“You must have been exhausted,” the ear-clip translated. Then Mitsuko said she was taking the day off from school, to be with Chia.
They drank the nearly colorless tea from little nubbly ceramic cups. Mitsuko explained that she lived here with her father, her mother, and a brother, Masahikth Her mother was away, visiting a 0 2 87 relative in Kyoto. Mitsuko said that Kyoto was very beautiful, and that Chia should go there.
“I’m here for my chapter,” Chia said. “I can’t do tourist things. I have things to find out.”
‘1 understand,” Mitsuko said.
“So is it true? Does Rez really want to marry a software agent?”
Mirsuko looked uncomfortable. “I am the social secretary,” she said. “You must first discuss this with Hiromi Ogawa.”
“Who’s she?’
“Hiromi is the president of our chapter.”
“Fine,” Chia said. “When do I talk to her?”
“We are erecting a site for the discussion, It will be ready soon.” Mitsuko still looked uncomfortable.
Chia decided to change the subject. “What’s your brother like? How old is he?”
“Masahiko is seventeen,” Mitsuko said. “He is a ‘pathologicaltechno-.fetishist-with-social-deflcit,'” this last all strung together like one word, indicating a concept that taxed the lexicon of the ear-clips. Chia wondered briefly if it would be worth running it through her Sandbenders, whose translation functions updated automatically whenever she ported.
“A what?”
“Otaku,” Mitsuko said carefully in Japanese. The translation burped its clumsy word string again.
“Oh,” Chia said, “we have those, We even use the same word.”
“I think that in America they are nor the same,” Mitsuko said.
“Well,” Chia said, “it’s a boy thing, right? The otaku guys at my last school were into, like, plastic anime babes, military simulations, and trivia. Bigtime into trivia.” She watched Mitsuko listen to the translation.
‘Yes,” Mitsuko said, “but you say they go to school. Ours do not go to school. They complete their studies on-line, and that is bad, because they cheat easily. Then they are tested, later, and are caught, and fail, but they do not care, It is a social problem.” 88 William Gibson “Your brother’s one?”
“Yes,’ Mitsuko said. “He lives in Walled City.”
“In where?”
“A multi-user domain. It is his obsession. Like a drug. He has a room here. He seldom leaves it, All his waking hours he is in Walled City. His dreams, too, I think.”
Chia tried to get more of a sense of Hiromi Ogawa, before the noon meeting, but with mixed results. She was older, seventeen (as old as Zona Rosa) and had been in the club for at least fIve years. She was possibly overweight (though this had had to be conveyed in intercultural girl-code, nothing overt) and favored elaborate iconics. But overall Chia kept running up against Mitsuko’s sense of her duty to her chapter, and of her own position, and of Hiromi’s position.
Chia hated club politics, and she was beginning to suspect they might pose a real problem here.
Mitsuko was getting her computer out. It was one of those soft, transparent Korean units, the kind that looked like a flat bag of clear white jelly with a bunch of colored jujubes inside. Chia unzipped her bag and pulled her Sandbenders out.
‘~What is that?” Mitsuko asked.
“My computer.”
Mitsuko was clearly impressed. “It is by Harley-Davidson?”
“It was made by the Sandbenders,” Chia said, finding her goggles and gloves. “They’re a commune, down on the Oregon coast. They do these and they do software.”
“It is American?”
“Sure.”
“I had not known Americans made computers,” Mitsuko said.
Chia worked each silver thimble over the tips of her fingers and thumbs, fastened the wrist straps.
“I’m ready for the meeting,” she said. Mirsuko giggled nervously.
89 13. Character Recognition Yamazaki phoned just before noon. The day was dim and overcast. Laney had closed the curtains in order to avoid seeing the nanotech buildings in that light.
He was watching an NHK show about champion top-spinners. The star, he gathered, was a little girl with pigtails and a blue dress with an old-fashioned sailor’s collar. She was slightly cross-eyed, perhaps from concentration. The tops were made of wood. Some of them were big, and looked heavy.