William Gibson - Virtual Light. William GIBSON . He watches a gunship traverse the city's middle distance like a. Hours earlier, missiles have fallen in a northern suburb. But here the mirrored ziggurats down. Closing his eyes, he centers himself in the background hiss of. He imagines himself in Tokyo, this room in some new wing of the old. Imperial. He sees himself in the streets of Chiyoda- ku, beneath the sighing trains. Red. paper lanterns line a narrow lane. He opens his eyes. Jack White tabs with online player. One accurate tab per song. Recommended by The Wall Street Journal. META-INF/MANIFEST.MFname/audet/samuel/shorttyping/ShortDictManager$BufferedStream.classname/audet/samuel/shorttyping/ShortDictManager.classname/audet/samuel/shorttyping/ShortDictTools$AbbrComparator.classname/audet/samuel. Adam Jones on Alex Grey's Art from CoSMvision on Vimeo. SUPPORT BMB: 26 May, 2016 (11:14am) BREAKING NEWS FROM THE IMAGINAL REALM & IDEA EMPORIUM NEWS 'LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE' FROM 'LE DRAGON ROUGE/GRAND GRIMOIRE' As it appears in.
![]() Mexico City is still there. The eight empty bottles, plastic miniatures, are carefully aligned. Japanese vodka, Come Back Salmon, its name more. On the screen above the console, the ptichka await him, all in a. When he takes up the remote, their high sharp cheekbones twist in the space. Their young men, invariably entering from behind, wear black leather. ![]() Slavic faces, calling up unwanted fragments of a childhood: the reek. Twenty- eight peripheral images frame the Russians in their earnest. Asian ferry. He opens another of the little bottles. Now the ptichka, their heads bobbing like well- oiled machines. The camera angles recall the ardor of. Soviet industrial cinema. His gaze strays to NHK Weather. A low- pressure front is crossing. Kansas. Next to it, an eerily calm Islamic downlink ceaselessly reiterates the name of God. He drinks the vodka. He watches television. After midnight, at the intersection of Liverpool and Florencia, he. Zona Rosa from the back of a white Lada, a nanopore Swiss respirator. And every passing face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed. Some, honoring the Day of the Dead, resemble the silver- beaded jaws of. Whatever form they take, their manufacturers all make the same. He's thought to escape the sameness, perhaps discover something of. An ancient American car comes creeping through the turn, out of. Avenida Chapultepec, gouts of carbon puising from beneath a dangling bumper. A dusty rind. of cola- colored resin and shattered mirror seals its every surface; only the windshield is. He feels the fear begin to accrete, seamlessly, senselessly, with. Cadillac, this oil- burning relic in. Why is it allowed to add its filth to the. Who sits inside, behind the black windshield? Trembling, he watches the thing pass.'That car ..' He finds himself leaning forward, compulsively. El coche,' says the driver, who wears no mask, and turning, now. The courier sees the mirrored Cadillac. The driver is staring at him. He tells the driver to return to the hotel. He comes awake from a dream of metal voices, down the vaulted. European airport, distant figures glimpsed in mute rituals of. Darkness. The hiss of climate- control. The touch of cotton sheets. His telephone beneath the pillow. Sounds. of traffic, muted by the gas- filled windows. All tension, his panic, are gone. He. remembers the atrium bar. Faces. He becomes aware of an inner balance, a rare equilibrium. It is all. he knows of peace. And, yes, the glasses are here, tucked beside his telephone. He. draws them out, opening the ear pieces with a guilty pleasure that has somehow endured. Prague. Very nearly a decade he has loved her, though he doesn't think of it. But he has never bought another piece of software and the black plastic. The label on the cassette is unreadable now. So many rooms like this one. He has long since come to prefer her in silence. He no longer. inserts the yellowing audio beads. He has learned to provide his own, whispering to her as. Hollywood nor Rio, but some soft- focus digital approximation of both. She is waiting for him, always, in the white house up the canyon. The jet- beaded dress against the matte perfection of her. Far away, beneath cotton sheets, his hands move. Later, drifting toward sleep of a different texture, the phone. Yes?''Confirming your reservation to San Francisco,' someone says, either. He touches a key, recording the flight number, says goodnight, and. Her white arms enfold him. Her blondness eternal. He sleeps. Inten. Secure had their wagons detailed every three shifts. They used. this big specialty car wash off Colby; twenty coats of hand- rubbed Wet Honey Sienna and. That one November evening the Republic of Desire put an end to his. Berry Rydell had arrived there a little early. He liked the way it smelled inside. They had this pink stuff they. Knoxville, his last year in school. They'd been putting condos into. Safeway out on Jefferson Davis. The architects wanted the cinder. Safeway paint left in the little dips and crannies. They were from. Memphis and they wore black suits and white cotton shirts. The. shirts had obviously cost more than the suits, or at least as much, and they never wore. Rydell had figured that that was a way for architects to. L. A., he knew it was true. He'd overheard one of them explaining to. He thought that was probably bullshit, but he sort of liked the sound of it. But what it really amounted to was getting most of thisshitty old paint off thousands and thousands of square feet of. If you thought the foreman wasn't looking, you could aim it at. Rydell and his friends all wore this Australian stuff that came in serious. Had to get your right distance. Rydell and. Buddy Crigger both got fired for doing that, finally, and then they walked across Jeff. Davis to a beer joint and Rydell wound up spending the night with this girl from Key West. Now here he was in Los Angeles, driving a six- wheeled Hotspur Hussar. The Hussar was an armored Land Rover that could. Hernandez, his shift super, said you couldn't trust an Englishman to. Inten. Secure should've bought Israeli or at least Brazilian, and who needed Ralph. Lauren to design a tank anyway? Rydell didn't know about that, but that paint job was definitely. He thought they probably wanted people to think of those big brown United. Parcel trucks, and at the same time they maybe hoped it would look sort of like something. Episcopal church. Not too much gilt on the logo. Sort of restrained. The people who worked in the car wash were mostly Mongolian. They did this crazy. He couldn't figure out. Now they were buffing the rows of chromed nubs down the sides. Those. had been meant to support electric crowd- control grids and were just chromed for looks. He was a medical student, days, and he always looked like he was about two. Rydell took the pad and the light- pen and signed the. Anderson handed Rydell the keys.'You ought to get you some rest,' Rydell said. Anderson grinned. Rydell walked over to Gunhead, deactivating the door alarm. Somebody had written that inside, 'GUNHEAD,' in green marker on the. The name stuck, but mostly because Sublett liked it. Sublett. was Texan, a refugee from some weird trailer- camp video- sect. He said his mother had been. Sublett wasn't too anxious to talk about it, but Rydell had gotten. Lord's preferred means of communicating. Sublett said. Gunhead was the name of a robot tank in a Japanese monster movie. It was still there, but Rydell knew. Sublett was too law- abiding to commit any vandalism, and anyway the ink in the marker. Sublett had had allergies. He went into shock from various kinds of. The. allergies made him light sensitive, too, so he had to wear these mirrored contacts. What. with the black Inten. Secure uniform and his dry blond hair, the contacts made him look like. Kian- assed Nazi robot. Which could get kind of complicated in the wrong store. Sunset, say three in the morning and all you really wanted was some mineral water and a. Coke. But Rydell was always glad to have him on shift, because he was as determinedly. And he probably wasn't even crazy. Both. of which were definite pluses for Rydell. As Hernandez was fond of pointing out, So. Cal had. stricter regulations for who could or couldn't be a hairdresser. Like Rydell, a lot of Inten. Secure's response people were former. LAPD, and if the company's rules about not. There were metal detectors on the staff- room doors. Hernandez usually had a drawer full of push- daggers, nunchuks, stunguns, knucks. Like Friday morning at a South. Miami high school. Hernandez gave it all back after the shift, but when they went calling. Glocks and the chunkers. The Glocks were standard police issue, at least twenty years old. Inten. Secure bought by the truckload from PDs that could afford to upgrade to caseless. If you did it by the book, you kept the Glocks in their plastic holsters, and. Velcroed to the wagon's central console. When you answered a call, you. That was the only time you were supposed to be out of the wagon with a gun on. The chunkers weren't even guns, not legally anyway, but a ten- second. They were Israeli riot- control. They looked like the. When you pulled the trigger. If you got really good with one, you could shoot. Up close, they'd. The theory was, you didn't always encounter that many. If you did encounter an armed intruder, you had the Glock. Although the intruder. Nor was it. part of the theory that seriously tooled- up intruders tended to be tightened on dancer. There had been a lot of dancer in Knoxville, and some of it had. Rydell suspended. He'd crawled into an apartment where a machinist named Kenneth. Turvey was holding his girlfriend, two little kids, and demanding to speak to the. Turvey was white, skinny, hadn't bathed in a month, and had the Last. Supper tattooed on his chest. It was a very fresh tattoo; it hadn't even scabbed over. Neither. did any of the Apostles.'Damn it,' Turvey said, when he saw Rydell. He had. something like a piece of pipe across his lap, all wrapped with tape.'We're trying to get her for you,' Rydell said. Rydell. could see the girlfriend through the open door of the apartment's single bedroom. She was. on her back, on the floor, and one of her legs looked broken. He couldn't see her face. Where were the kids?'What is that thing you got there?' Rydell asked, indicating the. Turvey's lap.'It's a gun,' Turvey said, 'and it's why I gotta talk to the. Never seen a gun like that,' Rydell allowed. It had. a sort of breech, very intricately machined, a trigger- thing like part of a pair of. These latter ran down, Rydell saw, to a.
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