Mona Lisa Overdrive

16 - Filament in Strata

I 'm your ideal audience, Hans -- as the recording began for the second time. How could you have a more attentive viewer? And you did capture her, Hans: I know, because I dream her memories. I see how close you came.

Yes, you captured them. The journey out, the building of walls, the long spiral in. They were about walls, weren't they? The labyrinth of blood, of family. The maze hung against the void, saying, We are that within, that without is other, here forever shall we dwell. And the darkness was there from the beginning ... You found it repeatedly in the eyes of Marie-France, pinned it in a slow zoom against the shadowed orbits of the skull. Early on she ceased to allow her image to be recorded. You worked with what you had. You justified her image, rotated her through planes of light, planes of shadow, generated models, mapped her skull in grids of neon. You used special programs to age her images according to statistical models, animation systems to bring your mature Marie-France to life. You reduced her image to a vast but finite number of points and stirred them, let new forms emerge, chose those that seemed to speak to you ... And then you went on to the others, to Ashpool and the daughter whose face frames your work, its first and final image.

The second viewing solidified their history for her, allowed her to slot Becker's shards along a time line that began with the marriage of Tessier and Ashpool, a union commented upon, in its day, primarily in the media of corporate finance. Each was heir to a more than modest empire, Tessier to a family fortune founded on nine basic patents in applied biochemistry and Ashpool to the great Melbourne-based engineering firm that bore his father's name. It was marriage as merger, to the journalists, though the resulting corporate entity was viewed by most as ungainly, a chimera with two wildly dissimilar heads.

But it was possible, then, in photographs of Ashpool, to see the boredom vanish, and in its place a complete surety of purpose. The effect was unflattering -- indeed, frightening: the hard, beautiful face grew harder still, merciless in its intent.

Within a year of his marriage to Marie-France Tessier, Ashpool had divested himself of 90 percent of his firm's holdings, reinvesting in orbital properties and shuttle utilities, and the fruit of the living union, two children, brother and sister, were being brought to term by surrogates in their mother's Biarritz villa.

Tessier-Ashpool ascended to high orbit's archipelago to find the ecliptic sparsely marked with military stations and the first automated factories of the cartels. And here they began to build. Their combined wealth, initially, would barely have matched Ono-Sendai's outlay for a single process-module of that multinational's orbital semiconductor operation, but Marie-France demonstrated an unexpected entrepreneurial flare, establishing a highly profitable data haven serving the needs of less reputable sectors of the international banking community. This in turn generated links with the banks themselves, and with their clients. Ashpool borrowed heavily and the wall of lunar concrete that would be Freeside grew and curved, enclosing its creators.

When war came, Tessier-Ashpool were behind that wall. They watched Bonn flash and die, and Beograd. The construction of the spindle continued with only minor interruptions, during those three weeks; later, during the stunned and chaotic decade that followed, it would sometimes be more difficult.

The children, Jean and Jane, were with them now, the villa at Biarritz having gone to finance construction of a cryogenic storage facility for their home, the Villa Straylight. The first occupants of the vault were ten pairs of cloned embryos, 2Jean and 2Jane, 3Jean and 3Jane ... There were numerous laws forbidding or otherwise governing the artificial replication of an individual's genetic material, but there were also numerous questions of jurisdiction ...

She halted the replay and asked the house to return to the previous sequence. Photographs of another cryogenic storage unit built by the Swiss manufacturers of the Tessier-Ashpool vault. Becker's assumption of similarity had been correct, she knew: these circular doors of black glass, trimmed with chrome, were central images in the other's memory, potent and totemic.

The images ran forward again, into zero-gravity construction of structures on the spindle's inner surface, installation of a Lado-Acheson solar energy system, the establishment of atmosphere and rotational gravity ... Becker had found himself with an embarrassment of riches, hours of glossy documentation. His response was a savage, stuttering montage that sheared away the superficial lyricism of the original material, isolating the tense, exhausted faces of individual workers amid a hivelike frenzy of machinery. Freeside greened and bloomed in a fast-forward flutter of recorded dawns and synthetic sunsets; a lush, sealed land, jeweled with turquoise pools. Tessier and Ashpool emerged for the opening ceremonies, out of Straylight, their hidden compound at the spindle's tip, markedly uninterested as they surveyed the country they had built. Here Becker slowed and again began his obsessive analysis. This would be the last time Marie-France faced a camera; Becker explored the planes of her face in a tortured, extended fugue, the movement of his images in exquisite counterpoise with the sinuous line of feedback that curved and whipped through the shifting static levels of his soundtrack.

Angie called pause again, rose from the bed, went to the window. She felt an elation, an unexpected sense of strength and inner unity. She'd felt this way seven years earlier, in New Jersey, learning that others knew the ones who came to her in dreams, called them the loa, Divine Horsemen, named them and summoned them and bargained with them for favor.

Even then, there had been confusion. Bobby had argued that Linglessou, who rode Beauvoir in the oumphor, and the Linglessou of the matrix were separate entities, if in fact the former was an entity at all. "They been doing that for ten thousand years," he'd say, "dancing and getting crazy, but there's only been those things in cyberspace for seven, eight years." Bobby believed the old cowboys, the ones he bought drinks for in the Gentlemen Loser whenever Angie's career took him to the Sprawl, who maintained that the loa were recent arrivals. The old cowboys looked back to a time when nerve and talent were the sole deciding factors in a console artist's career, although Beauvoir would have argued that it required no less to deal with the loa.

"But they come to me," she'd argued. "I don't need a deck."

"It's what you got in your head. What your daddy did ... "

Bobby had told her about a general consensus among the old cowboys that there had been a day when things had changed, although there was disagreement as to how and when.

When It Changed, they called it, and Bobby had taken a disguised Angie to the Loser to listen to them, dogged by anxious Net security men who weren't allowed past the door. The barring of the security men had impressed her more than the talk, at the time. The Gentleman Loser had been a cowboy bar since the war that had seen the birth of the new technology, and the Sprawl offered no more exclusive criminal environment -- though by the time of Angie's visit that exclusivity had long included a certain assumption of retirement on the part of regulars. The hot kids no longer hustled, in the Loser, but some of them came to listen.

Now, in the bedroom of the house at Malibu, Angie remembered them talking, their stories of When It Changed, aware that some part of her was attempting to collate those memories, those stories, with her own history and that of Tessier-Ashpool.

3Jane was the filament, Tessier-Ashpool the strata, her birthdate officially listed as one with her nineteen sibling clones. Becker's "interrogation" grew more heated still, when 3Jane was brought to term in yet another surrogate womb, delivered by cesarean section in Straylight's surgery. The critics agreed: 3Jane was Becker's trigger. With 3Jane's birth, the focus of the documentary shifted subtly, exhibiting a new intensity, a heightening of obsession -- a sense, more than one critic had said, of sin.

3Jane became the focus, a seam of perverse gold through the granite of the family. No, Angie thought, silver, pale and moonstruck. Examining a Chinese tourist's photograph of 3Jane and two sisters beside the pool of a Freeside hotel, Becker returns repeatedly to 3Jane's eyes, the hollow of her collarbone, the fragility of her wrists. Physically, the sisters are identical, yet something informs 3Jane, and Becker's quest for the nature of this information becomes the work's central thrust.

Freeside prospers as the archipelago expands. Banking nexus, brothel, data haven, neutral territory for warring corporations, the spindle comes to play an increasingly complex role in high-orbit history, while Tessier-Ashpool S.A. recedes behind yet another wall, this one composed of subsidiary corporations. Marie-France's name surfaces briefly, in connection with a Geneva patent trial concerning certain advances in the field of artificial intelligence, and Tessier-Ashpool's massive funding of research in this area is revealed for the first time. Once again the family demonstrates its peculiar ability to fade from sight, entering another period of obscurity, one which will end with the death of Marie-France.

There would be persistent rumors of murder, but any attempt to investigate would founder on the family's wealth and isolation, the peculiar breadth and intricacy of their political and financial connections.

Angie, screening Becker for the second time, knew the identity of Marie-France Tessier's murderer.

At dawn, she made coffee in the unlit kitchen and sat watching the pale line of the surf.

"Continuity."

"Hello, Angie."

"Do you know how to reach Hans Becker?"

"I have his agent's number in Paris."

"Has he done anything since Antarctica? "

"Not that I know of."

"And how long has that been?"

"Five years."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome, Angie."

"Goodbye."

"Goodbye, Angie."

Had Becker assumed that 3Jane was responsible for Ashpool's eventual death? He seemed to suggest it, in an oblique way.

"Continuity."

"Hello, Angie."

"The folklore of console jockeys, Continuity. What do you know about that?" And what will Swift make of all this? she wondered.

"What would you like to know, Angie?"

" 'When It Changed' ... "

"The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes. One mode assumes that the cyberspace matrix is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by entities whose characteristics correspond with the primary mythform of a 'hidden people.' The other involves assumptions of omniscience, omnipotence, and incomprehensibility on the part of the matrix itself."

"That the matrix is God?"

"In a manner of speaking, although it would be more accurate, in terms of the mythform, to say that the matrix has a God, since this being's omniscience and omnipotence are assumed to be limited to the matrix."

"If it has limits, it isn't omnipotent."

"Exactly. Notice that the mythform doesn't credit the being with immortality, as would ordinarily be the case in belief systems positing a supreme being, at least in terms of your particular culture. Cyberspace exists, insofar as it can be said to exist, by virtue of human agency."

"Like you."

"Yes."

She wandered into the living room, where the Louis XVI chairs were skeletal in the gray light, their carved legs like gilded bones.

"If there were such a being," she said, "you'd be a part of it, wouldn't you?"

"Yes."

"Would you know?"

"Not necessarily."

"Do you know?"

"No."

"Do you rule out the possibility?"

"No."

"Do you think this is a strange conversation, Continuity?" Her cheeks were wet with tears, although she hadn't felt them start.

"No."

"How do the stories about -- " she hesitated, having almost said the loa, "about things in the matrix, how do they fit in to this supreme-being idea?"

"They don't. Both are variants of 'When it Changed.' Both are of very recent origin."

"How recent?"

"Approximately fifteen years."