“Wait a minute,” Laney said. “You knew.”
“It’s the top segment on Wednesday’s show.” She closed the computer without bothering to turn off Clint Hiliman’s detweaked chin. “But now I’ve had a chance to watch you work, Laney. You’re a nat ural. I could almost believe there might actually be something to 0 2 37 5. Nodal Points that nodal point bullshit. ome o~ your moves made no logical sense whatever, but I’ve just wached 3ou hone in, cold, on something it took three experienced researchers a month to excavate. You did it in just under half an hour.”
“Some of that was illegal,” Laney said. “You’re tied into parts of DatAmerican that you aren’t supposed to be.”
“Do you know what anondisclosure agreement is, Laney?”
Yamazaki looked up fromhis notebook. “Very good,” he said, probably to Blackwell. “This i~ very good.”
Blackwell shifted his veight, the chair’s polycarbon frame creaking faintly in protest. “But he didn’t last there, did he?”
“A little over six morrhs,” Laney said.
Six months could be a vety long time, at Slitscan.
He used most of his fi:st month’s salary to lease a micro-batchelor in a retrofitted parking structure on Broadway Avenue, Santa Monica. He bought shirts he thought were more like the ones people wore at Slitscan, and kerr his l~alaysian button-downs to sleep in. He bought an expensive pair of sunglasses and made sure he never displayed as much as a sirgle felt-pen in his shirt pocket.
Life at Slitscan had a certair. focused quality. Laney’s colleagues limited themselves to a ~articular bandwidth of emotion. A certain kind of humor, as Kathy had said, was highly valued, but there was remarkably little laughter. ‘Ihe expected response was eye contact, a nod, the edge of a smile. Lives were destroyed here, and sometimes re-created, careers crushed or made anew in guises surreal and unexpected. Because Slitscan’s business ~as the titual letting of blood, and the blood it let was an aichemical fluid: celebrity in its rawest, purest form.
Laney’s ability to locate key data in apparently random wastes of incidental information earned him the envy and grudging admiration of more experiencec researchers. He became Kathy’s favorite, and was almost pleased when he discovered that a rumor had spread that they were having an affair.
They weren’t-except for that one time at her place in Sherman Oaks, and that hadn’t been a good idea. Nothing either of them wanted to repeat.
But Laney was still narrowing down, getting focused, pushing the envelope of whatever it was that manifested as this talent, his touch. And Kathy liked that. With his eyephones on and Slitscan’s dedicated landline feeding him the bleak reaches of DatAmerica, he felt increasingly at home. He went where Kathy suggested he go. He found the nodal points.
Sometimes, falling asleep in Santa Monica, he wondered vaguely if there might be a larger system, a field of greater perspective. Perhaps the whole of DatAmerica possessed its own nodal points, info-faults that might be followed down to some other kind of truth, another mode of knowing, deep within gray shoals of information. But only if there were someone there to pose the right question. He had no idea at all what that question might be, if indeed there were one, but he somthow doubted it would ever be posed from an SBU at Slitscan.
Slitscan was descended from “reality” programming and the network tabloids of the late twentieth century, but it resembled them no more than some large, swift, bipedal carnivore resembled its sluggish, shallow-dwelling ancestors. Slitscan was the mature form, supporting fully global franchises. Slitscan’s revenues had paid for entire satellites and built the building he worked in in Burbank.
Slitscan was a show so popular that it had evolved into something akin to the old idea of a network. It was flanked and buffered by spinoffs and peripherals, each designed to shunt the viewer back to the crucial core, the familiar and reliably bloody altar that one of Laney’s Mexican co-workers called Smoking Mirror.
It was impossible to work at Slitscan without a sense of part icipating in history, or else in what Kathy Torrance would argue had re P aced history. Shtscan itself, Laney suspected, might be one of those 0 2 larger nodal points he sometimes found himself trying to imagine, an informational peculiarity opening into some unthinkably deeper structure.