Mona Lisa Overdrive

The man's limp was more obvious as he climbed the stairs ahead of her. He wore a gray sharkskin suit and thick-soled suede oxfords the color of tobacco.

"Been expecting you," he said, hauling himself up another step, another.

"You have?"

"Knew you'd run from Swain's. Been logging their traffic, when I've had time from the other."

"The other?"

"You don't know, do you?"

"Excuse me?"

"It's the matrix. Something's happening. Easier to show you than try to explain it. As though I could explain it, which I can't. I'd say a good three-quarters of humanity is jacked at the moment, watching the show ... "

"I don't understand."

"Doubt anyone does. There's a new macroform in the sector that represents the Sprawl."

"A macroform?"

"Very large data-construct."

"I came here to warn Sally. Swain and Robin Lanier intend to give her to the ones who plot to kidnap Angela Mitchell."

"Wouldn't worry about that," he said, reaching the head of the stairs. "Sally's already scooped Mitchell and half-killed Swain's man in the Sprawl. They're after her in any case, now. Bloody everybody'll be after her, soon. Still, we can tell her when she checks in. If she checks in ... "

Tick lived in a single large room whose peculiar shape suggested the removal of walls. Large as it was, it was also very crowded; it looked to Kumiko as though someone had deployed the contents of an Akihabara module shop in a space already filled, gaijin-style, with too many pieces of bulky furniture. In spite of this, it was startlingly neat and tidy: the corners of magazines were aligned with the corners of the low glass table they rested on, beside an unused black ceramic ashtray and a plain white vase of cut flowers.

She tried Colin again, while Tick filled an electric kettle with water from a filter jug.

"What's that?" he asked, putting down the jug.

"A Maas-Neotek guide unit. It's broken now; I can't make Colin come ... "

"Colin? It's a stim rig?"

"Yes."

"Let's have a look ... " He held out his hand.

"My father gave it to me ... "

Tick whistled. "Thing cost a fortune. One of their little AIs. How's it work?"

"You close your hand around it and Colin's there, but no one else can see or hear him."

Tick held the unit beside his ear and shook it. "It's broken? How?"

"I dropped it."

"It's just the housing that's broken, see. The biosoft's come away from the case, so you can't access it manually."

"Can you repair it?"

"No. But we can access it through a deck, if you want ... " He returned it. The kettle was boiling.

Over tea, she told him the story of her trip to the Sprawl and Sally's visit to the shrine in the alley. "He called her Molly," she said.

Tick nodded, winked several times in rapid succession. "What she went by, over there. What did they talk about?"

"A place called Straylight. A man called Case. An enemy, a woman ... "

"Tessier-Ashpool. Found that for her when I rustled Swain's data flow for her. Swain's shopping Molly to this lady 3Jane, so called; she has the juiciest file of inside dirt you could imagine -- on anything and anyone at all. I've been bloody careful not to look too closely at any of that. Swain's trading it right and left, making a dozen fortunes in the process. I'm sure she's got enough dirt on our Mr. Swain as well ... "

"And she is here, in London?"

"In orbit somewhere, looks like, though some people say she's dead. I was working on that, actually, when the big fella popped into the matrix ... "

"Excuse me?"

"Here, I'll show you." When he returned to the white breakfast table, he carried a shallow square black tray with a number of tiny controls arranged along one side. He placed it on the table and touched one of the minute switches. A cubical holo display blinked on above the projector: the neon gridlines of cyberspace, ranged with the bright shapes, both simple and complex, that represented vast accumulations of stored data. "That's all your standard big shits. Corporations. Very much a fixed landscape, you might say. Sometimes one of 'em'll grow an a

"But someone must know," Kumiko said.

"Stands to reason, yes. But people in my line of work, and there's millions of us, haven't been able to find out. That's stranger, in some ways, than the fact that the thing's there at all. I was all up and down the grid, before you came, looking for any jockey with a clue. Nothing. Nothing at all."

"How could this 3Jane be dead?" But then she remembered the Fi

"Nothing for that but waiting," he said. "She'll probably phone in. In the meantime, we could have a go accessing that pricey little AI of yours, if you like."

"Yes," she said, "thank you."

"Only hope those Special Branch types in Swain's pay don't track you here. Still, we can only wait ... "

"Yes," Kumiko said, not at all pleased with the idea of waiting.

35 - The Factory War

Cherry found him with the Judge again, down there in the dark. He was sitting on one of the Investigators with a flashlight in his hand, shining it up the Judge's carapace of polished rust. He didn't remember coming here, but he couldn't feel the jerky edge of Korsakov's. He remembered the girl's eyes, in that room Bobby said was London.

"Gentry's got the Count and his box jacked into a cyberspace deck," Cherry said. "You know that?"

Slick nodded, still looking up at the Judge. "Bobby said we better."

"So what's going on? What happened when you both jacked?"

"Gentry and Bobby, they kind of hit it off. Both crazy the same way. When we jacked, we came out somewhere in orbit, but Bobby wasn't there ... Then Mexico, I think. Who's Tally Isham?"

"Stim queen when I was little. Like Angie Mitchell is now."

"Mitchell, she was his squeeze ... "

"Who?"

"Bobby. He was telling Gentry about it, in London."

"London?"

"Yeah. We went there, after Mexico."

"And he said he was Angie Mitchell's old man? Sounds crazy."

"Yeah, but he said that's how he got on to it, that aleph thing." He swung the light down and directed it into the skeletal steel maw of the Corpsegrinder. "He was hanging out with rich people and heard about it. Called it a soul-catcher. The people who had it would rent time on it to these rich people. Bobby tried it once, then he went back and stole it. Took it down to Mexico City and started spending all his time in there. But they came after him ... "

"Sounds like you're remembering things, anyway."

"So he got out of there. Went up to Cleveland and made a deal with Afrika, gave Afrika money to hide him, take care of him while he was under the wire, because he was getting real close ... "

"Close to what?"

"Don't know. Something weird. Like when Gentry talks about the Shape."

"Well," she said, "I think it might kill him, being jacked that way. His signs are starting to screw up. He's been on those drips too long. Why I came to find you."