Cyberpunk

might have passed her in the downstairs lobby: a thin Eurasian woman with a scar riding her face like an emotion.
    When I got to Ajah’s, they’d been there as well. He’d taken a while to die, and they had paid him with leisure, leisure to contemplate what they were doing to him. But he was unmistakably dead.
    They had caught him in the preparations for a meal; a block of white chicken meat, sized and shaped like a brick, lay on the cutting board, his good, all-purpose knife next to it. “Man just needs one good knife for everything,” he used to say. A bowl of breadcrumbs and an egg container sat near the chicken.
    Someone knocked on the door behind me, and opened it even as I turned. It was Lorelei, still well-heeled and clean. Her bosses must be paying well.
    “Jonny,” she said. She didn’t even look at Ajah’s body. Unsurprised. “Is it true?”
    “Is what true?”
    “They said he gave up a name, just one, but when I heard the name, I knew there had to be two.”
    “What was the name?”
    She chuckled. “You know already, I think. Grizz.”
    “Because of the memory?”
    “It’s more than memory. It grows as you add to it. Self-perpetuating. New tech—very special. Very expensive.”
    “We found it in the garbage!”
    She laughed. “You’ve done it yourself, I know. What’s the best way to steal from work?”
    “Stick it in the trash and pick it up later,” I realized.
    She nodded. “But when two streets come along, and take it first, you’re out of luck.” Her smile was cold. “So then you ask around, send a few people to track it.”
    “Did you mean to poison the Net for me? Was that part of it?”
    “You mean you haven’t found the cure yet?” she said. “Play around with folk remedies. It’ll come to you. But no. I was angry and figured I’d fuck you over the way you did me.”
    “Do they know my name?”
    She smiled in silence at me.
    “Answer me, you cunt,” I said. Three steps forward and I was in her face.
    She backed up toward the door, still smiling.
    The knife was in easy reach. I stabbed her once, then again. And again. Capturing every moment, letting it sear itself into the memory, and I swear it went hot as the bytes of experience wrote themselves along my back.
    “They don’t—” she started to say, then choked and fell forward, her head flopping to one side in time with the knife blows. She almost fell on me, but I pushed her away. Her wallet held black-market script, and plenty of it, along with some credit cards. I didn’t see any salvageable mods. The GPS’s purple glimmer tempted me, but they can backtrack those. I didn’t want anything traceable.
    All the time that I rifled through her belongings, feeling the dead weight she had become, I played the memory back of the forward lurch, the head flop and twist, again, again, her eyes going dull and glassy. The thoughts seared on my back as though it were on fire, but I kept on recording it, longer and more intense than I ever had before.
    She was right about the folk remedies; feverfew and valerian made the drug relax its hold and let me slide back into cyberspace. I’ve published a few pieces: a spring day with pigeons, an experimental subway ride, a sunset over the river. Pretty stuff, where I can find it. It seems scarce.
    One reviewer called me a brave new talent; another easy and glib. The sales are still slow, but they’ll get better. My latest show is called “Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars”—all stuff on the beach at dawn, the gulls walking back and forth at the waves’ edge and the foam clinging to the wet sand before it’s blown away by the wind.
    I don’t use the Captures of Grizz’s body or Lorelei’s death in my art, but I replay them often, obsessively. Sitting on the toilet, showering, eating, walking—Capturing other things is the only way I have to escape them.
    Between the royalties and Susanne’s continued employment though, I do well enough. She’s moved into Ajah’s place, and I’ve taken the room behind the clothing store where she used to live. I cook what I can there, small and tasteless meals, and watch the memories in my head. Memories of moments, as bright as falling stars.

ROCK ON

----
    Pat Cadigan

    Rain woke me. I thought, shit, here I am, Lady Rain-in-the- Face, because that’s where it was hitting, right in the old face. Sat up and saw I was still on Newbury Street. See beautiful downtown Boston. Was Newbury Street downtown? In the