some unfamiliar chemical, and he looked zonked.
“Are you really Hex DEF6?” I’d taken the wrong approach in my last conversation with him. Though I was still angry about the voodoo cyberspace head trip he’d run on me back in the Antland of Fnoor, I tried to make my voice sound mild and admiring. The point was to get some information out of him.
“That’s not who I am,” he said with spaced-out precision. “Hex DEF6 was a gig. My name is Riscky Pharbeque and I’m from Fort Worth, Texas.” He stuck out his hand and I shook it.
“So who hired you to scare the shit out of me? Was it West West?”
“No, man, it was a guy called Dirk Blanda. Mattel Incorporated fronted him the money to burn you.”
“ Dirk Blanda? My neighbor? The bodymapper who runs Dirk Blanda’s Personography? And-Mattel the toy company? I don’t get it.”
“It’s that Our American Home shit you did, old son. Perky Pat? You ripped off the CyberBarbie meshes Dirk did for Mattel, so they-all hired a phreak to burn you. Frontier justice, pardner. That’s how it goes. I picked the gig up off a phreak bulletin board. We call it the Burn Exchange, all kinds of kinky offers get posted there. But it was nothing personal, you wave?”
“Sure, Riscky, no problem,” I smiled. “But why was Hex DEF6 telling me to work for West West?”
“Well this was a real special gig. I got paid twice. Was supposed to get paid twice, anyhow. There was two rewards out on you, Jerzy. Blanda paid me up front to burn you, but a guy called Roger Coolidge said he’d pay me more to tell you to work for West West. Except he still hasn’t coughed up. He’s hog-stupid if he thinks he can short Riscky Pharbeque. I don’t much like Coolidge, and I might could burn him really bad.”
“That was really Roger there with us in Antland of Fnoor?” I remembered the weird gangster nightclub back room that the big ant had carried me to. Hex DEF6 had been there, and tuxedos of Roger and Susan Poker. Though when I’d asked Susan Poker about it, she’d insisted she was a computer illiterate who’d never been in cyberspace.
“That was Roger’s tuxedo all right, and he was in it-at least until I twisted him up. It was you, me, Roger and, oh yeah, Sue Poker. You know her, don’t you? Sue’s a cryp at Welsh amp; Tayke Realty. She knew your cyberspace access code, so I cut her in for fifteen percent. She wanted to watch me burn you, so I brought her along and slaved her tuxedo motions to the twitching of that big ant. Sue’s hot stuff under all that plastic.” Riscky Pharbeque cackled and then raised his voice to call to the bartender as Tom Jones reached his rutting, bellowing climax. “Come on, Lester, play some country next. Does Total Video got any like Charlie Daniels in all that old shit?”
“They’ve even got Van Halen, dude. Total Video rules.”
“Well git on it.”
“And give Riscky and me a round, Lester,” I called. “Two Coronas and two shots of tequila.”
“Thankee kindly,” said Riscky.
The bartender pressed a microphone button and asked the videoplayer for Charlie Daniels. The screen showed a grid of titled images and with Riscky’s loud advice, Lester tapped one of them. The music started. Lester served our drinks and went back to the bikers.
I raised my shot glass to Riscky Pharbeque in mock salute. “You’re a hell of a phreak, Riscky. As long as I’m asking questions, how about the GoMotion ants?”
“ Wiggly little suckers. Hats off to you on that, Jerzy. All us phreaks are rooting for you.”
“I mean, how did you get an ant to swallow my hands and carry me to you?”
“Hellfire, Jerzy, I ain’t gonna give all my secrets away. If you want to know how to use the ants, go and ask them yourself.”
“I can’t. I don’t have a cyberdeck.”
“ Business opportunity!” twanged Riscky happily. He played his accent like a musical instrument. “I got a deck I can sell you from out of the trunk of my car.”
“How much?”
“It’s a forty-thousand-dollar Pemex model twelve. I ain’t had it but ten weeks. I’d be amenable to oh…” He regarded me narrowly, suddenly not seeming as drunk and stoned as I’d thought he was. “Nine hundred dollars cash. That’ll leave you about four hundred dollars in the bank.”
“Of course you know my bank balance?”
“I got an interest in you, Jerzy. You make a run across the street and get the cash from Wells Fargo and then I’ll move the deck to your Animata. Do you know how to connect to the moonroof satellite dish?”
“Well, sort of. Not really. But I want to.”
“I’ll help you for another hundred bucks. One thousand dollars for a Pemex cyberdeck twelve, next to new, fully configured, and hardware-installed on an invisible phreak patch to the Net. Deals don’t come much sweeter than that, Mister Rugby.”
“What’s the catch?”
“I don’t pay for the cyberdecks, old son. I just get ’em delivered. I’m fixin’ to get me a Pemex thirteen delivered later today, so I might as well lay my old box off on you. I’ll have you up and running in an hour for one thousand dollars cash.”
The Charlie Daniels video ended and the floppy blond bartender started back up the bar toward us.
“Let’s do it, Mister Pharbeque,” I said.
Riscky waited in the bar while I got the money out of my bank. He’d been right about my balance: it was $1385. Just so I’d have some money in my pockets, I went ahead and took out thirteen hundred. Today was Tuesday, and on Friday my last paycheck from West West would come in. The last two weeks pay plus the four weeks severance pay would come to something like thirteen thousand dollars after taxes. Cash flow was all- important to me these days, as my credit cards had been canceled as soon as I’d been indicted for computer crime.
Riscky followed my car up to a deserted pull-out in the hills of Los Perros, about halfway to Queue’s. Within the hour, he had the Pemex cyberdeck installed in the trunk of my car right next to the map machine. The cyberdeck’s hookup to the Net was via the map machine’s antenna, which was a barely visible bull’s-eye of titanium rings embedded in the clear plastic of the Animata’s moonroof. The ring spacing was such that the pattern acted as a radio-wave Fresnel lens, able to transmit to and receive from satellites. Ordinarily the lens was only used to consult the navigational satellites, but with Riscky Pharbeque’s expertise, the system was soon tuned to the frequency of the cybernet communication satellites.
The Pemex twelve cyberdeck was awesome. It had a radio-connected headset that looked like a big pair of wraparound mirrorshades, and the control gloves were radio-linked as well.
“The deck can suck juice out of your car’s battery no matter if the car is off or on,” Riscky explained. “The glove and headset signals have a throw of four hundred feet. You can park your car and take the headset and gloves with you.”
“Does the deck always have to be on?” I asked. “Like overnight?”
“Naw, you can turn it on from the goggles, they’re sensitive to a certain sequence of taps. You do three fast taps, wait, then tap once, then wait, then tap four fast taps, then wait, and then tap one last time. That’s the code I set it to.”
I put on the goggles and tapped the Pharbeque three-one-four-one sequence on the temple. Ping, I was floating inside the familiar Bay Area Netport.
“I don’t have it set up for an office,” said Riscky half-apologetically. He was standing next to me. “We can’t use an office/cause this is an illegal connect. Turn her on and you pop up somewhere random in a given target space. I got the target set to the Netport. You can always change the target with the claim stake tool.”
I swung my head slowly back and forth. The visual effects were better than any I’d seen before-the resolution was incredibly high, and the updates were shockingly fast. There were no jaggies, no dithering, no lag time, no lurches, no compromises. What I saw was the purest and most convincing virtual reality I’d ever seen.
“It’s wonderful, Riscky. I didn’t know they made headsets this good.”
“Hell, Jerzy, I phreakified it is why it runs so good. This is an undocumented billion-pixel video mode. And look at this!” He tapped the other side of my headset in a five-nine-two-six tattoo, and suddenly it was as if I were looking through the headset at the dashboard of my car. I turned my head and saw Riscky. But the headset was opaque! Was this another dark dream, another voodoo cyberspace? I pulled the goggles off fast and looked at them. I hadn’t noticed before that there were two TV cameras like transparent glass pinheads set where my pupils would
