Burning Chrome by William Gibson

make it back. ‘Hey,’ say the other flies, ‘what’s happening on the other side of that door? What do they know that we don’t?’ At the edge of the Highway every human language unravels in your hands – except, perhaps, the language of the shaman, of the cabalist, the language of the mystic intent on mapping hierarchies of demons, angels, saints.
    But the Highway is governed by rules, and we’ve learned a few of them. That gives us something to cling to:
    Rule One: One entity per ride; no teams, no couples.
    Rule Two: No artificial intelligences; whatever’s out there won’t stop for a smart machine, at least not the kind we know how to build.
    Rule Three: Recording instruments are a waste of space; they always come back blank.
    Dozens of new schools of physics have sprung up in Saint Olga’s wake, ever more bizarre and more elegant heresies, each one hoping to shoulder its way to the inside track. One by one, they all fall down. In the whispering quiet of Heaven’s nights, you imagine you can hear the paradigms shatter, shards of theory tinkling into brilliant dust as the lifework of some corporate think tank is reduced to the tersest historical footnote, and all in the time it take your damaged traveler to mutter some fragment in the dark.
    Flies in an airport, hitching rides. Flies are advised not to ask too many questions; flies are advised not to try for the Big Picture. Repeated attempts in that direction invariably lead to the slow, relentless flowering of paranoia, your mind projecting huge, dark patterns on the walls of night, patterns that have a way of solidifying, becoming madness, becoming religion. Smart flies stick with Black Box theory; Black Box is the sanctioned metaphor, the Highway remaining x in every sane equation. We aren’t supposed to worry about what the Highway is, or who put it there. Instead, we concentrate on what we put into the Box and what we get back out of it. There are things we send down the Highway (a woman named Olga, her ship, so many more who’ve followed) and things that come to us (a madwoman, a seashell, artifacts, fragments of alien technologies). The Black Box theorists assure us that our primary concern is to optimize this exchange. We’re out here to see that our species gets its money’s worth. Still, certain things become increasingly evident; one of them is that we aren’t the only flies who’ve found their way into an airport. We’ve collectedartifacts from at least half a dozen wildly divergent cultures. ‘More hicks,’ Charmian calls them. We’re like pack rats in the hold of a freighter, trading little pretties with rats from other ports. Dreaming of the bright lights, the big city.
    Keep it simple, a matter of In and Out. Leni Hofmannstahl: Out.
    We staged the homecoming of Leni Hofmannstahl in Clearing Three, also known as Elysium. I crouched in a stand of meticulous reproductions of young vine maples and studied her ship. It had originally looked like a wingless dragonfly, a slender, ten-meter abdomen housing the reaction engine. Now, with the engine removed, it looked like a matte-white pupa, larval eye bulges stuffed with the traditional useless array of sensors and probes. It lay on a gentle rise in the center of the clearing, a specially designed hillock sculpted to support a variety of vessel formats. The newer boats are smaller, like Grand Prix washing machines, minimalist pods with no pretense to being exploratory vessels. Modules for meatshots.
    â€˜I don’t like it,’ Hiro said. ‘I don’t like this one. It doesn’t feel right…’ He might have been talking to himself; he might almost have been me talking to myself, which meant the handler-surrogate gestalt was almost operational. Locked into my role, I’m no longer the point man for Heaven’s hungry ear, a specialized probe radio-linked with an even more specialized psychiatrist;