Johnny Mnemonic (story)

'''Gibson, William. "Johnny Mnemonic."' Omni'' Magazine (May 1981). Collected Burning Chrome. 1986. Reprint New York: Harper Voyager, 2003. At least for a while, available on line at Project.Cyberpunk (CAUTION: This may be a pirated edition.) There is an audiobook of Burning Chrome.

Johnny Mnemonic stores data securely in his head: literally in his head, in an implanted data storage system, which can be accessed each time only by a recipient with the correct password, unknown to Johnny. In a noir plot, Johnny is threatened by the Yakuza (Japanese "mafia") and ends up protected by Molly, a "Razorgirl" who will go on in Gibson's universe as Molly Millions, and who has bodily augmentations making her quite deadly.

With the murder of Johnny's current customer, Johnny decides that the only way to save himself [...] is to get the data out of his head, which can be done only by using a SQUID to retrieve the password. Molly takes him to an amusement park to meet Jones, a cybernetically enhanced dolphin retired from Navy service. Jones' previous assignment was to locate and hack into enemy mines using the SQUID and other sensors implanted in his skull. Since he is now addicted to heroin, the result of the Navy's efforts to keep its dolphins loyal, Molly trades him a batch in exchange for finding the password. Johnny then has Molly read it out so he can enter his retrieval trance, with recorders capturing all the data. They upload a snippet to a Yakuza communications satellite and threaten to release the rest unless Johnny is left alone. (Wikipedia entry for the story).

See also for the "Lo Teks," summed up correctly by the Wikipedia entry linked above as "anti-technology outcasts."

RDE, Initial Compiler, 14Mar19