William Gibson - Virtual Light

“Wait a sec” Rydell said.

The man blinked a couple of times, behind his pink glasses.

“You talking about doing that thing to a pocket phone, right? Where you don’t have to pay the company?”

The man just looked at him.

“Well, thanks” Rydell said, quickly. “I appreciate it, but I just don’t have any phone on me. If I did, I’d be happy to take you up on it.”

Still looking at him. “Thought I saw you before…” Doubt.

“Naw” Rydell said. “I’m from Knoxville. Just come in out of the rain.” He decided it was time to risk turning around and checking the place out, because the mirrors behind the bar were steamed up solid and running with drops. He swung his shoulder around and saw that Japanese woman, the one he’d seen that time up in the hills over Hollywood, when he’d been cruising with Sublett. She was standing up on a little stage, naked, her long curly hair falling around her to her waist. Rydell heard himself grunt.

“Hey” the man was saying, “hey…”

Rydell shook himself, a weird automatic thing, like a wet dog, but she was still there.

“Hey. Credit.” The drone again. “Got problems? Maybe just wanna see what they’ve got on you? Anybody else, you got the right numbers—”

“Hey” Rydell said, “wait up. That woman up there?”

The pink glasses tilted.

“Who is that?” Rydell asked.

“That’s a hologram” the man said, in a completely different voice, and walked away.

“Damn” said the bartender, behind him. “You just set a record for blowing off Eddie the Shit. Earned yourself a beer, my man.”

The bartender was a black guy with copper beads in his hair. He was grinning at Rydell. “Call him Eddie the Shit cause he ain’t worth one, don’t give another. Hook your phone up to some box doesn’t have a battery, push a few buttons, pass a dead chicken over it, take your money. That’s Eddie.” He uncapped a beer and put it down beside the other one.

Rydell looked back at the Japanese woman. She hadn’t moved. “I just came in out of the rain” he said, all he could think to say.

“Good night for it” the bartender said.

“Say” Rydell said, “that lady up there—”

“That’s Josie’s dancer” the bartender said. “You watch. She’ll dance her in a minute, soon as there’s a song she likes.”

“Josie?”

The bartender pointed. Rydell looked where he was pointing. Saw a very fat woman in a wheelchair, her hair the color and texture of coarse steel wool. She wore brand-new blue denim bib overalls and an XXL white sweatshirt, and both her hands were hidden inside something that sat on her lap like a sn gray plastic muff. Her eyes were closed, face expressionless. He couldn’t have said for sure that she wasn’t asleep.

“Hologram?” The Japanese woman hadn’t moved at all. Rydell was remembering what he’d seen, that night. The horned crown, all silver. Her pubic hair, shaved like an exclamation point. This one didn’t have either of those, but it was her. It was.

“Josie’s always projectin’” the bartender said, like it was something that couldn’t really be helped.

“From that thing on her lap?”

“That’s the interface” the bartender said. “Projector’s, well, there.” He pointed. “Top of that NEC sign.”

Rydell saw a little black gizmo clamped to the top of this old illuminated sign. It looked kind of like an old camera, the optical kind. He didn’t know if NEC was a beer or what. The whole wall was covered with these signs, all different brands, and now he recognized a few of the names he decided they were ads for old electronics companies.

He looked at the gizmo, back at the fat woman in the wheelchair, and felt sad. Angry, too. Like he’d lost something. “Not like I knew what I thought it was” he said to himself.

“Fool anybody” said the bartender.

Rydeil thought about somebody sitting out there by that valley road. Waiting for cars. Like he and his friends would lie under the bushes down Jefferson Street and toss cans under people’s tires. Sounded like a hubcap had come off. See them get out and look, shake their heads. So what he’d seen had just been a version of that, somebody playing with an expensive toy.

“Shit” he said, and put his mind to looking for Chevette Washington in all this crowd. He didn’t notice the beer-smell now, or the smoke, more the wet hair and clothes and just bodies. And there she was, her and her two friends, hunched over a little round table in a corner. The sweatshirt’s hood was down now, showing Rydell a white, stubbled head with some kind of bat or bird tattooed off the side, up where it would be hidden if the hair grew in. It was the kind of tattoo somebody had done by hand, not the kind you got done on a computer-driven table. Baldhead had a hard little face, in profile, and he was wasn’t talking. Chevette Washington was telling something to the other one and not looking happy.

Then the music changed, these drums coming in, like there were millions of them, ranked backed somehow beyond the walls, and weird waves of static riding in on that, failing back, riding in again, and women’s voices, crying like birds, and none of it natural, the voices dopplering past like sirens on a highway, and the drums, when you listened, made up of little snipped bits of sound that weren’t drums at all.

The Japanese woman—the hologram, Rydell reminded himself—raised her arms and began to dance, a sort of looping shuffle, timed not to the tempo of the drums but to the waves of static washing back and forth across the sound, and when Rydell thought to look he saw the fat woman’s eyes were open, her hands moving inside that plastic muff.

Nobody else in the bar was paying it any attention at all, just Rydell and the woman in the wheelchair. Rydell leaned there on the bar, watching the hologram dance and wondering what he should do next.

Warbaby’s shopping list went like this: best he got the glasses and the girl, next best was the glasses, just the girl was definitely third, but a must if that was all that was going.

Josie’s music slid out and away for the last time and the hologram’s dance ended. There was some drunken applause from a couple of the tables, Josie nodding her head a little like she was thanking them.

The terrible thing about it, Rydell thought, was that there Josie was, shoehorned into that chair, and she just wasn’t much good at making that thing dance. It reminded him of this blind man in the park in Knoxville, who sat there all day strumming an antique National guitar. There he was, blind, had this old guitar, and he just couldn’t chord for shit. Never seemed to get any better at it, either. Didn’t seem fair.

Now some people got up from a table near where Chevette Washington was sitting. Rydell was in there quick, bringing the beer he’d won for getting rid of Eddie the Shit. He still wasn’t close enough to pick out what they were saying, but he could try. He tried to think up ways to maybe start up a conversation, but it seemed pretty hopeless. Not that he looked particularly out of place, because he had the impression that most of this crowd weren’t regulars here, just a random sampling, come in out of the rain. But he just didn’t have any idea what this place was about. He couldn’t figure out what ‘Cognitive Dissidents’ meant; it wouldn’t help him figure out what the theme, or whatever, was. And besides, whatever Chevette Washington and her guy were discussing, it looked to be getting sort of heated.

Her guy, he thought. Something there in her body-language that said Pissed-Off Girlfriend, and something in how hard this boy was studying to show how little any of it bothered him, like maybe she was the Ex. All this abruptly coming to nothing at all as every conversation died and Rydell looked up from his beer to see Lt. Orlovsky, the vampire-looking cop from SFPD Homicide, stepping in from the stairwell in his London Fog, some kind of fedora that looked like it was molded from flesh-colored plastic on his head, and those scary half-frame glasses. Orlovsky stood there, little streams running off the hem of his rain-darkened coat and pooling around his wingtips, while he unbuttoned the coat with one hand. Still had his black flak vest on underneath, and now that hand came up to rest on the smooth, injection-molded, olive-drab butt of his floating-breech H & K. Rydell looked for the badge-case on the nylon neck-thong, but didn’t see it.