“Oh,” Chia said. “Oh. Well. Myfriend. To see my friend.”
“It’s so strange. You know2 Sinc the quake.”
“But they’ve built it all back nov. Haven’t they?”
“Sure, but they did it all so fast,~nost1y with that nanotech, that just grows? Eddie got in there befor the dust had settled. Told me you could see those towers growingat night. Rooms up top like a honeycomb, and walls just sealing thmselves over, one after another. Said it was like watching a candle rielt, but in reverse. That’s too scary. Doesn’t make a sound. Machins too small to see. They can get into your body, you know?”
Chia sensed an underlying edg of panic there. “Eddie?” she asked, hoping to change the subject.
“Eddie’s like a businessman, Hewent to Japan to make money after the earthquake. He says the iifa, infa, the structure was wide open, then. He says it took the spin4 out of it, sort of, so you could come in and root around, quick, befre it healed over and hardened up again. And it healed over arounaEddie, like he’s an implant or something, so now he’s part of the ma, the infa-”
“Infrastructure.”
“The structure. Yeah. So now hes plugged in, to all that juice. 46 William Gibson He’s a landlord, and he OWfl5 these 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 ~Shell 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. 49 Laney met a woman who said she edited lamps for a design house in San Francisco. Tuesday evening. I-Ie’d been in Mexico three hours. Drinks in the lobby bar.