You watch your back, man. He nodded, anxious to be gone.

Threading his way through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat. Case was twenty-four.

All the meat, he thought, and all it wants. Wage, she said, narrowing her eyes. He wants to see you with a hole in your face. She lit her own cigarette. Who says?

At first, finding himself alone in Chiba, with little money and less hope of finding a cure, he'd gone into a kind of terminal overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had seemed to belong to someone else. In the first month, he'd killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before would have seemed ludicrous. Ninsei wore him down until the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish, some secret poison he hadn't known he carried. Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

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....

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 whore'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.

The girl to his right giggled and nudged him. The bartender's smile widened.

You got anywhere to sleep? Sleep. She shook her head. Sure, Case. She shivered, hunched forward over the table. Her face was filmed with sweat. Here, he said, and dug in the pocket of his windbreaker, coming up with a crumpled fifty.

You better give it to Wage. There was something in the gray eyes now that he couldn't read, something he'd never seen there before. I owe Wage a lot more than that.

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.

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 bullshit. 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.

Only biz, friend artiste? Dedication to commerce? The bartender's small brown eyes were nested deep in wrinkled flesh. I think I liked you better, with her.

Dedication to commerce? The bartender's small brown eyes were nested deep in wrinkled flesh. I think I liked you better, with her. You laughed more. Now, some night, you get maybe too artistic, you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts. You're breaking my heart, Ratz. He finished his beer, paid and left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rainstained khaki nylon of his windbreaker.

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.

She was wearing faded French orbital fatigues and new white sneakers. I been lookin' for you, man. She took a seat opposite him, her elbows on the table. The sleeves of the blue zip suit had been ripped out at the shoulders; he automatically checked her arms for signs of terms or the needle. Want a cigarette? She dug a crumpled pack of Yeheyuan filters from an ankle pocket and offered him one.

Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the money.

He stared at the black ring of grounds in his empty cup.

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 fuck isn't you. The whore's giggle went up an octave. Isn't you either, sister.

It was difficult to transact legitimate business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already illegal. In Japan, he'd known with a clenched and absolute certainty, he'd find his cure. In Chiba. Either in a registered clinic or in the shadow land of black medicine.