Mona Lisa Overdrive

  It’s called money, Lanette said.

  It’s called money. You just slip it in.

  20

  HILTON SWIFT

  He arrived unannounced, as he always did, and alone, the Net helicopter settling like a solitary wasp, stirring strands of seaweed across the damp sand.

  She watched from the rust-eaten railing as he jumped down, something boyish, almost bumbling, in his apparent eagerness. He wore a long topcoat of brown tweed; unbuttoned, it showed the immaculate front of one of his candystriped shirts, the propwash stirring his brown-blond hair and fluttering his Sense/Net tie. Robin was right, she decided: he did look as though his mother dressed him.

  Perhaps it was deliberate, she thought, as he came striding up the beach, a feigned naïveté. She remembered Porphyre once maintaining that major corporations were entirely independent of the human beings who composed the body corporate. This had seemed patently obvious to Angie, but the hairdresser had insisted that she’d failed to grasp his basic premise. Swift was Sense/Net’s most important human decision-maker.

  The thought of Porphyre made her smile; Swift, taking it as a greeting, beamed back at her.

  He offered her lunch in San Francisco; the helicopter was extremely fast. She countered by insisting on preparing him a bowl of dehydrated Swiss soup and microwaving a frozen brick of sourdough rye.

  She wondered, watching him eat, about his sexuality. In his late thirties, he somehow conveyed the sense of an extraordinarily bright teenager in whom the onset of puberty had been subtly delayed. Rumor, at one time or another, had supplied him with every known sexual preference, and with several that she assumed were entirely imaginary. None of them seemed at all likely to Angie. She’d known him since she’d come to Sense/Net; he’d been well established in the upper echelons of production when she’d arrived, one of the top people in Tally Isham’s team, and he’d taken an immediate professional interest in her. Looking back, she assumed that Legba had steered her into his path: he’d been so obviously on his way up, though she might not have seen it herself, then, dazzled by the glitter and constant movement of the scene.

  Bobby had taken an instant dislike to him, bristling with a Barrytowner’s inbred hostility to authority, but had generally managed to conceal it for the sake of her career. The dislike had been mutual, Swift greeting their split and Bobby’s departure with obvious relief.

  “Hilton,” she said, as she poured him a cup of the herbal tea he preferred to coffee, “what is it that’s keeping Robin in London?”

  He looked up from the steaming cup. “Something personal, I think. Perhaps he’s found a new friend.” Bobby had always been Angie’s friend, to Hilton. Robin’s friends tended to be young, male, and athletic; the muted erotic sequences in her stims with Robin were assembled from stock footage provided by Continuity and heavily treated by Raebel and his effects team. She remembered the one night they’d spent together, in a windblown house in southern Madagascar, his passivity and his patience. They’d never tried again, and she’d suspected that he feared that intimacy would undermine the illusion their stims projected so perfectly.

  “What did he think of me going into the clinic, Hilton? Did he tell you?”

  “I think he admired you for it.”

  “Someone told me recently that he’s been telling people I’m crazy.”

  He’d rolled up his striped shirtsleeves and loosened his tie. “I can’t imagine Robin thinking that, let alone saying it. I know what he thinks of you. You know what gossip is, in the Net.…”

  “Hilton, where’s Bobby?”

  His brown eyes, very still. “Isn’t that over, Angie?”

  “Hilton, you know. You must know. You know where he is. Tell me.”

  “We lost him.”

  “Lost him?”

  “Security lost him. You’re right, of course; we kept the closest possible track of him after he left you. He reverted to type.” There was an edge of satisfaction in his voice.

  “And what type was that?”

  “I’ve never asked what brought you together,” he said. “Security investigated both of you, of course. He was a petty criminal.”

  She laughed. “He wasn’t even that.…”

  “You were unusually well represented, Angie, for an unknown. You know that your agents made it a key condition of your contract that we take Bobby Newmark on as well.”

  “Contracts have had stranger conditions, Hilton.”

  “And he went on salary as your … companion.”

  “My ‘friend.’ ”

  Was Swift actually blushing? He broke eye contact, looked down at his hands. “When he left you, he went to Mexico, Mexico City. Security was tracing him, of course; we don’t like to lose track of anyone who knows that much about the personal life of one of our stars. Mexico City is a very … complicated place.… We do know that he seemed to be trying to continue his previous … career.”

  “He was hustling cyberspace?”

  He met her eyes again. “He was seeing people in the business, known criminals.”

  “And? Go on.”

  “He … faded out. Vanished. Do you have any idea what Mexico City is like, if you slip below the poverty line?”

  “And he was poor?”

  “He’d become an addict. According to our best sources.”

  “An addict? Addicted to what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Continuity!”

  He almost spilled his tea.

  “Hello, Angie.”

  “Bobby, Continuity. Bobby Newmark, my friend,” glaring at Swift. “He went to Mexico City. Hilton says he became addicted to something. A drug, Continuity?”

  “I’m sorry, Angie. That’s classified data.”

  “Hilton …”

  “Continuity,” he began, and coughed.

  “Hello, Hilton.”

  “Executive override, Continuity. Do we have that information?”

  “Security’s sources described Newmark’s addiction as neuroelectronic.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Some sort of, um, ‘wirehead’ business,” Swift offered.

  She felt an impulse to tell him how she’d found the drug, the charger.

  Hush, child. Her head was full of the sound of bees, a building pressure.

  “Angie? What is it?” He was half up from his chair, reaching for her.

  “Nothing. I’m … upset. I’m sorry. Nerves. It isn’t your fault. I was going to tell you about finding Bobby’s cyberspace deck. But you already know about that, don’t you?”

  “Can I get you anything? Water?”

  “No, thanks, but I’ll lie down for a while, if you don’t mind. But stay, please. I have some ideas for orbital sequences that I’d like your advice on.…”

  “Of course. Have a nap, I’ll have a walk on the beach, and then we’ll talk.”

  She watched him from the bedroom window, watched his brown figure recede in the direction of the Colony, followed by the patient little Dornier.

  He looked like a child on the empty beach; he looked as lost as she felt.

  21

  THE ALEPH

  As the sun rose, still no power for the 100-watt bulbs, Gentry’s loft filled with a new light. Winter sunlight softened the outlines of the consoles and the holo table, brought out the texture of the ancient books that lined sagging chipboard shelves along the west wall. As Gentry paced and talked, his blond roostertail bobbing each time he spun on a black bootheel, his excitement seemed to counter the lingering effects of Cherry’s sleep-derms. Cherry sat on the edge of the bed, watching Gentry but glancing occasionally at the battery telltale on the stretcher’s superstructure. Slick sat in a broken-down chair scrounged from the Solitude and recushioned with transparent plastic over wadded pads of discarded clothing.

  To Slick’s relief, Gentry had skipped the whole business of the Shape and launched straight into his theory about the aleph thing. As always, once Gentry got going, he used words and
constructions that Slick had trouble understanding, but Slick knew from experience that it was easier not to interrupt him; the trick was in pulling some kind of meaning out of the overall flow, skipping over the parts you didn’t understand.

  Gentry said that the Count was jacked into what amounted to a mother-huge microsoft; he thought the slab was a single solid lump of biochip. If that was true, the thing’s storage capacity was virtually infinite; it would’ve been unthinkably expensive to manufacture. It was, Gentry said, a fairly strange thing for anyone to have built at all, although such things were rumored to exist and to have their uses, most particularly in the storage of vast amounts of confidential data. With no link to the global matrix, the data was immune to every kind of attack via cyberspace. The catch, of course, was that you couldn’t access it via the matrix; it was dead storage.

  “He could have anything in there,” Gentry said, pausing to look down at the unconscious face. He spun on his heel and began his pacing again. “A world. Worlds. Any number of personality-constructs …”

  “Like he’s living a stim?” Cherry asked. “That why he’s always in REM?”

  “No,” Gentry said, “it’s not simstim. It’s completely interactive. And it’s a matter of scale. If this is aleph-class biosoft, he literally could have anything at all in there. In a sense, he could have an approximation of everything.…”

  “I gotta feeling off Kid Afrika,” Cherry said, “that this guy was paying to stay this way. Kinda wirehead action but different. And anyway, wireheads don’t REM like that.…”

  “But when you tried to put it out through your stuff,” Slick ventured, “you got that … thing.” He saw Gentry’s shoulders tense beneath black-beaded leather.

  “Yes,” Gentry said, “and now I have to reconstruct our account with the Fission Authority.” He pointed at the permanent storage batteries stacked beneath the steel table. “Get those out for me.”

  “Yeah,” Cherry said, “it’s about time. I’m freezing my ass.”

  They left Gentry bent over a cyberspace deck and went back to Slick’s room. Cherry had insisted they rig Gentry’s electric blanket to one of the batteries so she could drape it over the stretcher. There was cold coffee left on the butane stove; Slick drank it without bothering to reheat it, while Cherry stared out the window at the snow-streaked plain of the Solitude.

  “How’d it get like this?” she asked.

  “Gentry says it was a landfill operation a hundred years ago. Then they laid down a lot of topsoil, but stuff wouldn’t grow. A lot of the fill was toxic. Rain washed the cover off. Guess they just gave up and started dumping more shit on it. Can’t drink the water out there; fulla PCBs and everything else.”

  “What about those rabbits Bird-boy goes hunting for?”

  “They’re west of here. You don’t see ’em on the Solitude. Not even rats. Anyway, you gotta test any meat you take around here.”

  “There’s birds, though.”

  “Just roost here, go somewhere else to feed.”

  “What is it with you ’n’ Gentry?” She was still looking out the window.

  “How do you mean?”

  “My first idea was maybe you were gay. Together, I mean.”

  “No.”

  “But it’s kind of like you need each other some way.…”

  “It’s his place, Factory. Lets me live here. I … need to live here. To do my work.”

  “To build those things downstairs?”

  The bulb in the yellow cone of fax came on; the fan in the heater kicked in.

  “Well,” Cherry said, squatting in front of the heater and unzipping one jacket after another, “he may be crazy but he just did something right.”

  Gentry was slouched in the old office chair when Slick entered the loft, staring at the little flip-up monitor on his deck.

  “Robert Newmark,” Gentry said.

  “Huh?”

  “Retinal identification. Either this is Robert Newmark or someone who bought his eyes.”

  “How’d you get that?” Slick bent to peer at the screen of basic birth stats.

  Gentry ignored the question. “This is it. Push it and you run into something else entirely.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Someone wants to know if anyone asks any questions about Mr. Newmark.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.” Gentry drummed his fingers on his black leather thighs. “Look at this: nothing. Born in Barrytown. Mother: Marsha Newmark. We’ve got his SIN, but it’s definitely been tagged.” He shoved the chair back on its casters and swung around so that he could see the Count’s still face. “How about it, Newmark? Is that your name?” He stood up and went to the holo table.

  “Don’t,” Slick said.

  Gentry touched the power stud on the holo table.

  And the gray thing was there again, for an instant, but this time it dived toward the core of the hemispherical display, dwindled, and was gone. No. It was there, a minute gray sphere at the very center of the glowing projection field.

  Gentry’s crazy smile had returned. “Good,” he said.

  “What’s good?”

  “I see what it is. A kind of ice. A security program.”

  “That monkey?”

  “Someone has a sense of humor. If the monkey doesn’t scare you off, it turns into a pea.…” He crossed to the table and began to root through one of the panniers. “I doubt if they’ll be able to do that with a direct sensory link.” He held something in his hand now. A trode-net.

  “Gentry, don’t do it! Look at him!”

  “I’m not going to do it,” Gentry said. “You are.”

  22

  GHOSTS AND EMPTIES

  Staring through the cab’s smudged windows, she found herself wishing for Colin and his wry commentary, then remembered that this was entirely beyond his sphere of expertise. Did Maas-Neotek manufacture a similar unit for the Sprawl, she wondered, and if so, what form would its ghost take?

  “Sally,” she said, perhaps half an hour into the drive to New York, “why did Petal let me go with you?”

  “Because he was smart.”

  “And my father?”

  “Your father’ll shit.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Will be angry. If he finds out. And he may not. We aren’t here for long.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “I gotta talk to somebody.”

  “But why am I here?”

  “You don’t like it here?”

  Kumiko hesitated. “Yes, I do.”

  “Good.” Sally shifted on the broken-down seat. “Petal had to let us go. Because he couldn’t have stopped us without hurting one of us. Well, maybe not hurting. More like insulting. Swain could cool you, then tell you he was sorry later, tell your father it was for your own good, if it came to that, but if he cools me, it’s like face, right? When I saw Petal down there with the gun, I knew he was going to let us go. Your room’s kinked. The whole place is. I set the motion sensors off when I was getting your gear together. Figured I would. Petal knew it was me. That’s why he rang the phone, to let me know he knew.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Kind of a courtesy, so I’d know he was waiting. Gimme a chance to think. But he didn’t have a choice and he knew it. Swain, see, he’s being forced to do something, and Petal knows it. Or anyway Swain says he is, being forced. Me, I’m definitely being forced. So I start wondering how bad Swain needs me. Real bad. Because they let me walk off with the oyabun’s daughter, shipped all the way to Notting Hill for the safekeeping. Something there scares him worse than your daddy. ’Less it’s something that’ll make him richer than your daddy already has. Anyway, taking you kind of evens things up. Kind of like pushing back. You mind?”

  “But you are being threatened?”

  “Somebody knows a lot of things I did.”

  “And Tick has discovered the identity of this person?”

  “Yeah. Guess I knew anyway. Wish
to fuck I’d been wrong.”

  The hotel Sally chose was faced with rust-stained steel panels, each panel secured with gleaming chrome bolts, a style Kumiko knew from Tokyo and thought of as somewhat old-fashioned.

  Their room was large and gray, a dozen shades of gray, and Sally walked straight to the bed, after she’d locked the door, took off her jacket, and lay down.

  “You don’t have a bag,” Kumiko said.

  Sally sat up and began to remove her boots. “I can buy what I need. You tired?”

  “No.”

  “I am.” She pulled her black sweater over her head. Her breasts were small, with brownish pink nipples; a scar, running from just below the left nipple, vanished into the waistband of her jeans.

  “You were hurt,” Kumiko said, looking at the scar.

  Sally looked down. “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t you have it removed?”

  “Sometimes it’s good to remember.”

  “Being hurt?”

  “Being stupid.”

  Gray on gray. Unable to sleep, Kumiko paced the gray carpet. There was something vampiric about the room, she decided, something it would have in common with millions of similar rooms, as though its bewilderingly seamless anonymity were sucking away her personality, fragments of which emerged as her parents’ voices, raised in argument, as the faces of her father’s black-suited secretaries.…

  Sally slept, her face a smooth mask. The view from the window told Kumiko nothing at all: only that she looked out on a city that was neither Tokyo nor London, a vast generic tumble that was her century’s paradigm of urban reality.

  Perhaps she slept too, Kumiko, though later she wasn’t certain. She watched Sally order toiletries and underwear, tapping her requirements into the bedside video. Her purchases were delivered while Kumiko was in the shower.

  “Okay,” Sally said, from beyond the door, “towel off, get dressed, we’re going to see the man.”

  “What man?” Kumiko asked, but Sally hadn’t heard her.

  Gomi.