Burning Chrome, 1986

William Gibson, Burning Chrome, published 1986. One of the classic 80ies science fiction short story collections, this was put out shortly after Gibson's successful first novel Neuromancer. Collecting his early work, some of it set in the same setting as his novels, such as Burning Chrome and Johnny Mnemonic, it also features a couple of stories written in a different style and setting.

It was hot, the night we burned Chrome. Out in the
malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to
death against the neon, but in Bobby's loft the only light
came from a monitor screen and the green and red
LEDs on the face of the matrix simulator. I knew every
chip in Bobby's simulator by heart; it looked like your
workaday Ono-Sendai VII. the "Cyberspace Seven,"
but I'd rebuilt it so many time that you'd have had a
hard time finding a square millimeter of factory cir-
cuitry in all that silicon.

We waited side by side in front of the simulator
console, watching the time display in the screen's lower
left corner.

"Go for it," I said, when it was time, but Bobby
was already there, leaning forward to drive the Russian
program into its slot with the heel of his hand. He did it
with the tight grace of a kid slamming change into an ar-
cade game, sure of winning and ready to pull down a
string of free games.

William Gibson aleph - Sprawl series - Burning Chrome (1986)

Read William Gibson's Burning Chrome