Laney draws a ragged breath. “But they aren’t looking for me, are they?”
3 I “No,” Yamazaki says, “they are looking for her.”
“They won’t find her,” Laney says. “Not here. Not anywhere. Not now.’,
“Why did you run away, Laney?”
“The syndrome,” Laney says and coughs again, and Yamazaki feels the smooth, deep shudder of an incoming maglev, somewhere deeper in the station, not mechanical vibration but a vast pistoning of displaced air. “It finally kicked in. The 5-SB. The stalker effect.” Yamazaki hears feet hurrying by, perhaps an arm’s length away, behind the cardboard wall.
“It makes you cough?” Yamazaki blinks, making his new contact lenses swim uncomfortably.
“No,” Laney says and coughs into his pale and upraised hand. “Some bug. They all have it, down here.”
“I was worried when you vanished. They began to look for you, but when she was gone-”
“The shit really hit the fan.”
“Shit?”
Laney reaches up and removes the bulky, old-fashioned eyephones. Yamazaki cannot see what outputs to them, but the shifting light from the display reveals Laney’s hollowed eyes. “It’s all going to change, Yamazaki. We’re coming up on the mother of all nodal points. I can see it, now. It’s all going to change.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Know what the joke is? It didn’t change when they thought it would. Millennium was a Christian holiday. I’ve been looking at history, Yamazaki. I can see the nodal points in history. Last time we had one like this was 1911.”
“What happened in 1911?”
“Everything changed.”
“How?”
“It just did. That’s how it works. I can see it now”
“Laney,” Yamazaki says, “when you told me about the stalker effect, you said that the victims, the test subjects, became obsessed with one particular media figure.” “Yes.”
“And you are obsessed with her?”
Laney stares at him, eyes lit by a backwash of data. “No. Not with her. Guy named Harwood. Cody Harwood. They’re coming together, though. In San Francisco. And someone else. Leaves a sort of negative trace; you have to infer everything from the way he’s not there.
“Why did you ask me here, Laney? This is a terrible place. Do you wish me to help you to escape?” Yamazaki is thinking of the blades of the Swiss Army knife in his pocket. One of them is serrated; he could easily cut his way out through the wall. Yet the psychological space is powerful, very powerful, and overwhelms him. He feels very far from Shinjuku, from Tokyo, from anything. He smells Laney’s sweat. “You are not well.”
“Rydell,” Laney says, replacing the eyephones. “That rent-a-cop from the Chateau. The one you knew. The one who told me about you, back in LA.”
“Yes?”
“I need a man on the ground, in San Francisco. I’ve managed to move some money. I don’t think they can trace it. I dcked with DatArnerica’s banking sector. Find Rydell and tell him he can have it as a retainer.”
“To do what?”
Laney shakes his head. The cables on the eyephones move in the dark like snakes. “He has to be there, is all. Something’s coming down. Everything’s changing.”
“Laney, you are sick, Let me take you-”
“Back to the island? There’s nothing there. Never will be, now she’s gone.”
And Yamazaki knows this is true.
“Where’s Rez?” Laney asks.
“He mounted a tour of the Kombinat states, when he decided she was gone.”
Laney nods thoughtfully, the eyephones bobbing mantis-like in the dark. “Get Rydell, Yamazaki. I’ll tell you how he can get the money”
5 “But why?”
“Because he’s part of it. Part of the node.”
LATER Yamazaki stands, staring up at the towers of Shinjuku, the walls of animated light, sign and signifier twisting toward the sky in the unending ritual of commerce, of desire. Vast faces fill the screens, icons of a beauty at once terrible and banal.
Somewhere below his feet, Laney huddles and coughs in his cardboard shelter, all of DatAmerica pressing steadily into his eyes. Laney is his friend, and his friend is unwell. The American’s peculiar talents with data are the result of experimental trials, in a federal orphanage in Florida, of a substance known as 5-SB. Yamazaki has seen what Laney can do with data, and what data can do to Laney.