Music, uses the hardboiled tone common to cyberpunk, and is populated by state-sponsored druggies, external memory devices, a virtual monetary system, and genetically altered animals who speak, love, have sex, and die like humans. The story included here takes up the themes of pop culture and fame, getting deeper into both by using a crustacean, the titular crab, as the prototypical hard-living, idiosyncratic celebrity.

And finally, in compiling this collection, the writer in me wanted to look at the craft of cyberpunk, and the interesting, innovate forms some of the cyberpunk stories take. The prose of Pat Cadigan's Rock On has a vitality that makes my heart beat faster. Two stories—Bruce Sterling's User-Centric and Paul Tremblay's Blog at the End of the World—co-op new kinds of communication, email and blogging, to weave their tales. Daniel H. Wilson writes what could be called a cyberpunk fairytale, and Mark Teppo pokes at an acronym-heavy future, all while telling a story in the very language he's lampooning.

I was five years old when the first issue of Cheap Truth came out, and only eight when The Movement was declared dead. In 1991, when Lewis Shiner renounced his cyberpunk membership, I was wearing neon hair bands, plastic shoes, and bopping my head to Cyndi Lauper. I wasn't in any way punk, and I'm probably still not. But when you're holding a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, and when you're editing cyberpunk, you realize you're living in a cyberpunk world.

To wit, last week, the week of Thanksgiving, 2012, as the final edits were being made on this collection, the following items caught my eye: On the radio to the airport, I heard a commentator remarking on Project Glass, the Google initiative focusing on wearable computers; also on the radio, I heard about a scientist who had discovered that jellyfish can reverse the aging process, and that jellyfish stem cells might possess the secret to immortality. The talk around the pre-Thanksgiving dinner table was about California legalizing self-driving cars, and about how the rich/poor income gap in America is wider than it's been since 1967. Gawker posted a story about a man on family vacation in Florida who found anonymous sex in a theme-park bathroom with the help of an iPhone app. And on Thanksgiving itself, my second cousin told me all about a nonprofit he was starting with a group of like-minded retirees to help spread information about two things, the first being the 911 conspiracy, and the second being a government-operated data-center, Big Brother style, outside Salt Lake City.

The world seems to keep getting weirder and weirder, with no end in sight.

Thank you to everybody who helped with story suggestions, with author suggestions, and with new ways to look at the subject. But thank you especially to the authors in this collection, and to the authors who have written and continue to write cyberpunk, knowingly or not. You have given us a new view on the world, and a new voice to the great tech experiment that defines our age. I can't wait to see what happens next.

JOHNNY MNEMONIC

By William Gibson

I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: 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. I'd had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock on the 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. But I knew they'd work.

The meet was set for the Drome at 2300, but I rode the tube three stops past the closest platform and walked back. Immaculate procedure.

I checked myself out in the chrome siding of a coffee kiosk, your basic sharp-faced Caucasoid with a ruff of stiff, dark hair. The girls at Under the Knife were big on Sony Mao, and it was getting harder to keep them from adding the chic suggestion of epicanthic folds. It probably wouldn't fool Ralfi Face, but it might get me next to his table.

The Drome is a single narrow space with a bar down one side and tables along the other, thick with pimps and handlers and an arcane array of dealers. 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, but aside from that they were as nearly identical as cosmetic surgery could make them. They'd been lovers for years and were bad news in the tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male.

Ralfi was sitting at his usual table. Owing me a lot of money. I had hundreds of megabytes stashed in my head on an idiot/savant basis—information I had no conscious access to. Ralfi had left it there. He hadn't, however, come back for it. Only Ralfi could retrieve the data, with a code phrase of his own invention. I'm not cheap to begin with, but my overtime on storage is astronomical. And Ralfi had been very scarce.

Then I'd heard that Ralfi Face wanted to put out a contract on me. So I'd arranged to meet him in the Drome, but I'd arranged it as Edward Bax, clandestine importer, late of Rio and Peking.

The Drome stank of biz, a metallic tang of nervous tension. 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.

Pardon me. Pardon me, friends. Just Eddie Bax here, Fast Eddie the Importer, with his professionally nondescript gym bag, and please ignore this slit, just wide enough to admit his right hand.

Ralfi wasn't alone. Eighty kilos of blond California beef perched alertly in the chair next to his, martial arts written all over him.

Fast Eddie Bax was in the chair opposite them before the beef's hands were off the table. You black belt? I asked eagerly. He nodded, blue eyes running an automatic scanning pattern between my eyes and my hands. Me too, I said. Got mine here in the bag. And I shoved my hand through the slit and thumbed the safety off. Click. Double twelve-gauge with the triggers wired together.

That's a gun, Ralfi said, putting a plump, restraining hand on his boy's taut blue nylon chest. Johnny has an antique firearm in his bag. So much for Edward Bax.

I guess he'd always been Ralfi Something or Other, but he owed his acquired surname to a singular vanity. Built something like an overripe pear, 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 rocks. I'm a whiz at trivia.

Christian White: classic pop face with a singer's high-definition muscles, chiseled cheekbones. Angelic in one light, handsomely depraved in another. But Ralfi's eyes lived behind that face, and they were small and cold and black.

Please, he said, let's work this out like businessmen. His voice was marked by a horrible prehensile sincerity, and the corners of his beautiful Christian White mouth were always wet. Lewis here, nodding in the beefboy's direction, is a meatball. Lewis took this impassively, looking like something built from a kit. You aren't a meatball, Johnny.

Sure I am, Ralfi, a nice meatball chock-full of implants where you can store your dirty laundry while you go off shopping for people to kill me. From my end of this bag, Ralfi, it looks like you've got some explaining to do.

It's this last batch of product, Johnny. He sighed deeply. In my role as broker—

Fence, I corrected.

As broker, I'm usually very careful as to sources.

You buy only from those who steal the best. Got it.

He sighed again. I try, he said wearily, not to buy from fools. This time, I'm afraid, I've done that. Third sigh was the cue for Lewis to trigger the neural disruptor they'd taped under my side of the table.

I put everything I had into curling the index finger of my right hand, but I no longer seemed to be connected to it. I could feel the metal of the gun and the foam-padded tape I'd wrapped around the stubby grip, but my hands were cool wax, distant and inert. I was hoping Lewis was a true meatball, thick enough to go for the gym bag and snag my rigid trigger finger, but he wasn't.

We've been very worried about you, Johnny. Very worried. You see, that's Yakuza property you have there. A fool took it from them, Johnny. A dead fool.

Lewis giggled.

It all made sense then, an ugly kind of sense, like bags of wet sand settling around my head. Killing wasn't Ralfi's style. Lewis wasn't even Ralfi's style. But he'd got himself stuck between the Sons of the Neon Chrysanthemum and something that belonged to them—or, more likely, something of theirs that belonged to someone else. Ralfi, of course, could use the code phrase to throw me into idiot/savant, and I'd spill their hot program without remembering a single quarter tone. For a fence like Ralfi, that would ordinarily have been enough. But not for the Yakuza. The Yakuza would know about Squids, for one thing, and they wouldn't want to worry about one lifting those dim and permanent traces of their program out of my head. I didn't know very much about Squids, but I'd heard stories, and I made it a point never to repeat them to my clients. No, the Yakuza wouldn't like that; it looked too much like evidence. They hadn't got where they were by leaving evidence around. Or alive.

Lewis was grinning. I think he was visualizing a point just behind my forehead and imagining how he could get there the hard way.

Hey, said a low voice, feminine, from somewhere behind my right shoulder, you cowboys sure aren't having too lively a time.

Pack it, bitch, Lewis said, his tanned face very still. Ralfi looked blank.

Lighten up. You want to buy some good free base? She pulled up a chair and quickly sat before either of them could stop her. She was barely inside my fixed field of vision, a thin girl with mirrored glasses, her dark hair cut in a rough shag. She wore black leather, open over a T-shirt slashed diagonally with stripes of red and black. Eight thou a gram weight.

Lewis snorted his exasperation and tried to slap her out of the chair. Somehow he didn't quite connect, and her hand came up and seemed to brush his wrist as it passed. Bright blood sprayed the table. He was clutching his wrist white-knuckle tight, blood trickling from between his fingers.

But hadn't her hand been empty?

He was going to need a tendon stapler. He stood up carefully, without bothering to push his chair back. The chair toppled backward, and he stepped out of my line of sight without a word.

He better get a medic to look at that, she said. That's a nasty cut.

You have no idea, said Ralfi, suddenly sounding very tired, the depths of shit you have just gotten yourself into.

No kidding? Mystery. I get real excited by mysteries. Like why your friend here's so quiet. Frozen, like. Or what this thing here is for, and she held up the little control unit that she'd somehow taken from Lewis. Ralfi looked ill.

You, ah, want maybe a quarter-million to give me that and take a walk? A fat hand came up to stroke his pale, lean face nervously.

What I want, she said, snapping her fingers so that the unit spun and glittered, is work. A job. Your boy hurt his wrist. But a quarter'll do for a retainer.

Ralfi let his breath out explosively and began to laugh, exposing teeth that hadn't been kept up to the Christian White standard. Then she turned the disruptor off.

Two million, I said.

My kind of man, she said, and laughed. What's in the bag?

A shotgun.

Crude. It might have been a compliment.

Ralfi said nothing at all.

Name's Millions. Molly Millions. You want to get out of here, boss? People are starting to stare. She stood up. She was wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood.

And I saw for the first time that the mirrored lenses were surgical inlays, the silver rising smoothly from her high cheekbones, sealing her eyes in their sockets. I saw my new face twinned there.

I'm Johnny, I said. We're taking Mr. Face with us.

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. He looked like the kind who sing the corporate anthem and cry, who shake hands endlessly with the bartender. And the pimps and the dealers would leave him alone, pegging him as innately conservative. Not up for much, and careful with his credit when he was.

The way I figured it later, they must have amputated part of his left thumb, somewhere behind the first joint, replacing it with a prosthetic tip, and cored the stump, fitting it with a spool and socket molded from one of the Ono-Sendai diamond analogs. Then they'd carefully wound the spool with three meters of monomolecular filament.

Molly got into some kind of exchange with the Magnetic Dog Sisters, giving me a chance to usher Ralfi through the door with the gym bag pressed lightly against the base of his spine. She seemed to know them. I heard the black one laugh.

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.

Ralfi kept walking, but I don't think he was trying to escape. I think he'd already given up. Probably he already had an idea of what we were up against.

I looked back down in time to see him explode.

Playback on full recall shows Ralfi stepping forward as the little tech sidles out of nowhere, smiling. Just a suggestion of a bow, and his left thumb falls off. It's a conjuring trick. The thumb hangs suspended. Mirrors? Wires? And Ralfi stops, his back to us, dark crescents of sweat under the armpits of his pale summer suit. He knows. He must have known. And then the joke-shop thumb tip, heavy as lead, arcs out in a lighting yo-yo trick, and the invisible thread connecting it to the killer's hand passes laterally through Ralfi's skull, just above his eyebrows, whips up, and descends, slicing the pear-shaped torso diagonally from shoulder to rib cage. Cuts so fine that no blood flows until synapses misfire and the first tremors surrender the body to gravity.

Ralfi tumbled apart in a pink cloud of fluids, the three mismatched sections rolling forward onto the tiled pavement. In total silence.

I brought the gym bag up, and my hand convulsed. The recoil nearly broke my wrist.

It must have been raining; ribbons of water cascaded from a ruptured geodesic and spattered on the tile behind us. We crouched in the narrow gap between a surgical boutique and an antique shop. She'd just edged one mirrored eye around the corner to report a single Volks module in front of the Drome, red lights flashing. They were sweeping Ralfi up. Asking questions.

I was covered in scorched white fluff. The tennis socks. The gym bag was a ragged plastic cuff around my wrist. I don't see how the hell I missed him.

'Cause he's fast, so fast. She hugged her knees and rocked back and forth on her bootheels. His nervous system's jacked up. He's factory custom. She grinned and gave a little squeal of delight. I'm gonna get that boy. Tonight. He's the best, number one, top dollar, state of the art.

What you're going to get, for this boy's two million, is my ass out of here. Your boyfriend back there was mostly grown in a vat in Chiba City. He's a Yakuza assassin.

Chiba. Yeah. See, Molly's been Chiba, too. And she showed me her hands, fingers slightly spread. Her fingers were slender, tapered, very white against the polished burgundy nails. Ten blades snicked straight out from their recesses beneath her nails, each one a narrow, double-edged scalpel in pale blue steel.

I'd never spent much time in Nighttown. Nobody there had anything to pay me to remember, and most of them had a lot they paid regularly to forget. Generations of sharpshooters had clipped away at the neon until the maintenance crews gave up. Even at noon the arcs were soot-black against faintest pearl.

Where do you go when the world's wealthiest criminal order is feeling for you with calm, distant fingers? Where do you hide from the Yakuza, so powerful that it owns comsats and at least three shuttles? The Yakuza is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I was born, the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse.

Molly had an answer: you hide in the Pit, in the lowest circle, where any outside influence generates swift, concentric ripples of raw menace. You hide in Nighttown. Better yet, you hide above Nighttown, because the Pit's inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown never sees, sweating under its own firmament of acrylic resin, up where the Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles, black-market cigarettes dangling from their lips.

She had another answer, too.

So you're locked up good and tight, Johnny-san? No way to get that program without the password? She led me into the shadows that waited beyond the bright tube platform. The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration.

The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical contraautism prostheses. I reeled off a numb version of my standard sales pitch. "Client's code is stored in a special chip; barring Squids, which we in the trade don't like to talk about, there's no way to recover your phrase. Can't drug it out, cut it out, torture it. I don't know it, never did."

Squids? Crawly things with arms? We emerged into a deserted street market. Shadowy figures watched us from across a makeshift square littered with fish heads and rotting fruit.

Superconducting quantum interference detectors. Used them in the war to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.

Yeah? Navy stuff? From the war? Squid'll read that chip of yours? She'd stopped walking, and I felt her eyes on me behind those twin mirrors.

Even the primitive models could measure a magnetic field a billionth the strength of geomagnetic force; it's like pulling a whisper out of a cheering stadium.

Cops can do that already, with parabolic microphones and lasers.

But your data's still secure. Pride in profession. No government'll let their cops have Squids, not even the security heavies. Too much chance of interdepartmental funnies; they're too likely to Watergate you.

Navy stuff, she said, and her grin gleamed in the shadows. Navy stuff. I got a friend down here who was in the navy, name's Jones. I think you'd better meet him. He's a junkie, though. So we'll have to take him something.

A junkie?

A dolphin.

He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin's point of view he might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water slopped over the side, wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg.

He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-white hide.

Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded down the side of the tank.

What is this place? I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting chainlink and things under tarps. Above the tank hung a clumsy wooden framework, crossed and recrossed by rows of dusty Christmas lights.

Funland. Zoo and carnival rides. ‘Talk with the War Whale.' All that. Some whale Jones is . . .

Jones reared again and fixed me with a sad and ancient eye.

How's he talk? Suddenly I was anxious to go.

That's the catch. Say ‘Hi,' Jones.

And all the bulbs lit simultaneously. They were flashing red, white, and blue.

RWBRWBRWB

RWBRWBRWB

RWBRWBRWB

RWBRWBRWB

RWBRWBRWB

Good with symbols, see, but the code's restricted. In the navy they had him wired into an audiovisual display. She drew the narrow package from a jacket pocket. Pure shit, Jones. Want it? He froze in the water and started to sink. I felt a strange panic, remembering that he wasn't a fish that he could drown. We want the key to Johnny's bank, Jones. We want it fast.

The lights flickered, died.

Go for it, Jones!

B

BBBBBBBBB

B

B

B

Blue bulbs, cruciform.

Darkness.

"Pure! It's clean. Come on, Jones."

WWWWWWWWW

WWWWWWWWW

WWWWWWWWW

WWWWWWWWW

WWWWWWWWW

White sodium glare washed her features, stark monochrome, shadows cleaving from her cheekbones.

R RRRRR

R R

RRRRRRRRR

R R

RRRRR R

The arms of the red swastika were twisted in her silver glasses. Give it to him, I said. We've got it.

Ralfi Face. No imagination.

Jones heaved half his armored bulk over the edge of his tank, and I thought the metal would give way. Molly stabbed him overhand with the Syrette, driving the needle between two plates. Propellant hissed. Patterns of light exploded, spasming across the frame and then fading to black.

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 Ralfi's pathetic password from the chip buried in my head.

I can see them slipping up when he was demobbed, letting him out of the navy with that gear intact, but how does a cybernetic dolphin get wired to smack?

The war, she said. They all were. Navy did it. How else you get 'em working for you?

I'm not sure this profiles as good business, the pirate said, angling for better money. Target specs on a comsat that isn't in the book—

Waste my time and you won't profile at all, said Molly, leaning across his scarred plastic desk to prod him with her forefinger.

So maybe you want to buy your microwaves somewhere else? He was a tough kid, behind his Mao-job. A Nighttowner by birth, probably.

Her hand blurred down the front of his jacket, completely severing a lapel without even rumpling the fabric.

So we got a deal or not?

Deal, he said staring at his ruined lapel with what he must have hoped was only polite interest. Deal.

While I checked the two records we'd bought, she extracted the slip of paper I'd given her from the zippered wrist pocket of her jacket. She unfolded it and read silently, moving her lips. She shrugged. This is it?

Shoot, I said, punching the RECORD studs of the two desks simultaneously.

Christian White, she recited, and his Aryan Reggae Band.

Faithful Ralfi, a fan to his dying day.

Transition to idiot/savant mode is always less abrupt than I expect it to be. The pirate broadcaster's front was a failing travel agency in a pastel cube that boasted a desk, three chairs, and a faded poster of a Swiss orbital spa. A pair of toy birds with blown-glass bodies and tin legs were sipping monotonously from a Styrofoam cup of water on the ledge beside Molly's shoulder. As I phased into mode, they accelerated gradually until their Day-Glo-feathered crowns became solid arcs of color. The LEDs that told seconds on the plastic wall clock had become meaningless pulsing grids, and Molly and the Mao-faced boy grew hazy, their arms blurring occasionally in insect-quick ghosts of gesture. And then it all faded to cool gray static and an endless tone poem in the artificial language.

I sat and sang dead Ralfi's stolen program for three hours.

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 clean 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?

We'd been climbing for two hours, up concrete stairs and steel ladders with perforated rungs, past abandoned gantries and dust-covered tools. We'd started in what looked like a disused maintenance yard, stacked with triangular roofing segments. Everything there had been covered with that same uniform layer of spraybomb graffiti: gang names, initials, dates back to the turn of the century. The graffiti followed us up, gradually thinning until a single name was repeated at intervals. LO TEK. In dripping black capitals.

Who's Lo Tek?

Not us, boss. She climbed a shivering aluminum ladder and vanished through a hole in a sheet of corrugated plastic. ‘Low technique, low technology.' The plastic muffled her voice. I followed her up, nursing an aching wrist. Lo Teks, they'd think that shotgun trick of yours was effete.

An hour later I dragged myself up through another hole, this one sawed crookedly in a sagging sheet of plywood, and met my first Lo Tek.

'S okay, Molly said, her hand brushing my shoulder.

It's just Dog. Hey, Dog.

In the narrow beam of her taped flash, he regarded us with his one eye and slowly extruded a thick length of grayish tongue, licking huge canines. I wondered how they wrote off tooth-bud transplants from Dobermans as low technology. Immunosuppressives don't exactly grow on trees.

Moll. Dental augmentation impeded his speech. A string of saliva dangled from the twisted lower lip. Heard ya comin'. Long time. He might have been fifteen, but the fangs and the bright mosaic of scars combined with the gaping socket to present a mask of total bestiality. It had taken time and a certain kind of creativity to assemble that face, and his posture told me he enjoyed living behind it. He wore a pair of decaying jeans, black with grime and shiny along the creases. His chest and feet were bare. He did something with his mouth that approximated a grin. Bein' followed, you.

Far off, in Nighttown, a water vendor cried his trade.

Strings jumping, Dog? She swung her flash to the side, and I saw thin cords tied to eyebolts, cords that ran to the edge and vanished.

Kill the fuckin' light!

She snapped it off.

How come the one who's followin' you's got no light?

Doesn't need it. That one's bad news, Dog. Your sentries give him a tumble, they'll come home in easy-to-carry sections.

"This a friend friend, Moll?" He sounded uneasy. I heard his feet shift on the worn plywood.

No. But he's mine. And this one, slapping my shoulders, he's a friend. Got that?

Sure, he said, without much enthusiasm, padding to the platform's edge, where the eyebolts were. He began to pluck out some kind of message on the taut cords.

Nighttown spread beneath us like a toy village for rats; tiny windows showed candlelight, with only a few harsh, bright squares lit by battery lanterns and carbide lamps. I imagined the old men at their endless games of dominoes, under warm, fat drops of water that fell from wet wash hung out on poles between the plywood shanties. Then I tried to imagine him climbing patiently up through the darkness in his zoris and ugly tourist shirt, bland and unhurried. How was he tracking us?

Good, said Molly. He smells us.

Smoke? Dog dragged a crumpled pack from his pocket and prized out a flattened cigarette. I squinted at the trademark while he lit it for me with a kitchen match. Yiheyuan filters. Beijing Cigarette Factory. I decided that the Lo Teks were black marketeers. Dog and Molly went back to their argument, which seemed to revolve around Molly's desire to use some particular piece of Lo Tek real estate.

I've done you a lot of favors, man. I want that floor. And I want the music.

You're not Lo Tek . . .

This must have been going on for the better part of a twisted kilometer, Dog leading us along swaying catwalks and up rope ladders. 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 and feet, sawed into geodesic struts.

The Killing Floor, she called it. Scrambling after her, my new Eddie Bax shoes slipping on worn metal and damp plywood, I wondered how it could be any more lethal than the rest of the territory. At the same time I sensed that Dog's protests were ritual and that she already expected to get whatever it was she wanted.

Somewhere beneath us, Jones would be circling his tank, feeling the first twinges of junk sickness. The police would be boring the Drome regulars with questions about Ralfi. What did he do? Who was he with before he stepped outside? And the Yakuza would be settling its ghostly bulk over the city's data banks, probing for faint images of me reflected in numbered accounts, securities transactions, bills for utilities. 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 . . .

But by now the pirate would have shuttled our message into line for blackbox transmissions to the Yakuza comsat. A simple message: call off the dogs or we wideband your program.

The program. I had no idea what it contained. I still don't. I only sing the song, with zero comprehension. It was probably research data, the Yakuza being given to advanced forms of industrial espionage. A genteel business, stealing from Ono-Sendai as a matter of course and politely holding their data for ransom, threatening to blunt the conglomerate's research edge by making the product public.

But why couldn't any number play? Wouldn't they be happier with something to sell back to Ono-Sendai, happier than they'd be with one dead Johnny from Memory Lane?

Their program was on its way to an address in Sydney, to a place that held letters for clients and didn't ask questions once you'd paid a small retainer. Fourth-class surface mail. I'd erased most of the other copy and recorded our message in the resulting gap, leaving just enough of the program to identify it as the real thing.

My wrist hurt. I wanted to stop, to lie down, to sleep. I knew that I'd lose my grip and fall soon, knew that the sharp black shoes I'd bought for my evening as Eddie Bax would lose their purchase and carry me down to Nighttown. But he rose in my mind like a cheap religious hologram, glowing, the enlarged chip in his Hawaiian shirt looming like a reconnaissance shot of some doomed urban nucleus.

So I followed Dog and Molly through Lo Tek heaven, jury-rigged and jerry-built from scraps that even Nighttown didn't want.

The Killing Floor was eight meters on a side. A giant had threaded steel cable back and forth through a junkyard and drawn it all taut. It creaked when it moved, and it moved constantly, swaying and bucking as the gathering Lo Teks arranged themselves on the shelf of plywood surrounding it. The wood was silver with age, polished with long use, and deeply etched with initials, threats, declarations of passion. This was suspended from a separate set of cables, which lost themselves in darkness beyond the raw white glare of the two ancient floods suspended above the Floor.

A girl with teeth like Dog's hit the Floor on all fours. Her breasts were tattooed with indigo spirals. Then she was across the Floor, laughing, grappling with a boy who was drinking dark liquid from a liter flask.

Lo Tek fashion ran to scars and tattoos. And teeth. The electricity they were tapping to light the Killing Floor seemed to be an exception to their overall aesthetic, made in the name of . . . ritual, sport, art? I didn't know, but I could see that the Floor was something special. It had the look of having been assembled over generations.

I held the useless shotgun under my jacket. Its hardness and heft were comforting, even though I had no more shells. And 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.

And then I noticed just how quiet the Lo Teks had become.

He was there, at the edge of the light, taking in the Killing Floor and the gallery of silent Lo Teks with a tourist's calm. And as our eyes met for the first time with mutual recognition, a memory clicked into place for me, of Paris, and the long Mercedes electrics gliding through the rain to Notre Dame; mobile greenhouses, Japanese faces behind the glass, and a hundred Nikons rising in blind phototropism, flowers of steel and crystal. Behind his eyes, as they found me, those same shutters whirring.

I looked for Molly Millions, but she was gone.

The Lo Teks parted to let him step up onto the bench. He bowed, smiling, and stepped smoothly out of his sandals, leaving them side by side, perfectly aligned, and then he stepped down onto the Killing Floor. He came for me, across that shifting trampoline of scrap, as easily as any tourist padding across synthetic pile in any featureless hotel.

Molly hit the Floor, moving.

The Floor screamed.

It was miked and amplified, with pickups riding the four fat coil springs at the corners and contact mikes taped at random to rusting machine fragments. Somewhere the Lo Teks had an amp and a synthesizer, and now I made out the shapes of speakers overhead, above the cruel white floods.

A drumbeat began, electronic, like an amplified heart, steady as a metronome.

She'd removed her leather jacket and boots; her T-shirt was sleeveless, faint telltales of Chiba City circuitry traced along her thin arms. Her leather jeans gleamed under the floods. She began to dance.

She flexed her knees, white feet tensed on a flattened gas tank, and 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.

He rode with it, for a few heartbeats, and then he moved, judging the movement of the Floor perfectly, like a man stepping from one flat stone to another in an ornamental garden.

He pulled the tip from his thumb with the grace of a man at ease with social gesture and flung it at her. Under the floods, the filament was a refracting thread of rainbow. She threw herself flat and rolled, jackknifing up as the molecule whipped past, steel claws snapping into the light in what must have been an automatic rictus of defense. The drum pulse quickened, and she bounced with it, her dark hair wild around the blank silver lenses, her mouth thin, lips taut with concentration. The Killing Floor boomed and roared, and the Lo Teks were screaming their excitement.

He retracted the filament to a whirling meter-wide circle of ghostly polychrome and spun it in front of him, thumbless hand held level with his sternum. A shield.

And Molly seemed to let something go, something inside, and that was the real start of her mad-dog dance. She jumped, twisting, lunging sideways, landing with both feet on an alloy engine block wired directly to one of the coil springs. I cupped my hands over my ears and knelt in a vertigo of sound, thinking Floor and benches were on their way down, down to Nighttown, and I saw us tearing through the shanties, the wet wash, exploding on the tiles like rotten fruit. But the cables held, and the Killing Floor rose and fell like a crazy metal sea. And Molly danced on it.

And at the end, just before he made his final cast with the filament, I saw 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