Hardwired Read Online Free PDF

the black and pure diamond.
    “Okay, Cunningham,” she says. “Business.”
    Cunningham’s eyes flicker to the mirror behind her. “Friends?” he asks.
    “I don’t know you.”
    “You’ve called the Hetman?”
    She nods. “He was complimentary,” she says, “but you’re not working for him; he’s repaying you a favor, maybe. So I’m cautious.”
    “Understandable.” He takes a comp deck out of an inner pocket and plugs it into the table. A pale amber screen in the depths of the dark tabletop lights up, displaying a row of figures. “We’re offering you this in dollars,” he says.
    Sarah feels a touch of metal on her nerves, on her tongue. The score, she thinks, the real thing. “Dollars?” she says. ”Get serious.”
    “Gold?” Another set of figures appears.
    She takes a sip of rum. “Too heavy. ”
    “Stock. Or drugs. Take your pick.”
    “What kind of stock? What kind of drugs?”
    “Your choice.”
    “Polymyxin-phenildorphin Nu. There’s a shortage right now.”
    Cunningham frowns. “If you like. But there’ll be a lot of it coming onto the market in another three weeks or so.”
    Her eyes challenge him. “Did you bring it down from orbit with you?” she asks.
    His face fails so much as to twitch. “No,” he says. “But if I were you, I’d try chloramphenildorphin. Pfizer is arranging an artificial scarcity that will last several months. Here are the figures. Pharmacological quality, fresh from orbit.”
    Sarah looks at the amber numbers and nods. “Satisfactory,” she says. “Half in advance.”
    “Ten percent now,” Cunningham says. “Thirty on completion of training. The rest on completion of the contract, whether you succeed or not.”
    She looks up at one of the bar’s moving holograms, the colors clean and bright, as pure as if seen through a vacuum. A vacuum, she thinks. The stock isn’t bad, but she can do more with the drugs. Cunningham is offering her the drugs at their orbital value, where they are made and where the cost is almost nothing. The street value is far more, and with it she can buy more stock than the amount they were offering. Ten percent of that figure is more than she’d made last night, when she’d gone after the snagboy.
    To get into the Orbitals you have to have skills they need, skills she can never acquire.
    There is another way: they can’t refuse someone who owns enough shares. They are sucking up all of Earth’s remaining wealth, and if you help them and buy up enough stock, they might free you from the mud forever. This is almost enough, she calculates. Almost enough for a pair of tickets to the top of the gravity well.
    She brings her drink to her lips. “Let’s say a quarter now,” she says. “And then I’ll let you buy me a drink, and you can tell me just what you want me to do to earn it.”
    Cunningham turns and signals to one of the smiling corset girls. “It’s very simple,” he says, and he looks at her with his ice-cold eyes. “We want you to make someone fall in love with you. Just for a night.”

    IS YOUR LOVER LOOKING FOR SOMEONE YOUNGER? YOU CAN BE THAT SOMEONE!

    “The Princess is about eighty years old,” Cunningham says. The holo he gives Sarah shows a pale blond girl of about twenty, dressed in a kind of ruffled blouse that exposes her rounded shoulders, the hollows of her clavicles. She has Daud’s watery blue eyes and freckles above her breasts. She projects an air of vulnerable innocence.
    “We think he was originally from Russia,” Cunningham goes on, “but the Korolev Bureau has always been secretive and we don’t have a complete list of their senior staff and designers. When he rated the new body, he asked to be a woman. He’s important enough so that they gave it to him, but they gave him a demotion–– they rotate out all their old people to make way for the new. She’s doing courier duty now. ”
    Not unusual, Sarah thinks. These days you can get pornography read straight into the brain,