Silicon doesn’t wear out; microchips were effectively immortal. The Wig took notice of the fact. Like every other child of his age, however, he knew that silicon became obsolete, which was worse than wearing out; this fact was a grim and accepted constant for the Wig, like death or taxes, and in fact he was usually more worried about his gear falling behind the state of the art than he was about death (he was twenty-two) or taxes (he didn’t file, although he paid a Singapore money laundry a yearly percentage that was roughly equivalent to the income tax he would have been required to pay if he’d declared his gross). The Wig reasoned that all that obsolete silicon had to be going somewhere. Where it was going, he learned, was into any number of very poor places struggling along with nascent industrial bases. Nations so benighted that the concept of nation was still taken seriously. The Wig punched himself through a couple of African back-waters and felt like a shark cruising a swimming pool thick with caviar. Not that any one of those tasty tiny eggs amounted to much, but you could just open wide and scoop, and it was easy and filling and it added up. The Wig worked the Africans for a week, incidentally bringing about the collapse of at least three governments and causing untold human suffering. At the end of his week, fat with the cream of several million laughably tiny bank accounts, he retired. As he was going out, the locusts were coming in; other people had gotten the African idea.

The Wig sat on the beach at Cannes for two years, ingesting only the most expensive designer drugs and periodically flicking on a tiny Hosaka television to study the bloated bodies of dead Africans with a strange and curiously innocent intensity. At some point, no one could quite say where or when or why, it began to be noted that the Wig had gone over the edge. Specifically, the Finn said, the Wig had become convinced that God lived in cyberspace, or perhaps that cyberspace was God, or some new manifestation of same. The Wig’s ventures into theology tended to be marked by major paradigm shifts, true leaps of faith. The Finn had some idea of what the Wig was about in those days; shortly after his conversion to his new and singular faith, Wigan Ludgate had returned to the Sprawl and embarked on an epic if somewhat random voyage of cybernetic discovery. Being a former console jockey, he knew where to go for the very best in what the Finn called the hard and the soft. The Finn provided the Wig with all manner of both, as the Wig was still a rich man. The Wig explained to the Finn that his technique of mystical exploration involved projecting his consciousness into blank, unstructured sectors of the matrix and waiting. To the man’s credit, the Finn said, he never actually claimed to have met God, although he did maintain that he had on several occasions sensed His presence moving upon the face of the grid. In due course, the Wig ran out of money.

His spiritual quest having alienated the few remaining business connections from his pre-African days, he sank without a trace.

“But then he turned up one day,” the Finn said, “crazy as a shithouse rat. He was a pale little fucker anyway, but now he wore all this African shit, beads and bones and every-thing.” Bobby let go of the Finn’s narrative long enough to wonder how anyone who looked like the Finn could describe somebody as a pale little fucker, then glanced over at Lucas, whose face was dead grim. Then it occurred to Bobby that Lucas might take the Africa stuff personally, sort of. But the Finn was continuing his story.

“He had a lot of stuff he wanted to sell. Decks, peripherals, software. It was all a couple of years old, but it was top gear, so I gave him a price on it. I noticed he’d had a socket implant, and he kept this one sliver of microsoft jacked behind his ear. What’s the soft? It’s blank, he says. He’s sitting right where you are now, kid, and he says to me, it’s blank and it’s the voice of God, and I live forever in His white hum, or some shit like that. So I think, Christ, the Wig’s gone but good now, and there he is counting up the money I’d given him for about the fifth time. Wig, I said, time’s money but tell me what you intend to do now? Because I was curious. Known the guy years, in a business way Finn, he says, I gotta get up the gravity well, God’s up there. I mean, he says, He’s everywhere but there’s too much static down here, it obscures His face. Right, I say... you got it. So I show him the door and that’s it. Never saw him again.”

Bobby blinked, waited, squirmed a little on the hard seat of the folding chair.

“Except, about a year later, a guy turns up, high-orbit rigger down the well on a leave, and he’s got some good software for sale. Not great, but interesting. He says it’s from the Wig. Well, maybe the Wig’s a freak, and long out of the game, but he can still spot the good shit. So I buy it. That was maybe ten years ago, right? And every year or so, some guy would turn up with something. ‘The Wig told me I should offer you this.’ And usually I’d buy it. It was never anything special, but it was okay. Never the same guy bring-ing it, either.”

“Was that it, Finn, just software?” Lucas asked

“Yeah, mainly, except for these weird sculpture things. I’d forgotten that. I figured the Wig made ‘em. First time a guy came in with one of those, I bought the ‘ware he had, then said what the fuck do you call that? Wig said you might be interested, the guy said. Tell him he’s crazy, I said. The guy laughed. Well, you keep it, he says I’m not carrying the Goddamn thing back up with me. I mean, it was about the size of a deck, this thing, just a bunch of garbage and shit, stuck together in a box... So I pushed it behind this Coke crate fulla scrap iron, and forgot it, except old Smith – he’s a colleague of mine in those days, dealt mostly art and collectibles – she sees it and wants it. So we do some dipshit deal. Any more of these, Finn, he says, get ‘em. There’s assholes uptown go for this kind of shit. So the next time a guy turned up from the Wig, I bought the sculpture thing, too, and traded it to Smith. But it was never much money for any of it . . The Finn shrugged. “Not until last month, anyway. Some kid came in with what you bought. It was from the Wig. Listen. he says, this is biosoft and its a breaker. Wig says it’s worth a lot. I put a scan on it and it looked right. I thought it looked interesting, you know? Your partner Beauvoir thought it looked pretty interesting, too. I bought it. Beauvoir bought it off me. End of story.” The Finn dragged out a cigarette, this one broken, bent double. “Shit,” he said He pulled a faded pack of cigarette papers from the same pocket and extracted one of the fragile pink leaves, rolling it tightly around the broken cigarette, a sort of splint. When he licked the glue, Bobby caught a glimpse of a very pointed gray-pink tongue.

“And where, Finn, does Mr. Wig reside?” Lucas asked, his thumbs beneath his chin, his large fingers forming a steeple in front of his face.

“Lucas, I haven’t got the slightest fucking clue. In orbit somewhere. And modestly, if the kind of money he was getting out of me meant anything to him. You know, I hear there’s places up there where you don’t need money, if you fit into the economy, so maybe a little goes a long way. Don’t ask me, though, I’m agoraphobic.” He smiled nastily at Bobby, who was trying to get the image of that tongue out of his mind. “You know,” he said, squinting at Lucas, “it was about that time that I started hearing about weird shit happening in the matrix.”

“Like what?” Bobby asked.

“Keep the fuck out of this,” the Finn said, still looking at Lucas. “That was before you guys turned up, the new hoodoo team. I knew this street samurai got a job working for a Special Forces type made the Wig look flat fucking normal. Her and this cowboy they’d scraped up out of Chiba, they were on to something like that. Maybe they found it. Istanbul was the last I saw of ‘em. Heard she lived in London, once, a few years ago. Who the fuck knows? Seven, eight years.” The Finn suddenly seemed tired, and old, very old. He looked to Bobby like a big, mummified rat animated by springs and hidden wires. He took a wristwatch with a cracked face and a single greasy leather strap from his pocket and consulted it. “Jesus. Well, that’s all you get from me. Lucas. I’ve got some friends from an organ bank coming by in twenty minutes to talk a little biz.”