A short story by Michael Swanwick and William Gibson, appearing in the Burning Chrome anthology. Though not part of Gibson's sprawl series (the series of novels started by Neuromancer and expanded upon by shorter works such as Johnny Mnemonic), it shares those works' fusion of undesireable characters with advanced technology into a depressing, but credible, future.
Deke is a career criminal, a drifter, who becomes intrigued by a game he sees at an arcade during a rest stop on a coach journey down to Florida: the game is Spads&Fokkers, the local ace is a guy called Tiny. But Spads&Fokkers is no ordinary game, as the planes duke it out in mid-air rather than on a screen, rendered by faciliator remotes and sheer force of will, movement and fire controlled directly by the mind. Nor is Tiny an ordinary gaming pro- a massive bulk of a man slumped in a wheelchair and with a childlike voice at odds with his broken body. He was a figher pilot, and his edge in the game comes from his previous constant exposure to a drug known as Hype:
"...the direct neuron interface with the jumpjet was a two-way street. The onboard computers monitored biochemistry and decided when to open the sluice gates and give the human component a killer jolt of combat edge. Dosages like that ate you up. Ate you good and slow and constant, etching the brain surfaces, eroding away the brain-cell membranes. If you weren't yanked from the air promptly enough, you ended up with brain-cell attenuation- with reflexes too fast for your body to hand and your fight-or-flight reflexes fucked real good..."
Tiny's attentuation is real bad, but it allows it have some form of life where the other veterans simply slump outside the army surplus store. His mind should have crumbled with his plane- instead, Spads&Fokkers has become its replacement.
Deke boosts a copy of the game, a facilitator and two programming units, and searchs out a student to sell the spare unit to for his dinner. His first attempt sees him stunned by his brainlock when Nance, a rich student with a chastity brainlock and a fortune in programming units, unleashes an anti-mugging projection on him as he offers her the unit.
She turns out to be a programming expert, but unlike the "washed-out computer hacks" who coded his game in the old industry hex, she works with cutting edge projective wetware. Translating his game into a modern language she's able to slice his reaction times in half.
As Deke carves himself a name on the gaming circuit, Nance works on her finals program. Unable to finish the project in time, she scores two hits of hype, the first allowing her to not only pass the assessment but do so well that she gets exempted from exams, by assembling the fragments of code into a cohesive program on the fly in her head. The second she saves for an interview, which, if successful, will see her sidestepping two years of study and give her a career- and hence get her brainlock reversed by her parents.
But Deke gets his shot at fighting Tiny when another challenger pulls out, and despite his enhanced program he needs the hype edge. Forcing himself upon Nance, the nausea and spasms her brainlock induce force her to give him the second dose of Hype.
Hyped out he is able to defeat Tiny, despite, or perhaps as a result of, the hallucinations of being encased in a cybernetic jumpjet just as Tiny once had been. In the final moments of the game, he realises that Tiny's whole life revolves around Spads&Fokkers and to defeat him would be just as damaging as when he was blown out of the Bolivian sky by a SAM- if not worse, for his first crash robbed him of his body, but this defeat would destroy his mind.
High on Hype, Deke doesn't care, and shoots down Tiny's last biplane. But his elation is shortlived as he discovers he has no one to share it with- the crowd instantly hostile as their local champion falls; Nance lost by stealing her essential hype; and Tiny crushed. As the hype crash hits him, he realises he has in fact lost in every sense that matters.
CST Approved