Mona Lisa Overdrive

Remember one time Brigitte told you there was this other? Yeah? Well, that’s the what, and the what’s the why.”

The black man raised his eyebrows, except he didn’t have any eyebrows.

After that, for a long time, nothing mattered. It wasn’t like the not caring of the stillness, the crystal overdrive, and it wasn’t like crashing, just this past-it feeling, the way maybe a ghost feels.

wrists brushed by blood-smeared fur. To look into gone eyes, the light already fading. Just a long, longest way away.

out past Molly a white tracer goes racketing and whanging around steel girders, and Molly’s yelling at Gentry can he turn the goddamn lights on?

Now she steps across rolling dunes of soiled pink satin, under a tooled steel sky, free at last of the room and its data.

Snapped the three yellow crystals down like buttons in a row, picked up that metal hunk, and—one, two, three—banged them into powder. That did it: everybody looked. Except Angie. “ ’Scuse me,” Mona heard herself say, as she swept the mound of rough yellow powder into the waiting palm of her left hand, “how it is …” She buried her nose in the pile and snorted. “Sometimes,” she added, and snorted the rest.

“Unto this high castle,” came the voice from Angie’s mouth, thick as mud, and Cherry banged her head against the roof of the cab, dropping her hammer, “my horse is come.”

I imagine we could find a sort of Tokyo if we looked.

A single 100-watt bulb burned above Factory’s south gate, a pair of twisted steel doors frozen open with rust. […] Into candleglow, walls of whitewashed limestone, pale moths fluttering in the trailing branches of the willows.

“Cybernetic godhead? Light on the waters?”

He grinned, exposing sculpted teeth, streamlined teeth, an avant-garde dentist’s fantasy of what teeth might be like in a faster, more elegant species.

Something moved behind the slot, its color the unhealthy pink of hot cigarette ash in noon sunlight, and Kumiko’s face was washed with a stutter of light.

“I wanna talk to him,” she said, her voice hard and careful. “He’s dead.” “I know that.”

She watched Sally order toiletries and underwear, tapping her requirements into the bedside video. Her purchases were delivered while Kumiko was in the shower.

Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow. It’s called money, Lanette said.

It was what Eddy called an art crowd, people who had some money and dressed sort of like they didn’t, except their clothes fit right and you knew they’d bought them new.

Continuity could generate video images of Angie, animate them with templates compiled from her stims.

There was a voice somewhere, an angry child’s voice stringing obscenities together in an endless, meaningless chain; when she realized who it was, she stopped doing it.

The new buddy so god-damn smart the first night was just a stone wilson the next, dead stupid, no vision.

“It's not the Ritz” he said, “but we'll try to make you comfortable.” Mona made a noncommittal sound. The Ritz was a burger place in Cleveland and she couldn’t see what that had to do with anything.

He couldn’t remember when he hadn’t been able to remember, but sometimes he almost could.

She was ridden by gods, in New Jersey.