William Gibson & Michael Swanwick - Dogfight.pdf

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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/William%20Gibson%20&%20Michael%20Swanwick%20-%20Dogfight.txt
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/William%20Gibson%20&%20Michael%20Swanwick%20-%20Dogfight.txt
Michael SWANWICK and William GIBSON
Dogfight
[from LIB.RU]
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. Or maybe, with that ticket good as
long as he didn't stop riding, he'd just never get off Greyhound's Flying Dutchman. He grinned at
his faint reflection in cold, greasy glass while the downtown lights of Norfolk slid past, the bus
swaying on tired shocks as the driver slung it around a final corner. They shuddered to a halt in
the terminal lot, concrete lit gray and harsh like a prison exercise yard. But Deke was watching
himself starve, maybe in some snowstorm out of Oswego, with his cheek pressed up against that same
bus window, and seeing his remains swept out at the next stop by a muttering old man in faded
coveralls. One way or the other, he decided, it didn't mean shit to him. Except his legs seemed to
have died already. And the driver called a twenty-minute stopover Tidewater Station, Virginia. It
was an old cinder-block building with two entrances to each rest room, holdover from the previous
century.
Legs like wood, he made a halfhearted attempt at ghosting the notions counter, but the black girl
behind it was alert, guarding the sparse contents of the old glass case as though her ass depended
on it. Probably does, Deke thought, turning away. Opposite the washrooms, an open doorway offered
GAMES, the word flickering feebly in biofluorescent plastic. He could see a crowd of the local
kickers clustered around a pool table. Aimless, his boredom following him like a cloud, he stuck
his head in. And saw a biplane, wings no longer than his thumb, blossom bright orange flame.
Corkscrewing, trailing smoke, it vanished the instant it struck the green-felt field of the table.
"Tha's right, Tiny," a kicker bellowed, "you take that sumbitch!"
"Hey," Deke said. "What's going on?" The nearest kicker was a bean pole with a black mesh
Peterbilt cap. "Tiny's defending the Max," he said, not taking his eyes from the table.
"Oh, yeah? What's that?" But even as he asked, he saw it: a blue enamel medal shaped like a
Maltese cross, the slogan Pour le Merite divided among its arms.
The Blue Max rested on the edge of the table, directly before a vast and perfectly immobile bulk
wedged into a fragile-looking chrome-tube chair. The man's khaki work shirt would have hung on
Deke like the folds of a sail, but it bulged across that bloated torso so tautly that the buttons
threatened to tear away at any instant. Deke thought of southern troopers he'd seen on his way
down; of that weird, gut-heavy endotype balanced on gangly legs that looked like they'd been
borrowed from some other body. Tiny might look like that if he stood, but on a larger scale a
forty-inch jeans inseam that would need a woven-steel waistband to support all those pounds of
swollen gut. If Tiny were ever to stand at all for now Deke saw that that shiny frame was actually
a wheelchair. There was something disturbingly childlike about the man's face, an appalling
suggestion of youth and even beauty in features almost buried in fold and jowl. Embarrassed, Deke
looked away. The other man, the one standing across the table from Tiny, had bushy sideburns and a
thin mouth. He seemed to be trying to push something with his eyes, wrinkles of concentration
spreading from the corners....
"You dumbshit or what?" The man with the Peterbilt cap turned, catching Deke's Indo proleboy
denims, the brass chains at his wrists, for the first time. "Why don't you get your ass lost,
fucker. Nobody wants your kind in here." He turned back to the dogfight.
Bets were being made, being covered. The kickers were producing the hard stuff, the old stuff,
libertyheaded dollars and Roosevelt dimes from the stampand-coin stores, while more cautious
bettors slapped down antique paper dollars laminated in clear plastic. Through the haze came a
trio of red planes, flying in formation. Fokker D Vhs. The room fell silent. The Fokkers banked
majestically under the solar orb of a two-hundred-watt bulb.
The blue Spad dove out of nowhere. Two more plunged from the shadowy ceiling, following closely.
The kickers swore, and one chuckled. The formation broke wildly. One Fokker dove almost to the
felt, without losing the Spad on its tail. Furiously, it zigged and zagged across the green
flatlands but to no avail. At last it pulled up, the enemy hard after it, too steeply and stalled,
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too low to pull out in time. A stack of silver dimes was scooped up. The Fokkers were outnumbered
now. One had two Spads on its tail. A needle-spray of tracers tore past its cockpit. The Fokker
slip-turned right, banked into an Immelmann, and was behind one of its pursuers. It fired, and the
biplane fell, tumbling.
"Way to go, Tiny!" The kickers closed in around the table.
Deke was frozen with wonder. It felt like being born all over again.
Frank's Truck Stop was two miles out of town on the Commercial Vehicles Only route. Deke had
tagged it, out of idle habit, from the bus on the way in. Now he walked back between the traffic
and the concrete crash guards. Articulated trucks went slamming past, big eight-segmented jobs,
the wash of air each time threatening to blast him over. CVO stops were easy makes. When he
sauntered into Frank's, there was nobody to doubt that he'd come in off a big rig, and he was able
to browse the gift shop as slowly as he liked. The wire rack with the projective wetware wafers
was located between a stack of Korean cowboy shirts and a display for Fuzz Buster mudguards. A
pair of Oriental dragons twisted in the air over the rack, either fighting or fucking, he couldn't
tell which. The game he wanted was there: a wafer labeled SPADS&FOKKERS. It took him three seconds
to boost it and less time to slide the magnet which the cops in D.C. hadn't even bothered to
confiscate across the universal security strip. On the way out, he lifted two programming units
and a little Batang facilitator-remote that looked like an antique hearing aid.
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.
The cubicle smelled faintly of urine, and someone had scrawled Hard Anarchy Liberation Front
slogans across the walls. Deke kicked trash out of a corner, sat down, back to the wall, and
ripped open the wafer pack.
There was a folded instruction sheet with diagrams of loops, rolls, and Immelmanns, a tube of
saline paste, aDd a computer list of operational specs. And the wafer itself, white plastic with a
blue biplane and logo on one side, red on the other. He turned it over and over in his hand:
SPADS&FOKKERS, FOKKERS&SPADS. Red or blue. `He fitted the Batang behind his ear after coating the
inductor surface with paste, jacked its fiberoptic ribbon into the programmer, and plugged the
programmer into the wall current. Then he slid the wafer into the programmer. It was a cheap set,
Indonesian, and the base of his skull buzzed uncomfortably as the program ran. But when it was
done, a sky-blue Spad darted restlessly through the air a few inches from his face. It almost
glowed, it was so real. It had the strange inner life that fanatically detailed museum-grade
models often have, but it took all of his concentration to keep it in existence. If his attention
wavered at all, it lost focus, fuzzing into a pathetic blur.
He practiced until the battery in the earset died, then slumped against the wall and fell asleep.
He dreamed of flying, in a universe that consisted entirely of white clouds and blue sky, with no
up and down, and never a green field to crash into.
He woke to a rancid smell of frying krillcakes and winced with hunger. No cash, either. Well,
there were plenty of student types in the stack. Bound to be one who'd like to score a programming
unit. He hit the hall with the boosted spare. Not far down was a door with a poster on it: THERE'S
A HELL OF A GOOD UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR. Under that was a starscape with a cluster of multicolored
pills, torn from an ad for some pharmaceutical company, pasted over an inspirational shot of the
"space colony" that had been under construction since before he was born. LET'S GO, the poster
said, beneath the collaged hypnotics.
He knocked. The door opened, security slides stopping it at a two-inch slice of girlface. "Yeah?"
"You're going to think this is stolen." He passed the programmer from hand to hand. "I mean
because it's new, virtual cherry, and the bar code's still on it. But listen, I'm not gonna argue
the point. No. I'm gonna let you have it for only like half what you'd pay anywhere else."
"Hey, wow, really, no kidding?" The visible fraction of mouth twisted into a strange smile. She
extended her hand, palm up, a loose fist. Level with his chin. "Lookahere!"
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There was a hole in her hand, a black tunnel that ran right up her arm. Two small red lights.
Rat's eyes. They scurried toward him growing, gleaming. Something gray streaked forward and leaped
for his face.
He screamed, throwing hands up to ward it off. Legs twisting, he fell, the programmer shattering
under him.
Silicate shards skittered as he thrashed, clutching his head. Where it hurt, it hurt it hurt very
badly indeed.
"Oh, my God!" Slides unsnapped, and the girl was hovering over him. "Here, listen, come on." She
dangled a blue hand towel. "Grab on to this and I'll pull you up."
He looked at her through a wash of tears. Student. That fed look, the oversize sweatshirt, teeth
so straight and white they could be used as a credit reference. A thin gold chain around one ankle
(fuzzed, he saw, with baby-fine hair). Choppy Japanese haircut. Money. "That sucker was gonna be
my dinner," he said ruefully. He took hold of the towel and let her pull him up.
She smiled but skittishly backed away from him. "Let me make it up to you," she said. "You want
some food? It was only a projection, okay?"
He followed her in, wary as an animal entering a trap.
"Holy shit," Deke said, "this is real cheese. . . He was sitting on a gutsprung sofa, wedged
between a four-foot teddy bear and a loose stack of floppies. The room was ankle-deep in books and
clothes and papers. But the food she magicked up Gouda cheese and tinned beef and honest-to-God
greenhouse wheat wafers was straight out of the Arabian Nights.
"Hey," she said. "We know how to treat a proleboy right, huh?" Her name was Nance Bettendorf. She
was seventeen. Both her parents had jobs greedy buggers and she was an engineering major at
William and Mary. She got top marks except in English. "I guess you must really have a thing about
rats. You got some kind of phobia about rats?"
He glanced sidelong at her bed. You couldn't see it, really; it was just a swell in the ground
cover. "It's not like that. It just reminded me of something else, is all."
"Like what?" She squatted in front of him, the big shirt riding high up one smooth thigh.
"Well . . . did you ever see the " his voice involuntarily rose and rushed past the words
"Washington Monument? Like at night? It's got these two little red lights on top, aviation markers
or something, and I, and I..." He started to shake.
"You're afraid of the Washington Monument?" Nance whooped and rolled over with laughter, long
tanned legs kicking. She was wearing crimson bikini panties.
"I would die rather than look at it again," he said levelly.
She stopped laughing then, sat up, studied his face. White, even teeth worried at her lower lip,
like she was dragging up something she didn't want to think about. At last she ventured,
"Brainlock?"
"Yeah," he said bitterly. "They told me I'd never go back to D.C. And then the fuckers laughed."
"What did they get you for?" "I'm a thief." He wasn't about to tell her that the actual charge was
career shoplifting.
"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." Deke knew
this shrill, desperate rap, this long, circular jive that the lonely string out to the rare
listener; knew it from a hundred cold and empty nights spent in the company of strangers. Nance
was lost in it, and Deke, nodding and yawning, wondered if he'd even be able to stay awake when
they finally hit that bed of hers.
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"I built that projection I hit you with myself," she said, hugging her knees up beneath her chin.
"It's for muggers, you know? I just happened to have it on me, and I threw it at you `cause I
thought it was so funny, you trying to sell me that shit little Indojavanese programmer." She
hunched forward and held out her hand again. "Look here." Deke cringed. "No, no, it's okay, I
swear it, this is different." She opened her hand.
A single blue flame danced there, perfect and everchanging. "Look at that," she marveled. "Just
look. I programmed that. It's not some diddly little seven image job either. It's a continuous two-
hour loop, seven thousand, two hundred seconds, never the same twice, each instant as individual
as a fucking snowflake!"
The flame's core was glacial crystal, shards and facets flashing up, twisting and gone, leaving
behind near-subliminal images so bright and sharp that they cut the eye. Deke winced. People
mostly. Pretty little naked people, fucking. "How the hell did you do that?" She rose, bare feet
slipping on slick magazines, and melodramatically swept folds of loose printout from a raw plywood
shelf. 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..."
"You need all that to make one iittle flame?" "You betcha.
This is all state of the art, professional projective wetware gear.
It's years ahead of anything you've seen."
"Hey," he said, "you know anything about SPADS & FOKKERS?"
She laughed. And then, because he sensed the time was right, he reached out to take her hand.
"Don't you touch me, motherfuck, don't you ever touch me!" Nance screamed, and her head slammed
against the wall as she recoiled, white and shaking with terror.
"Okay!" He threw up his hands. "Okay! I'm nowhere near you. Okay?"
She cowered from him. Her eyes were round and unblinking; tears built up at the corners, rolled
down ashen cheeks. Finally, she shook her head. "Hey. Deke. Sorry. I should've told you."
"Told me what?" But he had a creepy feeling. already knew. The way she clutched her head. The
weakly spasmodic way her hands opened and closed. "You got a brainlock, too."
"Yeah." She closed her eyes. "It's a chastity lock. My asshole parents paid for it. So I can't
stand to have anybody touch me or even stand too close." Eyes opened in blind hate. "I didn't even
do anything. Not a fucking thing. But they've both got jobs and they're so horny for me to have a
career that they can't piss straight. They're afraid I'd neglect my studies if I got, you know,
involved in sex and stuff. The day the brainlock comes off I am going to fuck the vilest,
greasiest, hairiest . .
She was clutching her head again. Deke jumped up and rummaged through the medicine cabinet. He
found a jar of B-complex vitamins, pocketed a few against need, and brought two to Nance, with a
glass of water. "Here." He was careful to keep his distance. "This'lI take the edge off."
"Yeah, yeah," she said. Then, almost to herself, "You must really think I'm a jerk."
The games room in the Greyhound station was almost empty. A lone, long-jawed fourteen-year-old was
bent over a console, maneuvering rainbow fleets of submarines in the murky grid of the North
Atlantic.
Deke sauntered in, wearing his new kicker drag, and leaned against a cinder-block wall made smooth
by countless coats of green enamel. He'd washed the dye from his proleboy butch, boosted jeans and
T-shirt from the Goodwill, and found a pair of stompers in the sauna locker of a highstack with
cutrate security.
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"Seen Tiny around, friend?" The subs darted like neon guppies.
"Depends on who's asking." Deke touched the remote behind his left ear. The Spad snap-rolled over
the console, swift and delicate as a dragonfly. It was beautiful; so perfect, so true it made the
room seem an illusion. He buzzed the grid, millimeters from the glass, taking advantage of the
programmed ground effect.
The kid didn't even bother to look up. "Jackman's," he said. "Down Richmond Road, over by the
surplus."
Deke let the Spad fade in midclimb. Jackman's took up most of
the third floor of an old brick building. Deke found Best Buy War Surplus first, then a broken
neon sign over an unlit lobby. The sidewalk out front was littered with another kind of surplus
damaged vets, some of them dating back to Indochina. Old men who'd left their eyes under Asian
suns squatted beside twitching boys who'd inhaled mycotoxins in Chile. Deke was glad to have the
battered elevator doors sigh shut behind him.
A dusty Dr. Pepper clock at the far side of the long, spectral room told him it was a quarter to
eight. Jackman's had been embalmed twenty years before he was born, sealed away behind a yellowish
film of nicotine, of polish and hair oil. Directly beneath the clock, the flat eyes of somebody's
grandpappy's prize buck regarded Deke from a framed, blown-up snapshot gone the slick sepia of
cockroach wings. There was the click and whisper of pool, the squeak of a work boot twisting on
linoleum as a player leaned in for a shot. Somewhere high above the green-shaded lamps hung a
string of crepe-paper Christmas bells faded to dead rose. Deke looked from one cluttered wall to
the next. No facilitator.
"Bring one in, should we need it," someone said. He turned, meeting the mild eyes of a bald man
with steel-rimmed glasses. "My name's Cline. Bobby Earl. You don't look like you shoot pool,
mister." But there was nothing threatening in Bobby Earl's voice or stance. He pinched the steel
frames from his nose and polished the thick lenses with a fold of tissue. He reminded Deke of a
shop instructor who'd patiently tried to teach him retrograde biochip installation. "I'm a
gambler," he said, smiling. His teeth were white plastic. "I know I don't much look it."
"I'm looking for Tiny," Deke said. "Well," replacing the glasses, "you're not going to find him.
He's gone up to Bethesda to let the V.A. clean his plumbing for him. He wouldn't fly against you
any how." "Why not?"
"Well, because you're not on the circuit or I'd know your face. You any good?" When Deke nodded,
Bobby Earl called down the length of Jackman's, "Yo, Clarence! You bring out that facilitator. We
got us a flyboy."
Twenty minutes later, having lost his remote and what cash he had left, Deke was striding past the
bi soldiers of Best Buy.
"Now you let me tell you, boy," Bobby Earl had said in a fatherly tone as, hand on shoulder, he
led Deke back to the elevator, "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. 01'
Tiny, he was a pilot. Spent entire enlistment hyped to the gills. He's got memb attenuation real
bad . . . you ain't never going to him."
It was a cool night. But Deke burned with anger and humiliation.
"Jesus, that's crude," Nance said as the Spad str mounds of pink underwear. Deke, hunched up on
couch, yanked her flashy little Braun remote from behind his ear.
"Now don't you get on my case too, Miss richbitch gonna-have-a-job "
"Hey, lighten up! It's nothing to do with you it's just tech. That's a really primitive wafer you
got there. I mean, on the street maybe it's fine. But compared to the work I do at school, it's
hey. You ought to let me rewrite it for you.''
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