found the charger in the third cabinet, beside a
bubble card of derms. She bent close, peering at the gray plastic, the Japanese logo,
afraid to touch it. The charger looked new, unused. She was almost certain that she
hadn’t bought it, hadn’t left it here. She took the drug from her jacket pocket and
examined it, turning it over and over, watching the measured doses of violet dust
tumble in their sealed compartments.
She saw herself place the packet on the white marble ledge, position the charger above
it, remove a derm from its bubble and insert it. She saw the red flash of a diode
when the charger had drawn off a dose; she saw herself remove the derm, balancing
it like a white plastic leech on the tip of her index finger, its moist inner surface
glittering with minute beads of DMSO—
She turned, took three steps to the toilet, and dropped the unopened packet into the
bowl. It floated there like a toy raft, the drug still perfectly dry. Perfectly. Her
hand shaking, she found a stainless nailfile and knelt on the white tile. She had
to close her eyes when she held the packet and drove the tip of the file against the
seam, twisting. The file clattered on tile as she touched the flush button and the
two halves of the empty packet vanished. She rested her forehead against cool enamel,
then forcedherself to get up, go to the sink, and carefully wash her hands.
Because she wanted, now she really
knew
she wanted, to lick her fingers.
Later that day, in a gray afternoon, she found a corrugated plastic shipping cannister
in the garage, carried it up to the bedroom, and began to pack Bobby’s remaining things.
There wasn’t much: a pair of leather jeans he hadn’t liked, some shirts he’d either
discarded or forgotten, and, in the teak bureau’s bottom drawer, a cyberspace deck.
It was an Ono-Sendai, hardly more than a toy. It lay amid a tangle of black leads,
a cheap set of stim-trodes, a greasy-looking plastic tube of saline paste.
She remembered the deck he’d used, the one he’d taken with him, a gray factory-custom
Hosaka with unmarked keys. It was a cowboy’s deck; he’d insisted on traveling with
it, even though it caused problems during customs checks. Why, she wondered, had he
bought the Ono-Sendai? And why had he abandoned it? She was seated on the edge of
the bed; she lifted the deck from the drawer and put it on her lap.
Her father, long ago, in Arizona, had cautioned her against jacking in. You don’t
need it, he’d said. And she hadn’t, because she’d dreamed cyberspace, as though the
neon gridlines of the matrix waited for her behind her eyelids.
There’s no there, there
. They taught that to children, explaining cyberspace. She remembered a smiling tutor’s
lecture in the arcology’s executive crèche, images shifting on a screen: pilots in
enormous helmets and clumsy-looking gloves, the neuroelectronically primitive “virtual
world” technology linking them more effectively with their planes, pairs of miniature
video terminals pumping them a computer-generated flood of combat data, the vibrotactile
feedback gloves providing a touch-world of studs and triggers.… As the technology evolved, the helmets shrank, the video terminals atrophied.…
She leaned forward and picked up the trode-set, shook it to free its leads from the
tangle.
No there, there.
She spread the elastic headband and settled the trodes across her temples—one of the
world’s characteristic human gestures, but one she seldom performed. She tapped the
Ono-Sendai’s battery-test stud. Green for go. She touched the power stud and the bedroom
vanished behind a colorless wall of sensory static. Her head filled with a torrent
of white sound.
Her fingers found a random second stud and she was catapulted through the static wall,
into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the bright grid of the matrix
ranged around her like an
bubble card of derms. She bent close, peering at the gray plastic, the Japanese logo,
afraid to touch it. The charger looked new, unused. She was almost certain that she
hadn’t bought it, hadn’t left it here. She took the drug from her jacket pocket and
examined it, turning it over and over, watching the measured doses of violet dust
tumble in their sealed compartments.
She saw herself place the packet on the white marble ledge, position the charger above
it, remove a derm from its bubble and insert it. She saw the red flash of a diode
when the charger had drawn off a dose; she saw herself remove the derm, balancing
it like a white plastic leech on the tip of her index finger, its moist inner surface
glittering with minute beads of DMSO—
She turned, took three steps to the toilet, and dropped the unopened packet into the
bowl. It floated there like a toy raft, the drug still perfectly dry. Perfectly. Her
hand shaking, she found a stainless nailfile and knelt on the white tile. She had
to close her eyes when she held the packet and drove the tip of the file against the
seam, twisting. The file clattered on tile as she touched the flush button and the
two halves of the empty packet vanished. She rested her forehead against cool enamel,
then forcedherself to get up, go to the sink, and carefully wash her hands.
Because she wanted, now she really
knew
she wanted, to lick her fingers.
Later that day, in a gray afternoon, she found a corrugated plastic shipping cannister
in the garage, carried it up to the bedroom, and began to pack Bobby’s remaining things.
There wasn’t much: a pair of leather jeans he hadn’t liked, some shirts he’d either
discarded or forgotten, and, in the teak bureau’s bottom drawer, a cyberspace deck.
It was an Ono-Sendai, hardly more than a toy. It lay amid a tangle of black leads,
a cheap set of stim-trodes, a greasy-looking plastic tube of saline paste.
She remembered the deck he’d used, the one he’d taken with him, a gray factory-custom
Hosaka with unmarked keys. It was a cowboy’s deck; he’d insisted on traveling with
it, even though it caused problems during customs checks. Why, she wondered, had he
bought the Ono-Sendai? And why had he abandoned it? She was seated on the edge of
the bed; she lifted the deck from the drawer and put it on her lap.
Her father, long ago, in Arizona, had cautioned her against jacking in. You don’t
need it, he’d said. And she hadn’t, because she’d dreamed cyberspace, as though the
neon gridlines of the matrix waited for her behind her eyelids.
There’s no there, there
. They taught that to children, explaining cyberspace. She remembered a smiling tutor’s
lecture in the arcology’s executive crèche, images shifting on a screen: pilots in
enormous helmets and clumsy-looking gloves, the neuroelectronically primitive “virtual
world” technology linking them more effectively with their planes, pairs of miniature
video terminals pumping them a computer-generated flood of combat data, the vibrotactile
feedback gloves providing a touch-world of studs and triggers.… As the technology evolved, the helmets shrank, the video terminals atrophied.…
She leaned forward and picked up the trode-set, shook it to free its leads from the
tangle.
No there, there.
She spread the elastic headband and settled the trodes across her temples—one of the
world’s characteristic human gestures, but one she seldom performed. She tapped the
Ono-Sendai’s battery-test stud. Green for go. She touched the power stud and the bedroom
vanished behind a colorless wall of sensory static. Her head filled with a torrent
of white sound.
Her fingers found a random second stud and she was catapulted through the static wall,
into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the bright grid of the matrix
ranged around her like an
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