The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

"It’s not like I’m using," Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around
the door of the Chat. "It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency." It was a Sprawl voice
and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a
week and never hear two words in Japanese. Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking
monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a web
work of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan
on one of Lonny Zone’s ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were
ridged with precise rows of tribal scars. "Wage was in here early, with two Joe boys," Ratz said, shoving
a draft across the bar with his good hand. "Maybe some business with you, Case?" Case shrugged. The
girl to his right giggled and nudged him.

The bartender’s smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty,
there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another
mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in
grubby pink plastic. "You are too much the artiste, Herr Case." Ratz grunted; the sound served him as
laughter. He scratched his overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. "You are the artiste of
the slightly funny deal."

"Sure," Case said, and sipped his beer. "Somebody’s gotta be funny around here. Sure the ♥♥♥♥ isn’t you."
The ♥♥♥♥♥’s giggle went up an octave.

"Isn’t you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he’s a close personal friend of mine."

She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible spitting sound, her lips barely moving. But she
left. "Jesus," Case said, "what kind a creep joint you running here?

Man can’t have a drink."

"Ha," Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag, "Zone shows a percentage. You I let work here
for entertainment value."

As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange instants of silence descended, as though a
hundred unrelated conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause. Then the ♥♥♥♥♥’s
giggle rang out, tinged with a certain hysteria.

Ratz grunted. "An angel passed."

"The Chinese," bellowed a drunken Australian, "Chinese bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the
mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate . . ."

"Now that," Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly rising in him like bile, "that is so much
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥."

The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black
clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they
couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel.



A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns
he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices
of logic unfolding across that colorless void . . . The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the
Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it
through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like live wire voodoo and he’d cry for it, cry in
his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into
the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there.

"I saw your girl last night," Ratz said, passing Case his second Kirin.

"I don’t have one," he said, and drank.

"Miss Linda Lee."

Case shook his head.