Cyberpunk

took on a perpetual dazzled squint as though holy light surrounded everything around me.
    I never told Grizz though. Nor about the fact that every time I went to jack into the Net, the drug got between me and the interface. I was glad I hadn’t seen Lorelei—I was starting to wonder if she’d given it to me deliberately. It scared me. I lost myself in Capturing more and more. I started delivering packages for Ajah and Susanne, and laid aside enough cash to buy a simple editing package for it.
    Editing is internal work, so you can do it dozing on a park bench if you’ve got the mental room to spread out and take a look at the big picture. I did. What I wanted to do was start selling clips on the channels. It’d take a while though, I could tell, and I was still working out how I’d upload it, given the problems jacking in. I figured at some point I’d burn it off to flash memory and then use an all-accessible terminal, with keyboard and mouse. In the meantime I caged what meals I could, slept on a round of couches, and showed up at Ajah’s often.
    Sometimes after a meal, he’d roll out the still on its mismatched castors, and we’d strain its milky contents in order to drink them. He and I would sit near the window, passing the bottle back and forth.
    Early on into Grizz’s apprenticeship, he asked me about the memory. He said “That med complex near the dock, the one that went bust a few months ago, did you guys ever score out of there? I know that was in your turf.”
    “Went in one time and scored a little crap but not much.” Our hands were both touching the bottle as I took it from him. I added, “Nothing but some old memory,” and felt the bottle twitch in his sudden anguished grip.
    “What did you do with it?” he asked, watching me pour.
    “We used it. How do you think she did so well on the Exams?”
    “But you didn’t,” he said, confused.
    “Well, Grizz isn’t a moron, and I am, which would account for it.”
    He grunted and took the bottle back.
    “If I’d taken stuff from there,” he said. “I’d just not mention it to anyone ever. There have been some nasty customers asking around about it.”
    I went to visit Grizz a few weeks later; her roommate was out of town for the weekend. We ate in the cafeteria off her meal card: more food than I’d seen in a long time, and then went back to her room and stripped naked to lie in each other’s arms.
    We could have been there hours, but eventually we got hungry and went back to the cafeteria. The rest of the weekend was the same progression, repeated multiple times, up until Sunday afternoon, and the consequent tearful, snuffling goodbye. I’d never seen Grizz act sentimental before; it didn’t suit her.
    “You need to do something,” she said, looking strained.
    “Other than planning on riding your gravy train?”
    “It’s not that, Jonny, and you know it.”
    I could have told her then about the Capturing, but I was annoyed. Let her think me just another peon, living off dole and scavenging. Fine by me.
    The wall phone rang, and she broke off staring at me to answer it.
    “Hello,” she said. “Hello?” She shrugged and hung it up. “Nothing but breathing. Fuckazoid pervs.”
    “Get much of that?”
    “Every once in a while,” she said. “Some of the other students don’t like Dregs. Afraid I might stink up the classroom.”
    It irritated me, that she’d said how much she liked it and now was asking for sympathy, as though her life were worse than mine. So I left it there and made my goodbye. She clung to the doorframe, staring after me.
    It wasn’t as though I had much to leave behind; it was perhaps my mind’s sullen statement, forgetting my jacket. I got four blocks away, then jogged back, ran up the stairs. Knocked on the door and found silence, so I slipped the lock and went in.
    By then . . . by then she was dead, and they had already left her. The memory was stripped from her skin, leaving ragged, oozing marks. Her throat had been cut with callous efficiency.
    I stood there for at least ten minutes, just breathing. There was no chance she was not dead. The world was shaking me by the shoulders and all I did was stand there, Capturing, longer than I had ever managed before. Every detail, every dust mote riding the air, the smell of the musty carpeting and a quarrel next door over a student named Dian.
    I didn’t stick around to talk to the cops. I knew the roommate would be there soon to call it in. I