Hardwired Read Online Free PDF Page A

scars were Daud’s by right; she had suffered them on his behalf, shielding him with her body. The madman’s beatings had taught her to fight back, had made her hard and quick, but she couldn’t be there all the time. The old man had sensed weakness in Daud, and found it. When Sarah was fourteen she’d run with the first boy who’d promised her a place free from pain; two years later, when she’d bought her way out of her first contract and come back for him, Daud had been shattered beyond repair, the needle already in his arm. She’d led him to the new house where she worked–– it was the only place she had–– and there he’d learned to earn his living, as she had learned in her own time. He is broken still, and as long as they are in the streets, there is no way of healing him.
    If she hadn’t cracked, if she hadn’t run away, she might have been able to protect him. She won’t crack again.
    She returns to the other room and sees Daud lying on the sofa, one sandal hanging with the straps tangled between his toes. Tobacco smoke drifts up from his nostrils. Jackstraw is sitting next to him on the sofa and drinking one of his beers. He glances up.
    “You look like you’re limping,” Jackstraw says. “Would you like me to rub your legs?”
    “No,” Sarah says quickly; and then realizes she is being too sharp. “No,” she says again, with a smile. “Thank you. But it’s a bone bruise. If you touched me, I’d scream.”

    ARTIFICIAL DREAMS

    The Plastic Girl is a hustler’s idea of the good life. There is a room for zonedance, and there are headsets that plug you into euphoric states or pornography or whatever it is you need and are afraid to shoot into your veins. Orbital pharmaceutical companies provide the effects free, as advertising for their products. There are dancers on the mirrored bar in the back, a bar equipped with arcade games so that if you win, a connection snaps in one of the dancer’s garments and it falls off. If you win big, all the clothes fall off all the dancers at once.
    Sarah is in the big front room: brassy music, red leather booths, brass ornaments. She does not, and will probably never, rate the quiet room down the hall, all brushed aluminum and a lot of dark wood that might have been the last mahogany tree in Southeast Asia–– that room is for the big boys who run this fast and dangerous world, and though there isn’t a sign that says NO WOMEN ALLOWED, there might as well be. Sarah is an independent contractor and rates a certain amount of respect, but in the end she is still meat for hire, though on a more elevated plane than she once was.
    But still, the red room is nice. There are holograms, colors and helixes like modeled DNA, floating just above eye level, casting their variegated light through the crystal and sparkling liquor held in the patrons’ hands; there are sockets at every table for comp decks so that the patrons can keep up with their portfolios; and there are girls with reconstructed breasts and faces who come to each table in their tight plastic corsets, bring you your drink, and watch with identical and very white smiles as you put your credit needle into their tabulator and tap in a generous tip with your fingernail.
    Sarah is ready for the meet with Cunningham, wearing a navy blue jacket guaranteed to protect her against kinetic violence of up to 900 foot-pounds per square inch, and trousers good for 750. She has invested some of the endorphins and bought the time of a pair of her peers. They are walking loose about the bar, ready to keep Cunningham or his friends off her back if she needs it. She knows she needs a clear head and has kept the endorphin dose down. Pain is making her edgy, and she still can’t sit. She stands at a small table and sips her rum and lime, waiting. And then Cunningham is there. Bland face, brown eyes, brown hair, brown suit. A whispery voice that speaks of clean places she has never been, places bright and soft against