William Gibson - Burning Chrome

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BURNING CHROME

William Gibson

1986

The Gernsback Continuum

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to be-

come an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse,

it's peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome,

confining themselves to the corner of the eye. There was

that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but

it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters

have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid un-

folding themselves into the gleaming eighty lane

monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented

Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to

New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wave-

length of probability. I've worked hard for that. Tele-

vision helped a lot.

I suppose it started in London, in that bogus Greek

taverna in Battersea Park Road, with lunch on Cohen's

corporate tab. Dead steam-table food and it took them

thirty minutes to find an ice bucket for the retsina.

Cohen works for Barris-Watford, who publish big,

trendy "trade" paperbacks: illustrated histories of the

neon sign, the pinball machine, the windup toys of Oc-

cupied Japan. I'd gone over to shoot a series of shoe

ads; California girls with tanned legs and frisky Day-

Gb jogging shoes had capered for me down the

escalators of St. John's Wood and across the platforms

of Tooting Bec. A lean and hungry young agency had

decided that the mystery of London Transport would

sell waffle-tread nylon runners. They decide; I shoot.

And Cohen, whom I knew vaguely from the old days in

New York, had invited me to lunch the day before I was

due out of Heathrow. He brought along a very fash-

ionably dressed young woman named Dialta Downes,

who was virtually chinless and evidently a noted pop-art

historian. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside

Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes THIS

WAY LIES MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals.

Cohen introduced us and explained that Dialta was

the prime mover behind the latest Barris-Watford pro-

ject, an illustrated history of what she called "Ameri-

can Streamlined Moderne." Cohen called it "raygun

Gothic." Their working title was The Airstream

Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.

There's a British obsession with the more baroque

elements of American pop culture, something like the

weird cowboys-and-Indians fetish of the West Germans

or the aberrant French hunger for old Jerry Lewis films.

In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a

uniquely American form of architecture that most

Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn't sure

what she was talking about, but gradually it began to

dawn on me. I found myself remembering Sunday

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morning television in the Fifties.

Sometimes they'd run old eroded newsreels as filler

on the local station. You'd sit there with a peanut butter

sandwich and a glass of milk, and a static-ridden

Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A

Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers

would putter around with this big old Nash with wings,

and you'd see it rumbling furiously down some deserted

Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off,

but it flew away to Dialta Downes's never-never land,

true home of a generation of completely uninhibited

technophiles. She was talking about those odds and

ends of "futuristic" Thirties and Forties architecture

you pass daily in American cities without noticing; the

movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious en-

ergy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the

chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of tran-

sient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a

dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she

wanted me to photograph them for her.

The Thirties had seen the first generation of Ameri-

can industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil

sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners your

basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of

decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some

pencil sharpeners looked as though they'd been put to-

gether in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change

was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell,

you'd find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made

a certain kind of sense, because the most successful

American designers had been recruited from the ranks

of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a

series of elaborate props for playing at living in the

future.

Over coffee, Cohen produced a fat manila envelope

full of glossies. I saw the winged statues that guard the

Hoover Dam, forty-foot concrete hood ornaments lean-

ing steadfastly into an imaginary hurricane. I saw a

dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson's Wax

Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing

Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the

employees of Johnson's Wax must have felt as though

they were walking into one of Paul's spray-paint pulp

utopias. Wright's building looked as though it had been

designed for people who wore white togas and Lucite

sandals. I hesitated over one sketch of a particularly

grandiose prop-driven airliner, all wing, like a fat sym-

metrical boomerang with windows in unlikely places.

Labeled arrows indicated the locations of the grand

ballroom and two squash courts. It was dated 1936.

"This thing couldn't have flown. . . ?" I looked at

Dialta Downes.

"Oh, no, quite impossible, even with those twelve

giant props; but they loved the look, don't you see?

New York to London in less than two days, first-class

dining rooms, private cabins, sun decks, dancing to jazz

in the evening... The designers were populists, you see;

they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What

the public wanted was the future."

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I'd been in Burbank for three days, trying to suffuse a

really dull-looking rocker with charisma, when I got the

package from Cohen. It is possible to photograph what

isn't there; it's damned hard to do, and consequently a

very marketable talent. While I'm not bad at it, I'm not

exactly the best, either, and this poor guy strained my

Nikon's credibility. I got out, depressed because I do

like to do a good job, but not totally depressed, because

I did make sure I'd gotten the check for the job, and I

decided to restore myself with the sublime artiness of

the Barris-Watford assignment. Cohen had sent me

some books on Thirties design, more photos of stream-

lined buildings, and a list of Dialta Downes's fifty

favorite examples of the style in California.

Architectural photography can involve a lot of wait-

ing; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you

wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want,

or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal

itself in a certain way. While I was waiting, I thought

myself in Dialta Downes's America. When I isolated a

few of the factory buildings on the ground glass of the

Hasselblad, they came across with a kind of sinister

totalitarian dignity, like the stadiums Albert Speer built

for Hitler. But the rest of it was relentlessly tacky:

ephemeral stuff extruded by the collective American

subconscious of the Thirties, tending mostly to survive

along depressing strips lined with dusty motels, mattress

wholesalers, and small used-car lots. I went for the gas

stations in a big way.

During the high point of the Downes Age, they put

Ming the Merciless in charge of designing California gas

stations. Favoring the architecture of his native Mongo,

he cruised up and down the coast erecting raygun

emplacements in white stucco. Lots of them featured

superfluous central towers ringed with those strange

radiator flanges that were a signature motif of the style,

and made them look as though they might generate po-

tent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm, if you

could only find the switch that turned them on. I shot

one in San Jose an hour before the bulldozers arrived

and drove right through the structural truth of plaster

and lathing and cheap concrete.

"Think of it," Dialta Downes had said, "as a kind

of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An

architecture of broken dreams."

And that was my frame of mind as I made the sta-

tions of her convoluted socioarchitectural cross in my

red Toyota as I gradually tuned in to her image of a

shadowy America-that-wasn't, of Coca-Cola plants like

beached submarines, and fifth-run movie houses like

the temples of some lost sect that had worshiped blue

mirrors and geometry. And as I moved among these

secret ruins, I found myself wondering what the in-

habitants of that lost future would think of the world I

lived in. The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-

stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze,

but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps

had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming.

After the war, everyone had a car no wings for it and

the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the

sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and

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pitted the miracle crystal. . .

And one day, on the outskirts of Bolinas, when I

was setting up to shoot a particularly lavish example of

Ming's martial architecture, I penetrated a fine mem-

brane, a membrane of probability...

Every so gently, I went over the Edge

And looked up to see a twelve-engined thing like a

bloated boomerang, all wing, thrumming its way east

with an elephantine grace, so low that I could count the

rivets in its dull silver skin, and hear maybe the echo

of jazz.

I took it to Kihn.

Merv Kihn, free-lance journalist with an extensive

line in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactees,

bush-league Loch Ness monsters, and the Top Ten con-

spiracy theories in the loonier reaches of the American

mass mind.

"It's good," said Kihn, polishing his yellow

Polaroid shooting glasses on the hem of his Hawaiian

shirt, "but it's not mental; lacks the true quill."

But I saw it, Mervyn." We were seated poolside in

brilliant Arizona sunlight. He was in Tucson waiting for

a group of retired Las Vegas civil servants whose leader

received messages from Them on her microwave oven.

I'd driven all night and was feeling it.

"Of course you did. Of course you saw it. You've

read my stuff; haven't you grasped my blanket solution

to the UFO problem? It's simple, plain and country sim-

ple: people" he settled the glasses carefully on his long

hawk nose and fixed me with his best basilisk glare

"see . . . things. People see these things. Nothing's

there, but people see them anyway. Because they need

to, probably. You've read Jung. you should know the

score... .In your case, it's so obvious: You admit you

were thinking about this crackpot architecture, having

fantasies. .. .Look, I'm sure you've taken your share of

drugs, right? How many people survived the Sixties in

California without having the odd hallucination? All

those nights when you discovered that whole armies of

Disney technicians had been employed to weave

animated holograms of Egyptian hieroglyphs into the

fabric of your jeans, say, or the times when "

"But it wasn't like that."

"Of course not. It wasn't like that at all; it was `in a

setting of clear reality,' right? Everything normal, and

then there's the monster, the mandala, the neon cigar.

In your case, a giant Tom Swift airplane. It happens all

the time. You aren't even crazy. You know that, don't

you?" He fished a beer out of the battered foam cooler

beside his deck chair.

"Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I

interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who'd been assaulted

bya bar hade."

``A what?"

"A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar

hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying

saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps on cousin

Wayne's vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two

cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up

behind its ears." He burped. -

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"It assaulted her? How?"

"You don't want to know; you're obviously im-

pressionable. `It was cold' " he lapsed into his bad

southern accent " `and metallic.' It made electronic

noises. Now that is the real thing, the straight goods

from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a

witch. There's just no place for her to function in this

society. She'd have seen the devil, if she hadn't been

brought up on `The Bionic Man' and all those `Star

Trek' reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she

knows that it happened to her. I got out ten minutes

before the heavy UFO boys showed up with the

polygraph."

I must have looked pained, because he set his beer

down carefully beside the cooler and sat up.

"If you want a classier explanation, I'd say you

saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for in-

stance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that

permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens

that look like Fifties' comic art. They're semiotic phan-

toms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off

and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne air-

ships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.

But you saw a different kind of ghost, that's all. That

plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You

picked up on that, somehow. The important thing is not

to worry about it."

I did worry about it, though.

Kihn combed his thinning blond hair and went off

to hear what They had had to say over the radar range

lately, and I drew the curtains in my room and lay down

in air-conditioned darkness to worry about it. I was still

worrying about it when I woke up. Kihn had left a note

on my door; he was flying up north in a chartered plane

to check out a cattle-mutilation rumor ("muties," he

called them; another of his journalistic specialties).

I had a meal, showered, took a crumbling diet pill

that had been kicking around in the bottom of my shav-

ing kit for three years, and headed back to Los Angeles.

The speed limited my vision to the tunnel of the

Toyota's headlights. The body could drive, I told

myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained and

stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing

of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous

vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind's

eye along late-night highways. But the mind had its own

ideas, and Kihn's opinion of what I was already think-

ing of as my "sighting" rattled endlessly through my

head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts.

Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind

of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated

the diet pill, and the speed-vegetation along the road

began to assume the colors of infrared satellite images,

glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota's slipstream.

I pulled over, then, and a half-dozen aluminum

beer cans winked goodnight as I killed the headlights. I

wondered what time it was in London, and tried to

imagine Dialta Downes having breakfast in her Hamp-

stead flat, surrounded by streamlined chrome figurines

and books on American culture.

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Desert nights in that country are enormous; the

moon is closer. I watched the moon for a long time and

decided that Kihn was right. The main thing was not to

worry. All across the continent, daily, people who were

more normal than I'd ever aspired to be saw giant birds,

Bigfeet, flying oil refineries; they kept Kihn busy and

solvent. Why should I be upset by a glimpse of the 1930s

pop imagination loose over Bolinas? I decided to go to

sleep, with nothing worse to worry about than rattle-

snakes and cannibal hippies, safe amid the friendly

roadside garbage of my own familiar continuum. In the

morning I'd drive down to Nogales and photograph the

old brothels, something I'd intended to do for years.

The diet pill had given up.

The light woke me, and then the.voices.

The light came from somewhere behind me and

threw shifting shadows inside the car. The voices were

calm, indistinct, male and female, engaged in conversa-

tion.

My neck was stiff and my eyeballs felt gritty in their

sockets. My leg had gone to sleep, pressed against the

steering wheel. I fumbled for my glasses in the pocket of

my work shirt and finally got them on.

Then I looked behind me and saw the city.

The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one

of them contained sketches of an idealized city that

drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared

everything, soaring up through an architect's perfect

clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city

was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire

stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to

a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy

radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could

hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those

towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires,

crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads

of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant

wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of

the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose

gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance),

mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were

gyrocopters...

I closed my eyes tight and swung around in the seat.

When I opened them, I willed myself to see the mileage

meter, the pale road dust on the black plastic

dashboard, the overflowing ashtray.

"Amphetamine psychosis," I said. I opened my

eyes. The dash was still there, the dust, the crushed

filtertips. Very carefully, without moving my head, I

turned the headlights on.

And saw them.

They were blond. They were standing beside their

car, an aluminum avocado with a central shark-fin rud-

der jutting up from its spine and smooth black tires like

a child's toy. He had his arm around her waist and was

gesturing toward the city. They were both in white:

loose clothing, bare legs, spotless white sun shoes.

Neither of them seemed aware of the beams of my

headlights. He was saying something wise and strong,

and she was nodding, and suddenly I was frightened,

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frightened in an entirely different way. Sanity had

ceased to be an issue; I knew, somehow, that the city

behind me was Tucson a dream Tucson thrown up out

of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real, en-

tirely real. But the couple in front of me lived in it, and

they frightened me.

They were the children of Dialta Downes's `80-

that-wasn't; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were

white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They

were American. Dialta had said that the Future had

come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But

not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on

and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution,

the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was

possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly

content with themselves and their world. And in the

Dream, it was their world.

Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept

the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them throng-

ing the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their

bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit

avenues and silver cars.

It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth prop-

aganda.

I put the car in gear and drove forward slowly, until

the bumper was within three feet of them. They still

hadn't seen me. I rolled the window down and listened

to what the man was saying. His words were bright and

hollow as the pitch in some Chamber of Commerce

brochure, and I knew that he believed in them abso-

lutely.

"John," I heard the woman say, "we've forgotten

to take our food pills." She clicked two bright wafers

from a thing on her belt and passed one to him. I backed

onto the highway and headed for Los Angeles, wincing

and shaking my head.

I phoned Kihn from a gas station. A new one, in bad

Spanish Modern. He was back from his expedition and

didn't seem to mind the call.

"Yeah, that is a weird one. Did you try to get any

pictures? Not that they ever come out, but it adds an in-

teresting frisson to your story, not having the pictures

turnout.

But what should I do?

"Watch lots of television, particularly game shows

and soaps. Go to porn movies. Ever see Nazi Love

Motel? They've got it on cable, here. Really awful. Just

what you need."

What was he talking about?

"Quit yelling and listen to me. I'm letting you in on

a trade secret: Really bad media can exorcise your

semiotic ghosts. If it keeps the saucer people off my

back, it can keep these Art Deco futuroids off yours.

Try it. What have you got to lose?"

Then he begged off, pleading an early-morning

date with the Elect.

"The who?"

"These oldsters from Vegas; the ones with the

microwaves. ~

I considered putting a collect call through to Lon-

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don, getting Cohen at Barris-Watford and telling him

his photographer was checked out for a protracted

season in the Twilight Zone. In the end, I let a machine

mix me a really impossible cup of black coffee and

climbed back into the Toyota for the haul to Los

Angeles.

Los Angeles was a bad idea, and I spent two weeks

there. It was prime Downes country; too much of the

Dream there, and too many fragments of the Dream

waiting to snare me. I nearly wrecked the car on a

stretch of overpass near Disneyland, when the road

fanned out like an origami trick and left me swerving

through a dozen minilanes of whizzing chrome tear-

drops with shark fins. Even worse, Hollywood was full

of people who looked too much like the couple I'd seen

in Arizona. I hired an Italian director who was making

ends meet doing darkroom work and installing patio

decks around swimming pools until his ship came in; he

made prints of all the negatives I'd accumulated on the

Downes job. I didn't want to look at the stuff myself. It

didn't seem to bother Leonardo, though, and when he

was finished I checked the prints, riffling through them

like a deck of cards, sealed them up, and sent them air

freight to London. Then I took a taxi to a theater that

was showing Nazi Love Motel, and kept my eyes shut all

the way.

Cohen's congratulatory wire was forwarded to me

in San Francisco a week later. Dialta had loved the pic-

tures. He admired the way I'd ``really gotten into it,''

and looked forward to working with me again. That

afternoon I spotted a flying wing over Castro Street, but

there was something tenuous about it, as though it were

only half there. I rushed into the nearest newsstand and

gathered up as much as I could find on the petroleum

crisis and the nuclear energy hazard. I'd just decided to

buy a plane ticket for New York.

"Hell of a world we live in, huh?" The proprietor

was a thin black man with bad teeth and an obvious wig.

I nodded, fishing in my jeans for change, anxious to

find a park bench where I could submerge myself in

hard evidence of the human near-dystopia we live in.

"But it could be worse, huh?"

"That's right," I said, "or even worse, it could be

perfect."

He watched me as I headed down the street with my

little bundle of condensed catasttophe.

Fragments of a Hologram Rose

That summer Parker had trouble sleeping.

There were power droughts; sudden failures of the

delta-inducer brought painfully abrupt returns to con-

sciousness.

To avoid these, he used patch cords, miniature

alligator clips, and black tape to wire the inducer to a

battery-operated ASP deck. Power loss in the inducer

would trigger the deck's playback circuit.

He bought an ASP cassette that began with the sub-

ject asleep on a quiet beach. It had been recorded by a

young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an abnormally

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acute color sense. The boy had been flown to Barbados

for the sole purpose of taking a nap and his morning's

exercise on a brilliant stretch of private beach. The

microfiche laminate in the cassette's transparent case

explained that the yogi could will himself through alpha

to delta without an inducer. Parker, who hadn't been

able to sleep without an inducer for two years, won-

dered if this was possible.

He had been able to sit through the whole thing

only once, though by now he knew every sensation of

the first five subjective minutes. He thought the most in-

teresting part of the sequence was a slight editing slip at

the start of the elaborate breathing routine: a swift

glance down the white beach that picked out the figure

of a guard patrolling a chain link fence, a black machine

pistol slung over his arm.

While Parker slept, power drained from the city's

grids.

The transition from delta to delta-ASP was a dark

implosion into other flesh. Familiarity cushioned the

shock. He felt the cool sand under his shoulders. The

cuffs of his tattered jeans flapped against his bare

ankles in the morning breeze. Soon the boy would wake

fully and begin his Ardha-Matsyendra~something; with

other hands Parker groped in darkness for the ASP

deck.

Three in the morning.

Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a

flashlight when you pour the boiling water.

Morning's recorded dream, fading: through other

eyes, dark plume of a Cuban freighter fading with the

horizon it navigates across the mind's gray screen.

Three in the morning.

Let yesterday arrange itself around you in flat

schematic images. What you said what she said

watching her pack dialing the cab. However you

shuffle them they form the same printed circuit, hiero-

glyphs converging on a central component; you, stand-

ing in the rain, screaming at the cabby.

The rain was sour and acid, nearly the color of piss.

The cabby called you an asshole; you still had to pay

twice the fare. She had three pieces of luggage. In his

respirator and goggles, the man looked like an ant. He

pedaled away in the rain. She didn't look back.

The last you saw of her was a giant ant, giving you

the finger.

Parker saw his first ASP unit in a Texas shantytown

called Judy's Jungle. It was a massive console cased in

cheap plastic chrome. A ten-dollar bill fed into the slot

bought you five minutes of free-fall gymnastics in a

Swiss orbital spa, trampolining through twenty-meter

perihelions with a sixteen-year-old Vogue model

heady stuff for the Jungle, where it was simpler to

buy a gun than a hot bath.

He was in New York with forged papers a year

later, when two leading firms had the first portable

decks in major department stores in time for Christmas.

The ASP porn theaters that had boomed briefly in

California never recovered.

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Holography went too, and the block-wide Fuller

domes that had been the holo temples of Parker's

childhood became multilevel supermarkets, or housed

dusty amusement arcades where you still might find the

old consoles, under faded neon pulsing APPARENT SEN-

SORY PERCEPTION through a blue haze of cigarette

smoke.

Now Parker is thirty and writes continuity for

broadcast ASP, programming the eye movements of the

industry's human cameras.

The brown-out continues.

In the bedroom, Parker prods the bru~hed-alu-

minum face of his Sendai Sleep-Master. Its pilot light

flickers, then lapses into darkness. Coffee in hand, he

crosses the carpet to the closet she emptied the day

before. The flashlight's beam probes the bare shelves

for evidence of love, finding a broken leather sandal

strap, an ASP cassette, and a postcard. The postcard is

a white light reflection holo&ram of a rose.

At the kitchen sink, he feeds the sandal strap to the

disposal unit. Sluggish in the brown-out, it complains,

but swallows and digests. Holding it carefully between

thumb and forefinger, he lowers the hologram toward

the hidden rotating jaws. The unit emits a thin scream as

steel teeth slash laminated plastic and the rose is shred-

ded into a thousand fragments.

Later he sits on the unmade bed, smoking. Her cas-

sette is in the deck ready for playback. Some women's

tapes disorient him, but he doubts this is the reason he

now hesitates to start the machine.

Roughly a quarter of all ASP users are unable to

comfortably assimilate the subjective body picture of

the opposite sex. Over the years some broadcast ASP

stars have become increasingly androgynous in an at-

tempt to capture this segment of the audience.

But Angela's own tapes have never intimidated him

before. (But what if she has recorded a lover?) No, that

can't be it it's simply that the cassette is an entirely

unknown quantity.

When Parker was fifteen, his parents indentured him to

the American subsidiary of a Japanese plastics combine.

At the time, he felt fortunate; the ratio of applicants to

indentured trainees was enormous. For three years he

lived with his cadre in a dormitory, singing the company

hymns in formation each morning and usually manag-

ing to go over the compound fence at least once a month

for girls or the holodrome.

The indenture would have terminated on his twen-

tieth birthday, leaving him eligible for full employee

status. A week before his nineteenth birthday, with two

stolen credit cards and a change of clothes, he went over

the fence for the last time. He arrived in California three

days before the chaotic New Secessionist regime col-

lapsed. In San Francisco, warring splinter groups hit

and ran in the streets. One or another of four different

"provisional" city governments had done such an effi-

cient job of stockpiling food that almost none was

available at street level.

Parker spent the last night of the revolution in a

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William Gibson - Burning Chrome

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