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Mona Lisa Overdrive
by William Gibson


VERSION 1.1 (Feb 23 00). If you find and correct errors in
the text, please update the version number by 0.1 and
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The Smoke


The ghost was her father's parting gift, presented by a black-clad
secretary in a departure lounge at Narita.


For the first two hours of the flight to London it lay forgotten in her
purse, a smooth dark oblong, one side impressed with the ubiquitous
Maas-Neotek logo, the other gently curved to fit the user's palm.


She sat up very straight in her seat in the first-class cabin, her
features composed in a small cold mask modeled after her dead mother's
most characteristic expression. The surrounding seats were empty; her
father had purchased the space. She refused the meal the nervous steward
offered. The vacant seats frightened him, evidence of her father's
wealth and power. The man hesitated, then bowed and withdrew. Very
briefly, she allowed the mask her mother's smile.


Ghosts, she thought later, somewhere over Germany, staring at the
upholstery of the seat beside her. How well her father treated his
ghosts.


There were ghosts beyond the window, too, ghosts in the stratosphere of
Europe's winter, partial images that began to form if she let her eyes
drift out of focus. Her mother in Ueno Park, face fragile in September
sunlight. The cranes, Kumi! Look at the cranes! And Kumiko looked
across Shinobazu Pond and saw nothing, no cranes at all, only a few
hopping black dots that surely were crows. The water was smooth as silk,
the color of lead, and pale holograms flickered indistinctly above a
distant line of archery stalls. But Kumiko would see the cranes later,
many times, in dreams; they were origami, angular things folded from
sheets of neon, bright stiff birds sailing the moonscape of her mother's
madness. . . .


Remembering her father, the black robe open across a tattooed storm of
dragons, slumped behind the vast ebony field of his desk, his eyes flat