Sprawl [03] - Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson

Author:William Gibson [Gibson, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers & Suspense, Technothrillers, Cyberpunk, High Tech, Thrillers, Dystopian, Hard Science Fiction, Fiction - Science Fiction, Plastic & Cosmetic, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Medical, Canadian, Fiction, Science Fiction, Science Fiction - General, Surgery, General
ISBN: 9780553281743
Google: wbdaAAAAMAAJ
Amazon: B009QJMUAY
Goodreads: 154091
Publisher: Spectra
Published: 1988-01-01T02:00:00+00:00

20 - Hilton Swift

He arrived unannounced, as he always did, and alone, the Net helicopter settling like a solitary wasp, stirring strands of seaweed across the damp sand.

She watched from the rust-eaten railing as he jumped down, something boyish, almost bumbling, in his apparent eagerness. He wore a long topcoat of brown tweed; unbuttoned, it showed the immaculate front of one of his candystriped shirts, the propwash stirring his brown-blond hair and fluttering his Sense/Net tie. Robin was right, she decided: he did look as though his mother dressed him.

Perhaps it was deliberate, she thought, as he came striding up the beach, a feigned na•vetŽ. She remembered Porphyre once maintaining that major corporations were entirely independent of the human beings who composed the body corporate. This had seemed patently obvious to Angie, but the hairdresser had insisted that she'd failed to grasp his basic premise. Swift was Sense/Net's most important human decision-maker.

The thought of Porphyre made her smile; Swift, taking it as a greeting, beamed back at her.

He offered her lunch in San Francisco; the helicopter was extremely fast. She countered by insisting on preparing him a bowl of dehydrated Swiss soup and microwaving a frozen brick of sourdough rye.

She wondered, watching him eat, about his sexuality. In his late thirties, he somehow conveyed the sense of an extraordinarily bright teenager in whom the onset of puberty had been subtly delayed. Rumor, at one time or another, had supplied him with every known sexual preference, and with several that she assumed were entirely imaginary. None of them seemed at all likely to Angie. She'd known him since she'd come to Sense/Net; he'd been well established in the upper echelons of production when she'd arrived, one of the top people in Tally Isham's team, and he'd taken an immediate professional interest in her. Looking back, she assumed that Legba had steered her into his path: he'd been so obviously on his way up, though she might not have seen it herself, then, dazzled by the glitter and constant movement of the scene.

Bobby had taken an instant dislike to him, bristling with a Barrytowner's inbred hostility to authority, but had generally managed to conceal it for the sake of her career. The dislike had been mutual, Swift greeting their split and Bobby's departure with obvious relief.

"Hilton," she said, as she poured him a cup of the herbal tea he preferred to coffee, "what is it that's keeping Robin in London?"

He looked up from the steaming cup. "Something personal, I think. Perhaps he's found a new friend." Bobby had always been Angie's friend, to Hilton. Robin's friends tended to be young, male, and athletic; the muted erotic sequences in her stims with Robin were assembled from stock footage provided by Continuity and heavily treated by Raebel and his effects team. She remembered the one night they'd spent together, in a windblown house in southern Madagascar, his passivity and his patience. They'd never tried again, and she'd suspected that he feared that intimacy would undermine the illusion their stims projected so perfectly.

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