Idoru

17. The Walls of Fame

We had no time to do this right,” the woman said, handing Laney the eyephones. He was sitting on a child-sized pink plastic bench that matched the table. “If there is a way to do it right.”

“There are areas we could not arrange access to,” said the Japanese-American with the ponytail. “Blackwell said you’ve had experience with celebrities.”

“Actors,” Laney said. “Musicians, politicians…”

“You’ll probably find this different. Bigger. By a couple of degrees of magnitude.”

“What can’t you access?” Laney asked, settling the ’phones over his eyes.

“We don’t know,” he heard the woman say. “You’ll get a sense of the scale of things, going in. The blanks might be accountancy, tax-law stuff, contracts… We’re just tech support. He has other people someone pays to make sure parts of it stay as private as possible.”

“Then why not bring themin?” Laney asked.

He felt Blackwell’s hand come down on his shoulder like a bag of sand. “I’ll discuss that with you later. Now get in there and have a look. What we pay you for, isn’t it?”

In the week following Alison Shires’ death, Laney had used Out of Control’s DatAmerica account to re-access the site of her personal data. The nodal point was gone, and a certain subtle reduction had taken place. Not a shrinkage so much as a tidying, a folding in.

But the biggest difference was simply that she was no longer generating data. There was no credit activity. Even her Upful Groupvine account had been canceled. As her estate was executed, and various business affairs terminated, her data began to take on a neat rectilinearity. Laney thought of the dead bundled squarely in their graveclothes, of coffins and cairns, of the long straight avenues of cemeteries in the days when the dead had been afforded their own real estate.

The nodal point had formed where she had lived, while she had lived, in the messy, constantly proliferating interface with the ordinary yet endlessly multiplex world. Now there was no longer an interface.

He’d looked, but only briefly, and very cautiously, to see whether her actor might be undertaking tidying activities of his own. Nothing obvious there, but he imagined Out of Control would have set a more careful watch on that.

Her data was very still. Only a faint, methodical movement at its core: something to do with the ongoing legal mechanism of the execution of her estate.

A catalog of each piece of furniture in the bedroom of a guesthouse in Ireland. A subcatalog of the products provided in the seventeenth-century walnut commode at bedside there: toothbrush, toothpaste, analgesic tablets, tampons, razor, shaving gel. Someone would check these periodically, restock to the inventory. (The last guest had taken the gel but not the razor.) In the first catalog, there was a powerful pair of Austrian binoculars, tripod-mounted, which also functioned as a digital camera.

Laney accessed its memory, discovering that the recording function had been used exactly once, on the day the manufacturer’s warranty had been activated. The warranty was now two months void, the single recorded image a view from a white-curtained balcony, looking toward what Laney took to be the Irish Sea. There was an unlikely palm tree, a length of chainlink fence, a railbed with a twin dull gleam of track, a deep expanse of grayish-brown beach, and then the gray and silver sea. Closer to the sea, partially cut off by the image’s border, there appeared to be a low, broad fort of stone, like a truncated tower. Its stones were the color of the beach.

Laney tried to quit the bedroom, the guesthouse, and found himself surrounded by archaeologically precise records of the restoration of five vast ceramic stoves in an apartment in Stockholm. These were like giant chess pieces, towers of brick faced with elaborately glazed, lavishly molded ceramic. They rose to the fourteen-foot ceilings, and several people could easily have stood upright in one. There was a record of the numbering, disassembly, cleaning, restoration, and reassembly of each brick in each stove. There was no way to access the rest of the apartment, but the proportions of the stoves led Laney to assume that it was very large. He clicked to the end of the stove-record and noted the final price of the work; at current rates it was more than several times his former annual salary at Slitscan.

He clicked back, through points of recession, trying for a wider view, a sense of form, but there were only walls, bulking masses of meticulously arranged information, and he remembered Alison Shires and his apprehension of her data-death.

“The lights are on,” Laney said, removing the eyephones, “but there’s nobody home.” He checked the computer’s clock: he’d spent a little over twenty minutes in there.

Blackwell regarded him dourly, settled on an injection-molded crate like a black-draped Buddha, the scars in his eyebrows knitted into new configurations of concern. The three technicians looked carefully blank, hands in the pockets of their matching jackets.

“How’s that, then?” Blackwell asked.

“I’m not sure,” Laney said. “He doesn’t seem to doanything.”

“He doesn’t bloody do anything butdo things,” Blackwell declared, “as you’d know if you were orchestrating his bloody security!”

“Okay,” Laney said, “then where’d he have breakfast?”

Blackwell looked uncomfortable. “In his suite.”

“His suite where?”

“Imperial Hotel.” Blackwell glared at the technicians.

“Which empire, exactly?”

“Here. Bloody Tokyo”

“Here? He’s in Tokyo?”

“You lot,” Blackwell said, “outside,” The brown-haired woman shrugged, inside her nylon jacket, and went kicking through the Styrofoam, head down, the other two following in her wake. When the tarp dropped behind them, Blackwell rose from his crate. “Don’t think you can try me on for size…”

“l’m telling you that I don’t think this is going to work. Your man isn’t inthere.”

“That’s his bloody life.”

“How did he pay for his breakfast?”

“Signed to the suite.”

“Is the suite in his name?”

“Of course not.”

“Say he needs to buy something, during the course of the day?”

“Someone buysit for him, don’t they?”

“And pays with?”

“A card.”

“But not in his name.”

“Right.”

“So if anyone were looking at the transaction data, there’d be no way to connect it directly to him, would there?”

“No.”

“Because you’re doing your job, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then he’s invisible. To me. I can’t see him. He isn’t there. I can’t do what you want to pay me to do. It’s impossible.”

“But what about all the rest of it?”

Laney put the eyephones down on the keyboard. “That isn’t a person. That’s a corporation.”

“But you’ve got it all! His bloody houses! His flats! Where the gardeners put the bloody flowers in the rock wall! All of it!”

“But I don’t know who he is. I can’t make him out against the rest of it. He’s not leaving the traces that make the patterns I need.”

Blackwell sucked in his upper lip and kept it there. Laney heard the dislodged prosthesis click against his teeth.

“I have to get some idea of who he really is,” Laney said.

The lip re-emerged, damp and gleaming. “Christ,” Blackwell said, “that’sa poser.”

“I have to meet him.”

Blackwell wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “His music, then?” He raised his eyebrows hopefully. “Or there’s video—”

“I’ve gotvideo, thanks. It really might help if I could meet him.”

Blackwell touched his ear-stump. “You meet him, you think you’ll be able to get his nodes, nodal, do that thing Yama’s on about?”

“I don’t know,” Laney said. “I can try.”

“Bloody hell,” Blackwell said. He plowed through the Styrofoam, swept the tarp aside with his arm, barked for the waiting technicians, then turned back to Laney. “Sometimes I’d as soon be back with my mates in Jika Jika. Get things sorted, in there, they’d bloody staythat way.” The woman with the brown bangs thrust her head in, past the edge of the tarp. “Collect this business in the van,” Blackwell told her. “Have it ready to use when we need it.”

“We don’t have a van, Keithy,” the woman said.

“Buy one,” Blackwell said.