Burning Chrome (15 page)

‘You need all that to make one little 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'll 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 cut-rate security.

‘Seen Tiny around, friend?'

The subs darted like neon guppies. ‘Depends on who's asking.'

Deke tuched 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 Spade fade in midclimb.

Jackman's took up most of the third floor of an old brick bidding. 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 mad 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 VA clean his plumbing for him. He wouldn't fly against you anyhow.

‘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 broken 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. Ol' Tiny, he was a
pilot.
Spent his entire enlistment hyped to the gills. He's got membrane attenuation real bad…you ain't never going to beat him.'

It was a cool night. But Deke burned with anger and humiliation.

‘Jesus, that's crude,' Nance said as the Spad strafed mounds of pink underwear. Deke, hunched up on the couch, yanked her flashy little Braun remote from behind his ear.

‘Now don't you get on my case too, Miss rich-bitch 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.'

‘Say what?'

‘Lemme beef it up. These suckers are all written in hexadecimal, see, 'cause the industry programmers are all washed-out computer hacks. That's how they think. But let me take it to the reader-analyzer at the department, run a few changes on it, translate it into a modern wetlanguage. Edit out all the redundant intermediaries. That'll goose up your reaction time, cut the feedback loop in half. So you'll fly faster and better. Turn you into a real pro, Ace!' She took a hit off her bong, then doubled over laughing and choking.

‘Is that legit?' Deke asked dubiously.

‘Hey, why do you think people buy gold-wire remotes? For the prestige? Shit. Conductivity's better, cuts a few nanoseconds off the reaction time. And reaction time is the name of the game, kiddo.'

‘No,' Deke said. ‘If it were that easy, people'd already have it. Tiny Montgomery would have it. He'd have the best.'

‘Don't you ever
listen
?' Nance set down the bong; brown water slopped on to the floor. ‘The stuff I'm working with is three years ahead of anything you'll find on the street.'

‘No shit,' Deke said after a long pause. ‘I mean, you can do that?'

It was like graduating from a Model T to a ninety-three Lotus. The Spad handled like a dream, responsive to Deke's slightest thought. For weeks he played the arcades, with not a nibble. He flew against the local teens and by ones and threes shot down their planes. He took chances, played flash. And the planes tumbled…

Until one day Deke was tucking his seed money away, and a lanky black straightened up from the wall. He eyed the laminateds in Deke's hand and grinned. A ruby tooth
gleamed. ‘You know,' the man said, ‘I
heard
there was a casper who could fly, going up against the kiddies.'

‘Jesus.' Deke said, spreading Danish butter on a kelp stick. ‘I wiped the
floor
with those spades. They were good, too.'

‘That's nice, honey,' Nance mumbled. She was working on her finals project, sweating data into a machine.

‘You know, I think what's happening is I got real talent for this kind of shit. You know? I mean, the program gives me an edge, but I got the stuff to take advantage of it. I'm really getting a rep out there, you know.' Impulsively, he snapped on the radio. Scratchy, Dixieland brass blared.

‘Hey,' Nance said. ‘Do you
mind?'

‘No, I'm just – ‘ He fiddled with the knobs, came up with some slow, romantic bullshit. ‘There. Come on, stand up. Let's dance.'

‘Hey, you know I can't –'

‘Sure you can, sugarcakes.' He threw her the huge teddy bear and snatched up a patchwork cotton dress from the floor. He held it by the waist and sleeve, tucking the collar under his chin. It smelled of patchouli, more faintly of sweat. ‘See, I stand over here, you stand over there. We dance. Get it?'

Blinking softly, Nance stood and clutched the bear tightly. They danced then, slowly, staring into each other's eyes. After a while, she began to cry. But still, she was smiling.

Deke was daydreaming, imagining he was Tiny Montgomery wired into his jumpjet. Imagined the machine responding to his slightest neural twitch, reflexes cranked
way
up, hype flowing steadily into his veins.

Nance's floor became jungle, her bed a plateau in the Andean foothills, and Deke flew his Spad at forced speed, as if it were a full-wired interactive combat machine. Computerized hypos fed a slow trickle of high-performance enchancement melange into his bloodstream. Sensors were wired directly into his skull – pulling a supersonic snapturn in the green-blue bowl of sky over Bolivian rain forest. Tiny would have
felt
the airflow over control surfaces.

Below, grunts hacked through the jungle with hype-pumps strapped above elbows to give them that little extra death-dance fury in combat, a shot of liquid hell in a blue plastic vial. Maybe they got ten minutes' worth in a week. But coming in at treetop level, reflexes cranked to the max, flying so low the ground troops never spotted you until you were on them, phosgene agents released, away and gone before they could draw a bead…it took a constant trickle of hype just to maintain. And the direct neuron interface with the jumpjet was a two-way street. The onboard computers monitored biochemistry and decided when to open the sluice gates and give the human component a killer jolt of combat edge.

Dosages like that ate you up. Ate you good and slow and contant, etching the brain surfaces, eroding away the brain-cell membranes. If you weren't yanked from the air promptly enough, you ended up with brain-cell attenuation – with reflexes too fast for your body to handle and your fight-or-flight reflexes fucked real good…

‘I aced it, proleboy!'

‘Hah?' Deke looked up, startled, as Nance slammed in, tossing books and bag on to the nearest heap.

‘My finals project – I got exempted from exams. The prof said he'd never seen anything like it. Uh, hey, dim the lights, wouldja? The colors are weird on my eyes.'

He obliged. ‘So show me. Show me this wunnerful thing.'

‘Yeah, okay.' She snatched up his remote, kicked clear standing space atop the bed, and struck a pose. A spark flared into flame in her hand. It spread in a quicksilver line up her arm, around her neck, and it was a snake, with triangular head and flickering tongue. Molten colors, oranges and reds. It slithered between her breasts. ‘I call it a firesnake,' she said proudly.

Deke leaned close, and she jerked back. ‘Sorry. It's like your flame, huh? I mean, I can see these tiny little fuckers in it.'

‘Sort of.' The firesnake flowed down her stomach. ‘Next month I'm going to splice two hundred separate flame programs together with meld justification in between to get the visuals. Then I'll tap the mind's body image to make it self-orientating. So it can crawl all over your body without your having to mind it. You could wear it dancing.'

‘Maybe I'm dumb. But if you haven't done the work yet, how come I can see it?'

Nance giggled. ‘That's the best part – half the work isn't done yet. Didn't have the time to assemble the pieces into a unified program.Turn on that radio, huh? I want to dance.' She kicked off her shoes. Deke tuned in something gutsy. Then, at Nance's urging, turned it down, almost to a whisper.

‘I scored two hits of hype, see.' She was bouncing on the bed, weaving her hands like a Balinese dancer. ‘Ever try the stuff? Incredible. Gives you like absolute concentration. Look here.' She stood
en pointe.
‘Never done that before.'

‘Hype,' Deke said. ‘Last person I heard of got caught
with that shit got three years in the infantry. ‘How'd you score it?'

‘Cut a deal with a vet who was in grad school. She bombed out last month. Stuff gives me perfect visualization. I can hold the projection with my eyes shut. It was a snap assembling the program in my head.'

‘On just two hits, huh?'

‘One hit. I'm saving the other. Teach was so impressed he's sponsoring me for a job interview. A recruiter from I. G. Feuchtwaren hits campus in two weeks. That cap is gonna sell him the program
and
me. I'm gonna cut out of school two years early, straight into industry, do not pass jail, do not pay two hundred dollars.'

The snake curled into a flaming tiara. It gave Deke a funny-creepy feeling to think of Nance walking out of his life.

‘I'm a witch,' Nance sang, ‘a wetware witch.' She shucked her shirt over her head and sent it flying. Her fine, high breasts moved freely, gracefully, as she danced. ‘I'm gonna make it' – now she was singing a current pop hit – ‘to the…top!' Her nipples were small and pink and aroused. The firesnake licked at them and whipped away.