“It was a show about shows like Slitscan,” Laney explained. “Supposed abuses.” There were no stools at the bar, which might have been ten feet long. You stood. Aside from the bartender, in some kind of Kabuki drag, they had the place to themselves. By virtue of filling it, basically. It was probably the smallest freestanding commercial structure Lane>’ had ever seen, and it seemed to have been there forever, like a survival from ancient Edo, a city of shadows and minute dark lanes. The walls were shingled with faded postcards, gone a uniform sepia under a glaze of accumulated nicotine and cooking smoke.
“Ah,” Yamazaki said at last, “a meta-tabloid.'”
The bartender was broiling two sardines on a doll’s hotplate. He flipped them with a pair of steel chopsticks, transferred them to a tiny plate, garnished them with some kind of colorless, translucent pickle, and presented them to Laney.
“Thanks,” Lane>’ said. The bartender ducked his shaven eyebrows.
In spite of the modest decor, there were dozens of bottles of expensive-looking whiskey arranged behind the bar, each one with a hand-written brown paper sticker: the owner’s name in Japanese. Yamazaki had explained that you bought one and they kept it there for you. Blackwell was on his second tumbler of the local vodka-analog, on the rocks, Yamazaki was sticking to Coke Lire. Laney had an untouched shot of surrealistically expensive Kentucky srraight bourbon whiskey in front of him, and wondered vaguely what it would do to his jet lag if he were actually to drink it.
“So,” Blackwell said, draining the tumbler, ice clinking against his prosthetic, “they get you out so they can have a go at these other bastards.” 3 0 C -07 ‘a “That wu it, basically,” Laney said, They had their own Legal team waiting, to do that, and another team to work on the nondisclosure agreement I’d signed with Slirscan.”
“And the second team had the bigger job,” Blackwell said, shoving his empty glass toward the bartender, who swept it smoothly out of sight, producing a fresh replacement just as smoothly, as if from nowhere.
“That’s true,” Laney said. He’d had no idea, really, of what he’d be getting into when he’d found himself agreeing to the general outlines of Rice Daniels’ offer. But there was something in him that didn’t want to see Slitscan walk away from the sound of that one single shot from Alison Shires’ kitchen. (Produced, the cops had pointed out, by a Russian-made device that was hardly more than a cartridge, a tube to contain it, and the simplest possible firing mechanism; these were designed with suicide almost exclusively in mind; there was no way to aim them at anything more than two inches away. Laney had heard of them, but had never seen one before; for some itason, they were called Wednesday Night Specials.)
And Slitscan would walk away, he knew; they’d drop the sequence on Alison’s actor, if they felt they had to, and the whole thing would settle to the sea floor, silting over almost instantly with the world’s steady accretion of data.
And Alison Shires’ life, as he’d known it in all that terrible, banal intimacy, would lie there forever, forgotten and finally unknowable.
But if he went with Out of Control, her life might retrospectively become something else, and he wasn’t sure, exactly, sitting there on the hard little chair in Visitors, what that might be.
He thought of coral, of the reefs that grew around sunken aircraft carriers; perhaps she’d become something like that, the buried mystery beneath some exfoliating superstructure of supposition, or even of myth.
It seemed to him, in Visitors, that that might be a slightly less dead way of being dead. And he wished her that.
08 William Gibson 1~~ “Get me out of here,” he said to Daniels, who smiled beneath his surgical clamp, whipping the card triumphantly away from the plastic.
“Steady,” said Blackwell, laying his huge hand, with its silvery-pink fretwork of scars, over Laney’s wrist, “You haven’t even had your drink yet.”
Lane>’ had met Rydell when the Out of Control team installed him in a suite at the Chateau, that ancient simulacrum of a still more ancient original, its quaint concrete eccentricities pinched between the twin brutalities of a particularly nasty pair of office buildings dating from the final year of the previous century. These reflected all the Millennial anxiety of the year of their creation, while refracting it through some other, more mysterious, weirdly muted hysteria that seemed somehow more personal and even less attractive.