Neuromancer by William Gibson

...

11.

...

    "This cost a lot," she said, extending her right hand as though it held an  invisible fruit. The  five blades  slid  out,  then  retracted smoothly. "Costs to go to Chiba,  costs to get  the surgery, costs to have  them  jack your nervous  system up so  you'll have  the reflexes to go  with  the gear. .  . You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here.  Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke,  to start with, 'cause once they plant the cut-out  chip, it seems  like free money. Wake  up sore, sometimes, but that's it. Renting the  goods, is all. You aren't in,  when it's  all  happening.  House  has  software  for  whatever a customer  wants to  pay for..."  She cracked  her knuckles. "Fine.  I  was getting  my money.  Trouble was,  the cut-out  and  the  circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren't  compatible. So the  worktime started  bleeding in, and I  could remember it. . . But  it was just  bad dreams,  and not all bad."  She  smiled.  "Then  it  started  getting  strange."  She  pulled his cigarettes  from  his pocket and lit one. "The house  found  out what  I was doing  with  the money. I  had the blades in, but  the fine neuromotor  work would  take another three trips. No way I was ready to give up puppet time." She inhaled, blew  out  a  stream of smoke, capping  it  with three  perfect rings. "So the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. Berlin, that's the place for snuff, you know? Big market  for mean kicks, Berlin. I  never knew who wrote the  program they switched me to, but it was based on all the classics."
     "They knew you  were picking up on this  stuff? That you were conscious while you were working?"
     "I  wasn't  conscious.  It's like  cyberspace,  but  blank. Silver. It smells  like rain. . . You  can see  yourself orgasm,  it's like a  little nova right out  on the  rim of  space. But I was starting  to remember.  Like  dreams,  you  know.  And  they didn't tell  me.  They switched the software and started renting to specialty markets."
     She seemed to  speak from  a  distance.  "And I knew,  but I kept quiet about it. I needed the money. The dreams got worse and worse, and  I'd tell  myself  that at  least some  of  them  were just dreams,  but  by then I'd started to figure that the boss had a whole little clientele going for me. Nothing's too good for Molly, the boss says, and gives me this shit  raise." She shook her head. "That prick  was charging eight times what he was paying me, and he thought I didn't know."
     "So what was he charging for?"
     "Bad dreams.  Real ones. One night . . . one night, I'd just come back from Chiba." She dropped  the cigarette, ground it  out  with her heel, and sat  down,  leaning against the wall. "Surgeons went way in, that  trip. Tricky. They must have  disturbed the  cut-out chip.  I came  up. I was into this  routine with a customer. . ." She  dug her  fingers  deep in the foam. "Senator,  he was. Knew his fat  face  right away. We were both covered with blood. We  weren't  alone.  She  was  all.  . ."  She  tugged  at  the temperfoam. "Dead. And  that fat  prick, he  was saying, ‘What's wrong.  What's wrong?'  ‘Cause we  weren't  finished yet. . ."
     She began to shake.
     "So I guess I gave the Senator what he  really  wanted, you know?"  The shaking stopped. She released the foam and ran her fingers back  through her dark hair. "The house put a contract out on me. I had to hide for a while."
     Case stared at her.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

...

20.

...

     He refused her arms, that night, refused the food she offered him,  the place  beside  her in the nest of blankets and  shredded  foam.  He crouched beside the door, finally, and watched her sleep, listening to the wind scour the structure's  walls.  Every hour or so, he rose and  crossed to the makeshift stove,  adding  fresh driftwood from the  pile beside it. None  of this was real, but cold was cold.
     She  wasn't real, curled there  on her side  in the firelight. He watched her mouth, the lips parted slightly. She was the girl  he remembered from their trip across the Bay, and that was cruel.
     "Mean, motherfucker,"  he  whispered to the  wind. "Don't take  a chance, do you? Wouldn't give me any junkie, huh? I know what this is.
. ."  He tried to keep the desperation from  his voice. "I know, see? I know who you are.  You're the  other  one. 3Jane told  Molly. Burning bush. That wasn't Wintermute, it was you. He tried to warn  me  off with the Braun.  Now  you  got me flatlined, you got me here. Nowhere. With  a ghost.
Like I remember her before..."
     She stirred  in  her  sleep, called something out, drawing a  scrap  of blanket across her shoulder and cheek.
     "You   aren't  anything,"   he  said  to   the   sleeping   girl.
"You're dead and you meant fuck-all to me anyway. Hear  that, buddy? I know what you're doing. I'm flatlined. This has all taken  about twenty  seconds,  right?  I'm out on  my  ass in that  library and  my brain's dead. And pretty  soon  it'll be  dead,  if  you got any sense. You don't want Wintermute to pull his scam off, is all,  so you can just hang me up here. Dixie'll run Kuang,  but his ass is dead and you  can  second guess his moves,  sure. This Linda shit, yeah, that's all been you, hasn't it? Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me into the Chiba construct,  but  he  couldn't. Said it  was too tricky.
That  was  you moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn't it? That was you put her face on the dead puppet in Ashpool's room. Molly never saw that.  You  just  edited her simstim signal. 'Cause you think  you can hurt  me. 'Cause you think  I gave a  shit.  Well,  fuck you, whatever you're called. You won. You win. But none  of it  means anything to me now, right? Think I care? So why'd you do it to me this  way?"  He was shaking again, his voice shrill.