William Gibson - Virtual Light

“You don’t know why people are after them?”

She gave him a look like you might give a dog that had just told you it was a good day to spend all your money on one particular kind of lottery ticket.

“Let’s start over” Rydell suggested. “You tell me where you got the glasses.”

“Why should I?”

He thought about it. “Because you’d be dead by now if I hadn’t done the kind of dirt-stupid shit I just did, back there.”

She thought about that. “Okay” she said.

Maybe there really was something in the fat man’s Mormon tea, or maybe Rydell had just crossed over into that point of tiredness where it all flipped around for a while and you started to feel like you were more awake, some ways, than you usually ever were. But he wound up sipping that tea and listening to her, and when she’d get too deep into her story to remember to keep flipping the tattoo-pictures on the wallscreen, he’d do it for her.

When you worked it around to sequential order, she was this girl from Oregon, didn’t have any family, who’d come down here and moved out on that bridge with this old man, crazy by the sound of it, had a bad hip and needed somebody around to help him. Then she’d gotten her a job riding a bicycle around San Francisco, delivering messages. Rydell knew about messengers from his foot-patrol period in downtown Knoxville, because you had to keep ticketing them for riding on the sidewalk, traffic violation, and they’d give you a hard time about it. But they made pretty good money if they worked at it. This Sammy she’d said was shot, murdered, he was another messenger, a black guy who’d gotten her on at Allied, where she worked.

And her story of how she’d taken the glasses out of the guy’s pocket at this big drunk party she’d wandered into up in the Morrisey, that made as much sense to him as anything. And it wasn’t the kind of story people made up. Not like the glasses crawled into her hand or anything, she just flat-out stole them, impulse, just because the guy was in her face and obnoxious. Nuisance crime, except they’d turned out to be valuable.

But from her description he knew her asshole up in the Morrisey had been the same one got himself the Cuban necktie, your German-born Costa Rican citizen who maybe wasn’t either, star of that X-rated fax of Warbaby’s and the one Svobodov and Orlovsky had been investigating. If they had been.

“Shit” he said, in the middle of something she was trying to tell him.

“What?”

“Nothing. Keep talking…”

The Russians were bent, and he knew that. They were Homicide, they were bent, and he’d bet dollars to donuts they weren’t even investigating the case. They could talk Warbaby’s way onto the crime-scene, tap their department’s computer, but the rest of it had just been window-dressing, for him, for Rydell, the hired help. And what was that that Freddie had said, about DatAmerica and IntenSecure being basically your same company?

But Chevette Washington was on a roll of her own now, like sometimes when people get started talking they just let it all hang out, and she was saying how Lowell, who was the one with the hair and not the skinhead, and who actually had, sort of, been her boyfriend for a while, was a guy who could (you know?) get things done with computers, if you had the money, and that sort of scared her because he was always talking about the cops and how he didn’t have to worry about them.

Rydell nodded, automatically flipping through a couple more pictures of tattoos—lady there with these pink carnations sort of followed her bikini-line—but really he was listening to something going around in his own head. Like Hernandez was IntenSecure, the Morrisey was IntenSecure, Warbaby was IntenSecure, Freddie said DatAmerica and IntenSecure were like the same thing– “—Desire…”

Rydell blinked. Skinny guy there with J.D. Shapely all mournful on his chest. But you’d be mournful, too, you had chest hair growing out your eyes. “What?”

“Republic. Republic of Desire.”

“What is?”

“Why Lowell says the cops won’t ever bother him, but I told him he was full of shit.”

“Hackers” Rydell said.

“You haven’t heard a word I said.”

“No” Rydell said, “no, that’s not true. Desire. Republic of. Run that one by again, okay?”

She took the remote, blipped through a shaven head with a sun at the very top, planets orbiting down to the top of the ears, a hand with a screaming mouth on the palm, feet covered with blue-green creature-scales. “I said” she said, “Lowell bullshits about that, how he’s connected up with this Republic of Desire, how they can do anything they feel like with computers, so anybody messes with him is gonna get it.”

“No shit” Rydell said. “You ever see these guys?”

“You don’t see them” she said, “not like live. You talk to them, on the phone. Or like with goggles, and that’s the wildest.”

“Why?”

“Cause they look like lobsters and shit. Or some tv star. Anything. But I don’t know why I’m telling you.”

“Because I’ll nod out otherwise, then how’re we gonna decide if we’re getting the creature-feet or the crotch-carnations?”

“It’s your turn” she said, and just sat there until he started talking.

He told her how he was from Knoxville and about getting into the Academy, about how he’d always watched Cops in Trouble and then when he’d been a cop and gotten in trouble, it had looked like he was going to be on the show. How they’d brought him out to Los Angeles because they didn’t want Adult Survivors of Satanism stealing their momentum, but then the Pookey Bear murders had come along and they’d sort of lost interest, and he’d had to get on with IntenSecure and drive Gunhead. He told her about Sublett and living with Kevin Tarkovsky in the house in Mar Vista, and sort of skipped over the Republic of Desire and the night he’d driven Gunhead into the Schonbrunns’ place in Benedict Canyon.

About how Hernandez had come over, just the other morning but it seemed like years, to tell him he could come up here and drive for this Mr. Warbaby. Then she wanted to know what it was that skip tracers did, so he explained what it was they were supposed to do, and what it was he figured they probably did do, and she said they sounded like bad news.

When he was done, she just looked at him. “That’s it? That’s how you got here and what you’re doing?”

“Yeah” he said, “guess it is.”

“Jesus” she said. Sort of shook her head. They both watched a couple of full body-suits blip past, one of them all circuit-patterns, like they stenciled on old-fashioned circuit-boards. “You got eyes” she said, and yawned in the middle of it, “like two piss-holes in a snowbank.”

There was a knock at the door. It opened a crack, and somebody, not the man who jingled when he walked, said: “You having any luck picking a design? Henry’s gone home…”

“Well it’s just so hard to decide” Chevette Washington said, “there’s so many of them and we want to get just the right one.”

“That’s fine” said the voice, bored. “You just go right on looking.” The door closed.

“Let me see those glasses” Rydell said.

She reached over and got her jacket. Got out the case with the glasses, the phone. Handed him the glasses. The case was made out of some dark stuff, thin as eggshell, rigid as steel. He opened it. The glasses looked exactly like Warbaby’s. Big black frames, the lenses black now. They had a funny heft to them, weighed more than you thought they would.

Chevette Washington had flipped open the phone’s keypad.

“Hey” Rydell said, touching her hand, “they’ll have your number for sure. You dial out on that, or even take a call, they’ll be in here in about ten minutes.”