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THE PANTHER MODERNS |
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by William Gibson From "Neuromancer" [In this scene, Armitage has hired the Panther Moderns to create chaos as a distraction at Sense/Net (the centralized mass-media outlet). Meanwhile Molly the Razorgirl penetrates Sense/Net security, while Case, a Net cowboy, hacks the anti-hacker software and security monitors. The mission is a success. Molly secures the object of this complex burglary, a piece of computer hardware that holds the expert system of a dead Net-cowboy called the Flatline, famous for flatlining twice while jacked into cyberspace. But the chaos distraction suffers a little bit of overkill, as the hive of Sense/Net occupants, once put into paranoid overdrive, don't stop till they drop. -- Charles Carreon] The Panther Moderns allowed four minutes for their first move to take effect, then injected a second carefully prepared dose of misinformation. This time, they shot it directly into the Sense/Net building's internal video system. At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eighteen seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a susceptible segment of Sense/Net employees. Then something only vaguely like a human face filled the screens, its features stretched across asymmetrical expanses of bone like some obscene Mercator projection. Blue lips parted wetly as the twisted, elongated jaw moved. Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish clump of gnarled roots, fumbled toward the camera blurred and vanished. Subliminally rapid images of contamination: graphics of the building's water supply system, gloved hands manipulating laboratory glassware, something tumbling down into darkness, a pale splash .... The audio track, its pitch adjusted to run at just less than twice the standard playback speed, was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military uses of a substance known as HsG, a biochemical governing the human skeletal growth factor. Overdoses of HsG threw certain bone cells into overdrive, accelerating growth by factors as high as one thousand percent. At 12:05:00, the mirror-sheathed nexus of the Sense/Net consortium held just over three thousand employees. At five minutes after midnight, as the Moderns’ message ended in a flare of white screen, the Sense/Net Pyramid screamed. Half a dozen NYPD Tactical hovercraft, responding to the possibility of Blue Nine in the building's ventilation system, were converging on the Sense/Net Pyramid. They were running full riot lights. A BAMA Rapid Deployment helicopter was lifting off from its pad on Riker's. Case triggered his second
program. A carefully engineered virus attacked the code fabric screening
primary custodial commands for the sub-basement that housed the Sense/Net
research materials. "Boston," Molly's voice came across the link, "I'm
downstairs." Case switched and saw the blank wall of the elevator. She was
unzipping the white pants. A bulky packet, exactly the shade of her pale
ankle, was secured there with micropore. She knelt and peeled the tape
away. Streaks of burgundy flickered across the mimetic polycarbon as she
unfolded the Modern suit. She removed the pink raincoat, threw it down
beside the white pants, and began to pull the suit on 12:06:26. Case's virus had bored a window through the library's command ice. He punched himself through and found an infinite blue space ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight grid of pale blue neon. In the nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child's toy calculator, accessed through Case's Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. Case began to key the sequence the Finn had purchased from a mid-eschelon sarariman with severe drug problems. He began to glide through the spheres as if he were on invisible tracks. Here. This one. Punching his way into the sphere, chill blue neon vault above him starless and smooth as frosted glass, he triggered a subprogram that effected certain alterations in the core custodial commands. Out now. Reversing smoothly, the virus reknitting the fabric of the window. Done. Case had seen panic before, but never in an enclosed area. The Sense/Net employees, spilling out of the elevators, had surged for the street doors, only to meet the foam barricades of the Tacticals and the sandbag-guns of the BAMA Rapids. The two agencies, convinced that they were containing a horde of potential killers, were cooperating with an uncharacteristic degree of efficiency. Beyond the shattered wreckage of the main street doors, bodies were piled three deep on the barricades. The hollow thumping of the riot guns provided a constant background for the sound the crowd made as it surged back and forth across the lobby's marble floor. Case had never heard anything like that sound. Neither, apparently, had Molly. "Jesus," she said, and hesitated. It was a sort of keening, rising into a bubbling wail of raw and total fear. The lobby floor was covered with bodies, clothing, blood, and long trampled scrolls of yellow printout. "C'mon, sister. We're for out." The eyes of the two Moderns stared out of madly swirling shades of polycarbon, their suits unable to keep up with the confusion of shape and color that raged behind them. "You hurt? C'mon. Tommy'll walk you." Tommy handed something to the one who spoke, a video camera wrapped in polycarbon. "Chicago," she said, "I'm on my way." And then she was falling, not to the marble floor, slick with blood and vomit, but down some bloodwarm well, into silence and the dark. The Panther Modern leader, who introduced himself as Lupus Yonderboy, wore a polycarbon suit with a recording feature that allowed him to replay backgrounds at will. Perched on the edge of Case's worktable like some kind of state of the art gargoyle, he regarded Case and Armitage with hooded eyes. He smiled. His hair was pink. A rainbow forest of microsofts bristled behind his left ear; the ear was pointed, tufted with more pink hair. His pupils had been modified to catch the light like a cat's. Case watched the suit crawl with color and texture. "You let it get out of control," Armitage said. He stood in the center of the loft like a statue, wrapped in the dark glossy folds of an expensive-looking trenchcoat. "Chaos, Mr. Who," Lupus Yonderboy said. "That is our mode and modus. That is our central kick. Your woman knows.”
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