Cyberpunk

wasn’t a fish that he could drown. “We want the key to Johnny’s bank, Jones. We want it fast.”
    The lights flickered, died.
    “Go for it, Jones!”
    B
    BBBBBBBBB
    B
    B
    B
    Blue bulbs, cruciform.
    Darkness.
    “Pure! It’s clean . Come on, Jones.”
    WWWWWWWWW
    WWWWWWWWW
    WWWWWWWWW
    WWWWWWWWW
    WWWWWWWWW
    White sodium glare washed her features, stark monochrome, shadows cleaving from her cheekbones.
    R RRRRR
    R R
    RRRRRRRRR
    R R
    RRRRR R
    The arms of the red swastika were twisted in her silver glasses. “Give it to him,” I said. “We’ve got it.”
    Ralfi Face. No imagination.
    Jones heaved half his armored bulk over the edge of his tank, and I thought the metal would give way. Molly stabbed him overhand with the Syrette, driving the needle between two plates. Propellant hissed. Patterns of light exploded, spasming across the frame and then fading to black.
    We left him drifting, rolling languorously in the dark water. Maybe he was dreaming of his war in the Pacific, of the cyber mines he’d swept, nosing gently into their circuitry with the Squid he’d used to pick Ralfi’s pathetic password from the chip buried in my head.
    “I can see them slipping up when he was demobbed, letting him out of the navy with that gear intact, but how does a cybernetic dolphin get wired to smack?”
    “The war,” she said. “They all were. Navy did it. How else you get ’em working for you?”
    “I’m not sure this profiles as good business,” the pirate said, angling for better money. “Target specs on a comsat that isn’t in the book—”
    “Waste my time and you won’t profile at all,” said Molly, leaning across his scarred plastic desk to prod him with her forefinger.
    “So maybe you want to buy your microwaves somewhere else?” He was a tough kid, behind his Mao-job. A Nighttowner by birth, probably.
    Her hand blurred down the front of his jacket, completely severing a lapel without even rumpling the fabric.
    “So we got a deal or not?”
    “Deal,” he said staring at his ruined lapel with what he must have hoped was only polite interest. “Deal.”
    While I checked the two records we’d bought, she extracted the slip of paper I’d given her from the zippered wrist pocket of her jacket. She unfolded it and read silently, moving her lips. She shrugged. “This is it?”
    “Shoot,” I said, punching the RECORD studs of the two desks simultaneously.
    “Christian White,” she recited, “and his Aryan Reggae Band.”
    Faithful Ralfi, a fan to his dying day.
    Transition to idiot/savant mode is always less abrupt than I expect it to be. The pirate broadcaster’s front was a failing travel agency in a pastel cube that boasted a desk, three chairs, and a faded poster of a Swiss orbital spa. A pair of toy birds with blown-glass bodies and tin legs were sipping monotonously from a Styrofoam cup of water on the ledge beside Molly’s shoulder. As I phased into mode, they accelerated gradually until their Day-Glo-feathered crowns became solid arcs of color. The LEDs that told seconds on the plastic wall clock had become meaningless pulsing grids, and Molly and the Mao-faced boy grew hazy, their arms blurring occasionally in insect-quick ghosts of gesture. And then it all faded to cool gray static and an endless tone poem in the artificial language.
    I sat and sang dead Ralfi’s stolen program for three hours.
    The mall runs forty kilometers from end to end, a ragged overlap of Fuller domes roofing what was once a suburban artery. If they turn off the arcs on a clean day, a gray approximation of sunlight filters through layers of acrylic, a view like the prison sketches of Giovanni Piranesi. The three southernmost kilometers roof Nighttown. Nighttown pays no taxes, no utilities. The neon arcs are dead, and the geodesics have been smoked black by decades of cooking fires. In the nearly total darkness of a Nighttown noon, who notices a few dozen mad children lost in the rafters?
    We’d been climbing for two hours, up concrete stairs and steel ladders with perforated rungs, past abandoned gantries and dust-covered tools. We’d started in what looked like a disused maintenance yard, stacked with triangular roofing segments. Everything there had been covered with that same uniform layer of spraybomb graffiti: gang names, initials, dates back to the turn of the century. The graffiti followed us up, gradually thinning until a single name was repeated at intervals. LO TEK. In dripping black