Burning chrome by William Gibson

Author:William Gibson [Gibson, William]
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction/Fantasy, Science fiction, Adventure, General, Science Fiction - General, Fiction, Fiction - Science Fiction, Space Opera, Short stories, Science fiction, American, Science Fiction - High Tech, High Tech, General & Literary Fiction, Modern fiction, Short Stories (single author), Short stories, American, Canadian fiction, Science fiction, Canadian
ISBN: 9780441089345
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 2010-01-21T15:55:33+00:00

The Winter Market

It rains a lot, up here; there are winter days when it doesn’t really get light at all, only a bright, indeterinmate gray. But then there are days when it’s like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sun-lit, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God’s own movie. It was like that the day her agents phoned, from deep in the heart of their mirrored pyramid on Beverly Boulevard, to tell me she’d merged with the net, crossed over for good, that Kings of Sleep was going triple-platinum. I’d edited most of Kings, done the brain-map work and gone over it all with the fast-wipe module, so I was in line for a share of royalties.

No, I said, no. Then yes, yes, and hung up on them. Got my jacket and took the stairs three at a time, straight out to the nearest bar and an eight-hour black-out that ended on a concrete ledge two meters above midnight. False Creek water. City lights, that same gray bowl of sky smaller now, illuminated by neon and mercury-vapor arcs. And it was snowing, big flakes but not many, and when they touched black water, they were gone, no trace at all. I looked down at my feet and saw my toes clear of the edge of concrete, the water between them. I was wearing Japanese shoes, new and expensive, glove-leather Ginza monkey boots with rubber-capped toes. I stood there for a long time before I took that first step back my hand.

Because she was dead, and I’d let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I’d helped her get that way. And because I knew she’d phone me, in the morning.

My father was an audio engineer, a mastering engineer. He went way back, in the business, even before digital. The processes he was concerned with were partly mechanical, with that clunky quasi-Victorian quality you see in twentieth-century technology. He was a lathe operator, basically. People brought him audio recordings and he burned their sounds into grooves on a disk of lacquer. Then the disk was electroplated and used in the construction of a press that would stamp out records, the black things you see in antique stores. And I remember him telling me, once, a few months before he died, that certain frequencies transients, I think he called them could easily burn out the head, the cutting head, on a master lathe. These heads were incredibly expensive, so you prevented burnouts with something called an accelerometer. And that was what I was thinking of, as I stood there, my toes out over the water: that head, burning out.

Because that was what they did to her.

And that was what she wanted.

No accelerometer for Lise.

I disconnected my phone on my way to bed. I did it with the business end of a West German studio tripod that was going to cost a week’s wages to repair.

Woke some strange time later and took a cab back to Granville Island and Rubin’s place.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.