They passed an Apple Shires ad, a cobbled lane leading away into some hologram nursery land, where smiling juice bottles danced and sang. Laney's jet lag was back, in some milder but more baroque format. Something compounded of a pervasive sense of guilt and a feeling of physical distance from his own body, as though the sensory signals arrived stale, after too long a passage, through some other country that he himself was never privy to.
“I thought we'd done with all of that when we got rid of those Siberian neuropaths,” Blackwell said. He was dressed entirely in black, which had the effect of somewhat reducing his bulk. He wore a soft, smocklike garment sewn from very black denim, multiple pockets around its wide hem. Laney thought it looked vaguely Japanese, in some medieval way. Something a carpenter might wear. “Bent as a dog's hind legs. Picked them up touring the Kombinat states.”
“Neuropaths?”
“Filling Rez's head with their garbage. He's vulnerable to influences, touring. Combination of stress and boredom. Cities start to look the same. One hotel room after another. It's a syndrome, is what it is.”
“Where are we going?”
“Akihabara.”
“Where?”
“Where we're going.” Blackwell consulted an enormous, elaborately dialed, steel-braceleted chronometer that looked as though it had been designed to do double duty as brass knuckles. “Took a month before they'd let me have a go, do what was needed. Then we got him over to a clinic in Paris and they told us what those bastards had been feeding him had made a pig's breakfast of his endocrine system. Put him right, in the end, but it needn't have happened, none of it.”
“But you got rid of them?” Laney had no idea what Blackwell was talking about, but it seemed best to keep up the illusion of conversation.
“Told them I was thinking about putting them face-first through a little Honda tree-shredder I'd purchased, just on the off chance,” Blackwell said. “Not necessary. Showed them it, though. In the end, they were sent along with no more than a moderate touch-up.”
Laney looked at the back of the driver's head. The right-hand drive worried him. He felt like there was nobody in the driver's seat. “How long did you say you'd worked for the band?”
“Five years.”
Laney thought of the video, Blackwell's voice in the darkened club. Two years ago. “Where are we going?”
“Be there, soon enough.”
They entered an area of narrower streets, of featureless, vaguely shabby buildings covered with unlit, inactivated advertising. Huge representations of media platforms Laney didn't recognize. Some of the buildings revealed what he assumed was quake damage. Head-sized gobs of a brownish, glasslike substance protruded from cracks that ran diagonally across one facade, like a cheap toy repaired badly by a clumsy giant. The limo pulled to the curb.
“‘Electric Town,’” Blackwell said. “I'll page you,” he said to the driver, who nodded in a way that struck Laney as being not particularly Japanese. Blackwell opened the door and got out with that same unlikely grace Laney had noted before, the car bucking noticeably with the departure of his weight. Laney, sliding across the gray velour seat, felt tired and wooden.
“Somehow I was expecting a more upscale destination,” he said to Blackwell. It was true.
“Stop expecting,” Blackwell said.
The building with the cracks and the brown, saplike knobs opened into a white-and-pastel sea of kitchen appliances. The ceiling was low, laced with temporary-looking pipes and conduits. Laney followed Blackwell down a central aisle. A few figures stood along other aisles to either side, but he had no way of knowing whether these were salespeople or potential customers.
An old-fashioned escalator was grinding away, at the end of the central aisle, the rectilinear steel teeth at the edges of each ascending step worn sharp and bright. Blackwell kept walking. Levitated ahead of Laney, climbing, his feet barely seeming to move. Laney mounted hard behind him.
They rose up to a second level, this one displaying a less consistent range of goods: wallscreens, immersion consoles, automated recliners with massage-modules bulging from their cushions like the heads of giant mechanical grubs.
Along an aisle walled with corrugated plastic cartons, Blackwell with his scarred hands tucked deep in the pockets of his ninja smock. Into a maze of bright blue plastic tarps, slung from pipes overhead. Unfamiliar tools. A worker's dented thermos standing on a red toolkit that spanned a pair of aluminum sawhorses. Blackwell holding a final tarp aside. Laney ducked, entering.
“We've been holding it open for the past hour, Blackwell,” someone said. “Not an easy thing.”
Blackwell let the tarp fall into place behind him. “Had to collect him from the hotel.”
The space, walled off with the blue tarps on three sides, was twice the size of Laney's hotel room but considerably more crowded. A lot of hardware was assembled there: a collection of black consoles were cabled together in a white swamp of Styrofoam packing-forms, torn corrugated plastic, and crumpled sheets of bubble-pack. Two men and a woman, waiting. It was the woman who had spoken. As Laney shuffled forward, ankle-deep through the packing materials, the stuff creaked and popped, slippery under the soles of his shoes.
Blackwell kicked at it. “You might have tidied up.”
“We aren't set-dressers,” the woman said. She sounded to Laney as though she was from Northern California. She had short brown hair cut in bangs, and something about her reminded him of the quants who worked at Slitscan. Like the other two, men, one Japanese and one red-haired, she wore jeans and a generic nylon bomber jacket.
“Hell of a job on short notice,” the redhead said.
“No notice,” the other corrected, and he was definitely from California. His hair was pulled straight back, fastened high in a little samurai ponytail.
“What you're paid for,” Blackwell said.
“We're paid to tour,” the redhead said.
“If you want to tour again, you'd better hope that these work.” Blackwell looked at the cabled consoles.
Laney saw a folding plastic table set up against the rear wall. It was bright pink. There was a gray computer there, a pair of eyephones. Unfamiliar cables ran to the nearest console: flat ribbons candy-striped in different colors. The wall behind was plastered with an overlay of old advertising; a woman's eye was directly behind the pink table, a yard wide, her laser-printed pupil the size of Laney's head.
Laney moved toward the table, through the Styrofoam, sliding his feet, a motion not unlike cross-country skiing.
“Let's do it," he said. “Let's see what you've got.”
16. Zona
Zona Rosa kept a secret place, a country carved from what once had been a corporate website.
It was a valley lined with ruined swimming pools, overgrown with cactus and red Christmas flowers. Lizards posed like hieroglyphs on mosaics of shattered tile.
No houses stood in that valley, though sections of broken wall gave shade, or rusting rectangles of corrugated metal set aslant on weathered wooden uprights. Sometimes there were ashes of a cooking fire.
She kept it early evening there.
“Zona?”
“Someone is trying to find you.” Zona in her ragged leather jacket over a white t-shirt. In that place she presented as a quick collage, fragments torn from films, magazines, Mexican newspapers: dark eyes, Aztec cheekbones, a dusting of acne scars, her black hair tangled like smoke. She kept the resolution down, never let herself come entirely into focus.
“My mother?”
“No. Someone with resources. Someone who knows that you are in Tokyo.” The narrow toes of her black boots were pale with the dust of the valley. There were copper zips down the outer seams of her faded black jeans, waist to ankle. “Why are you dressed that way?”
Chia remembered that she was still presenting in the Silke-Marie Kolb outfit. “There was a meeting. Very formal. Major butt-pain. I got this with Kelsey's cashcard.”
“Where were you ported, whe
n you paid for it?”
“Where I'm ported now. Mitsuko's place.”
Zona frowned. “What other purchases have you made?”
“None.”
“Nothing?”
“A subway ticket.”
Zona snapped her fingers and a lizard scurried from beneath a rock. It ran up her leg and into her waiting hand. As she stroked it with the fingers of the other hand, the patterns of its coloration changed. She tapped its head and the lizard ran down her leg, vanishing behind a crumpled sheet of rusted roofing. “Kelsey is frightened, frightened enough to come to me.”
“Frightened of what?”
“Someone contacted her about your ticket. They were trying to reach her father, because the points used to purchase it were his. But he is traveling. They spoke with Kelsey instead. I think they threatened her.”
“With what?”
“I don't know. But she gave them your name and the number of the cashcard.”
Chia thought about Maryalice and Eddie.
Zona Rosa took a knife from her jacket pocket and squatted on a shelf of pinkish rock. Golden dragons swirled in the shallow depths of the knife's pink plastic handles. She thumbed a button of plated tin and the dragon-etched blade snapped out, its spine sawtoothed and merciless. “She has no balls, your Kelsey.”
“She's not my Kelsey, Zona.”
Zona picked up a length of green-barked branch and began to shave thin curls from it with the edge of the switchblade. “She would not last an hour, in my world.” On a previous visit, she'd told Kelsey stories of the war with the Rats, pitched battles fought through the garbage-strewn playgrounds and collapsing parking garages of vast housing projects. How had that war begun? Over what? Zona never said.
“Neither would I.”
“So who is looking for you?”
“My mother would be, if she knew I was here
“That was not your mother, the one who put the fear into Kelsey.”
“If someone knew my seat number on the flight over, they could get a ticket number and trace it back, right?”
“If they had certain resources, yes. It would be illegal.”
“From there, they could go to Kelsey—”
“From there they are in the frequent-flyer files of Air Magellan, which implies very serious resources.”
“There was a woman, on the plane… She had the seat beside me. Then I had to carry her suitcase, and she and her boyfriend gave me a ride into Tokyo…”
“You carried her suitcase?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me this story. All of it. When did you first see this woman?”
“In the airport, SeaTac. They were doing noninvasive DNA samples and I saw her do this weird thing…” Chia began the story of Maryalice and the rest of it, while Zona Rosa sat and peeled and sharpened her stick, frowning.
“Fuck your mother,” Zona Rosa said, when Chia had finished her story. The translation rendered her tone as either amazement or disgust, Chia couldn't tell.
“What?” Chia's confusion was absolute.
Zona looked at her along the length of the peeled stick. “An idiom. Idioma. Very rich and complicated. It has nothing to do with your mother.” She lowered the stick and did something to her knife, folding the blade away with a triple click. The lizard she'd adjusted earlier came scurrying low across a narrow ledge of rock, clinging so close as to appear two-dimensional. Zona picked it up and stroked it into yet another color-configuration.
“What are you doing?”
“Harder encryption,” Zona said, and put the lizard on the lapel of her jacket, where it clung like a brooch, its eyes tiny spheres of onyx. “Someone is looking for you. Probably they've already found you. We must try to insure that our conversation is secure.”
“Can you do that, with him?” The lizard's head moved.
“Maybe. He's new. But those are better.” She pointed up with the stick. Chia squinted into the evening sky, dark cloud tinted with streaks of sunset pink. She thought she saw a sweep of wings, so high. Two things flying. Big. Not planes. But then they were gone. “Illegal, in your country. Colombian. From the data-havens.” Zona put the pointed end of her stick on the ground and began to twirl it one way, then the other, between her palms. Chia had seen a rabbit make fire that way, once, in an ancient cartoon. “You are an idiot.”
“Why?”
“You carried a bag through customs? A stranger's bag?”
“Yes…”
“Idiot!”
“I am not.”
“She is a smuggler. You are hopelessly naive.”
But you went along with sending me here, Chia thought, and suddenly felt like crying. “But why are they looking for me?”
Zona shrugged. “In the District, a cautious smuggler would not let a mule go free…”
Something silvery and cold executed a tight little flip somewhere behind and below Chia's navel, and with it came the unwelcome recollection of the washroom at Whiskey Clone, and the corner of some-thing she hadn't recognized. In her bag. Stuffed down between her t-shirts. When she'd used one to dry her hands.
“What's wrong?”
“I better go. Mitsuko went to make tea…” Talking too quickly, biting off the words.
“Go? Are you insane? We must—”
“Sorry. 'Bye.” Pulling off the goggles and scrabbling at the wrist-fasteners.
Her bag there, where she'd left it.
17. The Walls of Fame
“We had no time to do this right,” the woman said, handing Laney the eyephones. He was sitting on a child-sized pink plastic bench that matched the table. “If there is a way to do it right.”
“There are areas we could not arrange access to,” said the Japanese-American with the ponytail. “Blackwell said you've had experience with celebrities.”
“Actors,” Laney said. “Musicians, politicians…”
“You'll probably find this different. Bigger. By a couple of degrees of magnitude.”
“What can't you access?” Laney asked, settling the 'phones over his eyes.
“We don't know,” he heard the woman say. “You'll get a sense of the scale of things, going in. The blanks might be accountancy, tax-law stuff, contracts… We're just tech support. He has other people someone pays to make sure parts of it stay as private as possible.”
“Then why not bring them in?” Laney asked.
He felt Blackwell's hand come down on his shoulder like a bag of sand. “I'll discuss that with you later. Now get in there and have a look. What we pay you for, isn't it?”
In the week following Alison Shires' death, Laney had used Out of Control's DatAmerica account to re-access the site of her personal data. The nodal point was gone, and a certain subtle reduction had taken place. Not a shrinkage so much as a tidying, a folding in.
But the biggest difference was simply that she was no longer generating data. There was no credit activity. Even her Upful Groupvine account had been canceled. As her estate was executed, and various business affairs terminated, her data began to take on a neat rectilinearity. Laney thought of the dead bundled squarely in their graveclothes, of coffins and cairns, of the long straight avenues of cemeteries in the days when the dead had been afforded their own real estate.
The nodal point had formed where she had lived, while she had lived, in the messy, constantly proliferating interface with the ordinary yet endlessly multiplex world. Now there was no longer an interface.
He'd looked, but only briefly, and very cautiously, to see whether her actor might be undertaking tidying activities of his own. Nothing obvious there, but he imagined Out of Control would have set a more careful watch on that.
Her data was very still. Only a faint, methodical movement at its core: something to do with the ongoing legal mechanism of the execution of her estate.
A catalog of each piece of furniture in the bedroom of a guesthouse in Ireland. A subcatalog of the products provided in the seventeenth-century walnut commode at bedside the
re: toothbrush, toothpaste, analgesic tablets, tampons, razor, shaving gel. Someone would check these periodically, restock to the inventory. (The last guest had taken the gel but not the razor.) In the first catalog, there was a powerful pair of Austrian binoculars, tripod-mounted, which also functioned as a digital camera.
Laney accessed its memory, discovering that the recording function had been used exactly once, on the day the manufacturer's warranty had been activated. The warranty was now two months void, the single recorded image a view from a white-curtained balcony, looking toward what Laney took to be the Irish Sea. There was an unlikely palm tree, a length of chainlink fence, a railbed with a twin dull gleam of track, a deep expanse of grayish-brown beach, and then the gray and silver sea. Closer to the sea, partially cut off by the image's border, there appeared to be a low, broad fort of stone, like a truncated tower. Its stones were the color of the beach.
Laney tried to quit the bedroom, the guesthouse, and found himself surrounded by archaeologically precise records of the restoration of five vast ceramic stoves in an apartment in Stockholm. These were like giant chess pieces, towers of brick faced with elaborately glazed, lavishly molded ceramic. They rose to the fourteen-foot ceilings, and several people could easily have stood upright in one. There was a record of the numbering, disassembly, cleaning, restoration, and reassembly of each brick in each stove. There was no way to access the rest of the apartment, but the proportions of the stoves led Laney to assume that it was very large. He clicked to the end of the stove-record and noted the final price of the work; at current rates it was more than several times his former annual salary at Slitscan.
He clicked back, through points of recession, trying for a wider view, a sense of form, but there were only walls, bulking masses of meticulously arranged information, and he remembered Alison Shires and his apprehension of her data-death.
“The lights are on,” Laney said, removing the eyephones, “but there's nobody home.” He checked the computer's clock: he'd spent a little over twenty minutes in there.