Cyberpunk

sharpshooters had clipped away at the neon until the maintenance crews gave up. Even at noon the arcs were soot-black against faintest pearl.
    Where do you go when the world’s wealthiest criminal order is feeling for you with calm, distant fingers? Where do you hide from the Yakuza, so powerful that it owns comsats and at least three shuttles? The Yakuza is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I was born, the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse.
    Molly had an answer: you hide in the Pit, in the lowest circle, where any outside influence generates swift, concentric ripples of raw menace. You hide in Nighttown. Better yet, you hide above Nighttown, because the Pit’s inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown never sees, sweating under its own firmament of acrylic resin, up where the Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles, black-market cigarettes dangling from their lips.
    She had another answer, too.
    “So you’re locked up good and tight, Johnny-san? No way to get that program without the password?” She led me into the shadows that waited beyond the bright tube platform. The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration.
    “The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical contraautism prostheses.” I reeled off a numb version of my standard sales pitch. “Client’s code is stored in a special chip; barring Squids, which we in the trade don’t like to talk about, there’s no way to recover your phrase. Can’t drug it out, cut it out, torture it. I don’t know it, never did.”
    “Squids? Crawly things with arms?” We emerged into a deserted street market. Shadowy figures watched us from across a makeshift square littered with fish heads and rotting fruit.
    “Superconducting quantum interference detectors. Used them in the war to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.”
    “Yeah? Navy stuff? From the war? Squid’ll read that chip of yours?” She’d stopped walking, and I felt her eyes on me behind those twin mirrors.
    “Even the primitive models could measure a magnetic field a billionth the strength of geomagnetic force; it’s like pulling a whisper out of a cheering stadium.”
    “Cops can do that already, with parabolic microphones and lasers.”
    “But your data’s still secure.” Pride in profession. “No government’ll let their cops have Squids, not even the security heavies. Too much chance of interdepartmental funnies; they’re too likely to Watergate you.”
    “Navy stuff,” she said, and her grin gleamed in the shadows. “Navy stuff. I got a friend down here who was in the navy, name’s Jones. I think you’d better meet him. He’s a junkie, though. So we’ll have to take him something.”
    “A junkie?”
    “A dolphin.”
    He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin’s point of view he might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water slopped over the side, wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg.
    He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-white hide.
    Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded down the side of the tank.
    “What is this place?” I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting chainlink and things under tarps. Above the tank hung a clumsy wooden framework, crossed and recrossed by rows of dusty Christmas lights.
    “Funland. Zoo and carnival rides. ‘Talk with the War Whale.’ All that. Some whale Jones is . . .”
    Jones reared again and fixed me with a sad and ancient eye.
    “How’s he talk?” Suddenly I was anxious to go.
    “That’s the catch. Say ‘Hi,’ Jones.”
    And all the bulbs lit simultaneously. They were flashing red, white, and blue.
    RWBRWBRWB
    RWBRWBRWB
    RWBRWBRWB
    RWBRWBRWB
    RWBRWBRWB
    “Good with symbols, see, but the code’s restricted. In the navy they had him wired into an audiovisual display.” She drew the narrow package from a jacket pocket. “Pure shit, Jones. Want it?” He froze in the water and started to sink. I felt a strange panic, remembering that he