Johnny Mneumonic Quiz

PDF page 131: Dog Sisters were on the door that night, and I didn’t relish trying to get out past them if things didn’t work out. They were two meters tall and thin as greyhounds. One was black and the other white, but aside from that they were as nearly identical as cosmetic surgery could make them. They’d been lovers for years and were bad news in a tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male. Ralfi was sitting at his usual table. Owing me a lot of money. I had hundreds of megabytes stashed in my head on an idiot/ savant basisll information I had no conscious access to. Ralfi had left it there. He hadn’t, however, come back for it. Only Ralfi could retrieve the data, with a code phrase of his own invention. I’m not cheap to begin with, bu.t my overtime on storage is astronomical. And Ralfi had been very scarce. Then I’d heard that Ralfi Face wanted to put out a contract on me. So I’d arranged to meet him in the Drome, but I’d arranged it as Edward Bax, clandestine importer, late of Rio and Peking. The Drome stank of biz, a metallic tang of nervous tension. Muscle-boys scattered through the crowd were flexing stock parts at one another and trying on thin, cold grins, some of them so lost under superstructures of muscle graft that their outlines weren’t really human. Pardon me. Pardon me, friends. Just Eddie Bax here, Fast Eddie the Importer, with his professionally nondescript gym. bag, and please ignore this slit, just wide enough to admit his right hand. Ralfi wasn’t alone. Eighty kilos of blond California beef perched alertly in the chair next to his, martial arts written all over him. Fast Eddie Bax was in the chair opposite them before the beef’s hands were off the table. “You black belt?” I asked eagerly. He nodded, blue eyes running an automatic scanning pattern between my eyes and my hands. “Me, too,” I said.

PDF page 130: I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all. but that was what I was aiming for: If they think ymfre crude, go technical; if they think you ,re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days. though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. Pd had to turn both these twelve-gauge shells from brass stock9 on a lathe, and then load them myself; I’d had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for handloading cartridges; I’d had to build a lever⯑action press to seat the primers-an very tricky. But I knew they’d work. The meet was set for the Drome at 2300J but I rode the tube three stops past the closest platform and walked back. Immaculate procedure. I checked myself out in the chrome siding of a cof fee kiosk, your basic sharp-faced Caucasoid with a ruff of stiff, dark hair. The girls at Under the Knife were big . on Sony Mao, and it was getting harder to keep them from adding the chic suggestion of epicanthic folds. It probably wouldn’t fool Ralfi Face, but it might get me next to his table. The Drome is a single narrow space with a bar down one side and ta\:iles along the other, thick with pimps and handlers and an arcane array of dealers. The Magnetic

PDF page 132: “Got mine here in the bag.” And I shoved my hand through the slit and thumbed the safety off. Click. “Double twelve-gauge with the trig⯑ gers wired together.’ “Tha.t”s a gun/’ Ralfi said, putting a plump, :restraining hand on his boy’s taut blue nylon chest. ” Johnny has an antique firearm in his bag.” So much for Edward Bax. I guess he’d always been Ralfi Something or Other⯑ but he owed his acquired surname to a singular vanity. Built something like an overripe pear, he’d wom. the oncefamous face of Christian White for twenty years- Christian White of the Aryan Reggae Band, Sony Mao to his generation, and final champion of race rock. Fm a whiz at trivia. Christian White: classic pop face with a singer’s high-definition muscles, chiseled cheekbones. Angelic in one light. handsomely depraved in another. But Ralfi’s eyes lived behind that face, and they were small and cold and black. “Please/’ he said, Hlet’s work this out like businessmen.” His voice was marked by a horrible prehensile sincerity, and the corners of his beautiful Christian White mouth were always wet. HLewis here, H nodding in the beefboy’ s direction, His a meatball. Vi Lewis took this impassively, looking like something built from a kit. “You aren’t a meatball, Johnny.H 6’Sure I am, Ralfi, a nice meatball chock-full of implants where you can store your dirty laundry while you go off shopping for people to kill me. From my end of this bag, Ralfi, it looks like you’ve got some explaining to do.” “It’s this last batch of product, Johnny/’ He sighed deeply. uin my role as broker-n “Fence/’ I corrected. “As broker, I’m usually very careful as to sources. ·You buy only from those who steal the best, Got it.” He sighed again. “I try/’ he said wearily, Hnot to buy

PDF page 131: Dog Sisters were on the door that night, and I didn’t relish trying to get out past them if things didn’t work out. They were two meters tall and thin as greyhounds. One was black and the other white, but aside from that they were as nearly identical as cosmetic surgery could make them. They’d been lovers for years and were bad news in a tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male. Ralfi was sitting at his usual table. Owing me a lot of money. I had hundreds of megabytes stashed in my head on an idiot/ savant basisll information I had no conscious access to. Ralfi had left it there. He hadn’t, however, come back for it. Only Ralfi could retrieve the data, with a code phrase of his own invention. I’m not cheap to begin with, bu.t my overtime on storage is astronomical. And Ralfi had been very scarce. Then I’d heard that Ralfi Face wanted to put out a contract on me. So I’d arranged to meet him in the Drome, but I’d arranged it as Edward Bax, clandestine importer, late of Rio and Peking. The Drome stank of biz, a metallic tang of nervous tension. Muscle-boys scattered through the crowd were flexing stock parts at one another and trying on thin, cold grins, some of them so lost under superstructures of muscle graft that their outlines weren’t really human. Pardon me. Pardon me, friends. Just Eddie Bax here, Fast Eddie the Importer, with his professionally nondescript gym. bag, and please ignore this slit, just wide enough to admit his right hand. Ralfi wasn’t alone. Eighty kilos of blond California beef perched alertly in the chair next to his, martial arts written all over him. Fast Eddie Bax was in the chair opposite them before the beef’s hands were off the table. “You black belt?” I asked eagerly. He nodded, blue eyes running an automatic scanning pattern between my eyes and my hands. “Me, too,” I said.

PDF page 132: “Got mine here in the bag.” And I shoved my hand through the slit and thumbed the safety off. Click. “Double twelve-gauge with the trig⯑ gers wired together.’ “Tha.t”s a gun/’ Ralfi said, putting a plump, :restraining hand on his boy’s taut blue nylon chest. ” Johnny has an antique firearm in his bag.” So much for Edward Bax. I guess he’d always been Ralfi Something or Other⯑ but he owed his acquired surname to a singular vanity. Built something like an overripe pear, he’d wom. the oncefamous face of Christian White for twenty years- Christian White of the Aryan Reggae Band, Sony Mao to his generation, and final champion of race rock. Fm a whiz at trivia. Christian White: classic pop face with a singer’s high-definition muscles, chiseled cheekbones. Angelic in one light. handsomely depraved in another. But Ralfi’s eyes lived behind that face, and they were small and cold and black. “Please/’ he said, Hlet’s work this out like businessmen.” His voice was marked by a horrible prehensile sincerity, and the corners of his beautiful Christian White mouth were always wet. HLewis here, H nodding in the beefboy’ s direction, His a meatball. Vi Lewis took this impassively, looking like something built from a kit. “You aren’t a meatball, Johnny.H 6’Sure I am, Ralfi, a nice meatball chock-full of implants where you can store your dirty laundry while you go off shopping for people to kill me. From my end of this bag, Ralfi, it looks like you’ve got some explaining to do.” “It’s this last batch of product, Johnny/’ He sighed deeply. uin my role as broker-n “Fence/’ I corrected. “As broker, I’m usually very careful as to sources. ·You buy only from those who steal the best, Got it.” He sighed again. “I try/’ he said wearily, Hnot to buy

PDF page 132: “Got mine here in the bag.” And I shoved my hand through the slit and thumbed the safety off. Click. “Double twelve-gauge with the trig⯑ gers wired together.’ “Tha.t”s a gun/’ Ralfi said, putting a plump, :restraining hand on his boy’s taut blue nylon chest. ” Johnny has an antique firearm in his bag.” So much for Edward Bax. I guess he’d always been Ralfi Something or Other⯑ but he owed his acquired surname to a singular vanity. Built something like an overripe pear, he’d wom. the oncefamous face of Christian White for twenty years- Christian White of the Aryan Reggae Band, Sony Mao to his generation, and final champion of race rock. Fm a whiz at trivia. Christian White: classic pop face with a singer’s high-definition muscles, chiseled cheekbones. Angelic in one light. handsomely depraved in another. But Ralfi’s eyes lived behind that face, and they were small and cold and black. “Please/’ he said, Hlet’s work this out like businessmen.” His voice was marked by a horrible prehensile sincerity, and the corners of his beautiful Christian White mouth were always wet. HLewis here, H nodding in the beefboy’ s direction, His a meatball. Vi Lewis took this impassively, looking like something built from a kit. “You aren’t a meatball, Johnny.H 6’Sure I am, Ralfi, a nice meatball chock-full of implants where you can store your dirty laundry while you go off shopping for people to kill me. From my end of this bag, Ralfi, it looks like you’ve got some explaining to do.” “It’s this last batch of product, Johnny/’ He sighed deeply. uin my role as broker-n “Fence/’ I corrected. “As broker, I’m usually very careful as to sources. ·You buy only from those who steal the best, Got it.” He sighed again. “I try/’ he said wearily, Hnot to buy

PDF page 133: from fools. This time, I’m afraid, rve done that.H Third sigh was the cue for Lewis to trigger the neural disruptor they?d taped under my side of the table. I put everything I had into curling the index finger of my right han.d, but I no longer seemed to be connected to it. I could feel the metal of the gun and the foam-pad tape I’d wrapped around the stubby grip, but m.y hands were cool wax, distant and inert. I was hoping Lewis was a true meatball, thick enough to go for the gym bag and snag my rigid trigger finger, but he wasn’t. HWe’ve been very worried about you, Johnny. Very worried.. You see, that’s Yakuza property you have there. A fool took it from them, Johnny. A dead fool.n Lewis giggled. It all made sense then, an ugly kind of sense, like bags of wet sand settling around my head. Killing wasn’t Ralfi’s style. Lewis wasn’t even Ralfi’s style. But he’d got himself stuck between the Sons of the Neon Chrysanthemum and something that belonged to them-or, more likely, something of theirs that belonged to someone else. Ralfi, of course. could use the code phrase to throw me into idiot/savant, and I’d spill their hot program without remembering a single quarter tone. For a fence like Ralfi, that would ordinarily have been enough. But not for the Yakuza. The Yakuza would know about Squids, for one thing, and they wouldn,t want to worry about one lifting those dim and permanent traces of their program out of my head. I didn’t know very much about Squids, but I’d heard stories, and I made it a point never to repeat them to my clients. No, the Yakuza wmlldn?t like that; it looked too much like evidence. They hadn1t got where they were by leaving evidence around. Or alive. Lewis was grinning. I think he was visualizing a point just behind my forehead and imagining how he could get there the hard way.

PDF page 135: wrist. But a quarter’U do for a retainer. H Ralfi let his breath out explosively and began to laugh, exposing teeth that hadn’t been kept up to the Christian White standard. Then she turned the disrup tor off. “Two million/’ I said. “My kind of man,” she said, and laughed. “What’s in the bag?” A shotgun/’ ucrude.” It might have been a compliment. Ralfi said nothing at all. ”Name’s Millions. Molly Millions. You want to get out of here, boss? People are starting to stare. H She stood up. She was wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood. And I saw for the first time that the mirrored lenses were surgical inlays, the silver rising smoothly from her high cheekbones, sealing her eyes in their sockets. I saw my new face twinned there. urm Johnny/’ I said. uwe’re taking Mr. Face with us.” He was outside, waiting. Looking like your standard tourist tech, in plastic zoris and a silly Hawaiian shirt printed with blowups of his firm9s most popular microprocessor; a mild Utt.le guy, the kind most likely to wind up drunk on sake in a bar that puts out miniature rice crackers with seaweed garnish. He looked like the kind who sing the corporate anthem and cry, who shake hands endlessly with the bartender. And the pimps and the dealers would leave him alone, pegging him as innately conservative. Not up for much, and careful with his credit when he was. The way I figured it later, they must have am⯑ putated part of his left thumb, somewhere behind the first joint, replacing it with a prosthetic tipll and cored the stump, fitting it with a spool and socket molded from one of

PDF page 136: the Ono⯑Sendai diamond analogs, Then they’d carefully wound the spool with three meters of monomolecular filament. Molly got into some kind of exchange with the Magnetic Dog Sisters, giving me a chance to usher Ralfi through the door with the gym bag pressed lightly against the base of his spine. She seemed to know them. I heard the black one laugh. I glanced up, out of some passing reflex, maybe because rve never got used to it, to the soaring arcs of light and the shadows of the geodesics above them. Maybe that saved me. Ralfi kept walkingt but I don’t think he was trying to escape. I think he’d already given up. Probably he already had an idea of what we were up against. I looked back down in time to see him explode. Playback on full recall shows Ralfi stepping forward as the little tech sidles out of nowhere, smiling. Just a suggestion of a bow, and his left thumb falls off. It’s a conjuring trick. The thumb hangs suspended, Mirrors? Wires? And Ralfi stops, his back to us, dark crescents of sweat under the armpits of his pale summer suit. He knows. He must have known. And then the joke-shop thumbtip, heavy as lead, arcs out in a Hghtning ·yo-yo trick, and the invisible thread connecting it to the killer’s hand passes laterally through Ralfi’s skull, just above his eyebrows, whips up, and descends, slicing the pearshaped torso diagonally from shoulder to rib cage. Cuts so fine that no blood flows until synapses misfire and the first tremors surrender the body to gravity. Ralfi tumbled apart in a pink cloud of fluids, the three mismatched sections rolling forward onto the tiled pavement. In total silence. I brought the gym bag up, and my hand convulsed. The recoil nearly broke my wri&t. It must have been raining; ribbons of water cascaded from a

PDF page 133: from fools. This time, I’m afraid, rve done that.H Third sigh was the cue for Lewis to trigger the neural disruptor they?d taped under my side of the table. I put everything I had into curling the index finger of my right han.d, but I no longer seemed to be connected to it. I could feel the metal of the gun and the foam-pad tape I’d wrapped around the stubby grip, but m.y hands were cool wax, distant and inert. I was hoping Lewis was a true meatball, thick enough to go for the gym bag and snag my rigid trigger finger, but he wasn’t. HWe’ve been very worried about you, Johnny. Very worried.. You see, that’s Yakuza property you have there. A fool took it from them, Johnny. A dead fool.n Lewis giggled. It all made sense then, an ugly kind of sense, like bags of wet sand settling around my head. Killing wasn’t Ralfi’s style. Lewis wasn’t even Ralfi’s style. But he’d got himself stuck between the Sons of the Neon Chrysanthemum and something that belonged to them-or, more likely, something of theirs that belonged to someone else. Ralfi, of course. could use the code phrase to throw me into idiot/savant, and I’d spill their hot program without remembering a single quarter tone. For a fence like Ralfi, that would ordinarily have been enough. But not for the Yakuza. The Yakuza would know about Squids, for one thing, and they wouldn,t want to worry about one lifting those dim and permanent traces of their program out of my head. I didn’t know very much about Squids, but I’d heard stories, and I made it a point never to repeat them to my clients. No, the Yakuza wmlldn?t like that; it looked too much like evidence. They hadn1t got where they were by leaving evidence around. Or alive. Lewis was grinning. I think he was visualizing a point just behind my forehead and imagining how he could get there the hard way.

PDF page 138: prostheses.” I reeled off a numb version of my standard sales pitch. uclient’s code is stored in a special chip; barring Squids, which we in the trade don’t like to talk about⯑ there’s no way to recover your phrase. Can’t drug it out, cut it out, torture it. I don’t know it, never did.” “Squids? Crawly things with arms?” We emerged into a deserted street market. Shadowy figures watched. us from across a makeshift square littered with fish heads

PDF page 138: interference detectors, Used them in the war to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.” uYeah? Navy stuff? From the war? Squid’ll read that chip of yours?” She’d stopped walking, and I felt her eyes o:n me behind those twin mirrors. “Even the primitive m⯑dels could

PDF page 139: measure a magnetic field a billionth the strength of geomagnetic force; it’s like pulling a whisper out of a cheering stadium.” “Cops can do that already, with parabolic microphones and lasers.” HBut your data’s still secure.” Pride in profession. “No government’Il let their cops have Squids, not even the security heavies. Too much chance of interdepart⯑ mental funnies; they’re too likely to watergate you. u “Navy stuff,” she said9 and her grin gleamed in the shadows. “Navy stuff. I got a friend down here who was in the navy, name’s Jones. I think you’d better meet him. He’s a junkie, though. So we’ll have to take him something.” HA junkie’? “A dolphin. He was more than a dolphin, but from another dol⯑ phin’s point of view he might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water slopped over the side, wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg,, He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-white hide. Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded down the side of the tank. “What is this place?H I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting chain link and things under tarps. Above the tank hung a clumsy wooden framework, crossed and recrossed by rows of dusty Christmas lights. “Funland. Zoo and carnival rides. ‘Talk with the War Whale.’ All that. Some whale Jones is .... ”

PDF page 138: interference detectors, Used them in the war to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.” uYeah? Navy stuff? From the war? Squid’ll read that chip of yours?” She’d stopped walking, and I felt her eyes o:n me behind those twin mirrors. “Even the primitive m⯑dels could

PDF page 139: measure a magnetic field a billionth the strength of geomagnetic force; it’s like pulling a whisper out of a cheering stadium.” “Cops can do that already, with parabolic microphones and lasers.” HBut your data’s still secure.” Pride in profession. “No government’Il let their cops have Squids, not even the security heavies. Too much chance of interdepart⯑ mental funnies; they’re too likely to watergate you. u “Navy stuff,” she said9 and her grin gleamed in the shadows. “Navy stuff. I got a friend down here who was in the navy, name’s Jones. I think you’d better meet him. He’s a junkie, though. So we’ll have to take him something.” HA junkie’? “A dolphin. He was more than a dolphin, but from another dol⯑ phin’s point of view he might have seemed like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water slopped over the side, wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg,, He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun, his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on exposed sections of his gray-white hide. Molly whistled. Jones thrashed his tail, and more water cascaded down the side of the tank. “What is this place?H I peered at vague shapes in the dark, rusting chain link and things under tarps. Above the tank hung a clumsy wooden framework, crossed and recrossed by rows of dusty Christmas lights. “Funland. Zoo and carnival rides. ‘Talk with the War Whale.’ All that. Some whale Jones is .... ”

PDF page 140: Jones reared again and fixed me with a sad and ancient eye. “How’s he talk?H Suddenly I was anxious to go. “That’s the catch. Say ‘hi,’ Jones.” And all the bulbs lit simultaneously. They were flashing red, white, and blue. RWBRWBRWB RWBRWBRWB RWBRWBRWB RWBRWBRWB RWBRWBRWB “Good with symbols, see, but the code’s restricted. In the navy they had him wired into an audiovisual display.” She drew the narrow package from a jacket pocket. “Pure shit, Jones. Want it?” He froze in the water and started to sink. I felt a strange panic, remembering that he 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

PDF page 141: 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 languorou⯑ly 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?” HThe war,” she said, HThey 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-n “Waste my time and you won’t profile at all,” said Molly, leaning across his scarred plastic desk to prod him with her fore finger. “So maybe you want to buy your microwaves somewhere else?” He was a tough kid, behind his Maojob. 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 recorders 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,