Idoru

Don’t think of a purple cow. Or was it a brown one? Laney couldn’t remember. Don’t look at the idoru’s face. She is not flesh; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative.

He could watch her hands. Watch the way she ate.

The meal was elaborate, many small courses served on individual rectangular plates. Each time a plate was placed before Rei Toei, and always within the field of whatever projected her, it was simultaneously veiled with a flawless copy, holo food on a holo plate.

Even the movement of her chopsticks brought on peripheral flickers of nodal vision. Because the chopsticks were information too, but nothing as dense as her features, her gaze. As each “empty” plate was removed, the untouched serving would reappear.

But when the flickering began, Laney would concentrate on his own meal, his clumsiness with his own chopsticks, conversation around the table. Kuwayama, the man with the rimless glasses, was answering something Rez had asked, though Laney hadn’t been able to catch the question itself. “—the result of an array of elaborate constructs that we refer to as ‘desiring machines’.” Rez’s green eyes, bright and attentive. “Not in any literal sense,” Kuwayama continued, “but please envision aggregates of subjective desire. It was decided that the modular array would ideally constitute an architecture of articulated longing…” The man’s voice was beautifully modulated, his English accented in a way that Laney found impossible to place.

Rez smiled then, his eyes going to the face of the idoru. As did Laney’s as well, automatically.

He fell through her eyes. He was staring up at a looming cliff face that seemed to consist entirely of small rectangular balconies, none set at quite the same level or depth. Orange sunset off a tilted, steel-framed window. Oilslick colors crawling in the sky.

He closed his eyes, looked down, opened them. A fresh plate there, more food.

“You’re really into your meal,” Arleigh said.

A concentrated effort with the chopsticks and he managed to capture and swallow something that was like a one-inch cube of cold chutney omelet. “Wonderful. Don’t want any of that fugu though. Blowfish with the neurotoxins? Heard about that?”

“You’ve already had seconds,” she said. “Remember the big plate of raw fish arranged like the petals of a chrysanthemum?”

“You’re kidding,” Laney said.

“Lips and tongue feel faintly numb? That’s it.”

Laney ran his tongue across his lips. Was she kidding? Yamazaki, seated to his left, leaned close. “There may be a way around the problem you face with Rez’s data. You are aware of Lo/Rez global fan activity?”

“Of what?”

“Many fans. They report each sighting of Rez, Lo, other musicians involved. There is much incidental detail.”

Laney knew from his day’s video education that Lo/Rez were theoretically a duo, but that there were always at least two other “members,” usually more. And Rez had been adamant from the start about his dislike of drum machines; the current drummer, “Blind” Willy Jude, seated opposite Yamazaki, had been with them for years. He’d been turning his enormous black glasses in the idoru’s direction throughout the meal; now he seemed to sense Laney’s glance. The black glasses, video units, swung around. “Man,” Jude said, “Rozzer’s sittin’ down there makin’ eyes at a big aluminum thermos bottle.”

“You can’t see her?”

“Holos are hard, man,” the drummer said, touching his glasses with a fingertip “Take my kids to Nissan County, I’ll call ahead, get ’em tweaked around a little. Then I can see ’em. But this lady’s on fu

The man seated between Jude and Mr. Kuwayama, whose name was Ozaki, bobbed apologetically in Jude’s direction. “We regret this very much. We regret deeply. A slight adjustment is required, but it ca

“Hey,” Jude said, “no big problem. I seen her already. I get all the music cha

Laney lost a chopstick.

“The most recent single,” Ozaki said.

“Yeah,” Jude said, “that’s pretty good. She wears that gold mask? Okay shit.” He popped a section of maki into his mouth and chewed.

26. HakNani

Chia and Masahiko sat facing one another on the white carpet. The room’s only chair was a fragile-looking thing with twisted wire legs and a heart-shaped seat upholstered in pink metal-flake plastic. Neither of them wanted to sit on the bed. Chia had her Sandbenders across her knees and was working her fingers into her tip-sets. Masahiko’s computer was on the carpet in front of him; he’d put its control-face back on and peeled a very compact pair of tip-sets out of the back of the cube, along with two small black oval cups on fine lengths of optical cable. Another length of the cable ran from his computer to a small open hatch at the back of the Sandbenders.

“Okay,” Chia said, settling the last of her tips, “let’s go. I’ve got to get hold of somebody…”

“Yes,” he said. He picked up the black cups, one in either hand, and placed them over his eyes. When he let go, they stayed there. It looked uncomfortable.

Chia reached up and pulled her own glasses down, over her eyes “What do I—”

Something at the core of things moved simultaneously in mutually impossible directions. It wasn’t even like porting. Software conflict? Faint impression of light through a fluttering of rags.

And then the thing before her: building or biomass or cliff face looming there, in countless unpla

“Hak Nam,” he said, beside her.

“What is it?”

“ ‘City of darkness.’ Between the walls of the world.”

She remembered the scarf she’d seen, in his room behind the kitchen, its intricate map of something chaotic and compacted, tiny irregular segments of red and black and yellow. And then they were moving forward, toward a narrow opening. “It’s a MUD, right?” Something like a larger, permanent version of the site the Tokyo chapter had erected for the meeting, or the tropical forest Kelsey and Zona had put up. But people played games in MUDs; they made up characters for themselves and pretended. Little kids did it, and lonely people.

“No,” he said, “not a game.” They were inside now, smoothly accelerating, and the squirming density of the thing was continual visual impact, an optical drumming. “Tai Chang Street.” Walls scrawled and crawling with scrolling messages, spectral doorways passing like cards in a shuffled deck.

And they were not alone: others there, ghost-figures whipping past, and everywhere the sense of eyes .

Fractal filth, bit-rot, the corridor of their passage tented with crazy swoops of faintly flickering lines of some kind. “Alms House Backstreet.” A sharp turn. Another. Then they were ascending a maze of twisting stairwells, still accelerating, and Chia took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Retinal fireworks bursting there, but the pressure was gone.

When she opened her eyes, they were in a much cleaner but no larger version of his room behind the kitchen in the restaurant. No empty ramen bowls, no piles of clothing. He was beside her on the sleeping ledge, staring at the shifting patterns on his computer’s control-face. Beside it on the work-surface, her Sandbenders. The texture-mapping was rudimentary, everything a little too smooth and glossy. She looked at him, curious to see how he’d present. A basic scan job, maybe a year out of date: his hair was shorter. He wore the same black tunic.