Mona Lisa Overdrive

"What?"

"They want it to look as though we've killed her."

"And how are we supposed to manage that?"

"They'll provide a body."

"I assume," Colin said, "that she left the room without comment. It ends there."

10 - The Shape

He spent an hour checking the saw's bearings, then lubed them again. It was already too cold to work; he'd have to go ahead and heat the room where he kept the others, the Investigators and the Corpsegrinder and the Witch. That in itself would be enough to disturb the balance of his arrangement with Gentry, but it faded beside the problem of explaining his agreement with Kid Afrika and the fact of two strangers in Factory. There was no way to argue with Gentry; the juice was his, because he was the one who fiddled it out of the Fission Authority; without Gentry's monthly passes on the console, the ritual moves that kept the Authority convinced Factory was somewhere else, some place that paid its bill, there wouldn't be any electricity.

And Gentry was so strange anyway, he thought, feeling his knees creak as he stood up and took the Judge's control unit from his jacket pocket. Gentry was convinced that cyberspace had a Shape, an overall total form. Not that that was the weirdest idea Slick had ever run across, but Gentry had this obsessive conviction that the Shape mattered totally. The apprehension of the Shape was Gentry's grail.

Slick had once stimmed a Net/Knowledge sequence about what shape the universe was; Slick figured the universe was everything there was, so how could it have a shape? If it had a shape, then there was something around it for it to have a shape in, wasn't there? And if that something was something, then wasn't that part of the universe too? This was exactly the kind of thing you didn't want to get into with Gentry, because Gentry could tie your head in knots. But Slick didn't think cyberspace was anything like the universe anyway; it was just a way of representing data. The Fission Authority had always looked like a big red Aztec pyramid, but it didn't have to; if the FA wanted it to, they could have it look like anything. Big companies had copyrights on how their stuff looked. So how could you figure the whole matrix had a particular shape? And why should it mean anything if it did?

He touched the unit's power stud; the Judge, ten meters away, hummed and trembled.

Slick Henry hated the Judge. That was what the art people never understood. That didn't mean it didn't give him pleasure to have built the thing, to have gotten the Judge out, out where he could see him and keep track of him and finally, sort of, be free of the idea of him, but that sure wasn't the same as liking him.

Nearly four meters tall, half as broad at the shoulders, headless, the Judge stood trembling in his patchwork carapace the color of rust gone a certain way, like the handles of an old wheelbarrow, polished by the friction of a thousand hands. He'd found a way to get that surface with chemicals and abrasives, and he'd used it on most of the Judge; the old parts anyway, the scavenged parts, not the cold teeth of the circular blades or the mirrored surfaces of the joints, but the rest of the Judge was that color, that finish, like a very old tool still in hard daily use.

He thumbed the joystick and the Judge took one step forward, then another. The gyros were working perfectly; even with an arm off, the thing moved with a terrible dignity, planting its huge feet just so.

Slick gri

He couldn't remember when he hadn't been able to remember, but sometimes he almost could.

That was why he had built the Judge, because he'd done something -- it hadn't been anything much, but he'd been caught doing it, twice -- and been judged for it, and sentenced, and then the sentence was carried out and he hadn't been able to remember, not anything, not for more than five minutes at a stretch. Stealing cars. Stealing rich people's cars. They made sure you remembered what you did.

Working the joystick, he got the Judge turned around and walked him into the next room, along an aisle between rows of damp-stained concrete pads that had once supported lathes and spot welders. High overhead, up in the gloom and dusty beams, dangled dead fluorescent fixtures where birds sometimes nested.

Korsakov's, they called that, something they did to your neurons so that short-term memories wouldn't stick. So that the time you did was time you lost, but he'd heard they didn't do it anymore, or anyway not for grand theft auto. People who hadn't been there thought it sounded easy, like jail but then it's all erased, but it wasn't like that. When he'd gotten out, when it was over -- three years strung out in a long vague flickering chain of fear and confusion measured off in five-minute intervals, and it wasn't the intervals you could remember so much as the transitions ... When it was over, he'd needed to build the Witch, the Corpsegrinder, then the Investigators, and finally, now, the Judge.

As he guided the Judge up the concrete ramp to the room where the others waited, he heard Gentry gu

People made Gentry uncomfortable, Slick thought as he headed for the stairs, but it worked both ways. Strangers could feel the Shape burning behind Gentry's eyes; his fixation came across in everything he did. Slick had no idea how he got along on his trips to the Sprawl; maybe he just dealt with people who were as intense as he was, loners on the jagged fringes of the drug and software markets. He didn't seem to care about sex at all, to the extent that Slick had no idea what it was he'd have wanted if he'd decided to care.

Sex was the Solitude's main drawback, as far as Slick was concerned, particularly in the winter. Summers, sometimes, he could find a girl in one of those rusty little towns; that was what had taken him to Atlantic City that time and gotten him in the Kid's debt. Lately he told himself the best solution was just to concentrate on his work, but climbing the shuddering steel stairs to the catwalk that led to Gentry's space, he found himself wondering what Cherry Chesterfield looked like under all those jackets. He thought about her hands, how they were clean and quick, but that made him see the unconscious face of the man on the stretcher, the tube feeding stuff into his left nostril, Cherry dabbing at his sunken cheeks with a tissue; made him wince.

"Hey, Gentry," he bellowed out into the iron void of Factory, "comin' up ... "

Three things about Gentry weren't sharp and thin and tight: his eyes, his lips, his hair. His eyes were large and pale, gray or blue depending on the light; his lips were full and mobile; his hair was swept back into a ragged blond roostertail that quivered when he walked. His thi

Gentry stared as Slick stepped through the door into the glare of ten 100-watt bulbs, making sure Slick knew he was another obstacle coming between Gentry and the Shape. He was putting a pair of motorcycle pa

Slick had cut roof panels away, installed struts where needed, covered the holes with sheets of rigid plastic, caulked the resulting skylights with silicone. Then Gentry came in with a mask and a sprayer and twenty gallons of white latex paint; he didn't dust or clean anything, just lay down a thick coat over all the crud and desiccated pigeonshit, sort of glued it all down and painted over it again until it was more or less white. He painted everything but the skylights, then Slick started winching gear up from Factory's floor, a small truckload of computers, cyberspace decks, a huge old holo-projection table that nearly broke the winch, effect generators, dozens of corrugated plastic cartons stuffed with the thousands of fiche Gentry had accumulated in his quest for the Shape, hundreds of meters of optics, on bright new plastic reels, that spoke to Slick of industrial theft. And books, old books with covers made of cloth glued over cardboard. Slick hadn't ever known how heavy books were. They had a sad smell, old books.