Neuromancer

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.

They caught the street's neon and twisted it, and it came to Case that these were the stars under which he voyaged, his destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.

A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete floor.

She gripped the tube with one hand, the pyramid between her other thumb and forefinger, and pulled. Three oiled, telescoping segments of tightly wound coil spring slid out and locked.

Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market....

The last of his octagon-induced bravado collapsed. He snapped the cobra into its handle and scrambled for the window, blind with fear, his nerves screaming.

'And you wander back and forth in this portable bombshelter built of booze and ups, sure. Proof against the grosser emotions, yes?'

The thing's barrel, made of paper-thin alloy wrapped with a kilometer of glass filament, was wide enough to swallow a fist.

She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.

Blue eyes so pale they made Case think of bleach.

The lenses were empty quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm.

Your nervous system would fall out on the floor if you jacked in now.

It was a belly gun, a magnum revolver with the barrel sawn down to a nub.

Molly had grinned at Case's side with a kind of ecstatic feral intensity, obviously longing for one of them to make a move.

Case saw the razor dipping for his throat like a dowser's wand.

Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.

The pale glitter of his eyes heightened the effect of a mask.

The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic.

A hidden exhaust fan began to purr. 'Time,' the man said, straightening up, 'and counting. You know the rate, Moll.'

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.

The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and color....

He willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes.

His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous.

It took him a few seconds to realize that the peculiar sensation at the tips of her fingers was caused by the blades as they were partially extruded, then retracted.

At five minutes after midnight, as the Modems' message ended in a flare of white screen, the Sense/Net Pyramid screamed.

Six thousand micrograms of endorphin analog came down on the pain like a hammer, shattering it.

Five separate alarm systems were convinced that they were still operative. The three elaborate locks deactivated, but considered themselves to have remained locked.

Perched on the edge of Case's worktable like some kind of state of the art gargoyle, he regarded Case and Armitage with hooded eyes.

Or else it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl's waste places.

The thing was a computer terminal, he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes.

Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood.

It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills, obsessions, kneejerk responses....

It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.

Corto and his dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling....

He became a subject in an experimental program that sought to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic models.

"Christ," Molly said. "Rat in a business suit."

Case saw a gutted locomotive atop rust-stained, broken lengths of fluted marble. Headless marble statues were stacked like firewood.

The back of the fallen man's jacket heaved and burst, blood splashing the wall and doorway.

You see a guy like that, you figure there's something he does when he's alone. But not Armitage. Sits and stares at the wall, man.

He's a kind of compulsive Judas. Can't get off sexually unless he knows he's betraying the object of desire.

Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed.

Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black rose, its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome.

A small trout swam out, trailing impossible bubbles. It glided past Case's cheek.

The sting came up, quivered, and sank into the skin above a bulging vein.

Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the smoky air.

Steppin' Razor. An' you bring a scourge on Babylon, sister, on its darkest heart....

Its blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind a vast sheet of frosted glass.

Something shifted at the core of things. The arcade froze, vibrated -- She was gone.

The recoil nearly broke his wrist. The muzzle-flash lit the office like a flashbulb.

The perspective's a bitch, if you're not used to it.

Each time the image of Deane's shattered head struck the rear wall of the office, Case was aware of another thought, something darker, hidden, that rolled away, diving like a fish, just beyond his reach.

The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp.

They looked to Case like machines built for racing; they deserved decals for their hairdressers, the designers of their white cotton ducks, for the artisans who'd crafted their leather sandals and simple jewelry.

My guess, Case, you're going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter.

Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.

His brain was deep-fried. No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the wrinkled lobes, shot through with greenish-purple flashes of pain.

The light clung around him like a skin, lit the dark hangings behind the stage.

There was an inverted symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl takes him apart.

He turned the hologram off and was rewarded with the condos that terraced the far slope.

He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure. Rage.

The girl sat up in bed and said something in German. Her eyes were soft and unblinking. Automatic pilot. A neural cut-out.

I came up. I was into this routine with a customer.... Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood.

But now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It's the meat talking, ignore it.

The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy.

He still had his anger. That was like being rolled in some alley and waking to discover your wallet still in your pocket, untouched.

One or all of them, he was certain, would be kinked for audio, very likely for simstim, and anything he said or did now was admissible evidence.

For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible.

The microlight struck, its electric engine silent until the carbon fiber prop chopped away the top of Pierre's skull.

That's king hell ice, Case, black as the grave and slick as glass.

The face of the Kuang logics kinda sleazes up to the target and mutates, so it gets to be exactly like the ice fabric.

He reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. 'See this? Part of my DNA, sort of....'

The Villa Straylight is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly.

Give you a whole life, just so you'll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders.

He looked at me and got into a pedicab. I knew. Went upstairs and Johnny was sitting in a chair by the window, with his mouth a little open, like he'd just thought of something to say.

He saw somebody lose this key twenty years ago, and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here. Then he killed him, the boy who'd brought it here. Kid was eight.

It took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing, gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint distant lights that bore no relationship to the matrix around it.

The gun's barrel seemed to be attached to her throat with a taut, invisible string.

The dreams grow like slow ice," he said. His face was tinged with blue.

A lozenge of white light clicked into place in front of him, hiding the Tessier-Ashpool ice; it showed him the calm, perfectly focused, utterly crazy face of Armitage, his eyes blank as buttons.

I mean, these guys are all batshit in here, like they got luminous messages scrawled across the inside of their foreheads or something.

And found his anger again, real as a shard of hot rock beneath his ribs.

Armitage's face had been masklike, impassive, but Corto's was the true schizoid mask, illness etched deep in involuntary muscle, distorting the expensive surgery.

A single sphere of dark blood had congealed there like some strange precious stone, a red-black pearl.

Case imagined the lifeboat jolting free,, blown clear by explosive bolts, a second's clawing hurricane of escaping air tearing mad Colonel Corto from his couch, from Wintermute's rendition of the final minute of Screaming Fist.

Wintermute had built Armitage up from scratch, with Corto's memories of Screaming Fist as the foundation.

Wintermute and the nest. Phobic vision of the hatching wasps, time-lapse machine gun of biology.

'You know salmon? Kinda fish? These fish, see, they're compelled to swim upstream. Got it?'

It's not just a mask, it's like he uses real profiles as valves, gears himself down to communicate with us.

His eyes, Case saw, as Molly stepped carefully forward, were tiny monitor screens, each one displaying the blue-gray image of a howling waste of snow.

She had it: the thing, the moves. And she'd pulled it all together for her entrance... marching down 3Jane's stairs like she owned the place, elbow of her gun arm at her hip, forearm up, wrist relaxed, swaying the muzzle of the fletcher with the studied nonchalance of a Regency duelist.

Her hands vanished at the wrists in a matte black sphere the size of a bowling ball.

The Chinese virus has completely penetrated the fabric of the Hosaka. There's nothing in the Hosaka but virus now.

And then, his face pink with the pleasure of cocaine and meperidine, he swung the glass hard into her left lens implant, smashing vision into blood and light.

"Some man in China say th' truth comes out this," he said, unwrapping an ancient, oilslick Remington automatic shotgun, its barrel chopped off a few millimeters in front of the battered forestock.

Case gasped as his internal organs were pulled into a different configuration.

"The Rastafarian navy," Case said, standing up, the cyberspace deck banging against his hip, "and all we want's a jack into your custodial system."

Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity.

The left implant was shattered, a long finger of silvered plastic driven deep in a socket that was an inverted pool of blood.

The sand was the shade of tarnished silver that hadn't gone entirely black.

The tide had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle than any a Tokyo gardener produced.

"Mean, motherfucker," he whispered to the wind. "Don't take a chance, do you?"

'I just couldn't figure how you'd have all those pictures of when I was little, Case. How my daddy looked, before he left.'

It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.

Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend, I am the dead, and their land.

There was a plain of black mirror, that tilted, and he was quicksilver, a bead of mercury, skittering down, striking the angles of an invisible maze, fragmenting, flowing together, sliding again....

His every move was part of a dance, a dance that never ended, even when his body was still, at rest, but for all the power it suggested, there was also a humility, an open simplicity.

Riviera screamed. But not in pain. It was a shriek of rage, so pure, so refined, that it lacked all humanity.

N-methyl-4-phenyl-1236, tetra-hydro-pyridene. A real slow hotshot.

His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue.

I saw her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code of the lock on the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in Julie Deane's account with a Hongkong shirtmaker.

I got no idea at all what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll change something!

Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo's dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.

I'm the matrix, Case.

Small as they were, he could make out the boy's grin, his pink gums, the glitter of the long gray eyes that had been Riviera's.

For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.

She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.

It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.

The recoil nearly broke his wrist. The muzzle-flash lit the office like a flashbulb.

My guess, Case, you're going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter.

I came up. I was into this routine with a customer.... Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood.

The Villa Straylight is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly.

Case imagined the lifeboat jolting free,, blown clear by explo sive bolts, a second's clawing hurricane of escaping air tearing mad Colonel Corto from his couch, from Wintermute's rendition of the final minute of Screaming Fist.

Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity.

Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend, I am the dead, and their land.

I'm the matrix, Case.