“A century’s-worth of padlocked walk-in freezers, fifty vacuum cleaners charging themselves at a row of numbered stations, rolls of broadloom stacked like logs. More people in work clothes, some in kitchen whites, but she’s trying for tag-pulling attitude and looks, she hopes, like she’s making a delivery.
She finds a narrow stairway and climbs. The air is hot and dead. Motion-sensors click the lights for her at the start of each flight. She feels the whole weight of this old building pressing down on her.
But her bike is there, on B-1, behind a column of nicked concrete.
‘Back off,’ it says when she’s five feet away. Not loud, like a car, but it sounds like it means it.
Under its coat of spray-on imitation rust and an artful bandaging of silver duct-tape, the geometry of the paper-cored, carbonwrapped frame makes Chevette’s thighs tremble. She slips her left hand through the recognition-loop behind the seat. There’s a little double zik as the particle-brakes let go, then she’s up and on it.
It’s never felt better, as she pumps up the oil-stained ramp and out of there”
William Gibson, Virtual Light
