DOC
:ch5.txt
5 the medical team molly employed occupied two floors of an anonymous condorack near the old hub of baltimore the building was modular like some giant version of cheap hotel each coffin forty meters long case met molly as she emerged from one that wore the elaborately worked logo of one ger ald chin dentist she was limping he says if i kick anything itll fall off i ran into one of your pals he said a modern yeah which one lupus yonderboy had a message he passed her a paper napkin with w i n t e r m u t e printed in red feltpen in his neat laborious capitals he said but her hand came up in the jive for silence get us some crab she said after lunch in baltimore molly dissecting her crab with alarming ease they tubed in to new york case had learned not to ask questions they only brought the sign for silence her leg seemed to be bothering her and she seldom spoke a thin black child with wooden beads and antique resistors woven tightly into her hair opened the finns door and led them along the tunnel of refuse case felt the stuff had grown some how during their absence or else it seemed that it was changing subtly cooking itself down under the pressure of time silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch a crystalline essence of discarded technology flowering secretly in the sprawls waste places beyond the army blanket the finn waited at the white table molly began to sign rapidly produced a scrap of paper wrote something on it and passed it to the finn he took it between thumb and forefinger holding it away from his body as though it might explode he made a sign case didnt know one that conveyed a mixture of impatience and glum resigna tion he stood up brushing crumbs from the front of his bat tered tweed jacket a glass jar of pickled herring stood on the table beside a torn plastic package of flatbread and a tin ashtray piled with the butts of partagas wait the finn said and left the room molly took his place extruded the blade from her index finger and speared a grayish slab of herring case wandered aimlessly around the room fingering the scanning gear on the pylons as he passed ten minutes and the finn came bustling back showing his teeth in a wide yellow smile he nodded gave molly a thumbs up salute and gestured to case to help him with the door panel while case smoothed the velcro border into place the finn took a flat little console from his pocket and punched out an elaborate sequence honey he said to molly tucking the console away you have got it no shit i can smell it you wanna tell me where you got it yonderboy molly said shoving the herring and crackers aside i did a deal with larry on the side smart the finn said its an ai slow it down a little case said berne the finn said ignoring him berne its got lim ited swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the act of 53 built for tessierashpool sa they own the mainframe and the original software whats in berne okay case deliberately stepped between them wintermute is the recognition code for an ai ive got the turing registry numbers artificial intelligence thats all just fine molly said but wheres it get us if yonderboys right the finn said this ai is backing armitage i paid larry to have the moderns nose around armitage a little molly explained turning to case they have some very weird lines of communication deal was theyd get my money if they answered one question whos running armi tage and you think its this ai those things arent allowed any autonomy itll be the parent corporation this tessle tessierashpool sa said the finn and i got a little story for you about them wanna hear he sat down and hunched forward finn molly said he loves a story havent ever told anybody this one the finn began the finn was a fence a trafficker in stolen goods primarily in software in the course of his business he sometimes came into contact with other fences some of whom dealt in the more traditional articles of the trade in precious metals stamps rare coins gems jewelry furs and paintings and other works of art the story he told case and molly began with another mans story a man he called smith smith was also a fence but in balmier seasons he surfaced as an art dealer he was the first person the finn had known whod gone silicon the phrase had an oldfashioned ring for case and the microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery sales with half a dozen chips in his new socket smiths knowledge of the art business was formidable at least by the standards of his colleagues but smith had come to the finn with a request for help a fraternal request one businessman to another he wanted a goto on the tessierashpool clan he said and it had to be executed in a way that would guarantee the impossibility of the subject ever tracing the inquiry to its source it might be possible the finn had opined but an explanation was definitely required it smelled the finn said to case smelled of money and smith was being very careful almost too careful smith it developed had had a supplier known as jimmy jimmy was a burglar and other things as well and just back from a year in high orbit having carried certain things back down the gravity well the most unusual thing jimmy had managed to score on his swing through the archipelago was a head an intricately worked bust cloisonn over platinum stud ded with seedpearls and lapis smith sighing had put down his pocket microscope and advised jimmy to melt the thing down it was contemporary not an antique and had no value to the collector jimmy laughed the thing was a computer terminal he said it could talk and not in a synthvoice but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes it was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed a per verse thing because synthvoice chips cost next to nothing it was a curiosity smith jacked the head into his computer and listened as the melodious inhuman voice piped the figures of last years tax return smiths clientele included a tokyo billionaire whose passion for clockwork automata approached fetishism smith shrugged showing jimmy his upturned palms in a gesture old as pawn shops he could try he said but he doubted he could get much for it when jimmy had gone leaving the head smith went over it carefully discovering certain hallmarks eventually hed been able to trace it to an unlikely collaboration between two zurich artisans an enamel specialist in paris a dutch jeweler and a california chip designer it had been commissioned he dis covered by tessierashpool sa smith began to make preliminary passes at the tokyo col lector hinting that he was on the track of something notewor thy and then he had a visitor a visitor unannounced one who walked in through the elaborate maze of smiths security as though it didnt exist a small man japanese enormously polite who bore all the marks of a vatgrown ninja assassin smith sat very still staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of vietnamese rosewood gently almost apologetically the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork a mechanism of great beauty which had been taken from the house of his master it had come to his attention the ninja said that smith might know of the whereabouts of this object smith told the man that he had no wish to die and produced the head and how much his visitor asked did you expect to obtain through the sale of this object smith named a figure far lower than the price hed intended to set the ninja produced a credit chip and keyed smith that amount out of a numbered swiss account and who the man asked brought you this piece smith told him within days smith learned of jimmys death so that was where i came in the finn continued smith knew i dealt a lot with the memory lane crowd and thats where you go for a quiet goto thatll never be traced i hired a cowboy i was the cutout so i took a percentage smith he was careful hed just had a very weird business experience and hed come out on top but it didnt add up whod paid out of that swiss stash yakuza no way they got a very rigid code covers situations like that and they kill the receiver too always was it spook stuff smith didnt think so spook biz has a vibe you get so you can smell it well i had my cowboy buzz the news morgues until we found tessierashpool in litigation the case wasnt anything but we got the law firm then he did the lawyers ice and we got the family address lotta good it did us case raised his eyebrows freeside the finn said the spindle turns out they own damn near the whole thing the interesting stuff was the picture we got when the cowboy ran a regular goto on the news morgues and compiled a precis family organization corporate structure supposedly you can buy into an sa but there hasnt been a share of tessierashpool traded on the open market in over a hundred years on any market as far as i know youre looking at a very quiet very eccentric firstgeneration high orbit family run like a corporation big money very shy of media lot of cloning orbital laws a lot softer on genetic engineering right and its hard to keep track of which gen eration or combination of generations is running the show at a given time hows that molly asked got their own cryogenic setup even under orbital law youre legally dead for the duration of a freeze looks like they trade off though nobodys seen the founding father in about thirty years founding momma she died in some lab accident so what happened with your fence nothing the finn frowned dropped it we had a look at this fantastic tangle of powers of attorney the tas have and that was it jimmy mustve gotten into straylight lifted the head and tessierashpool sent their ninja after it smith decided to forget about it maybe he was smart he looked at molly the villa straylight tip of the spindle strictly private you figure they own that ninja finn molly asked smith thought so expensive she said wonder whatever happened to that little ninja finn probably got him on ice thaw when needed okay case said we got armitage getting his goodies off an ai named wintermute wheres that get us nowhere yet molly said but you got a little side gig now she drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him he opened it grid coordinates and entry codes whos this armitage some data base of his bought it from the mod erns separate deal where is it london case said crack it she laughed earn your keep for a change case waited for a transbama local on the crowded plat form molly had gone back to the loft hours ago the flatlines construct in her green bag and case had been drinking steadily ever since it was disturbing to think of the flatline as a construct a hardwired rom cassette replicating a dead mans skills ob sessions kneejerk responses the local came booming in along the black induction strip fine grit sifting from cracks in the tunnels ceiling case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode a pair of predatory looking christian scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting the techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the christian sci entists from beneath lowered metallic lids the girls looked like tall exotic grazing animals swaying gracefully and un consciously with the movement of the train their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the cars floor before they could stampede take flight from the missionaries the train reached cases station he stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar suspended against the wall of the station freeside pulsing beneath it in contorted capitals that mimicked printed japanese he walked through the crowd and stood beneath it studying the thing why wait pulsed the sign a blunt white spindle flanged and studded with grids and radiators docks domes hed seen the ad or others like it thousands of times it had never appealed to him with his deck he could reach the freeside banks as easily as he could reach atlanta travel was a meat thing but now he noticed the little sigil the size of a small coin woven into the lower left corner of the ads fabric of light ta he walked back to the loft lost in memories of the flatline hed spent most of his nineteenth summer in the gentleman loser nursing expensive beers and watching the cowboys hed never touched a deck then but he knew what he wanted there were at least twenty other hopefuls ghosting the loser that summer each one bent on working joeboy for some cow boy no other way to learn theyd all heard of pauley the redneck jockey from the lanta fringes whod survived braindeath behind black ice the grapevine slender street level and the only one going had little to say about pauley other than that hed done the impossible it was big another wouldbe told case for the price of a beer but who knows what i hear maybe a brazilian payroll net anyway the man was dead flat down braindeath case stared across the crowded bar at a thickset man in shirt sleeves something leaden about the shade of his skin boy the flatline would tell him months later in miami im like them huge fuckin lizards you know had themself two goddam brains one in the head an one by the tailbone kept the hind legs movin hit that black stuff and ol tailbrain jus kept right on keepin on the cowboy elite in the loser shunned pauley out of some strange group anxiety almost a superstition mccoy pauley lazarus of cyberspace and his heart had done for him in the end his surplus russian heart implanted in a pow camp during the war hed refused to replace the thing saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing case fingered the slip of paper molly had given him and made his way up the stairs molly was snoring on the temperfoam a transparent cast ran from her knee to a few millimeters below her crotch the skin beneath the rigid micropore mottled with bruises the black shading into ugly yellow eight derms each a different size and color ran in a neat line down her left wrist an akai transdermal unit lay beside her its fine red leads connected to input trodes under the cast he turned on the tensor beside the hosaka the crisp circle of light fell directly on the flatlines construct he slotted some ice connected the construct and jacked in it was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder he coughed dix mccoy that you man his throat was tight hey bro said a directionless voice its case man remember miami joeboy quick study whats the last thing you remember before i spoke to you dix nothin hang on he disconnected the construct the presence was gone he reconnected it dix who am i you got me hung jack who the fuck are you ca your buddy partner whats happening man good question remember being here a second ago no know how a rom personality matrix works sure bro its a firmware construct so i jack it into the bank im using i can give it sequential real time memory guess so said the construct okay dix you are a rom construct got me if you say so said the construct who are you case miami said the voice joeboy quick study right and for starts dix you and me were gonna sleaze over to london grid and access a little data you game for that you gonna tell me i got a choice boy ...
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smith jimmy whod ninja lot pauley mccoy rom dix joeboy
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