Tokyo for the glare of the television sky

The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than

the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were

the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly,

and still they couldn't repair the damage he'd suffered in that

Memphis hotel.

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading

nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the

corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in

his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless

void.... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the

Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy.

Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the

dreams came on in the Japanese night like live wire voodoo

and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the

dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands

clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers,

trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

"I saw your girl last night," Ratz said, passing Case his

second Kirin.

"I don't have one," he said, and drank.

"Miss Linda Lee."

Case shook his head.

"No girl? Nothing? Only biz, friend artiste? Dedication to

commerce?" The bartender's small brown eyes were nested

deep in wrinkled flesh. "I think I liked you better, with her.

You laughed more. Now, some night, you get maybe too artistic,

you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts."

"You're breaking my heart, Ratz." He finished his beer,

paid and left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rain-stained

khaki nylon of his windbreaker. Threading his way

through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat.

Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy

a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by

the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the

biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a

byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace

deck that projected his disembodied consciousness

into the con sensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief

he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided

the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls

of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.

He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd

never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something

for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam.

He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it

mattered now. He'd expected to die, then, but they only smiled.

Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the

money. And he was going to need it. Because--still smiling--

they were going to make sure he never worked again.

They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian

mycotoxin.

Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning

out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.

The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.

For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace,

it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy

hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt

for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of

his own flesh.

His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat

sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through

the closed circuit of the world's black markets like the seashells

of the Trobriand islanders. It was difficult to transact legitimate

business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already

illegal.

In Japan, he'd known with a clenched and absolute certainty,

he'd find his cure. In Chiba. Either in a registered clinic or in

the shadow land of black medicine. Synonymous with implants,

nerve-splicing, and micro bionics, Chiba was a magnet for the

Sprawl's techno-criminal subcultures.

In Chiba, he'd watched his New Yen vanish in a two-month

round of examinations and consultations. The men in the black

clinics, his last hope, had admired the expertise with which

he'd been maimed, and then slowly shaken their heads.

Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the

port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all

night like vast stages; where you couldn't see the lights of

Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering

hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and doxycycline 100mg

was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals

of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes

dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and

city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an

area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart.

By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless,

the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned

silver sky.