Burning Chrome by William Gibson Read Free Book Online Page A

making ends meet doing darkroom work and installing patio decks around swimming pools until his ship came in; he made prints of all the negatives I’d accumulated on the Downes job. I didn’t want to look at the stuff myself. It didn’t seem to bother Leonardo, though, and when he was finished I checked the prints, riffling through them like a deck of cards, sealed them up, and sent them air freight to London. Then I took a taxi to a theater that was showing Nazi Love Motel, and kept my eyes shut all the way.
    Cohen’s congratulatory wire was forwarded to me in San Francisco a week later. Dialta had loved the pictures. He admired the way I’d ‘really gotten into it,’ and looked forward to working with me again. That afternoon I spotted a flying wing over Castro Street, but there was something tenuous about it, as though it were only half there. I rushed into the nearest newstand and gathered up as much as I could find on the petroleum crisis and the nuclear energy hazard. I’d just decided to buy a plane ticket for New York.
    â€˜Hell of a world we live in, huh?’ The proprietor was athin black man with bad teeth and an obvious wig. I nodded, fishing in my jeans for change, anxious to find a park bench where I could submerge myself in hard evidence of the human near-dystopia we live in. ‘But it could be worse, huh?’
    â€˜That’s right,’ I said, ‘or even worse, it could be perfect.’
    He watched me as I headed down the street with my little bundle of condensed catastrophe.

Fragments of a Hologram Rose
    That summer Parker had trouble sleeping.
    There were power droughts; sudden failures of the delta-inducer brought painfully abrupt returns to consciousness.
    To avoid these, he used patch cords, miniature alligator clips, and black tape to wire the inducer to a battery-operated ASP deck. Power loss in the inducer would trigger the deck’s playback circuit.
    He bought an ASP cassette that began with the subject asleep on a quiet beach. It had been recorded by a young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an abnormally acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados for the sole purpose of taking a nap and his morning’s exercise on a brilliant stretch of private beach. The microfiche laminate in the cassette’s transparent case explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha to delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn’t been able to sleep without an inducer for two years, wondered if this was possible.
    He had been able to sit through the whole thing only once, though by now he knew every sensation of the first five subjective minutes. He thought the most interesting part of the sequence was a slight editing slip at the start of the elaborate breathing routine: a swift glance down the white beach that picked out the figure of a guard patrolling a chain link fence, a black machine pistol slung over his arm.
    While Parker slept, power drained from the city’s grids.
    The transition from delta to delta-ASP was a darkimplosion into other flesh. Familiarity cushioned the shock. He felt the cool sand under his shoulders. The cuffs of his tattered jeans flapped against his bare ankles in the morning breeze. Soon the boy would wake fully and begin his Ardha-Matsyendra-something; with other hands Parker groped in darkness for the ASP deck.
    Three in the morning. Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water.
    Morning’s recorded dream, fading: through other eyes, dark plume of a Cuban freighter – fading with the horizon it navigates across the mind’s gray screen.
    Three in the morning.
    Let yesterday arrange itself around you in flat schematic images. What you said – what she said – watching her pack – dialing the cab. However you shuffle them they form the same printed circuit, hieroglyphs converging on a central component: you, standing in the rain,