COUNT ZERO

Bobby sca

“Two-a-Day,” the Gothick said. “Sure. Two-a-Day. Right, babe?” His girl tossed her head and looked away.

“You know ‘im?”

“Sure.”

“He here tonight?”

“No,” the Gothick said, and smiled meaninglessly.

Bobby opened his mouth, closed it, forced himself to nod. “Thanks, bro.”

“Anything for my man,” the Gothick said.

Another hour, more of the same. Too much white, chalk-pale Gothick white. Flat bright eyes of their girls, their bootheels like ebony needles. He tried to stay out of the simstim room, where Leon was ru

The Gothicks were into it, whoever. They were thrashing and stomping and generally into major tree-rat identification. Leon’s new hit tape, Bobby decided.

Just to his left, but well out of range of the stim, two Project girls stood, their baroque finery in sharp contrast with Gothick monochrome Long black frock coats opened over tight red vests in silk brocade, the tails of enormous white shirts hanging well beneath their knees. Their dark features were concealed beneath the brims of fedoras pi

He tried to imagine going up to them so smooth. just putting it to them: Hey, you ladies surely must know my good friend Mr. Two-a-Day? But they were older than he was, taller, and moved with a dignity he found intimidating. Probably they’d just laugh, but somehow he didn’t want that at all.

What he did want now, and very badly, was food. He touched his credit chip through the denim of his jeans. He’d go across the street and get a sandwich... Then he remembered why he was here, and suddenly it didn’t seem very smart to use his chip. If he’d been sussed, after his attempted run, they’d have his chip number by now; using it would spotlight him for anyone tracking him in cyberspace, pick him out in the Barrytown grid like a highway flare in a dark football stadium. He had his cash money, but you couldn’t pay for food with that It wasn’t actually illegal to have the stuff, it was just that nobody ever did anything legitimate with it. He’d have to find a Gothick with a chip, buy a New Yen’s worth of credit, probably at a vicious discount, then have the Gothick pay for the food. And what the hell was he supposed to take his change in?

Maybe you’re just spooked, he told himself. He didn’t know for sure that he was being backtracked, and the base he’d tried to crack was legit, or was supposed to be legit. That was why Two-a-Day had told him he didn’t have to worry about black ice Who’d put lethal feedback programs around a place that leased soft kino porn? The idea had been that he’d bleep out a few hours of digitalized kino, new stuff that hadn’t made it to the bootleg market. It wasn’t the kind of score anybody was liable to kill you for...”

But somebody had tried. And something else had happened. Something entirely else. He trudged back up the stairs again, out of Leon’s He knew there was a lot he didn’t know about the matrix, but he’d never heard of anything that weird . . . You got ghost stories, sure, and hotdoggers who swore they’d seen things in cyberspace, but he had them figured for wilsons who jacked in dusted; you could hallucinate in the matrix as easily as anywhere else...

Maybe that’s what happened, he thought. The voice was just part of dying, being flat-lined, some crazy bullshit your brain threw up to make you feel better, and something had happened back at the source, maybe a brownout in their part of the grid, so the ice had lost its hold on his nervous system.

Maybe. But he didn’t know. Didn’t know the turf. His ignorance had started to dig into him recently, because it kept him from making the moves he needed to make. He hadn’t ever much thought about it before, but he didn’t really know that much about anything in particular. In fact, up until he’d started hotdogging, he’d felt like he knew about as much as he needed to. And that was what the Gothicks were like, and that was why the Gothicks would stay here and burn themselves down on dust, or get chopped out by Kasuals, and the process of attrition would produce the percentage of them who’d somehow become the next wave of childbearing, condo-buying Barrytowners, and the whole thing could go round again.

He was like a kid who’d grown up beside an ocean, taking it as much for granted as he took the sky, but knowing nothing of currents, shipping routes, or the ins and outs of weather. He’d used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasn’t space, mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline.

But since he’d started hotdogging, he had some idea of how precious little he knew about how anything worked, and not just in the matrix. It spilled over, somehow, and he’d started to wonder, wonder and think. How Barrytown worked, what kept his mother going, why Gothicks and Kasuals in-vested all that energy in trying to kill each other off Or why Two-a-Day was black and lived up in the Projects, and what made that different.

As he walked, he kept up his search for the dealer. White faces, more white faces. His stomach had started to make a certain amount of noise; he thought about the fresh package of wheat cutlets in the fridge at home, fry ‘em up with some soy and crack a pack of krill wafers...

Passing the kiosk again, he checked the Coke clock. Marsha was home for sure, deep in the labyrinthine complexities of People of Importance, whose female protagonist’s life she’d shared through a socket for almost twenty years The Asahi Shimbun fax was still rolling down behind its little window, and he stepped closer in time to see the first report of the bombing of A Block, Level 3, Covina Concourse Courts, Barrytown, New Jersey..

Then it was gone, past, and there was a story about the formal funeral of the Cleveland Yakusa boss Strictly trad. They all carried black umbrellas.

He’d lived all his life in 503, A Block.

That enormous thing, leaning in, to stomp Marsha Newmark and her Hitachi flat. And of course it had been meant for him.

‘There’s somebody doesn’t mess around,” he heard himself say.

“Hey! My man! Count! You dusted, bro? Hey! Where you headin’!”

The eyes of two Deans twisting to follow him in the course of his headlong panic.