Idoru

37. Work Experience

Laney sat in the van’s front passenger seat again, the ’phones on his lap, waiting for Arleigh to connect Kuwayama’s gray module, He looked through the windshield at the concrete wall. His side didn’t hurt quite as much now, but the meeting with Kuwayama and the idoru, and then his huddle in the van with Yamazaki, had left him more confused than ever. If Rez and Rei Toei were making decisions in tandem, and if Yamazaki had decided to go along with them, where did that leave him? He couldn’t see that Blackwell was going to wake up to find some innate wonderfulness in the idea of Rez and Rei together. As far as Blackwell was concerned, Rez was still just trying to marry a software agent—whatever that might turn out to mean.

But Laney knew now that the idoru was more complex, more powerful, than any Hollywood synthespian. Particularly if Kuwayama were telling the truth about the videos being her “dreams.” All he knew about artificial intelligence came from work he’d done on a Slitscan episode documenting the unhappy personal life of one of the field’s leading researchers, but he knew that true AI was assumed never to have been achieved, and that current attempts to achieve it were supposed to be in directions quite opposite the creation of software that was good at acting like beautiful young women.

If there were going to be genuine AI, the argument ran, it was most likely to evolve in ways that had least to do with pretending to be human. Laney remembered screening a lecture in which the Slitscan episode’s subject had suggested that AI might be created accidentally, and that people might not initially recognize it for what it was.

Arleigh opened the door on the driver’s side and got in. “Sorry this is taking so long,” she said.

“You weren’t expecting it,” Laney said.

“It isn’t the software, it’s an optical valve. A cable-tip. They use a different gauge, one the French use.” She curled her hands around the top of the wheel and rested her chin on them. “So we’re dealing with these huge volumes of information, no problem, but we don’t have the right cable to pour it through.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Shannon’s got one in his room, Probably on a porno outfit, but he won’t admit it.” She looked at him sideways. “Shannon’s got a friend on the security team. His friend says that Blackwell ‘questioned’ one of the men who tried to grab Rez tonight.”

“That’s who they were after? Rez?”

“Seems like it. They’re Kombinat, and they claim Rez has hijacked something of theirs.”

“Hijacked what?”

“He didn’t know.” She closed her eyes.

“What do you think happened to him, the one Blackwell questioned?”

“I don’t know,” She opened her eyes, straightened up. “But somehow I don’t think we’ll find out.”

“Can he do that? Torture people? Kill them?”

She looked at Laney. “Well,” she said, finally, “he does have a certain advantage, making us think he might. It’s an established fact that he did that in his previous line of work. You know what scares me most about Blackwell?”

“What?”

“Sometimes I find myself getting used to him.”

Shannon rapped on the door beside her. Held up a length of cable.

“Ready when you are,” she said to Laney, opening the door and sliding from behind the wheel.

Laney looked through the tinted windshield at the concrete wall and remembered policing the steps outside the Municipal Court in Gainesville with Shaquille and Kenny, two others from the orphanage. Shaquille had gone on to the drug-testing program with Laney, but Kenny had been transferred to another facility, near Denver. Laney had no idea what had become of either of them, but it had been Shaquille who’d pointed out to Laney that when the injection had the real stuff in it, your mouth filled with a taste like corroded metal, aluminum or something. Pl-ceeb–o, Shaquille had said, don’t taste. And it was true. You could tell right away.

The three of them had had Work Experience there, five or six times, picking up the offerings people left before their day in court. These were considered to be a health hazard, and were usually carefully hidden, and you often found them by the smell, or the buzzing of flies. Parts of chickens, usually, tied up with colored yarn. What Shaquille said was the head of a goat, once. Shaquille said the people who left these things were drug dealers, and they did it because it was their religion. Laney and the others wore pale green latex gloves with orange Kevlar thimbles on the tips that gave you heat rash. They put the offerings in a white snap-top bucket with peeling Biohazard stickers. Shaquille had claimed to know the names of some of the gods these things were offered up to, but Laney hadnt been fooled. The names Shaquille made up, like O’Gunn and Sam Eddy, were obviously just that, and even Shaquille, dropping a white ball of chicken feathers into the bucket, had said an extra lawyer or two was probably a better investment. “But they do it while they waitin’. Hedge they bet.” Laney had actually preferred this to Work Experiences at fast-food franchises, even though it meant they got body-searched for drugs when they got back.

He’d told Yamazaki and Blackwell about knowing that Alison Shires was going to try to commit suicide, and now they must think he could see the future. But he knew he couldn’t. That would be like those chicken parts the dealers hid around the courthouse steps changing what was going to happen. What would happen in the future came out of what was happening now. Laney knew he couldn’t predict it, and something about the experience of the nodal points made him suspect that nobody could. The nodal points seemed to form when something might be about to change. Then he saw a place where change was most likely, if something triggered it. Maybe something as small as Alison Shires buying the blades for a box-cutter. But if an earthquake had come, that night, and pitched her apartment down into Fountain Avenue… Or if she’d lost the pack of blades… But if she’d used credit to buy that Wednesday Night Special, which she couldn’t do because it was illegal, and required cash, then it would’ve been obvious to anybody what she might be on the verge of doing.

Arleigh opened the passenger door. “You okay?”

“Sure,” Laney said, picking up the eyephones.

“Sure?”

“Let’s do it.” He looked at the ’phones.

“It’s up to you.” She touched his arm, “We’ll get you a doctor, after, okay?”

“Thanks,” Laney said, and put the ’phones on, the taste flooding his mouth—

The Lo/Rez data, translucent and intricately interpenetrated by the archives of the band’s fan-base, was crawling with new textures, maps that resolved, when he focused on them, into—

Shaquille, in his federal-issue sweats, showing Laney the goat’s head. It had been skinned, and nails had been driven into it, and Shaquille had pried open the jaw to show where the missing tongue had been replaced with a blood-soaked piece of brown paper with writing on it, That would be the name of the prosecutor, Shaquille had explained.

Laney shut his eyes, but the image remained.

He opened them on the idoru, her features rimmed with fur. She was looking at him. She wore some kind of embroidered, fur-lined hat, with earflaps, and snow was swirling around her, but then she flattened, dwindling into the texture-maps that ran down through the reef of data, and he let himself go, go with that, and he felt himself pass through the core of it, the very center, and out the other side.

“Wait—” he said, and there seemed to be a lag before he heard his own voice.

“Perspective,” the idoru said. “Yamazaki’s parallax.” Something seemed to turn him around, so that he looked directly at the data, but from some new angle, and from a great distance. And all around it, there was… nothing at all.

But through the data, like some infinitely more complex version of Arleigh’s Realtree, ran two vaguely parallel armatures. Rez and the idoru. They were sculpted in duration, Rez’s beginning, at the far end of it all, as something very minor, the first hints of his career. And growing, as it progressed, to something braided, multistranded… But then it began to get smaller again, Laney saw, the strands loosening… And that would be the point, he thought, where the singer began to become the thing that Kathy hated, the one who took up celebrity space just because he was a celebrity, because he was of a certain order of magnitude…

The idoru’s data began somewhere after that, and it began as something smoothly formed, deliberate, but lacking complexity. But at the points where it had swerved closest to Rez’s data, he saw that it had begun to acquire a sort of complexity. Or randomness, he thought. The human thing. That’s how she learns.

And both these armatures, these sculptures in time, were nodal, and grew more so toward the point, the present, where they intertwined…

He stood beside the idoru on the beach he’d seen recorded on the binoculars in the bedroom of the guesthouse in Ireland. Brownish-green sea flecked with whitecaps, stiff wind catching at the earflaps of her hat. He couldn’t feel that wind, but he could hear it, so loud now that he had trouble hearing her over it. “Can you see them?” she shouted.

“See what?”

“The faces in the clouds! The nodal points! I can see nothing! You must indicate them to me!”

And she was gone, the sea with her, Laney staring into the data again, where the digitized histories of Rez and Rei Toei mingled, on the verge of something else. If he had tried, in Los Angeles, would the box-cutter blade have emerged from Alison Shires’ nodal point?

He tried.

He was looking out across a fuzzy, indistinct white plain. Not snow. To where a pair of vast and very ornate brown-on-brown Western boots swung past against a cliff-like backdrop of violent pink. Then the image was gone, replaced by the rotating form of a. three-dimensional object, though Laney had no idea what it was supposed to be. With no clues as to scale, it looked vaguely like a Los Angeles bus with the wheels removed.

“Suite 17,” the idoru said. “Hotel Di.”

“Die?” Bus vanished, apparently taking boots with it.

“What is a ‘love hotel’?”

“What?”

“Love. Hotel.”

“Where people go to make love—I think.”

“What is ‘Rodel-van Erp primary biomolecular programming module C-slash-7A’?”

“I don’t know,” Laney said.

“But you have just shown it to me! It isour union, our intersection, that from which the rest must unfold!”

“Wait,” Laney said, “wait, you’ve got anotherone here; they sort of overlap—” The trying made his side hurt, but there were hills in the distance, twisted trees, the low roofline of a wooden house—

But the idoru was gone, and the house, its fabric eaten from within, was shimmering, folding. And then a glimpse of something towering, mismatched windows and a twisting, moire sky.

Then Arleigh pulled the ’phones off. “Stop screaming,” she said. Yamazaki was beside her. “Stop it, Laney.”

He took a long, shuddering breath, braced his palms against the padded cowling of the dash, and closed his eyes. He felt Arleigh’s hand against his neck.

“We have to go there,” he said.

“Go where?”

“Suite 17. We’ll be late, for the wedding…”