“Are you joking?”
“Probably, Mr. Laney. May I call you Cohn?”
“Yes..
She never did call him “Cohn,” then or ever. “You’ll find that humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool. You’ll find the type that’s most viable here is fairly oblique.”
“How do you mean, Ms. Torrance?”
“Kathy. I mean difficult to quote effectively in a memo. Or a court of law.”
Yamazaki was a good listener. He’d blink, swallow, nod, fiddle with the top button of his plaid shirt, whatever, all of it managing to somehow convey that he was getting it, the drift of Laney’s story.
Keith Alan Blackwell was something else. He sat there inert as a bale of beef, utterly motionless except when he’d raise his left hand and squeeze and twiddle the lobe-stump that was all that remained of his left ear. He did this without hesitation or embarrassment, and Laney formed the impression that it was affording him some kind of relief. The scar tissue reddened slightly under Blackwell’s ministrations.
Laney sat on an upholstered bench, his back to the wall. Yamazaki and Blackwell faced him across the narrow table. Behind them, over the uniformly black-haired heads of late-night Roppongi coffee-drinkers, the holographic features of the chain’s namesake floated in front of a lurid sunset vista of snow-capped Andean peaks. The lips of the ‘toon-Amos were like inflated red rubber sausages, a racial parody that would’ve earned the place a firebombing anywhere in the L.A. basin. He was holding up a steaming coffee cup, white and smoothly iconic, in a big, white-gloved, three-fingered urDisney hand.
Yamazaki coughed, delicately. “You are telling us, please, about your experiences at Slitscan?”
Kathy Torrance began by offering Laney a chance to net-surf, Slitscan style.
She checked a pair of computers out of the Cage, shooed four employees from an SBU, invited Laney in, and closed the door. Chairs, a round table, a large softboard on the wall. He watched as she jacked the computers into dataports and called up identical images of a longhaired dirty-blond guy in his mid-twenties. Goatee and a gold
27 earring. The face meant nothing to Laney. It might have been a face he’d passed on the street an hour before, the face of a minor player in daytime soap, or the face of someone whose freezer had recently been discovered to be packed with his victims’ fingers.
“Clinton Hillman,” Kathy Torrance said. “Hairdresser, sushi chef, music journalist, extra in mid-budget hardcore. This headshot’s tweaked, of course.” She tapped keys, detweaking it. Clint Hillman’s eyes and chin, on her screen, grew several clicks smaller. “Probably did it himself. With a professional job, there’d be nothing to work back from.”
“He acts in porno?” Laney felt obscurely sorry for Hillman, who looked lost and vulnerable without his chin.
“It isn’t the size of his chin they’re interested in,” Kathy said. “It’s mainly motion-capture, in porno. Extreme close. They’re all body-doubles. Map on better faces in post. But somebody’s still gotta get down in the trenches and bump uglies, right?”
Laney shot her a sideways look. “If you say so.”
She handed Laney an industrial-strength pair of rubberized Thomson eyephones. “Do him.”
“Do?”
“Him. Go for those nodal points you’ve been telling me about. The headshot’s a gateway to everything we’ve got on him. Whole gigs of sheer boredom. Data like a sea of tapioca, Laney. An endless vanilla plane. He’s boring as the day is long, and the day is long. Do it. Make my day. Do it and you’ve got yourself a job.”
Laney looked at the tweaked Hillman on his screen. “You haven’t told me what I’m looking for.”
“Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Shitscan’s audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered 28 William Gib~t~n with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”