William Gibson - Count Zero

Bobby thought he heard something scrape, behind the door, and then there was a rattle like chains. “Amazing,” Lucas said, “almost as though we were expected.”

The door swung ten centimeters on well-oiled hinges and seemed to catch on something. An eye regarded them, un-blinking, suspended there in that crack of dust and dark, and at first it seemed to Bobby that it must be the eye of some large animal, the iris a strange shade of brownish yellow, and the whites, mottled and shot through with red, the lower lid gaping redder still below. “Hoodoo man,” said the invisible face the eye belonged to, then, “hoodoo man and some little lump of shit. Jesus…” There was an awful, gurgling sound, as of antique phlegm being drawn up from hidden recesses, and then the man spat. “Well, move it, Lucas.” There was another grating sound and the door swung inward on the dark. “I’m a busy man…” This last from a meter away, receding, as though the eye’s owner were scurrying from the light admitted by the open door.

Lucas stepped through, Bobby on his heels, Bobby feeling the door swing smoothly shut behind him. The sudden dark-ness brought the hairs on his forearms up. It felt alive, that dark, cluttered and dense and somehow sentient.

Then a match flared and some sort of pressure lamp hissed and spat as the gas in its mantle ignited. Bobby could only gape at the face beyond the lantern, where the bloodshot yellow eye waited with its mate in what Bobby would very much have liked to believe was a mask of some kind.

“I don’t suppose you were expecting us, were you, Finn?” Lucas asked.

“You wanna know,” the face said, revealing large flat yellow teeth, “I was on my way out to find something to eat.“ He looked to Bobby as though he could survive on a diet of moldering carpet, or burrow patiently through the brown wood pulp of the damp-swollen books stacked shoulder-high on either side of the tunnel where they stood. “Who’s the little shit, Lucas?”

“You know, Finn, Beauvoir and I are experiencing difficulties with something we acquired from you in good faith.” Lucas extended his cane and prodded delicately at a dangerous-looking overhang of crumbling paperbacks.

“Are you, now?” The Finn pursed his gray lips in mock concern. “Don’t fuck with those first editions, Lucas. You bring ’em down, you pay for ’em.”

Lucas withdrew the cane. Its polished ferrule flashed in the lantern glare.

“So,” the Finn said. “You got problems Funny thing, Lucas, funny fucking thing.” His cheeks were grayish, seamed with deep diagonal creases. “I got some problems, too, three of ’em. I didn’t have ’em, this morning. I guess that’s just the way life is, sometimes “ He put the hissing lantern down on a gutted steel filing cabinet and fished a bent, unfiltered cigarette from a side pocket of something that might once have been a tweed jacket. “My three problems, they’re upstairs. Maybe you wanna have a look at them…” He struck a wooden match on the base of the lantern and lit his cigarette. The pungent reek of black Cuban tobacco gathered in the air between them.

“You know,” the Finn said, stepping over the first of the bodies, “I been at this location ’a long time. Everybody knows me. They know I’m here You buy from the Finn, you know who you’re buying from. And I stand behind my product, every time…”

Bobby was staring down at the upturned face of the dead man, at the eyes gone dull. There was something wrong with the shape of the torso, wrong with the way it lay there in the black clothes. Japanese face, no expression, dead eyes.

“And all that time,” the Finn continued, “you know how many people ever dumb enough to try to get in here to take me off? None’ Not one, not till this morning, and I get fucking three already. Well,” he shot Bobby a hostile glance, “that’s not counting the odd little lump of shit, I guess, but…” He shrugged.

“He looks kind of lopsided,” Bobby said still staring at the first corpse.

“That’s ’cause he’s dog food, inside “ The Finn leered “All mashed up.”

“The Finn collects exotic weapons,” Lucas said, nudging the wrist of a second body with the tip of his cane. “Have you scanned them for implants, Finn?”

“Yeah. Pain in the butt. Hadda carry ’em downstairs to the back room. Nothing. other than what you’d expect. They’re just a hit team.” He sucked his teeth noisily. “Why’s any-body wanna hit me?”

“Maybe you sold them a very expensive product that wouldn’t do its job,” Lucas volunteered.

“I hope you aren’t sayin’ you sent ’em, Lucas,” the Finn said levelly, “unless you wanna see me do the dog-food trick.”

“Did I say you’d sold us something that doesn’t work?”

Experiencing difficulties,’ you said. And what else have you guys bought from me recently?”

“Sorry, Finn, but they’re not ours. You know it, too.”

“Yeah, I guess I do So what the fuck’s got you down here, Lucas? You know that stuff you bought wasn’t covered by the usual guarantees…”

“You know,” said the Finn, after listening to the story of Bobby’s abortive cyberspace run, “that’s some weird shit out there.’ He slowly shook his narrow, strangely elongated head. “Didn’t used to be this way.” He looked at Lucas. “You people know, don’t you?”

They were seated around a square white table in a white room on the ground floor, behind the junk-clogged storefront. The floor was scuffed hospital tile, molded in a nonslip pattern, and the walls broad slabs of dingy white plastic concealing dense layers of antibugging circuitry. Compared to the storefront, the white room seemed surgically clean. Several alloy tripods bristling with sensors and scanning gear stood around the table like abstract sculpture.

“Know what?” Bobby asked. With each retelling of his story, he felt less like a wilson. Important. It made him feel Important.

“Not you, pisshead,” the Finn said wearily. “Him. Big hoodoo man. He knows. Knows it’s not the same. Hasn’t been, not for a long time. I been in the trade forever. Way back. Before the war, before there was any matrix, or anyway before people knew there was one.” He was looking at Bobby now. “I got a pair of shoes older than you are, so what the fuck should I expect you to know? There were cowboys ever since there were computers. They built the first computers to crack German ice. Right? Codebreakers. So there was ice before computers, you wanna look at it that way.” He lit his fifteenth cigarette of the evening, and smoke began to fill the white room.

“Lucas knows, yeah. The last seven, eight years, there’s been funny stuff out there, out on the console cowboy circuit. The new jockeys, they make deals with things, don’t they. Lucas? Yeah, you bet I know; they still need the hard and the soft, and they still gotta be faster than snakes on ice, but all of ’em, all the ones who really know how to cut it, they got allies, don’t they, Lucas?”

Lucas took his gold toothpick out of his pocket and began to work on a rear molar, his face dark and serious.

“Thrones and dominions,” the Finn said obscurely. “Yeah, there’s things out there. Ghosts, voices Why not? Oceans had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see?

Sure, it’s just a tailored hallucination we all agreed to have, cyberspace, but anybody who jacks in knows, fucking knows it’s a whole universe. And every year it gets a little more crowded, sounds like…”

“For us,” Lucas said, “the world has always worked that way.”

“Yeah” the Finn said, “so you guys could slot right into it, tell people the things you were cutting deals with were your same old bush gods…”