"Gibson, William - Johnny Mnemonic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

It must have been raining; ribbons of water cascaded from a ruptured
geodesic and spattered on the tile behind us. We crouched in the narrow
gap between a surgical boutique and an antique shop. She'd just edged
one mirrored eye around the corner to report a single Volks module in
frond of the Drome, red lights fliashing. They were sweeping Ralfi up.
Asking questions.
I was covered in scorched white fluff. The tennis socks. The gym bag was
a ragged plastic cuff around my wrist. 'I don't see how the hell I
missed him.'
'Cause he's faxt, so fast.' She hugged her knees and rocked back and
forth on her bootheels. 'His nervous system's jacked up. He's factory
custom.' She grinned and gave a little squeal of delight. 'I'm gonna get
that boy. Tonight. He's the best, number one, top dollar, state of the
art.'
'What you're going to get, for this boy's two million, is my ass out of
here. Your boyfriend back there was mostly grown in a vat in Chiba City.
He's a Yakuza assassin.'
'Chiba. Yeah. See, Molly's been Chiba, too.' And she showed me her
hands, fingers slighly spread. Her fingers were slender, tapered, very
white against the polished burgundy nails. Ten blades snicked straight
out from their recesses beneath her nails, each one a narrow,
doubleedged scalpel in pale blue steel.
***
I'd never spent much time in Nighttown. Nobody there had anything to pay
me to remember, and most of them had a lot they paid regularly to
forget. Generations of sharpsshooters had clipped away at the neon until
the maintenance crews gave up. Even at noon the arcs were soot-black
against faintest pearl.
Where do you go when the world's wealthiest criminal order is feeling
for you with calm, distant fingers? Where do you hide from the Yakuza,
so powerful that it owns comsats and at least three shuttles? The Yakuza
is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I
was born the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the
Union Corse.
Molly had an answer: You hide in the Pit, in the lowest circle, where
any outside influence generates swift, cocentric ripples of raw menace.
You hide in Nighttown. Better yet, you hide above Nighttown, because the
Pit's inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that
Nighttown never sees, sweating under its own filmament of acrylic resin,
up where the Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles, black-market
cigarettes dangling from their lips.
She had another answer, too.
'So you're locked up good and tight, Johnny-san? No way to get that
program without the password?' She led me into the shadows that waited
beyord the bright tube platform. The concrete walls were overlaid with
graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and
frustration.
'The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical
contraautism prostheses.' I reeled off a numb version of my standard