If you dont do it now, she said, we dont know how long itll take to get it all up and running again.
So well do it.
You dont look like you should even be walking.
He started walking, unsteadily, as if by way of demonstration. Wheres Rez?
Blackwells taken him back to his hotel. The sweep team didnt find anything. This way. She led him along a line of surgically clean grills and bumpers. He saw the green van parked with its front to the wall, its hatch and doors open. It was fenced behind orange plastic barricades, and surrounded by the black modules. Shannon, the redhaired tech, was doing something to a red and black cube centered on a folding plastic table.
Whats that? Laney asked.
Espresso, he said, his hand inside the housing, but I think the gaskets warped.
Sit here, Laney, Arleigh said, indicating the vans front passenger seat. It reclines.
Laney climbed up into the seat. Dont try it, he said. You might not be able to wake me up.
Yamazaki appeared, over Arleighs shoulder, blinking. You will access the Lo/Rez data as before, Laney-san, but you will simultaneously access the fan-activity base. Depth of field. Dimensionality. The fan-activity data providing the degree of personalization you requite. Parallax, yes?
Arleigh handed Laney the eyephones. Have a look, she said. If it doesnt work, to hell with it. Yamazaki flinched. Either way, well go and find you the hotel doctor, after.
Laney settled his neck against the seats headrest and put the phones on.
Nothing. He closed his eyes. Heard the phones power up. Opened his eyes to those same faces of data hed seen earlier, in Akihabara. Characterless. Institutional in their regularity.
Here comes the fan club, he heard Arleigh say, and the barren faces were suddenly translucent, networked depths of postings and commentary revealed there in baffling organic complexity.
Somethings he started to say, but then he was back in the apartment in Stockholm, with the huge ceramic stoves. But it was a place this time, not just a million tidily filed factoids. Shadows of flames danced behind the narrow mica panes of the stoves ornate iron door.
Candlelight. The floors were wooden planks, each one as broad as Laneys shoulders, spread with the soft tones of old carpets. Something directed his point of view into the next room, past a leather sofa spread with more and smaller rugs, and showed him the black window beyond the open drapes, where snowflakes, very large and ornate, fell with a deliberate gravity past the frosted panes.
Getting anything? Arleigh. Somewhere far away.
He didnt answer, watching as his view reversed. To be maneuvered down a central hallway, where a tall oval mirror showed no reflection as he passed. He thought of CD-ROMs hed explored in the orphanage: haunted castles, monstrously infested spacecraft abandoned in orbit Click here. Click there. And somehow hed always felt that he never found the central marvel, the thing that would have made the hunt worthwhile. Because it wasnt there, hed finally decided; it never quite was, and so hed lost interest in those games.
But the central marvel hereclick on bedroomwas Rei Toei. Propped on white pillows at the head of a sea of white, her head and gowned shoulders showing above eyelet lace and the glow of fine cottons.
You were our guest tonight, she said. I wasnt able to speak with you. I am sorry. It ended badly, and you were injured.
He looked at her, waiting for the mountain valleys and the bells, but she only looked back, nothing came, and he remembered what Yamazaki had said about bandwidth.
A stab of pain in his side. How do you know? That I was injured?
The preliminary Lo/Rez security report. Technician Paul Shannon states that you appeared to have been injured.
Why are you here? (Laney, he heard Arleigh say, are you okay?)
I found it, the idoru said. Isnt it wonderful? But he has not been here since the renovations were completed. So, really, hes never been here. But youve been here before, havent you? I think thats how I found it. She smiled. She was very beautiful here, floating in this whiteness. He hadnt been able to really look at her in the Western World.
I accessed it earlier, he said, but it wasnt like this.
But then it rounded out, didnt it? It became so much better. Because one of the artisans who reassembled the stoves had made a record of it all, when it was done. Just for herself, for her friends, but you see what its done. It was in the data from the fan club. She gazed in delight at a single taper, banded horizontally in cream and indigo, that burned in a candlestick of burnished brass. Beside it on the bedside table were a book and an orange. I feel very close to him, here.
Id feel closer to him if youd put me back, outside.
In the street? Its snowing. And Im not certain the street is there.
In the general data-construct, Please. So I can do my job
Oh, she said, and smiled at him, and he was staring into the tangled depths of the data-faces.
Laney? Arleigh said, touching his shoulder. Who are you talking to?
The idoru, Laney said.
In nodal manifestation? Yamazaki.
No. She was there in the data, I dont know how. She was in a model of his place in Stockholm. Said she got there because Id cruised it before. Then I asked her to put me back out here.
Out where? Arleigh asked.
Where I can see, Laney said, staring down into intricately overgrown canyons, dense with branchings that reminded him of Arleighs Realtree 7.2, but organic somehow, every segment thickly patched with commentary. Yamazaki was right. The fan stuff seems to do it.
He heard Gerrard Delouvrier, back in the TIDAL labs, urge him notto focus. What you do, it is opposite of the concentration, but we will learn to direct it.
Drift. Down through deltas of former girlfriends, degrees of confirmation of girlfriendhood, personal sightings of Rez or Lo together with whichever woman in whatever public place, each account illuminated with the importance the event had held for whoever had posted it. This being for Laney the most peculiar aspect of this data, the perspective in which these two loomed. Human in every detail but then not so. Everything scrupulously, fanatically accurate, probably, but always assembled around the hollow armature of celebrity. He could see celebrity here, not like Kathys idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the bands fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos, was the merest fragment of that.
But this is my favorite, Laney heard the idoru say, and then he was watching Rez mount a low stage in a crowded club of some kind, everything psychedelic Korean pinks, hypersaturated tints like cartoon versions of the flesh of tropical melons. It is what we feel. Rez raised a microphone and began to speak of new modes of being, of something he called the alchemical marriage.
And somewhere Arleighs hand was on his arm, her voice tense. Laney? Sorry. We need you back here now. Mr. Kuwayama is here.
34. Casino
Chia looked out between the dusty slats, to the street where it was raining. The idoru had done that. Chia had never made it rain, in Venice, but she didnt mind the way it looked. It seemed to fit. It was like Seattle.
The idoru said this apartment was called a casino. Chia had seen casinos on television and they hadnt looked anything like this. This was a few small rooms with flaking plaster walls, and big old-fashioned furniture with gold lion-feet. Everything worked up with fractals so you could almost smell it. It wouldve smelled dusty, she thought, and also like perfume. Chia hadnt been to many of these modules, the insides of her Venice, because they were all sort of creepy. They didnt give her the feeling she got in the streets.