Free Neuromancer by William Gibson Page B

systems when Molly
     needed it to. He watched the countdown in the corner of the screen. Two. One.
    He jacked in and triggered his program. “Mainline,” breathed the link man, his voice
     the only sound as Case plunged through the glowing strata of Sense/Net ice. Good.
     Check Molly. He hit the simstim and flipped into her sensorium.
    The scrambler blurred the visual input slightly. She stood before a wall of gold-flecked
     mirror in the building’s vast white lobby, chewing gum, apparently fascinated by her
     own reflection. Aside from the huge pair of sunglasses concealing her mirrored insets,
     she managed to look remarkably like she belonged there, another tourist girl hoping
     for aglimpse of Tally Isham. She wore a pink plastic raincoat, a white mesh top, loose
     white pants cut in a style that had been fashionable in Tokyo the previous year. She
     grinned vacantly and popped her gum. Case felt like laughing. He could feel the micropore
     tape across her ribcage, feel the flat little units under it: the radio, the simstim
     unit, and the scrambler. The throat mike, glued to her neck, looked as much as possible
     like an analgesic dermadisk. Her hands, in the pockets of the pink coat, were flexing
     systematically through a series of tension-release exercises. It took him a few seconds
     to realize that the peculiar sensation at the tips of her fingers was caused by the
     blades as they were partially extruded, then retracted.
    He flipped back. His program had reached the fifth gate. He watched as his icebreaker
     strobed and shifted in front of him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across
     the deck, making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled like a trick
     deck. Take a card, he thought, any card.
    The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had accepted his entry as a routine
     transfer from the consortium’s Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral
     subprograms peeled off, meshing with the gate’s code fabric, ready to deflect the
     real Los Angeles data when it arrived.
    He flipped again. Molly was strolling past the enormous circular reception desk at
     the rear of the lobby.
    12:01:20 as the readout flared in her optic nerve.
    A T MIDNIGHT , SYNCHED with the chip behind Molly’s eye, the link man in Jersey had given his command. “Mainline.”
     Nine Moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl, had simultaneously
     dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones. Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up,
     and drifted out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different police
     departments and public security agencies were absorbing the information that an obscure
     subsect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced
     clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as Blue Nine into the ventilation
     system of the Sense/NetPyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce
     acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.
    C ASE HIT THE switch as his program surged through the gates of the subsystem that controlled security
     for the Sense/Net research library. He found himself stepping into an elevator.
    “Excuse me, but are you an employee?” The guard raised his eyebrows. Molly popped
     her gum. “No,” she said, driving the first two knuckles of her right hand into the
     man’s solar plexus. As he doubled over, clawing for the beeper on his belt, she slammed
     his head sideways, against the wall of the elevator.
    Chewing a little more rapidly now, she touched CLOSE DOOR and STOP on the illuminated
     panel. She took a blackbox from her coat pocket and inserted a lead in the keyhole
     of the lock that secured the panel’s circuitry.
    T HE P ANTHER M ODERNS allowed four minutes for their first move to take effect, then injected a second
     carefully prepared dose of misinformation. This time, they shot it directly