The sky above the dockers was the grey color of concrete - dead, dead, dead! This was also Ace's impression of SubCity. It was the dwelling of mad scientists, murderers, violators, gamblers, frozen heads of dead people resting in a cryo hyper-sleep, just as in the Alien sequels, and of course the innumerable amount of console cowboys.
    Ace had been a console cowboy. Until they had poisoned him with Russian toxin chanterelles , a Shanghai Surprise back from the cold war of East and West. He would never work again. As a console cowboy Ace had been an eternal adventurer of a new and forgotten realm of virtual landscapes. Some said technology was forgotten magic, the daimyos had practiced in the ancient Japan. Other said talk like that was merely qualified bullshit. Ace didn't really care. He longed for the time when he still got stoned on the eight-edged pill, rotating in his circulation of adrenaline, and when he hadn't had the frequent nightmares of demons shaped as giant chanterelles, eating his deck with steel-plated teeth.
    He always woke up wet and cold.
    He dressed in a worn out T-shirt and blue jeans and hit the street. Cat was quite. It was like the stillness before the storm or the peace in the eye of the storm. AllyCat was never quite. It bothered Ace. The milk bar was an illusion of North Dakota, the accents ranged from Crosby to Ellendale, shaping a tangled triangle of an information nexus between the two cities.
    "Rat," said Ace, approaching the bar disk. Rat was a humanoid shaped copy of a ratlike human. He was a synthetic clone made by a photocopied pattern in one of the nameless clinics in SubCity. One of the best. He had been separated from his twin clone siblings, 2Rat and 3Rat, at manufacture and was a paradox in that his mouth was full of a fourth grader's braces, covered with paradigms of patina and a brownish rot which made it seem he was already at manufacture several years late for a dentist appointment, in a time when everyone could afford to be manufactured handsome.
    "Ace," Rat said. "The artist. What've kept you from the action, lately?"
    Ace grunted. A whore giggled. Ace gave her the cold eyes. Rat spit in an empty glass, like a bartender in a cowboy bar's supposed to. The whore giggled again. Ace gave her another pair of cold eyes. They where back where they had started. "Why it's quite here tonight?
    Rat nodded in the direction of the angel, walking back and forth in the back of the room.
    Ace snubbed. "Been here for long?
    "Like a damn cliché."
    "Cage been here?"
    "Yeah, with two chimps."
    "If he'll be back, tell him we need to talk."
    "Ace." Ace froze in the door-way. "You're in trouble?"
    "Did Marilyn Monroe shoot JFK?"
    "Well, I dunno, Ace."
    "Neither do I, Rat. Neither do I."
    Case despised these meaningless conversations.

The street smelled of shrimp noodles and L.A. pollution. This was SubCity, the Japanese City of Angels. Ace passed a stand with Swedish meatballs and fermented Baltic herring. The seller wore a gas-mask. Passing the stand at close range made Ace understand why.
    A doll peeped out of the crowed. Ace turned around and it was gone. His muscle beat harder. It was a female doll. The kind which could both open and close her eyes and make a number one and two while doing it. The kind of dolls which where manufactured at the nameless factories in SubCity, probably wired with sand which wasn't even out on the market yet. He was being followed by a ballerina. Cage wanted him bad.
    Ace increased his pace. It was time to meet Julia. Old Julie would know what to do.
    Julia Mean was a man in his early hundreds, dressed in a low-necked evening dress, of black satin, and wrapped in a black feathered boa, sprawled on a desk of natural stone, with pink nails visible like the claws of some rare bird of pray. He looked like already dead, or nor far from. And just as the innumerable Miami-beach-ladies he merely evoke disgust by squeezing his body into the tight satin dress.
    Beside the slut the stone desk was full of anti-monitoring-device. Julie's husband was a Korean oyabun and could eavesdrop from miles away. Recently he had thrown a guy out the window from the two hundred thirty second floor, for giving Julia a tooth massage. So now Julie got his massage form undercovered Secret Service, kind of like in Her Majesty's service. Of course no one had ever admitted the event had ever taken place. Ace wondered what drove man to giving Julie a foot massage. He had killed a family for pocket change once, but he would never do anything suicidal, not even for the amounts of yen Julie had.
    A licorice caramel popped out of Julie's pink mouth. The room was full of brass lamps with green screens. Julie produced a new lozenge and popped it back in. "what can I do for you, darling?" he asked pushing down a lamp with a chubby sandalled foot.

<zap>

Deanna close the door and took a step into the light. She had a string basket of oranges in her right hand. "This's gonna hurt a little, Jack," she said. Jack was knit up with black leather strings and rattling silver chains in the back of the room. He tried to say something but merely produced interpretable noise.
    The basket made an orange circle in the air and united with Jack's face. "They do this to trick the insurance companies." The spinning basket was an orange round plate, the color of the sky of some exotic city. "If you hit someone with oranges..."
    It spun faster.
    "...there will be ugly marks..."
    Faster, until it was a sphere of bright orange.
    "...but doesn't hurt as much, if you do it right."
    It expanded...
    It was a trick of orange neon in the air. Dead matter floating like an origami bird which suddenly grew alive. The time passed through narrow pipes of glowing light and then through a mandala of a red ocean of flames. Looping through the closed eyes of the Illuminati construct of a yellow pyramid and out through the green cube of the Japanese bank of America. The color of money...

<zap>

"Close the door, Ace."
    It was the doll. She was pointing a hand bazooka at him. The size of a small canon. Brown hair cut to precise and glassy eyes. Skin from a rape peach, with sockets in it, just above the left ear.
    She was a ballerina.
    "If you insist, mam." Ace got in and closed the door.
    "I'm Dolly, Ace. I'm not going to hurt you. I do hurt people sometimes, but you seem to be a cool guy, Ace."
    "I'm cool, Dolly."
    The doll smiled. A cutting smile of razor teeth. "I'm sure you are, Ace. There's someone who wants to meet you."

The Ermitage was a museum of imperialistic art in Leningrad, former S:t Petersburg, former Leningrad, former S:t Petersburg. (Obviolsy someone had a hard time making up one’s mind But it was also the name of the brown haired military, who had hired Dolly.
    Ace grabbed a pot of steaming coffee and threw it towards Ermitage. He dodged it. The dark liquid formed exact circular balls in the air-conditioned air, just as some Swedish ball-bearings fabric on outer/cyber space, before it coagulated on the walls of Chinese rice paper. Ace grabbed some kitchen knives and made dolly practice targeting with her hand canon, while he in vain tried to penetrate Ermitage with them. He picked up a sofa and threw it at the boosted military who dodged again. It flew out the window.
    "Relax, Ace," Dolly said, sitting in an arm-chair cleaning the canon with a silk handkerchief, like it was some invaluable piece of Chinese china. "You're not going anywhere until Ermitage has said what he wants to have said."
    "Very relaxing, Ace thought looking for ways to escape. The windows where bared. Bars of platinum. Dolly had spread her piece on the handkerchief. Two hundred fifty six pieces on black silk. He was trapped in a penthouse with a rich person and a ballerina.
    "I know you, Ace," Ermitage said. "We're brothers."
    "Yeah?"
    "I didn't mean that literary. I know all about you, Ace. We're made of the same stuff."
    "Yeah, you have a Russian pace maker as well?"
    "I'm serious, Ace. We're soul mates, I know about the chanterelles and I can help you."
    Ace looked out the window. "Bullshit. You don't know a squat about me and it's there where I belong, on the street. It's my home now." Now he knew he was dreaming. Guys looking like Ermitage always hired ballerinas to get him to a fancy penthouse, let him throw some things at them, then froze while giant chanterelles showed up in his dreams. This fitted the pattern of his dreams exactly, Ermitage wouldn't say anything more.
    "What do you say, Ace? Haven't you been longing for the virtual landscapes? I could give you them back."
    "What do I have to do?"
    "The thing you do best, of course. Be a cowboy."

The clinic was nameless and exclusive. In other words damn illegal. He didn't remember anything from the operation, only that he had been awake the whole time and the faces had returned before he passed out. He woke up days later in the darkness. Dolly was with him.
    "They made you good, Ace," she said. "You're clean." Her leather pants felt cold against his skin. "You're thirsty, Ace?" She produced a water flask and put it to his mouth in the dark. "I can see in the darkness." She gripped his scrotum between her thumb and index finger and pinched. Ace shrieked. He felt as a cowboy again.
    Black leather rubbed against milky skin. Ace shrieked again as she descended onto him. Small pulses of red pain mixed with sweat. "I can see in the dark, Ace," Dolly said. Ace was in hell making a deal with the devil and back to get some more of the juicy stuff. Dolly ascended and descended like a U.S. space shuttle which couldn't decide whether to stay or go.
    Ace rolled over Dolly, Dolly rolled over Ace, they both rolled over Dolly, a pair of leather jeans rolled over Ace and they were all back where they had started. A trembling milky hand reached out for Dolly's eyes.
    "Don't touch. Fingerprints."
    "Just once," Ace insisted.
    "I said, don't touch."
    Ace's hands where all over her. She smacked him over the cheek. "I said don't touch, you little prick."
    "So you like it hard, huh?" He penetrated her with a pole and she rode it until it went for the both of them. When her beaver swallowed him alive the faces slowly returned, dark faces of chanterelles in tiny nutshells. Their orgasms was a blue flame on which they both lit their cigarettes.


PART TWO
Home Sweet Home

Home.
    Home was ECIN, Ellendale-Crosby Information Nexus, North Dakota.
    A map showed the amount of illegal hacks made every second in the state.
    It was like the New Years Eve body count (for the corporations) three hundred sixty five days a year.
    Ace loved being home.
    The hacks had increased.

The bed was a madras of pink fungus and Ace lay upon it like a prince upon a pee. Between the reoccurring aches he had flashbacks of Paris, Tokyo and Amsterdam. He found himself possessing such useless knowledge as Orly is the airport in Paris, Naritain in Tokyo and Schiphol in Amsterdam. He knew maglev was the usual techie phrase used to mean a magnetic levitation train, which runs on powerful electrical charges to lift the vehicle above the ground and reduce the gravity to nill. He knew David Eddings had been a celebrated fantasy writer in the twentieth century and had an English degree he...
    Dolly unplugged the black chromed chip from the socket behind Ace's left ear and put it back in her jeans pocket. "You don't need that any more." She threw him a pair of black jeans. Paris label. "Get dressed, cowboy. We're going out."
    Out was work.

Mr. Sin was a skinny man with big teeth and rabbit ears. He had been both born and brought up in a cylindrical fan drum and therefor made pitch whistling noises as he spoke. Ace felt as speaking to a living whistle.
    "We need a fan, Sin," Dolly said.
    The bastárd whistled the signature tune to 60 Minutes. It meant the clock was ticking. Dolly produced a green stack of dead oyabuns and the music stopped. "I have some radio-active isotopes and I need to get rid of these coal-carbon combinations from the maglev. You think you can do it, Sin?"
    Mr. Sin smiled. It made him look even more like a rabbit. "Stand over there, Dolly. On the mark. I'll just turn the fan on." The fan was a huge cylinder which connected direct to Dolly's head. "Geez, Doll. What've you been doing there, had a fire fight? Looks worse then my coffin after Igor's birthday party. It's gonna take some serious blowing. And why all the sand? There's enough sand in there for a whole kindergarten _and_ a cat gang."
    "Okay, Sin, just turn on the fan." The fan worked in milliseconds... Dolly was as lean as a child's butt. Sin had even bothered to blow some free radicals away.
    Next stop was at the bazaar, also known as the super black market. Seven years old children sitting behind stands of softs. Dolly passed the several stands and stepped in front of a skinny, bald kid. An ivory cloth was wrapped around his hip and his upper body was naked. A tattooed pink panther on his left arm and the always reoccurring nameless detective, with the magnifying glass, on the right. The child was hovering a fractal of a yard above the ground lost in some Indian meditation.
    He was a follower of the Pink Panthers, a kindergarten toy and assassination union.
    "Fairy," Dolly said gently. "You're at home, Fairy?" She knocked the child resolutely on the head. A dozen credit sticks stuck out of several sockets on the shaved head. The kid was a hovering software bank looking like pinhead with several software sticks sticking out of his head instead of nails.
    "Dolly?" He sounded surprised.
    "I have a job for Them," said Dolly.
    The chips sticking out of the kid's head began a frenzied blinking. Made him look like a maltreated Christmas tree. "She has a passenger." He pointed Dolly in the face with a dirty index finger. Ace was sitting on Dolly's shoulders.
    "Yes, it's my partner, Fairy."
    "Fairy doesn't like passengers."
    "Okay, Fairy. I have a job for the Pink Panthers."
    "Lalala." Fairy close his ears with his hands and began singing. "I can't hear a word you're saying, lalala."
    "Okay, Ace, beat it. This big baby won't talk to me while you're here." Ace pulled a lever he had found laying around and where teleported to the neon paradigm of the matrix. Pink Panthers... sounded like some day-care center.

It was raining in Istanbul. It was two days past the night when they had spoken to Fairy and they had gotten their hands on what they where aiming for. The Trixie at Time construct. The living relics of the mad clocker personage, raised on a hydrochloric acid solution and digitized onto a circuit board.
    Dolly had played the burglar with Ace periodically resting on her shoulders by the help of the swimswim transmitter which allowed him to teleportable swim between his deck and Dolly's shoulders by pulling a console lever and bypassing some of the chief elements in life, such as St*r Tr*k is only a TV show and the scene where the crew are teleported from the ship to the surface of a planet and back is merely a camera trick and not a real event. Obviously Ace had been playing hookey the day they thought it in school. In the heat of the night Ace's constant swimming had become a too hard burden for Dolly and she had broken both her legs, five ribs and even some of the ribs of the staff guarding the Trixie at Time construct. She was now resting, wrapped into tons of skin-tape in different colors, making an appearance of a fly collided with the rainbow and cocooned by a spider with furiously gaudily colored weave. When Ace had told her to brake a leg before the run, he hadn't expected her to take it literary.
    The leader of the Pink Panthers, Wolf Tendertoy, a pink boy in his early eighths, had said something strange before penetrating his second security guard with a dumdum bullet the form of a grinning pink panther. Teddy-cute. Ace had asked him what he meant but the young criminal had either ignored the question or not herd it being asked. Ace had later found out Teddy-cute was an AI, Arctic Intelligence, owned by the Antarctic colony, Messiah's Cashpool. They thought North Pole was an ancient treasury of God and whoever would live there when the Day arrived would be eternally wealthy. So they spent their lives in ascetic justice, convinced they one day would inherit the wealth of heaven. To bad no one had told them Antarctic was the south pole and not the north.
    Any way, they where in Istanbul and it was raining. Dolly was resting on some pink fungus enjoying a tooth massage. It reminded Ace of Julie and the demonic faces of the chanterelles slowly made their appearing. He plugged in the Trixie at Time construct and jacked in.
    "Time for some tea," the construct exclaimed. A big-nosed plump man in an oversized virtual cylindrical hat began pouring tea into transparent cups outlined by green neon.
    "Hey, Trixie. Remember me, Ace?"
    "Hallo, lad. Care for some tea?" the construct said sweeping by Ace with the speed of light. He always had been a sucker for tea.
    "So you don't remember me, Trix?" Ace had been working some with Trixie back in Siberia. The prison camp during the cold war. The construct hadn't been late to a single alignment, had a digital watch implanted on what would be equivalent to its retinal. That's how it got its nickname, Trixie at Time.
    "Nope," Trixie said emptying the cups at the empty seats. "But you, lad, are welcome any way."
    "I was thinking, Trix." Ace didn't finish his sentence as the construct took on a pondering face, then began slowly walking towards him. Face down as in deep thoughts. Suddenly it leaped feet in the air when noticing Ace's presence. "Geez, lad, you shouldn't scare like that. Didn't notice you entering. I'm Trixie, who are you?"
    "I'm Ace, your friend from Siberia, remember?"
    "Whatever. Care for some tea, Ace?" The construct began its usual procedure of pouring and drinking tea. It was like speaking to Ace's senile grandfather. The phone rang and Ace unplugged the construct and jacked out.
    He answered from the bed without even touching the phone. He was getting good at the telepathy stuff. In a year or two he would perhaps temporally reside on the shoulders of the present president of the United States instead of Dolly's. It was Ermitage calling. The person.
    "Congratulations, you got the Trixie at Time construct."
    "Sure, just don't know what we'll use it for. The bastard's gone as senile as my granddaddy."
    "Haven't we all, lad? By the way, who am I talking to?" Ace was getting bad feelings about this. Perhaps it was contagious. "Just kidding," Ermitage said losing the British accent. "There'll come a man named Terrysebastianjimmyjulian to your room in about five minutes. He'll tell you what you're going to do next." He hung up.
    "I can see in the light as well," Dolly said from the pink fungus. She looked a little less as a cocooned fly now. "That's good, babe," Ace said. "There'll be a dude called Geoffrey something up here in a minute. Perhaps you'd better get rid of that cocoon."
    "Terrysebastianjimmyjulian," Dolly corrected him. "Worked with him a couple of years ago. A real slimebag."

Terrysebastianjimmyjulian crawled in with a bag of slime on his right shoulder. When Dolly had said slimebag, Ace hadn't expected that to be literary. A golden chain of twenty four carat gold peeped out of the slime on his chest. Obviously it was profitable being a slimebag here, as anywhere.
    As he spoke he mixed eight different languages into one. A module on his chest, among the gold and slime, translated it into English. They were supposed to get a guy called Dieter River Era. Real slime as well as the man whose name began with an T. Dolly had his profile in her knees as the limousine was driving them to the-soon-to-be-crime-scene. Mr. Sin had showed up dressed in a black suit and Dolly was still laughing at the sight of him, seven blocks down the road. This was the first time Ace had seen a bunny in a suit, as well.
    "Give me that," Mr. Sin said and pulled the Go-To out of her hands. "You're killing me, Sin," Dolly exclaimed as his rabbit ears flapped from the motion of the vehicle. "Did momy wish you to be a penguin today?" Ace exclaimed between violent laughter and Dolly fell on the floor, kicking with her legs in the side of the vehicle. "Shall we visit a restaurant? Perhaps they'll serve him, "Dolly said still laughing. "As rabbit stew," Ace added which brought another volley of laughter.
    Mr. Sin ignored them as well he could. "Says here River Era is some kind of master of illusions, Terry, he said addressing the only person in the vehicle who wasn't laughing. Terrysebastianjimmyjulian said something interpretable in reply, which the module translated into something which got dolly laughing even more violent and sent even Ace onto the floor of the vehicle, high-fiveing Terry for his words .
    Mr. Sin gave up. If he was going to be the laughing stock of the day at least he wasn't going to give them any fun.

River Era was in the middle of a show as the company got to the nightclub. He was frying an egg with bananas and garlic. They sat down around a circular table.
    The waiter refused to serve dolls at the club, so Dolly cut him up with alarming ease. Seemed she had some retractable nail-files or something. The owner of the club stopped by wishing them a pleasant night, so she cut him up as well, while she was still at it. Ace still remembered the young boy with his mouth full of shark transplantations. Ugliness seemed to be trendy this week. Terry said something involving the word doll and she performed a remote yubitsume on him from the other side of the table. Ace was impressed. Reminded him of his own youth. He used to be serial killer. Ran around naked with a chromed butter knife. Masked like Batman. Killing people. They called him the naked dude. Some of the faces still haunted him, though not as much as the chanterelles of course.
    River Era was finishing his second egg up at the stage and all of the sudden he was gone, right in front of their eyes. Dolly pronounced a number of four-letter words, all of them involving the letters F, U, C and K. For a second everything stopped. Then the panic began.
    Dolly was the first one too rise and produce her one-hand cannon from a leathered jeans pocket. Terry passed her, two tables down the road and took the lead, leaving a trace os slime as he ran. Mr. Sin jumped over Terry in a rabbitlike fashion. Dolly shot Mr. Sin in the back, scattering blood and brain tissue all over the place, then leaped over his had-been body stepping on a fat lady laying on the floor. The fat lady sang and it all stopped. He got away.
    "You killed him," Ermitage said crouching over a mixture of slime, blood and gray cells which used to go by the name Terrysebastianjimmyjulian.
    "Real nice," Dolly said ignoring Ermitage, "you where all watching the show, without paying any attention to what the chef was acctually doing. Perhaps you wanna go to some fancy french restaurant and have an omellette?"
    A minute later the company was on a plane to Paris on their way to chef Bon Bon, with an aeut Mirage waiting on a reserved table.


PART THREE
Up Thight in France

A man smoking.
    The cigar and thick smoke. Forming violent patterns in the nothingness. Space is nothing. Like an oil disaster, spreading over a vast area, in an infinite amount of time. Forming into shapeless islands, black. In the matrix of a computer monitor the dark color of the oil is rendered in two hundred fifty-six shades of three million infinite colors. If you get close enough. That's what it takes to show the color black. Black isn't really a color.
    Seaside was a cigar, owned by the exentric Antarctic colony, Messiah's Cashpool. But you had to be about 10¹²km tall to acctually smoke it, people livied in it. It was an escape to a sea resort, hoovering somewhere over the Antarctic. It wasn't really a sea resort, but heaven, always blue, was a pirate made in some French suburb, located by the sea. So the members of the colony found the name suitable. Besides, in a way the South Pole was one huge seaside.

    Ace found Dolly in a compartment with metalplated walls. The door had been open and Dolly was lieing naked on a carpet designed as a computer chip. Her chest and stomach was cut open as a girl on a photograph by J.K. Potter. Ace waited for the jaw to close and reopen, the red liquid still pouring in narrow runnels. Destiny of a ballerina.
    she looked at him as he closed the door and sat down beside her. He thougt she was dead.
    "How did you get in?" she almost choked on her own blood.
    "It was open."
    Dolly snorted. "Hotel security." Ace got a weird feeling he was talking to a living corpse. One of the living dead resorting in the very heart of Seaside, the Stray Cat. Full of cryodead people, you weren't dead, but you weren't living either. What a destiny, stuck between heaven and earth.
    When he touched her she was cold as ice.
    "Don't touch," she sneared.
    "Who did this to you?"
    "A man." the jaw opened a little more. "A very horny man."
    Ace couldn't see the logic. "Why did he cut you up?"
    "No reason. It's like when a boy finds a doll in his sister's doll's house. He begins playing with it and when he's done he rips it's arms off. There's no logic in it, no reason, just a thing people do. Peoples..." Everything stopped.
    this was beginning to become a cliché in Ace's dreams. they had no finishings, just abrupt endings. It was like watching some TV-show which ended with "to be continued", only this time it wouldn't. He was a collector of dreams with no ends. He wasn't sure if this one should be called a dream or a nightmare.
    When Ace entered the bar he was as high as a pitch tone of a fat lady. with a viking helmet and a corset in polished metal. It was an unwritten law, you didn't enter a bar like this, sober. and that way the owners knew no one was ever more present than they were themselves. People in the bar was making love to mermaids in the depth of the sea, some where fighting space battles with lasers as in St*r W*rs, and others just sitting doing not