He never washed the jacket; in its left pocket he found nearly an ounce of cocaine, carefully wrapped in plastic and transparent surgical tape. The right pocket held fifteen ampules of Megacillin-D and a ten-inch horn-handled switchblade. The antibiotic was worth twice its weight in cocaine.

He drove the knife hilt-deep into a rotten stump passed over by the Jungle's wood-gatherers and hung the jacket there, the flies circling it as he walked away.

That night, in a bar with a corrugated iron roof, waiting for one of the "lawyers" who worked passages through the cordon, he tried his first ASP machine. It was huge, all chrome and neon, and the owner was very proud of it; he had helped hijack the truck himself.

If the chaos of the nineties reflects a radical shift in the paradigms of visual literacy, the final shift away from the Lascaux/Gutenberg tradition of a pre-holographic society, what should we expect from this newer technology, with his promise of discrete encoding and subsequent reconstruction of the full range of sensory perception? Roebuck and Pierhal, Recent American History: A Systems View.

Fast-forward through the humming no-time of wiped tape into her body. European sunlight. Streets of a strange city.

Athens. Greek-letter signs and the smell of dust... and the smell of dust.

Look through her eyes (thinking, this woman hasn't met you yet; you're hardly out of Texas) at the gray monument, horses there in stone, where pigeons whirl up and circle and static takes love's body, wipes it clean and gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that isn't there. And the tape ends.

The inducer's light is burning now. Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose.