"

It was hot, the night we burned Chrome. Out in the

malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to

death against the neon, but in Bobby’s loft the only light

came from a monitor screen and the green and red

LEDs on the face of the matrix simulator. I knew every

chip in Bobby’s simulator by heart; it looked like your

workaday Ono-Sendai VII. the “Cyberspace Seven,”

but I’d rebuilt it so many time that you’d have had a

hard time finding a square millimeter of factory cir-

cuitry in all that silicon.

We waited side by side in front of the simulator

console, watching the time display in the screen’s lower

left corner.

“Go for it,” I said, when it was time, but Bobby

was already there, leaning forward to drive the Russian

program into its slot with the heel of his hand. He did it

with the tight grace of a kid slamming change into an ar-

cade game, sure of winning and ready to pull down a

string of free games.

A silver tide of phosphenes boiled across my field

of vision as the matrix began to unfold in my head, a

3-D chessboard, infinite and perfectly transparent. The

Russian program seemed to lurch as we entered the grid.

If anyone else had been jacked into that part of the

matrix, he might have seen a surf of flickering shadow

roll out of the little yellow pyramid that represented our

computer. The program was a mimetic weapon, de-

signed to absorb local color and present itself as a crash-

priority override in whatever context it encountered.

“Congratulations,” I heard Bobby say. “We just

became an Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority inspec-

tion probe… .” That meant we were clearing fiberoptic

lines with the cybernetic equivalent of a fire siren, but in

the simulation matrix we seemed to rush straight for

Chrome’s data base. I couldn’t see it yet, but I already

knew those walls were waiting. Walls of shadow, walls

of ice.

"