ew on  a Damrak thoroughfare. Paris  was a  blurred  dream. Shopping.
She'd taken him shopping.
     He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that lay at his
feet, and knelt beside the bags. The first one he opened  was Molly's:
neatly folded clothing and small  expensive-looking gadgets. The  second was
stuffed with things he didn't remember buying: books, tapes, a Simstim
deck,  clothing with French and Italian labels.  Beneath a green t-shirt, he
discovered a flat, origami-wrapped package, recycled Japanese paper.
     The paper tore when  he  picked  it up; a bright nine-pointed star fell
– to stick upright in a crack in the parquet.
     "Souvenir,"  Molly  said.  "I  noticed  you   were  always  looking  at
'em." He  turned and saw her sitting cross legged on the bed, sleepily
scratching her stomach with burgundy nails.

     "Someone's  coming  later to secure the place," Armitage said. He
stood  in the open doorway with an  old-fashioned magnetic key  in his hand.
Molly was making coffee on a tiny German stove she took from her bag.
     "I  can  do  it,"  she  said.  "I got  enough gear  already.  Infrascan
perimeter, screamers. . ."
     "No," he said, closing the door. "I want it tight."
     "Suit  yourself." She wore a  dark mesh t-shirt tucked into baggy black
cotton pants.
     "You ever the heat, Mr. Armitage?" Case  asked,  from where he sat, his
back against a wall.
     Armitage  was no  taller than Case, but with  his  broad  shoulders and
military  posture  he seemed to fill the  doorway. He wore  a somber Italian
suit; in his right hand he held a  briefcase of soft black calf. The Special
Forces earring was gone. The handsome,  inexpressive  features  offered  the
routine beauty of the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past
decade's  leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes heightened
the effect of a mask. Case began to regret the question.
     "Lots of Forces types wound up cops,  I  mean. Or corporate  security,"
Case added uncomfortably. Molly handed  him a steaming mug of  coffee. "That
number you had them do on my pancreas, that's like a cop routine."
     Armitage closed the door and  crossed the  room,  to stand  in front of
Case. "You're a lucky boy, Case. You should thank me."
     "Should I?" Case blew noisily on his coffee.
     "You needed a new pancreas. The one we  bought for you frees you from a
dangerous dependency."
     "Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency."
     "Good, because you have a new one."
     "How's that?" Case looked up from his coffee.
     Armitage was smiling. "You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining
of various main arteries, Case.  They're  dissolving. Very slowly, but
they definitely are dissolving.  Each one contains a mycotoxin. You're
already  familiar with the  effect of  that mycotoxin. It was  the one  your
former employers gave you in Memphis."
     Case blinked up at the smiling mask.
     "You  have  time  to  do what  I'm  hiring  you  for,  Case,  but
that's all. Do the job and I can inject you with an  enzyme  that will
dissolve the bond without opening the sacs. Then  you'll need a  blood
change. Otherwise, the sacs melt and you're back where I found you. So
you see, Case, you need  us. You need us as badly as you did when we scraped
you up from the gutter."
     Case looked at Molly. She shrugged.
     "Now go down to the freight  elevator and bring  up the cases  you find
there."  Armitage handed him the magnetic key.  "Go on.  You'll  enjoy
this, Case. Like Christmas morning."

     Summer in the Sprawl,  the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass,  a
field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification.
     He sat beside Molly in filtered sunlight on the rim  of a  dry concrete
fountain, letting the endless stream of faces recapitulate the stages of his
life. First a child  with hooded eyes, a street boy, hands relaxed and ready
at his sides; then a teenager, face smooth and  cryptic beneath red glasses.
Case  remembered  fighting on a  rooftop at seventeen,  silent combat in the
rose glow of the dawn geodesics.
     He shifted on the  concrete, feeling it rough and cool through the thin
black  denim.  Nothing  here like the  electric dance  of Ninsei.  This  was
different  commerce, a different rhythm, in  the  smell  of  fast  food  and
perfume and fresh summer sweat.
     With his deck  waiting,  back in the  loft, an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7.
They'd left the  place littered with the abstract  white forms of  the
foam packing  units, with crumpled plastic  film and hundreds  of tiny  foam
beads. The  Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer;  a
Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade  ice; a Braun  coffee  maker.
Armitage had only waited for Case's approval of each piece.
     "Where'd he go?" Case had asked Molly.
     "He  likes hotels.  Big  ones. Near  airports,  if  he  can  manage it.
Let's  go down to the street."  She'd zipped herself into an old
surplus vest with a dozen  oddly shaped pockets and  put on a  huge pair  of
black plastic sunglasses that completely covered her mirrored insets.
     "You know  about  that  toxin  shit,  before?"  he  asked  her, by  the
fountain. She shook her head. "You think it's true?"
     "Maybe, maybe not. Works either way."
     "You know any way I can find out?"
     "No," she said, her right hand coming  up to form the jive for silence.
"That  kind of  kink's  too subtle  to show up on  a  scan." Then  her
fingers moved again: wait. "And you don't care that much anyway. I saw
you stroking that Sendai; man, it was pornographic." She laughed.
     "So what's he got  on you? How's  he  got the  working girl
kinked?"
     "Professional pride, baby, that's all." And  again the  sign  for
silence.  "We're gonna  get some breakfast,  okay? Eggs,  real  bacon.
Probably  kill you,  you  been eating that rebuilt Chiba  krill for so long.
Yeah,  come  on,  we'll  tube  in  to  Manhattan  and  get  us  a real
breakfast."

     Lifeless neon spelled out  METRO HOLOGRAFIX in  dusty capitals of glass
tubing. Case  picked  at a shred of  bacon that had lodged between his front
teeth. He'd given up asking her where they were going and why; jabs in
the ribs and the sign  for silence  were all he'd gotten in reply. She
talked  about  the season's fashions, about sports, about a  political
scandal in California he'd never heard of.
     He looked  around  the deserted  dead end street. A  sheet of newsprint
went  cart  wheeling  past  the intersection.  Freak winds in the East side;
something to do with convection,  and an  overlap in  the domes. Case peered
through the  window at the dead sign. Her Sprawl wasn't his Sprawl, he
decided. She'd led him through a dozen bars and clubs he'd never
seen before,  taking care  of  business,  usually with  no more than  a nod.
Maintaining connections.
     Something was moving in the shadows behind METRO HOLOGRAFIX.
     The  door  was  a  sheet  of  corrugated  roofing.  In  front   of  it,
Molly's  hands  flowed  through an  intricate sequence of jive that he
couldn't follow. He caught the sign for cash, a thumb brushing the tip
of the forefinger. The door swung inward  and she led him into the smell  of
dust. They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk  rising on either side
to walls lined with  shelves of crumbling  paperbacks.  The junk looked like
something  that had grown there, a fungus of  twisted  metal and plastic. He
could  pick out individual objects, but then  they seemed to blur  back into
the mass: the guts of  a television so  old  it was  studded  with the glass
stumps of  vacuum tubes, a crumpled  dish  antenna, a  brown  fiber canister
stuffed with corroded  lengths of alloy  tubing. An  enormous  pile  of  old
magazines  had  cascaded into  the open area,  flesh of lost summers staring
blindly up as  he  followed  her  back through a  narrow  canyon of impacted
scrap. He heard the door close behind them. He didn't look back.
     The tunnel ended with an  ancient Army blanket tacked across a doorway.
White light flooded out as Molly ducked past it.
     Four  square  walls of blank  white plastic, ceiling  to match, floored
with white hospital tile molded in a non slip pattern of small raised disks.
In  the center  stood a  square, white-painted wooden  table  and four white
folding chairs.
     The man who stood blinking  now in the doorway behind them, the blanket
draping one  shoulder  like a  cape, seemed to have been designed in  a wind
tunnel. His ears were very small, plastered  flat  against his narrow skull,
and his large  front teeth, revealed in  something that wasn't quite a
smile,  were canted sharply backward.  He wore an ancient  tweed  jacket and
held a  handgun of some kind in his left  hand. He peered at them,  blinked,
and dropped the gun into a jacket pocket. He gestured to  Case, pointed at a
slab of white plastic that leaned  near the doorway. Case crossed to  it and
saw that it was a solid sandwich of circuitry, nearly a centimeter thick. He
helped   the   man  lift   it  and  position   it  in  the  doorway.  Quick,
nicotine-stained  fingers  secured  it with a white velcro border.  A hidden
exhaust fan began to purr.
     "Time,"  the  man  said, straightening up, "and counting.  You know the
rate, Moll."
     "We need a scan, Finn. For implants."
     "So  get over there between the pylons. Stand on the  tape.  Straighten
up, yeah. Now turn around, gimme a full threesixty." Case watched her rotate
between  two  fragile-looking stands  studded with sensors. The  man  took a
small  monitor from his pocket and squinted at it. "Something  new  in  your
head, yeah. Silicon. coat of pyrolitic carbons. A clock, right? Your glasses
gimme  the  read  they  always  have,  low-temp  isotropic  carbons.  Better
biocompatibility with  pyrolitics, but  that's your  business,  right?
Same with your claws."
     "Get over here, Case." He saw  a scuffed X in black on the white floor.
"Turn around. Slow."
     "Guy's a virgin." The  man shrugged. "Some cheap  dental work, is
all."
     "You  read for biologicals?" Molly unzipped her green vest and took off
the dark glasses.
     "You think this is the Mayo? Climb on the table, kid, we'll run a
little  biopsy."  He laughed,  showing  more  of  his  yellow  teeth.  "Nah.
Finn's word, sweetmeat,  you got no little bugs, no cortex bombs.  You
want me to shut the screen down?"
     "Just for as long as it takes you to leave, Finn. Then we'll want
full screen for as long as we want it."
     "Hey, that's fine  by the Finn, Moll. You're only paying by
the second."
     They  sealed the door  behind him and  Molly turned  one  of the  white
chairs around and sat on it, chin resting on crossed forearms. "We talk now.
This is as private as I can afford."
     "What about?"
     "What we're doing."
     "What are we doing?"
     "Working for Armitage."
     "And you're saying this isn't for his benefit?"
     "Yeah. I  saw your  profile, Case. And I've seen the  rest of our
shopping list, once. You ever work with the dead?"
     "No." He  watched his  reflection  in her glasses.  "I could,  I guess.
I'm good at what I do." The present tense made him nervous.
     "You know that the Dixie Flatline's dead?"
     He nodded. "Heart, I heard."
     "You'll be working with his construct."  She smiled.  "Taught you
the ropes, huh? Him and Quine. I know Quine, by the way. Real asshole."
     "Somebody's  got a recording of McCoy Pauley? Who?" Now Case sat,
and rested his elbows on the table. "I can't see  it. He'd never
have sat still for it."
     "Sense/Net. Paid him mega, you bet your ass."
     "Quine dead too?"
     "No such luck. He's in Europe. He doesn't come into this."
     "Well,  if we can get  the  Flatline, we're home free. He was the
best. You know he died brain death three times?"
     She nodded.
     "Flat lined on his EEG. Showed me tapes. ‘Boy, I was daid.'
"
     "Look, Case, I been trying  to suss out who  it is  is backing Armitage
since I signed on. But it doesn't  feel like a zaibatsu, a government,
or some Yakuza subsidiary. Armitage gets orders. Like something tells him to
go  off to Chiba,  pick  up a  pillhead who's  making one  last wobble
throught   the  burnout   belt,  and  trade  a  program  for  the  operation
that'll  fix him up. We  could a bought twenty world class cowboys for
what the  market was ready  to pay for that surgical program. You were good,
but not that good. . ." She scratched the side of her nose.
     "Obviously makes sense to somebody," he said. "Somebody big."
     "Don't let  me hurt  your feelings."  She  grinned.  "We're
gonna be pulling one hardcore  run, Case, just  to get the  Flatline's
construct. Sense/Net has it  locked in  a library vault uptown. Tighter than
an eel's ass, Case.  Now, Sense/Net,  they got all their  new material
for the fall season locked in there too. Steal that and we'd be richer
than shit. But no, we gotta get us the Flatline and nothing else. Weird."
     "Yeah,  it's  all  weird. You're  weird, this  hole's
weird, and who's the weird little gopher outside in the hall?"
     "Finn's an old connection of mine. Fence, mostly. Software.  This
privacy biz is a sideline. But I got Armitage  to  let him be our tech here,
so when he shows up later, you never saw him. Got it?"
     "So what's Armitage got dissolving inside you?"
     "I'm an easy  make." She smiled.  "Anybody any good at  what they
do, that's what  they are, right? You gotta jack,  I gotta tussle." He
stared at her.
     "So tell me what you know about Armitage."
     "For starters, nobody named Armitage took part in any Screaming Fist. I
checked. But that doesn't mean much. He doesn't look like any of
the pics of the guys who got out." She shrugged. "Big deal. And  starters is
all I got." She  drummed her nails on the back of the chair.  "But you are a
cowboy, aren't  you?  I  mean, maybe  you  could  have a  little  look
around." She smiled.
     "He'd kill me."
     "Maybe. Maybe  not. I think he needs you, Case, and  real bad. Besides,
you're a clever john, no? You can winkle him, sure."
     "What else is on that list you mentioned?"
     "Toys.  Mostly for you.  And  one certified  psychopath  name  of Peter
Riviera. Real ugly customer."
     "Where's he?"
     "Dunno. But he's one sick  fuck, no lie. I  saw his profile." She
made a face. "God awful." She stood up and stretched, catlike. "So we got an
axis going, boy? We're together in this? Partners?"
     Case looked at her. "I gotta lotta choice, huh?"
     She laughed. "You got it, cowboy."

     "The matrix  has  its  roots  in  primitive  arcade  games,"  said  the
voice-over,  "in early graphics programs  and military experimentation  with
cranial jacks." On  the  Sony,  a two-dimensional  space war faded  behind a
forest   of  mathematically  generated   ferns,  demonstrating  the  spacial
possibilities  of  logarithmic spirals;  cold blue  military footage  burned
through,  lab  animals wired  into test  systems, helmets feeding  into fire
control  circuits  of  tanks  and  war  planes.  "Cyberspace.  A  consensual
hallucination  experienced daily by  billions  of  legitimate  operators, in
every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic
representation  of data abstracted from the banks  of every  computer in the
human system. Unthinkable  complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace
of  the  mind,  clusters  and  constellations  of  data.  Like  city lights,
receding. . ."
     "What's that?" Molly asked, as he flipped the channel selector.
     "Kid's show." A discontinuous  flood  of  images  as the selector
cycled. "Off," he said to the Hosaka.
     "You want to try now, Case?"
     Wednesday. Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with Molly beside him.
"You want me to go out, Case? Maybe easier for you, alone. . ." He shook his
head.
     "No.  Stay, doesn't matter." He settled the black terry sweatband
across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai  dermatrodes. He
stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing it, seeing instead the shop
window  on  Ninsei,  the chromed shuriken  burning  with  reflected neon. He
glanced up;  on  the wall, just above  the Sony, he'd hung  her  gift,
tacking  it there with a yellow-headed  drawing pin through the hole at  its
center.
     He closed his eyes.
     Found the ridged face of the power stud.
     And in the bloodlit  dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in
from the edge  of space,  hypnagogic images  jerking past like film compiled
from  random  frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala
of visual information. Please, he prayed, now –
     A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
     Now –
     Disk  beginning to  rotate,  faster, becoming  a  sphere of paler gray.
Expanding –
     And flowed,  flowered for him, fluid neon  origami trick, the unfolding
of his distance less home,  his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending
to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern
Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank
of America, and high and  very far away  he  saw the spiral arms of military
systems, forever beyond his reach.
     And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers
caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

     Molly was gone when he took the trodes off, and  the loft was dark.  He
checked the time. He'd been in cyberspace for five  hours. He  carried
the  Ono-Sendai  to one  of  the  new  worktables and collapsed  across  the
bedslab, pulling Molly's black silk sleeping bag over his head.
     The security package taped to the steel fire door bleeped twice. "Entry
requested," it said. "Subject is cleared per my program."
     "So open it." Case pulled the silk from his face and sat up as the door
opened, expecting to see Molly or Armitage.
     "Christ," said a hoarse voice, "I know that bitch can  see in the dark.
. ."  A squat  figure stepped in and closed the  door. "Turn the lights  on,
okay?" Case scrambled off the slab and found the old-fashioned switch.
     "I'm the Finn," said the Finn, and made a warning face at Case.
     "Case."
     "Pleased to  meecha, I'm sure. I'm doing  some hardware for
your boss, it looks like." The  Finn fished a pack of Partagas from a pocket
and lit one.  The smell of Cuban tobacco  filled the room. He crossed to the
worktable  and  glanced at  the OnoSendai. "Looks stock. Soon fix  that. But
here is your problem, kid." He took a filthy manila envelope from inside his
jacket,  flicked  ash  on  the floor,  and  extracted  a  featureless  black
rectangle from the  envelope. "Goddamn factory prototypes," he said, tossing
the thing down on the table. "Cast  'em into a  block  of  polycarbon,
can't get in with a laser without frying  the works. Booby-trapped for
x-ray, ultrascan, God knows what else. We'll get in, but there's
no rest for the wicked,  right?"  He folded the envelope with great care and
tucked it away in an inside pocket.
     "What is it?"
     "It's a  flip flop switch,  basically. Wire it into  your  Sendai
here,  you can access live or recorded Simstim without having to jack out of
the matrix."
     "What for?"
     "I  haven't  got  a clue.  Know  I'm  fitting  Moll  for  a
broadcast  rig, though,  so  it's  probably her sensorium you'll
access." The Finn scratched his chin. "So now  you get  to find out just how
tight those jeans really are, huh?"



        4
     Case sat in the loft with the dermatrodes strapped across his forehead,
watching motes dance in  the diluted sunlight that filtered through the grid
overhead. A countdown was in progress in one corner of the monitor screen.
     Cowboys didn't  get  into Simstim,  he thought,  because  it  was
basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic
tiara  dangling from a  Simstim  deck were basically  the same, and that the
cyberspace  matrix was  actually  a  drastic  simplification  of  the  human
sensorium, at  least in terms of presentation, but Simstim itself struck him
as  a gratuitous  multiplication of flesh  input. The commercial  stuff  was
edited, of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the  course of a
segment, you didn't feel it.
     The screen bleeped a two-second warning.
     The  new switch was patched into his Sendai with a thin ribbon of fiber
optics.
     And one and two and –
     Cyberspace  slid into existence from  the  cardinal  points. Smooth, he
thought, but not smooth enough. Have to work on it. . .
     Then he keyed the new switch.
     The  abrupt jolt into  other  flesh.  Matrix gone, a wave of  sound and
color.  . .  She  was moving  through  a crowded street, past stalls vending
discount software,  prices felt penned on sheets  of  plastic, fragments  of
music  from  countless  speakers. Smells of  urine,  free monomers, perfume,
patties  of  frying krill. For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly
to  control  her body. Then  he willed  himself  into passivity, became  the
passenger behind her eyes.
     The  glasses didn't seem to  cut  down  the  sunlight at  all. He
wondered if the built-in amps compensated automatically.  Blue alphanumerics
winked the time, low in her left peripheral field. Showing off, he thought.
     Her  body  language  was  disorienting,  her style  foreign. She seemed
continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of
her way, stepped sideways, made room.
     "How you doing, Case?" He heard the  words and  felt her form them. She
slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple  under warm silk.
The sensation made him  catch his breath.  She  laughed.  But the  link  was
one-way. He had no way to reply.
     Two blocks later,  she was threading the outskirts of Memory Lane. Case
kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he would have used to find his
way. He began to find the passivity of the situation irritating.
     The   transition  to   cyberspace,  when   he  hit   the   switch,  was
instantaneous. He punched himself down a wall of primitive ice belonging  to
the  New  York Public  Library,  automatically  counting potential  windows.
Keying back  into her sensorium,  into the sinuous  flow  of muscle,  senses
sharp and bright.
     He found himself  wondering  about the  mind he shared these sensations
with. What did he know about  her? That she was  another  professional; that
she  said her being, like  his, was the thing she  did  to make a living. He
knew the way she'd moved against  him,  earlier,  when she woke, their
mutual  grunt of unity when  he'd entered her, and that  she liked her
coffee black, afterward. . .
     Her  destination was one of the dubious software  rental complexes that
lined  Memory Lane. There  was a stillness,  a hush. Booths  lined a central
hall. The clientele  were  young, few  of them out of their  teens. They all
seemed  to  have  carbon  sockets  planted  behind  the  left  ear, but  she
didn't focus on them. The counters  that fronted the  booths displayed
hundreds of  slivers  of microsoft,  angular fragments  of  colored  silicon
mounted  under  oblong  transparent bubbles on  squares of white  cardboard.
Molly went to  the seventh booth  along the south wall. Behind the counter a
boy  with  a shaven  head  stared vacantly into space,  a  dozen  spikes  of
microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear.
     "Larry, you  in,  man?" She positioned  herself in front  of  him.  The
boy's eyes focused. He sat up in his chair and pried  a bright magenta
splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail .
     "Hey, Larry."
     "Molly." He nodded.
     "I have some work for some of your friends, Larry."
     Larry took  a flat plastic case from the pocket of  his red sport shirt
and flicked  it open, slotting the microsoft beside a dozen others. His hand
hovered, selected  a  glossy black chip  that  was slightly longer  than the
rest, and inserted it smoothly into his head. His eyes narrowed.
     "Molly's got a  rider,"  he said,  "and  Larry doesn't like
that."
     "Hey," she said, "I didn't  know  you were  so  . . .  sensitive.
I'm impressed. Costs a lot, to get that sensitive."
     "I know you, lady?" The blank look  returned.  "You looking to buy some
softs?"
     "I'm looking for the Moderns."
     "You  got a  rider,  Molly.  This says." He  tapped the black splinter.
"Somebody else using your eyes."
     "My partner."
     "Tell your partner to go."
     "Got something for the Panther Moderns, Larry."
     "What are you talking about, lady?"
     "Case,  you take off," she said, and he hit the switch,  instantly back
in the  matrix. Ghost impressions of  the software  complex hung  for a  few
seconds in the buzzing calm of cyberspace.
     "Panther  Moderns," he said  to the Hosaka, removing the  trodes. "Five
minute precis."
     "Ready," the computer said.
     It wasn't  a name he knew. Something new, something that had come
in since he'd been in Chiba. Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the
speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for  a dozen
weeks, and then vanish  utterly. "Go," he said. The Hosaka  had accessed its
array of libraries, journals, and news services.
     The precis began with a long hold on a color still  that Case  at first
assumed was a collage of some kind, a boy's  face snipped from another
image and  glued  to  a  photograph of  a paint-scrawled  wall.  Dark  eyes,
epicanthic  folds obviously the result of  surgery, an angry dusting of acne
across pale narrow cheeks. The Hosaka released the  freeze;  the  boy moved,
flowing  with  the  sinister  grace  of  a  mime  pretending to  be a jungle
predator.  His  body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern approximating
the scribbled brickwork sliding smoothly across his tight one piece. Mimetic
polycarbon.
     Cut to Dr.  Virginia Rambali, Sociology,  NYU,  her name,  faculty, and
school pulsing across the screen in pink alphanumerics.
     "Given  their  penchant for  these random  acts of  surreal  violence,"
someone  said, "it may  be difficult  for our viewers  to understand why you
continue to insist that this phenomenon isn't a form of terrorism."
     Dr. Rambali smiled.  "There is always  a point at  which  the terrorist
ceases to  manipulate the media gestalt.  A point at which  the violence may
well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has  become symptomatic of the
media  gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand  it  is inately
media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in
their degree  of  self-consciousness, in  their awareness  of the  extent to
which media divorce the  act of terrorism from the  original  sociopolitical
intent. . ."
     "Skip it," Case said.

     Case met his  first  Modern  two  days after  he'd  screened  the
Hosaka's  precis. The Moderns, he'd decided, were a contemporary
version of the Big Scientists of  his  own  late teens. There was a  kind of
ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something  that carried the coded
precepts  of  various  short-lived sub  cults  and  replicated them  at  odd
intervals. The Panther Moderns were a softhead variant on the Scientists. If
the technology  had been  available the  Big Scientists  would all have  had
sockets stuffed with microsofts.  It  was  the style that mattered  and  the
style  was  the  same.  The  Moderns  were  mercenaries,  practical  jokers,
nihilistic technofetishists.

     The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of diskettes from the
Finn was a soft-voiced boy called Angelo. His face was a simple  graft grown
on collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous.  It was
one of the  nastiest  pieces  of elective surgery Case  had ever  seen. When
Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large animal,  Case
was actually relieved. Tooth bud transplants. He'd seen that before.
     "You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you," Molly said.
Case nodded, absorbed in the patterns of the Sense/Net ice.
     This was it. This was what he was, who he was,  his being. He forgot to
eat. Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of sushi on the corner of the
long  table.  Sometimes he resented having to  leave  the deck  to  use  the
chemical  toilet they'd set  up in a  corner of the loft. Ice patterns
formed and reformed on the screen as  he probed for  gaps, skirted  the most
obvious   traps,   and   mapped    the   route   he'd   take   through
Sense/Net's ice. It  was good  ice. Wonderful ice. Its patterns burned
there while he  lay with his arm under Molly's shoulders, watching the
red  dawn through the steel grid of the skylight. Its rainbow pixel maze was
the first thing he saw when he woke. He'd go straight to the deck, not
bothering to dress,  and jack in. He was cutting it. He was working. He lost
track of days.
     And sometimes, falling  asleep, particularly when  Molly was off on one
of  her reconnaissance  trips  with  her rented cadre of  Moderns, images of
Chiba  came  flooding  back.  Faces and  Ninsei  neon. Once he  woke  from a
confused  dream  of  Linda  Lee,  unable  to  recall  who  she  was or  what
she'd ever meant to him. When he did remember, he jacked in and worked
for nine straight hours.
     The cutting of Sense/Net's ice took a total of nine days. "I said
a week," Armitage  said, unable to conceal his satisfaction when Case showed
him his plan for the run. "You took your own good time."
     "Balls," Case  said, smiling at  the screen.  "That's  good work,
Armitage."
     "Yes," Armitage  admitted,  "but don't let  it  go  to your head.
Compared  to what you'll  eventually be up against, this  is an arcade
toy."

     "Love you, Cat Mother," whispered the Panther Modern's  link man.
His voice  was  modulated  static  in Case's headset. "Atlanta, Brood.
Looks go. Go, got it?" Molly's voice was slightly clearer.
     "To hear is to obey." The Moderns were  using some kind of chicken wire
dish  in New Jersey  to bounce the  link  man's scrambled signal off a
Sons of Christ the  King satellite in geosynchronous orbit above  Manhattan.
They chose to regard the entire operation as an elaborate private  joke, and
their  choice  of  comsats seemed  to have  been  deliberate.  Molly's
signals were being beamed up from a  one-meter umbrella dish epoxyed  to the
roof of a black glass bank tower nearly as tall as the Sense/Net building.
     Atlanta. The recognition code  was simple. Atlanta to Boston to Chicago
to  Denver, five  minutes  for  each  city. If  anyone managed  to intercept
Molly's signal, unscramble it, synth her voice, the code would tip the
Moderns.  If she remained in the  building for more than twenty  minutes, it
was highly unlikely she'd be coming out at all.
     Case gulped the last of his  coffee, settled  the trodes  in place, and
scratched his chest  beneath his  black t-shirt. He had only a vague idea of
what  the Panther Moderns  planned as a diversion for the Sense/Net security
people. His job was  to make  sure  the intrusion program he'd written
would link  with the Sense/Net  systems when Molly needed it  to. He watched
the countdown in the corner of the screen. Two. One.
     He jacked  in and  triggered his program. "Mainline," breathed the link
man, his voice the only sound as Case plunged through  the glowing strata of
Sense/Net ice. Good.  Check Molly.  He  hit the Simstim and flipped into her
sensorium.
     The scrambler blurred  the visual  input  slightly. She  stood before a
wall  of  gold-flecked  mirror  in the building's  vast  white  lobby,
chewing gum, apparently  fascinated by  her own  reflection. Aside  from the
huge pair of sunglasses  concealing her mirrored insets, she managed to look
remarkably  like  she  belonged  there,  another tourist girl  hoping for  a
glimpse of Tally Isham.  She wore a pink plastic raincoat, a white mesh top,
loose white  pants cut  in a style  that had  been fashionable in  Tokyo the
previous year.  She grinned  vacantly  and popped her  gum. Case  felt  like
laughing. He  could  feel the  micro pore tape across her ribcage,  feel the
flat little units under it: the radio,  the Simstim unit, and the scrambler.
The  throat mike, glued to  her neck,  looked  as much as  possible  like an
analgesic  dermadisk.  Her  hands,  in the pockets of  the  pink coat,  were
flexing systematically  through  a series  of tension-release  exercises. It
took him a few seconds to realize that the peculiar sensation at the tips of
her  fingers was caused by  the blades as they were partially extruded, then
retracted.
     He flipped back. His program had reached the  fifth gate. He watched as
his icebreaker  strobed and shifted in  front of him, only  faintly aware of
his hands playing across  the deck, making  minor  adjustments.  Translucent
planes  of color shuffled  like a trick deck.  Take a  card, he thought, any
card.
     The gate blurred past.  He laughed. The  Sense/Net ice had accepted his
entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's Los Angeles complex.
He  was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms  peeled  off, meshing with the
gate's code fabric, ready to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it
arrived.
     He  flipped  again. Molly  was strolling  past  the  enormous  circular
reception desk  at the rear of the  lobby. 12:01:20 as the readout flared in
her optic nerve.

     At midnight,  synched with  the chip behind Molly's eye, the link
man in Jersey had  given his  command. "Mainline."  Nine  Moderns, scattered
along two hundred miles of the Sprawl, had  simultaneously  dialed MAX EMERG
from  pay  phones. Each Modern  delivered a short set speech,  hung up,  and
drifted out  into the night,  peeling off  surgical  gloves. Nine  different
police  departments  and  public  security   agencies   were  absorbing  the
information that an obscure  sub  sect of militant Christian fundamentalists
had just taken credit for  having introduced clinical levels of an  outlawed
psychoactive agent  known as  Blue Nine into the  ventilation  system of the
Sense/Net  Pyramid. Blue Nine,  known in  California as Grievous  Angel, had
been shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal  psychosis in eighty-five
percent of experimental subjects.

     Case  hit the switch as his program surged  through  the  gates of  the
subsystem that  controlled security  for the Sense/Net research library.  He
found himself stepping into an elevator.
     "Excuse  me,  but are you an employee?" The  guard raised his eyebrows.
Molly popped her gum.  "No," she said, driving the first two knuckles of her
right hand into  the man's  solar plexus. As he  doubled over, clawing
for  the beeper on his belt she slammed his  head sideways, against the wall
of the elevator.
     Chewing  a little  more rapidly now, she touched CLOSE DOOR and STOP on
the  illuminated  panel. She  took  a  black  box  from  her coat pocket and
inserted a lead in  the keyhole of the lock that  secured the  panel's
circuitry.

     The Panther Moderns allowed four minutes  for their first move to  take
effect, then  injected a second  carefully prepared  dose of misinformation.
This  time,  they  shot  it directly  into  the  Sense/Net  building's
internal video system.
     At  12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eighteen seconds
in a frequency that produced seizures in  a susceptible segment of Sense/Net
employees. Then something only vaguely like a human face filled the screens,
its  features  stretched across  asymmetrical  expanses  of bone  like  some
obscene  Mercator  projection.  Blue  lips  parted  wetly  as  the  twisted,
elongated jaw moved. Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish clump
of  gnarled  roots,  fumbled  toward  the  camera,  blurred,  and  vanished.
Subliminally rapid images of contamination: graphics of the building's
water   supply  system,  gloved  hands  manipulating  laboratory  glassware,
something tumbling down into  darkness, a pale splash. . . The  audio track,
its pitch adjusted to run  at  just  less than twice the  standard  playback
speed, was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military uses of
a substance  known as HsG, a biochemical governing the human skeletal growth
factor.  Overdoses   of  HsG  threw   certain  bone  cells  into  overdrive,
accelerating growth by factors as high as one thousand percent.
     At 12:05:00, the mirror-sheathed nexus of the Sense/Net consortium held
just over  three thousand employees. At five minutes  after midnight, as the
Modems'  message  ended  in a flare  of  white  screen, the  Sense/Net
Pyramid screamed.
     Half a dozen NYPD Tactical hovercraft, responding to the possibility of
Blue Nine in the building's ventilation system, were converging on the
Sense/Net Pyramid.  They  were  running  full  riot  lights.  A  BAMA  Rapid
Deployment helicopter was lifting off from its pad on Riker's.

     Case  triggered  his  second  program.  A  carefully  engineered  virus
attacked  the  code  fabric  screening primary custodial  commands  for  the
sub-basement  that  housed  the  Sense/Net  research   materials.  "Boston,"
Molly's  voice  came across  the link,  "I'm  downstairs."  Case
switched and saw the blank wall of the elevator. She was unzipping the white
pants.  A bulky  packet,  exactly the shade of  her pale ankle,  was secured
there  with  micro pore.  She  knelt  and peeled the tape  away. Streaks  of
burgundy  flickered across the mimetic polycarbon as she  unfolded the Modem
suit. She removed the pink raincoat, threw  it down beside the  white pants,
and began to pull the suit on over the white mesh top.

     12:06:26.
     Case's  virus  had bored  a  window  through  the library's
command  ice. He punched himself through  and found  an infinite  blue space
ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight grid of pale blue neon. In
the nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed
unlimited  subjective  dimension; a  child's toy  calculator, accessed
through  Case's  Sendai,  would  have  presented  limitless  gulfs  of
nothingness  hung with  a few basic commands. Case began to key the sequence
the  Finn  had  purchased from  a  mid-eschelon sarariman with  severe  drug
problems. He began to glide through the  spheres as  if he were on invisible
tracks.
     Here. This one.
     Punching  his way into the  sphere,  chill blue  neon  vault above  him
starless and  smooth  as  frosted glass,  he  triggered  a  subprogram  that
effected certain alterations in the core custodial commands.
     Out now.  Reversing smoothly, the  virus reknitting the  fabric  of the
window.
     Done.

        x x x
     In the Sense/Net lobby, two  Panther Moderns sat  alertly behind  a low
rectangular  planter, taping  the riot with a video camera.  They both  wore
chameleon suits. "Tacticals are spraying foam  barricades  now,"  one noted,
speaking for the benefit of his  throat mike.  "Rapids  are  still trying to
land their copter."

     Case hit the Simstim switch. And flipped into the agony of broken bone.
Molly was braced against  the blank gray wall of a long corridor, her breath
coming ragged and uneven. Case was back in the matrix instantly, a white-hot
line of pain fading in his left thigh.
     "What's happening, Brood?" he asked the link man.
     "I dunno, Cutter. Mother's not talking. Wait."
     Case's program was cycling. A single hair-fine thread of  crimson
neon extended from the center of the restored window to the shifting outline
of his icebreaker. He didn't  have time to wait. Taking a deep breath,
he flipped again.
     Molly took a single step, trying  to support her weight on the corridor
wall.  In  the  loft,  Case groaned.  The  second  step  took  her  over  an
outstretched  arm. Uniform  sleeve bright with  fresh blood.  Glimpse  of  a
shattered  fiberglass shock stave. Her  vision  seemed to have narrowed to a
tunnel.  With  the third step,  Case screamed and found himself back in  the
matrix.
     "Brood? Boston, baby. .  ." Her voice  tight  with  pain. She  coughed.
"Little problem with the natives. Think one of them broke my leg."
     "What you  need  now,  Cat  Mother?"  The  link  man's  voice was
indistinct, nearly lost behind static.
     Case forced  himself  to flip back.  She was leaning  against the wall,
taking all of her weight on her right leg. She  fumbled through the contents
of the suit's kangaroo pocket and withdrew a sheet of  plastic studded
with  a  rainbow  of dermadisks.  She selected three  and thumbed them  hard
against her left wrist, over t