Idoru

Then she smiled. It was a slow smile, modular, as though there were stages to it, each one governed by a separate shyness or hesitation.

“I like your computer,” she said. “It looks like it was made by Indians or something.”

Chia looked down at her Sandbenders. Turned off the red switch. “Coral,” she said. “These are turquoise. The ones that look like ivory are the inside of a kind of nut. Renewable.”

“The rest is silver?”

“Aluminum,” Chia said. “They melt old cans they dig up on the beach, cast it in sand molds. These panels are micarta. That’s linen with this resin in it.”

“I didn’t know Indians could make computers,” the woman said, reaching out to touch the curved edge of the Sandbenders. Her voice was hesitant, light, like a child’s. The nail on the finger that rested on her Sandbenders was bright red, the lacquer chipped through and ragged. A tremble, then the hand withdrew.

“I drank too much. And with tequila in them, too. ‘Vitamin T,’ Eddie calls it. I wasn’t bad, was I?”

Chia shook her head.

“I can’t always remember, if I’m bad.”

“Do you know how much longer it is to Tokyo?” Chia asked, all she could think of to say.

“Nine hours easy,” the blond said, and sighed. “Subsonics just suck, don’t they? Eddie had me booked on a super, in full business, but then he said something went wrong with the ticket. Eddie gets all the tickets from this place in Osaka. We went on Air France once, first class, and your seat turns into a bed and they tuck you in with a little quilt. And they have an open bar right there and they just leave the bottles out, and champagne and just the best food.” The memory didn’t seem to cheer her up. “And they give you perfume and makeup in its own case, from Hermès. Real leather, too. Why are you going to Tokyo?”

“Oh,” Chia said. “Oh. Well. My friend. To see my friend.”

“It’s so strange. You know? Since the quake.”

“But they’ve built it all back now. Haven’t they?”

“Sure, but they did it all so fast, mostly with that nanotech, that just grows? Eddie got in there befor the dust had settled. Told me you could seethose towers growing at night. Rooms up top like a honeycomb, and walls just sealing themselves over, one after another. Said it was like watching a candle melt, but in reverse. That’s too scary. Doesn’t make a sound. Machines too small to see. They can get into your body, you know?”

Chia sensed an underlying edge of panic there. “Eddie?” she asked, hoping to change the subject.

“Eddie’s like a businessman, He went to Japan to make money after the earthquake. He says the infa, infa, the structurewas wide open, then. He says it took the spine out of it, sort of, so you could come in and root around, quick, before it healed over and hardened up again. And it healed over aroundEddie, like he’s an implant or something, so now he’s part of the infa, the infa—”

“Infrastructure.”

“The structure. Yeah. So now he’s plugged in, to all that juice. He’s a landlord, and he owns these clubs, and has deals in music and vids and things.”

Chia leaned over, dragging her bag from beneath the seat in front, putting away the Sandbenders. “Do you live there, in Tokyo?”

“Part of the time.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s… I… well… Weird, right? It’s not like anyplace. This huge thing happened there, then they fixed it with what was maybe even a huger thing, a bigger change, and everybody goes around pretending it never happened, that nothing happened. But you know what?”

“What?”

“Look at a map. A map from before? A lot of it’s not even where it used to be. Nowhere near. Well, a few things are, the Palace, that expressway, and that big city hall thing in Shinjuku, but a lot of the rest of it’s like they just made it up. They pushed all the quake-junk into the water, like landfill, and now they’re building that up, too. New islands.”

“You know,” Chia said, “I’m really sleepy. I think I’ll try to go to sleep now.”

“My name’s Maryalice. Like it’s one word.”

“Mine’s Chia.”

Chia closed her eyes and tried to put her seat back a little more, but that was as far as it could go.

“Pretty name,” Maryalice said.

Chia thought she could hear the Music Master’s DESH behind the sound of the engines, not so much a sound now as a part of her. That whiter shade of something, but she could never quite make it out.

7. The Wet, Warm Life in Alison Shires

She’ll try to kill herself,” Laney said.

“Why?” Kathy Torrance sipped espresso. A Monday afternoon in the Cage.

“Because she knows. She can feel me watching.”

“That’s impossible, Laney.”

“She knows.”

“You aren’t ‘watching’ her. You’re examining the data she generates, like the data all our lives generate. She can’t know that.”

“She does.”

The white cup clicking down into its saucer. “Then how can you know that she does? You’re looking at her phone records, what she chooses to watch and when, the music she accesses. How could you possibly know that she’s aware of your attention?”

The nodal point, he wanted to say. But didn’t.

“I think you’re working too hard, Laney. Five days off.”

“No, I’d rather—”

“I can’t afford to let you burn yourself out. I know the signs, Laney. Recreational leave, full pay, five days.”

She added a travel bonus. Laney was sent to Slitscan’s in-house agency and booked into a hollowed-out hilltop above Ixtapa, a hotel with vast stone spheres ranged across the polished concrete of its glass-walled lobby. Beyond the glass, iguanas regarded the registration staff with an ancient calm, green scales bright against dusty brown branches.

Laney met a woman who said she edited lamps for a design house in San Francisco. Tuesday evening. He’d been in Mexico three hours. Drinks in the lobby bar.

He asked her what that meant, to edit lamps. Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn’t have wanted. If people asked him what he did, he said he was a quantitative analyst. He didn’t try to explain the nodal points, or Kathy Torrance’s theories about celebrity.

The woman replied that her company produced short-run furniture and accessories, lamps in particular. The actual manufacturing took place at any number of different locations, mainly in Northern California. Cottage industry. One maker might contract to do two hundred granite bases, another to lacquer and distress two hundred steel tubes in a very specific shade of blue. She brought out a notebook and showed him animated sketches. All of the things had a thin, spiky look that made him think of African insects he’d seen on the Nature Cha

Did she design them? No. They were designed in Russia, in Moscow. She was the editor. She selected the suppliers of components. She oversaw manufacture, transport to San Francisco, assembly in what once had been a ca

Laney asked who they sold to. People who wanted things other people didn’t have, she said. Or that other people didn’t like? That too, she said. Did she enjoy it? Yes. Because she generally liked the things the Russians designed, and she tended to like the people who manufactured the components. Best of all, she told him, she liked the feeling of bringing something new into the world, of watching the sketches from Moscow finally become objects on the floor of the former ca

It’s there, one day, she said, and you can look at it, and touch it, and know whether or not it’s good.

Laney considered this. She seemed very calm. Shadows lengthened with almost visible speed across the floor of glossy concrete.