Supposedly the work did everything he’d ever been accused of, an irony dipped in blood. It was a digital puzzle box, a thing of dark beauty with the perfect crime at its axis.
A heist doesn’t occur in a bank - it occurs in the heart of the criminal. Dante heard about the Gamete treasure and his heart opened like a spreading gore stain. As data went, this was the true spice.
Following leads from bunker to web to needle bar, he learned more - often from blast-due bomb-zombies who grasped his arm and urged him to stick around. The book read the reader and, once attuned, told a tale which kicked off with the reader’s current circumstances. The book contained a hemisync oscillator which hypnotized the reader. Somewhere in the book was a doorway. The reader was through the door and lost before he knew it. Here was the ultimate role-playing scenario, a maze attuned precisely to the participant’s personality. It was vinyl-bound. It was in a safe box in the Deal Street Bank.
In the bank there really was a safe box registered to ‘Barbanel’. Dante had found his crime, like a long-lost brother.
Rosa Control had made him promise not to fire up the book until they were away and clear. But he was only browsing, keying up sub-entries, going deeper. He had found a scene where Biff Barbanel glances at a book called Punching the Sarge - by clicking on the title Dante found he could access the full text of Sarge , in which a brilliant mathematician shoots himself with a foam gun and drowns. Shortly before this denouement, a football coach quotes from The Tangle Hymn , the text of which Dante accessed with a single click. In Tangle there are numerous references to the fictitious author of The Think Tank , in which a bigot bums a copy of Parashite , which includes a scene in which a drowsy cleric browses through Knitting the Ties That Bind , at the front of which In Your Dreams is decorously quoted. In Your Dreams includes a reference to Bloody Rest , in which someone chews up a page from After the Future and flobs it at a passing jogger. Seven hundred levels, each level a different book, each written in the ‘torrential’ style so frowned upon for saving time. It was a sub-entry vortex, processing faster than light.
Near the hub the hypersubtext bulged like a landfill. Boundaries blurred into a narrative metastream. A character tried to determine the average half-life of a cliche by firing sepulchral pieties through a particle accelerator, but an insulation fault left him contaminated and talking bullshit. A fighter pilot roared abuse into his intercom to prove the ego is unaffected by variations in airspeed velocity. A convict in transit convinced the cop to whom he was handcuffed that the cop was the guiltier man, at which the cop shot him and escaped. Speeding past fireworks of information and overhearing conversation which described the arting of crime by bringing to it a sense of absolute specificity, Dante plunged into a tale in which he lay injured and jostled in a bodyvan, dead or alive. Fact or fiction? Unreachable, he raced into himself.
The bank front was burning like an exotic drink. ‘Hot enough for yuh Harpo?’ shouted Blince over the roar. ‘Rome in the last days, am I right? Explains a lot. If Rome wasn’t built in a day why’s it such a goddamn mess, know what I mean? You trooper boys - get this chestnut gun outta here and hose down the crime scene.’
The Duvall gun was backed up and a fire crew moved in as Blince and Specter strolled to the snack stand. ‘If yuh wanna follow this up, Harpo, we’re headin’ for the uptown den. Terry Geryon’s your man. Main den’s been Parkered. Hey, what am I thinkin’ here - Benny? Put out an APB on Parker. He’ll rue the day he rocketed outta the birth canal. And let’s clear it up once and for all Benny, can potatoes only be grown from potatoes?’
‘ I guess so, Chief,’ said Benny, itching to be gone.
‘ You guess,’ Blince rumbled ominously.
A heist doesn’t occur in a bank - it occurs in the heart of the criminal. Dante heard about the Gamete treasure and his heart opened like a spreading gore stain. As data went, this was the true spice.
Following leads from bunker to web to needle bar, he learned more - often from blast-due bomb-zombies who grasped his arm and urged him to stick around. The book read the reader and, once attuned, told a tale which kicked off with the reader’s current circumstances. The book contained a hemisync oscillator which hypnotized the reader. Somewhere in the book was a doorway. The reader was through the door and lost before he knew it. Here was the ultimate role-playing scenario, a maze attuned precisely to the participant’s personality. It was vinyl-bound. It was in a safe box in the Deal Street Bank.
In the bank there really was a safe box registered to ‘Barbanel’. Dante had found his crime, like a long-lost brother.
Rosa Control had made him promise not to fire up the book until they were away and clear. But he was only browsing, keying up sub-entries, going deeper. He had found a scene where Biff Barbanel glances at a book called Punching the Sarge - by clicking on the title Dante found he could access the full text of Sarge , in which a brilliant mathematician shoots himself with a foam gun and drowns. Shortly before this denouement, a football coach quotes from The Tangle Hymn , the text of which Dante accessed with a single click. In Tangle there are numerous references to the fictitious author of The Think Tank , in which a bigot bums a copy of Parashite , which includes a scene in which a drowsy cleric browses through Knitting the Ties That Bind , at the front of which In Your Dreams is decorously quoted. In Your Dreams includes a reference to Bloody Rest , in which someone chews up a page from After the Future and flobs it at a passing jogger. Seven hundred levels, each level a different book, each written in the ‘torrential’ style so frowned upon for saving time. It was a sub-entry vortex, processing faster than light.
Near the hub the hypersubtext bulged like a landfill. Boundaries blurred into a narrative metastream. A character tried to determine the average half-life of a cliche by firing sepulchral pieties through a particle accelerator, but an insulation fault left him contaminated and talking bullshit. A fighter pilot roared abuse into his intercom to prove the ego is unaffected by variations in airspeed velocity. A convict in transit convinced the cop to whom he was handcuffed that the cop was the guiltier man, at which the cop shot him and escaped. Speeding past fireworks of information and overhearing conversation which described the arting of crime by bringing to it a sense of absolute specificity, Dante plunged into a tale in which he lay injured and jostled in a bodyvan, dead or alive. Fact or fiction? Unreachable, he raced into himself.
The bank front was burning like an exotic drink. ‘Hot enough for yuh Harpo?’ shouted Blince over the roar. ‘Rome in the last days, am I right? Explains a lot. If Rome wasn’t built in a day why’s it such a goddamn mess, know what I mean? You trooper boys - get this chestnut gun outta here and hose down the crime scene.’
The Duvall gun was backed up and a fire crew moved in as Blince and Specter strolled to the snack stand. ‘If yuh wanna follow this up, Harpo, we’re headin’ for the uptown den. Terry Geryon’s your man. Main den’s been Parkered. Hey, what am I thinkin’ here - Benny? Put out an APB on Parker. He’ll rue the day he rocketed outta the birth canal. And let’s clear it up once and for all Benny, can potatoes only be grown from potatoes?’
‘ I guess so, Chief,’ said Benny, itching to be gone.
‘ You guess,’ Blince rumbled ominously.
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