All Tomorrow's Parties

16. SUB-ROUTINES

THAT Hole at the core of Laney's being, that underlying absence, he begins to suspect, is not so much an absence in the self as of the self.

Something has happened to him since his descent into the cardboard city. He has started to see that previously he had, in some unthinkably literal way, no self.

But what was there, he wonders, before?

Sub-routines: maladaptive survival behaviors desperately conspiring to approximate a presence that would be, and never quite be, Laney. And he has never known this before, although he knows that he has always, somehow, been aware of something having been desperately and utterly wrong.

Something tells him this. Something in the core and totality, it seems, of DatAmerica. How can that be?

But now he lies, propped in sleeping bags, in darkness, as if at the earth's core, and beyond cardboard walls are walls of concrete, sheathed in ceramic tile, and beyond them the footing of this country, Japan, with the shudder of the trains a reminder of tectonic forces, the shifting of continent-wide plates.

Somewhere within Laney, something else is shifting. There is movement, and potential for greater movement still, and he wonders why he is no longer afraid.

And all of this is somehow a gift of the sickness. Not of the cough, the fever, but of that underlying disease that he takes to be the product of the 5-SB he ingested so long ago in the orphanage in Gainesville.

We were all volunteers, he thinks, as he clutches the eyephones and follows his point of view over the edge of a cliff of data, plunging down the wall of this code mesa, its face compounded of fractally differentiated fields of information he has come to suspect of hiding some power or intelligence beyond his comprehension.

Something at once noun and verb.

While Laney, plunging, eyes wide against the pressure of information, knows himself to be merely adjectival: a Laney-colored smear, meaningless without context. A microscopic cog in some catastrophic plan. But positioned, he senses, centrally.

Crucially.

And that is why sleep is no longer an option.