William Gibson - Johnny Mnemonic.pdf - William Gibson - margozap

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Johnny Mnemonic

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, thought, 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 then

myself; I'd had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand-

loading cartidges; 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 a arcame 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, came 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 this, 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 shit, just wide enough to admit his right hand.

Ralfi wasn't alone. Eighty kilos of blond California beef perched alerty

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 a antique firearm in his bag.'

So much for Enward Bax.

I guess he'd always been Ralfi Something or Orther, but he owed his

acquired surname to a singular vanity. Built something like an overripe

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pear, he'd worn the oncefamous face of Christian White for twenty years

- Christian White of the Atyan 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 highdefinition

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

beautifull Christian White mouth were always wet. 'Lewis here,' nodding

in the beefboy's direction, 'is a meatball.' Lewis took his 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 u 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 am 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 ordinarity 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

envidence. 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

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gram weirht.'

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 tricklng 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 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? Myster. I get real excited by mysteries. Like why your

friends here's do 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

glitterd, '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 Chriatian White standard. The 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 colour 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 carefull 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, fiting 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 filement.

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 seemend 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

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up against.

I looked back down in time to see him explode.

Playback on full recall shows Ralfi stepping foward as the little tech

sidles out os nowhere, smilling. Just a suggestion of a bow, and his

left thumb falls of. It'a 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 thumbtip, heavy as lead, arcs out in a lighting

yo-yo trick, and the invisible thread connectingit to the killer's hand

passes laterally through Ralfi's skull, just above his eyebrows, whips

up, and descends, slicing the pearshaped torso diaganally 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

section rolling forwardon 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

frond of the Drome, red lights fliashing. 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 faxt, 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 slighly 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,

doubleedged 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 sharpsshooters 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, cocentric 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 filmament 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

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program without the password?' She led me into the shadows that waited

beyord 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 interfence 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 strenght of geomagnetic force; it's like pulling a whisper out of

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 stopped 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 doen

the side of the tank.

'What is this place?' I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting

chain link 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.

'Thta's the catch. Say "Hi," Jones.'

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

blue.

RWBRWBRWB

'Good with symbols, see, but the code'w recricted. In the navy they had

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William Gibson - Johnny Mnemonic.pdf

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