A what?
Otaku, Mitsuko said carefully in Japanese. The translation burped its clumsy word string again.
Oh, Chia said, we have those. We even use the same word.
I think that in America they are not the same, Mitsuko said.
Well, Chia said, its a boything, right? The otaku guys at my last school were into, like, plastic anime babes, military simulations, and trivia. Bigtime into trivia. She watched Mitsuko listen to the translation.
Yes, Mitsuko said, but you say they go to school. Ours do not go to school. They complete their studies on-line, and that is bad, because they cheat easily. Then they are tested, later, and are caught, and fail, but they do not care, It is a social problem.
Your brothers one?
Yes, Mitsuko said. He lives in Walled City.
In where?
A multi-user domain. It is his obsession. Like a drug. He has a room here. He seldom leaves it. All his waking hours he is in Walled City. His dreams, too, I think.
Chia tried to get more of a sense of Hiromi Ogawa, before the noon meeting, but with mixed results. She was older, seventeen (as old as Zona Rosa) and had been in the club for at least five years. She was possibly overweight (though this had had to be conveyed in intercultural girl-code, nothing overt) and favored elaborate iconics. But overall Chia kept running up against Mitsukos sense of her duty to her chapter, and of her own position, and of Hiromis position.
Chia hated club politics, and she was beginning to suspect they might pose a real problem here.
Mitsuko was getting her computer out. It was one of those soft, transparent Korean units, the kind that looked like a flat bag of clear white jelly with a bunch of colored jujubes inside. Chia unzipped her bag and pulled her Sandbenders out.
What is that? Mitsuko asked.
My computer.
Mitsuko was clearly impressed. It is by Harley-Davidson?
It was made by the Sandbenders, Chia said, finding her goggles and gloves. Theyre a commune, down on the Oregon coast. They do these and they do software.
It is American?
Sure.
I had not known Americans made computers, Mitsuko said.
Chia worked each silver thimble over the tips of her fingers and thumbs, fastened the wrist straps.
Im ready for the meeting, she said.
Mitsuko giggled nervously.
13. Character Recognition
Yamazaki phoned just before noon. The day was dim and overcast. Laney had closed the curtains in order to avoid seeing the nanotech buildings in that light.
He was watching an NHK show about champion top-spinners. The star, he gathered, was a little girl with pigtails and a blue dress with an old-fashioned sailors collar. She was slightly cross-eyed, perhaps from concentration. The tops were made of wood. Some of them were big, and looked heavy.
Hello, Mr. Laney, Yamazaki said. You are feeling better now?
Laney watched a purple-and-yellow top blur into action as the girl gave the carefully wound cord an expert pull. The commentator held a hand mike near the top to pick up the hum it was producing, then said something in Japanese.
Better than last night, Laney said.
It is being arranged for you to access the data that surrounds our friend. It is a complicated process, as this data has been protected in many different ways. There was no single strategy. The ways in which his privacy has been protected are complexly incremental.
Does our friend know about this?
There was a pause. Laney watched the spinning top. He imagined Yamazaki blinking. No, he does not.
I still dont know who Ill really be working for. For him? For Blackwell?
Your employer is Paragon-Asia Dataflow, Melbourne. They are employing me as well.
What about Blackwell?
Blackwell is employed by a privately held corporation, through which portions of our friends income pass. In the course of our friends career, a structure has been erected to optimize that flow, to minimize losses. That structure now constitutes a corporate entity in its own right.
Management, Laney said. His managements scared because it looks like he might do something crazy. Is that it?
The purple-and-yellow top was starting to exhibit the first of the oscillations that would eventually bring it to a halt. I am still a stranger to this business-culture, Mr. Laney. I find it difficult to assess these things.
What did Blackwell mean, last night, about Rez wanting to marry a Japanese girl who isnt real?
Idoru, Yamazaki said.
What?
Idol-singer. She is Rei Toei. She is a personality-construct, a congeries of software agents, the creation of information-designers. She is akin to what I believe they call a synthespian, in Hollywood.
Laney closed his eyes, opened them. Then how can he marry her?
I dont know, Yamazaki said. But he has very forcefully declared this to be his intention.
Can you tell me what it is theyve hired youto do?
Initially, I think, they hoped I would be able to explain the idoru to them: her appeal to her audience, therefore perhaps her appeal to him. Also, I think that, like Blackwell, they remain unconvinced that this is not the result of a conspiracy of some kind. Now they want me to acquaint you with the cultural background of the situation.
Who are they?
I cannot be more specific now.
The top was starting to wobble. Laney saw something like terror in the girls eyes. You dont think theres a conspiracy?
I will try to answer your questions this evening. In the meantime, while it is being arranged for you to access the data, please study these
Hey, Laney protested, as his top-spinning girl was replaced by an unfamiliar logo: a grinning cartoon bulldog with a spiked collar, up to its muscular neck in a big bowl of soup.
Two documentary videos on Lo/Rez, Yamazaki said. These are on the Dog Soup label, originally a small independent based in East Taipei. They released the bands first recordings. Lo/Rez later purchased Dog Soup and used it to release less commercial material by other artists.
Laney stared glumly at the grinning bulldog, missing the girl with pigtails. Like documentaries about themselves?
The documentaries were not made subject to the bands approval, They are not Lo/Rez corporate documents.
Well, I guess weve got that to be thankful for.
You are welcome. Yamazaki hung up.
The virtual POV zoomed, rotating in on one of the spikes on the dogs collar: in close-up, it was a shining steel pyramid. Reflected clouds whipped past in time-lapse on the towering triangular face as the Universal Copyright Agreement warning scrolled into view.
Laney watched long enough to see that the video was spliced together from bits and pieces of the bands public relations footage. Art-warning, he said, and went into the bathroom to decipher the shower controls.
He managed to miss the first six minutes, showering and brushing his teeth. Hed seen things like that before, art videos, but hed never actually tried to pay attention to one. Putting on the hotels white terry robe, he told himself hed better try. Yamazaki seemed capable of quizzing him on it later.
Why did people make things like this? There was no narration, no apparent structure; some of the same fragments kept repeating throughout, at different speeds.
In Los Angeles there were whole public-access channels devoted to things like this, and home-made talkshows hosted by naked Encino witches, who sat in front of big paintings of the Goddess theyd done in their garages. Except you could watch that. The logic of these cut-ups, he supposed, was that by making one you could somehow push back at the medium. Maybe it was supposed to be something like treading water, a simple repetitive human activity that temporarily provided at least an illusion of parity with the sea. But to Laney, who had spent many of his waking hours down in the deeper realms of data that underlay the worlds of media, it only looked hopeless. And tedious, too, although he supposed that that boredom was somehow meant to be harnessed, here, another way of pushing back.