But Laney knew now that the idoru was more complex, more powerful, than any Hollywood synthespian. Particularly if Kuwayama were telling the truth about the videos being her dreams. All he knew about artificial intelligence came from work hed done on a Slitscan episode documenting the unhappy personal life of one of the fields leading researchers, but he knew that true AI was assumed never to have been achieved, and that current attempts to achieve it were supposed to be in directions quite opposite the creation of software that was good at acting like beautiful young women.
If there were going to be genuine AI, the argument ran, it was most likely to evolve in ways that had least to do with pretending to be human. Laney remembered screening a lecture in which the Slitscan episodes subject had suggested that AI might be created accidentally, and that people might not initially recognize it for what it was.
Arleigh opened the door on the drivers side and got in. Sorry this is taking so long, she said.
You werent expecting it, Laney said.
It isnt the software, its an optical valve. A cable-tip. They use a different gauge, one the French use. She curled her hands around the top of the wheel and rested her chin on them. So were dealing with these huge volumes of information, no problem, but we dont have the right cable to pour it through.
Can you fix it?
Shannons got one in his room, Probably on a porno outfit, but he wont admit it. She looked at him sideways. Shannons got a friend on the security team. His friend says that Blackwell questioned one of the men who tried to grab Rez tonight.
Thats who they were after? Rez?
Seems like it. Theyre Kombinat, and they claim Rez has hijacked something of theirs.
Hijacked what?
He didnt know. She closed her eyes.
What do you think happened to him, the one Blackwell questioned?
I dont know, She opened her eyes, straightened up. But somehow I dont think well find out.
Can he do that? Torture people? Kill them?
She looked at Laney. Well, she said, finally, he does have a certain advantage, making us think he might. Its an established fact that he did that in his previous line of work. You know what scares me most about Blackwell?
What?
Sometimes I find myself getting used to him.
Shannon rapped on the door beside her. Held up a length of cable.
Ready when you are, she said to Laney, opening the door and sliding from behind the wheel.
Laney looked through the tinted windshield at the concrete wall and remembered policing the steps outside the Municipal Court in Gainesville with Shaquille and Kenny, two others from the orphanage. Shaquille had gone on to the drug-testing program with Laney, but Kenny had been transferred to another facility, near Denver. Laney had no idea what had become of either of them, but it had been Shaquille whod pointed out to Laney that when the injection had the real stuff in it, your mouth filled with a taste like corroded metal, aluminum or something. Pl-ceebo, Shaquille had said, dont taste. And it was true. You could tell right away.
The three of them had had Work Experience there, five or six times, picking up the offerings people left before their day in court. These were considered to be a health hazard, and were usually carefully hidden, and you often found them by the smell, or the buzzing of flies. Parts of chickens, usually, tied up with colored yarn. What Shaquille said was the head of a goat, once. Shaquille said the people who left these things were drug dealers, and they did it because it was their religion. Laney and the others wore pale green latex gloves with orange Kevlar thimbles on the tips that gave you heat rash. They put the offerings in a white snap-top bucket with peeling Biohazard stickers. Shaquille had claimed to know the names of some of the gods these things were offered up to, but Laney hadnt been fooled. The names Shaquille made up, like OGunn and Sam Eddy, were obviously just that, and even Shaquille, dropping a white ball of chicken feathers into the bucket, had said an extra lawyer or two was probably a better investment. But they do it while they waitin. Hedge they bet. Laney had actually preferred this to Work Experiences at fast-food franchises, even though it meant they got body-searched for drugs when they got back.
Hed told Yamazaki and Blackwell about knowing that Alison Shires was going to try to commit suicide, and now they must think he could see the future. But he knew he couldnt. That would be like those chicken parts the dealers hid around the courthouse steps changing what was going to happen. What would happen in the future came out of what was happening now. Laney knew he couldnt predict it, and something about the experience of the nodal points made him suspect that nobody could. The nodal points seemed to form when something might be about to change. Then he saw a place where change was most likely, if something triggered it. Maybe something as small as Alison Shires buying the blades for a box-cutter. But if an earthquake had come, that night, and pitched her apartment down into Fountain Avenue Or if shed lost the pack of blades But if shed used credit to buy that Wednesday Night Special, which she couldnt do because it was illegal, and required cash, then it wouldve been obvious to anybody what she might be on the verge of doing.
Arleigh opened the passenger door. You okay?
Sure, Laney said, picking up the eyephones.
Sure?
Lets do it. He looked at the phones.
Its up to you. She touched his arm, Well get you a doctor, after, okay?
Thanks, Laney said, and put the phones on, the taste flooding his mouth
The Lo/Rez data, translucent and intricately interpenetrated by the archives of the bands fan-base, was crawling with new textures, maps that resolved, when he focused on them, into
Shaquille, in his federal-issue sweats, showing Laney the goats head. It had been skinned, and nails had been driven into it, and Shaquille had pried open the jaw to show where the missing tongue had been replaced with a blood-soaked piece of brown paper with writing on it, That would be the name of the prosecutor, Shaquille had explained.
Laney shut his eyes, but the image remained.
He opened them on the idoru, her features rimmed with fur. She was looking at him. She wore some kind of embroidered, fur-lined hat, with earflaps, and snow was swirling around her, but then she flattened, dwindling into the texture-maps that ran down through the reef of data, and he let himself go, go with that, and he felt himself pass through the core of it, the very center, and out the other side.
Wait he said, and there seemed to be a lag before he heard his own voice.
Perspective, the idoru said. Yamazakis parallax. Something seemed to turn him around, so that he looked directly at the data, but from some new angle, and from a great distance. And all around it, there was nothing at all.
But through the data, like some infinitely more complex version of Arleighs Realtree, ran two vaguely parallel armatures. Rez and the idoru. They were sculpted in duration, Rezs beginning, at the far end of it all, as something very minor, the first hints of his career. And growing, as it progressed, to something braided, multistranded But then it began to get smaller again, Laney saw, the strands loosening And that would be the point, he thought, where the singer began to become the thing that Kathy hated, the one who took up celebrity space just because he was a celebrity, because he was of a certain order of magnitude
The idorus data began somewhere after that, and it began as something smoothly formed, deliberate, but lacking complexity. But at the points where it had swerved closest to Rezs data, he saw that it had begun to acquire a sort of complexity. Or randomness, he thought. The human thing. Thats how she learns.