When hed gone to interview for Slitscan, the interviewer had been Kathy Torrance. Hed had no way of knowing that she was a department head, or that she would soon be his boss. He told her the truth about himself. Most of it, anyway.
She was the palest woman Laney had ever seen. Pale to the point of translucence. (Later hed learned this had a lot to do with cosmetics, and in particular a British line that boasted of peculiar light-bending properties.)
Do you always wear Malaysian imitations of Brooks Brothers blue oxford button-downs, Mr. Laney?
Laney had looked down at his shirt, or tried to. Malaysia?
The stitch-counts dead on, but they still havent mastered the thread-tension.
Oh.
Never mind. A little prototypic nerd chic could actually lend a certain frisson, around here. You could lose the tie, though. Definitely lose the tie. And keep a collection of felt-tipped pens in your pocket. Unchewed, please. Plus one of those fat flat highliners, in a really nasty fluorescent shade.
Are you joking?
Probably, Mr. Laney. May I call you Colin?
Yes..
She never did call him Colin, then or ever. Youll find that humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool. Youll find the type thats most viable here is fairly oblique.
How do you mean, Ms. Torrance?
Kathy. I mean difficult to quote effectively in a memo. Or a court of law.
Yamazaki was a good listener. Hed blink, swallow, nod, fiddle with the top button of his plaid shirt, whatever, all of it managing to somehow convey that he was getting it, the drift of Laneys story.
Keith Alan Blackwell was something else. He sat there inert as a bale of beef, utterly motionless except when hed raise his left hand and squeeze and twiddle the lobe-stump that was all that remained of his left ear. He did this without hesitation or embarrassment, and Laney formed the impression that it was affording him some kind of relief. The scar tissue reddened slightly under Blackwells ministrations.
Laney sat on an upholstered bench, his back to the wall. Yamazaki and Blackwell faced him across the narrow table. Behind them, over the uniformly black-haired heads of late-night Roppongi coffee-drinkers, the holographic features of the chains namesake floated in front of a lurid sunset vista of snow-capped Andean peaks. The lips of the toon-Amos were like inflated red rubber sausages, a racial parody that wouldve earned the place a firebombing anywhere in the L.A. basin. He was holding up a steaming coffee cup, white and smoothly iconic, in a big, white-gloved, three-fingered Disney hand.
Yamazaki coughed, delicately. You are telling us, please, about your experiences at Slitscan?
Kathy Torrance began by offering Laney a chance to net-surf, Slitscan style.
She checked a pair of computers out of the Cage, shooed four employees from an SBU, invited Laney in, and closed the door. Chairs, a round table, a large softboard on the wall. He watched as she jacked the computers into dataports and called up identical images of a longhaired dirty-blond guy in his mid-twenties. Goatee and a gold earring. The face meant nothing to Laney. It might have been a face hed passed on the street an hour before, the face of a minor player in daytime soap, or the face of someone whose freezer had recently been discovered to be packed with his victims fingers.
Clinton Hillman, Kathy Torrance said. Hairdresser, sushi chef, music journalist, extra in mid-budget hardcore. This headshots tweaked, of course. She tapped keys, detweaking it. Clint Hillmans eyes and chin, on her screen, grew several clicks smaller. Probably did it himself. With a professional job, thered be nothing to work back from.
He acts in porno? Laney felt obscurely sorry for Hillman, who looked lost and vulnerable without his chin.
It isnt the size of his chin theyre interested in, Kathy said. Its mainly motion-capture, in porno. Extreme close. Theyre all body-doubles. Map on better faces in post. But somebodys still gotta get down in the trenches and bump uglies, right?
Laney shot her a sideways look. If you say so.
She handed Laney an industrial-strength pair of rubberized Thomson eyephones. Do him.
Do?
Him. Go for those nodal points youve been telling me about. The headshots a gateway to everything weve got on him. Whole gigs of sheer boredom. Data like a sea of tapioca, Laney. An endless vanilla plane. Hes boring as the day is long, and the day is long. Do it. Make my day. Do it and youve got yourself a job.
Laney looked at the tweaked Hillman on his screen. You havent told me what Im looking for.
Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscans audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. Its covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.
SBU?
Yamazaki had his notebook out, lightpen poised. Laney found that he didnt mind. It made the man look so much more comfortable. Strategic Business Unit, he said. A small conference room. Slitscans post office.
Post office?
California plan. People dont have their own desks. Check a computer and a phone out of the Cage when you come in. Hotdesk it if you need more peripherals. The SBUs are for meetings, but its hard to get one when you need it. Virtual meetings are a big thing there, better for sensitive topics. You get a locker to keep your personal stuff in. You dont want them to see any printouts. And they hate Post-its.
Why?
Because you mightve written something down from the in-house net, and it might get out. That notebook of yours would never have been allowed out of the Cage. If there was no paper, they had a record of every call, every image called up, every keystroke.
Blackwell nodded now, his stubbled dome catching the red of Amoss inner-tube lips. Security.
And you were successful, Mr. Laney? Yamazaki asked. You found the nodal points?
4. Venice Decompressed
Shut up now, the woman in 23E said, and Chia hadnt said anything at all. Sisters going to tell you a story.
Chia looked up from the seatback screen, where shed been working her way through the eleventh level of a lobotomized airline version of Skull Wars. The blond was looking straight ahead, not at Chia. Her screen was down so that she could use the back of it for a tray, and shed finished another glass of the iced tomato juice she kept paying the flight attendant to bring her. They came, for some reason, with squared-off pieces of celery stuck up in them, like a straw or stir-stick, but the blond didnt seem to want these. Shed stacked five of them in a square on the tray, the way a kid might build the walls of a little house, or a corral for toy animals.
Chia looked down at her thumbs on the disposable Air Magellan touchpad. Back up at the mascaraed eyes. Looking at her now.