In his quest for lesser nodal pouts, the sort that Kathy sent him into DatAmerica to locate, Laney hid already affected the courses of municipal elections, the market in pitent gene futures, abortion laws in the State of New Jersey, and the spin on an ecstatic pro-euthanasia movement (or suicide cult, depending) called Cease Upon The Midnight, not to mention the lives and careers of several dozen celebrities of various kinds.
Not always for the worst, either,in terms of what the show’s subjects might have wished for themselves. Kathy’s segment on the Dukes of Nuke ‘Em, exposing the band’s exclusive predilection for Iraqi fetal tissue, had sent their subsequent release instant platinum (and had resulted in show-trials and public hangings in Baghdad, but he supposed life was hard there so begin with).
Laney had never been a Slitscan ~iewer, himself, and he suspected that this had counted in his favor when he’d applied as a researcher. He had no strong opinion of the show either way. He accepted it, to the extent that he’d thought of it atall, as a fact of life. Slitscan was how a certain kind of news was done. Slitscan was where he worked.
Slitscan allowed him to do the one thing he possessed a genuine talent for, so he’d managed to avoid thinking in terms of cause and effect. Even now, attempting to e~plain himself to the attentive Mr.Yamazaki, he found it difficult to feel any clear linkage of responsibility. The rich and the famous, Kathy had once said, were seldom that way by accident. It was possible to be one or the other, but very seldom, accidentally, to be both,
Celebrities who were neither v~ere something else again, and Kathy viewed these as crosses she must bear: a mass-murderer, for instance, or his most recent victim’s parents. No star quality (though she always held out hope for the murderers, feeling that at least the potential was there).
It was the other kind that Kathy wanted, directing the atten au ~AIiiIi~.m flili~g~,. tions of Laney and as many as thirty other researchers to the more private aspects of the lives of those who were deliberately and at least moderately famous.
Alison Shires wasn’t famous at all, but the man Laney had confirmed she was having an affair with was famous enough.
And then something began to come clear to Laney.
Alison Shires knew, somehow, that he was there, watching. As though she felt him gazing down, into the pool of data that reflected her life, its surface made of all the bits that were the daily record of her life as it registered on the digital fabric of the world.
Laney watched a nodal point begin to form over the reflection of Alison Shires.
She was going to kill herself.
6. DESH (.~hia had programmed her Music Master to have an affinity for bridges. He appeared in her virtual Venice whenever she crossed one at moderate speed: a slender young man with pale blue eyes and a penchant for long, flowing coats.
He’d been the subject oi a look-and-feel action, in his beta release, when lawyers representing a venerable British singer had protested that the Music Master’s designers had scanned in images of their client as a much younger man. This had been settled out of court, and all later versions, including Chia’s, were much more carefully generic. (Kelsey had told her that it had mainly had to do with changing one of his eyes, but why only the one?)
She’d fed him into Venice on her second visit, to keep her company and provide musical variety, and keying his appearances to moments when she crossed bridges had seemed like a good idea. There were lots of bridges in Venice, some of them no more than a little arc of stone steps spanning the narrowest of waterways. There was the Bridge of Sighs, which Chia avoided because she found it sad and creepy, and the Bridge of Fists, which she liked mainly for its name, and so many others. And there was the Rialto, big and humped and fantastically old, where her father said men had invented banking, or a particular kind of banking. (Her father worked for a bank, which was why he had to live in Singapore.)