He thought of the toxin sacs. Old Ashpool was dead too, drilled through the eye with Molly's microscopic dart, deprived of whatever expert overdose he'd mixed for himself. That was a more puzzling death, Ashpool's, the death of a mad king. And he'd killed the puppet he'd called his daughter, the one with 3Jane's face. It seemed to Case, as he rode Molly's broadcast sensory input through the corridors of Straylight, that he'd never really thought of anyone like Ashpool, anyone as powerful as he imagined Ashpool had been, as human.

Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory. But Tessier Ashpool wasn't like that, and he sensed the difference in the death of its founder. T-A was an atavism, a clan. He remembered the litter of the old man's chamber, the soiled humanity of it, the ragged spines of the old audio disks in their paper sleeves. One foot bare, the other in a velvet slipper.

The Braun plucked at the hood of the Modern suit and Molly turned left, through another archway.

Wintermute and the nest. Phobic vision of the hatching wasps, time-lapse machine gun of biology. But weren't the zaibatsus more like that, or the Yakuza, hives with cybernetic memories, vast single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon? If Straylight was an expression of the corporate identity of Tessier-Ashpool, then T-A was crazy as the old man had been. The same ragged tangle of fears, the same strange sense of aimlessness. `If they'd turned into what they wanted to...' he remembered Molly saying. But Wintermute had told her they hadn't.

Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people.He'd seen it in the men who'd crippled him in Memphis, he'd seen Wage affect the semblance of it in Night City, and it had allowed him to accept Armitage's flatness and lack of feeling. He'd always imagined it as a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism. It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence.

But what was happening now, in the corridors of Villa Straylight?

Whole stretches were being stripped back to steel and concrete.

`Wonder where our Peter is now, huh? Maybe see that boy soon,' she muttered. `And Armitage. Where's he, Case?'

`Dead,' he said, knowing she couldn't hear him, `he's dead.'

He flipped.

The Chinese program was face to face with the target ice, rainbow tints gradually dominated by the green of the rectangle representing the T-A cores. Arches of emerald across the colorless void.

`How's it go Dixie?'

`Fine. Too slick. Thing's amazing... Shoulda had one that time in Singapore. Did the old New Bank of Asia for a good fiftieth of what they were worth. But that's ancient history. This baby takes all the drudgery out of it. Makes you wonder what a real war would be like, now...'

`If this kinda shit was on the street; we'd be out a job,' Case said.

`You wish. Wait'll you're steering that thing upstairs through black ice.'

`Sure.'

Something small and decidedly nongeometric had just appeared on the far end of one of the emerald arches.

`Dixie...'

`Yeah. I see it. Don't know if I believe it.'

A brownish dot, a dull gnat against the green wall of the T-A cores. It began to advance, across the bridge built by Kuang Grade Mark Eleven, and Case saw that it was walking. As it came, the green section of the arch extended, the polychrome of the virus program rolling back, a few steps ahead of the cracked black shoes.

`Gotta hand it to you, boss,' the Flatline said, when the short, rumpled figure of the Finn seemed to stand a few meters away. `I never seen anything this funny when I was alive.' But the eerie nonlaugh didn't come.

`I never tried it before,' the Finn said, showing his teeth, his hands bunched in the pockets of his frayed jacket.

`You killed Armitage,' Case said.

`Corto. Yeah. Armitage was already gone. Hadda do it. I know, I know, you wanna get the enzyme. Okay. No sweat. I was the one gave it to Armitage in the first place. I mean I told him what to use. But I think maybe it's better to let the deal stand. You got enough time. I'll give it to you. Only a coupla hours now, right?'

Case watched blue smoke billow in cyberspace as the Finn lit up one of his Partagas.

`You guys,' the Finn said, `you're a pain. The Flatline here, if you were all like him, it would be real simple. He's a construct, just a buncha ROM, so he always does what I expect him to. My projections said there wasn't much chance of Molly wandering in on Ashpool's big exit scene, give you one example.' He sighed.

`Why'd he kill himself?' Case asked.

`Why's anybody kill himself?' The figure shrugged. `I guess I know, if anybody does, but it would take me twelve hours to explain the various factors in his history and how they interrelate. He was ready to do it for a long time, but he kept going back into the freezer. Christ, he was a tedious old fuck.' The Finn's face wrinkled with disgust. `It's all tied in with why he killed his wife, mainly, you want the short reason. But what sent him over the edge for good and all, little 3Jane figured a way to fiddle the program that controlled his cryogenic system. Subtle, too. So basically, shekilled him. Except he figured he'd killed himself, and your friend the avenging angel figures she got him with an eyeball full of shellfish juice.' The Finn flicked his butt away into the matrix below. `Well, actually, I guess I did give 3Jane the odd hint, a little of the old how to, you know?'

`Wintermute,' Case said, choosing the words carefully, `you told me you were just a part of something else. Later on, you said you wouldn't exist, if the run goes off and Molly gets the word into the right slot.'

The Finn's streamlined skull nodded.

`Okay, then who we gonna be dealing with then? If Armitage is dead, and you're gonna be gone, just who exactly is going to tell me how to get these fucking toxin sacs out of my system? Who's going to get Molly back out of there? I mean, where, where exactly, are all our asses gonna be,we cut you loose from the hardwiring?'

The Finn took a wooden toothpick from his pocket and regarded it critically, like a surgeon examining a scalpel. `Good question,' he said, finally. `You know salmon? Kinda fish? These fish, see, they're compelledto swim upstream. Got it?'

`No,' Case said.

`Well, I'm under compulsion myself. And I don't know why. If I were gonna subject you to my very own thoughts, let's call 'em speculations, on the topic, it would take a couple of your lifetimes. Because I've given it a lot of thought. And I just don't know. But when this is over, we do it right, I'm gonna be part of something bigger. Much bigger,' The Finn glanced up and around the matrix. `But the parts of me that are me now, that'll still be here. And you'll get your payoff.'

Case fought back an insane urge to punch himself forward and get his fingers around the figure's throat, just above the ragged knot in the rusty scarf. His thumbs deep in the Finn's larynx.

`Well, good luck,' the Finn said. He turned, hands in pockets and began trudging back up the green arch.

`Hey, asshole,' the Flatline said, when the Finn had gone a dozen paces. The figure paused, half turned. `What about me? What about my payoff?'

`You'll get yours,' it said.

`What's that mean?' Case asked, as he watched the narrow tweed back recede.