‘Hello, Mr. Laney,” Yamazaki said. “You are feeling better now?”
Laney watched a purple-and-yellow top blur into action as the girl gave the carefully wound cord an expert pull. The commentator held a hand mike near the top to pick up the hum it was producing, then said something in Japanese.
‘Better than last night,” Laney said.
“It is being arranged for you to access the data that surrounds .
our friend. It is a complicated process, as this data has been protected in many different ways. There was no single strategy. The ways in which his privacy has been protected are complexly incremental.”
“Does ‘our friend’ know about this?”
There was a pause. Laney watched the spinning top. He imagined Yamazaki blinking. “No, he does not.”
“I still don’t know who I’ll really be working for. For him? For
Blackwell?”
‘Your employer is Paragon-Asia Dataflow, Melbourne. They are employing me as well.”
‘What about Blackwell?”
“Blackwell is employed by a privately held corporation, through which portions of our friend’s income pass. In the course of our friend’s career, a structure has been erected to optimize that flow, to minimize losses. That structure now constitutes a corporate entity in its own right.”
“Management,” Laney said. “His management’s scared because it looks like he might do something crazy. Is that it?”
The purple-and-yellow top was starting to exhibit the first of the oscillations that would eventually bring it to a halt. “I am still a stranger to this business-culture, Mr. Laney. I find it difficult to assess these things.”
“What did Blackwell mean, last night, about Rez wanting to marry a Japanese girl who isn’t real?”
“Idoru,” Yamazaki said.
“What?”
“‘Idol-singer.’ She is Rei Toei. She is a personality-construct, a congeries of software agents, the creation of information-designers. She is akin to what I believe they call a ‘synthespian,’ in Hollywood.”
Laney closed his eyes, opened them. “Then how can he marry her?”
“I don’t know,” Yamazaki said. “But he has very forcefully declared this to be his intention.”
“Can you tell me what it is they’ve hired you to do?”
“Initially, I think, they hoped I would be able to explain the idotu to them: her appeal to her audience, therefore perhaps her appeal to him. Also, I think that, like Blackwell, they remain unconvinced that this is not the result of a conspiracy of some kind. Now they want me to acquaint you with the cultural background of the situation.”
“Who are they?” 02 William Gibson “I cannot be more specific now.”
The top was starting to wobble. Laney saw something like terror in the girl’s eyes. “You don’t think there’s a conspiracy?”
“I will try to answer your questions this evening. In the meantime, while it is being arranged for you to access the data, please study these
“Hey,” Laney protested, as his top-spinning girl was replaced by an unfamiliar logo: a grinning cartoon bulldog with a spiked collar, up to its muscular neck in a big bowl of soup.
“Two documentary videos on Lo/Rez,” Yamazaki said. “These are on the Dog Soup label, originally a small independent based in East Taipei. They released the band’s first recordings LofRez later purchased Dog Soup and used it to release less commercial material by other artists.”
Laney stared glumly at the grinning bulldog, missing the girl with pigtails. “Like documentaries about themselves?”
“The documentaries were not made subject to the band’s approval, They are not Lo/Rez corporate documents.”
“Well, I guess we’ve got that to be thankful for.”
“You are welcome.” Yamazaki hung up.
The virtual POV zoomed, rotating in on one of the spikes on the dog’s collar: in close-up, it was a shining steel pyramid. Reflected clouds whipped past in time-lapse on the towering triangular face as the Universal Copyright Agreement warning scrolled into view.
Laney watched long enough to see that the video was spliced together from bits and pieces of the band’s public relations footage, “Art-warning,” he said, and went into the bathroom to decipher the shower controls.
He managed to miss the first six minutes, showering and brushing his teeth. He’d seen things like that before, art videos, but he’d never actually tried to pay attention to one. Putting on the hotel’s white terry robe, he told himself he’d better try. Yamazaki seemed capable of quizzing him on it later. Why did people make things like this? There was no narration, no apparent structure; some of the same fragments kept repeating throughout, at different speeds.