Mona Lisa Overdrive

40 - Pink Satin

Angela Mitchell comprehends this room and its inhabitants through shifting data planes that represent viewpoints, though of whom or what, she is in most cases in doubt. There is a considerable degree of overlap, of contradiction.

The man with the ragged crest of hair, in black-beaded leather is Thomas Trail Gentry (as birth data and SIN digits cascade through her) of no fixed address (as a different facet informs her that this room is his). Past a gray wash of official data traces, faintly marbled with the Fission Authority's repeated pink suspicions of utilities fraud, she finds him in a different light: he is like one of Bobby's cowboys; though young, he is like the old men of the Gentleman Loser; he is an autodidact, an eccentric, obsessed, by his own lights a scholar; he is mad, a night-runner, guilty (in Mamman's view, in Legba's) of manifold heresies; Lady 3Jane, in her own eccentric scheme, has filed him under RIMBAUD. (Another face flares out at Angie from RIMBAUD; his name is Riviera, a minor player in the dreams.) Molly has deliberately stunned him, causing an explosive flechette to detonate eighteen centimeters from his skull.

Molly, like the girl Mona, is SINless, her birth unregistered, yet around her name (names) swarm galaxies of supposition, rumor, conflicting data. Streetgirl, prostitute, bodyguard, assassin, she mingles on the manifold planes with the shadows of heroes and villains whose names mean nothing to Angie, though their residual images have long since been woven through the global culture. (And this too belonged to 3Jane, and now belongs to Angie.)

Molly has just killed a man, has fired one of the explosive fletchettes into his throat. His collapse against a steel railing suffering metal fatigue has caused a large section of catwalk to tumble to the floor below. This room has no other entrance, a fact of some strategic importance. It was probably not Molly's intention to cause the collapse of the catwalk. She sought to prevent the man, a hired mercenary, from using his weapon of choice, a short alloy shotgun coated with a black, nonreflective finish. Nonetheless, Gentry's loft is now effectively isolated.

Angie understands Molly's importance to 3Jane, the source of her desire for and rage at her; knowing this, she sees all the banality of human evil.

Angie sees Molly restlessly prowling a gray winter London, a young girl at her side -- and knows, without knowing how she knows, that this same girl is now at 23 Margate Road, SW2. (Continuity? ) The girl's father was previously the master of the man Swain, who had lately become 3Jane's servant for the sake of the information she provides to those who do her bidding. As has Robin Lanier, of course, though he waits to be paid in a different coin.

For the girl Mona, Angie feels a peculiar tenderness, a pity, a degree of envy: though Mona has been altered to resemble Angie as closely as possible, Mona's life has left virtually no trace on the fabric of things, and represents, in Legba's system, the nearest thing to innocence.

Cherry-Lee Chesterfield is surrounded by a sad ragged scrawl, her information profile like a child's drawing: citations for vagrancy, petty debts, an aborted career as a paramedical technician Grade 6, framing birth data and SIN.

Slick, or Slick Henry, is among the SINless, but 3Jane, Continuity, Bobby, all have lavished their attention on him. For 3Jane, he serves as the focus of a minor node of association: she equates his ongoing rite of construction, his cathartic response to chemo-penal trauma, with her own failed attempts to exorcise the barren dream of Tessier-Ashpool. In the corridors of 3Jane's memory, Angie has frequently come upon the chamber where a spider-armed manipulator stirs the refuse of Straylight's brief, clotted history -- an act of extended collage. And Bobby provides other memories, tapped from the artist as he accessed 3Jane's library of Babel: his slow, sad, childlike labor on the plain called Dog Solitude, erecting anew the forms of pain and memory.

Down in the chill dark of Factory's floor, one of Slick's kinetic sculptures, controlled by a subprogram of Bobby's, removes the left arm of another mercenary, employing a mechanism salvaged two summers before from a harvesting machine of Chinese manufacture. The mercenary, whose name and SIN boil past Angie like hot silver bubbles, dies with his cheek against one of Little Bird's boots.

Only Bobby, of all the people in this room, is not here as data. And Bobby is not the wasted thing before her, strapped down in alloy and nylon, its chin filmed with dried vomit, nor the eager, familiar face gazing out at her from a monitor on Gentry's workbench. Is Bobby the solid rectangular mass of memory bolted above the stretcher?

Now she steps across rolling dunes of soiled pink satin, under a tooled steel sky, free at last of the room and its data.

Brigitte walks beside her, and there is no pressure, no hollow of night, no hive sound. There are no candles. Continuity is there too, represented by a strolling scribble of silver tinsel that reminds her, somehow, of Hilton Swift on the beach at Malibu.

"Feeling better?" Brigitte asks.

"Much better, thank you."

"I thought so."

"Why is Continuity here?"

"Because he is your cousin, built from Maas biochips. Because he is young. We walk with you to your wedding."

"But who are you, Brigitte? What are you really?"

"I am the message your father was told to write. I am the vévés he drew in your head." Brigitte leans close. "Be kind to Continuity. He fears that in his clumsiness, he has earned your displeasure."

The tinsel scribble scoots off before them, across the satin dunes, to announce the bride's arrival.