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Lucifer · 03-31-2009, 05:38 AM

I found a website with a collection of cyberpunk stories, including all of Gibsons, so I'm quoting some of them with the ideas that he had, for anyone who doesn't read him:

from Johnny Mnemonic:

Quote:

The meet was set for the Drome at 2300, but I rode the tube three stops past the closest
platform and walked back. Immaculate procedure. I checked myself out in the chrome
siding of a coffee kiosk, your basic sharp-faced Caucasoid with a ruff of stiff, dark hair.
The girls at Under the Knife were big on Sony Mao, and it was getting harder to keep them
from adding the chic suggestion of epicanthic folds. It probably wouldn't fool Ralfi Face,
but it might get me next to his table. The Drome is a single narrow space with a bar down
one side and tables along the other, thick with pimps and handlers and a arcame array of
dealers. The Magnetic Dog Sisters were on the door that night, and I didn't relish trying to
get out past them if things didn't work out. They were two meters tall and thin as
greyhounds. One was black and the other white, but aside from that they were as nearly
identical as cosmetic surgery could make them. They'd been lovers for years and were
bad news in the tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male.

Quote:

'I don't see how the hell I missed him.'
'Cause he's faxt, so fast.' She hugged her knees and rocked back and forth on her
bootheels. 'His nervous system's jacked up. He's factory custom.' She grinned and gave a
little squeal of delight. 'I'm gonna get that boy. Tonight. He's the best, number one, top
dollar, state of the art.'
'What you're going to get, for this boy's two million, is my ass out of here. Your boyfriend
back there was mostly grown in a vat in Chiba City. He's a Yakuza assassin.'
'Chiba. Yeah. See, Molly's been Chiba, too.' And she showed me her hands, fingers
slighly spread. Her fingers were slender, tapered, very white against the polished
burgundy nails. Ten blades snicked straight out from their recesses beneath her nails,
each one a narrow, doubleedged scalpel in pale blue steel.

Quote:

An hour later I dragged myself up through another hole, this one sawed crookedly in a
sagging sheet of plywood, and met my first Lo Tek.
'S okay,' Molly said, her hand brushing my shoulder. 'It's just Dog. Hey, Dog.'
In the narrow beam of her taped flash, he regarded us with his one eye and slowly
extruded a thick length of grayish tongue, licking huge canines. I wondered how they wrote
off tooth-bud transplants from Dobermans as low technology. Immunosuppressives don;t
exactly grow on trees.
'Moll.' Dental augmentation impeded his speech. A string of saliva dangled from the
twisted lower lip. 'Heard ya comin'. Long time.' He might have been fifteen, but the fangs
and the bright mosaic of scars combined with the gaping socket to present a mask of total
bestiality. It had taken time and a certain kind of creativity to assemble that face, and his
posture told-me he enjoyed living behind it. He wore a pair of decaying jeans, black with
grime and shiny along the creases. His chest and feet were bare. He did something with
his mouth that approximated a grin.

from Burning Chrome:

Quote:

I went out and looked for Rikki, found her in a cafe with a boy with Sendai eyes, half-healed suture lines
radiating from his bruised sockets. She had a glossy brochure spread open on the table, Tally Isham smiling up from a dozen photographs, the Girl with the Zeiss Ikon Eyes.
Her little simstim deck was one of the things I'd stacked under my bench the night before, the one I'd fixed for her the day after I'd first seen her. She spent hours jacked into that unit, the contact band across her forehead like a gray plastic tiara. Tally Isham was her favorite, and with the contact band on, she was gone, off somewhere in the recorded sensorium of simstim s biggest star. Simulated stimuli: the world all the interesting parts, anyway as perceived by Tally Isham. Tally raced a black Fokker ground-effect plane across Arizona mesa tops. Tally dived the Truk Island preserves. Tally partied with the superrich on private Greek islands, heartbreaking purity of those tiny white seaports at dawn.
Actually she looked a lot like Tally, same coloring and cheekbones. I thought Rikki's mouth was stronger. More sass. She didn't want to be Tally Isham, but she coveted the job. That was her ambition, to be in simstim. Bobby just laughed it off. She talked to me about it, though. "How'd I look with a pair of these?" she'd ask, holding a full-page headshot, Tally Isham's blue Zeiss Ikons lined up with her own amber-brown. She'd had her corneas done twice, but she still wasn't 20-20; so she wanted Ikons. Brand of the stars. Very expensive.
"You still window-shopping for eyes?" I asked as I sat down.
"Tiger just got some," she said. She looked tired, I thought.
Tiger was so pleased with his Sendais that he couldn't help smiling, but I doubted whether he'd have smiled otherwise. He had the kind of uniform good looks you get after your seventh trip to the surgical boutique; he'd probably spend the rest of his life looking vaguely like each new season's media front-runner; not too obvious a copy, but nothing too original, either.