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