The Bridge Trilogy Part 41

"Oh."

"Never mind. A little prototypic nerd chic could actually lend a certain frisson, around here. You could lose the tie, though. Definitely lose the tie. And keep a collection of felt-tipped pens in your pocket. Unchewed, please. Plus one of those fat flat highliners, in a really nasty fluorescent shade."

"Are you joking?"

"Probably, Mr. Laney. May I call you Cohn?"

"Yes..

She never did call him "Cohn," then or ever. "You'll find that humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool. You'll find the type that's most viable here is fairly oblique."

"How do you mean, Ms. Torrance?"

"Kathy. I mean difficult to quote effectively in a memo. Or a court of law."

Yamazaki was a good listener. He'd blink, swallow, nod, fiddle with the top b.u.t.ton of his plaid s.h.i.+rt, whatever, all of it managing to somehow convey that he was getting it, the drift of Laney's story.

Keith Alan Blackwell was something else. He sat there inert as a bale of beef, utterly motionless except when he'd raise his left hand and squeeze and twiddle the lobe-stump that was all that remained of his left ear. He did this without hesitation or embarra.s.sment, and Laney formed the impression that it was affording him some kind of relief. The scar tissue reddened slightly under Blackwell's ministrations.

Laney sat on an upholstered bench, his back to the wall. Yamazaki and Blackwell faced him across the narrow table. Behind them, over the uniformly black-haired heads of late-night Roppongi coffee- drinkers, the holographic features of the chain's namesake floated in front of a lurid sunset vista of snow-capped Andean peaks. The lips of the 'toon-Amos were like inflated red rubber sausages, a racial parody that would've earned the place a firebombing anywhere in the L.A. basin.

He was holding up a steaming coffee cup, white and smoothly iconic, in a big, white-gloved, three- fingered urDisney hand.

Yamazaki coughed, delicately. "You are telling us, please, about your experiences at Slitscan?"

Kathy Torrance began by offering Laney a chance to net-surf, Slitscan style.

She checked a pair of computers out of the Cage, shooed four employees from an SBU, invited Laney in, and closed the door. Chairs, a round table, a large softboard on the wall. He watched as she jacked the computers into dataports and called up identical images of a longhaired dirty-blond guy in his mid-twenties. Goatee and a gold

earring. The face meant nothing to Laney. It might have been a face he'd pa.s.sed on the street an hour before, the face of a minor player in daytime soap, or the face of someone whose freezer had recently been discovered to be packed with his victims' fingers.

"Clinton Hillman," Kathy Torrance said. "Hairdresser, sus.h.i.+ chef, music journalist, extra in mid- budget hardcore. This headshot's tweaked, of course." She tapped keys, detweaking it. Clint Hillman's eyes and chin, on her screen, grew several clicks smaller. "Probably did it himself.

With a professional job, there'd be nothing to work back from."

"He acts in p.o.r.no?" Laney felt obscurely sorry for Hillman, who looked lost and vulnerable without his chin.

"It isn't the size of his chin they're interested in," Kathy said. "It's mainly motion-capture, in p.o.r.no. Extreme close. They're all body-doubles. Map on better faces in post. But somebody's still gotta get down in the trenches and b.u.mp uglies, right?"

Laney shot her a sideways look. "If you say so."

She handed Laney an industrial-strength pair of rubberized Thomson eyephones. "Do him."

"Do?"

"Him. Go for those nodal points you've been telling me about. The headshot's a gateway to everything we've got on him. Whole gigs of sheer boredom. Data like a sea of tapioca, Laney. An endless vanilla plane. He's boring as the day is long, and the day is long. Do it. Make my day. Do it and you've got yourself a job."

Laney looked at the tweaked Hillman on his screen. "You haven't told me what I'm looking for."

"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to s.h.i.+tscan's audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm G.o.d-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered 28 William Gib~t~n with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."

Yamazaki had his notebook out, hightpen poised. Laney found that he didn't mind. It made the man look so much more comfortable. "Strategic Business Unit," he said. "A small conference room.

s.h.i.+tscan's post office."

"Post office?"

"California plan. People don't have their own desks. Check a computer and a phone out of the Cage when you come in. Hotdesk it if you need more peripherals. The SBUs are for meetings, but it's hard to get one when you need it. Virtual meetings are a big thing there, better for sensitive topics. You get a locker to keep your personal stuff in. You don't want them to see any printouts~ And they hate Post-its."

"Why?"

"Because you might've written something down from the in-house net, and it might get out. That notebook of yours would never have been allowed out of the Cage. If there was no paper, they had a record of every call, every image called up, every keystroke."

Blackwell nodded now, his stubbled dome catching the red of Amos's inner-tube lips. "Security."

"And you were successful, Mr. Laney?" Yamazaki asked. "You found the. . . nodal points?"

29.

4. Venice Decompressed "Shut up now,~' the woman in 23E said, and Chia hadn't said anything at all. "Sister's going to tell you a story."

Chia looked up from the seatback screen, where she'd been working her way through the eleventh level of a lobotomized airline version of Skull Wars. The blond was looking straight ahead, not at Chia. Her screen was down so that she could use the back of it for a tray, and she'd finished another gla.s.s of the iced tomato juice she kept paying the flight attendant to bring her. They came, for some reason, with squared-off pieces of celery stuck up in them, like a straw or stir- stick, but the blond didn't seem to want these. She'd stacked five of them in a square on the tray, the way a kid might build the walls of a little house, or a corral for toy animals.

Chia looked down at her thumbs on the disposable Air Magellan

touchpad. Back up at the mascaraed eyes. Looking at her now.

"There's a place where it's always light," the woman said. "Bright, everywhere. No place dark.

Bright like a mist, like something falling, always, every second. All the colors of it. Towers you can't see the top of, and the light falling. Down below, they pile up bars. Bars and strip clubs and discos. Stacked up like shoe boxes, one on top of the other. And no matter how far you worm your way in, no matter how many stairs you climb, how many elevators you ride, no matter how small a room you finally get to, the light still finds you. It's a light that blows in under the door, like powder. Fine, so fine.

31.

Blows in under your eyelids, if you find a way to get to sleep. But you don't want to sleep there.

Not in s.h.i.+njuku. Do you?"

Chia was suddenly aware of the sheer physical ma.s.s of the plane, of the terrible unlikeliness of its pa.s.sage through s.p.a.ce, of its airframe vibrating thiough frozen night somewhere above the sea, off the coast of Alaska now-impossible but true. "No," Chia heard herself say, as Skull Wars, noting her inattention, dumped her back a level.

"No," the woman agreed, "you don't. I know. But they make you. They make you. At the center of the world." And then she put her head back, closed h~r eyes, and began to snore.

Chia exited Skull Wars and tucked the touchpad into the seat-back pocket. She felt like screaming.

What had that been about?

The attendant came by, scooped up the corral of celery sticks in a napkin, took the woman's gla.s.s, wiped the tray, and snapped it up into position in the seatback.

"My bag?" Chia said. "In the bin?" She pointed.

He opened the hatch above her, pulled out her bag, and lowered it into her lap.

"How do you undo these?" She touched the loops of tough red jelly that held the Zip-tabs together.