9781784879297

JARED SHURIN

Jared Shurin’s previous anthologies include The Outcast Hours and The Djinn Falls in Love (both with Mahvesh Murad and both finalists for the World Fantasy Award). He has also been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award (twice), the British Science Fiction Association Award (twice) and the Hugo Award (twice), and won the British Fantasy Award (twice).

Alongside Anne C. Perry, he founded and edited the ‘brilliantly brutal’ (Guardian ) pop culture website Pornokitsch for ten years, responsible for many of its more irritating and exuberant articles. Together, they also co-founded the Kitschies, the prize for progressive, intelligent and entertaining speculative and fantastic fiction, and Jurassic London, an award-winning, not-for-profit small press.

His other projects have included the Best of British Fantasy and Speculative Fiction series and anthologies of mummies, weird Westerns and Dickensian London. A frequent reviewer, he has also written articles on topics as diverse as Gossip Girl and Deadwood

Jared is a certified BBQ judge.

ALSO EDITED BY JARED SHURIN

The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories (with Mahvesh Murad)

The Outcast Hours (with Mahvesh Murad) Irregularity

The Lowest Heaven (with Anne C. Perry)

JARED SHURIN

The Big Book of Cyberpunk

Vintage Classics is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

Introduction and selection copyright © Jared Shurin 2023

The authors have asserted their right to be identified as the authors of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Pages 719–723 should be seen as an extension to this copyright page.

First published in Great Britain by Vintage Classics in 2024

First published in The United States by Vintage Books in 2023

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I’m an optimist about humanity in general, I suppose.

Tim Berners-Lee

EDITOR’S NOTE

The Big Book of Cyberpunk is a historical snapshot as much as a literary one, containing stories that span almost seventy-five years.

Cyberpunk, at its inception, was ahead of many other forms of literature in how it embraced (and continues to embrace) progressive themes. Cyberpunk, at its best, has strived for an inclusive vision of the present and future of society. Accordingly, the stories within The Big Book of Cyberpunk discuss all aspects of identity and existence. This includes, but is not limited to, gender, sexuality, race, class, and culture.

Even while attempting to be progressive, however, these stories also use language, tropes, and stereotypes common to the times and the places in which they were originally written. Even as some of the authors challenged the problems of their time, their work still includes problematic elements. To pretend otherwise would be hypocritical; it is the essence of cyberpunk to understand that one can simultaneously challenge and deserve to be challenged.

Cyberpunk is also literature that exists in opposition, and the way it expresses its rebellion is very often shocking, provocative, and offensive. It is transgressive by design, but not without purpose, and I tried to make my selections with that principle in mind.

Jared Shurin

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 1

THE DAY OF TWO THOUSAND PIGS

There once lived a man who was naked, raving, and could not be bound. According to the Gospel: “He tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet.” It turns out (spoiler) he was possessed. The demons were cast out of the man. Lacking a human host, the demons possessed an entire herd of pigs (two thousand of them, says Mark!). They then ran straight into the ocean.

The man, liberated of foul influences, sat there “dressed and in his right mind.” The people around him were comforted. The day of demons was behind them. After a brief period of naked, raving chaos, order had been restored.

Or so they thought.

The biblical story of Legion is an iconic one, perhaps the most well-known exorcism in Western culture.* It is also, perhaps, the perfect metaphor for cyberpunk. It is literature unchained, naked, and raving but only briefly. Depending on which expert source you read, this day of demons lasted a decade or a few short years—or, according to some, it died even before it was born. The pigs went straight into the sea. Order restored.

There’s no question that cyberpunk had a shockingly brief existence as a cohesive entity. Born out of science fiction’s new wave, literary postmodernism, and a perfect storm of external factors (Reaganism, cheap transistors, networked computing, and MTV), the genre cohered as a tangible, fungible thing in the early 1980s, most famously exemplified by the aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and the themes of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). The

* It also inspired one of the best X-Men characters.

term cyberpunk itself, as coined by Bruce Bethke, came into being in 1983.* The neologism captured the zeitgeist: the potential of, and simultaneous disillusionment with, techno-capitalism on steroids.

Cyberpunk was born of the punk ethos. It was a genre that, in many ways, existed against a mainstream cultural and literary tradition, rather than for anything definable or substantive in its own right. This is, at least, an argument posited by those who believe the genre peaked—and died—with Bruce Sterling’s superb anthology Mirrorshades (1986). Accepted as the definitive presentation of cyberpunk, Sterling had pressed a Heisenbergian self-destruct button. Once it was a defined quality, cyberpunk could no longer continue in that form.

Although this is a romantic theory (and cyberpunk is a romantic pursuit, despite—or perhaps because of—the leather and chrome), it is not one to which I personally subscribe. While collecting for this volume, I found that the engine of the genre was still spinning away, producing inventive and disruptive interpretations of the core cyberpunk themes through to the start of the next decade. These include novels and collections such as Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988), Misha’s Prayers of Steel (1988), Richard Kadrey’s Metrophage (1988), Lisa Mason’s Arachne (1990), and Richard Paul Russo’s Destroying Angel (1992); as well as movies, television programs, and games such as Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987), the Max Headroom series (1985), FASA’s Shadowrun (1989), and Bullfrog’s Syndicate (1993). Meaningful social commentary was still being produced as well: Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for instance, as well as the cypherpunks and even the first steampunks.†

By the mid-1990s, however, the hogs had well and truly left for the ocean. The mundanity of the technocratic society had been firmly realized—as expressed, for example, in Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs (1995). And at the other extreme, the visual aesthetic had proved overwhelmingly popular, thriving independently of the ideas (or even the material) that spawned it. Johnny Mnemonic (1995) serves as a painful example of how the visual tropes of cyberpunk no longer bore any connection to its original themes. A bit like Frankenstein’s monster, the cyberpunk style had gone lumbering off on its own, inadvertently appropriating the name of its creator.‡ Cyberpunk slouched along in increasingly glossy and pastiche-ridden forms, but its frenetic glory days were now truly

* Bethke’s story—found in this volume—was written in 1980 and first published in 1983. The term was quickly adopted by the legendary science fiction editor Gardner Dozois, who used it to describe the movement he was seeing in the pages of his Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

† This is a larger discussion, but steampunk, even more than cyberpunk, is a genre in which the aesthetic rapidly subsumed its original themes. It has, however, regained its footing as a platform for discussing postcolonialism. Also, airships.

‡ In Storming the Reality Studio (1991), Richard Kadrey and Larry McCaffery make a compelling argument for Frankenstein (1818) as a cyberpunk work, therefore increasing the lifespan of the genre by approximately 170 years.

behind it. Cyberpunk qua cyberpunk had been pulled apart by the twin poles of banal reality and hyperactive fantasy.

Why would a Big Book be given over to something that lived, thrived, and died in such a short period of time? Because, in this case, the pigs took the long way round.

Cyberpunk’s manifestation in a single and singular form was indeed brief. But it left quite an impression. A lingering dissatisfaction that being well-dressed and well-behaved is a bit, well, dull. The growing realization that chains aren’t the nicest things to wear. A dawning awareness that there are actually a lot of extremely valid reasons to run around and scream (clothing optional). People understood that the world itself was not in its right mind, and maybe the demons had the right idea.

Even as the brief golden era of cyberpunk—the day of Legion—slips further into nostalgia, the legacy of cyberpunk remains not only relevant but ubiquitous. We now live our lives in a perplexing mix of the virtual and the real. At no time in human history have we ever been exposed to more messages, more frequently, and more intrusively. Civilians using bootstrap technology are guiding drones in open warfare against marauding professional mercenaries. Protesters use umbrellas and spray paint to hide their identity from facial recognition technology. Battles between corporations are fought in the streams of professional videogame players. Algorithmically generated videos lead children down the rabbit hole of terrorist recruitment. The top touring musical act is a hologram. Your refrigerator is spying on you.

Perhaps the madman in the cave was not possessed but an oracle. Cyberpunk, however brief its reign, gave us the tools, the themes, and the vocabulary to understand the madness to come. It understood that the world itself was raving and undressed—irrational, unpredictable, and ill behaved. This is how we live, and Legion saw it coming.

WHAT IS CYBERPUNK?

It is impossible to collect The Big Book of Cyberpunk without actually defining cyberpunk. Unless we dare to name Legion, we can’t track the two thousand feral hogs and the spoor they left behind.

Unsurprisingly, given cyberpunk’s robust academic and critical legacy, there are many definitions to draw upon. With a genre so nebulous and sprawling, it is possible for each artist, author, academic, game designer or editor to find in it what they want. Cyberpunk is a land of definitional opportunity, however there are some fundamental principles to uphold.

Cyberpunk has clear origins in both the “genre” and “literary” worlds. The division between these worlds is a false tension that has been remarked on, with their trademark directness, by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer in their introduction to The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016). From its start, cyberpunk stories and cyberpunk authors were bobbing and weaving between

both literary and genre outlets, as well as commercial and academic presses, traditional and experimental formats, and formal and informal modes of publishing.

Cyberpunk has now been “claimed” by science fiction (or, more controversially, science fiction has been consumed by cyberpunk). But it would be a narrow and inaccurate view of the genre to see it as a wholly science-fictional endeavor.

Cyberpunk is inextricably linked with the real experience of technology. Technology in cyberpunk is not a hypothetical but a fundamental, tangible, and omnipresent inclusion in human life. Cyberpunk’s predecessors largely dealt with technology as an abstract possibility: a controlled progress in the hands of a scientific elite, with visionary, but entirely rational, outcomes. But the reality of the computing explosion is that irrationality reigned, science became decentralised and personalised, and utopian visions were subsumed by capitalism, politics, and individual whim. Technology outpaced not only its expectations but its limitations.

As a genre about technology, and not “science” more broadly, there are limits to cyberpunk’s scope. Technology, in this context, is manufactured. Cyberpunk is not science fiction that explores the ramifications of something inherent (such as the anthropological science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin), innate (such as fiction that focuses on xenobiology, mutation, psychic powers, or other “flukes of biology” stories), or encountered (such as stories about discovering or exploring alien civilizations, lost worlds, or strange artifacts). By focusing on technology as a product, cyberpunk is about agency: it speaks about change that we are attempting to bring about and upon ourselves.

Cyberpunk exists in opposition to its predecessors. The -punk of cyberpunk is unavoidable: cyberpunk contains a fundamental sense of challenge. The man in the cave wasn’t raving blindly; he was raving against. Cyberpunk pushes boundaries; it is provocative. It tries to find and break conventions. This need to rebel is intrinsic to the genre, leading to experimentation with both theme and form. As noted previously, it also connects to the possible “death” of cyberpunk: once the genre was absorbed by the mainstream, it could no longer exist as a single cohesive rebellion, and fragmented accordingly.

Cyberpunk is neither static nor teleological. Cyberpunk is literature about change. That change can take the form of progress or regress; evolution or revolution; or even degradation. It is not epic in the sense of a grand and ultimate destination. There are no final and decisive conclusions, only, at most, incremental movement. Cyberpunk is often described as dystopian, but dystopia implies a final and established system. Even in its grimmest worlds, cyberpunk presents the possibility of dynamism and of change. (And, similarly, even when set in the most scintillating futures, cyberpunk seeds the potential for regression or disruption.)

This final principle also hints at the limitations of technology. Cyberpunk is not about technological supremacy. In fact, the reverse is true: cyberpunk is about the perseverance of humanity. Cyberpunk accepts that irrationality and personality cannot be subsumed. This recognition is for good and for ill: techno-utopian outcomes are impossible because of our core, intractable

humanness. But nor should those outcomes even be desirable: our irrepressible need for individuality may keep us from paradise but is, ultimately, the most essential part of our nature. In theme, and often in form, cyberpunk embraces chaos and irrationality, perpetually defiant of sweeping solutions, absolutist worldviews, or fixed patterns.

Marshall McLuhan, one of the great scholars of technology and society, described the same dynamics that led to the development of cyberpunk. McLuhan suggested that, in order to study technology, we step away from admiring the technology itself and instead examine how it shapes or displaces society. This quasi-phenomenological approach finds meaning not in the thing itself, but in our response to it. McLuhan concludes that the “message” of any medium or technology is the scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.* Applying this same concept to cyberpunk: it is not the fiction of technology but that of our reaction to it. The technology itself matters only in how it affects “human affairs.”

Cyberpunk fiction is therefore an attempt, through literature, to make sense of the unprecedented scale and pace of contemporary technology, and also of the brutal and realistic acknowledgment that there may be no sense to it at all. As a working definition, therefore, it means cyberpunk is speculative fiction about the influence of technology on the scale, the pace, or the pattern of human affairs. Technology may accelerate, promote, delay, or even oppose these affairs, but humanity remains ultimately, unchangeably, human. It is the fiction of irrationality. Science fiction looks to the stars; cyberpunk stares into a mirror.

It seems tautological, but a definition is only as good as its ability to define. I crawled through almost two thousand works for this book, and, as Big™ as this book is, a mere hundred or so made it in. How did this definition work as a set of practical selection criteria? More importantly, what should you expect to find within these pages?

Cyberpunk is fiction—a self-serving selection requirement, and a controversial one at that. There’s a wealth of cyberpunk-adjacent non-fiction that fully merits a Big Book of its own. From the reviews of Cheap Truth to the ads in the back of Mondo 2000, there are essays, travelogues, manifestos, articles, and memoirs that are immensely important to cyberpunk. But cyberpunk is speculative, not descriptive. The non-fiction inspires the genre, and is inspired by it, but is not the genre itself.

The protagonist needs to be recognisably human. As stated, cyberpunk is about human affairs. Protagonists that are aliens, robots, or artificial intelligence (AI) shift the focus from human social relationships to the relationship between humanity and the other. Human/other relationships can be an insightful way of exploring what makes us human (as seen in great science fiction ranging from Mary Doria Russell to Becky Chambers), but cyberpunk eschews

* Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964).

that additional layer of metaphor. To be about human affairs, the story needs to be about humans.

The story is set in the present, the near present, or an easily intuited future. As we project further and further out, deciphering the scale, the pace, or the pattern requires more and more assumptions on the part of the author. Again, this is about the point of focus: the more speculation involved, and the less the manufactured technology is immediately recognisable, the more the story becomes about exploring the wondrous, rather than interrogating the probable. The “present,” of course, is relative. (Objectively speaking, most of cyberpunk is now, disturbingly, alternate history.)

Given the stagnant state of space exploration, this also excludes virtually all stories that take place off-planet or in deep space.* (Again, arguments could be made for films such as Alien, 1979, or Outland, 1981, that take place in deep space, but with oddly minimal evidence of human scientific or social progress.) Similarly, there are very few examples of cyberpunk in secondary worlds or of cyberpunk with magic. As the fantastical becomes more and more necessary to the story, the focus shifts away from human affairs and toward the story’s imaginative underpinnings.

Technology is mediative, not transformative. This is a deeply subjective divide but one critical to what makes cyberpunk a distinct genre or subgenre of science fiction. A story in which technology fundamentally transforms, replaces, or subsumes human relationships is exciting, intriguing, and wildly imaginative but not cyberpunk. A cyberpunk story is one that examines the way technology changes the way humans relate to other humans but still leaves that relationship fundamentally intact. The underlying resilience of human social relationships, for better or for worse, remains the key theme—not the transformative potential of technology.

In the spirit of cyberpunk, it is fair to note that these rules are in no way consistent. There are obvious exceptions to each of the above contained within this book, including AI protagonists, alien encounters, and even the overt use of magic.

The eagle-eyed will also note that I’ve tried to avoid the vocabulary that normally surrounds cyberpunk. As mentioned above, cyberpunk needs not be dystopian, for example. In fact, because of its focus on the resilience of human relationships, cyberpunk is neither optimistic nor pessimistic but brutally realistic. If that realism is often read as dystopian, that is more a commentary on the nature of humanity.

Nor does cyberpunk have to be set in a city, or under neon lights, or wearing

* Is there anything more emblematic of cyberpunk than the corporatization of the space race? When John F. Kennedy announced the ambition of a manned mission to the moon, he declared: “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.” Sixty years later, egocentric billionaires are farting radioactive garbage over the south Texas landscape in the rush to get billboards into orbit.

sunglasses, or in the rain, or (god forbid) in a trench coat. These tropes demonstrate the lingering appeal of the aesthetic that stemmed from cyberpunk but have little to do with its underpinning themes. Indeed, some of the most spectacularly non-cyberpunk works can masquerade as cyberpunk. The presence of a parsley garnish does not guarantee a steak beneath.

The last word commonly applied to cyberpunk is noir, and there is much merit to it. Unfortunately, in noir, we find a genre that is somehow even more commonly misinterpreted; confused with an aesthetic than cyberpunk itself. Noir is, like cyberpunk, about human relationships, whether the protagonist’s troubled relationship with their own identity (Dark Passage, 1947) or their conflict with a claustrophobic broader society (Chinatown, 1974). There is even a McLuhan-esque technological change at the center of most noir stories: the modern industrial city and its resultant impact on the pace, the scale, and the pattern of human affairs. Cyberpunk as science fiction noir can be a fairly apt description, but only when used in the thematic sense. It is, however, too often misapplied in the sense of “two genres that both feature rain and trench coats,” which is why I have strenuously avoided “noir” here.

Since cyberpunk is posited in this collection as the speculative examination of technology on human affairs, The Big Book of Cyberpunk is structured to examine the genre along the dimensions upon which those affairs exist: self, culture, system, and challenge. These sections also nod to McLuhan’s concept of the “global village”—a world in which media and technology has made the pace and the scale of human affairs instantaneous and global.* This global village, for better or for worse, is a world that McLuhan envisioned, that cyberpunk speculated upon, and in which we now live.

Each section begins with a (much briefer) introduction, followed by a “precyberpunk” story. As tidy as it would be to divide the world into an orderly, rationalist, technophilic Golden Age and then the raving of cyber-demons, that would be a false dichotomy. Like all cultural trends, cyberpunk has its harbingers, more easily identified with the benefits of hindsight and distance.

For each theme, I’ve included a story that, in its own way, predicts, pioneers, or inspires the cyberpunk that followed. From there, the stories within each section are ordered chronologically, up to—as much as possible—the present day. The sole caveat here is that “publication order” is an arbitrary metric: a story may have been conceived, written, or even submitted long before its publication. But this rough chronological ordering shows how the central themes of cyberpunk stayed consistent, even as the technology or media explored shifted over time. This ordering also demonstrates, in many ways, how cyberpunk has always been self-reflexive, with stories often in gleeful conversation with their forebears both within and outside the “core” genre.

Finally, each volume of The Big Book of Cyberpunk concludes with a section

*

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).

on post-cyberpunk. The stories here showcase the “What next?”—a question that has been asked since even before the genre began.

THE SOURCE CODE OF TWO THOUSAND PIGS

For those interested in deciphering the construction of this anthology, there were some functional—if idiosyncratic—editorial rules in place.

Respect antecedents. Notable cyberpunk anthologies include Bruce Sterling’s formative Mirrorshades; Rudy Rucker, Robert Anton Wilson, and Peter Lamborn Wilson’s groundbreaking Semiotext(e) SF (1989); Larry McCaffery’s equally important Storming the Reality Studio (1991); Pat Cadigan’s The Ultimate Cyberpunk (2002); James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel’s Rewired (2007); Victoria Blake’s Cyberpunk (2013); and Jason Heller and Joshua Viola’s Cyber World (2016).

Each of these editors had their distinct (and occasionally contradictory) vision of the genre, and these anthologies are all, in my opinion, required reading. Rather than imitate their vision, or worse, subsume it, I have kept repetition to a bare minimum. That same respect also applies to all other anthologies, including the Big Book series. Although some authors rightfully appear in this volume and previous Big Books, there are no overlapping stories.

Showcase varying perspectives. Although peak or core cyberpunk was demographically homogeneous (something of which the cyberpunks were, to their credit, fully aware), its legacy is astoundingly and brilliantly diverse. I have attempted to capture how writers from many different backgrounds— demographic, geographic, and artistic—took on the challenge of writing about our relationship with technology and one another.

Cyberpunk is a truly global phenomenon. Storytellers all over the world have used the genre as a means of addressing and discussing their concerns. This is not a recent development; cyberpunk has been a global genre since its earliest days. I’ve sought out stories that show both cyberpunk’s global contemporary presence and its roots. This book includes multiple translations, including five commissioned specifically for this volume—among them the first Englishlanguage appearances of classic cyberpunk stories by Gerardo Horacio Porcayo and Victor Pelevin, two undisputed masters of the genre.

Afrofuturism is an important movement unto itself, with its own unique cultural evolution. It is not “Black cyberpunk,” although the two are often conflated. Treating Afrofuturism as a subset of cyberpunk is to treat it with disrespect. However, there are undeniable parallels, as both genres, for example, present alternative views to a “mainstreamed” culture, and both are robustly transmedia in their creative expression. There has also been some intersection over time, perhaps most popularly in the music, videos, and writing of Janelle Monáe. Their novella, co-written with Alaya Dawn Johnson, features in this volume. “The Memory Librarian” is one of several works within this Big Book that has a foot in both movements, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that Afrofuturism is thoroughly explored herein.

As a corollary to the principle of diverse perspectives: the de facto Big Book rule is that no author can appear twice in a single volume—and this has been mostly maintained. However, cyberpunk has always been a collaborative genre. Some of its most impressive and defining works were co-written, creating results that neither could achieve independently. Although a very slim loophole, I’ve exploited it, meaning a few names do have the audacity to repeat herein.

Celebrate the experimental. Cyberpunk media included film and television, albums and art, software and games. Many of these formats are impossible to capture on the printed page, certainly not without doing them a massive disservice—although there are some visual stories inside this collection. I attempt to pay tribute to the original cyberpunks by gathering materials from a wide variety of sources: a reflection of the non-traditional publishing journey taken by many of these writers. Inside are stories first published in magazines, anthologies, and websites, but also as zines, liner notes, and fleeting social media posts.

Cyberpunk is not solely the province of science fiction, and herein are stories first published by newspapers, in science journals, in literary magazines, and as role-playing game tie-ins. Due to the combination of provocative content and technologically savvy authors, cyberpunk has always been at the forefront of self-publishing— a trend also reflected here.

Continuing the experimental theme, all the stories in The Big Book of Cyberpunk are self-contained “holistic” works. There are many great stories that require the reader to have preexisting knowledge of the setting or the characters. There are a wealth of fantastic cyberpunk novels that could have provided extracts. Restricting this anthology solely to short fiction was necessary for my own sake.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

The first story, William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981) stands outside the five main sections. It is the boot-up sound for the hundred-odd stories that follow.

William Gibson is the figure most closely connected with cyberpunk, not only through Neuromancer and the Sprawl trilogy, but also through his short stories and non-fiction, all of which encapsulated the fledgling genre in its fragile early years. There is no author more appropriate to open this volume.*

“The Gernsback Continuum” defines the problem that cyberpunk would then go on to solve. It shows the fantasies of scientific aspiration, and it repositions visions of progress as the ghosts of value. The story is achingly, poignantly sad. Not because it is set in a dystopian hellscape but because the world is so painfully ordinary. It shows where we are, but through the lens of where we thought we’d be. By setting the recognizable against the aspirational, Gibson

* “The Gernsback Continuum” was also the first story in the now oft-mentioned Mirrorshades. This is a coincidence, but I like it.

shows the gap between imagination and reality and sets out the challenge for future writers to fill it—including, as it turns out, Gibson himself. “The Gernsback Continuum” refuted the science-fictional tradition that had prevailed since the 1930s and made space for a new form of storytelling.

Above all else, “The Gernsback Continuum” is simply a beautiful story, perfectly constructed and gloriously atmospheric. Although all stories in this anthology were chosen for their historical and thematic significance, the most important selection criterion was that they are enjoyable to read, and I hope you find as much pleasure in them as I have.

WILLIAM GIBSON

THE GERNSBACK CONTINUUM (1981)

mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was that flyingwing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot.

I suppose it started in London, in that bogus Greek taverna in Battersea Park Road, with lunch on Cohen’s corporate tab. Dead steam-table food and it took them thirty minutes to find an ice bucket for the retsina. Cohen works for BarrisWatford, who publish big, trendy “trade” paperbacks: illustrated histories of the neon sign, the pinball machine, the windup toys of Occupied Japan. I’d gone over to shoot a series of shoe ads; California girls with tanned legs and frisky Day-Glo jogging shoes had capered for me down the escalators of St. John’s Wood and across the platforms of Tooting Bec. A lean and hungry young agency had decided that the mystery of London Transport would sell waffle-tread nylon runners. They decide; I shoot. And Cohen, whom I knew vaguely from the old days in New York, had invited me to lunch the day before I was due out of Heathrow. He brought along a very fashionably dressed young woman named

Dialta Downes, who was virtually chinless and evidently a noted pop-art historian. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes this way lies madness in huge sans serif capitals.

Cohen introduced us and explained that Dialta was the prime mover behind the latest Barris-Watford project, an illustrated history of what she called “American Streamlined Moderne.” Cohen called it “raygun Gothic.” Their working title was The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.

There’s a British obsession with the more baroque elements of American pop culture, something like the weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of the West Germans or the aberrant French hunger for old Jerry Lewis films. In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a uniquely American form of architecture that most Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but gradually it began to dawn on me. I found myself remembering Sunday morning television in the Fifties.

Sometimes they’d run old eroded newsreels as filler on the local station. You’d sit there with a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk, and a staticridden Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers would putter around with this big old Nash with wings, and you’d see it rumbling furiously down some deserted Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off, but it flew away to Dialta Downes’s never-never land, true home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of “futuristic” Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing: the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her.

The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners—your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future.

Over coffee, Cohen produced a fat manila envelope full of glossies. I saw the winged statues that guard the Hoover Dam, forty-foot concrete hood ornaments leaning steadfastly into an imaginary hurricane. I saw a dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the employees of Johnson Wax must have felt as though they were walking into one of Paul’s spray-paint pulp Utopias. Wright’s building looked as though it had been designed for people who wore white togas and Lucite sandals. I hesitated over one sketch of a particularly grandiose prop-driven airliner, all wing, like a fat, symmetrical

boomerang with windows in unlikely places. Labeled arrows indicated the locations of the grand ballroom and two squash courts. It was dated 1936.

“This thing couldn’t have flown . . . ?” I looked at Dialta Downes.

“Oh, no, quite impossible, even with those twelve giant props; but they loved the look, don’t you see? New York to London in less than two days, first-class dining rooms, private cabins, sun decks, dancing to jazz in the evening . . . The designers were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.”

I’d been in Burbank for three days, trying to suffuse a really dull-looking rocker with charisma, when I got the package from Cohen. It is possible to photograph what isn’t there; it’s damned hard to do, and consequently a very marketable talent. While I’m not bad at it, I’m not exactly the best, either, and this poor guy strained my Nikon’s credibility. I got out depressed because I do like to do a good job, but not totally depressed, because I did make sure I’d gotten the check for the job, and I decided to restore myself with the sublime artiness of the Barris-Watford assignment. Cohen had sent me some books on Thirties design, more photos of streamlined buildings, and a list of Dialta Downes’s fifty favorite examples of the style in California.

Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way. While I was waiting, I thought of myself in Dialta Downes’s America. When I isolated a few of the factory buildings on the ground glass of the Hasselblad, they came across with a kind of sinister totalitarian dignity, like the stadiums Albert Speer built for Hitler. But the rest of it was relentlessly tacky; ephemeral stuff extruded by the collective American subconscious of the Thirties, tending mostly to survive along depressing strips lined with dusty motels, mattress wholesalers, and small used-car lots. I went for the gas stations in a big way.

During the high point of the Downes Age, they put Ming the Merciless in charge of designing California gas stations. Favoring the architecture of his native Mongo, he cruised up and down the coast erecting raygun emplacements in white stucco. Lots of them featured superfluous central towers ringed with those strange radiator flanges that were a signature motif of the style and which made them look as though they might generate potent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm if you could only find the switch that turned them on. I shot one in San Jose an hour before the bulldozers arrived and drove right through the structural truth of plaster and lathing and cheap concrete.

“Think of it,” Dialta Downes had said, “as a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams.”

And that was my frame of mind as I made the stations of her convoluted socioarchitectural cross in my red Toyota—as I gradually tuned in to her image of a shadowy America-that-wasn’t, of Coca-Cola plants like beached submarines, and fifth-run movie houses like the temples of some lost sect that had worshiped blue mirrors and geometry. And as I moved among these secret ruins, I found myself wondering what the inhabitants of that lost future would think of

the world I lived in. The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car—no wings for it—and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal . . .

And one day, on the outskirts of Bolinas, when I was setting up to shoot a particularly lavish example of Ming’s martial architecture, I penetrated a fine membrane, a membrane of probability

Ever so gently, I went over the Edge—

And looked up to see a twelve-engined thing like a bloated boomerang, all wing, thrumming its way east with an elephantine grace, so low that I could count the rivets in its dull silver skin, and hear—maybe—the echo of jazz.

I took it to Kihn. Merv Kihn, freelance journalist with an extensive line in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactées, bush-league Loch Ness monsters, and the Top Ten conspiracy theories in the loonier reaches of the American mass mind.

“It’s good,” said Kihn, polishing his yellow Polaroid shooting glasses on the hem of his Hawaiian shirt, “but it’s not mental ; lacks the true quill.”

“But I saw it, Mervyn.” We were seated poolside in brilliant Arizona sunlight. He was in Tucson waiting for a group of retired Las Vegas civil servants whose leader received messages from Them on her microwave oven. I’d driven all night and was feeling it.

“Of course you did. Of course you saw it. You’ve read my stuff; haven’t you grasped my blanket solution to the UFO problem? It’s simple, plain and country simple: people”—he settled the glasses carefully on his long hawk nose and fixed me with his best basilisk glare—“see . . . things. People see these things. Nothing’s there, but people see them anyway. Because they need to, probably. You’ve read Jung, you should know the score . . . In your case, it’s so obvious: You admit you were thinking about this crackpot architecture, having fantasies . . . Look, I’m sure you’ve taken your share of drugs, right? How many people survived the Sixties in California without having the odd hallucination? All those nights when you discovered that whole armies of Disney technicians had been employed to weave animated holograms of Egyptian hieroglyphs into the fabric of your jeans, say, or the times when—”

“But it wasn’t like that.”

“Of course not. It wasn’t like that at all; it was ‘in a setting of clear reality,’ right? Everything normal, and then there’s the monster, the mandala, the neon cigar. In your case, a giant Tom Swift airplane. It happens all the time. You aren’t even crazy. You know that, don’t you?” He fished a beer out of the battered foam cooler beside his deck chair.

“Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I interviewed a sixteen-yearold girl who’d been assaulted by a bar hade.”

“A what?”

“A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see, was floating

around on its own little flying saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps on cousin Wayne’s vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up behind its ears.” He burped.

“It assaulted her? How?”

“You don’t want to know; you’re obviously impressionable. ‘It was cold’ ”— he lapsed into his bad Southern accent—“ ‘and metallic.’ It made electronic noises. Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There’s no place for her to function in this society. She’d have seen the devil if she hadn’t been brought up on The Bionic Woman and all those Star Trek reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she knows that it happened to her. I got out ten minutes before the heavy UFO boys showed up with the polygraph.”

I must have looked pained, because he set his beer down carefully beside the cooler and sat up.

“If you want a classier explanation, I’d say you saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties’ comic art. They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing. But you saw a different kind of ghost, that’s all. That plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow. The important thing is not to worry about it.”

I did worry about it, though.

Kihn combed his thinning blond hair and went off to hear what They had had to say over the radar range lately, and I drew the curtains in my room and lay down in air-conditioned darkness to worry about it. I was still worrying about it when I woke up. Kihn had left a note on my door; he was flying up north in a chartered plane to check out a cattle-mutilation rumor (“muties,” he called them; another of his journalistic specialties).

I had a meal, showered, took a crumbling diet pill that had been kicking around in the bottom of my shaving kit for three years, and headed back to Los Angeles.

The speed limited my vision to the tunnel of the Toyota’s headlights. The body could drive, I told myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained and stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind’s eye along late-night highways. But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn’s opinion of what I was already thinking of as my “sighting” rattled endlessly through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated the diet pill, and the speed-vegetation along the road began to assume the colors of infrared satellite images, glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota’s slipstream.

I pulled over, then, and a half-dozen aluminum beer cans winked goodnight as I killed the headlights. I wondered what time it was in London, and tried to

imagine Dialta Downes having breakfast in her Hampstead flat, surrounded by streamlined chrome figurines and books on American culture.

Desert nights in that country are enormous; the moon is closer. I watched the moon for a long time and decided that Kihn was right. The main thing was not to worry. All across the continent, daily, people who were more normal than I’d ever aspired to be saw giant birds, Bigfeet, flying oil refineries; they kept Kihn busy and solvent. Why should I be upset by a glimpse of the 1930s pop imagination loose over Bolinas? I decided to go to sleep, with nothing worse to worry about than rattlesnakes and cannibal hippies, safe amid the friendly roadside garbage of my own familiar continuum. In the morning I’d drive down to Nogales and photograph the old brothels, something I’d intended to do for years. The diet pill had given up.

The light woke me, and then the voices. The light came from somewhere behind me and threw shifting shadows inside the car. The voices were calm, indistinct, male and female, engaged in conversation.

My neck was stiff and my eyeballs felt gritty in their sockets. My leg had gone to sleep, pressed against the steering wheel. I fumbled for my glasses in the pocket of my work shirt and finally got them on.

Then I looked behind me and saw the city.

The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect’s perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters

I closed my eyes tight and swung around in the seat. When I opened them, I willed myself to see the mileage meter, the pale road dust on the black plastic dashboard, the overflowing ashtray.

“Amphetamine psychosis,” I said. I opened my eyes. The dash was still there, the dust, the crushed filter tips. Very carefully, without moving my head, I turned the headlights on.

And saw them.

They were blond. They were standing beside their car, an aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rudder jutting up from its spine and smooth black tires like a child’s toy. He had his arm around her waist and was gesturing toward the city. They were both in white: loose clothing, bare legs, spotless white sun shoes. Neither of them seemed aware of the beams of my headlights. He was saying something wise and strong, and she was nodding, and suddenly I was frightened, frightened in an entirely different way. Sanity had ceased to be an issue; I knew,

somehow, that the city behind me was Tucson—a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real, entirely real. But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me.

They were the children of Dialta Downes’s ’80-that-wasn’t; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we’d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world.

Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars.

It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda.

I put the car in gear and drove forward slowly, until the bumper was within three feet of them. They still hadn’t seen me. I rolled the window down and listened to what the man was saying. His words were bright and hollow as the pitch in some chamber of commerce brochure, and I knew that he believed in them absolutely.

“John,” I heard the woman say, “we’ve forgotten to take our food pills.” She clicked two bright wafers from a thing on her belt and passed one to him. I backed onto the highway and headed for Los Angeles, wincing and shaking my head.

I phoned Kihn from a gas station. A new one, in bad Spanish Modern. He was back from his expedition and didn’t seem to mind the call.

“Yeah, that is a weird one. Did you try to get any pictures? Not that they ever come out, but it adds an interesting frisson to your story, not having the pictures turn out. . . .”

But what should I do?

“Watch lots of television, particularly game shows and soaps. Go to porn movies. Ever see Nazi Love Motel ? They’ve got it on cable, here. Really awful. Just what you need.”

What was he talking about?

“Quit yelling and listen to me. I’m letting you in on a trade secret: Really bad media can exorcize your semiotic ghosts. If it keeps the saucer people off my back, it can keep these Art Deco futuroids off yours. Try it. What have you got to lose?”

Then he begged off, pleading an early-morning date with the Elect.

“The who?”

“These oldsters from Vegas; the ones with the microwaves.”

I considered putting a collect call through to London, getting Cohen at Barris-Watford and telling him his photographer was checked out for a protracted season in the Twilight Zone. In the end, I let a machine mix me a really

impossible cup of black coffee and climbed back into the Toyota for the haul to Los Angeles.

Los Angeles was a bad idea, and I spent two weeks there. It was prime Downes country; too much of the Dream there, and too many fragments of the Dream waiting to snare me. I nearly wrecked the car on a stretch of overpass near Disneyland when the road fanned out like an origami trick and left me swerving through a dozen minilanes of whizzing chrome teardrops with shark fins. Even worse, Hollywood was full of people who looked too much like the couple I’d seen in Arizona. I hired an Italian director who was 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 if it were only half there. I rushed to the nearest newsstand 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.

“Hell of a world we live in, huh?” The proprietor was a thin 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?”

“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.

SELF

The notion of identity—and the many and heated discussions around it—has long been explored through fiction. Cyberpunk is no exception. Of the many different relationships that constitute human affairs, the self—how we see, perceive, and define ourselves—is perhaps the most complex. Until we know who we are, how can we understand our place in the world?

Cyberpunk has always understood that technology has the power to affect even this most intimate and individual relationship. Who we are—who we think we are—is, like every other social construct, mediated by technology.

In the early days of the genre, cyberpunk fiction was rightfully fascinated by the idea of our virtual selves. The existence of cyberspace presupposes our cyber-selves. Is our online presence a projection? A twin? A shadow? What is the tenuous connection between these planes—are there physical or moral repercussions for how our digital self acts in their world? Decades later, we are no closer to answering the questions that cyberpunk was the first to ask.

Cyberpunk also looked at technology’s broader potential for personal transformation: how much it can change us; what we can become; what we can and can’t leave behind. Modern understanding of identity is that it is a layered and dynamic concept. Humans are not one thing. Who we are can shift depending on the context we’re in, the company we keep, the choices we make, or that are made for us. Cyberpunk fiction is a way of exploring the tension between the fluidity of identity (lubricated by technology) and the immutable essence of what makes us human.

This section opens with James Tiptree Jr.’s excellent “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973). In terms of vocabulary and technology, it sets the tone for much of the cyberpunk fiction that would follow. It also raises questions about the impact of virtuality on identity: Will it be liberating to “depart” ourselves for another body, or is there something damaging about severing that connection? What harm is caused by a society that makes that possible or, in fact, encourages it?

This discussion of freedom (and the “curse” of being anchored to a physical presence) is found through many of the stories in this section. Pat Cadigan’s “Pretty Boy Crossover” (1986) describes a world where physical beauty is upheld to the point that the body is itself made the ultimate sacrifice. The criminals of John Shirley’s “Wolves of the Plateau” (1988) use the power of the virtual plane to free themselves and become something more. In “The World as We Know It” (1992), George Effinger’s sleuth, Marîd Audran, encounters communities that prefer virtual worlds to physical ones, despite the high cost of maintaining the suspension of disbelief. Gwyneth Jones’s “Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland” (1996) uses the virtual world as a form of psychotherapy: online identities allowing repressed appetites to run free.

Once plugged in to the augmented world of Jean-Marc Ligny’s “RealLife 3.0” (2014) (appearing here for the first time in English), our protagonist experiences reality and the virtual fantasy side-by-side, with predictable dispiriting results.

In Aleš Kot’s “A Life of Its Own” (2019), the virtual becomes a cage, with those same dreams used to keep you entombed (thanks, in no small part, to the fine print). Kot’s story is notable because at no point is the physical world preferable: the grievance is the concept of being trapped, not the prison itself.

Charles Stross’s madcap satire, “Lobsters” (2001) features a MacGuffin (or is it?) based on the profit potential of digital crustaceans. Surrounding that central conceit is a whirlwind of influences: our protagonist attempting to maintain his own self-identity while being buffeted by political, financial, technological, and romantic winds.

In Sparkletown, the setting of Jeff Noon’s “Ghost Codes of Sparkletown” (2011), the self can be endangered by cultural ghosts: fragments of music that float through a haunted graveyard of burned-out CPUs.*

J. P. Smythe’s “The Infinite Eye” (2017) is a story that descends in a direct line from Tiptree’s, again describing a corporate world where the desperate sell themselves to stay afloat. In “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” our protagonist receives an ecstatic reward, and a chance to live the fantasy. In “The Infinite Eye,” they merely receive a paycheck (and, presumably, no health care). In the final story in this section, qntm’s “Lena” (2021), a man is blessed/cursed with virtual immortality, give or take some messy version control.

* Jeff Noon’s story was first composed on Twitter, and has since been reincarnated in various forms, including as the inspiration for the album Ghost Codes by The Forgetting Room. This is the story’s first appearance in this “holistic” form.

The fluidity of the self is not solely contained in the virtual realm.

Anna, in Richard Kadrey’s “Surfing the Khumbu” (2002), is “living in machines and flesh at the same time,” a scenario that will leave the reader quivering in both fear and jealousy. In Cat Rambo’s “Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars” (2006), technology—in this case “memory,” both biological and computational—is embedded in the body, both a resource and a drug.

Karen Heuler’s “The Completely Rechargeable Man” (2008) reads more like a fairy tale than your average cyberpunk short. It describes a lonely individual whose life is so technological that he has become a form of entertainment. The titular character in Christian Kirtchev’s “File: The Death of Designer D.” (2009) is the source of mystery on several levels. Why did she die? What was she fighting against? And who was she in the first place? The singular letters of “D.” and her investigator, “K.” are reminiscent of Kafka, as D. battles to have an identity in a world of “gray lemmings.”

Transhuman aspiration runs amok in many of these stories. Jean Rabe’s “Better Than” (2010) is the tale of a lost soul, addicted to self-transformation, with an identity so degraded as to be totally lost.* In Alvaro Zinos-Amaro’s “wysiomg” (2016), we also have transient, fragmented identities, with biology and identity both subsumed into an anarchistic internet culture.

“The Real You™” (2018) by Molly Tanzer takes the control of the self to its ultimate conclusion with “Refractin,” a treatment in which your face is completely removed. Tanzer’s story is focused less on the perplexing how, but on the why—what could compel someone to remove their identity entirely, and what would be the repercussions of living faceless in society?

Several of the stories in this section are devoted to the intersection of the self and destruction. Not self-destruction, per se (although that is often the case), but stories that explore our slavish, one-sided devotion to technology that only exists to harm us. Sunny Moraine’s “I Tell Thee All, I Can No More” (2013) is a tale of truly forbidden love, centered around a romance that crosses all possible boundaries. It is, in the best cyberpunk tradition, a story that simply should not work, but Moraine somehow spins beauty out of nightmare, while never letting us forget the true horror beneath.

“Four Tons Too Late” (2014) and “Helicopter Story” (2020) are also about a savage blend of human and machine, as well as the subservience of the self to the military-industrial complex. In the former, K. C. Alexander describes the psychological toll on a new type of veteran. They have been, in every sense, a “good soldier”. But what is the reward for loyalty to an inherently callous system? In “Helicopter Story,” Isabel Fall reclaims a transphobic meme and uses it as the vehicle to describe a society that suppresses gender identity while simultaneously

* Cyberpunk fiction exists as much in movies, television, music, and games as in literature. Jean Rabe’s story is one of two in this book that originated in the setting of FASA’s Shadowrun, a long-established role-playing game that mixes fantasy tropes and cyberpunk, and has done much to introduce new audiences to the latter.

worshiping at the altar of hyper-militarized machismo.* The story asks “Have you ever been exultant?” and then brutally condemns a world where the only way to answer this question positively is by transforming yourself into a weapon of war.

The capacity of technology to make new selves is a fascination of cyberpunk: the ability to create an identity, or even a living being, out of whole cloth. Cyberpunk’s fixation on androids could be argued away as another aesthetic trope (thanks, Blade Runner), but it is a natural extension of the genre’s discussion of the virtual self and transhumanism. At what point does technology allow us to imitate the self so precisely that it becomes a new self of its own? And does that new being have a soul, or even the right to exist?

Phillip Mann’s “An Old-Fashioned Story” (1989) is a slice-of-life tale (apologies for the pun), in which a couple set about fixing their household android and, in the process, reveal a great deal about themselves.

In “The Girl Hero’s Mirror Says He’s Not the One” (2007), Justina Robson’s Girl Hero inhabits a completely fabricated identity that has been imposed upon her. But despite being forced into a specific role (or Role), she owns it, and takes agency over the illusion.

Lavie Tidhar’s “Choosing Faces” (2012) is one of the author’s trademark satires, featuring a particularly famous martial artist in his greatest battle(s) yet. It is hilarious, and reminiscent of Warhol with the way it addresses the tragic erosion of the self that stems from celebrity culture.

Neon Yang’s “Patterns of a Murmuration, in Billions of Data Points” (2014) is one of the few stories in this book with a nonhuman protagonist—in this case, an AI swarm that collectively takes action to solve the death of their “mother.” As compelling as our hive-mind protagonist is, this story uses them as the lens through which we can watch the fumblings of human behavior, as the humans attempt to wield this technology to their own advantage.

Every other dimension of human affairs is external—the author has the advantage of distance. Writing about the self, even a fictional self, is necessarily personal. Even blurred through the lens of fiction, there’s an emotional connection that’s unavoidable. Writing about space voyages or football is undeniably complex, but lacks the same closeness. The interest is in what’s happening out there: in the void, on the pitch. These cyberpunk stories, however, are intimate. They are not about the out there, but the right here. Whatever is happening with technology is inescapable; in our face. It is uncomfortable. We lack the distance to have perspective, or to make objective decisions. That is a reflection of cyberpunk’s central theme: despite our best (or worst) efforts to suppress it, we are inevitably, irreversibly, irrationally human.

* The meme—“I sexually identify as an attack helicopter”— emerged on Reddit and 4chan a few years before this story was first published, and was used to dismiss the notion of nonbinary gender identity and the principle of self-identification. This story not only makes sense without the original context but, rather gratifyingly, will long outlive it.

JAMES TIPTREE JR.

THE GIRL WHO WAS PLUGGED IN (1973)

listen, zombie. Believe me. What I could tell you—you with your silly hands leaking sweat on your growth-stocks portfolio. One-ten lousy hacks of AT &T on twenty-point margin and you think you’re Evel Knievel. AT &T? You doubleknit dummy, how I’d love to show you something.

Look, dead daddy, I’d say. See for instance that rotten girl?

In the crowd over there, that one gaping at her gods. One rotten girl in the city of the future. (That’s what I said.) Watch.

She’s jammed among bodies, craning and peering with her soul yearning out of her eyeballs. Love! Oo-ooh, love them! Her gods are coming out of a store called Body East. Three youngbloods, larking along loverly. Dressed like simple street-people but smashing. See their great eyes swivel above their nose-filters, their hands lift shyly, their inhumanly tender lips melt? The crowd moans. Love! This whole boiling megacity, this whole fun future world loves its gods.

You don’t believe gods, dad? Wait. Whatever turns you on, there’s a god in the future for you, custom-made. Listen to this mob. “I touched His foot! Ow-oow, I touched Him!”

Even the people in the GTX tower up there love the gods—in their own way and for their own reasons.

The funky girl on the street, she just loves. Grooving on their beautiful lives, their mysterioso problems. No one ever told her about mortals who love a god

and end up as a tree or a sighing sound. In a million years it’d never occur to her that her gods might love her back.

She’s squashed against the wall now as the godlings come by. They move in a clear space. A holocam bobs above, but its shadow never falls on them. The store display-screens are magically clear of bodies as the gods glance in and a beggar underfoot is suddenly alone. They give him a token. “Aaaaah!” goes the crowd.

Now one of them flashes some wild new kind of timer and they all trot to catch a shuttle, just like people. The shuttle stops for them—more magic. The crowd sighs, closing back. The gods are gone.

(In a room far from—but not unconnected to—the GTX tower a molecular flipflop closes too, and three account tapes spin.)

Our girl is still stuck by the wall while guards and holocam equipment pull away. The adoration’s fading from her face. That’s good, because now you can see she’s the ugly of the world. A tall monument to pituitary dystrophy. No surgeon would touch her. When she smiles, her jaw—it’s half purple—almost bites her left eye out. She’s also quite young, but who could care?

The crowd is pushing her along now, treating you to glimpses of her jumbled torso, her mismatched legs. At the corner she strains to send one last fond spasm after the godlings’ shuttle. Then her face reverts to its usual expression of dim pain and she lurches onto the moving walkway, stumbling into people. The walkway junctions with another. She crosses, trips, and collides with the casualty rail. Finally she comes out into a little bare place called a park. The sportshow is working, a basketball game in three-di is going on right overhead. But all she does is squeeze onto a bench and huddle there while a ghostly free-throw goes by her ear.

After that nothing at all happens except a few furtive hand-mouth gestures which don’t even interest her bench mates. But you’re curious about the city? So ordinary after all, in the future ?

Ah, there’s plenty to swing with here—and it’s not all that far in the future, dad. But pass up the sci-fi stuff for now, like for instance the holovision technology that’s put TV and radio in museums. Or the worldwide carrier field bouncing down from satellites, controlling communication and transport systems all over the globe. That was a spin-off from asteroid mining, pass it by. We’re watching that girl.

I’ll give you just one goodie. Maybe you noticed on the sportshow or the streets? No commercials. No ads.

That’s right. No ads. An eyeballer for you.

Look around. Not a billboard, sign, slogan, jingle, sky-write, blurb, sublimflash, in this whole fun world. Brand names? Only in those ticky little peep-screens on the stores, and you could hardly call that advertising. How does that finger you?

Think about it. That girl is still sitting there.

She’s parked right under the base of the GTX tower, as a matter of fact. Look way up and you can see the sparkles from the bubble on top, up there among the domes of godland. Inside that bubble is a boardroom. Neat bronze shield on the door: Global Transmissions Corporation—not that that means anything.

I happen to know there are six people in that room. Five of them technically male, and the sixth isn’t easily thought of as a mother. They are absolutely unremarkable. Those faces were seen once at their nuptials and will show again in their obituaries and impress nobody either time. If you’re looking for the secret Big Blue Meanies of the world, forget it. I know. Zen, do I know! Flesh? Power? Glory? You’d horrify them.

What they do like up there is to have things orderly, especially their communications. You could say they’ve dedicated their lives to that, to freeing the world from garble. Their nightmares are about hemorrhages of information; channels screwed up, plans misimplemented, garble creeping in. Their gigantic wealth only worries them, it keeps opening new vistas of disorder. Luxury? They wear what their tailors put on them, eat what their cooks serve them. See that old boy there—his name is Isham—he’s sipping water and frowning as he listens to a databall. The water was prescribed by his medistaff. It tastes awful. The databall also contains a disquieting message about his son, Paul.

But it’s time to go back down, far below to our girl. Look!

She’s toppled over sprawling on the ground.

A tepid commotion ensues among the bystanders. The consensus is she’s dead, which she disproves by bubbling a little. And presently she’s taken away by one of the superb ambulances of the future, which are a real improvement over ours when one happens to be around.

At the local bellevue the usual things are done by the usual team of clowns aided by a saintly mop-pusher. Our girl revives enough to answer the questionnaire without which you can’t die, even in the future. Finally she’s cast up, a pumped-out hulk on a cot in the long, dim ward.

Again nothing happens for a while except that her eyes leak a little from the understandable disappointment of finding herself still alive.

But somewhere one GTX computer has been tickling another, and toward midnight something does happen. First comes an attendant who pulls screens around her. Then a man in a business doublet comes daintily down the ward. He motions the attendant to strip off the sheet and go.

The groggy girl-brute heaves up, big hands clutching at body parts you’d pay not to see.

“Burke? P. Burke, is that your name?”

“Y-yes.” Croak. “Are you policeman?”

“No. They’ll be along shortly, I expect. Public suicide’s a felony.”

“. . . I’m sorry.”

He has a ’corder in his hand. “No family, right?”

“No.”

“You’re seventeen. One year city college. What did you study?”

“La—languages.”

“H’mm. Say something.”

Unintelligible rasp.

He studies her. Seen close, he’s not so elegant. Errand-boy type.

“Why did you try to kill yourself?”

She stares at him with dead-rat dignity, hauling up the gray sheet. Give him a point, he doesn’t ask twice.

“Tell me, did you see Breath this afternoon?”

Dead as she nearly is, that ghastly love-look wells up. Breath is the three young gods, a loser’s cult. Give the man another point, he interprets her expression.

“How would you like to meet them?”

The girl’s eyes bug out grotesquely.

“I have a job for someone like you. It’s hard work. If you did well you’d be meeting Breath and stars like that all the time.”

Is he insane? She’s deciding she really did die.

“But it means you never see anybody you know again. Never, ever. You will be legally dead. Even the police won’t know. Do you want to try?”

It all has to be repeated while her great jaw slowly sets. Show me the fire I walk through. Finally P. Burke’s prints are in his ’corder, the man holding up the big rancid girl-body without a sign of distaste. It makes you wonder what else he does.

And then—the magic. Sudden silent trot of litterbearers tucking P. Burke into something quite different from a bellevue stretcher, the oiled slide into the daddy of all luxury ambulances—real flowers in that holder!—and the long jarless rush to nowhere. Nowhere is warm and gleaming and kind with nurses. (Where did you hear that money can’t buy genuine kindness?) And clean clouds folding P. Burke into bewildered sleep.

Sleep which merges into feedings and washings and more sleeps, into drowsy moments of afternoon where midnight should be, and gentle businesslike voices and friendly (but very few) faces, and endless painless hyposprays and peculiar numbnesses. And later comes the steadying rhythm of days and nights, and a quickening which P. Burke doesn’t identify as health, but only knows that the fungus place in her armpit is gone. And then she’s up and following those few new faces with growing trust, first tottering, then walking strongly, all better now, clumping down the short hall to the tests, tests, tests, and the other things.

And here is our girl, looking—

If possible, worse than before. (You thought this was Cinderella transistorized?)

The disimprovement in her looks comes from the electrode jacks peeping out of her sparse hair, and there are other meldings of flesh and metal. On the other hand, that collar and spinal plate are really an asset; you won’t miss seeing that neck.

P. Burke is ready for training in her new job.

The training takes place in her suite and is exactly what you’d call a charm course. How to walk, sit, eat, speak, blow her nose, how to stumble, to urinate, to hiccup—deliciously. How to make each nose-blow or shrug delightfully, subtly, different from any ever spooled before. As the man said, it’s hard work.

But P. Burke proves apt. Somewhere in that horrible body is a gazelle, a houri, who would have been buried forever without this crazy chance. See the ugly duckling go!

Only it isn’t precisely P. Burke who’s stepping, laughing, shaking out her shining hair. How could it be? P. Burke is doing it all right, but she’s doing it

through something. The something is to all appearances a live girl. (You were warned, this is the future.)

When they first open the big cryocase and show her her new body, she says just one word. Staring, gulping, “How?”

Simple, really. Watch P. Burke in her sack and scuffs stump down the hall beside Joe, the man who supervises the technical part of her training. Joe doesn’t mind P. Burke’s looks, he hasn’t noticed them. To Joe, system matrices are beautiful.

They go into a dim room containing a huge cabinet like a one-man sauna and a console for Joe. The room has a glass wall that’s all dark now. And just for your information, the whole shebang is five hundred feet underground near what used to be Carbondale, PA

Joe opens the sauna cabinet like a big clamshell standing on end with a lot of funny business inside. Our girl shucks her shift and walks into it bare, totally unembarrassed. Eager. She settles in face-forward, butting jacks into sockets. Joe closes it carefully onto her humpback. Clunk. She can’t see in there or hear or move. She hates this minute. But how she loves what comes next!

Joe’s at his console, and the lights on the other side of the glass wall come up. A room is on the other side, all fluff and kicky bits, a girly bedroom. In the bed is a small mound of silk with a rope of yellow hair hanging out.

The sheet stirs and gets whammed back flat.

Sitting up in the bed is the darlingest girl child you’ve ever seen. She quivers—porno for angels. She sticks both her little arms straight up, flips her hair, looks around full of sleepy pazazz. Then she can’t resist rubbing her hands down over her minibreasts and belly. Because, you see, it’s the god-awful P. Burke who is sitting there hugging her perfect girl-body, looking at you out of delighted eyes.

Then the kitten hops out of bed and crashes flat on the floor.

From the sauna in the dim room comes a strangled noise. P. Burke, trying to rub her wired-up elbow, is suddenly smothered in two bodies, electrodes jerking in her flesh. Joe juggles inputs, crooning into his mike. The flurry passes; it’s all right.

In the lighted room the elf gets up, casts a cute glare at the glass wall, and goes into a transparent cubicle. A bathroom, what else? She’s a live girl, and live girls have to go to the bathroom after a night’s sleep even if their brains are in a sauna cabinet in the next room. And P. Burke isn’t in that cabinet, she’s in the bathroom. Perfectly simple, if you have the glue for that closed training circuit that’s letting her run her neural system by remote control.

Now let’s get one thing clear. P. Burke does not feel her brain is in the sauna room, she feels she’s in that sweet little body. When you wash your hands, do you feel the water is running on your brain? Of course not. You feel the water on your hand, although the “feeling” is actually a potential-pattern flickering over the electrochemical jelly between your ears. And it’s delivered there via the long circuits from your hands. Just so, P. Burke’s brain in the cabinet feels the water on her hands in the bathroom. The fact that the signals have jumped across space on

the way in makes no difference at all. If you want the jargon, it’s known as eccentric projection or sensory reference and you’ve done it all your life. Clear?

Time to leave the honeypot to her toilet training—she’s made a booboo with the toothbrush, because P. Burke can’t get used to what she sees in the mirror—

But wait, you say. Where did that girl-body come from?

P. Burke asks that too, dragging out the words.

“They grow ’em,” Joe tells her. He couldn’t care less about the flesh department. “PD s. Placental decanters. Modified embryos, see? Fit the control implants in later. Without a Remote Operator it’s just a vegetable. Look at the feet—no callus at all.” (He knows because they told him.)

“Oh oh, she’s incredible .”

“Yeah, a neat job. Want to try walking-talking mode today? You’re coming on fast.”

And she is. Joe’s reports and the reports from the nurse and the doctor and style man go to a bushy man upstairs who is some kind of medical cybertech but mostly a project administrator. His reports in turn go—to the GTX boardroom? Certainly not, did you think this is a big thing? His reports just go up. The point is, they’re green, very green. P. Burke promises well.

So the bushy man—Dr.  Tesla—has procedures to initiate. The little kitten’s dossier in the Central Data Bank, for instance. Purely routine. And the phase-in schedule which will put her on the scene. This is simple: a small exposure in an off-network holoshow.

Next he has to line out the event which will fund and target her. That takes budget meetings, clearances, coordinations. The Burke project begins to recruit and grow. And there’s the messy business of the name, which always gives Dr. Tesla an acute pain in the bush.

The name comes out weird, when it’s suddenly discovered that Burke’s “P.” stands for “Philadelphia.” Philadelphia? The astrologer grooves on it. Joe thinks it would help identification. The semantics girl references brotherly love, Liberty Bell, main line, low teratogenesis, blah-blah. Nicknames Philly? Pala? Pooty? Delphi? Is it good, bad? Finally “Delphi” is gingerly declared goodo. (“Burke” is replaced by something nobody remembers.)

Coming along now. We’re at the official checkout down in the underground suite, which is as far as the training circuits reach. The bushy Dr. Tesla is there, braced by two budgetary types and a quiet fatherly man whom he handles like hot plasma.

Joe swings the door wide and she steps shyly in.

Their little Delphi, fifteen and flawless.

Tesla introduces her around. She’s child-solemn, a beautiful baby to whom something so wonderful has happened you can feel the tingles. She doesn’t smile, she . . . brims. That brimming joy is all that shows of P. Burke, the forgotten hulk in the sauna next door. But P. Burke doesn’t know she’s alive—it’s Delphi who lives, every warm inch of her.

One of the budget types lets go a libidinous snuffle and freezes. The fatherly man, whose name is Mr. Cantle, clears his throat.

“Well, young lady, are you ready to go to work?”

“Yes, sir,” gravely from the elf.

“We’ll see. Has anybody told you what you’re going to do for us?”

“No, sir.” Joe and Tesla exhale quietly.

“Good.” He eyes her, probing for the blind brain in the room next door.

“Do you know what advertising is?”

He’s talking dirty, hitting to shock. Delphi’s eyes widen and her little chin goes up. Joe is in ecstasy at the complex expressions P. Burke is getting through. Mr. Cantle waits.

“It’s, well, it’s when they used to tell people to buy things.” She swallows. “It’s not allowed.”

“That’s right.” Mr. Cantle leans back, grave. “Advertising as it used to be is against the law. A display other than the legitimate use of the product, intended to promote its sale. In former times every manufacturer was free to tout his wares any way, place, or time he could afford. All the media and most of the landscape was taken up with extravagant competing displays. The thing became uneconomic. The public rebelled. Since the so-called Huckster Act sellers have been restrained to, I quote, displays in or on the product itself, visible during its legitimate use or in on-premises sales.” Mr. Cantle leans forward. “Now tell me, Delphi, why do people buy one product rather than another?”

“Well .” Enchanting puzzlement from Delphi. “They, um, they see them and like them, or they hear about them from somebody?” (Touch of P. Burke there; she didn’t say, from a friend.)

“Partly. Why did you buy your particular body-lift?”

“I never had a body-lift, sir.”

Mr. Cantle frowns; what gutters do they drag for these Remotes?

“Well, what brand of water do you drink?”

“Just what was in the faucet, sir,” says Delphi humbly. “I—I did try to boil it—”

“Good god.” He scowls; Tesla stiffens. “Well, what did you boil it in? A cooker?”

The shining yellow head nods.

“What brand of cooker did you buy?”

“I didn’t buy it, sir,” says frightened P. Burke through Delphi’s lips. “But—I know the best kind! Ananga has a Burnbabi. I saw the name when she—”

“Exactly!” Cantle’s fatherly beam comes back strong; the Burnbabi account is a strong one, too. “You saw Ananga using one so you thought it must be good, eh? And it is good, or a great human being like Ananga wouldn’t be using it. Absolutely right. And now, Delphi, you know what you’re going to be doing for us. You’re going to show some products. Doesn’t sound very hard, does it?”

“Oh, no, sir . . .” Baffled child’s stare; Joe gloats.

“And you must never, never tell anyone what you’re doing.” Cantle’s eyes bore for the brain behind this seductive child.

“You’re wondering why we ask you to do this, naturally. There’s a very serious reason. All those products people use, foods and healthaids and cookers and

cleaners and clothes and cars—they’re all made by people. Somebody put in years of hard work designing and making them. A man comes up with a fine new idea for a better product. He has to get a factory and machinery, and hire workmen. Now. What happens if people have no way of hearing about his product? Word of mouth is far too slow and unreliable. Nobody might ever stumble onto his new product or find out how good it was, right? And then he and all the people who worked for him—they’d go bankrupt, right? So, Delphi, there has to be some way that large numbers of people can get a look at a good new product, right? How? By letting people see you using it. You’re giving that man a chance.”

Delphi’s little head is nodding in happy relief.

“Yes, sir, I do see now—but sir, it seems so sensible, why don’t they let you—”

Cantle smiles sadly.

“It’s an overreaction, my dear. History goes by swings. People overreact and pass harsh unrealistic laws which attempt to stamp out an essential social process. When this happens, the people who understand have to carry on as best they can until the pendulum swings back.” He sighs. “The Huckster Laws are bad, inhuman laws, Delphi, despite their good intent. If they were strictly observed they would wreak havoc. Our economy, our society, would be cruelly destroyed. We’d be back in caves!” His inner fire is showing; if the Huckster Laws were strictly enforced he’d be back punching a databank.

“It’s our duty, Delphi. Our solemn social duty. We are not breaking the law. You will be using the product. But people wouldn’t understand, if they knew. They would become upset just as you did. So you must be very, very careful not to mention any of this to anybody.”

(And somebody will be very, very carefully monitoring Delphi’s speech circuits.)

“Now we’re all straight, aren’t we? Little Delphi here”—he is speaking to the invisible creature next door—“little Delphi is going to live a wonderful, exciting life. She’s going to be a girl people watch. And she’s going to be using fine products people will be glad to know about and helping the good people who make them. Yours will be a genuine social contribution.” He keys up his pitch; the creature in there must be older.

Delphi digests this with ravishing gravity.

“But sir, how do I—?”

“Don’t worry about a thing. You’ll have people behind you whose job it is to select the most worthy products for you to use. Your job is just to do as they say. They’ll show you what outfits to wear to parties, what suncars and viewers to buy, and so on. That’s all you have to do.”

Parties—clothes—suncars! Delphi’s pink mouth opens. In P. Burke’s starved seventeen-year-old head the ethics of product sponsorship float far away.

“Now tell me in your own words what your job is, Delphi.”

“Yes, sir. I—I’m to go to parties and buy things and use them as they tell me, to help the people who work in factories.”

“And what did I say was so important?”

“Oh—I shouldn’t let anybody know, about the things.”

“Right.” Mr. Cantle has another paragraph he uses when the subject shows, well, immaturity. But he can sense only eagerness here. Good. He doesn’t really enjoy the other speech.

“It’s a lucky girl who can have all the fun she wants while doing good for others, isn’t it?” He beams around. There’s a prompt shuffling of chairs. Clearly this one is go.

Joe leads her out, grinning. The poor fool thinks they’re admiring her coordination.

It’s out into the world for Delphi now, and at this point the up-channels get used. On the administrative side account schedules are opened, subprojects activated. On the technical side the reserved bandwidth is cleared. (That carrier field, remember?) A new name is waiting for Delphi, a name she’ll never hear. It’s a long string of binaries which have been quietly cycling in a GTX tank ever since a certain Beautiful Person didn’t wake up.

The name winks out of cycle, dances from pulses into modulations of modulations, whizzes through phasing, and shoots into a giga-band beam racing up to a synchronous satellite poised over Guatemala. From there the beam pours twenty thousand miles back to Earth again, forming an all-pervasive field of structured energics supplying tuned demand-points all over the CanAm quadrant.

With that field, if you have the right credit rating, you can sit at a GTX console and operate an ore extractor in Brazil. Or—if you have some simple credentials like being able to walk on water—you could shoot a spool into the network holocam shows running day and night in every home and dorm and rec site. Or you could create a continentwide traffic jam. Is it any wonder GTX guards those inputs like a sacred trust?

Delphi’s “name” appears as a tiny analyzable nonredundancy in the flux, and she’d be very proud if she knew about it. It would strike P. Burke as magic; P. Burke never even understood robotcars. But Delphi is in no sense a robot. Call her a waldo if you must. The fact is she’s just a girl, a real-live girl with her brain in an unusual place. A simple real-time on-line system with plenty of bit-rate— even as you and you.

The point of all this hardware, which isn’t very much hardware in this society, is so Delphi can walk out of that underground suite, a mobile demand-point draining an omnipresent fieldform. And she does—eighty-nine pounds of tender girl flesh and blood with a few metallic components, stepping out into the sunlight to be taken to her new life. A girl, with everything going for her including a meditech escort. Walking lovely, stopping to widen her eyes at the big antennae system overhead.

The mere fact that something called P. Burke is left behind down underground has no bearing at all. P. Burke is totally un-self-aware and happy as a clam in its shell. (Her bed has been moved into the waldo cabinet room now.) And P. Burke isn’t in the cabinet; P. Burke is climbing out of an airvan in a fabulous Colorado beef preserve, and her name is Delphi. Delphi is looking at live Charolais steers and live cottonwoods and aspens gold against the blue smog and stepping over live grass to be welcomed by the reserve super’s wife.

The super’s wife is looking forward to a visit from Delphi and her friends, and by a happy coincidence there’s a holocam outfit here doing a piece for the nature nuts.

You could write the script yourself now, while Delphi learns a few rules about structural interferences and how to handle the tiny time lag which results from the new forty-thousand-mile parenthesis in her nervous system. That’s right— the people with the leased holocam rig naturally find the gold aspen shadows look a lot better on Delphi’s flank than they do on a steer. And Delphi’s face improves the mountains too, when you can see them. But the nature freaks aren’t quite as joyful as you’d expect.

“See you in Barcelona, kitten,” the headman says sourly as they pack up.

“Barcelona?” echoes Delphi with that charming little subliminal lag. She sees where his hand is and steps back. “Cool, it’s not her fault,” another man says wearily. He knocks back his grizzled hair. “Maybe they’ll leave in some of the gut.”

Delphi watches them go off to load the spools on the GTX transport for processing. Her hand roves over the breast the man had touched. Back under Carbondale, P. Burke has discovered something new about her Delphi-body.

About the difference between Delphi and her own grim carcass.

She’s always known Delphi has almost no sense of taste or smell. They explained about that: only so much bandwidth. You don’t have to taste a suncar, do you? And the slight overall dimness of Delphi’s sense of touch—she’s familiar with that, too. Fabrics that would prickle P. Burke’s own hide feel like a cool plastic film to Delphi.

But the blank spots. It took her a while to notice them. Delphi doesn’t have much privacy; investments of her size don’t. So she’s slow about discovering there’s certain definite places where her beastly P. Burke body feels things that Delphi’s dainty flesh does not. H’mm! Channel space again, she thinks—and forgets it in the pure bliss of being Delphi.

You ask how a girl could forget a thing like that? Look. P. Burke is about as far as you can get from the concept girl. She’s a female, yes—but for her, sex is a four-letter word spelled P-A-I-N. She isn’t quite a virgin. You don’t want the details; she’d been about twelve and the freak lovers were bombed blind. When they came down, they threw her out with a small hole in her anatomy and a mortal one elsewhere. She dragged off to buy her first and last shot, and she can still hear the clerk’s incredulous guffaws.

Do you see why Delphi grins, stretching her delicious little numb body in the sun she faintly feels? Beams, saying, “Please, I’m ready now.”

Ready for what? For Barcelona like the sour man said, where his nature-thing is now making it strong in the amateur section of the Festival. A winner! Like he also said, a lot of strip mines and dead fish have been scrubbed, but who cares with Delphi’s darling face so visible?

So it’s time for Delphi’s face and her other delectabilities to show on Barcelona’s Playa Nueva. Which means switching her channel to the EurAf synchsat.

They ship her at night so the nanosecond transfer isn’t even noticed by that

insignificant part of Delphi that lives five hundred feet under Carbondale, so excited the nurse has to make sure she eats. The circuit switches while Delphi “sleeps,” that is, while P. Burke is out of the waldo cabinet. The next time she plugs in to open Delphi’s eyes it’s no different—do you notice which relay boards your phone calls go through?

And now for the event that turns the sugarcube from Colorado into the princess.

Literally true, he’s a prince, or rather an Infante of an old Spanish line that got shined up in the Neomonarchy. He’s also eighty-one, with a passion for birds—the kind you see in zoos. Now it suddenly turns out that he isn’t poor at all. Quite the reverse; his old sister laughs in their tax lawyer’s face and starts restoring the family hacienda while the Infante totters out to court Delphi. And little Delphi begins to live the life of the gods.

What do gods do? Well, everything beautiful. But (remember Mr. Cantle?) the main point is Things. Ever see a god empty-handed? You can’t be a god without at least a magic girdle or an eight-legged horse. But in the old days some stone tablets or winged sandals or a chariot drawn by virgins would do a god for life. No more! Gods make it on novelty now. By Delphi’s time the hunt for new god-gear is turning the earth and seas inside-out and sending frantic fingers to the stars. And what gods have, mortals desire.

So Delphi starts on a Euromarket shopping spree squired by her old Infante, thereby doing her bit to stave off social collapse.

Social what? Didn’t you get it, when Mr. Cantle talked about a world where advertising is banned and fifteen billion consumers are glued to their holocam shows? One capricious self-powered god can wreck you.

Take the nose-filter massacre. Years, the industry sweated years to achieve an almost invisible enzymatic filter. So one day a couple of pop-gods show up wearing nose-filters like big purple bats. By the end of the week the world market is screaming for purple bats. Then it switched to bird-heads and skulls, but by the time the industry retooled the crazies had dropped bird-heads and gone to injection globes. Blood!

Multiply that by a million consumer industries, and you can see why it’s economic to have a few controllable gods. Especially with the beautiful hunk of space R&D the Peace Department laid out for and which the taxpayers are only too glad to have taken off their hands by an outfit like GTX , which everybody knows is almost a public trust.

And so you—or rather, GTX find a creature like P. Burke and give her Delphi. And Delphi helps keep things orderly, she does what you tell her to. Why? That’s right, Mr. Cantle never finished his speech.

But here come the tests of Delphi’s button-nose twinkling in the torrent of news and entertainment. And she’s noticed. The feedback shows a flock of viewers turning up the amps when this country baby gets tangled in her new colloidal body-jewels. She registers at a couple of major scenes, too, and when the Infante gives her a suncar, little Delphi trying out suncars is a tiger. There’s a solid response in high-credit country. Mr. Cantle is humming his happy tune as he

cancels a Benelux subnet option to guest her on a nude cook-show called Wok Venus.

And now for the superposh old-world wedding! The hacienda has Moorish baths and six-foot silver candelabra and real black horses, and the Spanish Vatican blesses them. The final event is a grand gaucho ball with the old prince and his little Infanta on a bowered balcony. She’s a spectacular doll of silver lace, wildly launching toy doves at her new friends whirling by below.

The Infante beams, twitches his old nose to the scent of her sweet excitement. His doctor has been very helpful. Surely now, after he has been so patient with the suncars and all the nonsense—

The child looks up at him, saying something incomprehensible about “breath.” He makes out that she’s complaining about the three singers she had begged for.

“They’ve changed!” she marvels. “Haven’t they changed? They’re so dreary. I’m so happy now!”

And Delphi falls fainting against a gothic vargueno.

Her American duenna rushes up, calls help. Delphi’s eyes are open, but Delphi isn’t there. The duenna pokes among Delphi’s hair, slaps her. The old prince grimaces. He has no idea what she is beyond an excellent solution to his tax problems, but he had been a falconer in his youth. There comes to his mind the small pinioned birds which were flung up to stimulate the hawks. He pockets the veined claw to which he had promised certain indulgences and departs to design his new aviary.

And Delphi also departs with her retinue to the Infante’s newly discovered yacht. The trouble isn’t serious. It’s only that five thousand miles away and five hundred feet down P. Burke has been doing it too well.

They’ve always known she has terrific aptitude. Joe says he never saw a Remote take over so fast. No disorientations, no rejections. The psychomed talks about self-alienation. She’s going into Delphi like a salmon to the sea.

She isn’t eating or sleeping, they can’t keep her out of the body-cabinet to get her blood moving, there are necroses under her grisly sit-down. Crisis!

So Delphi gets a long “sleep” on the yacht and P. Burke gets it pounded through her perforated head that she’s endangering Delphi. (Nurse Fleming thinks of that, thus alienating the psychomed.)

They rig a pool down there (Nurse Fleming again) and chase P. Burke back and forth. And she loves it. So naturally when they let her plug in again Delphi loves it too. Every noon beside the yacht’s hydrofoils darling Delphi clips along in the blue sea they’ve warned her not to drink. And every night around the shoulder of the world an ill-shaped thing in a dark burrow beats its way across a sterile pool.

So presently the yacht stands up on its foils and carries Delphi to the program Mr. Cantle has waiting. It’s long-range; she’s scheduled for at least two decades’ product life. Phase One calls for her to connect with a flock of young ultrariches who are romping loose between Brioni and Djakarta where a competitor named PEV could pick them off.

A routine luxgear op, see; no politics, no policy angles, and the main budget items are the title and the yacht, which was idle anyway. The storyline is that Delphi goes to accept some rare birds for her prince—who cares? The point is that the Haiti area is no longer radioactive and look!—the gods are there. And so are several new Carib West Happy Isles which can afford GTX rates, in fact two of them are GTX subsids.

But you don’t want to get the idea that all these newsworthy people are wiredup robbies, for pity’s sake. You don’t need many if they’re placed right. Delphi asks Joe about that when he comes down to Barranquilla to check her over. (P. Burke’s own mouth hasn’t said much for a while.)

“Are there many like me?”

“Nobody’s like you, buttons. Look, are you still getting Van Allen warble?”

“I mean, like Davy. Is he a Remote?”

(Davy is the lad who is helping her collect the birds. A sincere redhead who needs a little more exposure.)

“Davy? He’s one of Matt’s boys, some psychojob. They haven’t any channel.”

“What about the real ones? Djuma van O, or Ali, or Jim Ten?”

“Djuma was born with a pile of GTX basic where her brain should be, she’s nothing but a pain. Jimsy does what his astrologer tells him. Look, peanut, where do you get the idea you aren’t real? You’re the realest. Aren’t you having joy?”

“Oh, Joe!” Flinging her little arms around him and his analyzer grids. “Oh, me gustó mucho, ¡muchísimo!”

“Hey, hey.” He pets her yellow head, folding the analyzer.

Three thousand miles north and five hundred feet down a forgotten hulk in a body-waldo glows.

And is she having joy. To waken out of the nightmare of being P. Burke and find herself a peri, a star-girl? On a yacht in paradise with no more to do than adorn herself and play with toys and attend revels and greet her friends—her, P. Burke, having friends!—and turn the right way for the holocams? Joy!

And it shows. One look at Delphi and the viewers know: dreams can come true.

Look at her riding pillion on Davy’s sea-bike, carrying an apoplectic macaw in a silver hoop. Oh, Morton, let’s go there this winter! Or learning the Japanese chinchona from that Kobe group, in a dress that looks like a blowtorch rising from one knee, and which should sell big in Texas. Morton, is that real fire? Happy, happy little girl!

And Davy. He’s her pet and her baby, and she loves to help him fix his redgold hair. (P. Burke marveling, running Delphi’s fingers through the curls.) Of course Davy is one of Matt’s boys—not impotent exactly, but very very low drive. (Nobody knows exactly what Matt does with his bitty budget, but the boys are useful and one or two have made names.) He’s perfect for Delphi; in fact the psychomed lets her take him to bed, two kittens in a basket. Davy doesn’t mind the fact that Delphi “sleeps” like the dead. That’s when P. Burke is out of the body-waldo up at Carbondale, attending to her own depressing needs.

A funny thing about that. Most of her sleepy-time Delphi’s just a gently ticking lush little vegetable waiting for P. Burke to get back on the controls. But now

and again Delphi all by herself smiles a bit or stirs in her “sleep.” Once she breathed a sound: “Yes.”

Under Carbondale P. Burke knows nothing. She’s asleep too, dreaming of Delphi, what else? But if the bushy Dr. Tesla had heard that single syllable, his bush would have turned snow white. Because Delphi is turned off.

He doesn’t. Davy is too dim to notice, and Delphi’s staff boss, Hopkins, wasn’t monitoring.

And they’ve all got something else to think about now, because the cold-fire dress sells half a million copies, and not only in Texas. The GTX computers already know it. When they correlate a minor demand for macaws in Alaska the problem comes to human attention: Delphi is something special.

It’s a problem, see, because Delphi is targeted on a limited consumer bracket. Now it turns out she has mass-pop potential—those macaws in Fairbanks, man!—it’s like trying to shoot mice with an ABM . A whole new ball game. Dr. Tesla and the fatherly Mr. Cantle start going around in headquarters circles and buddy-lunching together when they can get away from a seventh-level weasel boy who scares them both.

In the end it’s decided to ship Delphi down to the GTX holocam enclave in Chile to try a spot on one of the mainstream shows. (Never mind why an Infanta takes up acting.) The holocam complex occupies a couple of mountains where an observatory once used the clean air. Holocam total-environment shells are very expensive and electronically superstable. Inside them actors can move freely without going off-register, and the whole scene or any selected part will show up in the viewer’s home in complete three-di, so real you can look up their noses and much denser than you get from mobile rigs. You can blow a tit ten feet tall when there’s no molecular skiffle around.

The enclave looks— well, take everything you know about HollywoodBurbank and throw it away. What Delphi sees coming down is a neat giant mushroom-farm, domes of all sizes up to monsters for the big games and stuff. It’s orderly. The idea that art thrives on creative flamboyance has long been torpedoed by proof that what art needs is computers. Because this showbiz has something TV and Hollywood never had—automated inbuilt viewer feedback Samples, ratings, critics, polls? Forget it. With that carrier field you can get realtime response-sensor readouts from every receiver in the world, served up at your console. That started as a thingie to give the public more influence on content.

Yes.

Try it, man. You’re at the console. Slice to the sex-age-educ-econ-ethnocetera audience of your choice and start. You can’t miss. Where the feedback warms up, give ’em more of that. Warm—warmer—hot! You’ve hit it—the secret itch under those hides, the dream in those hearts. You don’t need to know its name. With your hand controlling all the input and your eye reading all the response, you can make them a god and somebody’ll do the same for you.

But Delphi just sees rainbows, when she gets through the degaussing ports and the field relay and takes her first look at the insides of those shells. The next thing she sees is a team of shapers and technicians descending on her, and

millisecond timers everywhere. The tropical leisure is finished. She’s in gigabuck mainstream now, at the funnel maw of the unceasing hose that’s pumping the sight and sound and flesh and blood and sobs and laughs and dreams of reality into the world’s happy head. Little Delphi is going plonk into a zillion homes in prime time and nothing is left to chance. Work!

And again Delphi proves apt. Of course it’s really P. Burke down under Carbondale who’s doing it, but who remembers that carcass? Certainly not P. Burke, she hasn’t spoken through her own mouth for months. Delphi doesn’t even recall dreaming of her when she wakes up.

As for the show itself, don’t bother. It’s gone on so long no living soul could unscramble the plotline. Delphi’s trial spot has something to do with a widow and her dead husband’s brother’s amnesia.

The flap comes after Delphi’s spots begin to flash out along the world-hose and the feedback appears. You’ve guessed it, of course. Sensational! As you’d say, they identify.

The report actually says something like InskinEmp with a string of percentages, meaning that Delphi not only has it for anybody with a Y chromosome, but also for women and everything in between. It’s the sweet supernatural jackpot, the million-to-one.

Remember your Harlow? A sexpot, sure. But why did bitter hausfraus in Gary and Memphis know that the vanilla-ice-cream goddess with the white hair and crazy eyebrows was their baby girl ? And write loving letters to Jean warning her that their husbands weren’t good enough for her? Why? The GTX analysts don’t know either, but they know what to do with it when it happens.

(Back in his bird sanctuary the old Infante spots it without benefit of computers and gazes thoughtfully at his bride in widow’s weeds. It might, he feels, be well to accelerate the completion of his studies.)

The excitement reaches down to the burrow under Carbondale where P. Burke gets two medical exams in a week and a chronically inflamed electrode is replaced. Nurse Fleming also gets an assistant who doesn’t do much nursing but is very interested in access doors and identity tabs.

And in Chile, little Delphi is promoted to a new home up among the stars’ residential spreads and a private jitney to carry her to work. For Hopkins there’s a new computer terminal and a full-time schedule man. What is the schedule crowded with?

Things.

And here begins the trouble. You probably saw that coming too.

“What does she think she is, a goddamn consumer rep ?” Mr. Cantle’s fatherly face in Carbondale contorts.

“The girl’s upset,” Miss Fleming says stubbornly. “She believes that, what you told her about helping people and good new products.”

“They are good products,” Mr. Cantle snaps automatically, but his anger is under control. He hasn’t got where he is by irrelevant reactions.

“She says the plastic gave her a rash and the glo-pills made her dizzy.”

“Good god, she shouldn’t swallow them,” Dr. Tesla puts in agitatedly.

“You told her she’d use them,” persists Miss Fleming.

Mr. Cantle is busy figuring how to ease this problem to the feral-faced young man. What, was it a goose that lays golden eggs?

Whatever he says to Level Seven, down in Chile the offending products vanish. And a symbol goes into Delphi’s tank matrix, one that means roughly Balance unit resistance against PR index.

This means that Delphi’s complaints will be endured as long as her Pop Response stays above a certain level. (What happens when it sinks need not concern us.) And to compensate, the price of her exposure time rises again. She’s a regular on the show now and response is still climbing.

See her under the sizzling lasers, in a holocam shell set up as a walkway accident. (The show is guesting an acupuncture school shill.)

“I don’t think this new body-lift is safe,” Delphi’s saying. “It’s made a funny blue spot on me—look, Mr. Vere.”

She wiggles to show where the mini–gray pak that imparts a delicious sense of weightlessness is attached.

“So don’t leave it on, Dee. With your meat—watch that deck-spot, it’s starting to synch.”

“But if I don’t wear it it isn’t honest. They should insulate it more or something, don’t you see?”

The show’s beloved old father, who is the casualty, gives a senile snigger.

“I’ll tell them,” Mr. Vere mutters. “Look now, as you step back bend like this so it just shows, see? And hold two beats.”

Obediently Delphi turns, and through the dazzle her eyes connect with a pair of strange dark ones. She squints. A quite young man is lounging alone by the port, apparently waiting to use the chamber.

Delphi’s used by now to young men looking at her with many peculiar expressions, but she isn’t used to what she gets here. A jolt of something somber and knowing. Secrets.

“Eyes! Eyes, Dee!”

She moves through the routine, stealing peeks at the stranger. He stares back. He knows something.

When they let her go she comes shyly to him.

“Living wild, kitten.” Cool voice, hot underneath.

“What do you mean?”

“Dumping on the product. You trying to get dead?”

“But it isn’t right,” she tells him. “They don’t know, but I do, I’ve been wearing it.”

His cool is jolted.

“You’re out of your head.”

“Oh, they’ll see I’m right when they check it,” she explains. “They’re just so busy. When I tell them—”

He is staring down at little flower-face. His mouth opens, closes. “What are you doing in this sewer anyway? Who are you?”

Bewilderedly she says, “I’m Delphi.”

“Holy Zen.”

“What’s wrong? Who are you, please?”

Her people are moving her out now, nodding at him.

“Sorry we ran over, Mr. Uhunh,” the script girl says.

He mutters something, but it’s lost as her convoy bustles her toward the flower-decked jitney.

(Hear the click of an invisible ignition-train being armed?)

“Who was he?” Delphi asks her hairman.

The hairman is bending up and down from his knees as he works.

“Paul. Isham. Three,” he says and puts a comb in his mouth.

“Who’s that? I can’t see.”

He mumbles around the comb, meaning, “Are you jiving?” Because she has to be, in the middle of the GTX enclave.

Next day there’s a darkly smoldering face under a turban-towel when Delphi and the show’s paraplegic go to use the carbonated pool.

She looks.

He looks.

And the next day, too.

(Hear the automatic sequencer cutting in? The system couples, the fuels begin to travel.)

Poor old Isham senior. You have to feel sorry for a man who values order: when he begets young, genetic information is still transmitted in the old ape way. One minute it’s a happy midget with a rubber duck—look around and here’s this huge healthy stranger, opaquely emotional, running with god knows who. Questions are heard where there’s nothing to question, and eruptions claiming to be moral outrage. When this is called to Papa’s attention—it may take time, in that boardroom—Papa does what he can, but without immortality-juice the problem is worrisome.

And young Paul Isham is a bear. He’s bright and articulate and tender-souled and incessantly active, and he and his friends are choking with appalment at the world their fathers made. And it hasn’t taken Paul long to discover that his father’s house has many mansions and even the GTX computers can’t relate everything to everything else. He noses out a decaying project which adds up to something like, Sponsoring Marginal Creativity (the free-lance team that “discovered” Delphi was one such grantee). And from there it turns out that an agile lad named Isham can get his hands on a viable packet of GTX holocam facilities.

So here he is with his little band, way down the mushroom-farm mountain, busily spooling a show which has no relation to Delphi’s. It’s built on bizarre techniques and unsettling distortions pregnant with social protest. An underground expression to you.

All this isn’t unknown to his father, of course, but so far it has done nothing more than deepen Isham senior’s apprehensive frown.

Until Paul connects with Delphi.

And by the time Papa learns this, those invisible hypergolics have exploded,

the energy-shells are rushing out. For Paul, you see, is the genuine article. He’s serious. He dreams. He even reads—for example, Green Mansions and he wept fiercely when those fiends burned Rima alive.

When he hears that some new GTX pussy is making it big, he sneers and forgets it. He’s busy. He never connects the name with this little girl making her idiotic, doomed protest in the holocam chamber. This strangely simple little girl.

And she comes and looks up at him and he sees Rima, lost Rima the enchanted bird girl, and his unwired human heart goes twang.

And Rima turns out to be Delphi.

Do you need a map? The angry puzzlement. The rejection of the dissonance Rima-hustling-for-GTX -My-Father. Garbage, cannot be. The loitering around the pool to confirm the swindle dark eyes hitting on blue wonder, jerky words exchanged in a peculiar stillness the dreadful reorganization of the image into Rima-Delphi in my Father’s tentacles—

You don’t need a map.

Nor for Delphi either, the girl who loved her gods. She’s seen their divine flesh close now, heard their unamplified voices call her name. She’s played their god-games, worn their garlands. She’s even become a goddess herself, though she doesn’t believe it. She’s not disenchanted, don’t think that. She’s still full of love. It’s just that some crazy kind of hope hasn’t—

Really you can skip all this, when the loving little girl on the yellow-brick road meets a Man. A real human male burning with angry compassion and grandly concerned with human justice, who reaches for her with real male arms and— boom! She loves him back with all her heart.

A happy trip, see?

Except.

Except that it’s really P. Burke five thousand miles away who loves Paul. P. Burke the monster down in a dungeon smelling of electrode paste. A caricature of a woman burning, melting, obsessed with true love. Trying over twenty-double-thousand miles of hard vacuum to reach her beloved through girl-flesh numbed by an invisible film. Feeling his arms around the body he thinks is hers, fighting through shadows to give herself to him. Trying to taste and smell him through beautiful dead nostrils, to love him back with a body that goes dead in the heart of the fire.

Perhaps you get P. Burke’s state of mind?

She has phases. The trying, first. And the shame. The shame. I am not what thou lovest. And the fiercer trying. And the realization that there is no, no way, none. Never. Never . . . A bit delayed, isn’t it, her understanding that the bargain she made was forever? P. Burke should have noticed those stories about mortals who end up as grasshoppers.

You see the outcome—the funneling of all this agony into one dumb protoplasmic drive to fuse with Delphi. To leave, to close out the beast she is chained to.

To become Delphi.

Of course it’s impossible.

However, her torments have an effect on Paul. Delphi-as-Rima is a potent

enough love object, and liberating Delphi’s mind requires hours of deeply satisfying instruction in the rottenness of it all. Add in Delphi’s body worshiping his flesh, burning in the fire of P. Burke’s savage heart—do you wonder Paul is involved?

That’s not all.

By now they’re spending every spare moment together and some that aren’t so spare.

“Mr. Isham, would you mind staying out of this sports sequence? The script calls for Davy here.”

(Davy’s still around, the exposure did him good.)

“What’s the difference?” Paul yawns. “It’s just an ad. I’m not blocking that thing.”

Shocked silence at his two-letter word. The script girl swallows bravely.

“I’m sorry, sir, our directive is to do the social sequence exactly as scripted. We’re having to respool the segments we did last week, Mr. Hopkins is very angry with me.”

“Who the hell is Hopkins? Where is he?”

“Oh, please, Paul. Please.”

Paul unwraps himself, saunters back. The holocam crew nervously check their angles. The GTX boardroom has a foible about having things pointed at them and theirs. Cold shivers, when the image of an Isham nearly went onto the world beam beside that Dialadinner.

Worse yet, Paul has no respect for the sacred schedules which are now a fulltime job for ferret boy up at headquarters. Paul keeps forgetting to bring her back on time, and poor Hopkins can’t cope.

So pretty soon the boardroom data-ball has an urgent personal action-tab for Mr. Isham senior. They do it the gentle way, at first.

“I can’t today, Paul.”

“Why not?”

“They say I have to, it’s very important.”

He strokes the faint gold down on her narrow back. Under Carbondale, PA , a blind mole-woman shivers.

“Important. Their importance. Making more gold. Can’t you see? To them you’re just a thing to get scratch with. A huckster. Are you going to let them screw you, Dee? Are you?”

“Oh, Paul—”

He doesn’t know it, but he’s seeing a weirdie; Remotes aren’t hooked up to flow tears.

“Just say no, Dee. No. Integrity. You have to.”

“But they say, it’s my job—”

“Will you believe I can take care of you, Dee? Baby, baby, you’re letting them rip us. You have to choose. Tell them, no.”

“Paul I w-will .”

And she does. Brave little Delphi (insane P. Burke). Saying, “No, please, I promised, Paul.”

They try some more, still gently.

“Paul, Mr. Hopkins told me the reason they don’t want us to be together so much. It’s because of who you are, your father.”

She thinks his father is like Mr. Cantle, maybe.

“Oh, great. Hopkins. I’ll fix him. Listen, I can’t think about Hopkins now. Ken came back today, he found out something.”

They are lying on the high Andes meadow watching his friends dive their singing kites.

“Would you believe, on the coast the police have electrodes in their heads ?”

She stiffens in his arms.

“Yeah, weird. I thought they only used PP on criminals and the army. Don’t you see, Dee—something has to be going on. Some movement. Maybe somebody’s organizing. How can we find out?” He pounds the ground behind her: “We should make contact ! If we could only find out.”

“The, the news?” she asks distractedly.

“The news.” He laughs. “There’s nothing in the news except what they want people to know. Half the country could burn up, and nobody would know it if they didn’t want. Dee, can’t you take what I’m explaining to you? They’ve got the whole world programmed! Total control of communication. They’ve got everybody’s minds wired in to think what they show them and want what they give them and they give them what they’re programmed to want—you can’t break in or out of it, you can’t get hold of it anywhere. I don’t think they even have a plan except to keep things going round and round—and god knows what’s happening to the people or the Earth or the other planets, maybe. One great big vortex of lies and garbage pouring round and round, getting bigger and bigger, and nothing can ever change. If people don’t wake up soon we’re through!”

He pounds her stomach softly.

“You have to break out, Dee.”

“I’ll try, Paul, I will—”

“You’re mine. They can’t have you.”

And he goes to see Hopkins, who is indeed cowed.

But that night up under Carbondale the fatherly Mr. Cantle goes to see P. Burke.

P. Burke? On a cot in a utility robe like a dead camel in a tent, she cannot at first comprehend that he is telling her to break it off with Paul. P. Burke has never seen Paul. Delphi sees Paul. The fact is, P. Burke can no longer clearly recall that she exists apart from Delphi.

Mr. Cantle can scarcely believe it either, but he tries.

He points out the futility, the potential embarrassment, for Paul. That gets a dim stare from the bulk on the bed. Then he goes into her duty to GTX , her job, isn’t she grateful for the opportunity, etcetera. He’s very persuasive.

The cobwebby mouth of P. Burke opens and croaks.

“No.”

Nothing more seems to be forthcoming.

Mr. Cantle isn’t dense, he knows an immovable obstacle when he bumps one.

He also knows an irresistible force: GTX . The simple solution is to lock the waldo-cabinet until Paul gets tired of waiting for Delphi to wake up. But the cost, the schedules! And there’s something odd here . . . he eyes the corporate asset hulking on the bed and his hunch-sense prickles.

You see, Remotes don’t love. They don’t have real sex, the circuits designed that out from the start. So it’s been assumed that it’s Paul who is diverting himself or something with the pretty little body in Chile. P. Burke can only be doing what comes natural to any ambitious gutter-meat. It hasn’t occurred to anyone that they’re dealing with the real hairy thing whose shadow is blasting out of every holoshow on Earth.

Love?

Mr. Cantle frowns. The idea is grotesque. But his instinct for the fuzzy line is strong; he will recommend flexibility. And so, in Chile:

“Darling, I don’t have to work tonight! And Friday too—isn’t that right, Mr. Hopkins?”

“Oh, great. When does she come up for parole?”

“Mr. Isham, please be reasonable. Our schedule—surely your own production people must be needing you?”

This happens to be true. Paul goes away. Hopkins stares after him, wondering distastefully why an Isham wants to ball a waldo. How sound are those boardroom belly-fears—garble creeps, creeps in! It never occurs to Hopkins that an Isham might not know what Delphi is.

Especially with Davy crying because Paul has kicked him out of Delphi’s bed.

Delphi’s bed is under a real window.

“Stars,” Paul says sleepily. He rolls over, pulling Delphi on top. “Are you aware that this is one of the last places on Earth where people can see the stars? Tibet, too, maybe.”

“Paul . . .”

“Go to sleep. I want to see you sleep.”

“Paul, I . . . I sleep so hard, I mean, it’s a joke how hard I am to wake up. Do you mind?”

“Yes.”

But finally, fearfully, she must let go. So that five thousand miles north a crazy spent creature can crawl out to gulp concentrates and fall on her cot. But not for long. It’s pink dawn when Delphi’s eyes open to find Paul’s arms around her, his voice saying rude, tender things. He’s been kept awake. The nerveless little statue that was her Delphi-body nuzzled him in the night.

Insane hope rises, is fed a couple of nights later when he tells her she called his name in her sleep.

And that day Paul’s arms keep her from work and Hopkins’s wails go up to headquarters where the weasel-faced lad is working his sharp tailbone off packing Delphi’s program. Mr. Cantle defuses that one. But next week it happens again, to a major client. And ferret-face has connections on the technical side.

Now you can see that when you have a field of complexly heterodyned energy modulations tuned to a demand-point like Delphi, there are many problems of

standwaves and lashback and skiffle of all sorts which are normally balanced out with ease by the technology of the future. By the same token they can be delicately unbalanced too, in ways that feed back into the waldo operator with striking results.

“Darling—what the hell! What’s wrong? Delphi!”

Helpless shrieks, writhings. Then the Rima-bird is lying wet and limp in his arms, her eyes enormous.

“I . . . I wasn’t supposed to . . .” she gasps faintly. “They told me not to . . .”

“Oh, my god—Delphi.”

And his hard fingers are digging in her thick yellow hair. Electronically knowledgeable fingers. They freeze.

“You’re a doll ! You’re one of those PP implants. They control you. I should have known. Oh, god, I should have known.”

“No, Paul,” she’s sobbing. “No, no, no—”

“Damn them. Damn them, what they’ve done—you’re not you—”

He’s shaking her, crouching over her in the bed and jerking her back and forth, glaring at the pitiful beauty.

“No!” she pleads (it’s not true, that dark bad dream back there). “I’m Delphi!”

“My father. Filth, pigs—damn them, damn them, damn them.”

“No, no,” she babbles. “They were good to me—” P. Burke underground mouthing, “They were good to me—aah-aaaah!”

Another agony skewers her. Up north the sharp young man wants to make sure this so-tiny interference works. Paul can scarcely hang on to her, he’s crying too. “I’ll kill them.”

His Delphi, a wired-up slave! Spikes in her brain, electronic shackles in his bird’s heart. Remember when those savages burned Rima alive?

“I’ll kill the man that’s doing this to you.”

He’s still saying it afterward, but she doesn’t hear. She’s sure he hates her now, all she wants is to die. When she finally understands that the fierceness is tenderness, she thinks it’s a miracle. He knows—and he still loves!

How can she guess that he’s got it a little bit wrong?

You can’t blame Paul. Give him credit that he’s even heard about pleasurepain implants and snoops, which by their nature aren’t mentioned much by those who know them most intimately. That’s what he thinks is being used on Delphi, something to control her. And to listen—he burns at the unknown ears in their bed.

Of waldo-bodies and objects like P. Burke he has heard nothing.

So it never crosses his mind as he looks down at his violated bird, sick with fury and love, that he isn’t holding all of her. Do you need to be told the mad resolve jelling in him now?

To free Delphi.

How? Well, he is, after all, Paul Isham III . And he even has an idea where the GTX neurolab is. In Carbondale.

But first things have to be done for Delphi, and for his own stomach. So he gives her back to Hopkins and departs in a restrained and discreet way. And the

Chile staff is grateful and do not understand that his teeth don’t normally show so much.

And a week passes in which Delphi is a very good, docile little ghost. They let her have the load of wildflowers Paul sends and the bland loving notes. (He’s playing it coony.) And up in headquarters weasel boy feels that his destiny has clicked a notch onward and floats the word up that he’s handy with little problems.

And no one knows what P. Burke thinks in any way whatever, except that Miss Fleming catches her flushing her food down the can and next night she faints in the pool. They haul her out and stick her with IV s. Miss Fleming frets, she’s seen expressions like that before. But she wasn’t around when crazies who called themselves Followers of the Fish looked through flames to life everlasting. P. Burke is seeing Heaven on the far side of death, too. Heaven is spelled P-a-u-l, but the idea’s the same. I will die and be born again in Delphi.

Garbage, electronically speaking. No way.

Another week and Paul’s madness has become a plan. (Remember, he does have friends.) He smolders, watching his love paraded by her masters. He turns out a scorching sequence for his own show. And finally, politely, he requests from Hopkins a morsel of his bird’s free time, which duly arrives.

“I thought you didn’t want me anymore,” she’s repeating as they wing over mountain flanks in Paul’s suncar. “Now you know—”

“Look at me!”

His hand covers her mouth, and he’s showing her a lettered card.

DON’T TALK THEY CAN HEAR EVERYTHING WE SAY.

I’M TAKING YOU AWAY NOW.

She kisses his hand. He nods urgently, flipping the card.

DON’T BE AFRAID. I CAN STOP THE PAIN IF THEY TRY TO HURT YOU

With his free hand he shakes out a silvery scrambler-mesh on a power pack. She is dumbfounded.

THIS WILL CUT THE SIGNALS AND PROTECT YOU DARLING.

She’s staring at him, her head going vaguely from side to side, No. “Yes!” He grins triumphantly. “Yes!”

For a moment she wonders. That powered mesh will cut off the field, all right. It will also cut off Delphi. But he is Paul. Paul is kissing her, she can only seek him hungrily as he sweeps the suncar through a pass.

Ahead is an old jet ramp with a shiny bullet waiting to go. (Paul also has

credits and a Name.) The little GTX patrol courier is built for nothing but speed. Paul and Delphi wedge in behind the pilot’s extra fuel tank, and there’s no more talking when the torches start to scream.

They’re screaming high over Quito before Hopkins starts to worry. He wastes another hour tracking the beeper on Paul’s suncar. The suncar is sailing a pattern out to sea. By the time they’re sure it’s empty and Hopkins gets on the hot flue to headquarters, the fugitives are a sourceless howl above Carib West.

Up at headquarters weasel boy gets the squeal. His first impulse is to repeat his previous play, but then his brain snaps to. This one is too hot. Because, see, although in the long run they can make P. Burke do anything at all except maybe live, instant emergencies can be tricky. And—Paul Isham III

“Can’t you order her back?”

They’re all in the GTX tower monitor station, Mr. Cantle and ferret-face and Joe and a very neat man who is Mr. Isham senior’s personal eyes and ears.

“No, sir,” Joe says doggedly. “We can read channels, particularly speech, but we can’t interpolate organized pattern. It takes the waldo op to send one-to-one—”

“What are they saying?”

“Nothing at the moment, sir.” The console jockey’s eyes are closed. “I believe they are, ah, embracing.”

“They’re not answering,” a traffic monitor says. “Still heading zero zero three zero—due north, sir.”

“You’re certain Kennedy is alerted not to fire on them?” the neat man asks anxiously.

“Yes, sir.”

“Can’t you just turn her off?” The sharp-faced lad is angry. “Pull that pig out of the controls!”

“If you cut the transmission cold you’ll kill the Remote,” Joe explains for the third time. “Withdrawal has to be phased right, you have to fade over to the Remote’s own autonomics. Heart, breathing, cerebellum, would go blooey. If you pull Burke out you’ll probably finish her too. It’s a fantastic cybersystem, you don’t want to do that.”

“The investment.” Mr. Cantle shudders.

Weasel boy puts his hand on the console jock’s shoulder, it’s the contact who arranged the no-no effect for him.

“We can at least give them a warning signal, sir.” He licks his lips, gives the neat man his sweet ferret smile. “We know that does no damage.”

Joe frowns, Mr. Cantle sighs. The neat man is murmuring into his wrist. He looks up. “I am authorized,” he says reverently, “I am authorized to, ah, direct a signal. If this is the only course. But minimal, minimal.”

Sharp-face squeezes his man’s shoulder.

In the silver bullet shrieking over Charleston Paul feels Delphi arch in his arms. He reaches for the mesh, hot for action. She thrashes, pushing at his hands, her eyes roll. She’s afraid of that mesh despite the agony. (And she’s right.) Frantically Paul fights her in the cramped space, gets it over her head. As he turns the power up she burrows free under his arm and the spasm fades.

“They’re calling you again, Mr. Isham!” the pilot yells.

“Don’t answer. Darling, keep this over your head damn it how can I—”

An AX 90 barrels over their nose, there’s a flash.

“Mr. Isham! Those are Air Force jets!”

“Forget it,” Paul shouts back. “They won’t fire. Darling, don’t be afraid.”

Another AX 90 rocks them.

“Would you mind pointing your pistol at my head where they can see it, sir?” the pilot howls.

Paul does so. The AX 90s take up escort formation around them. The pilot goes back to figuring how he can collect from GTX too, and after Goldsboro AB the escort peels away.

“Holding the same course.” Traffic is reporting to the group around the monitor. “Apparently they’ve taken on enough fuel to bring them to towerport here.”

“In that case it’s just a question of waiting for them to dock.” Mr. Cantle’s fatherly manner revives a bit.

“Why can’t they cut off that damn freak’s life-support,” the sharp young man fumes. “It’s ridiculous.”

“They’re working on it,” Cantle assures him.

What they’re doing, down under Carbondale, is arguing. Miss Fleming’s watchdog has summoned the bushy man to the waldo room.

“Miss Fleming, you will obey orders.”

“You’ll kill her if you try that, sir. I can’t believe you meant it, that’s why I didn’t. We’ve already fed her enough sedative to affect heart action; if you cut any more oxygen she’ll die in there.”

The bushy man grimaces. “Get Dr. Quine here fast.”

They wait, staring at the cabinet in which a drugged, ugly madwoman fights for consciousness, fights to hold Delphi’s eyes open.

High over Richmond the silver pod starts a turn. Delphi is sagged into Paul’s arm, her eyes swim up to him.

“Starting down now, baby. It’ll be over soon, all you have to do is stay alive, Dee.”

“. stay alive .”

The traffic monitor has caught them. “Sir! They’ve turned off for Carbondale—Control has contact—”

“Let’s go.”

But the headquarters posse is too late to intercept the courier wailing into Carbondale. And Paul’s friends have come through again. The fugitives are out through the freight dock and into the neurolab admin port before the guard gets organized. At the elevator Paul’s face plus his handgun get them in.

“I want Doctor—what’s his name, Dee? Dee!”

“. . . Tesla . . .” She’s reeling on her feet.

“Dr. Tesla. Take me down to Tesla, fast.”

Intercoms are squalling around them as they whoosh down, Paul’s pistol in the guard’s back. When the door slides open the bushy man is there.

“I’m Tesla.”

“I’m Paul Isham. Isham. You’re going to take your flaming implants out of this girl—now. Move!”

“What?”

“You heard me. Where’s your operating room? Go!”

“But—”

“Move! Do I have to burn somebody?”

Paul waves the weapon at Dr. Quine, who has just appeared.

“No, no,” says Tesla hurriedly. “But I can’t, you know. It’s impossible, there’ll be nothing left.”

“You screaming well can, right now. You mess up and I’ll kill you,” says Paul murderously. “Where is it, there? And wipe the feke that’s on her circuits now.”

He’s backing them down the hall, Delphi heavy on his arm.

“Is this the place, baby? Where they did it to you?”

“Yes,” she whispers, blinking at a door. “Yes . . .”

Because it is, see. Behind that door is the very suite where she was born.

Paul herds them through it into a gleaming hall. An inner door opens, and a nurse and a gray man rush out. And freeze.

Paul sees there’s something special about that inner door. He crowds them past it and pushes it open and looks in.

Inside is a big mean-looking cabinet with its front door panels ajar.

And inside that cabinet is a poisoned carcass to whom something wonderful, unspeakable, is happening. Inside is P. Burke, the real living woman who knows that he is there, coming closer—Paul whom she had fought to reach through forty thousand miles of ice—Paul is here!—is yanking at the waldo doors—

The doors tear open and a monster rises up.

“Paul darling!” croaks the voice of love, and the arms of love reach for him.

And he responds.

Wouldn’t you, if a gaunt she-golem flab-naked and spouting wires and blood came at you clawing with metal-studded paws—

“Get away!” He knocks wires.

It doesn’t much matter which wires. P. Burke has, so to speak, her nervous system hanging out. Imagine somebody jerking a handful of your medulla—

She crashes onto the floor at his feet, flopping and roaring PAUL -PAULPAUL in rictus.

It’s doubtful he recognizes his name or sees her life coming out of her eyes at him. And at the last it doesn’t go to him. The eyes find Delphi, fainting by the doorway, and die.

Now of course Delphi is dead, too.

There’s a total silence as Paul steps away from the thing by his foot.

“You killed her,” Tesla says. “That was her.”

“Your control.” Paul is furious, the thought of that monster fastened into little Delphi’s brain nauseates him. He sees her crumpling and holds out his arms. Not knowing she is dead.

And Delphi comes to him.

One foot before the other, not moving very well—but moving. Her darling

face turns up. Paul is distracted by the terrible quiet, and when he looks down he sees only her tender little neck.

“Now you get the implants out,” he warns them. Nobody moves.

“But, but she’s dead,” Miss Fleming whispers wildly.

Paul feels Delphi’s life under his hand, they’re talking about their monster. He aims his pistol at the gray man.

“You. If we aren’t in your surgery when I count three, I’m burning off this man’s leg.”

“Mr. Isham,” Tesla says desperately, “you have just killed the person who animated the body you call Delphi. Delphi herself is dead. If you release your arm you’ll see what I say is true.”

The tone gets through. Slowly Paul opens his arm, looks down. “Delphi?”

She totters, sways, stays upright. Her face comes slowly up.

“Paul . . .” Tiny voice.

“Your crotty tricks,” Paul snarls at them. “Move!”

“Look at her eyes,” Dr. Quine croaks.

They look. One of Delphi’s pupils fills the iris, her lips writhe weirdly.

“Shock.” Paul grabs her to him. “Fix her!” He yells at them, aiming at Tesla.

“For god’s sake bring it in the lab.” Tesla quavers.

“Good-bye-bye,” says Delphi clearly. They lurch down the hall, Paul carrying her, and meet a wave of people.

Headquarters has arrived.

Joe takes one look and dives for the waldo room, running into Paul’s gun.

“Oh, no, you don’t.”

Everybody is yelling. The little thing in his arm stirs, says plaintively, “I’m Delphi.”

And all through the ensuing jabber and ranting she hangs on, keeping it up, the ghost of P. Burke or whatever whispering crazily, “Paul . . . Paul . . . Please, I’m Delphi . . . Paul?”

“I’m here, darling, I’m here.” He’s holding her in the nursing bed. Tesla talks, talks, talks unheard.

“Paul don’t sleep .” The ghost-voice whispers. Paul is in agony, he will not accept, will not believe.

Tesla runs down.

And then near midnight Delphi says roughly, “Ag-ag-ag—” and slips onto the floor, making a rough noise like a seal.

Paul screams. There’s more of the ag-ag business and more gruesome convulsive disintegrations, until by two in the morning Delphi is nothing but a warm little bundle of vegetative functions hitched to some expensive hardware— the same that sustained her before her life began. Joe has finally persuaded Paul to let him at the waldo-cabinet. Paul stays by her long enough to see her face change in a dreadfully alien and coldly convincing way, and then he stumbles out bleakly through the group in Tesla’s office.

Behind him Joe is working wet-faced, sweating to reintegrate the fantastic

complex of circulation, respiration, endocrines, midbrain homeostases, the patterned flux that was a human being—it’s like saving an orchestra abandoned in midair. Joe is also crying a little; he alone had truly loved P. Burke. P. Burke, now a dead pile on a table, was the greatest cybersystem he has ever known, and he never forgets her.

The end, really.

You’re curious?

Sure, Delphi lives again. Next year she’s back on the yacht getting sympathy for her tragic breakdown. But there’s a different chick in Chile, because while Delphi’s new operator is competent, you don’t get two P. Burkes in a row—for which GTX is duly grateful.

The real belly-bomb of course is Paul. He was young, see. Fighting abstract wrong. Now life has clawed into him and he goes through gut rage and grief and grows in human wisdom and resolve. So much so that you won’t be surprised, sometime later, to find him—where?

In the GTX boardroom, dummy. Using the advantage of his birth to radicalize the system. You’d call it “boring from within.”

That’s how he put it, and his friends couldn’t agree more. It gives them a warm, confident feeling to know that Paul is up there. Sometimes one of them who’s still around runs into him and gets a big hello.

And the sharp-faced lad?

Oh, he matures too. He learns fast, believe it. For instance, he’s the first to learn that an obscure GTX research unit is actually getting something with their loopy temporal anomalizer project. True, he doesn’t have a physics background, and he’s bugged quite a few people. But he doesn’t really learn about that until the day he stands where somebody points him during a test run— and wakes up lying on a newspaper headlined “Nixon Unveils Phase Two.”

Lucky he’s a fast learner.

Believe it, zombie. When I say growth, I mean growth. Capital appreciation. You can stop sweating. There’s a great future there.

PAT CADIGAN

PRETTY BOY CROSSOVER (1986)

First you see video. Then you wear video. Then you eat video. Then you be video. The Gospel According to Visual Mark

Watch or Be Watched. Pretty Boy Credo

“who made you?”

“You mean recently?”

Mohawk on the door smiles and takes his picture. “You in. But only you, okay? Don’t try to get no friends in, hear that?”

“I hear. And I ain’t no fool, fool. I got no friends.”

Mohawk leers, leaning forward. “Pretty Boy like you, no friends?”

“Not in this world.” He pushes past the Mohawk, ignoring the kissy-kissy sounds.

He would like to crack the bridge of the Mohawk’s nose and shove bone splinters into his brain but he is lately making more effort to control his temper and besides, he’s not sure if any of that bone splinters in the brain stuff is really true. He’s a Pretty Boy, all of sixteen years old, and tonight could be his last chance.

The club is Noise. Can’t sneak into the bathroom for quiet, the Noise is piped in there, too. Want to get away from Noise? Why? No reason. But this Pretty Boy has learned to think between the beats. Like walking between the raindrops to stay dry, but he can do it. This Pretty Boy thinks things all the time—all the time. Subversive (and, he thinks so much that he knows that word subversive, sixteen, Pretty, or not). He thinks things like how many Einsteins have died of hunger and thirst under a hot African sun and why can’t you remember being born and why is music common to every culture and especially how much was there going on that he didn’t know about and how could he find out about it.

And this is all the time, one thing after another running in his head, you can see by his eyes. It’s for def not much like a Pretty Boy but it’s one reason why they want him. That he is a Pretty Boy is another and one reason why they’re halfway home getting him.

He knows all about them. Everybody knows about them and everybody wants them to pause, look twice, and cough up a card that says, Yes, we see possibilities, please come to the following address during regular business hours on the next regular business day for regular further review. Everyone wants it but this Pretty Boy, who once got five cards in a night and tore them all up. But here he is, still a Pretty Boy. He thinks enough to know this is a failing in himself, that he likes being Pretty and chased and that is how they could end up getting him after all and that’s b-b-b-bad. When he thinks about it, he thinks it with the stutter. B-b-b-bad. B-bb-bad for him because he doesn’t God help him want it, no, no n-n-n-no. Which may make him the strangest Pretty Boy still live tonight and every night.

Still live and standing in the club where only the Prettiest Pretty Boys can get in anymore. Pretty Girls are too easy, they’ve got to be better than Pretty and besides, Pretty Boys like to be Pretty all alone, no help thank you so much. This Pretty Boy doesn’t mind Pretty Girls or any other kind of girls. Lately, though, he has begun to wonder how much longer it will be for him. Two years? Possibly a little longer? By three it will be for def over and the Mohawk on the door will as soon spit in his face as leer in it.

If they don’t get to him.

And if they do get to him, then it’s never over and he can be wherever he chooses to be and wherever that is will be the center of the universe. They promise it, unlimited access in your free hours and endless hot season, endless youth. Pretty Boy Heaven, and to get there, they say, you don’t even really have to die.

He looks up to the dj’s roost, far above the bobbing, boogieing crowd on the dance floor. They still call them djs even though they aren’t discs anymore, they’re chips and there’s more than just sound on a lot of them. The great hyperprogram, he’s been told, the ultimate of ultimates, a short walk from there to the fourth dimension. He suspects this stuff comes from low-steppers shilling for them, hoping they’ll get auditioned if they do a good enough shuck job. Nobody knows what it’s really like except the ones who are there and you can’t trust them, he figures. Because maybe they aren’t, anymore. Not really.

The dj sees his Pretty upturned face, recognizes him even though it’s been a while since he’s come back here. Part of it was wanting to stay away from them and part of it was that the thug on the door might not let him in. And then, of course, he had to come, to see if he could get in, to see if anyone still wanted him. What was the point of Pretty if there was nobody to care and watch and pursue? Even now, he is almost sure he can feel the room rearranging itself around his presence in it and the dj confirms this is true by holding up a chip and pointing it to the left.

They are squatting on the make-believe stairs by the screen, reminding him of pigeons plotting to take over the world. He doesn’t look too long, doesn’t want to give them the idea he’d like to talk. But as he turns away, one, the younger man, starts to get up. The older man and the woman pull him back.

He pretends a big interest in the figures lining the nearest wall. Some are Pretty, some are female, some are undecided, some are very bizarre, or wealthy, or just charity cases. They all notice him and adjust themselves for his perusal.

Then one end of the room lights up with color and new noise. Bodies dance and stumble back from the screen where images are forming to rough music.

It’s Bobby, he realizes.

A moment later, there’s Bobby’s face on the screen, sixteen feet high, even Prettier than he’d been when he was loose among the mortals. The sight of Bobby’s Pretty-Pretty face fills him with anger and dismay and a feeling of loss so great he would strike anyone who spoke Bobby’s name without his permission.

Bobby’s lovely slate-gray eyes scan the room. They’ve told him senses are heightened after you make the change and go over but he’s not so sure how that’s supposed to work. Bobby looks kind of blind up there on the screen. A few people wave at Bobby—the dorks they let in so the rest can have someone to be hip in front of—but Bobby’s eyes move slowly back and forth, back and forth, and then stop, looking right at him.

“Ah . . .” Bobby whispers it, long and drawn out. “Aaaaaa-hhhh.” He lifts his chin belligerently and stares back at Bobby.

“You don’t have to die anymore,” Bobby says silkily. Music bounces under his words. “It’s beautiful in here. The dreams can be as real as you want them to be. And if you want to be, you can be with me.”

He knows the commercial is not aimed only at him but it doesn’t matter. This is Bobby. Bobby’s voice seems to be pouring over him, caressing him, and it feels too much like a taunt. The night before Bobby went over, he tried to talk him out of it, knowing it wouldn’t work. If they’d actually refused him, Bobby would have killed himself, like Franco had.

But now Bobby would live forever and ever, if you believed what they said. The music comes up louder but Bobby’s eyes are still on him. He sees Bobby mouth his name.

“Can you really see me, Bobby?” he says. His voice doesn’t make it over the music but if Bobby’s senses are so heightened, maybe he hears it anyway. If he does, he doesn’t choose to answer. The music is a bumped up remix of a song Bobby used to party-till-he-puked to. The giant Bobby-face fades away to be replaced with a whole Bobby, somewhat larger than life, dancing better than the old Bobby ever could, whirling along changing scenes of streets, rooftops, and beaches. The locales are nothing special but Bobby never did have all that much imagination, never wanted to go to Mars or even to the South Pole, always just to the hottest club. Always he liked being the exotic in plain surroundings and he still likes it. He always loved to get the looks. To be watched, worshipped, pursued. Yeah. He can see this is Bobby-heaven. The whole world will be giving him the looks now.

The background on the screen goes from street to the inside of a club; this club, only larger, better, with an even hipper crowd, and Bobby shaking it with them. Half the real crowd is forgetting to dance now because they’re watching Bobby, hoping he’s put some of them into his video. Yeah, that’s the dream, get yourself remixed in the extended dance version.

His own attention drifts to the fake stairs that don’t lead anywhere. They’re still perched on them, the only people who are watching him instead of Bobby. The woman, looking overaged in a purple plastic sacsuit, is fingering a card.

He looks up at Bobby again. Bobby is dancing in place and looking back at him, or so it seems. Bobby’s lips move soundlessly but so precisely he can read the words: This can be you. Never get old, never get tired, it’s never last call, nothing happens unless you want it to and it could be you. You. You. Bobby’s hands point to him on the beat. You. You. You.

Bobby. Can you really see me?

Bobby suddenly breaks into laughter and turns away, shaking it some more.

He sees the Mohawk from the door pushing his way through the crowd, the real crowd, and he gets anxious. The Mohawk goes straight for the stairs, where they make room for him, rubbing the bristly red strip of hair running down the center of his head as though they were greeting a favored pet. The Mohawk looks as satisfied as a professional glutton after a foodrace victory. He wonders what they promised the Mohawk for letting him in. Maybe some kind of limited contract. Maybe even a try-out.

Now they are all watching him together. Defiantly, he touches a tall girl dancing nearby and joins her rhythm. She smiles down at him, moving between him and them purely by chance but it endears her to him anyway. She is wearing a flap of translucent rag over secondskins, like an old-time showgirl. Over six feet tall, not beautiful with that nose, not even pretty, but they let her in so she could be tall. She probably doesn’t know that; she probably doesn’t know anything that goes on and never really will. For that reason, he can forgive her the hard-tech orange hair.

A Rude Boy brushes against him in the course of a dervish turn, asking acknowledgment by ignoring him. Rude Boys haven’t changed in more decades than anyone’s kept track of, as though it were the same little group of leathered and chained troopers buggering their way down the years. The Rude Boy isn’t dancing with anyone. Rude Boys never do. But this one could be handy, in case of an emergency.

The girl is dancing hard, smiling at him. He smiles back, moving slightly to her right, watching Bobby possibly watching him. He still can’t tell if Bobby really sees anything. The scene behind Bobby is still a double of the club, getting hipper and hipper if that’s possible. The music keeps snapping back to its first peak passage. Then Bobby gestures like God and he sees himself. He is dancing next to Bobby, Prettier than he ever could be, just the way they promise. Bobby doesn’t look at the phantom but at him where he really is, lips moving again. If you want to be, you can be with me. And so can she.

His tall partner appears next to the phantom of himself. She is also much improved, though still not Pretty, or even pretty. The real girl turns and sees herself and there’s no mistaking the delight in her face. Queen of the Hop for a minute or two. Then Bobby sends her image away so that it’s just the two of them, two Pretty Boys dancing the night away, private party, stranger go find your own good time. How it used to be sometimes in real life, between just the two of them. He remembers hard.

“B-B-B-Bobby!” he yells, the old stutter reappearing. Bobby’s image seems to give a jump, as though he finally heard. He forgets everything, the girl, the Rude Boy, the Mohawk, them on the stairs, and plunges through the crowd toward the screen. People fall away from him as though they were reenacting the Red Sea. He dives for the screen, for Bobby, not caring how it must look to anyone. What would they know about it, any of them. He can’t remember in his whole sixteen years ever hearing one person say, I love my friend. Not Bobby, not even himself.

He fetches up against the screen like a slap and hangs there, face pressed to the glass. He can’t see it now but on the screen Bobby would seem to be looking down at him. Bobby never stops dancing.

The Mohawk comes and peels him off. The others swarm up and take him away. The tall girl watches all this with the expression of a woman who lives upstairs from Cinderella and wears the same shoe size. She stares longingly at the screen. Bobby waves bye-bye and turns away.

“Of course, the process isn’t reversible,” says the older man. The steely hair has a careful blue tint; he has sense enough to stay out of hip clothes.

They have laid him out on a lounger with a tray of refreshments right by him. Probably slap his hand if he reaches for any, he thinks.

“Once you’ve distilled something to pure information, it just can’t be reconstituted in a less efficient form,” the woman explains, smiling. There’s no warmth to her. A less efficient form. If that’s what she really thinks, he knows he should be plenty scared of these people. Did she say things like that to Bobby? And did it make him even more eager?

“There may be no more exalted a form of existence than to live as sentient information,” she goes on. “Though a lot more research must be done before we can offer conversion on a larger scale.”

“Yeah?” he says. “Do they know that, Bobby and the rest?”

“Oh, there’s nothing to worry about,” says the younger man. He looks as though he’s still getting over the pain of having outgrown his boogie shoes. “The system’s quite perfected. What Grethe means is we want to research more applications for this new form of existence.”

“Why not go over yourselves and do that, if it’s so exalted.”

“There are certain things that need to be done on this side,” the woman says bitchily. “Just because—”

“Grethe.” The older man shakes his head. She pats her slicked-back hair as though to soothe herself and moves away.

“We have other plans for Bobby when he gets tired of being featured in clubs,” the older man says. “Even now, we’re educating him, adding more data to his basic information configuration—”

“That would mean he ain’t really Bobby anymore, then, huh?”

The man laughs. “Of course he’s Bobby. Do you change into someone else every time you learn something new?”

“Can you prove I don’t ?”

The man eyes him warily. “Look. You saw him. Was that Bobby?”

“I saw a video of Bobby dancing on a giant screen.”

“That is Bobby and it will remain Bobby no matter what, whether he’s poured into a video screen in a dot pattern or transmitted the length of the universe.”

“That what you got in mind for him? Send a message to nowhere and the message is him?”

“We could. But we’re not going to. We’re introducing him to the concept of higher dimensions. The way he is now, he could possibly break out of the threedimensional level of existence, pioneer a whole new plane of reality.”

“Yeah? And how do you think you’re gonna get Bobby to do that?”

“We convince him it’s entertaining.”

He laughs. “That’s a good one. Yeah. Entertainment. You get to a higher level of existence and you’ll open a club there that only the hippest can get into. It figures.”

The older man’s face gets hard. “That’s what all you Pretty Boys are crazy for, isn’t it? Entertainment?”

He looks around. The room must have been a dressing room or something back in the days when bands had been live. Somewhere overhead he can hear the faint noise of the club but he can’t tell if Bobby’s still on. “You call this entertainment?”

“I’m tired of this little prick,” the woman chimes in. “He’s thrown away opportunities other people would kill for—”

He makes a rude noise. “Yeah, we’d all kill to be someone’s data chip. You think I really believe Bobby’s real just because I can see him on a screen ?”

The older man turns to the younger one. “Phone up and have them pipe Bobby down here.” Then he swings the lounger around so it faces a nice modern screen implanted in a shored-up cement-block wall.

“Bobby will join us shortly. Then he can tell you whether he’s real or not himself. How will that be for you?”

He stares hard at the screen, ignoring the man, waiting for Bobby’s image to appear. As though they really bothered to communicate regularly with Bobby this way. Feed in that kind of data and memory and Bobby’ll believe it. He shifts uncomfortably, suddenly wondering how far he could get if he moved fast enough.

“My boy,” says Bobby’s sweet voice from the speaker on either side of the screen and he forces himself to keep looking as Bobby fades in, presenting himself on the same kind of lounger and looking mildly exerted, as though he’s just come off the dance floor for real.

“Saw you shakin’ it upstairs a while ago. You haven’t been here for such a long time. What’s the story?”

He opens his mouth but there’s no sound. Bobby looks at him with boundless patience and indulgence. So Pretty, hair the perfect shade now and not a bit dry from the dyes and lighteners, skin flawless and shining like a healthy angel. Overnight angel, just like the old song.

“My boy,” says Bobby. “Are you struck, like, shy or dead ?”

He closes his mouth, takes one breath. “I don’t like it, Bobby. I don’t like it this way.”

“Of course not, lover. You’re the Watcher, not the Watchee, that’s why. Get yourself picked up for a season or two and your disposition will change.”

“You really like it, Bobby, being a blip on a chip?”

“Blip on a chip, your ass. I’m a universe now. I’m, like, everything. And, hey, dig—I’m on every channel.” Bobby laughed. “I’m happy I’m sad!”

“S-A-D,” comes in the older man. “Self-Aware Data.”

“Ooo-eee,” he says. “Too clever for me. Can I get out of here now?”

“What’s your hurry?” Bobby pouts. “Just because I went over you don’t love me anymore?”

“You always were screwed up about that, Bobby. Do you know the difference between being loved and being watched?”

“Sophisticated boy,” Bobby says. “So wise, so learned. So fully packed. On this side, there is no difference. Maybe there never was. If you love me, you watch me. If you don’t look, you don’t care and if you don’t care I don’t matter. If I don’t matter, I don’t exist. Right?”

He shakes his head.

“No, my boy, I am right.” Bobby laughs. “You believe I’m right, because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t come shaking your Pretty Boy ass in a place like this, now, would you? You like to be watched, get seen. You see me, I see you. Life goes on.”

He looks up at the older man, needing relief from Bobby’s pure Prettiness. “How does he see me?”

“Sensors in the equipment. Technical stuff, nothing you care about.”

He sighs. He should be upstairs or across town, shaking it with everyone else, living Pretty for as long as he could. Maybe in another few months, this way would begin to look good to him. By then they might be off Pretty Boys and looking for some other type and there he’d be, out in the cold-cold, sliding down the other side of his peak and no one would want him. Shut out of something going on that he might want to know about after all. Can he face it? He glances at the younger man. All grown up and no place to glow. Yeah, but can he face it?

He doesn’t know. Used to be there wasn’t much of a choice and now that there is, it only seems to make it worse. Bobby’s image looks like it’s studying him for some kind of sign, Pretty eyes bright, hopeful.

The older man leans down and speaks low into his ear. “We need to get you before you’re twenty-five, before the brain stops growing. A mind taken from a still-growing brain will blossom and adapt. Some of Bobby’s predecessors have made marvelous adaptation to their new medium. Pure video: there’s a staff that does nothing all day but watch and interpret their symbols for breakthroughs in thought. And we’ll be taking Pretty Boys for as long as they’re publicly soughtafter. It’s the most efficient way to find the best performers, go for the ones everyone wants to see or be. The top of the trend is closest to heaven. And even if you never make a breakthrough, you’ll still be entertainment. Not such a bad way to live for a Pretty Boy. Never have to age, to be sick, to lose touch. You spent most of your life young, why learn how to be old? Why learn how to live without all the things you have now—”

He puts his hands over his ears. The older man is still talking and Bobby is

saying something and the younger man and the woman come over to try to do something about him. Refreshments are falling off the tray. He struggles out of the lounger and makes for the door.

“Hey, my boy,” Bobby calls after him. “Gimme a minute here, gimme what the problem is.”

He doesn’t answer. What can you tell someone made of pure information anyway?

There’s a new guy on the front door, bigger and meaner than His Mohawkness, but he’s only there to keep people out, not to keep anyone in. You want to jump ship, go to, you poor unhip asshole. Even if you are a Pretty Boy. He reads it in the guy’s face as he passes from noise into the three a.m. quiet of the street.

They let him go. He doesn’t fool himself about that part. They let him out of the room because they know all about him. They know he lives like Bobby lived, they know he loves what Bobby loved—the clubs, the admiration, the lust of strangers for his personal magic. He can’t say he doesn’t love that, because he does. He isn’t even sure if he loves it more than he ever loved Bobby, or if he loves it more than being alive. Than being live.

And here it is, three a.m., clubbing prime time, and he is moving toward home. Maybe he is a poor unhip asshole after all, no matter what he loves. Too stupid even to stay in the club, let alone grab a ride to heaven. Still he keeps moving, unbothered by the chill but feeling it.

Bobby doesn’t have to go home in the cold anymore, he thinks. Bobby doesn’t even have to get through the hours between club-times if he doesn’t want to. All times are now prime time for Bobby. Even if he gets unplugged, he’ll never know the difference. Poof, it’s a day later, poof, it’s a year later, poof, you’re out for good. Painlessly.

Maybe Bobby has the right idea, he thinks, moving along the empty sidewalk. If he goes over tomorrow, who will notice? Like when he left the dance floor— people will come and fill up the space. Ultimately, it wouldn’t make any difference to anyone.

He smiles suddenly. Except them. As long as they don’t have him, he makes a difference. As long as he has flesh to shake and flaunt and feel with, he makes a pretty goddamn big difference to them. Even after they don’t want him anymore, he will still be the one they didn’t get. He rubs his hands together against the chill, feeling the skin rubbing skin, really feeling it for the first time in a long time, and he thinks about sixteen million things all at once, maybe one thing for every brain cell he’s using, or maybe one thing for every brain cell yet to come.

He keeps moving, holding to the big thought, making a difference, and all the little things they won’t be making a program out of. He’s lightheaded with joy— he doesn’t know what’s going to happen.

Neither do they.

JOHN SHIRLEY

WOLVES OF THE PLATEAU (1988)

nine a.m., and Jerome-X wanted a smoke. He didn’t smoke, but he wanted one in here, and he could see how people went into prison nonsmokers and came out doing two packs a day. Maybe had to get their brains rewired to get off it. Which was ugly, he’d been rewired once to get off Sink, synthetic cocaine, and he’d felt like a processor with a glitch for a month after that.

He pictured his thoughts like a little train, zipping around the cigarette-burnt graffiti: you fucked now and gasman wuzzere and gasman is an idiot- mo The words were stippled on the dull pink ceiling in umber burn spots. Jerome wondered who gasman was and what they’d put him in prison for.

He yawned. He hadn’t slept much the night before. It took a long time to learn to sleep in prison. He wished he’d upgraded his chip so he could use it to activate his sleep endorphins. But that was a grade above what he’d been able to afford—and way above the kind of brain chips he’d been dealing. He wished he could turn off the light panel, but it was sealed in.

There was a toilet and a broken water fountain in the cell. There were also a few bunks, but he was alone in this static place of watery blue light and faint pink distances. The walls were salmon-colored garbage blocks. The words singed into the ceiling were blurred and impotent.

Almost noon, his stomach rumbling, Jerome was still lying on his back on the top bunk when the trash can said, “Eric Wexler, re-ma-a-in on your bunk while the ne-ew prisoner ente-e-ers the cell!”

Wexler? Oh, yeah. They thought his name was Wexler. The fake ID program.

He heard the cell door slide open; he looked over, saw the trash can ushering a stocky Chicano guy into lockup. The robot everyone called “the trash can” was a stumpy metal cylinder with a group of camera lenses, a retractable plastic arm, and a gun muzzle that could fire a Taser charge, rubber bullets, tear-gas pellets, or 45-caliber rounds. It was supposed to use the .45 only in extreme situations, but the robot was battered, it whined when it moved, its digital voice was warped. When they got like that, Jerome had heard, you didn’t fuck with them; they’d mix up the rubber bullets with the .45-caliber, Russian Roulette style.

The door sucked itself shut, the trash can whined away down the hall, its rubber wheels squeaking once with every revolution. Jerome heard a tinny cymbal crash as someone, maybe trying to get it to shoot at a guy in the next cell, threw a tray at it; followed by some echoey human shouting and a distorted admonishment from the trash can. The Chicano was still standing by the plexigate, hands shoved in his pockets, staring at Jerome, looking like he was trying to place him.

“’Sappenin’,” Jerome said, sitting up on the bed. He was grateful for the break in the monotony.

“¿Qué pasa? You like the top bunk, huh? Tha’s good.”

“I can read the ceiling better from up here. About ten seconds’ worth of reading matter. It’s all I got. You can have the lower bunk.”

“You fuckin’-A I can.” But there was no real aggression in his tone. Jerome thought about turning on his chip, checking the guy’s subliminals, his somatic signals, going for a model of probable aggression index; or maybe project for deception. He could be an undercover cop: Jerome hadn’t given them his dealer, hadn’t bargained at all.

But he decided against switching the chip on. Some jails had scanners for unauthorized chip output. Better not use it unless he had to. And his gut told him this guy was only a threat if he felt threatened. His gut was right almost as often as his brain chip.

The Chicano was maybe five foot six, a good five inches shorter than Jerome but probably outweighing him by fifty pounds. His face had Indian angles and small jet eyes. He was wearing printout gray-blue prison jams, #6631; they’d let him keep his hairnet. Jerome had never understood the Chicano hairnet, never had the balls to ask about it.

Jerome was pleased. He liked to be recognized, except by people who could arrest him.

“You put your hands in the pockets of those paper pants, they’ll rip, and in LA County they don’t give you any more for three days,” Jerome advised him.

“Yeah? Shit.” The Chicano took his hands carefully out of his pockets. “I don’t want my cojones hanging out, people think I’m advertising—they some big fucking cojones too. You not a f——, right?”