From: cathedrl@iglou.iglou.com (Max Foster)
Subject: Story II: Untitled
Date: Mon, 22 May 1995 05:47:16 GMT

     She walked out of Berkeley with a double Ph.D.  One in molecular
biology, the other in neurochemistry.  She walked into a world filled with
people offering their souls to have her.  Their souls were cheap.  They
could be bought, anything could be bought.  The whispered crystal
promises in her ears.  Bought into the Edge, where people who could not,
absolutely would not be touched paid mega yen to starving dirtgirls to beat
them with weighted whips.  Running jacked in, one half into the gene
sequencer, the other neck deep in watching some ditch trash kill each
other in a deserted Jai Alai court.  She thought it was Miami.
    Two years later, she hit dirtside Rio so hard you could hear it in
Uptown.
     Dirtside Rio is as low as you can go, and not be gone.  The natives
might not know how to make fire, but they sure as shit know how to use
those H&K chipped smartguns.  Chips don't care if you're Einstein or an
orangutan.  With the crystal in your veins, every shot counts.  Bam.
Instant arithmetic.
     I worked snagboy for Chipper those days.  I ran her shit from here
to there.  I knifed those who would steal from her.  I cut her shit before I
sold it so I could make some yen.  I loved her.  Chipper represented
something I could never reach.  The mud from dirtside Rio had never
ground under her skin.  By the time that I knew her, nothing could reach
under her skin.  It was callused.  There were bruises on her fourteen year
old's arms where she kept popping the airhypo, jacked with some unholy
East Bloc neuroenhancers. . .They made her talk like a drawer full of
dropped silverware, tumbled on top of one another, jangled.  She would
spend the days jacked into the sequencer,  dressed in a gray tank top,
and black six pocket Armani fatigues.  They were cut off, so you could see
the 3 inches of twisted leather, twine, and metal she wore on one stolen
ankle.  The fiber leading to the sequencer was dressed in odd bits of cloth,
an antique brass cartridge, some bones.
     Sometimes, she would send me out with something she had pulled
out of her nightmares, on the edge of that broken chrome dream.  Those
days, she wailed into the sequencer, and it sang back to her, a hymn of
tortured proteins, ripped nucleotides.  She sent me out with these
fragments of her dreams to pawn off on some dirt.  When she asked,
later, I told her the truth, how they died, screaming, trying to sort their
intestines back inside, after they had ripped them out. Face down in the
black Rio mud.  She just smiled.
     She sold pieces of that chrome dream for at least the year and a
half that I worked for her.  Never the same piece.  Everything she made
was peculiar in some way, as if somewhere around the back of the rush,
you would open a door and find rats gnawing the flesh from the bones of a
bride in white.  You would clear your throat, embarrassed, and close the
door, switch out the light.  Chipper's gifts gave, and took.  I would not be
suprised, some day later, to open a door in the back of my mind, and see
here there, wrapping the fiber idly around one foot, humming to that out-
of-date Sysegen sequencer.

//Cathedral