Free Neuromancer by William Gibson

colored silicon mounted under oblong
     transparent bubbles on squares of white cardboard. Molly went to the seventh booth
     along the south wall. Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly
     into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear.
    “Larry, you in, man?” She positioned herself in front of him. The boy’s eyes focused.
     He sat up in his chair and pried a bright magenta splinter from his socket with a
     dirty thumbnail.
    “Hey, Larry.”
    “Molly.” He nodded.
    “I have some work for some of your friends, Larry.”
    Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red sportshirt and flicked it
     open, slotting the microsoft beside a dozen others. His hand hovered, selected a glossy
     black chip that was slightly longer than the rest, and inserted it smoothly into his
     head. His eyes narrowed.
    “Molly’s got a rider,” he said, “and Larry doesn’t like that.”
    “Hey,” she said, “I didn’t know you were so . . . sensitive. I’m impressed. Costs
     a lot, to get that sensitive.”
    “I know you, lady?” The blank look returned. “You looking to buy some softs?”
    “I’m looking for the Moderns.”
    “You got a rider, Molly. This says.” He tapped the black splinter. “Somebody else
     using your eyes.”
    “My partner.”
    “Tell your partner to go.”
    “Got something for the Panther Moderns, Larry.”
    “What are you talking about, lady?”
    “Case, you take off,” she said, and he hit the switch, instantly back in the matrix.
     Ghost impressions of the software complex hung for a few seconds in the buzzing calm
     of cyberspace.
    “Panther Moderns,” he said to the Hosaka, removing the trodes. “Five minute precis.”
    “Ready,” the computer said.
    It wasn’t a name he knew. Something new, something that had come in since he’d been
     in Chiba. Fads swept the youth of the Sprawlat the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen
     weeks, and then vanish utterly. “Go,” he said. The Hosaka had accessed its array of
     libraries, journals, and news services.
    The precis began with a long hold on a color still that Case at first assumed was
     a collage of some kind, a boy’s face snipped from another image and glued to a photograph
     of a paint-scrawled wall. Dark eyes, epicanthic folds obviously the result of surgery,
     an angry dusting of acne across pale narrow cheeks. The Hosaka released the freeze;
     the boy moved, flowing with the sinister grace of a mime pretending to be a jungle
     predator. His body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern approximating the scribbled
     brickwork sliding smoothly across his tight onepiece. Mimetic polycarbon.
    Cut to Dr. Virginia Rambali, Sociology, NYU, her name, faculty, and school pulsing
     across the screen in pink alphanumerics.
    “Given their penchant for these random acts of surreal violence,” someone said, “it
     may be difficult for our viewers to understand why you continue to insist that this
     phenomenon isn’t a form of terrorism.”
    Dr. Rambali smiled. “There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate
     the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which
     the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we
     ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from
     other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness
     of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical
     intent. . . .”
    “Skip it,” Case said.
    C ASE MET HIS first Modern two days after he’d screened the Hosaka’s precis. The Moderns, he’d
     decided, were a contemporary version of the Big Scientists of his own late teens.
     There was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that carried
     the coded precepts of various short-lived subcults and