Mona Lisa Overdrive

The ski

"Shut up," Molly said, like she was thinking about something else. She shot without even looking at the gun. Blue flash on the wall beside his head and Mona couldn't hear anything but her ears ringing.

Ski

Angie walking toward the stretcher where the dead guy lay, his eyes just white. Slow, slow, like she was moving underwater, and this look on her face ...

Mona's hand, in her jacket pocket, was sort of figuring something out, all by itself. Sort of squeezing that Ziploc she'd picked up downstairs, telling her ... it had wiz in it.

She pulled it out and it did. Sticky with drying blood. Three crystals inside and some kind of derm.

She didn't know why she'd pulled it out, right then, except that nobody was moving.

The guy with the Fighting Fish had sat up, but he just stayed there. Angie was over by the stretcher, where she didn't seem to be looking at the dead guy but at this gray box stuck up over his head on a kind of frame. Cherry from Cleveland had got her back up against the wall of books and was sort of jamming her knuckles into her mouth. The big guy just stood there beside Molly, who had her head cocked to the side like she was listening for something.

Mona couldn't stand it.

Table had a steel top. Big hunk of old metal there, holding down a dusty stack of printout. Snapped the three yellow crystals down like buttons in a row, picked up that metal hunk, and -- one, two, three -- banged them into powder. That did it: everybody looked. Except Angie.

" 'scuse me," Mona heard herself say, as she swept the mound of rough yellow powder into the waiting palm of her left hand, "how it is ... " She buried her nose in the pile and snorted. "Sometimes," she added, and snorted the rest.

Nobody said anything.

And it was the still center again. Just like that time before.

So fast it was standing still.

Rapture. Rapture's coming.

So fast, so still, she could put a sequence to what happened next: This big laugh, haha, like it wasn't really a laugh. Through a loudspeaker. Past the door. From out on the catwalk thing. And Molly just turns, smooth as silk, quick but like there's no hurry in it, and the little gun snicks like a lighter.

Then there's this blue flash outside, and the big guy gets sprayed with blood from out there as old metal tears loose and Cherry's screaming before the catwalk thing hits with this big complicated sound, dark floor down there where she found the wiz in its bloody bag.

"Gentry," someone says, and she sees it's a little vid on the table, young guy's face on it, "jack Slick's control unit now. They're in the building." Guy with the Fighting Fish scrambles up and starts to do things with wires and consoles.

And Mona could just watch, because she was so still, and it was all interesting stuff.

How the big guy gives this bellow and rushes over, shouting how they're his, they're his. How the face on the screen says: "Slick, c'mon, you don't need 'em anymore ... "

Then this engine starts up, somewhere downstairs, and Mona hears this clanking and rattling, and then somebody yelling, down there.

And sun's coming in the tall, ski

It's interesting.

40 - Pink Satin

Angela Mitchell comprehends this room and its inhabitants through shifting data planes that represent viewpoints, though of whom or what, she is in most cases in doubt. There is a considerable degree of overlap, of contradiction.

The man with the ragged crest of hair, in black-beaded leather is Thomas Trail Gentry (as birth data and SIN digits cascade through her) of no fixed address (as a different facet informs her that this room is his). Past a gray wash of official data traces, faintly marbled with the Fission Authority's repeated pink suspicions of utilities fraud, she finds him in a different light: he is like one of Bobby's cowboys; though young, he is like the old men of the Gentleman Loser; he is an autodidact, an eccentric, obsessed, by his own lights a scholar; he is mad, a night-ru

Molly, like the girl Mona, is SINless, her birth unregistered, yet around her name (names) swarm galaxies of supposition, rumor, conflicting data. Streetgirl, prostitute, bodyguard, assassin, she mingles on the manifold planes with the shadows of heroes and villains whose names mean nothing to Angie, though their residual images have long since been woven through the global culture. (And this too belonged to 3Jane, and now belongs to Angie.)

Molly has just killed a man, has fired one of the explosive fletchettes into his throat. His collapse against a steel railing suffering metal fatigue has caused a large section of catwalk to tumble to the floor below. This room has no other entrance, a fact of some strategic importance. It was probably not Molly's intention to cause the collapse of the catwalk. She sought to prevent the man, a hired mercenary, from using his weapon of choice, a short alloy shotgun coated with a black, nonreflective finish. Nonetheless, Gentry's loft is now effectively isolated.

Angie understands Molly's importance to 3Jane, the source of her desire for and rage at her; knowing this, she sees all the banality of human evil.

Angie sees Molly restlessly prowling a gray winter London, a young girl at her side -- and knows, without knowing how she knows, that this same girl is now at 23 Margate Road, SW2. (Continuity? ) The girl's father was previously the master of the man Swain, who had lately become 3Jane's servant for the sake of the information she provides to those who do her bidding. As has Robin Lanier, of course, though he waits to be paid in a different coin.

For the girl Mona, Angie feels a peculiar tenderness, a pity, a degree of envy: though Mona has been altered to resemble Angie as closely as possible, Mona's life has left virtually no trace on the fabric of things, and represents, in Legba's system, the nearest thing to i

Cherry-Lee Chesterfield is surrounded by a sad ragged scrawl, her information profile like a child's drawing: citations for vagrancy, petty debts, an aborted career as a paramedical technician Grade 6, framing birth data and SIN.

Slick, or Slick Henry, is among the SINless, but 3Jane, Continuity, Bobby, all have lavished their attention on him. For 3Jane, he serves as the focus of a minor node of association: she equates his ongoing rite of construction, his cathartic response to chemo-penal trauma, with her own failed attempts to exorcise the barren dream of Tessier-Ashpool. In the corridors of 3Jane's memory, Angie has frequently come upon the chamber where a spider-armed manipulator stirs the refuse of Straylight's brief, clotted history -- an act of extended collage. And Bobby provides other memories, tapped from the artist as he accessed 3Jane's library of Babel: his slow, sad, childlike labor on the plain called Dog Solitude, erecting anew the forms of pain and memory.