Neuromancer Read Free

franchised coffee shop called Beautiful
     Girl, the electronic thunder of an arcade. He stepped out of the way to let a dark-suited
     sarariman by, spotting the Mitsubishi-Genentech logo tattooed across the back of the
     man’s right hand.
    Was it authentic? If that’s for real, he thought, he’s in for trouble.If it wasn’t, served him right. M-G employees above a certain level were implanted
     with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear
     like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic.
    The sarariman had been Japanese, but the Ninsei crowd was a gaijin crowd. Groups of
     sailors up from the port, tense solitary tourists hunting pleasures no guidebook listed,
     Sprawl heavies showing off grafts and implants, and a dozen distinct species of hustler,
     all swarming the street in an intricate dance of desire and commerce.
    There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the Ninsei enclave,
     but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a
     kind of historical park, a reminder of humble origins. But he also saw a certain sense
     in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t
     there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology
     itself.
    Was Linda right, he wondered, staring up at the lights? Would Wage have him killed
     to make an example? It didn’t make much sense, but then Wage dealt primarily in proscribed
     biologicals, and they said you had to be crazy to do that.
    But Linda said Wage wanted him dead. Case’s primary insight into the dynamics of street
     dealing was that neither the buyer nor the seller really needed him. A middleman’s
     business is to make himself a necessary evil. The dubious niche Case had carved for
     himself in the criminal ecology of Night City had been cut out with lies, scooped
     out a night at a time with betrayal. Now, sensing that its walls were starting to
     crumble, he felt the edge of a strange euphoria.
    The week before, he’d delayed transfer of a synthetic glandular extract, retailing
     it for a wider margin than usual. He knew Wage hadn’t liked that. Wage was his primary
     supplier, nine years in Chiba and one of the few gaijin dealers who’d managed to forge
     links with the rigidly stratified criminal establishment beyond Night City’s borders.
     Genetic materials and hormones trickled down to Ninsei along an intricate ladder of
     fronts and blinds. Somehow Wage had managed to trace something back, once, and now
     he enjoyed steady connections in a dozen cities.
    Case found himself staring through a shop window. The place sold small bright objects
     to the sailors. Watches, flicknives, lighters, pocket VTRs, simstim decks, weighted
     manriki chains, and shuriken. The shuriken had always fascinated him, steel stars
     with knife-sharp points. Some were chromed, others black, others treated with a rainbow
     surface like oil on water. But the chrome stars held his gaze. They were mounted against
     scarlet ultrasuede with nearly invisible loops of nylon fishline, their centers stamped
     with dragons or yinyang symbols. They caught the street’s neon and twisted it, and
     it came to Case that these were the stars under which he voyaged, his destiny spelled
     out in a constellation of cheap chrome.
    “Julie,” he said to his stars. “Time to see old Julie. He’ll know.”
    J ULIUS D EANE WAS one hundred and thirty-five years old, his metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly
     fortune in serums and hormones. His primary hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage
     to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons reset the code of his DNA, a procedure unavailable
     in Chiba. Then he’d fly to Hongkong and order the year’s suits and shirts. Sexless
     and inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in his devotion to
     esoteric forms of tailor-worship. Case had never