Cyberpunk

capitals.
    “Who’s Lo Tek?”
    “Not us, boss.” She climbed a shivering aluminum ladder and vanished through a hole in a sheet of corrugated plastic. “‘Low technique, low technology.’” The plastic muffled her voice. I followed her up, nursing an aching wrist. “Lo Teks, they’d think that shotgun trick of yours was effete.”
    An hour later I dragged myself up through another hole, this one sawed crookedly in a sagging sheet of plywood, and met my first Lo Tek.
    “’S okay,” Molly said, her hand brushing my shoulder.
    “It’s just Dog. Hey, Dog.”
    In the narrow beam of her taped flash, he regarded us with his one eye and slowly extruded a thick length of grayish tongue, licking huge canines. I wondered how they wrote off tooth-bud transplants from Dobermans as low technology. Immunosuppressives don’t exactly grow on trees.
    “Moll.” Dental augmentation impeded his speech. A string of saliva dangled from the twisted lower lip. “Heard ya comin’. Long time.” He might have been fifteen, but the fangs and the bright mosaic of scars combined with the gaping socket to present a mask of total bestiality. It had taken time and a certain kind of creativity to assemble that face, and his posture told me he enjoyed living behind it. He wore a pair of decaying jeans, black with grime and shiny along the creases. His chest and feet were bare. He did something with his mouth that approximated a grin. “Bein’ followed, you.”
    Far off, in Nighttown, a water vendor cried his trade.
    “Strings jumping, Dog?” She swung her flash to the side, and I saw thin cords tied to eyebolts, cords that ran to the edge and vanished.
    “Kill the fuckin’ light!”
    She snapped it off.
    “How come the one who’s followin’ you’s got no light?”
    “Doesn’t need it. That one’s bad news, Dog. Your sentries give him a tumble, they’ll come home in easy-to-carry sections.”
    “This a friend friend, Moll?” He sounded uneasy. I heard his feet shift on the worn plywood.
    “No. But he’s mine. And this one,” slapping my shoulders, “he’s a friend. Got that?”
    “Sure,” he said, without much enthusiasm, padding to the platform’s edge, where the eyebolts were. He began to pluck out some kind of message on the taut cords.
    Nighttown spread beneath us like a toy village for rats; tiny windows showed candlelight, with only a few harsh, bright squares lit by battery lanterns and carbide lamps. I imagined the old men at their endless games of dominoes, under warm, fat drops of water that fell from wet wash hung out on poles between the plywood shanties. Then I tried to imagine him climbing patiently up through the darkness in his zoris and ugly tourist shirt, bland and unhurried. How was he tracking us?
    “Good,” said Molly. “He smells us.”
    “Smoke?” Dog dragged a crumpled pack from his pocket and prized out a flattened cigarette. I squinted at the trademark while he lit it for me with a kitchen match. Yiheyuan filters. Beijing Cigarette Factory. I decided that the Lo Teks were black marketeers. Dog and Molly went back to their argument, which seemed to revolve around Molly’s desire to use some particular piece of Lo Tek real estate.
    “I’ve done you a lot of favors, man. I want that floor. And I want the music.”
    “You’re not Lo Tek . . .”
    This must have been going on for the better part of a twisted kilometer, Dog leading us along swaying catwalks and up rope ladders. The Lo Teks leech their webs and huddling places to the city’s fabric with thick gobs of epoxy and sleep above the abyss in mesh hammocks. Their country is so attenuated that in places it consists of little more than holds and feet, sawed into geodesic struts.
    The Killing Floor, she called it. Scrambling after her, my new Eddie Bax shoes slipping on worn metal and damp plywood, I wondered how it could be any more lethal than the rest of the territory. At the same time I sensed that Dog’s protests were ritual and that she already expected to get whatever it was she wanted.
    Somewhere beneath us, Jones would be circling his tank, feeling the first twinges of junk sickness. The police would be boring the Drome regulars with questions about Ralfi. What did he do? Who was he with before he stepped outside? And the Yakuza would be settling its ghostly bulk over the city’s data banks, probing for faint images of me reflected in numbered accounts, securities transactions, bills for utilities. We’re an