Hardwired Read Free Page B

them, to touch them in the zonedance and absorb a piece of their radiance. The jocks wear their colors, vests, and jackets bearing the emblems of their blocs– Hughes, Pfizer, Toshiba, Tupolev, ARAMCO– the blazons of the Rock War-victors borne with careless pride by the jocks who had won them their place in the sky. Six feet three inches in height, Sarah stalks among them in a black satin jacket, blazoned on its back with a white crane that rises to the starry firmament amid a flock of chrome-bright Chinese characters. It is the badge of a small bloc that does most of its business out of Singapore, and is hardly ever seen here in the Florida Free Zone. Her face is unknown to the regulars, but it is hoped they won’t think it odd, not as odd as it would seem if she wore the badge of Tupolev or Kikuyu Optics I.G.
    Her sculpted face is pale, the Florida tan gone, her eyes dark-rimmed. Her almost-black hair is short on the sides and brushy on top, her nape hair falling in two thin braids down her back. Chrome-steel earrings brush her shoulders. Firebud has broadened her already-broad shoulders and pared down the width of her pelvis; her face is sharp and pointed beneath a widow’s peak, looking like a succession of arrowheads, the shaped charge that Cunningham demands. She wears black dancing slippers laced over the ankles and dark purple stretch overalls with suspenders that frame her breasts, stretching the fabric over the nipples that Firebud has made more prominent. Her shirt is gauze spangled with silver; her neck scarf, black silk. There is a receiver tagged to the optic centers of her forebrain, at the moment monitoring police broadcasts, a constant Times Square of an LED running amber, at will, above her expanded vision.
    Gifts from Cunningham. Her hardwired nerves are her own. So is Weasel.

    I LOVE MY KIKUYU EYES, SEZ PRIMO PORNOSTAR ROD MCLEISH, AND WITH THE INFRARED OPTION, I CAN TELL IF MY PARTNER’S REALLY EXCITED OR IF I’M JUST ON A SILICON RIDE…
    -Kikuyu Optics I.G.,
    A Division Of Mikoyan-Gurevich

    She first met Cunningham in another bar, the Blue Silk. Sarah ran Weasel as per contract, but the snagboy, a runner who had got more greedy than he had the smarts to handle, had been altered himself–– she is nursing bruises. She recovered the goods, fortunately, and since the contract was with the thirdmen, she was paid in endorphins, handy since she needs a few of them herself.
    There is a bone bruise on the back of her thigh and she can’t sit; instead, she leans back against the padded bar and sips her rum and lime. The Blue Silk’s audio system plays island music and soothes her played-up nerves.
    The Blue Silk is run by an ex-cutterjock named Maurice, a West Indian with the old-model Zeiss eyes who was on the losing side in the Rock War. He’s got Chip sockets on his ankles and wrists, the way the military wore them then. There are pictures of his friends and heroes on the walls, all of them with the azure silk neck scarves of the elite space defense corps, most of them framed with black mourning ribbons turning purple with the long years.
    Sarah wonders what he has seen with those eyes. Did it include the burst of X rays that preceded the 10,000-ton rocks, launched from the orbital mass drivers, that tore through the atmosphere to crash on Earth’s cities? The artificial meteors, each with the force of a nuclear blast, had first fallen in the eastern hemisphere, over Mombasa and Calcutta, and by the time the planet had rotated and made the western hemisphere a target, the Earth had surrendered–– but the Orbital blocs felt they hadn’t made their point forcefully enough in the West, and so the rocks fell anyway. Communications foul-up, they said. Earth’s billions knew better.
    Sarah was ten. She was doing a tour in a Youth Reclamation Camp near Stone Mountain when three rocks obliterated Atlanta and killed her mother. Daud, who was eight, was trapped in the rubble, but the neighbors heard