Idoru

“Marry,” Laney said.

Her smile vanished. “You don’t correct me, Laney.”

“You want me to spy on him.”

“Research.”

“Balls.”

“You wish.”

“If I got anything you could use, you’d want me to set him up.”

The smile returned. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“And I get?”

“A life. A life in which you haven’t been branded an obsessive stalker who preyed on the attractive daughter of the object of your obsession. A life in which it isn’t public knowledge that a series of disastrous pharmaceutical trials permanently and hideously rewired you. Fair enough?”

“What about her? The daughter. She do all that with the Hillman guy for nothing?”

“Your call, Laney. Work for us, get me what I need, she’s shit out of luck.”

“That easy? She’d go along with that? After what she had to do?”

“If she wants even the remotest hope of having a career eventually—yes.”

Laney looked at her. “That isn’t me. It’s a morph. If I could prove it was a morph, I could sue you.”

“Really? You could afford that, could you? It takes years. And even then, you might not win. We’ve got a lot of money and talent to throw at problems like that, Laney. We do it all the time.” The door chimed. “That’ll be mine,” she said. She got up, went to the door, touched the security screen. Laney glimpsed part of a man’s face. She opened the door. It was Rice Daniels, minus his trademark sunglasses. “Rice is with us now, Laney,” she said. “He’s been a terrific help with your backgrounder.”

“Out of Control didn’t work out?” Laney asked Daniels.

Daniels showed Laney a lot of very white teeth. “I’m sure we could work together, Laney. I hope you don’t have any issues around what happened.”

“Issues,” Laney said.

Kathy walked back, handed Laney a blank white card with a pencilled number. “Call me. Before nine tomorrow. Leave a message. Yes or no.”

“You’re giving me a choice?”

“It’s more fun that way. I want you to thinkabout it.” She reached down and flicked the collar of Laney’s shirt. “Stitch-count,” she said. Turned and walked out, Daniels pulling the door shut behind them.

Laney sat there, staring at the closed door, until the phone began to ring.

It was Yamazaki.

32. The Uninvited

We must attack,” said Zona Rosa, punctuating it with a quick shift to Aztec death’s-head mode. They were with Masahiko and Gomi Boy now, back in Masahiko’s room in the Walled City, away from the hypnotic chaos of the crawling roofscape.

“Attack?” Gomi Boy’s huge eyes bulged as brightly as ever, but his voice betrayed his tension. “Who will you attack?”

“We will find a way to carry the fight to the enemy,” Zona Rosa said, gravely. “Passivity is death.”

Something that looked to Chia like a bright orange drink coaster came gliding in under Masahiko’s door and across the floor, but the shadow-thing gobbled it before she could get a closer look.

“You,” said Gomi Boy to Zona Rosa, “are in Mexico City. Youare not physically or legally endangered by any of this!”

“Physically?” said Zona Rosa, snapping back into a furious version of her previous presentation. “You want physically, son of a bitch? I’ll fucking kill you, physically! You think I can’t do that? You think you live on Mars or something? I fly here Aeronaves direct with my girls, we find you, we cut your Japanese balls off! You think I can’t do that?” The saw-toothed, dragon-handled switchblade was out now, quivering, in front of Gomi Boy’s face.

“Zona, please,” Chia begged. “He hasn’t done anything so far but help me! Don’t!”

Zona snorted. The blade reversed, vanishing. “You don’t push me,” she said to Gomi Boy. “My friend, she is in some bad shit, and I have some ghost-bastard thingon my site.”

“It’s in the software on my Sandbenders, too,” Chia said. “I saw it in Venice.”

“You sawit?” The fractured images cycling faster.

“I saw something—”

“What? You saw what?”

“Someone. By the fountain at the end of a street. It might have been a woman. I was scared. I bailed. I left my Venice open—”

“Show me,” Zona said. “In my site I could not see it. My lizards could not see it either, but they grew agitated. The birds flew lower, but could find nothing. Show me this thing!”

“But Zona—”

“Now!” Zona said. “It is part of this shit you are in. It must be.”

“My God,” Zona said, staring up at St. Mark’s. “Who wrote this?”

“It’s a city in Italy,” Chia said. “It used to be a country. They invented banking. That’s St. Mark’s. There’s a module where you can see what they do at Easter, when the Patriarch brings out all these bones and things, set into gold, parts of saints.”

Zona Rosa crossed herself. “Like Mexico… this is where the water comes up to the bottoms of the doors, and the streets, they are water?”

“I think a lot of this is under water now,” Chia said.

“Why is it dark?”

“I keep it that way Chia looked away, searching the shadows beneath archways. ”That Walled City, Zona, what is that?“

“They say it began as a shared killfile. You know what a kill– file is?”

“No.”

“It is an old expression. A way to avoid incoming messages. With the killfile in place, it was like those messages never existed. They never reached you. This was when the net was new, understand?”

Chia knew that when her mother was born, there had been no net at all, or almost none, but as her teachers in school were fond of pointing out, that was hard to imagine. “How could that become a city? And whys it all squashed in like that?”

“Someone had the idea to turn the killfile inside out. This is not really how it happened, you understand, but this is how the story is told: that the people who founded Hak Nam were angry, because the net had been very free, you could do what you wanted, but then the governments and the companies, they had different ideas of what you could, what you couldn’t do. So these people, they found a way to unravel something. A little place, a piece, like cloth. They made something like a killfile of everything, everything they didn’t like, and they turned that inside out.” Zona’s hands moved like a conjurer’s. “And they pushed it through, to the other side…”

“The other side of what?”

“This is not how they did it,” Zona said impatiently, “this is the story. How they did it, I don’t know. But that is the story, how they tell it. They went there to get away from the laws. To have no laws, like when the net was new.”

“But why’d they make it look like that?”

“That I know,” Zona said. “The woman who came to help me build my country, she told me. There was a place near an airport, Kowloon, when Hong Kong wasn’t China, but there had been a mistake, a long time ago, and that place, very small, many people, it still belonged to China. So there was no law there. An outlaw place. And more and more people crowded in; they built it up, higher. No rules, just building, just people living. Police wouldn’t go there. Drugs and whores and gambling. But people living, too. Factories, restaurants. A city. No laws.”

“Is it still there?”

“No,” Zona said, “they tore it down before it all became China again. They made a park with concrete. But these people, the ones they say made a hole in the net, they found the data. The history of it. Maps. Pictures. They built it again.”

“Why?”

“Don’t ask me. Ask them. They are all crazy.” Zona was sca

Chia watched her Music Master, or something that looked like him, stroll toward them from the shadows of the stone arches where the cafes were, a dark greatcoat flapping to reveal a lining the color of polished lead.