William Gibson - Virtual Light

“Where?” he said.

She pointed to where her bike stood, cabled to Sammy Sal’s. “The pink and black one.”

He gestured with the gun.

“Back off” her bike said when she was five feet from it.

“What’s that?” The gun in her back.

“This other bike. Clunker with a voice-alarm. Keeps people off mine.” She bent to thumb the tab that released Sammy Sal’s bike, but she didn’t touch the recognition-loop behind the seat of her own.

“I fucking mean it, shithead” her bike said.

“Shut it off” he said.

“Okay.”

She knew she had to do it in one go, flip it sideways and over, just her thumb and forefinger on the nonconductive rubber of the tire.

But it was really just an accident that the frame hit his gun. She saw an inch of lightning arc between her bike and the pistol, hot purple and thick as your finger, the particle-brake capacitors in the up-tube emptying their stored charge into the anti-theft system worked into the fake rust and the carefully frayed silver duct-tape. He went down on his knees, eyes unfocused, a single silver bubble of spit forming and bursting between his half-open lips. She thought she saw steam curl from the gun in his hand.

Proj. she thought, crouching to run, but then the black thing hit him and knocked him flat, flapping down out of the dark above them with a sound like broken wings. A roll of tarpaper. She made out Sammy Sal then, standing up there on a dark carbon cross-brace, his arm around an upright. She thought she saw his white smile.

“Forgot this” he said, and tossed something down. The glasses in their case. Hands tied, she caught them anyway, like they knew where they wanted to go. She’d never know why he did that.

Because the little pistol made a chewing sound then, blue pops like a dozen backfires run together, and Sammy Sal went over backward off the brace, just gone.

And then she was running.

Yamazaki heard gunfire, where he knelt on the floor, his wrists joined by glistening plastic behind the rough metal brace that supported Skinner’s wall-table. Or was it only the sound of some hydraulic tool?

There was a smell in the room, high and acrid. He thought it must be the smell of his own fear.

His eyes were level with a chipped white plate, a smear of pulped avocado blackening on its edge.

“Told him what I had” Skinner said, struggling to his feet, his arms fastened behind him. “Didn’t want it. Want what they want, don’t they?” The little television slid off the edge of the bed and hit the floor, its screen popping out on a rainbow ribbon of flat cable. “Shit.” He swayed, wincing as his bad hip took his weight, and Yamazaki thought he would fall. Skinner took one step, another, leaning forward to maintain his balance.

Yamazaki strained at the plastic bonds. Yelped as he felt them tighten. Like something alive.

“You tug, twist ’em” Skinner said, behind him, “bastards’ll clinch up on you. Cops used to carry those. Got made unconstitutional.” There was a crash that shook the room and made the light flicker. Yamazaki looked over his shoulder and saw Skinner sitting on the floor, his knees drawn half up, leaning forward. “There’s a pair of twenty-inch bolt-cutters in here” the old man said, indicating a dented, rust-scarred green toolkit with his left foot. “That’ll do it, if I can get ’em out.” Yamazaki watched as he began to work his toes through the holes in his ragged gray socks. “Not sure I can do shit with ’em, once I do…” He stopped. Looked at Yamazaki. “Better idea, but you won’t like it.”

Skinner-san?”

“Look at that brace there.”

Discolored blobs of puddled welding-rod held the thing together, but it looked sturdy enough. He counted the mismatched heads of nine screws. The diagonal brace itself seemed to be made up of thin metal shims, lashed together top and bottom with rusting twists of wire.

“I made that” Skinner said. “Those’re three sections of blade off a factory saw. Never did grind the teeth off. On top there.”

Yamazaki’s fingertips moved over hidden roughness.

“Shot, Scooter. Wouldn’t cut for shit. Why I used ’em.”

“I saw plastic?” Poising his wrists.

“Wait up. You start sawing on that crazy-goo, it isn’t gonna like it. Have to get through it quick or it’s gonna close up right down to the bone. I said wait…”

Yamazaki froze. He looked back.

“You’re too close to the center. You cut through there, you’ll have a ring around each wrist and the suckers’ll still close up. You want to go through as close to one side as possible, get over here and get the cutter on the other one before it does you. I’ll try to get this open…” He bumped the case with his toes. It rattled.

Yamazaki brought his face close to the red restraint. It had a faint, medicinal smell. He took a breath, set his teeth, and sawed furiously with his wrists. The thing began to shrink. Bands of iron, the pain hot and impossible. He remembered Loveless’s hand around his wrist.

“Do it” Skinner said.

The plastic parted with an absurdly loud pop, like some sound-effect in a child’s cartoon. He was free and, for an instant, the red band around his left wrist loosened, absorbing the rest of the mass.

“Scooter!”

It tightened. He scrambled for the toolkit, amazed to see it open, as Skinner kicked it over with his heel, spilling a hundred pieces of tooled metal.

“Blue handles!”

The bolt-cutter was long, clumsy, its handles wrapped in greasy blue tape. He saw the red band narrowing, starting to sink below the level of his flesh. Fumbled the cutter one-handed from the tangle, sank its jaws blindly into his wrist and brought all his weight down on the uppermost handle. A stab of pain. The detonation.

Skinner blew air out between his lips, a long low sound of relief. “You okay?”

Yamazaki looked at his wrists. There was a deep, bluish gouge in the left one. It was starting to bleed, but no more than he would have expected. The other had been scratched by the saw. He glanced around the floor, looking for the remains of the restraint.

“Do me” Skinner said. “But hook it under the plastic, okay? Try not to take a hunk out. And do the second one fast.”

Yamazaki tested the action of the cutter, knelt behind Skinner, slid one of the blades beneath the plastic around the old man’s right wrist. The skin translucent there, blotched and discolored, the veins swollen and twisted. The plastic parted easily, with that same ridiculous noise, instantly whipping itself around skinner’s other wrist, writhing like a live thing. He severed it before it could tighten, but this time, with the cartoon pop, it simply vanished.

Yamazaki stared at the space where the restraint had been.

“Katey bar the door!” Skinner roared.

“What?”

“Lock the fucking hatch!”

Yamazaki scrambled across the floor on hands and knees, dropped the hatch into place, and bolted it with a flat device of dull bronze, something that might once have been part of a ship. “The girl” he said, looking back at Skinner.

“She can knock” Skinner said. “You want that dickhead with the gun back in here?”

Yamazaki didn’t. He looked up at the ceiling-hatch, the one that opened onto the roof. Open now.

“Go up there and look for the ’mo.”

“Skinner-san? Pardon?”

“Big fag buddy. The black one, right?”

Not knowing what or whom Skinner was talking about, Yamazaki climbed the ladder. A gust of wind threw rain into his face as he thrust his head up through the opening. He had the sudden intense conviction that he was high atop some ancient ship, some black iron schooner drifting derelict on darkened seas, its plastic sails shredded and its crew mad or dead, with Skinner its demented captain, shouting orders from his cell below.