Tom Maddox - Snake Eyes

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Snake Eyes

From Mirrorshades

Tom Maddox

Snake-Eyes

By 1986 the new Eighties esthetic was in full swing. Its current state of the art is brilliantly represented by

this story from Virginia writer Tom Maddox.

Tom Maddox is an assistant professor of languages and literature at Virginia State University. He is not a

prolific writer, his output to date a bare handful of short stories. Yet his mastery of the cyberpunk

dynamic is unsurpassed.

In this fast-paced, intensely visionary story, Maddox moves swiftly and incisively across a broad range

of the Movement's themes and obsessions, "Snake-Eyes" stands as a definitive example of modern

hard-core cyberpunk.

Dark meat in the can-brown, oily, and flecked with mucus-gave off a repellent fishy smell; and the taste

of it rose in his throat, putrid and bitter like something from a dead man's stomach. George Jordan sat on

the kitchen floor and vomited, then pushed himself away front the shining pool, which looked very much

like what remained in the can. He thought, no, this won't do: I have wires in my head, and they make me

eat cat food. The snake likes cat food.

He needed help, but knew there was little point in calling the Air Force. He'd tried them, and there was

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no way they were going to admit responsibility for the monster in his head. What George called "the

snake" the Air Force called Effective Human Interface Technology, and they didn't want to hear about

any post-discharge problems with it. They had their own problems with Congressional committees

investigating "the conduct of the war in Thailand."

He lay for awhile with his cheek on the cold linoleum, got up and rinsed his mouth in the sink, then stuck

his head under the faucet and ran cold water over it, thinking, call the goddamned multicomp then, call

SenTrax and say, is it true you can do something about this incubus that wants to take possession of my

soul? And if they ask you, what's your problem? you say, cat food, and maybe they'll tell you, hell, it just

wants to take possession of your lunch.

A chair covered in brown corduroy stood in the middle of the barren living room, a white telephone on

the floor beside it, a television flat against tire opposite wall-that was the whole thing: what might have

been home, if it weren't for the snake.

He picked up the phone, called up the directory on its screen, and keyed TELECOM SENTRAX.

The Orlando Holiday Inn stood next to the airport terminal, where the tourists flowed in eager for the

delights of Disney World-but for me, George thought, there are no cute, smiling ducks and rodents. Here

as everywhere, it's snake city.

He leaned against the wall of his motel room, watching gray sheets of rain cascade across the pavement.

He had been waiting two days for a launch. A shuttle sat on its pad at Canaveral, and when the weather

cleared, a helicopter would pick him up and drop him there, a package for delivery to SenTrax Inc. at

Athena Station, over thirty thousand kilometers above the equator.

Behind him, under the laser light of a Blaupunkt holostage, people a foot high chattered about the war in

Thailand and how lucky the United States had been to escape another Vietnam.

Lucky? Maybe. He had been wired up and ready for combat, already accustomed to the form-fitting

contours in the rear couch of tire black fiber-bodied General Dynamics A-230. The A-230 flew on the

deadly edge of instability, every control surface monitored by its own bank of microcomputers, all

hooked into the snakebrain flight-and-fire assistant with the twin black miloprene cables running front

either side of his esophagus-getting off, oh, yes, when the cables snapped home and the airframe

resonated through his nerves, his body singing with that identity, that power.

Then Congress pulled the plug on the war, the Air Force pulled the plug on George, and when his

discharge came, there he was, all dressed up and nowhere to go, left with technological blue balls and

this hardware in his head that had since taken on a life of its own.

Lightning walked across the purpled sky, ripping it, crazing it into a giant upturned bowl of shattered

glass. Another foot-high man on the holostage said the tropical storm would pass in the next two hours.

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Tom Maddox - Snake Eyes

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