Cyberpunk

He’d thrown himself away trying to get it . . .
    Why was it so fucking important? his stomach demanded, wringing itself vindictively.
    “Thing is,” Bones said, “we could all be cruisin’ into a setup. Some kind of sting thing. Maybe it’s a little too weird how the police prober let us all through.”
    (Someone listening would have heard him say, “Sting, funny luck.”)
    Jessie snorted. “I tol’ you, man. The prober is paid off. They letting them all through because some of them are mob. I know that, because I’m part of the thing. We deal wid the Russians. Okay?”
    (“Probe greased, fa-me.”)
    “You with the mob?” Bones asked.
    (“You’m?”)
    “You got it. Just a dealer. But I know where a half million Newbux wortha augshit is, so they going to get me out if I do my part. The way the system is set up, the prober had to let everyone through. His boss thinks we got our chips taken out when they arraigned us; sometimes they do it that way. This time it was supposed to be the jail surgeon. By the time they catch up their own red tape, we get outta here. Now listen—we can’t do the trashcan without we all get into it, because we haven’t got enough K otherwise. So who’s in, for fuck’s sake?”
    He’d said, “Low, half mill, bluff surgeon, there here, twip, all-none, who yuh fucks?”
    Something in his voice skittered with claws behind smoked glass: he was getting testy, irritable from the chip adjustments for his nicotine habit, maybe other adjustments: the side effects of liberal cerebral self-modulating burning through a threadbare nervous system.
    The rest of the meeting, translated . . .
    “I dunno,” Eddie said. “I thought I’d do my time, ’cause if it goes sour—”
    “Hey man,” Jessie said, “I can take your fuckin’ chip. And be out before they notice your ass don’t move no more.”
    “The man’s right,” Swish said. Her pain-suppression system was unraveling, axon by axon, and she was running out of adjust. “Let’s just do it, okay? Please? Okay? I gotta get out. I feel like I wish I was dogshit so I could be something better.”
    “I can’t handle two years in the Big, Eddie, and I’ll do what I gotta, dudeski,” Jerome heard himself say, realizing he was helping Jessie threaten Eddie. Amazed at himself. Not his style.
    “It’s all of us or nobody, Eddie,” Bones said.
    Eddie was quiet for a while.
    Jerome had turned off his chip, because it was thinking endlessly about Jessie’s plan, and all it came up with was an ugly model of the risks. You had to know when to go with intuition.
    Jerome was committed. And he was standing on the brink of link. The time was now, starting with Jessie.
    Jessie was operator. He picked the order. First Eddie, to make sure about him. Then Jerome. Maybe because he had Jerome scoped for a refugee from the middle class, an anomaly here, and Jerome might try and raise the Heat on his chip, make a deal. Once they had him linked in, he was locked up.
    After Jerome, it’d be Bones and then Swish.
    They held hands, so that the link signal, transmitted from the chip using the electric field generated by the brain, would be carried with the optimum fidelity.
    He heard them exchange frequency designates, numbers strung like beads in the darkness, and heard the hiss of suddenly indrawn breaths as Jessie and Eddie linked in. And he heard, “Let’s go, Jerome.”
    Jerome’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, the night giving up some of its buried light, and Jerome could just make a crude outline of Jessie’s features like a charcoal rubbing from an Aztec carving.
    Jerome reached to the back of his own head, found the glue-tufted hairs that marked his flap, and pulled the skin away from the chip’s jack unit. He tapped the chip. It didn’t take. He tapped it again, and this time he felt the shift in his bioelectricity; felt it hum between his teeth.
    Jerome’s chip communicated with his brain via an interface of nano-print configured rhodopsin protein; the ribosomes borrowing neurohumoral transmitters from the brain’s blood supply, reordering the transmitters so that they carried a programmed pattern of ion releases for transmission across synaptic gaps to the brain’s neuronal dendrites; the chip using magnetic resonance holography to collate with brain-stored memories and psychological trends. Declaiming to itself the mythology of the brain; reenacting on its silicon stage the Legends of his subjective world