Pattern Recognition

She lets them wait, then closes Netscape and powers down.

She no longer has to devote any thought to cabling the iBook to the cell phone. If Boone was right, back in Tokyo, this one isn't passing any keystrokes to the Man from U.N.C.L.E. room. Although, she thinks, entering hotmail, what if they came round while she was out for Greek food, and… ?

"Fuck it," aloud, to Damien's robot girls. She can't live that way. Refuses.

Hotmail has three, for her.

The first is from Boone.

Hi. Greetings from LGA, the land of Very Intense Security. Out of here shortly for Colombus and initial meeting with The Firm In Question. Will have to play that completely by ear, of course. How are you? Let me know.

You are not, she thinks, the most eloquent of correspondents. But what, she asks herself, is she expecting? Shakespeare, from a layover at LaGuardia?

Hi yourself. On my laptop, as per our discussion. Okay here. Nothing to report.

Parkaboy next, opening on:

Jesus. (My mother was very religious, in her dysfunctional way. Have I told you that? Hence all my fear-words are blasphemous, I suppose.) Darryl is letting Judy script the Keiko mail, as you said we had no choice other than to do. She's virtually moved in with him now, and has phoned in sick two nights ru

Next up, Ivy, F:F:F's founder and owner, whtoi she hasn't heard from since she left New York.

Hello Cayce. Long time no see on the forum. Are you in Japan? Am still here in Seoul, in big numbered building!

Ivy had once sent Cayce a jpeg of her high-rise, with a ten-story "4" painted up the side. Behind it, receding into the distance, you could make out buildings 5 and 6, identical.

Mama Anarchia does not write to me often. That is fine with me. You know she has always gotten on my nerves.

Ivy and Cayce have sometimes had to coordinate diplomacy, to prevent the friction between Parkaboy and la Anarchia from polarizing the site, or simply taking up too much space…

She freezes.

Are you in Japan?

Unless Parkaboy has told Ivy about Cayce's trip, which Cayce ca

Today I had a very strange e-mail from her. Very friendly. Thanking me for F:F:F etc. Then asking about you like she is your old friend. From this I think you are in Tokyo? But something about this makes me worry. Here is the only part of her message referring to you. I can send the rest if you want.

> And how is CayceP? She is not posting, recently. You know of

> course that I was an avid lurker, before I began to post, and

> CayceP's insights struck me, from the first post of hers I read, as

> the very shape of the enthusiast. That was the one in which she

> suggested that the maker had the resources of the Russian mafia,

> or some similarly secretive organization. Do you remember it?

> One day I hope to meet her in person, perhaps when she returns

> from Tokyo.

Cayce scowls at the screen. Feels like hurling it at the nearest robot girl. No fair. No fucking fair. She doesn't need this.

But if Mama Anarchia is somehow involved in the recent weird-ness, why would she tip her hand this way to Ivy? To send a message to Cayce? Or?

Because Mama made a mistake? Freudian slip: meant to type "London," not "Tokyo"? The restraint of pen and tongue that Win always advised is difficult to maintain in a medium that involves neither, Cayce knows, and mistakes happen.

She and Mama Anarchia are not friends by any means.

At best they have exchanged a few strained messages. Cayce is too obviously Parkaboy's friend, on the site, and Parkaboy's loathing for Mama Anarchia has been far too vocal, from his scathing assaults on the French philosophers she quotes to deliberately absurd personal attacks (considering he's never met her, and has no idea of what she might look like). This e-mail to Ivy is a fishing expedition of some kind, and a clumsy one. Although Mama Anarchia has no way, that Cayce knows of, to know that she and Ivy are friends, and discuss the site and its more prominent participants in private, and fairly frequently.

Creepy. She takes a deep breath. "He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots."

Reflexively, like a slot player pulling the lever in hope of bringing down a better reality, she clicks hotmail in case another message has arrived in the meantime.

Margot. Her Australian friend in New York, former Bigend girlfriend, currently assigned to visit Cayce's apartment on a frequent basis, pick up mail, check that all is well. Margot lives two blocks closer to Harlem proper, but still within the psychological footprint of Columbia.

'Lo dear. Bit of worry here. Went to your place today, as usual. Saw your super sweeping steps and he wasn't visibly pissed, but that isn't the unusual I have to report. Actually I wish I could be more certain about this, but I think someone else had been in your flat since I was last there. Two things: the toilet was ru

Cayce closes her eyes and sees her blue-floored cave, her $l,200-a-month rent-stabilized apartment on 111th, secured when her former roommate, the previous lease holder, had moved back to San Francisco. Home. Who's been there? Not the super, not without a bribe.

How she hates this. How faint and peripheral somehow, these little things, yet how serious. A weight on her life, like trying to sleep under Damien's silver oven mitt.