`Peter's good as dead anyway,' Molly said. `In another twelve hours, he'll start to freeze up. Won't be able to move, his eyes is all.'
`Why?' Case turned to her.
`I poisoned his shit for him,' she said. `Condition's like Parkinson's disease, sort of.'
3Jane nodded. `Yes. We ran the usual medical scan, before he was admitted.' She touched the ball in a certain way and it sprang away from Molly's hands. `Selective destruction of the cells of the
`You ever see resolution this high?' Case asked.
`No, but I never cracked an AI, either.'
`This thing know where it's going?'
`It better.'
They were dropping, losing altitude in a canyon of rainbow neon.
`Dix --'
An arm of shadow was uncoiling from the flickering floor below, a seething mass of darkness, unformed, shapeless...
`Company,' the Flatline said, as Case hit the representation of his deck, fingers flying automatically across the board. The Kuang swerved sickeningly, then reversed, whipping itself backward, shattering the illusion of a physical vehicle.
The shadow thing was growing, spreading, blotting out the city of data. Case took them straight up, above them the distanceless bowl of jade-green ice.
The city of the cores was gone now, obscured entirely by the dark beneath them.
`What is it?'
`An AI's defense system,' the construct said, `or part of it. If it's your pal Wintermute, he's not lookin'~ real friendly.'
`Take it,' Case said. `You're faster.'
`Now your best
His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue.
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines. The spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.
The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets that whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests that pressed against the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread, growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down into the waiting, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of Tessier Ashpool S.A.
And he was remembering an ancient story, a king placing coins on a chessboard, doubling the amount at each square...
Exponential...
Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become...
And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no more,and something tore.