Pattern Recognition

9. TRANS

She wakes to sunshine through Damien's windows.

Squares of blue sky, decorative bits of cloud.

Stretches her toes beneath the duvet. Then remembers the complications of her current situation.

Determines to get up and out with as little thought as possible. Breakfast.

Avails herself of the surgical shower, jeans and a T-shirt, and goes out, locking up and doing the Bond thing with a fresh hair and mint-flavored spit — sealing Damien's flat against whatever bad mojo there might be.

Down Parkway and over to little Inverness, the market street that runs its single block into Camden. She knows a café here, a French place. Remembering breakfast there with Damien.

Passing record and comics shops, windows papered with flyers (where she half looks for, but does not find, the kiss).

Here it is: faux-French with real French waiting tables. Chunnel kids, guest workers.

The first thing she sees, going in, is Voytek, seated at a table with silver-haired Billy Prion, the former lead singer of a band called BSE.

She's long kept track of certain obscure mirror-world pop figures, not because they interest her in themselves but because their careers can be so compressed, so eerily quantum-brief, like particles whose existence can only be proven, after the fact, by streaks detected on specially sensitized plates at the bottom of disused salt mines.

Billy Prion's streak is by reason of his having deliberately had the left side of his mouth paralyzed with Botox for the first BSE gigs, and because, when Margot was taking her NYU extension course in disease-as-metaphor, Cayce had suggested she do something with his mouth. Margot, struggling to outline a paper in which Bigend was the disease she needed to find a metaphor for, hadn't been interested.

Having automatically registered Prion media hits ever since, she knows that BSE had broken up, and that he'd been briefly rumored to be romantically involved with that Finnish girl, the one whose band had been called Velcro Kitty until the trademark lawyers arrived.

As she passes their table, she sees that Voytek has a scrawled tarot of spiral-bound notebooks spread out around the remains of his breakfast, everything executed in red ballpoint. Diagrams, with lots of linked rectangles. From what she sees of Prion's mouth, the cosmetic toxin seems long since to have worn off. He isn't smiling, but if he were, it would probably be symmetrical. Voytek is quietly explaining something, his brow wrinkled with concentration.

An irritable-looking girl with red-rimmed eyes and very red lipstick fans a menu in her face, gesturing curtly toward a table farther in the rear. Seated, not bothering with the menu, Cayce orders coffee, eggs, and sausage, all in her best bad French.

The girl looks at her in amazed revulsion, as though Cayce were a cat bringing up a particularly repellant hairball.

“All right,” says Cayce, under her breath, to the girl's receding back, “be French.”

But her coffee does arrive, and is excellent, as do her eggs and sausage, very good as well, and when she's finished she looks up to see Voytek staring at her. Prion is gone.

“Casey,” he says, remembering but getting it wrong.

“That was Billy Prion, wasn't it?”

“I join you?”

“Please.”

He repacks his spiral-bound notebooks, closing each one and tucking it carefully away into his shoulder pouch, and crosses to her table.

“Is Billy Prion a friend of yours?”

“Owns gallery. I need space to show ZX 81 project.”

“Is it finished?”

“I am still collecting ZX 81.”

“How many do you need?”

“Many. Patronage also.”

“Is Billy in the patronage business as well?”

“No. You work for large corporation? They wish to learn of my project?”

“I'm freelance.”

“But you are here to work?”

“Yes. For an advertising agency”

He adjusts the pouch on his lap.

“Saatchi?”

“No. Voytek, do you know anything about watermarking?”

He nods. “Yes?”

“Steganography?”

“Yes?”

“What might it mean if something, say a segment of digitized video, is watermarked with a number?”

“Is visible?”

“Not ordinarily, I don't think. Concealed?”

“That is the steganography, the concealment. Multi-digit number?”

“Maybe.”

“Can be code supplied to client by watermarking firm. Firm sells client stego-encrypted watermark and means to conceal. Check web for that number. If client's image or video has been pirated, that is revealed by search.”

“You mean you could use the watermark to follow the dissemination of a given image or video clip?”

He nods.

“Who does this, the actual watermarking?”

“There are companies.”

“Could a watermark be traced to a particular company, its number?”

“Would not be so good for client security”

“Would it be possible for someone to detect, or extract, a secret watermark? Without knowing the code, or who placed it there, or even being sure it's there in the first place?”

Voytek considers. “Difficult, but might be done. Hobbs knows these things.”

“Who's Hobbs?”

“You meet. Man with Curtas.”

Cayce remembers the mean Beckett face, the filthy fingernails. “Really? Why?”

“Maths. Trinity, Cambridge, then works for United States. NSA. Very difficult.”

“The work?”

“Hobbs.”

THE Children's Crusade is remounting in force, this sunny morning.

She stands in Inverness with Voytek, watching them troop past, looking dusty in this sunlight and medieval, slouching not toward Bethlehem but Camden Lock.

Voytek has put on a pair of shades with small round lenses. They remind Cayce of coins placed on the eyes of a corpse.

“I must meet Magda,” he announces.

“Who is she?”

“Sister. She is selling hats, in Camden Lock. Come.” Voytek pushes off into the current of bodies, clockwise, “Saturday sells in Portobello, the fashion market. Sunday, here.” Cayce follows, thinking, framing questions about watermarking.

The sun on this shuffling press is soothing, and they soon arrive at the lock, carried along by a current of feet responsible for all those billions in athletic-shoe sales.

Voytek has implied that Magda, aside from designing and making hats, does something in advertising herself, although Cayce can't quite make out what it is.

The market is set back in a maze of Victorian brick.

Warehouses, she supposes, and subterranean stables for the horses that drew the barges down the canals. She isn't certain she's ever really gotten to the bottom of the labyrinth, though she's been here many times. Voytek leads the way, past sheet-hung stalls of dead men's clothes, film posters, recordings on vinyl, Russian alarm clocks, sundries for smokers of anything but tobacco.

Deeper into the brickwork vaults, away from the sun, illuminated by Lava lamps and fluorescents in nonstandard colors, they find Magda, who aside from those cheekbones looks nothing at all like her brother. Short, pretty, hennaed, laced into a projectile bodice that seems to have been retrofitted from some sort of pressurized flying gear, she is happily packing her goods and preparing to close her stall.

Voytek asks her something in whatever their native tongue is. She answers, laughing.

“She says men from France buy wholesale,” Voytek explains. “She speak good English.”

Magda says to Cayce. “I'm Magda.” “Cayce Pollard.” They shake hands.

“Casey is advertising too.”

“Probably not the way I am, but don't remind me,” says Magda, wrapping another hat in tissue and putting it into a cardboard carton with the rest.

Cayce starts to help. Magda's hats are hats that Cayce could wear, if she wore hats. Gray or black only, knit, crocheted, or yarn-stitched with a sailor's needle from thick industrial felt, they are without period or label. “These are nice.”

“Thank you.”

“You're in advertising? What do you do?”

“Look sorted, go to clubs and wine bars and chat people up. While I'm at it, I mention a client's product, of course favorably. I try to attract attention while I'm doing it, but attention of a favorable sort. I haven't been doing it long, and I don't think I like it.”

Magda does indeed speak good English, and Cayce wonders at the difference in their fluencies. But says nothing.

Magda laughs. “I really am his sister,” she says, “but our mother brought me here when I was five, thank God.” Putting away the last hat, she closes the carton and hands it to Voytek.

“You're paid to go to clubs and mention products?”

“Firm's called Trans. Doing very well, apparently. I'm a design student, need something to make ends meet, but it's getting to be a bit much.” She's lowering a sheet of tattered transparent plastic to indicate that her makeshift stall is now closed. “But I've just sold twenty hats! Time for a drink!”

“YOU're in a bar, having a drink,” Magda says, the three of them wedged into one darkly varnished corner of an already raucous Camden pub, drinking lager.

“I know,” says Voytek, defensively.

“No! I mean you're in a bar, having a drink, and someone beside you starts a conversation. Someone you might fancy the look of. All very pleasant, and then you're chatting along, and she, or he, we have men as well, mentions this great new streetwear label, or this brilliant little film they've just seen. Nothing like a pitch, you understand, just a brief favorable mention. And do you know what you do? This is what I can't bloody stand about it! Do you know what you do?”

“No,” Cayce says.

“You say you like it too! You lie! At first I thought it was only men who'd do that, but women do it as well! They lie!”

Cayce has heard about this kind of advertising, in New York, but has never run across anyone who's actually been involved in it. “And then they take it away with them,” she suggests, “this favorable mention, associated with an attractive member of the opposite sex. One who's shown some slight degree of interest in them, whom they've lied to in an attempt to favorably impress.”

“But they buy jeans,” Voytek demands, “see movie? No!”

“Exactly,” Cayce says, “but that's why it works. They don't buy the product: They recycle the information. They use it to try to impress the next person they meet.”

“Efficient way to disseminate information? I don't think.”

“But it is,” Cayce insists. “The model's viral. 'Deep niche.' The venues would be carefully selected —”

“Bloody brilliantly! That's the thing, I'm every night to these bleeding-edge places, cab fare, cash for drinks and food.” She takes a long pull on her half pint. “But it's starting to do something to me. I'll be out on my own, with friends, say, not working, and I'll meet someone, and we'll be talking, and they'll mention something.”

“And?”

“Something they like. A film. A designer. And something in me stops.” She looks at Cayce. “Do you see what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“I'm devaluing something. In others. In myself. And I'm starting to distrust the most casual exchange.” Magda looks glum. “What sort of advertising do you do?”

“I consult on design.” Then, because this is not exactly the stuff of interesting conversation: “And I hunt 'cool,' although I don't like to describe it that way. Manufacturers use me to keep track of street fashion.” Magda's eyebrows go up. “And you like my hats?”

“I really like your hats, Magda. I'd wear them, if I wore hats.” Magda nods, excited now.

“But the 'cool' part — and I don't know why that archaic usage has stuck, by the way — isn't an inherent quality. It's like a tree falling, in the forest.”

“It cannot hear,” declares Voytek, solemnly.

“What I mean is, no customers, no cool. It's about a group behavior pattern around a particular class of object. What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does.”

“And then?”

“I point a commodifier at it.”

“And?”

“It gets productized. Turned into units. Marketed.” She takes a sip of lager. Looks around the pub. The crew in here aren't from the Children's Crusade. She guesses they are the folks who live nearby, probably back behind this side of the street, a neighborhood less gentrified than Damien's. The wood of the bar is worn the way old boats can be worn, virtually to splinters, held together by a thousand coats of coffin-colored varnish.

“So,” Magda says, “I am being used to establish a pattern? To fake that? To bypass a part of the process.”

“Yes,” Cayce says.

“Then why are they trying to do it with bloody video clips from the Internet? This couple kissing in a doorway? Is it a product? They won't even tell us.”

And Cayce can only stare.

“HELENA. It's Cayce. Thank you for dinner. It was lovely —”

“How was Hubertus? Bernard thought he might have the hots for you, to put it bluntly.”

“Bluntness appreciated, Helena, but I don't think that's the case. We had a drink. I'd never really had a one-on-one with him before.”

“He's brilliant, isn't he?” Something in her tone. A sort of resignation?

“Yes. Is Bernard there, Helena? Hate to disturb him, but I have a question about work.”

“Sorry, but he's out. Take a message?”

“Do you know if there's a branch, a subsidiary of some kind, of Blue Ant, called Trans? As in-lation? Or-gressive?”

Silence. “Yes. There is. Laura Dawes-Trumbull has it. Lives with a cousin of Bernard's, oddly. In lawn care.”

“Pardon?” A place name?

“The cousin. Lawn care. Lawn products. But Laura heads Trans, I do know that. One of Hubertus's pet projects.”

“Thanks, Helena. Have to run.”

“Bye, dear.”

“Bye.”

Cayce removes her card from the pay phone and hangs up, the receiver being immediately taken by a dreadlocked Crusader waiting on the sidewalk behind her.

The sunlight seems not so pleasant now. She's made her excuses, come out here, bought a phone card, waited in line. And now it seems that Magda is indeed employed, by a sub-unit of Blue Ant, to encourage interest in the footage. What is Bigend doing?

She fords the stream of the Crusade, making it to the opposite bank and heading back down toward Parkway. The street-wide flood of kids seems strangely removed, as though they themselves are footage.

A suggestion of autumn is in the light, now, and she wonders where she'll be this winter. Will she be here? In New York? She doesn't know. What is that, to be over thirty and not know where you'll be in a month or two?

She reaches a point where the Crusade flows around a stationary, drinking knot of Camden's resident, revenant alcoholics. They are why Damien had been able to afford to rent here, years before he'd made any money or bought his house. Somewhere nearby is a Victorian doss house, a vast red brick pile of a hostel for the homeless, purpose-built and hideous, and its inhabitants, however individually transitory, have congregated in the High Street since the day it first opened. Damien had shown it to her one full-moon night, out walking. It stood as a bulwark against gentrification, he'd explained. The re-purposers, the creators of loft spaces, saw the inhabitants, these units dedicated to the steady-state consumption of fortified lagers and sugary ciders, and turned back. And these defenders stand now, drinking, amid the Children's Crusade, rocks in a river of youth.

A peaceful people for the most part, when their spells weren't on them, but now one, younger perhaps than the others, looks at her out of blue and burning eyes, acetylene and ageless, from the depths of his affliction, and she shivers, and hurries on, wondering what it was he'd seen.

In Inverness the market men are locking green-painted shutters across their stalls, closing early, and the place where she'd had breakfast is in full bistro swing, a spill of laughing, drinking children out across the pavement.

She walks on, feeling not foreign but alien, made so by this latest advent of something that seems to be infecting everything. Hubertus, and Trans…

She closes Parkaboy's latest, gets up now and goes into the yellow kitchen. Puts the kettle on. Coffee or tea? “I hate the domestication,” Donny had confided, once, insofar as he was capable.

She wonders if an absent friend's flat in London is perhaps preferable to her own, back in New York, as carefully cleansed of extraneous objects as she can keep it, and why? Does she hate the domestication? She has fewer things in her apartment than anyone, her friend Margot says.

She feels the things she herself owns as a sort of pressure. Other people's objects exert no pressure. Margot thinks that Cayce has weaned herself from materialism, is preternaturally adult, requiring no external tokens of self.

Waiting for the kettle to boil, she looks back, out into Damien's main room, and sees the robot girls, eyeless. No flies on Damien. He's kept his decorators from decorating, resulting in a semiotic neutrality that Cayce is starting to appreciate more, the longer she stays here. Her own place, in New York, is a whitewashed cave, scarcely more demonstrative of self, its uneven tenement floors painted a shade of blue she discovered in northern Spain. An ancient tint, arsenic-based. Peasants there had used it for centuries on interior walls, and it was said to keep flies away. Cayce had had it mixed in plastic enamel, sans arsenic, from a Polaroid she'd taken. Like the varnish on the bar in Camden High Street, it sealed the furry splinters of wear. Texture. She likes an acquired texture, evidence of long habitation, but nothing too personal.

The kettle whistles. She makes a single cup of Colombian and takes it back to the Cube. F:F:F is open there, and she flips back and forth between posts, getting a sense of what's been going on. Not much, aside from ongoing analysis of #135, which is normal, and discussion of this Vatican story from Brazil. Maurice, interestingly, posts to point out that both the story and the alleged papal interest seem to issue from Brazil, and that there has apparently been no independent confirmation from elsewhere. Is it true? he wonders. A hoax?

Cayce frowns. Magda's story. Shown #135 prior to an evening's assignment, then given a brief scripting: It is apparently a feature film, of unknown origin, very interesting somehow, intriguing, and has the one she addresses heard of it? And then debriefed, after, for responses, which she says is unique in her experience of the job so far. And where, Cayce had asked, had Magda been sent to spread this? A private club, Covent Garden: media people. She'd been taken in by a member, someone she'd been introduced to after the briefing, and left to work the room on her own.

Trans. Blue Ant. Bigend.

And tomorrow she meets with Stonestreet again. And Dorotea.