William Gibson - All Tomorrow's Parties

Tessa tucked the Mylar balloon between her knees and accepts the greasy paper packet.

'Got any idea where you want to sleep tonight? Chevette asked, unwrapping her own sandwich.

'In the van, Tessa said, around a mouthful. 'Got bags, foam.

'Not where it is, Chevette told her. 'Kinda cannibal, around there.

'Where then?

'If it's still got wheels, there's a place over by one of the piers, foot of Folsom, where people park and sleep. Cops know about it, but they go easy; easier for them if people all park in one place, to camp. But it can be hard to get a place.

'This is good, Tessa said to her sandwich, wiping grease from her lips with the back of her hand.

'Bridge chickens. Raise 'em over by Oakland, feed 'em scraps and stuff. She bit into her sandwich. The bread was a square bun of sourdough white, dusted with flour. She chewed, staring into the window of this Bad Sector place.

Flat square tabs or sheets of plastic, different sizes and colors, baffled her, but then she got it: these were data disks, old magnetic media. And those big, round, flat black plastic things were analogue audio media, a mechanical system. You stuck a needle in a spiral scratch and spun the thing. Biting off more sandwich, she stepped past Tessa for a better look. There were reels of fine steel wire, ragged pink cylinders of wax with faded paper labels, yellowing transparent plastic reels of quarter-inch brown tape.

Looking past the disks, she could see a lot of old hardware side by side on shelves, most of it in that grubby beige plastic. Why had people, for the first twenty years of computing, cased everything in that? Anything digital, from that century it was pretty much guaranteed to be that sad-ass institutional bridge, unless they'd wanted it to look more dramatic, more cutting edge, in which case they'd opted for black. But mostly this old stuff was folded in nameless shades of next-to-nothing, nondescript sort-of-tan.

'This is buggered, sighed Tessa, who'd finished her sandwich and gone back to poking at God's Little Toy with the driver. She stuck out her hand, offering Chevette the driver. 'Give it back to him, okay?

'Who?

'The sumo guy inside'

Chevette took the little micro-torque tool and went into Bad Sector.

There was a Chinese kid behind the counter who looked like he might weigh in somewhere over two hundred pounds. He had that big pumpkin head the sumo guys had too, but his was recently shaven and he had a soul patch. He had a short-sleeve print shirt on, big tropical flowers, and a conical spike of blue Lucite through the lobe of his left ear. He was standing, behind a counter, in front of a wall covered with dog-eared posters advertising extinct game platforms.

'This your driver, right?

'She have any luck with it? He made no move to take it.

'I don't think so, Chevette said, 'but I think she pinpointed the problem. She heard a faint, rapid clicking. Looked down to see a six-inch robot marching briskly across the countertop on big cartoony feet. It had that man-in-armor look, segmented glossy white shells over shiny steel armatures. She'd seen these before: it was a fully remote peripheral, controlled by a program that would take up most of a standard notebook. It came to a halt, put its hands together, executed a perfect miniature bow, straightened, held up its little clip hands for the driver. She let it take the driver, the pull of the little arms somehow scary. It straightened up, putting the driver over its shoulder like a miniature rifle, and gave her a military salute.

Sumo boy was waiting for a reaction, but Chevette wasn't having any. She pointed at the beige hardware. 'How come this old shit is always that same color?

His forehead creased. 'There are two theories. One is that it was to help people in the workplace be more comfortable with radically new technologies that would eventually result in the mutation or extinction of the workplace. Hence the almost universal choice, by the manufacturers, of a shade of plastic most often encountered in downscale condoms. He smirked at Chevette.

'Yeah? What's two?

'That the people who were designing the stuff were unconsciously terrified of their own product, and in order not to scare themselves, kept it looking as unexciting as possible. Literally 'plain vanilla, you follow me?

Chevette brought her finger close to the microbot; it did a funny little fall-back-and-shuffle to avoid being touched. 'So who's into this old stuff? Collectors?

'You'd think so, wouldn't you?

'Well?

'Programmers.

'I don't get it, Chevette said.

'Consider, he said, holding out his hand to let the little 'bot offer him the driver, 'that when this stuff was new, when they were writing multi-million-line software, the unspoken assumption was that in twenty years that software would have been completely replaced by some better, more evolved version. He took the driver and gestured with it toward the hardware on the shelves. 'But the manufacturers were surprised to discover that there was this perverse but powerful resistance to spending tens of millions of dollars to replace existing software, let alone hardware, plus retraining possibly thousands of employees. Follow me? He raised the driver, sighting down its shaft at her.

'Okay, Chevette said.

'So when you need the stuff to do new things, or to do old things better, do you write new stuff, from the ground up, or do you patch the old stuff?

'Patch the old?

'You got it. Overlay new routines. As the machines got faster, it didn't matter if a routine went through three hundred steps when it could actually be done in three steps. It all happens in a fraction of a second anyway, so who cares?

'Okay, Chevette said, 'so who does care?

'Smart cookies, he said and scratched his soul patch with the tip of the driver. 'Because they understand that all that really happens, these days, is that ancient software is continually encrusted with overlays, to the point where it's literally impossible for any one programmer to fully understand how any given solution is arrived at.

'I still don't see why this stuff would be any help.

'Well, actually, he said, 'you're right. He winked at her. 'You got it, girl. But the fact remains that there are some very smart people who like to have this stuff around, maybe just to remind themselves where it all comes from and how, really, all any of us do, these days, is just fixes. Nothing new under the sun, you know?

'Thanks for the screwdriver, Chevette said. 'I gotta go see a little black boy now.

'Really? What about?

'A van, Chevette said.

'Girl, he said, raising his eyebrows, 'you deep.

RYDELL sees it's dark, down here on the lower level, the narrow thoroughfare crowded and busy, greenish light of scavenged fluorescents seen through swooping bundles of that transparent plumbing, pushcarts rattling past to take up the day's positions. He took a flight of clanging steel stairs, up through a hole cut unevenly in the roadbed above, to the upper level.

Where more light fell, diffused through plastic, shadowed by the jackstraw country suspended above, shacks that were no more than boxes, catwalks in between, sails of wet laundry that had gone back up with the dying of the earlier wind.

Young girl, brown eyes big as the eyes in those old Japanese animations, handing out slips of yellow paper, 'BED & BREAKFAST. He studied the map on the back.

He started walking, bag over his shoulder and the GlobEx box under his arm, and in fifteen minutes he'd come upon something announced in pink neon as the Ghetto Chef Beef Bowl. He knew the name from the back of the yellow flyer, where the map gave it as a landmark to find the bed-and-breakfast.

Line up outside Ghetto Chef, a place with steamed-up windows, prices painted in what looked like nail polish on a sheet of cardboard.