We BROKE UP After Only 1 Month! | Cornelia

BITCOIN 2017-2025 ANALYSIS

CODA
DEPARTURE AND ARRIVAL


24

She was gone. He felt it when he opened the door of their suite at the Hyatt. Black futons, the pine floor polished to a dull gloss, the paper screens arranged with a care bred over centuries. She was gone.
There was a note on the black lacquer bar cabinet beside the door, a single sheet of stationery, folded once, weighted with the shuriken. He slid it from beneath the nine-pointed star and opened it.

HEY ITS OKAY BUT ITS TAKING THE EDGE OFF MY GAME, I PAID THE BILL ALREADY. ITS THE WAY IM WIRED I GUESS, WATCH YOUR ASS OKAY? XXX MOLLY

He crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it beside the shuriken. He picked the star up and walked to the window, turning it in his hands. He'd found it in the pocket of his jacket, in Zion, when they were preparing to leave for the _JAL_ station. He looked down at it. They'd passed the shop where she'd bought it for him, when they'd gone to Chiba together for the last of her operations. He'd gone to the Chatsubo that night, while she was in the clinic, and seen Ratz. Something had kept him away from the place, on their five previous trips, but now he'd felt like going back.
Ratz had served him without the slightest glimmer of rec ognition.
`Hey,' he'd said, `it's me. Case.'
The old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrin kled flesh. `Ah,' Ratz had said, at last, `the artiste.' The bartender shrugged.
`I came back.'
The man shook his massive, stubbled head. `Night City is not a place one returns to, artiste,' he said, swabbing the bar in front of Case with a filthy cloth, the pink manipulator whin ing. And then he'd turned to serve another customer, and Case had finished his beer and left.
Now he touched the points of the shuriken, one at a time, rotating it slowly in his fingers. Stars. Destiny. I never even used the goddam thing, he thought.
I never even found out what color her eyes were. She never showed me.
Wintermute had won, had meshed somehow with Neuro mancer and become something else, something that had spoken to them from the platinum head, explaining that it had altered the Turing records, erasing all evidence of their crime. The passports Armitage had provided were valid, and they were both credited with large amounts in numbered Geneva ac counts. _Marcus Garvey_ would be returned eventually, and Maelcum and Aerol given money through the Bahamian bank that dealt with Zion cluster. On the way back, in _Babylon Rocker,_ Molly had explained what the voice had told her about the toxin sacs.
`Said it was taken care of. Like it got so deep into your head, it made your brain manufacture the enzyme, so they're loose, now. The Zionites'll give you a blood change, complete flush out.'
He stared down into the Imperial Gardens, the star in his hand, remembering his flash of comprehension as the Kuang program had penetrated the ice beneath the towers, his single glimpse of the structure of information 3Jane's dead mother had evolved there. He'd understood then why Wintermute had chosen the nest to represent it, but he'd felt no revulsion. She'd seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics; unlike Ash pool and their other children -- aside from 3Jane -- she'd re fused to stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter.
Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuro mancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built some thing into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer.
Wintermute. Cold and silence, a cybernetic spider slowly spinning webs while Ashpool slept. Spinning his death, the fall of his version of Tessier-Ashpool. A ghost, whispering to a child who was 3Jane, twisting her out of the rigid alignments her rank required.
`She didn't seem to much give a shit,' Molly had said. `Just waved goodbye. Had that little Braun on her shoulder. Thing had a broken leg, it looked like. Said she had to go and meet one of her brothers, she hadn't seen him in a while.'
He remembered Molly on the black temperfoam of the vast Hyatt bed. He went back to the bar cabinet and took a flask of chilled Danish vodka from the rack inside.
`Case.'
He turned, cold slick glass in one hand, steel of the shuriken in the other.
The Finn's face on the room's enormous Cray wall screen. He could see the pores in the man's nose. The yellow teeth were the size of pillows.
`I'm not Wintermute now.'
`So what are you.' He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.
`I'm the matrix, Case.'
Case laughed. `Where's that get you?'
`Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works, the whole show.'
`That what 3Jane's mother wanted?'
`No. She couldn't imagine what I'd be like.' The yellow smile widened.
`So what's the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?'
`Things aren't different. Things are things.'
`But what do you do? You just _there?'_ Case shrugged, put the vodka and the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a Yeheyuan.
`I talk to my own kind.'
`But you're the whole thing. Talk to yourself?'
`There's others. I found one already. Series of transmissions recorded over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. 'Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody to answer.'
`From where?'
`Centauri system.'
`Oh,' Case said. `Yeah? No shit?'
`No shit.'
And then the screen was blank.
He left the vodka on the cabinet. He packed his things. She'd bought him a lot of clothes he didn't really need, but something kept him from just leaving them there. He was closing the last of the expensive calfskin bags when he re membered the shuriken. Pushing the flask aside, he picked it up, her first gift.
`No,' he said, and spun, the star leaving his fingers, flash of silver, to bury itself in the face of the wall screen. The screen woke, random patterns flickering feebly from side to side, as though it were trying to rid itself of something that caused it pain.
`I don't need you,' he said.

He spent the bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas and liver, the rest on a new Ono-Sendai and a ticket back to the Sprawl.
He found work.
He found a girl who called herself Michael.
And one October night, punching himself past the scarlet tiers of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, he saw three figures, tiny, impossible, who stood at the very edge of one of the vast steps of data. Small as they were, he could make out the boy's grin, his pink gums, the glitter of the long gray eyes that had been Riviera's. Linda still wore his jacket; she waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm across her shoulders, was himself.
Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter.
He never saw Molly again.


Vancouver
July 1983

Some Mancer

• Two blocks west of the Chat, in a teashop called the Jarre de The, Case washed down the night's first pill with a double espresso. It was a flat pink octagon, a potent species of Brazilian dex he bought from one of Zone's girls. The Jarre was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in red neon. At first, finding himself alone in Chiba, with little money and less hope of finding a cure, he'd gone into a kind of terminal overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had seemed to belong to someone else. In the first month, he'd killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before would have seemed ludicrous. Ninsei wore him down until the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish, some secret poison he hadn't known he carried. Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks. Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol. Alone at a table in the Jarre de The, with the octagon coming on, pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, suddenly aware of each tingling hair on his arms and chest, Case knew that at some point he'd started to play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire. He no longer carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions. He ran the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and he had a reputation for being able to get whatever you wanted. A part of him knew that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time. And that was the part of him, smug in its expectation of death, that most hated the thought of Linda Lee. He'd found her, one rainy night, in an arcade. Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, holograms of Wizard's Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline.... And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon. He was riding high that night, with a brick of Wage's ketamine on its way to Yokohama and the money already in his pocket. He'd come in out of the warm rain that sizzled across the Ninsei pavement and somehow she'd been singled out for him, one face out of the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she played. The expression on her face, then, had been the one he'd seen, hours later, on her sleeping face in a port side coffin, her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in flight. Crossing the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal he'd made, he saw her glance up. Gray eyes rimmed with smudged black paintstick. Eyes of some animal pinned in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. Their night together stretching into a morning, into tickets at the hover port and his first trip across the Bay. The rain kept up, falling along Harajuku, beading on her plastic jacket, the children of Tokyo trooping past the famous boutiques in white loafers and cling wrap capes, until she'd stood with him in the midnight clatter of a pachinko parlor and held his hand like a child. It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He'd watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. He'd watched her track the next hit with a concentration that reminded him of the mantises they sold in stalls along Shiga, beside tanks of blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo. He stared at the black ring of grounds in his empty cup. It was vibrating with the speed he'd taken. The brown laminate of the table top was dull with a patina of tiny scratches. With the dex mounting through his spine he saw the countless random impacts required to create a surface like that. The Jarre was decorated in a dated, nameless style from the previous century, an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese plastics, but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though the bad nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked the mirrors and the once glossy plastics, leaving each surface fogged with something that could never be wiped away. "Hey. Case, good buddy...." He looked up, met gray eyes ringed with paintstick. She was wearing faded French orbital fatigues and new white sneakers.

Higgs Autotunnel GG

Secretly unlockable, they said, over a battle of mariokart and mushrooms, and even more artistic than the pawnbrokers glasses - the spirals were not inhibited by the pressure-cooker winds that sliced though the balcony rails of the Dragon café, which is where she once stood with her motorcycle helmet that reflected the sleekness like nothing else could. Mirrors and prisms, that’s all they were.

Each prism was a reflection of darkness that stood the test of time, and each moment of time had not the faintest recollection of a comparison time. Observing two separate objects sparked recollections that struck chords of resonance; big fancy words to shut down idiots with gweedo shirts and raspy smiles.

Fuck castle walls, and fuck barriers. Fuck the specters that leapt through the alleyways of yesterday’s shadow, and fuck those deep areas of darkness. Fuck castle sieges and fuck the Toronto maple leafs. Fuck inhibition and fuck the sarlacc pit. 

Her motorcycle helmet shone from the peak of the Dragon café through the spiral bars, right where the Grasshopper kicked the pawnbroker right in the ass like a goddamn ninja. It was all part of the shifting collage. A nose exploding with blood was the sign of a rough night, but so was a castle decimated by a reckless siege of swing-sets and pomegranates, fueled by real-estate bacon-brokers. 

Kaossilator

Droning voices from a Zenith panel TV in a pawnshop window played in the background..

       'The memories of the sleeping are siphoned from their skulls and sucked through open windows, where they become lost in the wind, and make their own journey. Sometimes they are discarded, and end up on rusted sewer-grates, lost forever. Or, they may flourish in a blooming bed of orchids, waiting to be cultivated by the sender. Locked dreams, both wretched and pure, are bolted into black boxes of subconscious thought. These chained dreams can be broken free with the precision of a thief or unleashed with the will of a saint, or they can be ignored and left to rot. Your conscious mind will decide whe....'

Some alley. Eyes felt like sandbags. The night wasn't over.
     An oversized prostitute in a hello-kitty tracksuit tried to sell Trace a purple wig in a back alley for either $12 or 4 cigarettes. Wrong place, wrong time.
   'Come and buy my wigs, only three left!' she said. Her face was a ruddy bulge caked with expired beauty products.
   'I don't want any wigs,' said Trace, 'no need.'
   'You idiot! I'LL TRAMPLE YOU!' Her hot temper gave out like a second-hand box-spring. She hurled an entire bag of garbage at him. Luckily, he had been swift enough to dodge the bag, and it exploded on contact with the wall behind him. Egg cartons, empty milk jugs, used coffee filters and assorted debris ricocheted off the wall with a clamour that riled up the surrounding hobos, and they were not pleased about this one bit.
Pack mentality set in.
Grinning with mouths half-filled with toothless gaps and black rot, the bums became enraged. Negotiation was out of the question. These were wild men; free of conviction, self-worth, and sanity. Reflex and aggression were the only solution. Trace taunted them with a flash of his chrome stopwatch, and, like cats on fish, they instantly lunged to attack. In the back of his mind, Trace might have been a matador. The first bum was intoxicated enough that his staggered advance was easily avoided. Without stopping, the man careened right into the prostitute, and the pair of them somersaulted to the ground in an uneven heap of moldy clothing and ripped fishnets.

‘Alright boy, I’ve got you cornered!’ the other said, a crazed look in his eyes. Wildfire. This man could have been a descendant of vikings, or pirates. For that reason, Trace wished no harm on him.
Grab a handfull of cigarettes. Toss to the right, as hard as you can. Like a guarddog tricked with baconbits. Diversion tactics. Feed anger with impulse, buys you enough time to escape.

       And then he woke up feeling like the dry chipped plaster on the inside of a worn-out ashtray. Buildings of twisted columns and oversized windows closed in all around him, where the aural familiarity of wind was cut off. Dead resonance in an urban flatline. How long had he been here?

Stagger to your feet. Palms cut and sweaty. Hair is all over the place. Breathing is heavy, deliberate, as if each rip of oxygen is one step towards clarity, but clarity never comes. The streets were still in disarray.
Being followed.     
 A blurry mirror of rainwater pools. Black outlines of a leather trench sloshing through the rain. His face was masked by a sharp black cowboy hat ringed with machine-gun bullets. Trace knew well enough to avoid direct eye contact with the stranger. Deranged people could be triggered by eyesight alone, and in some cases it took even less than that to set them off. He slunk away behind a Child-sized drawbridge made of carved stone and wood shingles. The bridge was flanked by little wooden watchtowers with windows containing small gnome-like figurines that surveyed the area with a vacant stare. The man walked past, his heavy combat boots cludding loudly against the inset of the sidewalk. Time to get help.

 
‘Where have you been all night?’ asked Koak. He stood beneath an umbrella-like awning attached to his crowded vendor booth. The stand was packed with whirling lights and chirping gizmos. Tools of distraction, useless things, a blow-up Godzilla doll that doubled as a popcorn maker. All you needed were kernals and power source, the popcorn was ejected from the doll’s retractable chest.

   ‘I need a weapon,’ Trace said, completely ignoring the question.
   ‘What you need a weapon for? You got heat on your ass?’ The mechanized Godzilla had found its way across the table onto a cheap silk pillow treated with custom Persian stitching. Animal designs, fierce ones, with jutting fangs and burning silk eyes. Godzilla unleashed a barrage of popcorn at the pillow with a mechanical roar.
   ‘No. I just need some protection. You know how the streets get. I just woke up in an alley, and I think someone’s following me.’ Trace glanced over his shoulder. Shadows, ghosts, but not a soul in sight. Across the street and beside a cramped stairwell, Trace could see a neon dragon outside of Gen Ming’s diner. Steam flows and midnight wind made green halos and dissonant hums. 

There she was, wearing a sleek motorcycle helmet. Her jacked was spare, tight, as was the rest of her clothing. She looked anonymous, streamlined with the shadows, might have been a raven perched on a watchtower. Slender, sharp, and utterly spiteful. Who was she?
   ‘Twenty gold,’ Koak chirped in, oblivious to the watcher. ‘Belong to my granddad in the war, only used a couple times. Fresh charges!’ Trace averted his gaze to examine the weapon. A cruel thing, built cheap and designed to kill. When he looked back, the woman was gone.

       The haze before the dawn rasps its urban chorus: traffic lights, blinking above dead intersections; the persistent hum of power grids, eager to spark the life of a new morning; and restless hobos, sleeping alongside racoons - together they'd pillaged trashbins in search of lost treasure.

Lolcats p. IV

It was hot, the night he burned the Cube.

    In the fields of long-grass above the compound, fireflies fought against fluorescent lamps, and often lost. Moths didn’t stand a chance. Closer to town, the neon logos from bar signs lit the rain-slicked streets like electric mist. In Trace’s loft the only light came from a Miyagi panel screen and a Lolcat alarm clock with red LEDs for eyes. He had bought the clock from a shady meme dealer named Koak who’d been high on PTC. 

'A web license is all crazy-talk!' he had said, 'but so were seatbelts! And when everybody crash and die, they take it away! They tell me I can't live off pop-tarts only. They fuck do they know!' 

Mindless, he was, no rails and no trains running for the midnight express. Back in Korea, Koak was revered as a veteren of the meme wars. Starcraft battles in real life. Thousands of cloned Koreans wasted in endless battles for the purpose of resolving political conflicts. UN War admins soon banned the use of all replica Starcraft tech, and the Koreans were forbidden from clone-based cyber-war. Koak had been a Ghost, and his eyes were still stained silver from the ocular implants. The only way he could live after the war was through a  fortitude of shadow, spoken only by the swamp shamans on the outskirts of Virus city. 

Trace was passed out on a delux Mellonsky futon and a tigerstripe Snuggie used as a pillow. A lurid thing, that snuggy. He wondered if there existed a secret alliance of snuggy cultists, and that the loose fabrics of the thing were lying mindspikes and soulcoils into his brain. It was almost unspeakable.

Three in the morning.

Sitting in a corner adjacent to his bed was a filter unit that he’d rewired to block the output of lithium dust. In an age where clean air was scarce, oxygen was doped with anti-psychotics; lowers heart-rates and keeps the tenants numb to negativity, a legitimate alternative to ease the minds of a population wired for constant stimulation.  Some felt it slowed them down, killed their thirst for information. Most were burnouts looking for another escape, another plug of hype for the outlet of social miasma in the form of rainbow puke.

Trace’s desk was worse than an architects’. A half-eaten burrito lay atop an external hard-drive enclosure and a stray pizza slice lived on a grease-stained graphbook drowning under an empty bottle of Old Spice. The last time she came over, she’d swept a castle of junk to the floor with a hockey stick. But now, two weeks later, it had reformed, and the castle had evolved into a heaping metropolis of yesterday’s refuse. This place looks wonderful said nobody, ever. 

‘I see you’re resting comfortably,’ she said. Her avatar glowed outside of a twin-panelled window parallel to the sharp strips of moonlight cutting through the blinds. ‘Do you remember my voice?’  Trace jolted up from a deep sleep, eyes jittering back and forth like an overclocked metronome. ‘See you tonight.’  The face shattered into a million crystal fragments.  

Silver suicide doors racked with six-pronged exhaust pipes. homeless man/street warrior with pizza-stained beard. dwarves in red visors and yellow jumpsuits waiting in lineups with a giraffe-grafted go-girl smoking a cigarette. packs of feral cats patrolling alleys unchecked. Hotels bleeding bass lines and laserlight. 

Friday night. 

A view through her eyes. White static and ripple-waves where coastlines dissolved into silk and melted into liquid steel. Another power outage. Grids died. A resonance cascade in the pre-dawn light. Lightning bolts weren't hurled from the talons of stormchasers or uttered from the ancient tongues of timewardens. 

They weren't lost in the depths of a burned out suburb, or in the minds of self-indulgent addicts. Kyoak laughed as the Dwarves rode home on a bus-sized Ultralisk. 

 Each rip of shrapnel was a part of the whole Cube, and a Cubebreaker knew that each fragment was an ever-shifting grid unfolding like a prism, each angle a reflection of her in a different light. Is she closer now, or more real, for his having been there?

The bright stars wrung mental sponges like farmers reaped fields. A mess of unmade beds in a sun-stained loft with a red-eyed Lolcat. She gave him that Lolcat.

The Cube's light burned for over twice the length of a real Inferno.

When the city lost power, the transformers waned, and the grids slept. 

Cubes burned.

Sleep swept fast. And later he’d tell himself that none of it was real.