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  Now, in Death Cube K, he imagined that she'd told him that he'd never work in that town again, and indeed it seemed he might not. Disloyalty to one's employers being a particularly difficult notch on anyone's 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.

  “I'm 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. Laney's 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.

  Blackwell's 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 Australian's 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 man's 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 you're being gotten at, taken advantage of…”

  “She isn't even as ‘cute’ as the last two.”

  “Exactly. She's almost normal-looking. Almost a civilian. Tag her.”

  Laney looked up. “What for?”

  “Tag her. He could get off pretending she's a waitress or some-thing.”

  “You think she's the one?”

  “You've 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 girl's 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. “You're falling asleep in your bowl. Time you tell us how you lost your last job, if we're 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. Laney's 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 couldn't explain how he did what he did. He just didn't know.

  He'd come to Slitscan from DatAmerica, where he'd 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. He'd spent his time skimming vast floes of undifferentiated data, looking for “nodal points” he'd 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 didn't 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 they'd been doing, they looked at him as though they thought he was crazy.

  When he'd gone to interview for Slitscan, the interviewer had been Kathy Torrance. He'd 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 he'd 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-count's dead on, but they still haven't 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. “You'll find that humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool. You'll find the type that's 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. He'd 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 Laney's story.

  Keith Alan Blackwell was something else. He sat there inert as a bale of beef, utterly motionless except when he'd 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 Blackwell's 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 chain's 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 would've 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 ur-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 he'd 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 headshot's tweaked, of course.” She tapped keys, detweaking it. Clint Hillman's eyes and chin, on her screen, grew several clicks smaller. “Probably did it himself. With a professional job, there'd 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 isn't the size of his chin they're interested in,” Kathy said. “It's mainly motion-capture, in porno. Extreme close. They're all body-doubles. Map on better faces in post. But somebody's 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 you've been telling me about. The headshot's a gateway to everything we've got on him. Whole gigs of sheer boredom. Data like a sea of tapioca, Laney. An endless vanilla plane. He's boring as the day is long, and the day is long. Do it. Make my day. Do it and you've got yourself a job.”

  Laney looked at the tweaked Hillman on his screen. “You haven't told me what I'm looking for.”

  “Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's 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. It's 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 didn't mind. It made the man look so much more comfortable. “Strategic Business Unit,” he said. “A small conference room. Slitscan's post office.”

  “Post office?”

  “California plan. People don't 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 it's 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 don't want them to see any printouts. And they hate Post-its.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you might've 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 Amos's 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 hadn't said anything at all. “Sister's going to tell you a story.”

  Chia looked up from the seatback screen, where she'd 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 she'd 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 didn't seem to want these. She'd 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.

  “There's a place where it's always light,” the woman said. “Bright, everywhere. No place dark. Bright like a mist, like something falling, always, every second. All the colors of it. Towers you can't see the top of, and the light falling. Down below, they pile up bars. Bars and strip clubs and discos. Stacked up like shoe boxes, one on top of the other. And no matter how far you worm your way in, no matter how many stairs you climb, how many elevators you ride, no matter how small a room you finally get to, the light still finds you. It's a light that blows in under the door, like powder. Fine, so fine. Blows in under your eyelids, if you find a way to get to sleep. But you don't want to sleep there. Not in Shinjuku. Do you?”

  Chia was suddenly aware of the sheer physical mass of the plane, of the terrible unlikeliness of its passage through space, of its airframe vibrating through frozen night somewhere above the sea, off the coast of Alaska now—impossible but true. “No,” Chia heard herself say, as Skull Wars, noting her inattention, dumped her back a level.

  “No,” the woman agreed, “you don't. I know. But they make you. They make you. At the center of the world.” And then she put her head back, closed her eyes, and began to snore.

  Chia exited Skull Wars
and tucked the touchpad into the seatback pocket. She felt like screaming. What had that been about?

  The attendant came by, scooped up the corral of celery sticks in a napkin, took the woman's glass, wiped the tray, and snapped it up into position in the seatback.

  “My bag?” Chia said. “In the bin?” She pointed.

  He opened the hatch above her, pulled out her bag, and lowered it into her lap.

  “How do you undo these?” She touched the loops of tough red jelly that held the zip-tabs together.

  He took a small black tool from a black holster on his belt. It looked like something she'd seen a vet use to trim a dog's nails. He held his other hand cupped, to catch the little balls the loops became when he snipped them with the tool.

  “Okay to run this?” She pulled a zip and showed him her Sand-benders, stuffed in between four pairs of rolled-up tights.

  “You can't port back here; only in business or first,” he said. “But you can access what you've got. Cable to the seatback display, if you want.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Got gogs.” He moved on.

  The blond's snore faltered in mid-buzz as they jolted over a pocket of turbulence. Chia dug her glasses and tip-sets from their nests of clean underwear, putting them beside her, between her hip and the armrest. She pulled the Sandbenders out, zipped the bag shut, and used her free hand and both feet to wedge the bag under the seat in front of her. She wanted out of here so bad.

  With the Sandbenders across her thighs, she thumbed a battery check. Eight hours on miser mode, if she was lucky. But right now she didn't care. She uncoiled the lead from around the bridge of her glasses and jacked it. The tip-sets were tangled, like they always were. Take your time, she told herself. A torn sensor-band and she'd be here all night with an Ashleigh Modine Carter clone. Little silver thimbles, flexy framework fingers; easy did it…. Plug for each one. Jack and jack…