Free Count Zero by William Gibson

herself.
    “Still, he is very, very wealthy, and he’s paying you a great deal to do something that you may be uniquely suited to do.” Andrea smiled and readjusted a finely turned charcoal cuff. “You don’t have a great deal of choice, do you?”
    “I know. I suppose that’s what’s making me uneasy.”
    “Well,” Andrea said, “I thought I might put off telling you a bit longer, but I have something else that may make you feel uneasy. If ‘uneasy’ is the word.”
    “Yes?”
    “I considered not telling you at all, but I’m sure he’ll get to you eventually. He smells money, I suppose.”
    Marly put her empty cup down carefully on the cluttered little rattan table.
    “He’s quite acute that way,” Andrea said.
    “When?”
    “Yesterday. It began, I think, about an hour after you would have had your interview with Virek. He called me at work. He left a message here, with the concierge. If I were to remove the screen program”—she gestured toward the phone—“I think he’d ring within thirty minutes.”
    Remembering the concierge’s eyes, the ticking of the bicycle chain.
    “He wants to talk, he said,” Andrea said. “Only to talk. Do you want to talk with him, Marly?”
    “No,” she said, and her voice was a little girl’s voice, high and ridiculous. Then, “Did he leave a number?” Andrea sighed, slowly shook her head, and then said, “Yes, of course he did.”

9
UP THE PROJECTS
    T HE DARK WAS FULL of honeycomb patterns the color of blood. Everything was warm. And soft, too, mostly soft.
    “What a mess,” one of the angels said, her voice far off but low and rich and very clear.
    “We should’ve clipped him out of Leon’s,” the other angel said. “They aren’t gonna like this upstairs.”
    “Must’ve had something in this big pocket here, see? They slashed it for him, getting it out.”
    “Not all they slashed, sister. Jesus. Here.”
    The patterns swung and swam as something moved his head. Cool palm against his cheek.
    “Don’t get any on your shirt,” the first angel said.
    “Two-a-Day ain’t gonna like this. Why you figure he freaked like that and ran?”
     
    It pissed him off, because he wanted to sleep. He was asleep, for sure, but somehow Marsha’s jack-dreams were bleeding into his head so that he tumbled through broken sequences of People of Importance. The soap had been running continuously since before he was born, the plot a multiheaded narrative tapeworm that coiled back in to devour itself every few months, then sprouted new heads hungry for tension and thrust. He could see it writhing in its totality, the way Marsha could never see it, an elongated spiral of Sense/Net DNA, cheap brittle ectoplasm spun out to uncounted hungry dreamers. Marsha, now, she had it from the POV of Michele Morgan Magnum, the female lead, hereditarycorporate head of Magnum AG. But today’s episode kept veering weirdly away from Michele’s frantically complex romantic entanglements, which Bobby had anyway never bothered to keep track of, and jerking itself into detailed socioarchitectural descriptions of Soleri-style mincome arcologies. Some of the detail, even to Bobby, seemed suspect; he doubted, for instance, that there really were entire levels devoted to the sale of ice-blue shaved-velour lounge suites with diamond-buckled knees, or that there were other levels, perpetually dark, inhabited exclusively by starving babies. This last, he seemed to recall, had been an article of faith to Marsha, who regarded the Projects with superstitious horror, as though they were some looming vertical hell to which she might one day be forced to ascend. Other segments of the jack-dream reminded him of the Knowledge channel Sense/Net piped in free with every stim subscription; there were elaborate animated diagrams of the Projects’ interior structure, and droning lectures in voice-over on the life-styles of various types of residents. These, when he was able to focus on them, seemed even