He knew that she was screaming because her mouth was open, but the syllables of her rage couldnt penetrate the seamless hissing surf of the white-noise generator provided by his lawyers. Hed been advised to wear the generator at all times, during this last visit to the Slitscan offices. Hed been instructed to make no statements. Certainly he would hear none.
And later he would sometimes wonder exactly how she might have framed her fury. Some restatement of her theory of celebrity and the nature of its price, of Slitscans place in that, of Laneys inability to function there? Or would she have focused on his treason? But he hadnt heard; hed only put these things he didnt really want into a corrugated plastic carton that still smelled faintly of Mexican oranges. The notebook, screen cracked now, useless, that hed carried through college. Insulated mug with the Nissan County logo peeling away. Notes hed made on paper, counter to office policy. A coffeestained fax from a woman hed slept with in Ixtapa, someone whose initials couldnt be deciphered now and whose name hed forgotten. Pointless pieces of the self, destined for a cannister in the buildings parking lot. But hed leave nothing here, and Kathy kept on screaming.
Now, in Death Cube K, he imagined that shed told him that hed never work in that town again, and indeed it seemed he might not. Disloyalty to ones employers being a particularly difficult notch on anyones ticket, and perhaps particularly so, in that town, when the act itself had sprung from what Laney recalled had once been called scruples.
The word itself striking him now as singularly ridiculous.
You smiled. Blackwell staring at him from across the tiny table.
Seratonin depletion.
Food, said Blackwell.
Im not really hungry.
Need to carbo-load, Blackwell said, standing. He took up a remarkable amount of space.
Laney and Yamazaki got to their feet and followed Blackwell down out of Death Cube K, to descend the O My Golly Building itself. Out of roach-light, into the chrome and neon gulch of Roppongi Dori. A reek of putrid fish and fruit even in this chill damp night, though muted somewhat by the baking-sugar sweetness of Chinese gasohol from the vehicles whirring past on the expressway. But there was comfort in the steady voice of traffic, and Laney found it better to be upright, moving.
If he kept moving, perhaps he could puzzle out the meaning of Keith Alan Blackwell and Shinya Yamazaki.
Blackwell leading the way across a pedestrian overpass. Laneys hand brushed an irregularity on the alloy rail. He saw that it was an accidental fold or pucker in a bright little sticker; a bare-breasted girl smiling up at him from a palm-sized silvery hologram. As his angle of vision changed, she seemed to gesture at the telephone number above her head. The railing, end to end, was dressed with these small ads, though there were precise gaps where a few had been peeled away for later perusal.
Blackwells bulk parted the sidewalk crowd on the far side like a freighter through a bobbing stream of pleasure craft. Carbohydrates, he said, over a mountainous shoulder. He steered them down an alley, a narrow maw of colored light, past an all-night veterinary clinic in whose window a pair of white-gowned surgeons were performing an operation on what Laney hoped was a cat. A relaxed little tableau of pedestrians paused here, observing from the pavement.
Blackwell eased himself edgewise into a bright cave, where steam rose from cookers behind a counter of reconstituted granite.
Laney and Yamazaki followed him in, the counterman already ladling out fragrant messes of broth-slick beige to the Australians order.
Laney watched Blackwell raise the bowl to his mouth and apparently inhale the bulk of his noodles, severing them from the remainder with a neat snap of his bright plastic teeth. Muscles in the mans thick neck worked mightily as he swallowed.
Laney stared.
Blackwell wiped his mouth with the back of one vast and pinkly jigsawed hand. He belched. Give us one of those baby tubes of Dry He downed the entire beer in a single swallow, absently crushing the sturdy steel can as though it were a paper cup. Similar, he said, rattling his bowl for the counterman.
Laney, suddenly ravenous in spite or because of this gluttonous display, gave his attention to his own bowl, where dyed pink slices of mystery meat, thin as paper, basked atop a sargasso of noodles.
Laney ate in silence, as did Yamazaki, Blackwell downing another three beers to no apparent effect. As Laney drank off the remaining broth, and put his bowl down on the counter, he noticed an ad behind the counter for something called Apple Shires Authentic Fine Fruit Beverage. Misreading it initially as Alison Shires, once the object of his scruples.
Taste the wet warm life in Apple Shires, the ad advised.
Alison Shires, glimpsed first as animated headshots, five months into his time at Slitscan, had been a rather ordinarily attractive girl murmuring her stats to imagined casting directors, agents, someone, anyone.
Kathy Torrance had watched his face, as he watched the screen. Babed out yet, Laney? Allergic reaction to cute? First symptoms are a sort of underlying irritation, a resentment, a vague but persistent feeling that youre being gotten at, taken advantage of
She isnt even as cute as the last two.
Exactly. Shes almost normal-looking. Almost a civilian. Tag her.
Laney looked up. What for?
Tag her. He could get off pretending shes a waitress or something.
You think shes the one?
Youve got another three hundred in there easy, Laney. Picking probables is a start.
At random?
We call it instinct. Tag her.
Laney cursor-clicked, the pale blue arrow resting by chance in the shadowed orbit of the girls lowered eye. Marking her for closer examination as the possible sometime partner of a very publicly married actor, famous in a way that Kathy Torrance understood and approved of. One who must obey the dictates of the food chain. Not too big for Slitscan to swallow. But he or his handlers had so far been very cautious. Or very lucky.
But no more. A rumor had reached Kathy, via one of those back channels she depended on, and now the food chain must have its way.
Wake up, Blackwell said. Youre falling asleep in your bowl. Time you tell us how you lost your last job, if were going to offer you another.
Coffee, Laney said.
Laney was not, he was careful to point out, a voyeur. He had a peculiar knack with data-collection architectures, and a medically documented concentration-deficit that he could toggle, under certain conditions, into a state of pathological hyperfocus. This made him, he continued over lattes in a Roppongi branch of Amos n Andes, an extremely good researcher. (He made no mention of the Federal Orphanage in Gainesville, nor of any attempts that might have been made there to cure his concentration-deficit. The 5-SB trials or any of that.)
The relevant data, in terms of his current employability, was that he was an intuitive fisher of patterns of information: of the sort of signature a particular individual inadvertently created in the net as he or she went about the mundane yet endlessly multiplex business of life in a digital society. Laneys concentration-deficit, too slight to register on some scales, made him a natural channel-zapper, shifting from program to program, from database to database, from platform to platform, in a way that was, well, intuitive.
And that was the catch, really, when it came to finding employment: Laney was the equivalent of a dowser, a cybernetic water-witch. He couldnt explain how he did what he did. He just didnt know.
Hed come to Slitscan from DatAmerica, where hed been a research assistant on a project code named TIDAL. It said something about the corporate culture of DatAmerica that Laney had never been able to discover whether or not TIDAL was an acronym, or (even remotely) what TIDAL was about. Hed spent his time skimming vast floes of undifferentiated data, looking for nodal points hed been trained to recognize by a team of French scientists who were all keen tennis players, and none of whom had had any interest in explaining these nodal points to Laney, who came to feel that he served as a kind of native guide. Whatever the Frenchmen were after, he was there to scare it up for them. And it beat Gainesville, no contest. Until TIDAL, whatever it was, had been cancelled, and there didnt seem to be anything else for Laney to do at DatAmerica. The Frenchmen were gone, and when Laney tried to talk to other researchers about what theyd been doing, they looked at him as though they thought he was crazy.