Idoru by William Gibson Read Free Book Online Page B

clubs, and has deals in music and vids and things.”
    Chia leaned over, dragging her bag from beneath the seat in front, putting away the Sandbenders. “Do you live there, in Tokyo?”
    “Part of the time.”
    “Do you like it?”
    “It's… I… well… Weird , right? It's not like anyplace. This huge thing happened there, then they fixed it with what was maybe even a huger thing, a bigger change, and everybody goes around pretending it never happened, that nothing happened . But you know what?”
    “What?”
    “Look at a map. A map from before? A lot of it's not even where it used to be . Nowhere near. Well, a few things are, the Palace, that expressway, and that big city hall thing in Shinjuku, but a lot of the rest of it's like they just made it up. They pushed all the quake-junk into the water, like landfill, and now they're building that up, too. New islands.”
    “You know,” Chia said, “I'm really sleepy. I think I'll try to go to sleep now.”
    “My name's Maryalice. Like it's one word.”
    “Mine's Chia.”
    Chia closed her eyes and tried to put her seat back a little more, but that was as far as it could go.
    “Pretty name,” Maryalice said.
    Chia thought she could hear the Music Master's DESH behind the sound of the engines, not so much a sound now as a part of her. That whiter shade of something, but she could never quite make it out.

7. The Wet, Warm Life in Alison Shires
    “She'll try to kill herself,” Laney said.
    “Why?” Kathy Torrance sipped espresso. A Monday afternoon in the Cage.
    “Because she knows. She can feel me watching.”
    “That's impossible, Laney.”
    “She knows.”
    “You aren't ‘watching’ her. You're examining the data she generates, like the data all our lives generate. She can't know that.”
    “She does.”
    The white cup clicking down into its saucer. “Then how can you know that she does? You're looking at her phone records, what she chooses to watch and when, the music she accesses. How could you possibly know that she's aware of your attention?”
    The nodal point, he wanted to say. But didn't.
    “I think you're working too hard, Laney. Five days off.”
    “No, I'd rather—”
    “I can't afford to let you burn yourself out. I know the signs, Laney. Recreational leave, full pay, five days.”
    She added a travel bonus. Laney was sent to Slitscan' s in-house agency and booked into a hollowed-out hilltop above Ixtapa, a hotel with vast stone spheres ranged across the polished concrete of its glass-walled lobby. Beyond the glass, iguanas regarded the registration staff with an ancient calm, green scales bright against dusty brown branches.
    Laney met a woman who said she edited lamps for a design house in San Francisco. Tuesday evening. He'd been in Mexico three hours. Drinks in the lobby bar.
    He asked her what that meant, to edit lamps. Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted. If people asked him what he did, he said he was a quantitative analyst. He didn't try to explain the nodal points, or Kathy Torrance's theories about celebrity.
    The woman replied that her company produced short-run furniture and accessories, lamps in particular. The actual manufacturing took place at any number of different locations, mainly in Northern California. Cottage industry. One maker might contract to do two hundred granite bases, another to lacquer and distress two hundred steel tubes in a very specific shade of blue. She brought out a notebook and showed him animated sketches. All of the things had a thin, spiky look that made him think of African insects he'd seen on the Nature Channel.
    Did she design them? No. They were designed in Russia, in Moscow. She was the editor. She selected the suppliers of components. She oversaw manufacture, transport to San Francisco, assembly in what once had been a cannery. If the design documents specified something that couldn't be provided,