William Gibson: Virtual Light

“Grapefruit cans” Turvey said. “Fulla concrete.”

“No shit?”

“Watch” Turvey said, and brought the thing to his shoulder. It had a sort of breech, very intricately machined, a trigger-thing like part of a pair of vise-grip pliers, and a couple of flexible tubes. These latter ran down, Rydell saw, to a great big canister of gas, the kind you’d need a hand truck to move, which lay on the floor beside the couch.

There on his knees, on the girlfriend’s dusty polyester carpet, he’d watched that muzzle swing past. It was big enough to put your fist down. He watched as Turvey took aim, back through the open bedroom door, at the closet.

“Turvey” he heard himself say, “where’s the goddamn kids?”

Turvey moved the vise-grip handle and punched a hole the size of a fruit-juice can through the closet door. The kids were in there. They must’ve screamed, though Rydell couldn’t remember hearing it. Rydell’s lawyer later argued that he was not only deaf at this point, but in a state of sonically induced catalepsy. Turvey’s invention was only a few decibels short of what you got with a SWAT stun-grenade. But Rydell couldn’t remember. He couldn’t rememher shooting Kenneth Turvey in the head, either, or anything else at all until he woke up in the hospital. There was a woman there from Cops in Trouble, which had been Rydell’s father’s favorite show, but she said she couldn’t actually talk to him until she’d spoken with his agent. Rydell said he didn’t have one. She said she knew that, but one was going to call him.

Rydell lay there thinking about all the times he and his father had watched Cops in Trouble. “What kind of trouble we talking here?” he finally asked.

The woman just smiled. “Whatever, Berry, it’ll probably be adequate.”

He squinted up at her. She was sort of good-looking. “What’s your name?”

“Karen Mendelsohn.” She didn’t look like she was from Knoxville, or even Memphis.

“You from Cops in Trouble?”

“Yes.”

“What you do for ’em?”

“I’m a lawyer” she said. Rydell couldn’t recall ever actually having met one before, but after that he wound up meeting lots more.

Gunhead’s displays were featureless slabs of liquid crystal; they woke when Rydell inserted the key, typed the security code, and ran a basic systems check. The cameras under the rear bumper were his favorites; they made parking really easy; you could see exactly where you were backing up. The downlink from the Death Star wouldn’t work while he was still in the car wash, too much steel in the building, but it was Sublett’s job to keep track of all that with an ear-bead.

There was a notice posted in the staff room at IntenSecure, telling you it was company policy not to call it that, the Death Star, but everybody did anyway. The LAPD called it that themselves. Officially it was the Southern California Dosynclinical Law Enforcement Satellite.

Watching the dashboard screens, Rydell backed carefully out of the building. Gunhead’s twin ceramic engines were new enough to still be relatively quiet; Rydell could hear the tires squish over the wet concrete floor.

Sublett was waiting outside, his silver eyes reflecting the red of passing taillights. Behind him, the sun was setting, the sky’s colors bespeaking more than the usual cocktail of additives. He stepped back as Rydell reversed past him, anxious to avoid the least droplet of spray from the tires. Rydell was anxious too; he didn’t want to have to haul the Texan to Cedars again if his allergies kicked up.

Rydell waited as Sublett pulled on a pair of disposable surgical gloves.

“Howdy” Sublett said, climbing into his seat. He closed his door and began to remove the gloves, gingerly peeling them into a Ziploc Baggie.

“Don’t get any on you” Rydell said, watching the care with which Sublett treated the gloves.

“Go ahead, laugh” Sublett said mildly. He took out a pack of hypo-allergenic gum and popped a piece from its bubble. “How’s ol’ Gunhead?”

Rydell scanned the displays, satisfied. “Not too shabby.”

“Hope we don’t have to respond to any damn’ stealth houses tonight” Sublett said, chewing.

Stealth houses, so-called, were on Sublett’s personal list of bad calls. He said the air in them was toxic. Rydell didn’t think it made any sense, but he was tired of arguing about it. Stealth houses were bigger than most regular houses, cost more, and Rydell figured the owners would pay plenty to keep the air clean. Sublett maintained that anybody who built a stealth house was paranoid to begin with, would always keep the place locked up too tight, no air circulation, and you’d get that bad toxic buildup.

If there’d been any stealth houses in Knoxville, Rydell hadn’t known about them. He thought it was an L.A. thing.

Sublett, who’d worked for IntenSecure for almost two years, mostly on day patrol in Venice, had been the first person to even mention them to Rydell. When Rydell finally got to answer a call to one, he couldn’t believe the place; it just went down and down, dug in beneath something that looked almost, but not quite, like a bombed-out drycleaning plant. And it was all peeled logs inside, white plaster, Turkish carpets, big paintings, slate floors, furniture like he’d never seen before. But it was some kind of tricky call; domestic violence, Rydell figured. Like the husband hit the wife, the wife hit the button, now they were making out it was all just a glitch. But it couldn’t really be a glitch, because someone had had to hit the button, and there hadn’t been any response to the password call that came back to them three-point-eight seconds later. She must’ve messed with the phones, Rydell thought, then hit the button. He’d been been riding with ‘Big George’ Kechakmadze that night, and the Georgian (Tbilisi, not Atlanta) hadn’t liked it either. “You see these people, they’re subscribers, man; nobody bleeding, you get your ass out, okay?” Big George had said, after. But Rydell kept remembering a tension around the woman’s eyes, how she held the collar of the big white robe folded against her throat. Her husband in a matching robe but with thick hairy legs and expensive glasses. There’d been something wrong there but he’d never know what. Not any more than he’d ever understand how their lives really worked, lives that looked like what you saw on tv but weren’t.

L.A. was full of mysteries, when you looked at it that way. No bottom to it.

He’d come to like driving through it, though. Not when he had to get anywhere in particular, but just cruising with Gunhead was okay. Now he was turning onto La Cienega and the little green cursor on the clash was doing the same.

“Forbidden Zone” Sublett said. “Herve Villechaize, Susan Rydell, Marie-Pascal Elfman, Viva.”

“Viva?” Rydell asked. “Viva what?”

“Viva. Actress.”

“When’d they make that?”

“1980.”

“I wasn’t born yet.”

“Time on tv’s all the same time, Rydell.”

“Man, I thought you were trying to get over your upbringing and all.” Rydell de-mirrored the door-window to better watch a redheaded girl pass him in a pink Daihatsu Sneaker with the top off. “Anyway, I never saw that one.” It was just that hour of evening when women in cars looked about as good, in Los Angeles, as anything ever did. The surgeon general was trying to outlaw convertibles; said they contributed to the skin-cancer rate.

“End game. Al Cliver, Moira Chen, George Eastman, Gordon Mitchell. 1985.”

“Well, I was two” Rydell said, “but I didn’t see that one either.”

Sublett fell silent. Rydell felt sorry for him; the Texan really didn’t know any other way to start a conversation, and his folks back home in the trailer-camp would’ve seen all those films and more.