William Gibson - All Tomorrow's Parties

He could see, walking up to it, that it was a newer model than the one he'd worked in on Sunset. It had fewer corners, so there was less to chip off or med repair. He supposed that designing a Lucky Dragon module was about designing something that would hold up under millions of uncaring and even hostile hands. Ultimately, he thought, you'd wind up with something like a seashell, hard and smooth.

The store on Sunset had a finish that ate graffiti. The gang kids would come and tag it; twenty minutes later these flat, dark, vaguely crab-like patches of dark blue would come gliding around the corner. Rydell had never understood how they worked and Durius said they'd been developed in Singapore. They seemed to be embedded, a few millimeters down into the surface, which seems a sort of non-glossy gel-coat affair, but able to move around under there. Smart material, he'd heard that called. And they'd glide up to the tag, whatever artfully abstract scrawl had been sprayed there to declare fealty or mark territory or swear revenge (Durius had been able to read these things and construct a narrative out of them) and start eating it. You couldn't actually see the crablegs move. They just sort of nuzzled in and gradually the tag started to unravel, de-rez, molecules of paint sucked down into the blue of the Lucky Dragon graffiti-eaters.

And once someone had come with a smart tag, a sort of decal they'd somehow adhered to the wall, although neither Rydell nor Durius had been able to figure how they'd done it without being seen. Maybe, Durius said, they'd shot it from a distance. It was the tag of a gang called the Chupacabras, a fearsome spiky thing, all black and red, insectoid and menacing and, Rydell thought, kind of good-looking, exciting-looking. He'd seen it worn as a tattoo, in the store. The kids who wore it favored those contacts, the kind gave you pupils like a snake's. When the graffiti-eaters came out after it though, it had moved.

They'd edge up to it, and it would sense them and move away. Almost too slow to see it happening, but it moved. Then the graffiti-eaters would move again. Durius and Rydell watched it, the first night, get all the way around to the back of the store. It was starting to work its way back around toward the front when they went off shift.

Next shift it was still there, and a couple of standard spray-bomb tags as well. The graffiti-eaters were locked on the smart tag and not taking care of business. Durius showed it to Mr. Park, who didn't like it that they hadn't told him before. Rydell showed him where they'd logged it in the shift record when they clocked off, which had just pissed Mr. Park off more.

About an hour later, two men in white Tyvek coveralls showed up in an unmarked, surgically clean white van and went to work. Rydell would've liked to watch them get the smart tag off, but there was a run of shoplifters that night and he didn't get to see what they did to it. They didn't use scrapers or solvents, he knew that. They used a notebook and a couple of adhesive probes. Basically, he guessed, they reprogrammed it, messed with its code, and after they left, the graffiti-eaters were back out there, slurping down the latest Chupacabra iconography.

This Lucky Dragon by the bridge was smooth and white as a new china plate, Rydell observed, as he came up to it. It looked like a piece of some different dream, fallen here. The entrance to the bridge had an unplanned drama to it, and Rydell wondered if there'd been a lot of meetings, back in Singapore, about whether or not to put this unit here. Lucky Dragon had some units on prime tourist real estate, and Rydell knew that from watching the Global Interactive Video Column back in LA; there was one in the mall under Red Square, that fancy KD branch in Berlin, the big-ass one in Piccadilly, London, but putting one here struck him as a strange, or strangely deliberate, move.

The bridge was a dodgy place, safe enough but not 'tourist safe. There was a walk-on tourist contingent, sure, and a big one, particularly on this end of the bridge, but no tours, no guides. If you went, you went on your own. Chevette had told him how they repelled evangelicals, and the Salvation Army and any other organized entity, in no uncertain terms. Rydell figured that in fact that was part of the draw of the place, that it was unregulated.

Autonomous zone, Durius called that. He'd told Rydell that Sunset Strip had started out as one of those, a place between police jurisdictions, and somehow that had set the DNA of the street, which was why, you still got hookers in elf hats there, come Christmas.

But maybe Lucky Dragon knew something people didn't, he thought. Things could change. His father, for instance, used to swear that Times Square had been a really dangerous place.

Rydell made his way through the crowd flowing on and off the bridge and past the Global Interactive Video Column, daydreaming as he did that he'd look up and see the Sunset branch there, with Praisegod beaming sunnily at him from out in front.

What he got was some skater kid in Seoul shaking his nuts at the camera.

He went in, to be immediately stopped by a very large man with a very broad forehead and pale, almost invisible eyebrows. 'Your bag, said the security man, who was wearing a pink Lucky Dragon fanny pack exactly like the one Rydell had worn in LA. As a matter of fact, Rydell's was in the very duffel the guy was demanding.

'Please, Rydell said, handing the bag over. Lucky Dragon security were supposed to say that: please. It was on Mr. Park's notebook, and anyway when you asked somebody for their bag, you were admitting you thought they might shoplift, so you might as well be polite about it.

The security man narrowed his eyes. He put the bag in a numbered cubicle behind his station and handed Rydell a Lucky Dragon logo tag that looked like an oversized drink coaster with the number five on the back. It was the size it was, Rydell knew, because it had been determined that this size made the tags just that much too big to fit into most pockets, thereby preventing people from pocketing, forgetting, and wandering away with them. Kept costs down. Everything about Lucky Dragon was worked out that way. You sort of had to admire them.

'You're welcome, Rydell said. He headed for the ATM in the back Lucky Dragon International Bank He knew it was watching him as he walked up to it pulling his wallet from his back pocket.

'I'm here to get a chip issued, he said.

Identify yourself please Lucky Dragon ATMs all had this same voice a weird uptight strangled little castrato voice and he wondered why that was. But you could be sure they'd worked it out probably it kept people from standing around, bullshitting with the machine. But Rydell knew that you didn't want to do that anyway, because the suckers would pepper-spray you. They were plastered with notices to that effect too, although he doubted anyone ever actually read them. What the notices didn't say, and Lucky Dragon wasn't telling, was that if you tried seriously to dick with one, drive a crowbar into the money slot, say, the thing would mist you and itself down with water and then electrify itself.

'Berry Rydell, he said, taking his Tennessee driver's license from his wallet and inserting the business end into the ATM's reader.

'Palm contact.

Rydell pressed his hand within the outline of a hand. He hated the way that felt. Bad cootie factor with those palm-scan things. Hand grease.

He wiped his palm on his trousers.

'Please enter your personal identification code.

Rydell did, working through his mnemonic to the two cans of 7-Up.

'Processing credit request, the thing said, sounding as if someone were squeezing its balls.

Rydell looked around and saw that he was pretty much the only customer aside from a woman with gray lair and black leather pants, who was giving the checker a hard time in what sounded to Rydell like German.