Virtual Light

“They’ll take us up now” he said. The cap Warbaby had handed the phone to came out from behind the counter. He saw Rydell was wearing an IntenSecure shirt with the patches ripped off, but he didn’t say anything. Rydell wondered when he was going to have a chance to buy some clothes, and where he should go to do it. He looked at Freddie’s shirt, thinking Freddie probably wasn’t the guy to ask.

“This way, sir” the cap said to Warbaby. Freddie and Rydell followed Warbaby across the lobby. Rydell saw how he jabbed his cane, hard, into the carpeting, the brace on his leg ticking like a slow clock.

Sometimes, when she rode hard, when she could really proj, Chevette got free of everything: the city, her body, even time. That was the messenger’s high, she knew, and though it felt like freedom, it was really the melding-with, the clicking-in, that did it. The bike between her legs was like some hyperevolved alien tail she’d somehow extruded, as though over patient centuries; a sweet and intricate bone-machine, grown Lexan-armored tires, near-frictionless bearings, and gas-filled shocks. She was entirely part of the city then, one wild-ass little dot of energy and matter, and she made her thousand choices, instant to instant, according to how the traffic flowed, how rain glinted on the streetcar tracks, how a secretary’s mahogany hair fell like grace itself, exhausted, to the shoulders of her loden coat.

And she was starting to get that now, in spite of everything; if she just let go, quit thinking, let her mind sink down into the machinery of bone and gear-ring and carbon-wound Japanese paper…

But Sammy Sal swerved in beside her, bass pumping from his bike’s bone-conduction beatbox. She had to bu

“Something eating you, little honey?” His hand on her arm, rough and angry. “Like maybe some wonder product makes you smarter, faster? Huh?”

13. Tweaking

Let me go.”

“No way. I got you this job. You’re go

“Please, Sammy, I gotta get up to Ski

He let go of her arm. “Why?”

She started to cough, caught it, took three deep breaths. “You ever steal anything, Sammy Sal? I mean, when you were working?”

Sammy Sal looked at her. “No” he said, finally, “but I been known to fuck the clients.”

Chevette shivered. “Not me.”

“No” Sammy Sal said, “but you don’t pull tags all the places I do. ’Sides, you a girl.”

“But I stole something last night. From this guy’s pocket, up at this party at the Hotel Morrisey.”

Sammy Sal licked his lips. “How come you had your hand in his pocket? He somebody you know?”

“He was some asshole” Chevette said.

“Oh. Him. Think I met him.”

“Gave me a hard time. It was sticking out of his pocket.” “You sure it was his pocket this hard time sticking out of?” “Sammy Sal” she said, “this is serious. I’m scared shitless.” He was looking at her, close.

“That it? You scared? Stole some shit, you scared?”

“Bu

“Shit” Sammy Sal said, still studying her, “I thought you high, on dancer. Thought Bu

She looked at him. “That’s right.”

“Well” he said, digging his fingers into the black foam, “what you scared of?”

“Scared they’ll come up to Ski

“Find what?”

“These glasses.”

“Spy, baby? Shot? Looking, like Alice ‘n’ all?” He drummed his fingers on the black foam.

“These black glasses. Like sunglasses, but you can’t see through ’em.”

Sammy Sal tilted his beautiful head to one side. “What’s that mean?”

“They’re just black.”

“Sunglasses?”

“Yeah. But just black.”

“Huh” he said, “you had been fucking the clients, but only just the cute ones, like me, you’d know what those are. Tell you don’t have that many upscale boyfriends, pardon me. You date you some architects, some brain-surgeons, you’d know what those are.” His hand came up, forefinger flicking the corroded ball-chain that dangled from the zip.tab at the neck of Ski

She’d heard of it, but she wasn’t sure what it was. “They expensive, Sammy Sal?”

“Shit, yes. ’Bout as much as a Japanese car. Not all that much more, though. Got these little EMP-drivers around the lenses, work your optic nerves direct. Friend of mine, he’d bring a pair home from the office where he worked. Landscape architects. Put ’em on, you go out walking, everything looks normal, but every plant you see, every tree, there’s this little label hanging there, what its name is, Latin under that…”

“But they’re solid black.”

“Not if you turn ’em on, they aren’t. Turn ’em on, they don’t even look like sunglasses. Just make you look, I du

She shivered. “Come back up to Ski

“I don’t like heights, much” he said. “That little box blow right off the top of that bridge, one night.”

“Please, Sammy? This thing’s got me tweaking. Be okay, riding with you, but I stop and I start thinking about it, I’m scared I’m go

Sammy Sal gave her the look he’d given her the night she’d asked him to get her on at Allied. Then he gri

He bongoed off the curb, his Fluoro-Rimz flaring neonwhite when he came down pumping. He must have thumbed Play then, because she caught the bass throbbing as she came after him through the traffic.

14. Loveless

You want another beer, honey?”

The woman behind the bar had an intricate black tracery along either side of her shaven skull, down to what Yamazaki took to be her natural hairline. The tattoo’s style combined Celtic knots and cartoon lightning-bolts. Her hair, above it, was like the pelt of some nocturnal animal that had fed on peroxide and Vaseline. Her left ear had been randomly pierced, perhaps a dozen times, by a single length of fine steel wire. Ordinarily Yamazaki found this sort of display quite interesting, but now he was lost in composition, his notebook open before him.

“No” he said, “thank you.”

“Don’t wa

“Yes?”

“You wa

“Beer, please.”

“Same?”

“Yes, please.”

She opened a bottle of Mexican beer, fragments of ice sliding down the side as she put it down on the bar in front of him, and moved on to the customer to his left. Yamazaki returned to his notebook.

Ski