Cyberpunk

appeared on a few thousand TV screens, through video tagging, transer graffiti. Growing up with a sense that media events were real and personal events were not. Anything that didn’t happen on the Grid didn’t happen. Even as he hated conventional programming, even as he regarded it as the cud of ruminants, still the net and tv and di-vees defined his sense of personal unreality; and left him unfinished.
    Jerome saw Jerome: perceiving himself unreal. Jerome: scamming a transer, creating a presence via video graffiti. Thinking he was doing it for reasons of radical statement. Seeing, now, that he was doing it to make himself feel substantial, to superimpose himself on the Media Grid . . .
    And then Eddie’s link was there, Eddie’s computer model sliding down over Jerome like a mudslide. Eddie seeing himself as a Legendary Wanderer, a rebel, a homemade mystic; his fantasy parting to reveal an anal-expulsive sociopath; a whiner perpetually scanning for someone to blame for his sour luck.
    Suddenly Bones tumbled into the link; a complex worldview that was a sort of streetside sociobiology, mitigated by a loyalty to friends, a mystical faith in brain chips and amphetamines. His underside a masochistic dwarf, the troll of self-doubt, lacerating itself with guilt.
    And then Swish, a woman with an unsightly growth, errant glands that were like tumors in her, something other people called “testicles.” Perpetually hungry for the means to dampen the pain of an infinite self-derision that mimicked her father’s utter rejection of her. A mystical faith in synthetic morphine.
    . . . Jerome mentally reeling with disorientation, seeing the others as a network of distorted self-images, caricatures of grotesque ambitions. Beyond them he glimpsed another realm through a break in the psychic clouds: the Plateau, the whispering plane of brain chips linked on forbidden frequencies, an electronic haven for doing deals unseen by cops; a Plateau prowled only by the exquisitely ruthless; a vista of enormous challenges and inconceivable risks and always the potential for getting lost, for madness. A place roamed by the wolves of wetware.
    There was a siren quiver from that place, a soundless howling, pulling at them . . . drawing them in . . .
    “ Uh-uh , wolflost, pross,” Bones said, maybe aloud or maybe through the chips. Translated from chip shorthand, those two syllables meant. “Stay away from the Plateau, or we get sucked into it, we lose our focus. Concentrate on parallel processing function.”
    Jerome looked behind his eyelids, sorted through the files. He moved the cursor down . . .
    Suddenly, it was there. The group-thinking capacity looming above them, a sentient skyscraper. They all felt a rush of megalomaniacal pleasure in identifying with it; with a towering edifice of Mind. Five chips became One.
    They were ready. Jessie transmitted the bait.
    Alerted to an illegal use of implant chips, the trashcan was squeaking down the hall, scanning to precisely locate the source. It came to a sudden stop, rocking on its wheels in front of their cell. Jessie reached through the bars and touched its input jack.
    The machine froze with a clack midway through a turn, and hummed as it processed what they fed it. Would the robot bite?
    Bones had a program for the IBM Cyberguard Fourteens, with all the protocol and a range of sample entry codes. Parallel processing from samples took less than two seconds to decrypt the trashcan’s access code. Then—
    They were in. The hard part was the reprogramming.
    Jerome found the way. He told the trashcan that he wasn’t Eric Wexler, because the DNA code was all wrong, if you looked close enough; what we have here is a case of mistaken identity.
    Since this information seemed to be coming from authorized sources—the decrypted access code made them authorized—the trashcan fell for the gag and opened the cage.
    The trashcan took the five Eric Wexlers down the hall—that was Jessie’s doing, showing them how to make it think of five as one, something his people had learned from the immigration computers. It escorted them through the plastiflex door, through the steel door, and into Receiving. The human guard was heaping sugar into his antique Ronald McDonald coffee mug and watching The Mutilated on his wallet TV. Bones and Jessie were in the room and moving in on him before he broke free of the television and went for the button. Bones’s long left arm spiked out and his stiffened