Lockpicks

The door in front of her was old, a carved slab of Thai teak that seemed to have been sawn in half to fit the low doorway. A primitive mechanical lock with a stainless face had been inset beneath a swirling dragon. She knelt, drew a tight little roll of black chamois from an inside pocket, and selected a needle-thin pick. “Never much found anybody I gave a damn about, after that.”

She inserted the pick and worked in silence, nibbling at her lower lip. She seemed to rely on touch alone; her eyes unfocused and the door was a blur of blond wood. Case listened to the silence of the hall, punctuated by the soft clink of the candelabrum. Candles? Straylight was all wrong. He remembered Cath’s story of a castle with pools and lilies, and 3Jane’s mannered words recited musically by the head. A place grown in upon itself. Straylight smelled faintly musty, faintly perfumed, like a church. Where were the Tessier-Ashpools? He’d expected some clean hive of disciplined activity, but Molly had seen no one. Her monologue made him uneasy; she’d never told him that much about herself before. Aside from her story in the cubicle, she’d seldom said anything that had even indicated that she had a past.

She closed her eyes and there was a click that Case felt rather than heard. It made him remember the magnetic locks on the door of her cubicle in the puppet place. The door had opened for him, even though he’d had the wrong chip. That was Wintermute, manipulating the lock the way it had manipulated the drone micro and the robot gardener. The lock system in the puppet place had been a subunit of Freeside’s security system. The simple mechanical lock here would pose a real problem for the AI, requiring either a drone of some kind or a human agent.

***

Neuromancer ch 15