Pattern Recognition

"I don't think I follow you, Hubertus."

"The London office. She thinks I am going to hire you to run the London office."

"That's absurd." And it is, huge relief, as Cayce is not someone you hire to run an agency in London. Not someone you hire to run anything. She is hyper-specialized, a freelancer, someone contracted to do a very specific job. She has seldom had a salary. She is entirely a creature of fees, adamantly short-term, no managerial skills whatever. But mainly she's relieved if it isn't sexual. Or at least that he seems to have indicated that it isn't. She feels herself held by those eyes, against all conscious will. Progressively locked into something.

Bigend's hand comes up with his glass, and he finishes his kir. "She knows that I'm very interested in you. She wants to work for Blue Ant, and she covets Bernard's position. She's been angling to leave H and P since well before they made her our liaison."

I can't see it," Cayce says, meaning replacing Stonestreet with

Dorotea. "She's not exactly a people person." An insane bitch, actually. Burner of jackets and burglar of apartments.

"No, of course not. She'd be a complete disaster. And I've been delighted with Bernard since the day I hired him. Dorotea may be one of those people who aren't going to make it through."

"Through what?"

"This business of ours is narrowing. Like many others. There will be fewer genuine players. It's no longer enough to simply look the part and cultivate an attitude."

Cayce has imagined something like this herself, and indeed has been wondering whether she's likely to make it through the narrowing, into whatever waits on the other side.

"You're smart enough," he says. "You can't doubt it."

She'll take a page from his book, then. Caltrop time. "Why are you rebranding the world's second-largest manufacturer of athletic shoes? Was it your idea or theirs?"

"I don't work that way. The client and I engage in a dialogue. A path emerges. It isn't about the imposition of creative will." He's looking at her very seriously now, and to her embarrassment she feels herself shiver. She hopes he didn't notice. If Bigend can convince himself that he doesn't impose his will on others, he must be capable of convincing himself of anything. "It's about contingency. I help the client go where things are already going. Do you want to know the most interesting thing about Dorotea?"

"What?"

"She once worked for a very specialized consultancy, in Paris. Founded by a retired and very senior French intelligence type who'd done a lot of that sort of work on his government's behalf, in Germany and the United States."

"She's… a spy?"

"'Industrial espionage,' though that's sounding increasingly archaic, isn't it? I suppose she may still know whom to call, to have certain things done, but I wouldn't call her a spy. What interested me, though, was how that business seemed in some ways to be the inverse of ours."

"Of advertising?"

"Yes. I want to make the public aware of something they don't quite yet know that they know—or have them feel that way. Because they'll move on that, do you understand? They'll think they've thought of it first. It's about transferring information, but at the same time about a certain lack of specificity."

Cayce tries to put this together with what she's seen of Blue Ant campaigns. It makes a degree of sense.

"I imagined," he continues, "that the sort of business Dorotea had been involved in would be about absolutely specific information."

"And was it?"

"Sometimes, yes, but just as often it was simply 'black PR.' Painting the competition with the ugly-brush. It wasn't really very interesting."

"But you were considering her for a position?"

"Yes, though not one she would have chosen for herself. But now we've made it clear we aren't interested. If she thinks that you may get the position she wanted, she could be very angry."

What's he trying to tell her? Should she tell him about the jacket, about Asian Sluts? No. She doesn't trust him, not at all.

Dorotea as corporate spook? Bigend as someone who'd be interested in someone like that? Or who claimed he'd been interested. Or claimed he wasn't still interested. None of it might be true.

Well," Bigend says, leaning slightly forward, "let's hear it."

"Hear what?"

"The kiss. What you think about it."

Cayce instantly knows what kiss he's talking about, but the contextual shift required to reframe Bigend as a footagehead is so peculiar, so vast a rotation, that she can only sit there, feeling her diaphragm re-spending slightly to the bottom end of the music—which until an instant ago she'd ceased entirely to be aware of. Someone, a woman, laughs brightly at another table.

"What kiss?" Reflex.

Bigend responds by reaching inside the raincoat he hasn't taken off and pulling out a dapper-looking matte-silver cigarette case, which when he places it on the table becomes a titanium DVD player that opens as of its own accord, a touch of his fingertip calling up segment #135. She watches the kiss, looks up at Bigend. "That kiss," he says.

"What's your question, exactly?" Stalling for time.

"I want to know how significant you think it is, in terms of previous uploads."

"Since we can only speculate about its position in a hypothetical narrative, how can we judge its relative significance?"

He turns the player off, closes it.

"That's not my question. I'm not asking vis-a-vis segments of a narrative, but in terms of the actual sequential order of uploaded segments."

Cayce isn't used to thinking of the footage in those terms, although she recognizes them. She thinks she knows where Bigend is probably heading with this, but opts to play dumb. "But they clearly aren't in a logical narrative sequence. Either they're uploaded randomly—"

"Or very carefully, intending to provide the illusion of randomness. Regardless, and regardless of everything else, the footage has already been the single most effective piece of guerilla marketing ever. I've been tracking hits on enthusiast sites, and searching for mentions elsewhere. The numbers are amazing. Your friend in Korea—"

"How do you know about that?"

"I've had people look at all the sites. In fact we monitor them on a constant basis. Your contributions are some of the more useful material we've come across. 'CayceP,' when you start to know the players, is obviously you. Your interest in the footage is therefore a matter of public record, and to be interested, in this case, is to be involved to whatever extent in a subculture."

The idea that Bigend, or his employees, have been lurking on F:F:F will take some getting used to. The site had come to feel like a second home, but she'd always known that it was also a fishbowl; it felt like a friend's living room, but it was a sort of text-based broadcast, available in its entirety to anyone who cared to access it.

"Hubertus," carefully, "what exactly is the nature of your interest in this?"

Bigend smiles. He should learn not to do that, she thinks, otherwise he was undeniably good-looking. Or perhaps there were oral surgeons capable of artful downsizing? "Am I a true believer? That is your first question. Because you are one yourself. You care passionately about this thing. It's completely evident in your posts. That is what makes you so valuable. That and your talents, your allergies, your tame pathologies, the things that make you a secret legend in the world of marketing. But am I a believer? My passion is marketing, advertising, media strategy, and when I first discovered the footage, that is what responded in me. I saw attention focused daily on a product that may not even exist. You think that wouldn't get my attention? The most brilliant marketing ploy of this very young century. And new. Somehow entirely new."