All Tomorrow's Parties

39. PANOPTICON

LANEY'S progress through all the data in the world (or that data's progress through him) has long since become what he is, rather than something he merely does.

The Hole, that blankness at the core of his being, ceases to trouble him here. He is a man with a mission, though he readily admits to himself that he has no real idea what that mission may finally be.

This all began, he reflects, knocking back his cough syrup in the amniotic darkness of his cardboard hutch, with his 'interest' in Cody Harwood. The first prickings of the so-called stalker syndrome thought to eventually afflict every test subject ever dosed with 5-SB. His initial reaction, of course, had been denial: this couldn't be happening to him, not after all these years. He was interested in Harwood, and for good reason; his awareness of the nodal points, the points from which change was emerging, would repeatedly bring Harwood to his attention. It was not so much that he was focusing on Harwood, as that things swung toward Harwood, gently yet unavoidably, like the needle of a compass. His life, at that point, had been in stasis: employed by the management of Lo/Rez, the pop group, to facilitate the singer Rez's 'marriage' to the Japanese virtual star Rei Toei, Laney had settled into a life in Tokyo that centered around visits to a private, artificially constructed island in Tokyo Bay, an expensive nub of engineered landfill upon which Rez and Rei Toei intended to bring forth some sort of new reality. That Laney had never been able to quite grasp the nature of this reality hadn't surprised him. Rez was a law unto himself, very possibly the last of the pre-posthuman megastars, and Rei Toei, the idoru, was an emergent system, a self continually being iterated from experiential input. Rez was Rez, and thereby difficult, and Rei Toei was that river into which one can never step twice. As she became more herself, through the inputting of experience, through human interaction, she grew and changed. Rez hadn't, and a psychologist employed by the band's management had confided in Laney that Rez, whom the psychologist characterized as having narcissistic personality disorder, wasn't likely to. 'I've met a lot of people, particularly in this industry, the psychologist had said, 'who have that, but I've never met one who had had it.

So Laney had climbed, each working day, from a Tokyo dock into an inflatable Zodiac. To skim across the gray metallic skin of the bay to that nameless and perfectly circular island, and there to interact with ('teach' was not the word, somehow) the idoru. And what he had done, although neither of them had planned it, was to take her with him, into that flow of information where he was most at home (or, really, farthest from his inner Hole). He had shown her, as it were, the ropes, although they were not ropes that he or anyone else had names for. He had shown her nodal points in that flow, and they had watched together as change had emerged from these into the physical world.

And he had never asked her how it was, exactly, that she intended to 'marry' Rez, and he doubted that, in any ordinary sense, she knew. She simply continued to emerge, to be, to be more. More present. And Laney fell in love with her, although he understood that she had been designed for him (and for the world) to fall in love with. As the amplified reflection of desire, she was a team effort; to the extent that her designers had done their jobs properly, she was a waking dream, a love object sprung from an approximation of the global mass unconscious. And this was not, Laney understood, a matter of sexual desire exclusively (though of course he felt that, to his great confusion) but of some actual and initially painful opening of his heart.

He loved her, and in loving her understood that his most basic sense of what that word might mean had changed, supplanting every previous concept. An entirely new feeling, and he had held it close, sharing it with no one, least of all the idoru.

And it had been toward the end of this that Cody Harwood, shy and smiling and gently elusive, someone Laney had never felt the least interest in, had begun to obsess him. Harwood, most often depicted as a twenty-first-century synthesis of Bill Gates and Woody Allen, had never previously been any more to Laney than a vague source of irritation, one of those familiar icons who loom regularly on the horizons of media, only to drop away until they next appear. Laney had had no opinion of Harwood, other than that he felt he had been glimpsing him all his life, and didn't quite know why, and was vaguely tired of it. But as he spent more time cruising the aspects of the flow that were concerned with Harwood, and with the activities of his firm, Harwood Levine, it had begun to become apparent that this was a locus of nodal points, a sort of meta-node, and that, in some way he had been unable to define, something very large was happening here. His compulsive study of Harwood and things Harwoodian had led him to the recognition that history too was subject to the nodal vision, and the version of history that Laney came to understand there bore little or no relation to any accepted version.

He had been taught, of course, that history, along with geography, was dead. That history in the older sense was an historical concept.

History in the older sense was narrative, stories we told ourselves about where we'd come from and what it had been like, and those narratives were revised by each new generation, and indeed always had been. History was plastic, was a matter of interpretation. The digital had not so much changed that as made it too obvious to ignore. History was stored data, subject to manipulation and interpretation.

But the 'history' Laney discovered, through the quirk in his vision induced by having been repeatedly dosed with 5-SB, was something very different. It was that shape comprised of every narrative, every version; it was that shape that only he (as far as he knew) could see.

At first, discovering this, he had attempted to share it with the idoru. Perhaps, if shown, she, this posthuman emergent entity, would simply start to see this way as well. And he had been disappointed when she had finally told him that what he saw was not there for her; that his ability to apprehend the nodal points, those emergent systems of history, was not there, nor did she expect to find it with growth. 'This is human, I think, she'd said, when pressed. 'This is the result of what you are, biochemically, being stressed in a particular way. This is wonderful. This is closed to me.

And shortly after that, as her growing complexity continued to widen the distance he already knew she felt toward Rez, she had come to him and asked him to interpret the data as it flowed around herself and Rez. And he had done this, though reluctantly, out of love. Knowing somehow he would be saying good-bye to her in the process.

The flow around Rez and Rei was ripe with nodal points, particularly at those junctures where queerly occulted data poured steadily in from the Walled City, that semi-mythical otherwhere of outlaw iconoclasts. 'Why have you connected with these people? he'd asked.

'Because I need them, she'd said, 'I don't know why, but I know that I do. The situation does.

'Without them, he'd said, 'you might not have a situation.

'I know. Smiling.

But as his obsession with Harwood had deepened, Laney had grown less comfortable with his trips to the island and their forays together into the fields of data. It had been as though he did not wish her to see him this way, his concentration warped from within, bent toward this one object, this strangely banal object. The sense of Harwood, of the information cloud he generated, swarmed in Laney's dreams. And one morning, waking in the Tokyo hotel in which Lo/Rez kept him billeted, he had decided not to go to work.

And sometime after that, he knew from Yamazaki, and from his own observation of the flow, the idoru had departed Tokyo as well. He had his own theories about that, about her conversations with the denizens (they would have insisted on the term, he thought) of the digitally occluded Walled City, and now, evidently, she was in San Francisco. Although he had known she would be, because of course she had to be. Because San Francisco, he could see in the shape of things, was where the world ended. Was ending. And she was a part of that, and so was he, and Harwood as well.

But something would be decided (was being decided) there. And that was why he dared not sleep. Why he must send the Suit, immaculate and malodorous, with his ankles tarred black, for Regain and more of the blue syrup.

SOMETIMES, now, beyond the point of exhaustion, he has started to enter, for what may be seconds but can feel like hours or days, some new mode of being.

It is as though he becomes a single retina, distributed evenly across the inner surface of a sphere. Unblinking, he stares, globally, into that eye, seeing that with which he sees, while from a single invisible iris appear individual, card-like images of Harwood, one after another.

Yamazaki has brought him pillows and fresh sleeping bags, bottles of water, an unused change of clothes. He is vaguely aware of these things, but when he becomes the eye that looks in upon itself, and upon the endless string of images, he has no awareness beyond that interiority, infinite and closed.

And part of him asks himself if this is an artifact of his illness, of the 5-SB, or if this vast and inward-looking eye is not in fact some inner aspect of that single shape comprised of every bit of data in the world?

This last he feels is at least partly confirmed by his repeated experience of the eye averting, turning itself inside out, in Moebius spasm, at which point he finds himself, invariably, staring at that indescribable shape.

But now, when he is the eye, he is starting to be aware of someone else watching. Someone else is very interested in those images of Harwood. He feels them register each one.

THE vintage plastic Gunsmith Cats alarm watch pulls him from the flow. He finds it in the dark and turns off the alarm. He wonders where it came from. The old man?

It is time to phone Rydell in San Francisco. He moves his fingers delicately over the disposables on the cardboard shelf, feeling for the used one with ten minutes left.

How can that be?