Cyberpunk

information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified . . .
    But by now the pirate would have shuttled our message into line for blackbox transmissions to the Yakuza comsat. A simple message: call off the dogs or we wideband your program.
    The program. I had no idea what it contained. I still don’t. I only sing the song, with zero comprehension. It was probably research data, the Yakuza being given to advanced forms of industrial espionage. A genteel business, stealing from Ono-Sendai as a matter of course and politely holding their data for ransom, threatening to blunt the conglomerate’s research edge by making the product public.
    But why couldn’t any number play? Wouldn’t they be happier with something to sell back to Ono-Sendai, happier than they’d be with one dead Johnny from Memory Lane?
    Their program was on its way to an address in Sydney, to a place that held letters for clients and didn’t ask questions once you’d paid a small retainer. Fourth-class surface mail. I’d erased most of the other copy and recorded our message in the resulting gap, leaving just enough of the program to identify it as the real thing.
    My wrist hurt. I wanted to stop, to lie down, to sleep. I knew that I’d lose my grip and fall soon, knew that the sharp black shoes I’d bought for my evening as Eddie Bax would lose their purchase and carry me down to Nighttown. But he rose in my mind like a cheap religious hologram, glowing, the enlarged chip in his Hawaiian shirt looming like a reconnaissance shot of some doomed urban nucleus.
    So I followed Dog and Molly through Lo Tek heaven, jury-rigged and jerry-built from scraps that even Nighttown didn’t want.
    The Killing Floor was eight meters on a side. A giant had threaded steel cable back and forth through a junkyard and drawn it all taut. It creaked when it moved, and it moved constantly, swaying and bucking as the gathering Lo Teks arranged themselves on the shelf of plywood surrounding it. The wood was silver with age, polished with long use, and deeply etched with initials, threats, declarations of passion. This was suspended from a separate set of cables, which lost themselves in darkness beyond the raw white glare of the two ancient floods suspended above the Floor.
    A girl with teeth like Dog’s hit the Floor on all fours. Her breasts were tattooed with indigo spirals. Then she was across the Floor, laughing, grappling with a boy who was drinking dark liquid from a liter flask.
    Lo Tek fashion ran to scars and tattoos. And teeth. The electricity they were tapping to light the Killing Floor seemed to be an exception to their overall aesthetic, made in the name of . . . ritual, sport, art? I didn’t know, but I could see that the Floor was something special. It had the look of having been assembled over generations.
    I held the useless shotgun under my jacket. Its hardness and heft were comforting, even though I had no more shells. And it came to me that I had no idea at all of what was really happening, or of what was supposed to happen. And that was the nature of my game, because I’d spent most of my life as a blind receptacle to be filled with other people’s knowledge and then drained, spouting synthetic languages I’d never understand. A very technical boy. Sure.
    And then I noticed just how quiet the Lo Teks had become.
    He was there, at the edge of the light, taking in the Killing Floor and the gallery of silent Lo Teks with a tourist’s calm. And as our eyes met for the first time with mutual recognition, a memory clicked into place for me, of Paris, and the long Mercedes electrics gliding through the rain to Notre Dame; mobile greenhouses, Japanese faces behind the glass, and a hundred Nikons rising in blind phototropism, flowers of steel and crystal. Behind his eyes, as they found me, those same shutters whirring.
    I looked for Molly Millions, but she was gone.
    The Lo Teks parted to let him step up onto the bench. He bowed, smiling, and stepped smoothly out of his sandals, leaving them side by side, perfectly aligned, and then he stepped down onto the Killing Floor. He came for me, across that shifting trampoline of scrap, as easily as any tourist padding across synthetic pile in any featureless hotel.
    Molly hit the Floor,