Cyberpunk

soup.”
    “Yeah, that’s true, but we’ll let it cool down after it cooks, it’ll still taste good.” He sat on the floor and turned on the hot plate, poured water from the plastic jug into the pot, opened the can of soup, mixed it in. While they were spooning it out Rochelle Jackson knocked on the door and came in.
    “Feeling better, I see.” Rochelle had been a nurse before her hospital closed, and Lee had enlisted her help when Debra fell sick. “We’ll have to take your temperature later.”
    Lee wolfed down crackers while he watched Rochelle fuss over Debra. Eventually she took a temperature and Lee walked her out.
    “It’s still pretty high, Lee.”
    “What’s she got?” he asked, as he always did. Frustration.
    “I don’t know any more than yesterday. Some kind of flu, I guess.”
    “Would a flu hang on this long?”
    “Some of them do. Just keep her sleeping and drinking as much as you can, and feed her when she’s hungry. Don’t be scared, Lee.”
    “I can’t help it! I’m afraid she’ll get sicker . . . And there ain’t nothing I can do!”
    “Yeah, I know. Just keep her fed. You’re doing just what I would do.”
    After cleaning up, he left Debra to sleep and went back down to the street, to join the men on the picnic tables and benches in the park tucked into the intersection. This was the “living room” on summer evenings, and all the regulars were there in their usual spots, sitting on tables or bench backs. “Hey there, Robbie! What’s happening?”
    “Not much, not much. No man, don’t kick that soccer ball at me, I can’t kick no soccer ball tonight.”
    “You been walking the streets, hey?”
    “How else we going to find her to bring her home to you.”
    “Hey lookee here, Ghost is bringing out his TV.”
    “It’s Tuesday night at the movies, y’all!” Ghost called out as he approached and plunked a little hologram TV and a Honda generator on the picnic table. They laughed and watched Ghost’s pale skin glow in the dusk as he hooked the system up.
    “Where’d you get this one, Ghost? You been sniffing around the funeral parlors again?”
    “You bet I have!” Ghost grinned. “This one’s picture is all fucked up, but it still works—I think—”
    He turned the set on and blurry 3-D figures swam into shape in a cube above the box—all in dark shades of blue.
    “Man, we must have the blues tonight,” Ramon remarked. “Look at that!”
    “They all look like Ghost,” said Lee.
    “Hey, it works, don’t it?” Ghost said. Hoots of derision. “And dig the sound! The sound works—”
    “Turn it up then.”
    “It’s up all the way.”
    “What’s this?” Lee laughed. “We got to watch frozen midgets whispering, is that it, Ghost? What do midgets say on a cold night?”
    “Who the fuck is this?” said Ramon.
    Johnnie said, “That be Sam Spade, the greatest computer spy in the world.”
    “How come he live in that shack, then?” Ramon asked.
    “That’s to show it’s a tough scuffle making it as a computer spy, real tough.”
    “How come he got four million dollars’ worth of computers right there in the shack, then?” Ramon asked, and the others commenced giggling, Lee loudest of all. Johnnie and Ramon could be killers sometimes. A bottle of rum started around, and Steve broke in to bounce the soccer ball on the TV, smashing the blue figures repeatedly.
    “Watch out now, Sam about to go plug his brains in to try and find out who he is.”
    “And then he gonna be told of some stolen wetware he got to find.”
    “I got some wetware myself, only I call it a shirt.”
    Steve dropped the ball and kicked it against the side of the picnic table, and a few of the watchers joined in a game of pepper. Some men in a stopped van shouted a conversation with the guys on the corner. Those watching the show leaned forward. “Where’s he gonna go?” said Ramon. “Hong Kong? Monaco? He gonna take the bus on over to Monaco?”
    Johnnie shook his head. “Rio, man. Fucking Rio de Janeiro.”
    Sure enough, Sam was off to Rio. Ghost choked out an objection: “Johnnie—ha!—you must have seen this one before.”
    Johnnie shook his head, though he winked at Lee. “No man, that’s just where all the good stolen wetware ends up.”
    A series of commercials interrupted their fun: deodorant, burglar-killers, cars. The men in the van drove off. Then the show was back, in Rio, and Johnnie said, “He’s about to meet a slinky Afro-Asian spy.”
    When