Pattern Recognition

13. LITTLE BOAT

Her seat on the upper deck of this British Airways 747 subsides into a bed that makes her think of a little boat, a coracle of Hexcel and teak-finish laminate. She's nearest the nose, no other seating units in her line of sight.

The cabin is like some optimally comfy cube-farm, a cluster of automated, supremely ergonomic workstation enclosures. It feels as though, with just a little more engineering, they could simultaneously tube-feed you and tidily exhaust the resulting wastes.

However many hours in the air now, her watch tucked ritually out of sight, dinner served, lights dimmed, she imagines her soul bobbing stupidly, somewhere back over the concrete of Heathrow, its invisible tether spooling steadily out of her. As does a certain degree of fear, she notes, now that she knows they must be far out over an ocean, where no human agents threaten. For most of her life, flying, she'd felt most vulnerable right here, suspended in a void, above trackless water, but now her conscious flying-fears are about things that might be arranged to happen over populous human settlements, fears of ground-to-air, of scripted CNN moments.

But commercial aircraft have also been problematic for Cayce in another way, with their endless claustrophobic repetition of the carrier's logo. BA has never been particularly difficult, but Virgin, with its multi-pronged product-associations, is completely impossible.

Her biggest problem with BA now, she reminds herself, is a more ordinary one: no movies she'd even consider watching in the armrest DVD, she's under a personally enforced video news ban in effect now for some time, she's neglected to bring anything to read, and sleep refuses to come. With London receding and Tokyo still largely unimagined, unremembered, she sits up cross-legged in the center of her narrow little bed and knuckles her eyes, feeling like a bedridden child, just well enough to be utterly restless.

Then she remembers Bigend's iBook, with its bright new Heathrow security sticker.

She hauls the nylon case up from the floor and opens it. She'd spent twenty minutes, the night before, poking around on the desktop, but now for the first time she notices an ummarked CD-ROM that proves, on insertion, to be a searchable database of all of F:F:F. Whoever does these things for Bigend has also provided, on the hard drive, a complete collection of the footage and her three favorite edits, one of them by Filmy and Maurice.

Still sitting cross-legged, she makes a Stickie: COPY CD FOR IVY.

Ivy's wanted a searchable database of the forum almost since the forum began, because the free software that allows her to keep the site up isn't searchable, and she hasn't had anyone willing or able to do the compiling. Posters have bookmarked their favorite threads, and swap them, but there's been no way to trace a particular topic or theme through the site's evolution.

Or, rather, now there is.

Cayce has no idea how many pages of posts have accumulated since the site's first day. She's never gone back and looked at that, at the Ur-site, the early days, but now she enters and searches CayceP.

Ah. Not her first post. At first she hadn't even been CayceP. Reenters Cayce.

She'd added the P later, because there had briefly been another Cayce, surname, a Marvin, in Wichita, who'd also pronounced it Case, not Casey.

She feels somewhat the way she might if she had uncovered her high-school yearbook.

Here's Parkaboy's first post:

This had been prior to La Anarchia's arrival, after three days of which Parkaboy had made the first of his many noisy departures from the site.

She fiddles with the matte alloy buttons on her armrest, converting her bed into a lounger. It feels good when it moves: powerful motors devoted to her comfort. She settles back in her black sweats (having declined the offer of a BA romper suit) and pulls the tartan blanket across her legs, iBook on her stomach. Adjusts the snaky fiber-optic reading lamp, with its head like a policeman's flashlight.

Exits the CD-ROM and clicks on Filmy and Maurice's edit.

It opens on that rooftop, against the oddly shaped chimneys. He is there. Walks to the low parapet. Looks out toward a city that never resolves. A framegrab on what he sees would reveal only a faint arrangement of vertical and horizontal lines. No focus. Definitely a skyline but not enough information to provide any sort of identification. Rule out Manhattan, others; there are lists arguing the places it cannot, might not be.

Maurice cuts to that segment that consists entirely of long shots, the girl in the formal park.

Sometimes, when she watches a good edit, and this is one of the best, it's as though it's all new; she sinks into it with joy and anticipation, and when the edit ends, she's shocked. That's it. All there is. How can that be?

This is one of those times. It ends.

She falls asleep, iBook on her lap.

When she wakes, the cabin is darker, and she needs to pee.

Grateful that she isn't wearing a BA romper, she shuts the iBook down, stows it away, unbuckles her seat belt, puts on BA slippers, and makes her way back toward the toilets.

Passing, as she does, what can only be the sleeping form of Billy Prion, snoring lightly, his still-unparalyzed mouth slightly open. He has his tartan blanket arranged around his shoulders like an old man in a bath chair, his face slack and inert. She blinks, trying to convince herself that this cannot be the former lead singer of BSE, but it quite clearly is, all in what looks to be last season's Agnes B Homme.

In the coracle nearest Prion sleeps a blindfolded blonde, a pair of modest nipple rings clearly visible in outline through the taut black fabric of her top.

This, Cayce decides, further confirming her identification of Prion, is the singer from the former Velcro Kitty, the one the music press had supposed he was no longer with.

She forces herself to shuffle on, in her navy vinyl slippers, to the almost-spacious safety of a first-class toilet, with its fresh flowers and Molton Brown face stuff, where she locks the door and sits, unable to put this together: Prion, at whose gallery Voytek hopes to show his ZX 81 project, is on her flight to Tokyo. Why? If it's that small a world, it starts to smell funny.

Watching that intensely blue fluid pressure-swirl down as she flushes.

Returning to her seat, she sees the nipple-ringed singer awake, seated upright, blindfold discarded, studying a glossy fashion magazine under a tightly focused fiber-optic beam. Prion is still snoring.

Back in her own little boat, she accepts a lukewarm white washcloth from the flight attendant's tongs.

Why are they here, on this flight, Prion and the Velcro Kitty girl? She remembers her father's views on paranoia.

Win, the Cold War security expert, ever watchful, had treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained. Like someone who'd learned how best to cope with chronic illness, he never allowed himself to think of his paranoia as an aspect of self. It was there, constantly and intimately, and he relied on it professionally, but he wouldn't allow it to spread, become jungle. He cultivated it on its own special plot, and checked it daily for news it might bring: hunches, lateralisms, frank anomalies.

Is Prion's presence on this plane a frank anomaly?

Only, she decides, if she thinks of herself as the center, the focal point of something she doesn't, can't, understand. That had always been Win's first line of defense, within himself: to recognize that he was only a part of something larger. Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.

But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.

The danger, she supposes, is a species of apophenia.

The damp white cloth has grown cold in her hand.

She places it on the armrest and closes her eyes.