Count Zero

The sinister thing about a simstim construct, really, was that it carried the suggestion that any environment might be unreal, that the windows of the shopfronts she passed now with Andrea might be figments. Mirrors, someone had once said, were in some way essentially un- wholesome; constructs were more so, she decided.

he paid a Singapore money laundry a yearly percentage that was roughly equivalent to the income tax he would have been required to pay if he'd declared his gross.

“I’ve been trying to reach you for weeks,” he said, and she knew that that was a lie, and yet, as she often had before, she wondered if he was entirely conscious of the fact that he was lying. Andrea nmaintained that men like Alain lied so constantly, so passionately, that some basic distinction had been lost. They were artists in their own right, Andrea said, intent on restructuring reality.

Now the building brought her depression circling in again, but the feel of her new outfit and the tidy click of her bootheels on marble kept it at a distance. She wore an oversized leather coat a few shades lighter than her handbag, a wool skirt, and a silk blouse from Paris Isetan. She'd had her hair cut that morning on Faubourg St. Honoré, by a Burmese girl with a West German laser pencil; an expensive cut, subtle without being too conservative.

And his heart rolled right over, on its back, and kicked his lunch up with its red cartoon legs, galvanic frog-leg spasm hurling him from the chair and tearing the trodes from his forehead.

There was some magic chemistry in that impending darkness, something that let him glimpse the infinite desirability of that room, with its carpet-colored carpet and curtain-colored curtains, its dingy foam sofa-suite, the angular chrome frame supporting the components of a six-year-old Hitachi entertainment module.