The glaring trid screen set into the wall at the rear of the booth jammers
about some suit chewed up by a machine gun inside a parking garage. Neona 
ignores it. The bar is Humphrey’s Jack Zone, and from her booth near the street
entrance it has the wild-eyed ambiance of an arcade. A billion multicolored 
lights flash and flare from the mirrored ceiling, walls, tables, and bar, and 
from at least half the people crowding the place, all wearing mirrored 
NeoMonochrome. The band is wired for sound and playing frantic-time from the 
semicircular stage up behind the U-shaped bar. Holographic images of impossibly 
proportioned naked and semi-naked women dance along the top of the bar, in 
alcoves along the walls, and on top of the few unoccupied tables. Every table 
has a bowl of Nerps, a paycom, a Matrix port of deckers, and headsets for those 
who want to sample the bar’s 1,000+! Dir-X! Theatrical! Masterpiece! simsense
recordings, including Monochrome Dreams and The Summoning 
of Abbirleth, looping twenty-four hours a day. The roaring music, the 
jammering trids, and the bells, buzzers, and sirens of the games being played 
everywhere blend into a deafening electronic babble that threatens Neona’s head
with static.