Cyberpunk

all.
    “Name’s Millions. Molly Millions. You want to get out of here, boss? People are starting to stare.” She stood up. She was wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood.
    And I saw for the first time that the mirrored lenses were surgical inlays, the silver rising smoothly from her high cheekbones, sealing her eyes in their sockets. I saw my new face twinned there.
    “I’m Johnny,” I said. “We’re taking Mr. Face with us.”
    He was outside, waiting. Looking like your standard tourist tech, in plastic zoris and a silly Hawaiian shirt printed with blowups of his firm’s most popular microprocessor; a mild little guy, the kind most likely to wind up drunk on sake in a bar that puts out miniature rice crackers with seaweed garnish. He looked like the kind who sing the corporate anthem and cry, who shake hands endlessly with the bartender. And the pimps and the dealers would leave him alone, pegging him as innately conservative. Not up for much, and careful with his credit when he was.
    The way I figured it later, they must have amputated part of his left thumb, somewhere behind the first joint, replacing it with a prosthetic tip, and cored the stump, fitting it with a spool and socket molded from one of the Ono-Sendai diamond analogs. Then they’d carefully wound the spool with three meters of monomolecular filament.
    Molly got into some kind of exchange with the Magnetic Dog Sisters, giving me a chance to usher Ralfi through the door with the gym bag pressed lightly against the base of his spine. She seemed to know them. I heard the black one laugh.
    I glanced up, out of some passing reflex, maybe because I’ve never got used to it, to the soaring arcs of light and the shadows of the geodesics above them. Maybe that saved me.
    Ralfi kept walking, but I don’t think he was trying to escape. I think he’d already given up. Probably he already had an idea of what we were up against.
    I looked back down in time to see him explode.
    Playback on full recall shows Ralfi stepping forward as the little tech sidles out of nowhere, smiling. Just a suggestion of a bow, and his left thumb falls off. It’s a conjuring trick. The thumb hangs suspended. Mirrors? Wires? And Ralfi stops, his back to us, dark crescents of sweat under the armpits of his pale summer suit. He knows. He must have known. And then the joke-shop thumb tip, heavy as lead, arcs out in a lighting yo-yo trick, and the invisible thread connecting it to the killer’s hand passes laterally through Ralfi’s skull, just above his eyebrows, whips up, and descends, slicing the pear-shaped torso diagonally from shoulder to rib cage. Cuts so fine that no blood flows until synapses misfire and the first tremors surrender the body to gravity.
    Ralfi tumbled apart in a pink cloud of fluids, the three mismatched sections rolling forward onto the tiled pavement. In total silence.
    I brought the gym bag up, and my hand convulsed. The recoil nearly broke my wrist.
    It must have been raining; ribbons of water cascaded from a ruptured geodesic and spattered on the tile behind us. We crouched in the narrow gap between a surgical boutique and an antique shop. She’d just edged one mirrored eye around the corner to report a single Volks module in front of the Drome, red lights flashing. They were sweeping Ralfi up. Asking questions.
    I was covered in scorched white fluff. The tennis socks. The gym bag was a ragged plastic cuff around my wrist. “I don’t see how the hell I missed him.”
    “’Cause he’s fast, so fast.” She hugged her knees and rocked back and forth on her bootheels. “His nervous system’s jacked up. He’s factory custom.” She grinned and gave a little squeal of delight. “I’m gonna get that boy. Tonight. He’s the best, number one, top dollar, state of the art.”
    “What you’re going to get, for this boy’s two million, is my ass out of here. Your boyfriend back there was mostly grown in a vat in Chiba City. He’s a Yakuza assassin.”
    “Chiba. Yeah. See, Molly’s been Chiba, too.” And she showed me her hands, fingers slightly spread. Her fingers were slender, tapered, very white against the polished burgundy nails. Ten blades snicked straight out from their recesses beneath her nails, each one a narrow, double-edged scalpel in pale blue steel.
    I’d never spent much time in Nighttown. Nobody there had anything to pay me to remember, and most of them had a lot they paid regularly to forget. Generations of