Free Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson Page A

again. Rapture, he said. Rapture’s coming.
    Mona turned a corner at random, automatic reflex avoiding a crazy, and found herself
     walking past sunfadedcard tables spread with cheap Indo simstim sets, used cassettes, colored spikes of
     microsoft stuck in blocks of pale blue Styrofoam. There was a picture of Angie Mitchell
     taped up behind one of the tables, a poster Mona hadn’t seen before. She stopped and
     studied it hungrily, taking in the star’s clothes and makeup first, then trying to
     figure out the background, where it had been shot. Unconsciously, she adjusted her
     expression to approximate Angie’s in the poster. Not a grin, exactly. A sort of half-grin,
     maybe a little sad. Mona felt a special way about Angie. Because—and tricks said it,
     sometimes—she looked like her. Like she was Angie’s sister. Except her nose, Mona’s,
     had more of a tilt, and she, Angie, didn’t have that smear of freckles out to her
     cheekbones. Mona’s Angie half-grin widened as she stared, washed in the beauty of
     the poster, the luxury of the pictured room. She guessed it was a kind of castle,
     probably it was where Angie lived, sure, with lots of people to take care of her,
     do her hair and hang up her clothes, because you could see the walls were made of
     big rocks, and those mirrors had frames on them that were solid gold, carved with
     leaves and angels. The writing across the bottom would say where it was, maybe, but
     Mona couldn’t read. Anyway, there weren’t any fucking roaches there, she was sure
     of that, and no Eddy either. She looked down at the stim sets and briefly considered
     using the rest of her money. But then she wouldn’t have enough for a stim, and anyway
     these were old, some of them older than she was. There was whatsit, that Tally, she’d
     been big when Mona was maybe nine.…
    When she got back, Eddy was waiting for her, with the tape off the window and the
     flies buzzing. Eddy was sprawled out on the bed, smoking a cigarette, and the suit
     with the beard, who’d been watching her, was sitting in the broken chair, still wearing
     his sunglasses.

    Prior
, he said that was his name, like he didn’t have a first one. Or like Eddy didn’t
     have a last one. Well, she didn’t have a last name herself, unless you counted Lisa,
     and that was more like having two first ones.
    She couldn’t get much sense of him, in the squat. She thought maybe that was because
     he was English. He wasn’t really a suit, though, not like she’d thought when she’d
     seen him in the mall; he was onto some game, it just wasn’t clear which one. He kept
     his eyes on her a lot, watched her pack her things in the blue Lufthansa bag he’d
     brought, but she couldn’t feel any heat there, not like he wanted her. He just watched
     her, watched Eddy smoke, tapped his sunglasses on his knee, listened to Eddy’s line
     of bullshit, and said as little as he needed to. When he did say something, it was
     usually funny, but the way he talked made it hard to tell when he was joking.
    Packing, she felt light-headed, like she’d done a jumper but it hadn’t quite come
     on. The flies were fucking against the window, bumping on the dust-streaked glass,
     but she didn’t care. Gone, she was already gone.
    Zipping up the bag.
    It was raining when they got to the airport, Florida rain, pissing down warm out of
     a nowhere sky. She’d never been to an airport before, but she knew them from the stims.
    Prior’s car was a white Datsun rental that drove itself and played elevator music
     through quad speakers. It left them beside their luggage in a bare concrete bay and
     drove away in the rain. If Prior had a bag, it wasn’t with him; Mona had her Lufthansa
     bag and Eddy had two black gator-clone suitcases.
    She tugged her new skirt down over her hips and wondered if she’d bought the right
     shoes. Eddy wasenjoying himself, had his hands in his pockets and his shoulders tilted to show he
     was doing