Count Zero (proofread) by William Gibson

Author:William Gibson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ace
Published: 1986-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

“You know,” said the Finn, after listening to the story of Bobby’s abortive cyberspace run, “that’s some weird shit out there.” He slowly shook his narrow, strangely elongated head. “Didn’t used to be this way.” He looked at Lucas. “You people know, don’t you?”

They were seated around a square white table in a white room on the ground floor, behind the junk-clogged storefront. The floor was scuffed hospital tile, molded in a nonslip pattern, and the walls broad slabs of dingy white plastic concealing dense layers of antibugging circuitry. Compared to the storefront, the white room seemed surgically clean. Several alloy tripods bristling with sensors and scanning gear stood around the table like abstract sculpture.

“Know what?” Bobby asked. With each retelling of his story, he felt less like a wilson. Important. It made him feel important.

“Not you, pisshead,” the Finn said wearily. “Him. Big hoodoo man. He knows. Knows it’s not the same. . . . Hasn’t been, not for a long time. I been in the trade forever. Way back. Before the war, before there was any matrix, or anyway before people knew there was one.” He was looking at Bobby now. “I got a pair of shoes older than you are, so what the fuck should I expect you to know? There were cowboys ever since there were computers. They built the first computers to crack German ice, right? Codebreakers. So there was ice before computers, you wanna look at it that way.” He lit his fifteenth cigarette of the evening, and smoke began to fill the white room.

“Lucas knows, yeah. The last seven, eight years, there’s been funny stuff out there, out on the console cowboy circuit. The new jockeys, they make deals with things, don’t they, Lucas? Yeah, you bet I know; they still need the hard and the soft, and they still gotta be faster than snakes on ice, but all of ’em, all the ones who really know how to cut it, they got allies, don’t they, Lucas?”

Lucas took his gold toothpick out of his pocket and began to work on a rear molar, his face dark and serious.

“Thrones and dominions,” the Finn said obscurely. “Yeah, there’s things out there. Ghosts, voices. Why not? Oceans had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see? Sure, it’s just a tailored hallucination we all agreed to have, cyberspace, but anybody who jacks in knows, fucking knows it’s a whole universe. And every year it gets a little more crowded, sounds like . . .”

“For us,” Lucas said, “the world has always worked that way.”

“Yeah,” the Finn said, “so you guys could slot right into it, tell people the things you were cutting deals with were your same old bush gods . . .”

“Divine Horsemen . . .”

“Sure. Maybe you believe it. But I’m old enough to remember when it wasn’t like that. Ten years ago, you went in the Gentleman Loser and tried telling any of the top jocks you talked with ghosts in the matrix, they’d have figured you were crazy.

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