William Gibson Burning Chrome

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I had no idea at all what to say. Didn't even know what I felt.
Propped up in the exoskeleton, she was looking worse than she had that first
night, at Rubin's. The wizz was eating her, under the stuff the makeup team
kept smoothing on, and sometimes it was like seeing a death's-head surface
beneath the face of a not very handsome teenager. I had no idea of' her real
age. Not old, not young.
"The ramp effect," I said, coiling a length of cable.
"What's that?"
"Nature's way of telling you to clean up your act.
Sort of mathematical law, says you can only get off real good on a stimulant x
number of times, even if you in-
crease the doses. But you can't ever get off as nice as you did the first few
times. Or you shouldn't be able to, anyway. That's the trouble with designer
drugs; they're too clever. That stuff you're doing has some tricky tail on one
of its molecules, keeps you from turning the decomposed adrenaline into
adrenochrome. If it didn't, you'd be schizophrenic by now. You got any little
prob-
lems, Lise? Like apneia? Sometimes maybe you stop breathing if you go to
sleep?"
But I wasn't even sure I felt the anger that I heard in my own voice.
She stared at me with those pale gray eyes. The wardrobe people had replaced
her thrift-shop jacket with a butter-tanned matte black blouson that did a
bet-
ter job of hiding the polycarbon ribs. She kept it zipped to the neck, always,
even though it was too warm in the studio. The hairdressers had tried
something new the day before, and it hadn't worked out, her rough dark hair a
lopsided explosion above that drawn, triangular face. She stared at me and I
felt it again, her singleness of purpose.
"I don't sleep, Casey."
It wasn't until later, much later, that I remembered she'd told me she was
sorry. She never did again, and it was the only time I ever heard her say
anything that seemed to be out of character.
Rubin's diet consists of vending-machine sandwiches, Pakistani takeout food,
and espresso. I've never seen him eat anything else. We eat samosas in a
narrow shop on Fourth that has a single plastic table wedged between the
counter and the door to the can. Rubin eats his dozen samosas, six meat and
six veggie, with total con-
centration, one after another, and doesn't bother to wipe his chin. He's
devoted to the place. He loathes the
Greek counterman; it's mutual, a real relationship. If the counterman ~ft,
Rubin might not come back. The
Greek glares at the crumbs on Rubin's chin and jacket.
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Between samosas, he shoots daggers right back, his eyes narrowed behind the
smudged lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses.
The samosas are dinner. Breakfast will be egg salad on dead white bread,
packed in one of those triangles of milky plastic, on top of six little cups
of poisonously strong espresso.
"You didn't see it coming, Casey." He peers at me
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file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Burning%20Chrome.txt out of the thumbprinted
depths of his glasses." `Cause you're no good at lateral thinking. You read
the hand-
book. What else did you think she was after? Sex? More win? A world tour? She
was past all that. That's what made her so strong. She was past it. That's why
Kings of
Sleep's as big as it is, and why the kids buy it, why they believe it. They
know. Those kids back down the
Market, warming their butts around the fires and wondering if they'll find
someplace to sleep tonight, they believe it. It's the hottest soft in eight
years. Guy at a shop on Granville told me he gets more of the damned things
lifted than he sells of anything else. Says it's a hassle to even stock it. .
. . She's big because she was what they are, only more so. She knew, man. No
dreams, no hope. You can't see the cages on those kids, Casey, but more and
more they're twigging to it, that they aren't going anywhere." He brushes a
greasy crumb of meat from his chin, missing three more. "So she sang it for
them, said it that way they can't, painted them a picture. And she used the
money to buy herself a way out, that's all."
I watch the steam bead roll down the window in big drops, streaks in the
condensation. Beyond the window
I can make out a partially stripped Lada, wheels scav-
enged, axles down on the pavement.
"How many people have done it, Rubin? Have any idea?"
"Not too many. Hard to say, anyway, because a lot of them are probably
politicans we think of as being comfortably and reliably dead." He gives me a
funny look. "Not a nice thought. Anyway, they had first shot at the
technology. It still costs too much for any or-
dinary dozen millionaires, but I've heard of at least seven. They say
Mitsubishi did it to Weinberg before his immune system finally went tits up.
He was head of their hybridoma lab in Okayama. Well, their stock's still
pretty high, in monoclonals, so maybe it's true.
And Langlais, the French kid, the novelist . . ." He shrugs. "Lise didn't have [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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