Cyberpunk

months. No. Illegal augs.”
    “Hey, man! Me too!”
    “You?” Jerome couldn’t conceal his surprise. You didn’t see a lot of barrio dudes doing illegal augmentation. They generally didn’t like people tinkering in their brains.
    “What, you think a guy from East LA can’t use augs?”
    “No, no. I know lots of Latino guys that use it,” Jerome lied.
    “Ooooh, he says Latino , that gotta nice sound.” Overtones of danger.
    Jerome hastily changed the direction of the conversation. “You never been in the big lockups where they use these fuckin’ paper jammies?”
    “No, just the city jail once. They didn’t have those motherfucking screw machines either. Hey, you’re Jerome—my name’s Jessie. Actually, it Jesus”—he pronounced it “hay-soo”—“but people they, you know . . . You got any smokes? No? Shit. Okay, I adjust. I get used to it. Shit. No smokes. Fuck.”
    He sat on the edge of the bed, to one side of Jerome’s dangling legs, and tilted his head forward. He reached under his hairnet, and under what turned out to be a hairpiece, and pulled a chip from a jack unit set into the base of his skull.
    Jerome stared. “Goddamn, their probes really are busted.”
    Jessie frowned over the chip. There was a little blood on it. The jack unit was leaking. Cheap installation. “No, they ain’t busted, there’s a guy working on the probe, he’s paid off, he’s letting everyone through for a couple of days because of some Russian mob guys coming in, he don’t know which ones they are. Some of them Russian mob guys got the augments.”
    “I thought sure they were going to find my unit,” Jerome said. “The strip search didn’t find it, but I thought the prison probes would and that’d be another year on my sentence. But they didn’t.”
    Neither one of them thinking of throwing away the chips. It’d be like cutting out an eye.
    “Same story here, bro. We both lucky.”
    Jessie put the microprocessing chip in his mouth, the way people did with their contact lenses, to clean it, lubricate it. Of course, bacterially speaking, it came out dirtier than it went in.
    “Does the jack hurt?” Jerome asked.
    Jessie took the chip out, looked at it a moment on his fingertips. It was smaller than a contact lens, a sliver of silicon and non-osmotic gallium arsenide and transparent interface-membrane, with, probably, 800,000,000 nanotransistors of engineered protein molecules sunk into it, maybe more. “No, it don’t hurt yet. But if it’s leaking, it fuckin’ will hurt, man.” He said something else in Spanish, shaking his head. He slipped the chip back into his jack-in unit and tapped it with the thumbnail of his right hand. So that was where the activation mouse was: under the thumbnail. Jerome’s was in a knuckle.
    Jessie rocked slightly, just once, sitting up on his bunk, which meant the chip had engaged and he was getting a readout. They tended to feed back into your nervous system a little at first, make you twitch once or twice; if they weren’t properly insulated, they could make you crap your pants.
    “That’s okay,” Jessie said, relaxing. “That’s better.” The chip inducing his brain to secrete vasopressin, contract the veins, simulate the effect of nicotine. It worked for a while, till you could get cigarettes. High-grade chip could do some numbing if you were hung up on Sim, synthetic morphine, and couldn’t get any. But that was Big Scary. You could turn yourself off for good that way. You better be doing some damn fine adjusting.
    Jerome thought about the hypothetical chip scanners. Maybe he should object to the guy using his chip here. But what the Chicano was doing wouldn’t make for much leakage.
    “What you got?” Jerome asked.
    “I got an Apple NanoMind II. Big gigas. What you got?”
    “You got the Mercedes, I got the Toyota. I got a Seso Picante Mark I. One of those Argentine things.” (How had this guy scored an ANM II?)
    “Yeah, what you got, they kinda basic, but they do most what you need. Hey, our names, they both start with J . And we both here for illegal augs. What else we got in common. What’s your sign?”
    “Uh—” What was it, anyway? He always forgot. “Pisces I think.”
    “No shit! I can relate to Pisces. I ran an astrology program, figured out who I should hang with. Pisces is okay. But Aquarius is—I’m a Scorpio, like—Aquarius, que bueno .”
    What did he mean exactly, hang with , Jerome wondered. Scoping me about am I a