Cyberpunk Read online

  CYBERPUNK

  Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Revolution, and Evolution

  EDITED BY VICTORIA BLAKE

  INTRODUCTION

  By Victoria Blake

  "As American SF lies in a reptilian torpor, its small, squishy cousin, Fantasy, creeps gecko-like across the bookstands," Bruce Sterling wrote in the first issue of Cheap Truth, a one-page, double-sided bright coal of a fan-zine first published in 1983. "Dreaming of dragon-hood, Fantasy has puffed itself up with air like a Mojave chuckwalla. SF's collapse ha[s] formed a vacuum that forces Fantasy into a painful and explosive bloat . . . Short stories, crippled with the bends, expand into whole hideous trilogies as hollow as nickel gumballs."

  These were fighting words, aimed directly at the bulls-eye of publishers, editors, critics, authors, and readers in the "smokestack" publishing-industrial complex. There was, Sterling wrote in Cheap Truth issue five, "a crying need to re-think, re-tool, and adapt to the modern era. SF has one critical advantage: it is still a pop industry that is close to its audience. It is not yet wheezing in the iron lung of English departments or begging for government Medicare through arts grants. . . . SF has always preached the inevitability of change. Physician, heal thyself."

  The physician, in this case, was the collection of early 80s writers that Cheap Truth showcased as carriers of the flame—Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, William Gibson, et al—and the challenge was to find a new voice for a new kind of reader in a new kind of world. "This year's Nebula Ballot looked like a list of stuff that Mom and Dad said it was okay to read," a pseudonymous Lewis Shiner wrote in Cheap Truth. "I mean, this is the kind of writing that Mom and Dad grew up on, full of ‘Golly's' and blushes and grins. And aren't those dolphins cute? . . . They'd rather hear that somebody ‘muttered an oath' or came out with some made-up word like ‘Ifni!' than be told that they really said ‘shit' or ‘shove it up your ass, motherfucker.'"

  Nobody had ever read anything like what the cyberpunks were writing—stories and novels that were the bastard child of science fiction, with a common-man perspective, a love of tech and drugs, and an affinity for street culture. That most cyberpunk was written by white males didn't seem to ruffle any feathers. Cyberpunk was new, it was vital, it was irreverent. Most importantly, cyberpunk rocked.

  When Sterling and his gang of pranksters shuttered Cheap Truth in 1985, a mere eighteen issues after launch, he declared that the movement was over, it had become too big, and that much of the "original freedom" was lost. "People know who I am," he wrote, "and they get all hot and bothered by personalities, instead of ideas and issues. CT can no longer claim the ‘honesty of complete desperation.' That first fine flower of red-hot hysteria is simply gone." In other words, The Movement had been changed by its acceptance into the smokestack machine. (Cheap Truth had been mentioned in an issue of Rolling Stone, evidence of it being swallowed whole.) When, in 1986, Sterling published Mirrorshades, the first and some say only true cyberpunk anthology, the movement was consolidated into a particular table of contents, a closed club whose membership was limited to the original cyberpunk writers. In 1991, Lewis Shiner renounced cyberpunk in a New York Times op-ed. When Time ran a cover story about cyberpunks, the cyberpunks themselves were outraged. Counter culture had been embraced by culture. "I hereby declare the revolution over," Sterling wrote in the final issue of Cheap Truth. "Long live the provisional government."

  Thirty years later, cyberpunk is both very much dead and very much alive. It is dead in the sense that the Reagan years are over, the Cold War is done, straight video has been replaced by CGI, and the achievement of the Xerox machine, once the very pinnacle of technological advancement available to the masses, is being outdone by 3-D printers. But it is very much alive in that cyberpunk was never really about a specific technology or a specific moment in time. It was, and it is, an aesthetic position as much as a collection of themes, an attitude toward mass culture and pop culture, an identity, a way of living, breathing, and grokking our weird and wired world.

  Anthology editing is a tricky business. On the one hand, the anthology editor must revere, must even do a little bit of worshipping at the foot of the statue. On the other hand, the editor must be removed enough to see the subject with clear eyes, and to offer an unimpassioned editorial read. But she must also bring just enough of herself to the selection to make the anthology as a whole useful, interesting, unique, timeless, and, hopefully, fun.

  In putting together this collection, I have tried to do four things. The first—spurred by the worshipper within me—is to pay homage to cyberpunk beginnings. To that end, this collection contains reprints of cyberpunk gems that are now difficult to find—"Mozart in Mirrorshades" by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner is one of my personal favorites—and it showcases stories by the founding or first-generation cyberpunk authors—Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Greg Bear, and Paul Di Filippo among them—that weren't in the original collections.

  Second, the critic in me wanted to offer an as-complete-as-possible look at cyberpunk themes and topics. Some of my favorites include the low-life of the Low Teks in William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic," the imbedded digital brains of David Marusek's "Getting to Know You," the drugs and outlaws of Gwyneth Jones's "Blue Clay Blues," the multi-mind madness of John Shirley's "Wolves of the Plateau," the body augmentation of James Patrick Kelly's "Mr. Boy," and the environmental meltdown of Paul Di Filippo's "Life in the Anthropocene."

  One story from this group deserves a special explanation: "Down and Out in the Year 2000," by Kim Stanley Robinson, occupies a unique position in the cyberpunk cannon as perhaps the solitary story to critique the cyberpunk reverence for "the street." "I was living in Washington DC in the summer of 1985," Robinson wrote me in an email, after I requested some information about the genesis of the story, "hanging out in Dupont Circle park and the smaller park outside our apartment. Watching the people there, I began to think that the cyberpunks were white middle-class people like me, and they had no idea; ‘street smart' was just a trendy phrase, a literary or Hollywood idea. So I wrote the story to express that feeling."

  Third, the iconoclast in me wanted to move past traditional cyberpunk, and beyond the cast of known cyberpunk characters, to take a look at how the movement has developed since the end of the Cold War, and to pull the veil back on what the future might hold. Cory Doctorow, arguably the new Chairman of Tech, ends the collection by celebrating the heroic sysadmins, a rarely lauded group. Cat Rambo, not usually associated with cyberpunk, beautifully describes how relationships are changed by technology. New-comer Benjamin Parzybok, author of the novel Couch, contributed an original story notable for its authentic re-imagining of low life in the slums, a different kind of low life entirely from that described by the 80s cyberpunk. Jonathan Lethem's "Interview with the Crab" thrilled me when I read it the first time, and it continues to astound me with its craft. I've never heard Lethem described as a cyberpunk, but my favorite of his novels, Gun, with Occasional Music, uses the hardboiled tone common to cyberpunk, and is populated by state-sponsored druggies, external memory devices, a virtual monetary system, and genetically altered animals who speak, love, have sex, and die like humans. The story included here takes up the themes of pop culture and fame, getting deeper into both by using a crustacean, the titular crab, as the prototypical hard-living, idiosyncratic celebrity.

  And finally, in compiling this collection, the writer in me wanted to look at the craft of cyberpunk, and the interesting, innovate forms some of the cyberpunk stories take. The prose of Pat Cadigan's "Rock On" has a vitality that makes my heart beat faster. Two stories—Bruce Sterling's "User-Centric" and Paul Tremblay's "Blog at the End of the World"—co-op new kinds of communication, email and blogging, to weave their tales. Daniel H. Wilson writes w
hat could be called a cyberpunk fairytale, and Mark Teppo pokes at an acronym-heavy future, all while telling a story in the very language he's lampooning.

  I was five years old when the first issue of Cheap Truth came out, and only eight when The Movement was declared dead. In 1991, when Lewis Shiner renounced his cyberpunk membership, I was wearing neon hair bands, plastic shoes, and bopping my head to Cyndi Lauper. I wasn't in any way punk, and I'm probably still not. But when you're holding a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, and when you're editing cyberpunk, you realize you're living in a cyberpunk world.

  To wit, last week, the week of Thanksgiving, 2012, as the final edits were being made on this collection, the following items caught my eye: On the radio to the airport, I heard a commentator remarking on Project Glass, the Google initiative focusing on wearable computers; also on the radio, I heard about a scientist who had discovered that jellyfish can reverse the aging process, and that jellyfish stem cells might possess the secret to immortality. The talk around the pre-Thanksgiving dinner table was about California legalizing self-driving cars, and about how the rich/poor income gap in America is wider than it's been since 1967. Gawker posted a story about a man on family vacation in Florida who found anonymous sex in a theme-park bathroom with the help of an iPhone app. And on Thanksgiving itself, my second cousin told me all about a nonprofit he was starting with a group of like-minded retirees to help spread information about two things, the first being the 911 conspiracy, and the second being a government-operated data-center, Big Brother style, outside Salt Lake City.

  The world seems to keep getting weirder and weirder, with no end in sight.

  Thank you to everybody who helped with story suggestions, with author suggestions, and with new ways to look at the subject. But thank you especially to the authors in this collection, and to the authors who have written and continue to write cyberpunk, knowingly or not. You have given us a new view on the world, and a new voice to the great tech experiment that defines our age. I can't wait to see what happens next.

  JOHNNY MNEMONIC

  By William Gibson

  I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. I'd had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock on the lathe, and then load them myself; I'd had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand-loading cartridges; I'd had to build a lever-action press to seat the primers—all very tricky. But I knew they'd work.

  The meet was set for the Drome at 2300, but I rode the tube three stops past the closest platform and walked back. Immaculate procedure.

  I checked myself out in the chrome siding of a coffee kiosk, your basic sharp-faced Caucasoid with a ruff of stiff, dark hair. The girls at Under the Knife were big on Sony Mao, and it was getting harder to keep them from adding the chic suggestion of epicanthic folds. It probably wouldn't fool Ralfi Face, but it might get me next to his table.

  The Drome is a single narrow space with a bar down one side and tables along the other, thick with pimps and handlers and an arcane array of dealers. The Magnetic Dog Sisters were on the door that night, and I didn't relish trying to get out past them if things didn't work out. They were two meters tall and thin as greyhounds. One was black and the other white, but aside from that they were as nearly identical as cosmetic surgery could make them. They'd been lovers for years and were bad news in the tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male.

  Ralfi was sitting at his usual table. Owing me a lot of money. I had hundreds of megabytes stashed in my head on an idiot/savant basis—information I had no conscious access to. Ralfi had left it there. He hadn't, however, come back for it. Only Ralfi could retrieve the data, with a code phrase of his own invention. I'm not cheap to begin with, but my overtime on storage is astronomical. And Ralfi had been very scarce.

  Then I'd heard that Ralfi Face wanted to put out a contract on me. So I'd arranged to meet him in the Drome, but I'd arranged it as Edward Bax, clandestine importer, late of Rio and Peking.

  The Drome stank of biz, a metallic tang of nervous tension. Muscle-boys scattered through the crowd were flexing stock parts at one another and trying on thin, cold grins, some of them so lost under superstructures of muscle graft that their outlines weren't really human.

  Pardon me. Pardon me, friends. Just Eddie Bax here, Fast Eddie the Importer, with his professionally nondescript gym bag, and please ignore this slit, just wide enough to admit his right hand.

  Ralfi wasn't alone. Eighty kilos of blond California beef perched alertly in the chair next to his, martial arts written all over him.

  Fast Eddie Bax was in the chair opposite them before the beef's hands were off the table. "You black belt?" I asked eagerly. He nodded, blue eyes running an automatic scanning pattern between my eyes and my hands. "Me too," I said. "Got mine here in the bag." And I shoved my hand through the slit and thumbed the safety off. Click. "Double twelve-gauge with the triggers wired together."

  "That's a gun," Ralfi said, putting a plump, restraining hand on his boy's taut blue nylon chest. "Johnny has an antique firearm in his bag." So much for Edward Bax.

  I guess he'd always been Ralfi Something or Other, but he owed his acquired surname to a singular vanity. Built something like an overripe pear, he'd worn the once-famous face of Christian White for twenty years—Christian White of the Aryan Reggae Band, Sony Mao to his generation, and final champion of race rocks. I'm a whiz at trivia.

  Christian White: classic pop face with a singer's high-definition muscles, chiseled cheekbones. Angelic in one light, handsomely depraved in another. But Ralfi's eyes lived behind that face, and they were small and cold and black.

  "Please," he said, "let's work this out like businessmen." His voice was marked by a horrible prehensile sincerity, and the corners of his beautiful Christian White mouth were always wet. "Lewis here," nodding in the beefboy's direction, "is a meatball." Lewis took this impassively, looking like something built from a kit. "You aren't a meatball, Johnny."

  "Sure I am, Ralfi, a nice meatball chock-full of implants where you can store your dirty laundry while you go off shopping for people to kill me. From my end of this bag, Ralfi, it looks like you've got some explaining to do."

  "It's this last batch of product, Johnny." He sighed deeply. "In my role as broker—"

  "Fence," I corrected.

  "As broker, I'm usually very careful as to sources."

  "You buy only from those who steal the best. Got it."

  He sighed again. "I try," he said wearily, "not to buy from fools. This time, I'm afraid, I've done that." Third sigh was the cue for Lewis to trigger the neural disruptor they'd taped under my side of the table.

  I put everything I had into curling the index finger of my right hand, but I no longer seemed to be connected to it. I could feel the metal of the gun and the foam-padded tape I'd wrapped around the stubby grip, but my hands were cool wax, distant and inert. I was hoping Lewis was a true meatball, thick enough to go for the gym bag and snag my rigid trigger finger, but he wasn't.

  "We've been very worried about you, Johnny. Very worried. You see, that's Yakuza property you have there. A fool took it from them, Johnny. A dead fool."

  Lewis giggled.

  It all made sense then, an ugly kind of sense, like bags of wet sand settling around my head. Killing wasn't Ralfi's style. Lewis wasn't even Ralfi's style. But he'd got himself stuck between the Sons of the Neon Chrysanthemum and something that belonged to them—or, more likely, something of theirs that belonged to someone else. Ralfi, of course, could use the code phrase to throw me into idiot/savant, and I'd spill their hot program without remembering a single quarter tone. For a fence like Ralfi, that would ordinarily have
been enough. But not for the Yakuza. The Yakuza would know about Squids, for one thing, and they wouldn't want to worry about one lifting those dim and permanent traces of their program out of my head. I didn't know very much about Squids, but I'd heard stories, and I made it a point never to repeat them to my clients. No, the Yakuza wouldn't like that; it looked too much like evidence. They hadn't got where they were by leaving evidence around. Or alive.

  Lewis was grinning. I think he was visualizing a point just behind my forehead and imagining how he could get there the hard way.

  "Hey," said a low voice, feminine, from somewhere behind my right shoulder, "you cowboys sure aren't having too lively a time."

  "Pack it, bitch," Lewis said, his tanned face very still. Ralfi looked blank.

  "Lighten up. You want to buy some good free base?" She pulled up a chair and quickly sat before either of them could stop her. She was barely inside my fixed field of vision, a thin girl with mirrored glasses, her dark hair cut in a rough shag. She wore black leather, open over a T-shirt slashed diagonally with stripes of red and black. "Eight thou a gram weight."

  Lewis snorted his exasperation and tried to slap her out of the chair. Somehow he didn't quite connect, and her hand came up and seemed to brush his wrist as it passed. Bright blood sprayed the table. He was clutching his wrist white-knuckle tight, blood trickling from between his fingers.

  But hadn't her hand been empty?

  He was going to need a tendon stapler. He stood up carefully, without bothering to push his chair back. The chair toppled backward, and he stepped out of my line of sight without a word.

  "He better get a medic to look at that," she said. "That's a nasty cut."

  "You have no idea," said Ralfi, suddenly sounding very tired, "the depths of shit you have just gotten yourself into."

  "No kidding? Mystery. I get real excited by mysteries. Like why your friend here's so quiet. Frozen, like. Or what this thing here is for," and she held up the little control unit that she'd somehow taken from Lewis. Ralfi looked ill.