Burning Chrome by William Gibson Read Free Book Online Page B

screaming at the cabby.
    The rain was sour and acid, nearly the color of piss. The cabby called you an asshole; you still had to pay twice the fare. She had three pieces of luggage. In his respirator and goggles, the man looked like an ant. He pedaled away in the rain. She didn’t look back.
    The last you saw of her was a giant ant, giving you the finger.
    Parker saw his first ASP unit in a Texas shantytown called Judy’s Jungle. It was a massive console in cheap plastic chrome. A ten-dollar bill fed into the slot bought you five minutes of free-fall gymnastics in a Swiss orbital spa, trampolining through twenty-meter perihelions with a sixteen-year-old Vogue model – heady stuff for the Jungle,where it was simpler to buy a gun than a hot bath.
    He was in New York with forged papers a year later, when two leading firms had the first portable decks in major department stores in time for Christmas. The ASP porn theaters that had boomed briefly in California never recovered.
    Holography went too, and the block-wide Fuller domes that had been the holo temples of Parker’s childhood became multilevel supermarkets, or housed dusty amusement arcades where you still might find the old consoles, under faded neon pulsing APPARENT SENSORY PERCEPTION through a blue haze of cigarette smoke.
    Now Parker is thirty and writes continuity for broadcast ASP, programming the eye movements of the industry’s human cameras.
    The brown-out continues.
    In the bedroom, Parker prods the brushed-aluminum face of his Sendai Sleep-Master. Its pilot light flickers, then lapses into darkness. Coffee in hand, he crosses the carpet to the closet she emptied the day before. The flashlight’s beam probes the bare shelves for evidence of love, finding a broken leather sandal strap, an ASP cassette, and a postcard. The postcard is a white light reflection hologram of a rose.
    At the kitchen sink, he feeds the sandal strap to the disposal unit. Sluggish in the brown-out, it complains, but swallows and digests. Holding it carefully between thumb and forefinger, he lowers the hologram toward the hidden rotating jaws. The unit emits a thin scream as steel teeth slash laminated plastic and the rose is shredded into a thousand fragments.
    Later he sits on the unmade bed, smoking. Her cassette is in the deck ready for playback. Some women’s tapesdisorient him, but he doubts this is the reason he now hesitates to start the machine.
    Roughly a quarter of all ASP users are unable to comfortably assimilate the subjective body picture of the opposite sex. Over the years some broadcast ASP stars have become increasingly androgynous in an attempt to capture this segment of the audience.
    But Angela’s own tapes have never intimidated him before. (But what if she has recorded a lover?) No, that can’t be it – it’s simply that the cassette is an entirely unknown quantity.
    When Parker was fifteen, his parents indentured him to the American subsidiary of a Japanese plastics combine. At the time, he felt fortunate; the ratio of applicants to indentured trainees was enormous. For three years he lived with his cadre in a dormitory, singing the company hymns in formation each morning and usually managing to go over the compound fence at least once a month for girls or the holodrome.
    The indenture would have terminated on his twentieth birthday, leaving him eligible for full employee status. A week before his nineteenth birthday, with two stolen credit cards and a change of clothes, he went over the fence for the last time. He arrived in California three days before the chaotic New Secessionist regime collapsed. In San Francisco, warring splinter groups hit and ran in the streets. One or another of four different ‘provisional’ city governments had done such an efficient job of stockpiling food that almost none was available at street level.
    Parker spent the last night of the revolution in a burned-out Tucson suburb, making