It was Maryalice’s idea that they give Chia a ride into Tokyo. She said the train was too crowded and it cost a lot anyway. She said she wanted to do Chia a &vor, because Chia had carried her bag for her. (Chia had noticed that Eddie had put one bag in the Graceland’s trunk, but kept the one with the Nissan County sticker up front, next to him, beside the driver’s seat.)
Chia wasn’t really listening to Maryalice now; it was some time at night and the jet lag was too weird and they were on this big bridge that seemed to be made out of neon, with however many lanes of traffic around them, the little cars like strings of bright beads, all of them shiny and new. There were screens that kept blurring past, tall and narrow, with Japanese writing jumping around on some of them, and people on others, faces, smiling as they sold something.
And then a woman’s face: Itei Toei, the idoru Rez wanted to marry. And gone. 04 William Gibson “Rice Daniels, Mr. Lane>’. Out of control.” Pressing a card of some kind to the opposite side of the scratched plastic that walled the room called Visitors away from those who gave it its name. Laney had tried to read it, but the attempt at focusing had driven an atrocious spike of pain between his eyes. He’d looked at Rice Daniels instead, through tears of pain: close-cropped dark hair, close-fitting sunglasses with small oval lenses, the black frames gripping the man’s head like some kind of surgical clamp.
Nothing at all about Rice Daniels appeared to be out of control.
“The series,” he said. “‘Out of Control.’ As in: aren’t the media? Out of Control: the cutting edge of counter-investigative journalism.”
Laney had gingerly tried touching the tape across the bridge of his nose: a mistake. “Counter-investigative?”
“You’re a quant, Mr. Laney.” A quantitative analyst. He wasn’t, really, but that was technically his job description, “For Slitscan.”
Laney didn’t respond.
“The girl was the focus of intensive surveillance. Slitscan was all over her. You know why. We believe a case can be made here for Slitscan’s culpability in the death of Alison Shires.”
Lane>’ looked down at his running shoes, their laces removed by the Deputies. “She killed herself,” he said. “But we know why.” 3 0 2 05 9. Out of Control “No,” Laney said, meeting the black ovals again, “I don’t, Not exactly.” The nodal point. Protocols of some other realm entirely.
“You’re going to need help, Lane>’. You might be looking at a manslaughter charge. Abetting a suicide. They’ll want to know why you were up there.”
“I’ll tell them why.”
“Our producers managed to get me in here first, Lane>’. It wasn’t easy. There’s a spin-control team from Slitscan out there now, waiting to talk with you. If you let them, they’ll turn it all around. They’ll get you off, because they have to, in order to cover the show. They can do it, with enough money and the right lawyers. But ask yourself this: do you want to let them do it?”
Daniels still had his business card thumbed up against the plastic. Trying to focus on it again, Laney saw that someone had scratched something in from the other side, in small, uneven mirror-letters, so that he could read it left to right:
I NO U DIDIT
‘i’ve never heard of Out of Control.”
“Our hour-long pilot is in production as we speak, Mr. Lane>’.” A measured pause. “We’re all very excited.”
“Why?”
“Out of Control isn’t just a series. We think of it as an entirely new paradigm. A new way to do television. Your story-Alison Shires’ story-is precisely what we intend to get out there. Our producers are people who want to give something back to the audience. They’ve done well, they’re established, they’ve proven themselves; now they want to give something back-to restore a degree of honesty, a new opportunity for perspective.” The black ovals drew slightly closer to the scratched plastic. “Our producers are the producers of ‘Cops in Trouble’ and ‘A Calm and Deliberate Fashion.”
“A what?”
“Factual accounts of premeditated violence in the global fashion industry.” 06 ~AiEtha.n G~bsnn . . . “Counter-investigative’?” Yamazaki’s pen hovered over the notebook.