Cyberpunk

faggot, maybe that was something defensive.
    But he meant something else. “You know somethin’, Jerome, you got your chip too, we could do a link and maybe get over on that trashcan.”
    Break out? Jerome felt a chilled thrill go through him. “Link with that thing? Control it? I don’t think the two of us would be enough.”
    “We need some more guys maybe, but I got news, Jerome, there’s more comin’. Maybe their names all start with J . You know, I mean—in a way.”
    In quick succession, the trashcan brought their cell three more guests: a fortyish beach bum named Eddie; a cadaverous black dude named Bones; a queen called Swish, whose real name, according to the trashcan, was Paul Torino.
    “This place smells like it’s comin’ apart,” Eddie said. He had a surfer’s greasy blond topknot and all the usual Surf Punk tattoos. Meaningless now, Jerome thought; the pollution-derived oxidation of the offshore had pretty much ended surfing. The anaerobics had taken over the surf, in North America, thriving in the toxic waters like a gelatinous Sargasso. If you surfed you did it with an antitoxin suit and a gas mask. “Smells in here like somethin’ died and didn’t go to heaven. Stinks worse’n Malibu.”
    “It’s those landfill blocks,” Bones said. He was missing three front teeth, and his sunken face was like something out of a zombie video. But he was an energetic zombie, pacing back and forth as he spoke. “Compressed garbage,” he told Eddie. “Organic stuff mixed with the polymers, the plastics, whatever was in the trash heap, make ’em into bricks ’cause they run outta landfill, but after a while, if the contractor didn’t get ’em to set right, y’know, they start to rot. It’s hot outside is why you’re gettin’ it now. Use garbage to cage garbage, they say. Fucking assholes.”
    • • •

    The trashcan pushed a rack of trays up to the Plexiglas bars and whirred their lunch to them, tray by tray. The robot gave them an extra tray. It was screwing up.
    They ate their chicken patties—the chicken was almost greaseless, gristleless, which meant it was vat chicken, genetically engineered fleshstuff—and between bites they bitched about the food and indulged the usual paranoid speculation about mind-control chemicals in the coffee.
    Jerome looked around at the others, thinking: at least they’re not ass-kickers.
    They were crammed here because of the illegal augs sweep, some political drive to clean up the clinics, maybe to see to it that the legal augmentation companies kept their pit bull grip on the industry. So there wasn’t anybody in for homicide, for gang torture, or anything. No major psychopaths. Not a bad cell to be in.
    “You Jerome-X, really?” Swish fluted. She (Jerome always thought of a queen as she and her, out of respect for the tilt of her consciousness) was probably Filipino; had her face girled up at a cheap clinic. Cheeks built up for a heart shape, eyes rounded, lips filled out, tits looking like there were a couple of tin funnels under her jammies. Some of the collagen they’d injected to fill out her lips had shifted its bulk so her lower lip was lopsided. One cheekbone was a little higher than the other. A karmic revenge on at least some of malekind, Jerome thought, for forcing women into girdles and footbinding and anorexia. What did this creature use her chip for, besides getting high?
    “Oooh, Jerome-X! I saw your tag before on the TV. The one when your face kind of floated around the President’s head and some printout words came out of your mouth and blocked her face out. God, she’s such a cunt .”
    “What words did he block her out with?” Eddie asked.
    “I think . . . ‘Would you know a liar if you heard one anymore?’ That’s what it was!” Swish said. “It was sooo perfect, because that cunt wanted that war to go on forever, you know she did. And she lies about it, ooh God she lies.”
    “You just think she’s a cunt because you want one,” Eddie said, dropping his pants to use the toilet. He talked loudly to cover up the noise of it. “You want one and you can’t afford it. I think the Prez was right, the fucking Mexican People’s Republic is jammin’ our borders, sending commie agents in—”
    Swish said, “Oh, God, he’s a Surf Nazi—but God yes, I want one—I want her cunt. That bitch doesn’t know how to use it anyway. Honey, I know how I’d use that thing—” Swish stopped abruptly and shivered, hugged