Black Glass

  Black Glass is published by Elder Signs Press, Inc.

  This book is © 2008 Elder Signs Press, Inc.

  All material © 2008 by John Shirley.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover & Design by Deborah Jones.

  All characters within this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is strictly coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the written persmission of the publisher.

  FIRST EDITION

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Published in November 2008

  ISBN: 1-934501-06-9 (Hardcover) 1-934501-07-7 (Trade Paperback)

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Published by Elder Signs Press

  P.O. Box 389

  Lake Orion, MI 48361-0389

  www.eldersignspress.com

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  SOME REMARKS FROM THE AUTHOR ABOUT THE LOST CYBERPUNK NOVEL

  BLACK GLOSSARY

  CHAPTER ONE— THAT’S HOW IT IS, HODE, ASK ANYONE

  CHAPTER TWO— —PERSONAL SHIT ‘TWEEN ME ’N’ YOU

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR - JUS’ SNUCK UP ON YOU AND IT’S WATCHING EVERYTHING YOU DO

  YA CHAPTER FIVE— GOTTA MAKE THE MOMENT COME ALIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN - HAS A LIFE OF ITS OWN, IT’S A DEVIL’S SIGH, IT’S AN ANGEL’S GROAN

  CHAPTER EIGHT?

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN? - WISH YOU WERE BACK IN NUMBER SEVEN?

  CHAPTER TWELVE, - HUNTS LIKE A FLYIN’ GUN, IT’S COMIN’ AFTER YOU, AIN’T THE LAST ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN? - MIGHT BE BAD LUCK—BUT YOU PROBABLY WON’T BE HIT BY A TRUCK

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN’S - PICKING UP SPEED LIKE SOMEBODY DOSED YOUR BAG OF WEED

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN’S - THE END, NO ILLUSION—SLAM THIS FUCKER RIGHT TO A CONCLUSION

  EPILOGUE

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM ELDER SIGNS PRESS

  For Bruce, Rudy, Bill, Richard, Lew, and Pat

  Special Thanks to

  William Gibson

  and

  Paula Guran

  (Paula, extra thanks for extra editorial help)

  SOME REMARKS FROM THE AUTHOR ABOUT THE LOST CYBERPUNK NOVEL

  Black Glass was conceived under a different name and as a different kind of project, in the early days of cyberpunk, by myself and William Gibson. That’s not William Gibson the playwright; I mean the author of Neuromancer and Spook Country and all his books in between. We had collaborated on a couple of projects before this one. I don’t remember who came up with the main idea or the general story of Black Glass. I know I wrote up an elaborate tale based on our discussion; I’m the one who fleshed it out and Bill approved it. But then the project got derailed, we both got diverted, and Bill was swept off to collect awards, count his royalties, chill with rock stars, and work on other projects. Subsequently, long subsequently, I remembered the book and inquired; Bill is a busy guy and turned the whole thing over to me.

  So some years later I have written the novel, which I think of as the Lost Cyberpunk Novel; I have written it in its entirety. No one else should be held to blame.

  Cyberpunk fiction, as written by Bruce Sterling, Lew Shiner, Pat Cadigan, Richard Kadrey, Rudy Rucker and William Gibson (oh—and me), has more roots than the obvious Samuel R. Delany novels (like Nova and Dhalgren), John Brunner novels (like Shockwave Rider and Stand on Zanzibar) and, well, writing by Philip Dick and Alfred Bester and JG Ballard and Michael Moorcock’s NewWave sf, generally. Its antecedents reach back into noir; into hardboiled crime fiction and certain kinds of detective novels. Agatha Christie? Hell no. But James M. Cain? Hell yes. Dashiell Hammett. John D. MacDonald—my memory is that Gibson and Sterling both mentioned, to me, having read most of John D. MacDonald. We all read Jim Thompson, too, probably. And certain very gritty, darkly urbane spy novels were important to cyberpunk: Len Deighton and especially early John le Carré.

  Many of William Gibson’s short stories and early novels share a tone and surface texture not dissimilar to le Carré and, at times, to the hardboiled, hardnosed detective writers. Crime novel heroes are people on the edge; even when they are working for the law, they don’t mind breaking it along the way; they womanize, they slap gunsels around, they smoke, they drink. They’re moody sons of bitches who slouch down dirty sidewalks under flickering streetlights. Cyberpunk characters have that same grim, doomed, resigned, but simmeringly angry feel about them.

  All of these ancestors flock from the past and come home to roost in Black Glass. This is, unabashedly, a crime novel set in the future; its hero, Richard Candle, while a nuanced guy into meditation, is descended from old-style pulp detective heroes. He’d have been perfectly comfortable in Black Mask magazine.

  I haven’t tried to be as technologically updated as, no doubt, some of the new crop of cyberpunk writers are. Things happen so fast now I’d never be caught up and wouldn’t fit into the current mode of compacted, cryptographically intense expression. I have not culled a great many terms, memes or tropes from Wired Magazine or Jane’s, or the edgiest technoblogs, or 4chan. But the story has been updated, according to my lights, from the original project; it is both “classic” cyberpunk and a modern science-fiction novel. It is also a John Shirley cyberpunk novel; hence the recurrence of musical references, music as a kind of setting, lyrics, rock-inflected characters, and other idiosyncrasies that hopefully are more endearing than annoying. I didn’t try to write the book in a ‘postmodern’ style; it’s not post-Gibson, either. I wrote this book, in this era, more or less the way I wrote those books back then. That’s how I write the stuff.

  The language of Richard Candle’s future society would probably be mostly understandable to us, but would have far more new slang and neologisms than I have provided it with. However, I have undertaken to provide a little, a taste, of the lingo of his time. I doubt if it is language that we will really see in the future but I feel it has the ring of real slang about it and, to my ear, it works. I have provided the Black Glossary to explicate certain terms. And I’d like to point out that, as now, people in the future will not use slang terms in every instance in which they might apply. Sometimes they use them, sometimes they use something else.

  Black Glass, perhaps, brings cyberpunk full circle. In a way, it’s a “pulp novel of ideas.” But it is a work of cyberpunk science-fiction; it is woven with science fiction imagery and lit up by science-fiction ideas. It is a crime novel, a novel of the street, and it’s a novel of political attitude: most cyberpunk novels reflect a jaded reaction against authority; an assumption that a world dominated by corporations is a world that was stolen from you before you were born.

  But my main hope for Black Glass is simply that readers will enjoy it as entertainment.

  —J.S., February 2008

  BLACK GLOSSARY

  Some of the neologisms and slang in the novel, like EnviroFoam, are self explanatory enough to not need inclusion in the glossary, and some, like thugflesh, PiP and exo-suit, are explained in the story by context or exposition.

  ALLWALL—building materials made of a wide, very wide, variety of recycled materials, often recycled trash paper and shredded plastic, with bits of animal bone. But not as mysterious as Mystercyke, which comes from China.

  BLOGMOUTHING—babbling, often while drunk or stoned. Indiscreet jabber.

  CASIMIR FORCE—something quite real in our own time, a quantum mechanics effect which causes objects to stick together; it can be engineered for t
he opposite effect, a degree of levitation.

  CHECKY—a checky is a woman, attractive, very together; not a bimbo.

  CLICKED AT—as in “Where you clicked at?” Where someone has gone to. Where they are.

  DEEZY—a wimp. Deezy Collins was a flamboyant effeminate-male streaming video performer, known for squealing when startled. Was not homosexual.

  DOUBLE-YOU-TEE-EFF—verbalizing WTF. What the fuck.

  DROP-CALL—bad info, or simply “bullshit.”

  DUH-TAUNTS—more pejorative but mostly same as “dilettantes” from which it is probably derived, but spliced with “Duh!” Emphasis always on first syllable. Like sneering, “Amateurs!”

  EX—it depends, but as a verb it means to leave, to split, to hit the road.

  FLOW—money. Especially electronically transferred World Dollars.

  A GINGER—a genetic engineer available to the general public. You can hire him to give you an extra whatever.

  HAPPYCRAP—New-Age-type bullshit.

  HODE—an expression more or less taking the place of dude, and assumed to be related to dude, but possibly combined with whore. (Though this seems improbable to some linguists as hode is not particularly insulting, depending on inflection, and whore usually is, though in fact not always.)

  HODEY-BRUDDER—same as hode but affectionate. Not much different than “freak-hode.”

  HOOK-IN—dealer or other source for illegal virtual reality. (Probably descended from the terms “hook up” or “hooked me up with.”)

  I-CORE—the possibly mythical sense of independent selfness that a complex enough computing system can supposedly develop.

  ISSUING—Feeling good, positive, going ahead with something. Or an adjective for an okay person.

  J-PEN—A sprawling bootcamp-like penal colony for juveniles.

  MYSTERCYKE—recycled materials from truly unguessable, possibly toxic sources. Anything might’ve gone into it.

  NOISE FLOGGERS—a program that creates thousands of unreal transactions and apparent data transfers in order to hide the real ones. An online tech business smoke screen.

  NUMBDUMB—stoned. More for drugs than alcohol.

  O-SOURCE—from open source, someone who’s okay, they’re cool now, you can trust them.

  PAGOTHS—Pagan Goths (pronounced pay-goths).

  ROTTERS—from ‘rotors’, microscopic rotor-shaped nanomachines that float through the brain stimulating brain cells, can easily be remote-tinkered with so they over-stimulate and “rot” them.

  SEX SUIT—a clinging outfit that covers your body from mouth to toes, which transmits the ghostly computer-generated sensation of a lover to your skin, while VR recreates the sights and sounds of the sexual encounter. The basic model includes a choice of genital suction-sock or penetration probe.

  SINKITIES—girls, especially “easy” girls. (Debate about origins of this slang term: Possibly from ‘sin’ and ‘kitties’, but some philologists enigmatically insist it’s more likely related to ‘sink’.)

  SIGNALER—an illegal means to activate a cell phone, or phone implant, or bluetooth, when any one of them has been shut down for non payment.

  SNAPPER—also called a snaptop, equivalent of a laptop in Candle’s time; snaps down to fairly small, like a wallet; snaps open, piece by piece, fairly large, like today’s laptop. Flexible screen. Snapper has a different meaning in the UK.

  SQUATZY—AKA SQUAT BIZ—A business that occupies an abandoned property, operates “under the radar” of the State, unlicensed, very impromptu. Rooted in the late 20th century, to some extent in New York, but especially Europe.

  PHISHLINE—any big lie.

  THE TEXER—the shortest explanation.

  THIRDY CARD—when your only money is on the buy card you carry, and it’s precious little. Thirdy from Third World.

  TROLL—an insulting term, originally something to do with irritating Internet behavior, or hoaxes, now just a general insult.

  V-RAT—hard core illegal Virtual Reality addict. (May be used as a general derogatory calumny, like ‘crackhead’.) They’re obsessed with taking a V-RIDE.

  WANX—a mild, unseriously pejorative term for a friend or acquaintance, probably from the British “wanker.” Not quite so pejorative as wanker.

  WHAT SEARCH—What’s up?

  WI-HIGH—addiction, originally technologically based addiction of any kind but now any addiction may be referred to with a variation, as an alcoholic is called a wine-wi, and so on.

  WD—World Dollars are a global currency, instituted after the Third Global Economic Crisis, and used all over the world, with only a few countries insisting on their old currency. A WD in Candle’s future buys more than a US dollar does now.

  YEX—a street drug descended from MDMA, aka ‘X’, but allegedly made partly from animal brain extracts, some of them often decayed so that the pill has a rotten-meat smell. Hence “yex” was yech combined with X.

  HAS TO BE

  CHAPTER ONE—

  THAT’S HOW IT IS, HODE, ASK ANYONE

  THE CALIFORNIA STATE PEN—DOWNLOADING DIV—2033 AD

  When the screen beeped for a ReMinding, “Pup” Benson was thinking about Cabo San Lucas. Of course, Cabo wasn’t much to see nowadays, being mostly underwater, along with a lot of the Mexican coast, but there was a high time to be had in the old days—about the time of Pup’s first spring break, what, twenty-three or twenty-four years ago, long before he dreamed he’d end up a guard in an UnMinded Cellblock; back when a college student in Cabo could slide down, over and over, from a hot pinnacle of self gratification: Margueritas over-the-counter Mexican Dexedrine, endless golden spillways of San Miguel cerveza, dancing, beach games—and a living search engine for willing women. Long as your parents’ credit card held out you were a god.

  The girl in Cabo he remembered most vividly (though he’d forgotten her name) was that crazy Japanese-American piece who giggled when he banged her and was ready just about any time at all. “What’s that?” she’d asked playfully, with a pretense of wide eyes, every time he flipped out his business end. “That’s my little puppy,” he’d say. She’d giggle and she’d pet his puppy and he wondered whatever had happened to that girl–

  “BENSON GET IT IN FUCKING GEAR–”

  Pup practically shot out of his orange plastic staff-lounge seat, because Stremp, with his black D.I.’s voice, had bounced the shout off the back of his head. “FUCK, Stremp, you are not in the motherfuckin’ ComSee anymore–” Stremp, a tall chubby bald black man, had been a trainer for the Community Service Militia. Had been a big hard man and now this job dealing with the UnMinded left Stremp a big soft man.

  “We’ve got two ReMinds and one UnMind to do,” Stremp snapped, barely dialing back his bellow, “and I don’t have any time for your whining bullshit. Let’s go.”

  Pup ran a hand through his thinning hair, shrugged, and went to the head like he had to piss, just to make the son of a bitch wait. He hated Wednesdays. He hated every workday. He worked whatever shifts the privatized prison system told him to. Weekends had become nearly extinct when unions had.

  In the bathroom, Pup looked in the mirror, tweaked some pimples on his nose; doc said he was getting broken veins on it from drinking. You worked in this place, you had to drink sometimes.

  “BENSON–!”

  Fuck. Pup wanted a drink.

  Pup thumbed the greasy tab on the cell lock; the panel in the door became transparent and a stream of light automatically spot-lit the con lying on the padded shelf that passed for an UnMinded’s bed.

  Richard Candle.

  Pup looked at the UnMinded prisoner on the shelf bed, then at the digital image on the remote switcher. Two views of the guy, along with his numbers. Face and numbers matched.

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  He closed the panel, tapped the code. Got it wrong the first time; the door panel blinked red. “Shit.” Tried again. Door slid open. Prisoner 788843, in prison blues and slippers, was lying on his back, the way they
all did—because that was how regs wanted them—like a dead guy with his hands over his chest, eyes shut, couldn’t even see him breathe.

  UnMinded he was, but anyone could still see Candle’s personality in the lines of his face. A lean, squarish face with deep-set eyes, hard lines to his jaw, a slightly perverse crookedness to his lips; the early-middle-aged face that said: I’d like to stay on the right side of you so don’t fuck with me. A face that had held an expression of friendly warning for long periods of time.

  Pup tapped his wrist remote. In response, Candle opened his eyes. Looking up at the ceiling. No expression in those smoky gray-blue eyes.