afrodita | It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.
Out in the malls and plazas, moths were
batting themselves to death against the
neon, but in Bobby's loft the only
light came from a monitor screen and
the green and red LEDs on the face of
the matrix simulator. I knew every
chip in Bobby's simulator by heart; it
looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai
VII, the 'Cyberspace Seven,' but I'd
rebuilt it so many times that you'd
have had a hard time finding a square
millimeter of factory circuitry in all
that silicon.
We waited side by side in front of
the simulator console, watching the
time display in the screen's left
corner.
"Go for it," I said, when it was
time, but Bobby was already there,
leaning forward to drive the Russian
program into its slot with the heel of
his hand. He did it with the tight
grace of a kid slamming change into an
arcade game, sure of winning and ready
to pull down a string of free games.
A silver tide of phosphenes boiled
across my field of vision as the matrix
began to unfold in my head, a 3D
chessboard, infinite and perfectly
transparent. The Russian program
seemed to lurch as we entered the grid.
If anyone else had been jacked into
that part of the matrix, he might have
seen a surf of flickering shadow roll
out of the little yellow pyramid that
represented our computer. The program
was a mimetic weapon, designed to
absorb local color and present itself
as a crash-priority override in
whatever context it encountered.
"Congratulations," I heard Bobby
say. "We just became an Eastern
Seaboard Fission Authority inspection
probe..." That meant we were clearing
fiberoptic lines with the cybernetic
equivalent of a fire siren, but in the
simulation matrix we seemed to rush
straight for Chrome's data base. I
couldn't see it yet, but I already knew
those walls were waiting. Walls of
shadow, walls of ice.
Chrome: her pretty childface smooth
as steel, with eyes that would have
been at home on the bottom of some deep
Atlantic trench, cold grey eyes that
lived under terrible pressure. They
said she cooked her own cancers for
people who crossed her, rococo custom
variations that took years to kill you.
They said a lot of things about Chrome,
none of them at all reassuring.
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