William Gibson - Virtual Light

Chevette followed him in. He closed the door behind her. The goggles he used for dispatching dangled around his neck, one padded eyepiece patched with cellophane tape. There were no windows in the room and Bunny kept the lights off when he was working. Half a dozen color monitors were arranged in a semicircle in front of a black swivel armchair with Bunny’s pink rubber Sacro-saver backrest strapped to it like some kind of giant bulging larva.

Bunny rubbed his lower back with the heels of his hands. “Disk’s killing me” he said, not particularly to Chevette.

“Oughta let Sammy Sal crack it for you” she suggested. “He’s real good.”

“It’s cracked already, sweetheart. What’s wrong with it in the first place. Now tell me what were you doin’ over the Morrisey last night. And it better be good.”

“Pulling a tag” Chevette said, going on automatic, the way she had to if she were going to lie and get away with it. She’d been halfway expecting something like this, but not so soon.

She watched as Bunny took the goggles off, disconnected them, and put them on top of one of the monitors. “So how come you never checked back out? They call us on it, say you went in to make a delivery, they scanned your badges, you never come back out. Look, I tell ’em, I know she’s not there now, guys, ’cause I got her out Alabama Street on a call, okay?” He was watchiag her.

“Hey, Bunny” Chevette said, “it was my last tag, my ride was down in the basement, I saw a freight el on its way down, jumped in. I know I’m supposed to clock out at security, but I thought they’d have somebody on the parking exit, you know? I get up the ramp and there’s nobody, a car’s going out, so I deak under the barrier and I’m in the street. I shoulda gone back around and done the lobby thing?”

“You know it. It’s regs.”

“It was late, you know?”

Bunny sat down, wincing, in the chair with the Sacro-saver. He cupped each knee in a big-knuckled hand and stared at her. Very un-Bunny. Like something was really bothering him. Not just security grunts pissing because a mess blew the check-out off. “How late?”

“Huh?”

“They wanna know when you left.”

“Maybe ten minutes after I went in. Fifteen tops. Basement in there’s a rat-maze.”

“You went in 6:32:18” he said. “They got that when they scanned you. The tag, this lawyer, they talked to him, so they know you delivered.” He still had that look.

“Bunny, what’s the deal? Tell ’em I screwed up, is all.”

“You didn’t go anywhere else? In the hotel?”

“Uh-uh” she said, and felt this funny ripple move through her, like she’d crossed some line and couldn’t go back. “I gave the guy his package, Bunny.”

“I don’t think they’re worrying about the guy’s package” Bunny said.

“So?”

“Lookit, Chev” he said, “security guy calls, that’s one thing. Sorry, boss, won’t let it happen again. But this was somebody up in the company, IntenSecure it’s called, and he called up Wilson direct.” Allied’s owner. “So I gotta make nice with Wilson and Mr. Security, I gotta have Grasso cover for me on the board and naturally he screws everything up…”

“Bunny” she said, “I’m sorry.”

“Hey. You’re sorry, I’m sorry, but there’s some big shit rentacop sitting behind a desk and he’s putting fucking Wilson through about what precisely did you do after you gave that lawyer his package. About what kind of employee are you exactly, how long you mess for Allied, any criminal record, any drug use, where you live.”

Chevette saw the asshole’s black glasses, right where she’d left them. In their case, behind Skinner’s Geographics. She tried to lift them out of there with mind-power. Right up to the tar-smelling roof and off the edge. Put those bastards in the Bay like she should’ve done this morning. But no, they were there.

“That ain’t normal” Bunny said. “Know what I mean?”

“You tell ’em where I live, Bunny?”

“Out on the bridge” he said, then cracked her a little sliver of grin. “Not like you got much of an address, is it?” Now he spun himself around in the chair and began to shut the monitors down.

“Bunny” she said, “what’ll they do now?”

“Come and find you.” His back to her. “Here. ”Cause they won’t know where else to go. You didn’t do anything, did you, Chevy?“ The back of his skull showing gray stubble.

Automatic. “No. No… Thanks, Bunny.”

He grunted in reply, neutral, ending it, and Chevette was back in the corridor, her heart pounding under Skinner’s jacket. Up the stairs, out the door, plotting the quickest way home, running red lights in her head, gotta get rid of the glasses, gotta– Sammy Sal had Ringer braced up against a blue recyc bin.

Worry was starting to penetrate Ringer’s rudimentary view of things. “Didn’t do nuthin to you, man.”

“Been carvin’ your name in elevators again, Ringer.”

“But I din’t do nuthin to you!”

“Cause and effect, mofo. We know it’s a tough concept for you, but try: you do shit, other shit follows. You go scratching your tag in the clients’ fancy elevators, we hassle you, man.” Sammy Sal spread the long brown fingers of his left hand across Ringer’s beat-to-shit helmet, palming it like a basketball, and twisted, lifting, the helmet’s strap digging into Ringer’s chin. “Din’t do nuthin!” Ringer gurgled.

Chevette ducked past them, heading for the bike-rack beneath the mural portrait of Shapely. Someone had shot him in his soulful martyr’s eye with a condomful of powder blue paint, blue running all down his hallowed cheek.

“Hey” Sammy Sal said, “come here and help me torment this shit-heel.”

She stuck her hand through the recognition-loop and tried to pull her handlebars out of the rack’s tangle of molybdenum steel, graphite, and aramid overwrap. The other bikes’ alarms all went off at once, a frantic chorus of ear-splitting bleats, basso digital sirennioans, and OUC extended high-volume burst of snake-hiss Spanish profanity, cunningly mixed with yelps of animal torment. She swung her bike around, got her toe in the clip, and kicked for the street, almost going over as she mounted. She saw Sammy Sal, out the corner of her eye, drop Ringer.

She saw Sammy Sal straddle his own bike, a pink and black-fleck fat-tube with Fluoro-Rimz that ran off a hubgenerator.

Sammy Sal was coming after her. She’d never wanted company less.

She took off.

Proj. Just proj.

Like her morning dream, but scarier.

Rydell looked at these two San Francisco cops, Svobodov and Orlovsky, and decided that working for Warbaby had a chance of being interesting. These guys were the real, the super-heavy thing. Homicide was colossus, any department anywhere.

And here he’d been in Northern California all of forty-eight minutes and he was sitting at a counter drinking coffee with Homicide. Except they were drinking tea. Hot tea. In glasses. Heavy on the sugar. Rydell was at the far end, on the other side of Freddie, who was drinking milk. Then Warbaby, with his hat still on, then Svobodov, then Orlovsky.

Svobodov was nearly as tall as Warbaby, but it all seemed to be sinew and big knobs of bone. He had long, pale hair, combed straight back from his rocky forehead, eyebrows to match, and skin that was tight and shiny, like he’d stood too long in front of a fire. Orlovsky was thin and dark, with a widow’s peak, lots of hair on the backs of his fingers, and those glasses that looked like they’d been sawn in half.

They both had that eye thing, the one that pinned you and held you and sank right in, heavy and inert as lead.