Burning, Burning

Tom Maddox

copyright (c) 1991

On a rainy morning in Seattle, Gonzales was ready for the egg. A week ago he had returned from Myanmar, the country once known as Burma, and now, after two days of drugs and fasting, he was prepared: he had become an alien, at home in a distant landscape.

His brain was filled with blossoms of fire, their spread white flesh torched to yellow, the center of a burning world. On the dark stained oak door, angel wings danced in blue flame, their faces beatific in the cold fire. Staring at the animated carved figures, Gonzales thought, `the fire is in my eyes, in my brain.'

He pushed down the s-curved brass handle and stepped through to the hallway, his split-toed shoes of soft cotton and rope scuffing without noise across floors of bleached oak. Through the open door at the hallway's end, morning's light through stained glass made abstract patterns of crimson and buttery yellow. Inside the room, a blue monitor console stood against the far wall, SenTrax corporate sunburst glowing on its face; in the center of the room was the egg, split hemispheres of chromed steel, cracked and waiting. One half-egg was filled with beige tubes and snakes of optic cable, the other half with hard dark plastic lying slack against the shell.

Gonzales rubbed his hands across his eyes, then pulled his hair back into a long hank and slipped a circle of elastic over it. He reached to his waist and grabbed the bottom hem of his navy blue t-shirt and pulled the shirt over his head. Dropping it to the floor, he kicked off his shoes, stepped out of baggy tan pants and loose white cotton underpants and stood naked, his pale skin gleaming with a light coat of sweat. His skin felt hot, eyes grainy, stomach sore.

He stepped up and into a chrome half-egg, then shivered and lay back as body-warmth liquid bled into the slack plastic, which began to balloon underneath him. He took hold of finger-thick cables and pushed their junction ends home into the sockets set in the back of his neck. As the egg continued to fill, he fit a mask over his face, felt its edges seal, and inhaled. Catheters moved toward his crotch, iv needles toward the crooks of both arms. The egg shut closed on him and liquid spilled into its interior.

He floated in silence, waiting, breathing slowly and deeply as elation punched through the chaotic mix of emotions generated by drugs, meditation, and the egg. No matter that he was going to relive his own terror, this was what moved him: access to the many-worlds of human experience--travel through space, time, and probability all in one.

Virtual realities were everywhere--virtual vacations, sex, superstardom, you name it--but compared to the egg, they were just high-res videogames or stage magic. VRs used a variety of tricks to simulate physical presence, but the sensorium could be fooled only to a certain degree, and when you inhabited a VR, you were conscious of it, so sustaining its illusion depended on willing suspension of disbelief. With the egg, however, you got total involvement through all sensory modalities--the worlds were so compelling that people waking from them often seemed lost in the waking world, as if it were a dream.

A needle punched into a membrane set in one of the neural cables and injected a neuropeptide mix. Gonzales was transported.

It was the final day of Gonzales's three week stay in Pagan, the town in central Myanmar where the government had moved its records decades earlier, in the wake of ethnic rioting in Yangon. He sat with Grossback, the Division Head of SenTrax Myanmar, at a central rosewood table in the main conference room. The table's work stations, embedded oblongs of glass, lay dark and silent in front of them.

Gonzales had come to Myanmar to do an information audit. The local SenTrax group supplied the Federated State of Myanmar with its primary information utilities: all its records of personnel and materiel, and all transactions among them. A month earlier, SenTrax Myanmar's reports had triggered "look-see" alarms in the home company's passive auditing programs, and Gonzales and his memex had been sent to look more closely at the raw data.

So for twenty straight days Gonzales and the memex had explored data structures and their contents, testing nominal functional relationships against reality. Wherever there were movements of information, money, equipment or personnel, there were records, and the two followed. They searched cash trails, matched purchase orders to services and materiel, verified voucher signatures with personnel records, cross-checked the personnel records themselves against government databases, and traced the backgrounds and movements of the people they represented; they read contracts and back-chased to their bid and acquisition; they verified daily transaction logs.

Hard, slogging work, all patience and detail, and so far it had shown nothing but the usual inefficiencies--Grossback didn't run a particularly taut operation, but, as of the moment, he didn't seem to have a corrupt one. However, neither he nor SenTrax Myanmar was cleared yet; Gonzales's final report would come later, after he and the memex had analyzed the records at their leisure.

Gonzales stretched and rubbed his eyes. As usual at the end of short-term, intensive gigs like this, he felt tired, washed- out, eager to go. He said to Grossback, "I've got a company plane out of here late this afternoon to Bangkok. I'll connect with whatever commercial flight's available there."

Grossback smiled, obviously glad Gonzales was leaving. Grossback was a slight man, of mixed German and Thai descent; he had a light brown complexion, black hair, and delicate features. He wore politically correct clothing in the old-fashioned Burmese style: a dark skirt called a `longyi', a white cotton shirt.

During Gonzales's time there, Grossback had dealt with him coldly and correctly from behind a mask of corporate protocol and clenched teeth. `Fair enough', Gonzales had thought: the man's operation was suspect, and him along with it. Anyway, people resented these outside intrusions almost every time; representing Internal Affairs, Gonzales answered only to his division head, F.L. Traynor, and SenTrax Board, and that made almost everyone nervous.

"You leaving out of Myaung U Airport?" Grossback asked.

"No, I've asked for a pick-up south of town." Like anyone else who could arrange it, he was not going to fly out of Pagan's official airport, where partisan groups had several times brought down aircraft. Surely Grossback knew that.

Grossback asked, "What will your report say?"

Surprised, Gonzales said, "You know I can't tell you anything about that." Even mentioning the matter constituted an embarrassment, not to mention a reportable violation of corporate protocol. The man was either stupid or desperate.

"You haven't found anything," Grossback said.

What was his problem? Gonzales said, "I have a year's data to examine before I can make an assessment."

"You won't tell me what the preliminary report will look like," Grossback said. His face had gone cold.

"No," said Gonzales. He stood and said, "I have to finish packing." For the moment, he just wanted to get out before Grossback did something irretrievable, like threatening him or offering a bribe. "Goodbye," Gonzales said. The other man said nothing as Gonzales left the room.

Gonzales returned to the Thiripyitsaya Hotel, a collection of low bungalows fabricated from bamboo and ferro-concrete that stood above the Irrawady River. The rooms were afflicted by Myanmar's tattered version of Asian tourist decor: lacquered bamboo on the walls, along with leaping dragon holos, black teak dresser, tables, chairs, and bed frame, ceiling fans that had wandered in from the twentieth century--just to give your average citizen that rush of the Exotic East, Gonzales figured. However, the hotel had been rebuilt less than a decade before, so, by local standards, Gonzales had luxury: working climatizer, microwave, and refrigerator.

Of course, many nights the air conditioner didn't work, and Gonzales lay sweaty and semi-conscious through hot, humid nights then was greeted just after dawn by lizards fanning their ruby neck flaps and doing push ups.

He had gotten up several of those mornings and walked the cart paths that threaded the plains around Pagan, passing among the temples and pagodas as the sun rose and turned the morning mist into a huge veil of luminous pink, with the towers sticking up like fairy castles. Everywhere around Pagan were the temples, thousands of them, young and flourishing when William the Conqueror was king. Now, quick-fab structures housing government agencies nested among thousand year old pagodas, some in near perfect condition, like Thatbyinnu Temple, myriad others no more than ruins and forgotten names. You gained merit by building pagodas, not by keeping up those built by someone long dead.

Like some other Southeast Asian countries, Myanmar still was trying to recover from late-twentieth century politics; in Myanmar's case, its decades-long bout with round-robin military dictatorships and the chaos that came in their wake. And as was so often the case in politically wobbly countries, it still restricted access to the worldnet; through various kinds of governments, its leaders had found the prospect of free information flow unacceptable. Ka-band antennas were expensive, their use licensed by permits almost impossible to get. As a result, Gonzales and the memex had been like meat eaters stranded among vegetarians, unable to get their nourishment.

He'd taken down the memex that morning. Its functions dormant, it lay nestled inside one of his two fiber and aluminum shock-cases, ready for transport. The other case held memory boxes containing SenTrax Myanmar group's records.

When they got home, Gonzales would tell the memex the latest news about Grossback, how the man had cracked at the last moment. Gonzales was sure the m-i would think what he did--Grossback was dog dirty and scared they would find it.

At the edge of a sandy field south of Pagan, Gonzales waited for his plane. Gonzales wore his usual international traveller's mufti, a tan gabardine two-piece suit over an open-collared white linen shirt, dark brown slipover shoes. His hair was gathered back into a ponytail held together by a silver ring made from lizard figures joined head-to-tail. Next to him sat a soft brown leather bag and the two shock-cases.

In front of him a pagoda climbed in a series of steeples to a gilded and jeweled umbrella top, pointing to heaven. On its steps, beside the huge paw of a stone lion, a monk sat in full lotus, his face shadowed by the animal rising massive and lumpy and mock fierce above him. The lion's flanks were dyed orange by sunset, its lips stained the color of dried blood. The minutes passed, and the monk's voice droned, his face in shadow.

"Come tour the temples of ancient Pagan," a voice said. "Shwezigon, Ananda, Thatbyinnu--"

"Go away," Gonzales said to the tour cart that had rolled up behind him. It would hold two dozen or so passengers in eight rows of narrow wooden benches but was now empty--almost all the tourists would have joined the crush on the terraces of Thatbyinnu, where they could watch the sun set over the temple plain.

"Last tour of the day," the cart said. "Very cheap, also very good exchange rate offered as courtesy to visitors."

It wanted to exchange kyats for dollars or yen: in Myanmar, even the machines worked the black market. "No thanks."

"Extremely good rate, sir."

"Fuck off," Gonzales said. "Or I'll report you as defective." The cart whirred as it moved away.

Gonzales watched a young monk eyeing him from the other side of the road, ready to come across and beg for pencils or money. Gonzales caught the monk's eye and shook his head. The monk shrugged and walked on, his orange robe billowing.

`Where the hell was his plane?' Soon hunter flares would cut into the new moon's dark, and government drones would scurry around the edges of the shadows like huge mutant bats. Upcountry Myanmar trembled on the edge of chaos, beset by a multi-ethnic mix of Karens, Kachins, and Shans in various political postures, all fierce, all contemptuous of the central government. They fought with whatever was at hand, from sharpened stick to backpack missile, and they only quit when they died.

A high-pitched wail built quickly until it filled the air. Within seconds a silver swing-wing, an ungainly thing, each huge rectangular wing loaded with a bulbous, oversized engine pod, came low over the dark mass of forest. Its running lights flashing red and yellow, the swing-wing slewed to a stop above the field, wings tilting to the perpendicular and engine sound dropping into the bass. Its spots picked out a ten-meter circle of white light that the aircraft dropped into, blowing clouds of sand that swept over Gonzales in a whirlwind. The inverted fans' roar dropped to a whisper, and with a creak the plane kneeled on its gear, placing the cockpit almost on the ground. Gonzales picked up his bags and walked toward the plane. A ladder unfolded with a hydraulic hiss, and Gonzales stepped up and into the plane's bubble.

"Mikhail Gonzales?" the pilot asked. His multi-function flight glasses were tilted back on his forehead, where their mirrored ovoid lenses made a blank second pair of eyes; a thin strand of black fiberoptic cable trailed from their rim. Beneath the glasses, his thin face was brown and seamed-- `no cosmetic work for this guy', Gonzales thought. The man wore a throwaway "tropical" shirt with dancing pink flamingos on a navy blue background.

"That's me," Gonzales said. He gestured with the shock-case in his right hand, and the pilot toggled a switch that opened the luggage locker. Gonzales put his bags into the steel compartment and watched as the safety net pulled tight against the bags and the compartment door closed. He took a seat in the first of eight empty rows behind the pilot. Cushions sighed beneath him, and from the seatback in front of him a feminine voice said, "You should engage your harness. If you need instructions, please say so now."

Gonzales snapped closed the trapezoidal catch where shoulder and lap belts connected, then stretched against the harness, feeling the sweat dry on his skin in the plane's cool interior. "Thank you," said the voice.

The pilot was speaking to Myaung U Airport traffic control as the plane lifted into twilight over the city. The soft white glow from the dome light vanished, then there were only the last moments of orange sunlight coming through the bubble.

The temple plain was spread out beneath, all murk and shadow, with the temple and pagoda spires reaching up toward the light, white stucco and gold tinted red and orange.

"Man, that's a beautiful sight," the pilot said.

"You're right," Gonzales said. It was, but he'd seen it before, and besides, it had already been a long day.

The pilot flipped his glasses down, and the plane banked left and headed south along the river. Gonzales lay back in his seat and tried to relax.

They flew above black water, following the Irrawady River until they crossed an international flyway to Bangkok. Dozing in the interior darkness, Gonzales was almost asleep when he heard the pilot say, "Shit, somebody's here. Partisan attack group, probably--no recognition codes. Must be flying ultralights--our radar didn't see them. We've got an image now, though."

"Any problem?" Gonzales asked.

"Just coming for a look. They don't bother foreign charters." And he pointed to their transponder message flashing above the primary displays:

THIS INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT IS NON-MILITARY. IT CLAIMS RIGHT OF PASSAGE UNDER U.N. ACT OF 2020.

It would keep on repeating until they crossed into Thai airspace.

The flight computer display lit bright red with COLLISION WARNING, and a Klaxon howl filled the plane's interior. The pilot said, "Fuck, they launched!" The swing-wing's turbines screamed full out as the plane's computer took command, and the pilot's hands gripped his yoke, not guiding, just hanging on.

Gonzales's straps pulled tight as the plane tumbled and fell, corkscrewed, looped, climbed again--smart metal fish evading fiery harpoons. Explosions blossomed in the dark, quick asymmetrical bursts of flame followed immediately by hard thumping sounds and shock waves that knocked the swing-wing as it followed its chaotic path through the night.

Then an aircraft appeared, flaring in fire that surged around it, its pilot in blazing outline--a stick figure with arms thrown to the sky in the instant before pilot and aircraft disintegrated in flame.

Their own flight went steady and level, and control returned to the pilot's yoke. Gonzales's shocked retinas sparkled as the night returned to blackness. "Collision averted," the plane's computer said. "Time in red zone, six point eight nine seconds."

"What the hell?" Gonzales said. "What happened?"

"Holy Jesus motherfucker," the pilot said.

Gonzales sat gripping his seat, chilled by the blast of cold air from the plane's air conditioner onto his sweat-soaked shirt. He glanced down to his lap: no, he hadn't pissed himself. Really, everything happened too quickly for him to get that scared.

A Mitsubishi-McDonnell "Loup Garou" warplane dived in front of them and circled in slow motion. Like the ultralights it was cast in matte black, but with a massive fuselage. It turned a slow barrel roll as it circled them, lazy predator looping fat, slow prey, then turned on brilliant floods that played across their canopy.

The pilot and Gonzales both froze in the glare.

Then the Loup Garou's black cockpit did a reverse-fade; behind the transparent shell Gonzales saw the mirror-visored pilot, twin cables running from the base of his neck. The Loup Garou's wings slid forward into reverse-sweep, and it stood on its tail and disappeared.

Gonzales strained against his taut harness.

"Assholes!" the pilot screamed.

"Who was that?" Gonzales asked, his voice thin and shaking. "What do you mean?"

"The Myanmar Air Force," the pilot said, his voice tight, face red beneath the flight glasses' mirrors. "They set us up, the pricks. They used us to troll for a guerrilla flight." The pilot flipped up his glasses and stared with pointless intensity out the cockpit window, as if he could see through the blackness. "And waited," he said. "Waited till they had the whole flight." The pilot swiveled around abruptly and faced Gonzales, his features distorted into a mad and angry caricature of the man who had welcomed Gonzales ninety minutes before. "Do you know how fucking close we came?" he asked.

No, Gonzales shook his head. No.

"Milliseconds, man. Fucking milliseconds. Close enough to touch," the pilot said. He swiveled his seat to face forward, and Gonzales heard its locking mechanism click as he settled back into his own seat, fear and shame spraying a wild neurochemical mix inside his brain--

Gonzales had never felt things like this before--death down his spine and up his gut, up his throat and nose, as close as his skin; death with a bad smell...burning, burning.

• * *

As the morning passed, the sun moved away from the stained glass, and the room's interior went to gloom. Only monitor lights remained lit, steady rows of green above flickering columns of numbers on the light blue face of the monitor panel.

A housekeeping robot, a pod the size of a large goose, worked slowly across the floor, nuzzled into the room's corners, then left the room, its motion tentacles beneath it making a sound like wind through dry grass.

The cockpit display flashed as landing codes fed through the flight computer, then the swing-wing locked into the Bangkok landing grid and began its slide down an invisible pipe. They went to touchdown guided by electronic hands.

The pilot turned to Gonzales as they descended and said, "I'll have to file a report on the attack. But you're lucky--if we had landed in Myanmar, government investigators would have been on you like white on rice, and you could forget about leaving for days, maybe weeks. You're okay now: by the time they process the report and ask the Thais to hold you, you'll be gone."

At the moment, the last thing Gonzales wanted to do was spend any time in Myanmar. "I'll get out as quickly as I can," he said.

Now that it was all over, he could feel the Fear climbing in him like the onset of a dangerous drug. Trying to calm himself, he thought, `really, nothing happened, except you got the shit scared out of you, that's all.'

As the swing-wing settled on the pad, Gonzales stood and went to pick up his luggage from the open baggage hold. The pilot sat watching as the plane went through its shutdown procedures.

`Do something,' Gonzales said to himself, feeling panic mount. He pulled the memex's case out of the hold and said, "I want a copy of your flight records."

"I can't do that."

"You can. I'm working with Internal Affairs, and I was almost killed while flying in your aircraft."

"So was I, man."

"Indeed. But I need this data. Later, IA will go the full official route and pick everything up, but I need it now. A quick dump into my machine here, that's all it will take. I'll give you authorization and receipt." Gonzales waited, keeping the pressure on by his insistent gaze and posture.

The pilot said, "Okay, that ought to cover my ass."

Gonzales slid the shock-case next to the pilot's seat, kneeled and opened the lid. "Are you recording?" he asked the pilot.

The man nodded and said, "Always."

"That's what I thought. All right, then: for the record, this is Mikhail Mikhailovitch Gonzales, senior employee of Internal Affairs Division, SenTrax. I am acquiring flight records of this aircraft to assist in my investigation of certain events that occurred during its most recent flight." He looked at the pilot. "That should do it," he said.

He pulled out a data lead from the case and snapped it into the access plug on the instrument panel. Lights flashed across the panel as data began to spool into the quiescent memex. The panel gonged softly to signal transfer was complete, and Gonzales unplugged the lead and closed the case. "Thanks," he said to the pilot, who sat staring out the cockpit bubble.

Gonzales stood and patted the case and thought to himself, `hey, memex, got a surprise for you when you wake up.' He felt much better.

A carry-slide hauled Gonzales a mile or so through a brightly- lit tunnel with baby blue plastic and plaster walls marked with signs in half a dozen languages promising swift retribution for vandalism. Red and green virus graffiti smeared everything, signs included, and as Gonzales watched, messages in Thai and Burmese transmuted, and new stick figures emerged with dialogue balloons saying god knows what. A lone phrase in red paint read in English, HEROIN ALPHA DEVIL FLOWER. Shattered boxes of black fibroid or coarse sprays of multi-wire cable marked where surveillance cameras had been.

Grey floor-to-ceiling steel shutters blocked the narrow portal to International Arrivals and Departures. Faceless holoscan robots--dark, wheeled cubes with carbon-fiber armor and tentacles and spiked sensor antennas--worked the crowd, antennas swiveling.

All around were Asian travelers, dark-suited men and women: Japanese, Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thai. They spread out from Asia's "dragons," world centers of research and manufacturing, taking their low margins and hard sell to Europe and the Americas, where consumption had become a way of life. Everywhere Gonzales traveled, it seemed, he found them: cadres armed with technical and scientific prowess and fueled by persistent ambition.

They formed the steel core of much of the world's prosperity. The United States and the dragons lived in uneasy symbiosis: the Asians had a hundred ways of making sure the American economy didn't just roll over and die and take the prime North American consumer market with it. Whether Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Hong Kong Chinese-Canadians--they bought some corporations and merged with others, and Americans ended up working for General Motors Fanuc, Chrysler Mitsubishi, or Daewoo-DEC, and with their paychecks they bought Japanese memexes, Korean autos, Malaysian robotics.

Shutter blades cranked open with a quick scream of metal, and Gonzales stepped inside. An Egyptian guard in a white headdress, blue-and-white checked headband, and gray U.N. drag cross-checked his i.d., gave a quick, meaningless smile--teeth white and perfect under a black moustache--and waved him on.

Southeast Asian Faction Customs waited in the form of a small Thai woman in a brown uniform with indecipherable scrawls across yellow badges. Her features were pleasant and impassive; she wore her black hair pulled tightly back and held with a clear plastic comb. She stood behind a gray metal table; on the floor next to it was a two-meter high general purpose scanner, its controls, screens, and read-outs hidden under a black cloth hood. Dirty green walls wore erratically-spaced signs in a dozen languages, detailing in small type the many categories of contraband.

The woman motioned for him to sit in the upright chair in front of the table, then for him to put his clothes bag and cases on the table.

She spoke, and the translator box at her waist echoed in clear, neuter machine English: "Your person has been scanned and cleared." She put the soft brown bag into the mouth of the scanner, and the machine vetted the bag with a quiet beep. The woman slid it back to Gonzales.

She spoke again, and the translator said, "Please open these cases" as she pointed toward the two shock-cases. For each, Gonzales screened the access panel with his left hand and tapped in the entry codes with his right. The case lids lifted with a soft sigh. Inside the cases, monitor and diagnostic lights flashed above rows of memory modules, heavy solids of black plastic the size of a small safety deposit box.

Gonzales saw she was holding a copy of the Data Declaration Form the memex had filled out in Myanmar and transmitted to both Myanmar and Thai governments. She looked into one of the cases and pointed to a row of red-tagged and sealed memory modules.

The translator's words followed behind hers and said, "These modules we must hold to verify that they contain no contraband information."

"Myanmar customs did so. These are SenTrax corporate records."

"Perhaps they are. We have not cleared them."

"If you wish, I will give you the access protocols. I have nothing to hide, but the modules are important to my work."

She smiled. "I do not have proper equipment. They must be examined by authorities in the city." The translator's tones accurately reflected her lack of concern.

Gonzales sensed the onset of severe bureaucratic intransigence. For whatever occult reasons, this woman had decided to fuck him around, and the harder he pushed, the worse things would be. Give it up, then. He said, "I assume they will be returned to me as soon as possible."

"Certainly. After careful examination. Though it is unlikely that the examination can be completed before your departure." She slid the case off her desk and to the floor behind it. She was smiling again, a satisfied bureaucrat's smile. She turned back to her console, Gonzales's case already a thing of the past. She looked up to see him still standing there and said, "How else can I help you?"

The machine-world began to disperse, turning to fog, and as it did, banks of low-watt incandescents lit up around the room's perimeter, and the patterns of console lights went through a series of rapid permutations as Gonzales was brought to a waking state. The room's lights had been full up for an hour when the desynching series was complete and the egg began to split.

Inside the egg Gonzales lay pale, nude, near-comatose, machine-connected: a new millennium Snow White. A flesh-colored catheter led from his water-shrunken genitals, transparent iv feeds from both forearms. White sealant and anti-irritant paste had clotted around the tubes from throat and mouth. The sharp ozone smell of the paste was all over him.

An autogurney had rolled next to the egg, and its hands, shining chrome claws, began disconnecting tubes and leads. Then it worked with hands and black flexible arms the thickness of a stout rope to lift Gonzales from the egg and onto its own surface.

Gonzales woke up in his own bedroom and began to whimper. "It's okay," the memex whispered through the room's speaker. "It's okay."

Some time later Gonzales awoke again, lay in gloom and considered his condition. Some nausea, legs weak, but no apparent loss of gross motor control, no immediate parapsychological effects (disorientations, amnesias, synesthesias) ...

Gonzales got up and went to the bathroom, stood amid white tile, polished aluminum and mirrors and said, "Warm shower." Water hissed, and the shower stall door swung open. The water ran down his skin and the sweat and paste rolled off his body.

Tom Maddox has published stories in _Omni_, _Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine_, and in anthologies and magazines in the U. S. and abroad, including _Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology_. The excerpts presented here are from _Halo_, his first novel; it will be published in November of this year by Tor Books in the U. S. and Century Hutchinson in England.

He is currently the writing coordinator at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington. On the net, he frequents rec.arts.books, alt.cyberpunk, alt.postmodern, rec.arts.sf-lovers, and alt.flame; he has been involved in a few moderately lunatic flame wars. He plays blues guitar. He was cited at the end of _Neuromancer_ as the inventor of ICE.

maddox@blake.u.washington.edu