and didn’t quite know why, and was vaguely tired of it. But as he spent more time cruising the aspects of the flow that were
concerned with Harwood, and with the activities of his firm, Harwood Levine, it had begun to become apparent that this was a locus of nodal points, a sort of meta-node, and that, in some way he had been unable
to define, something very large was happening here. His compulsive study of Harwood and things Harwoodian had led him to the recognition that history too was subject to the nodal vision, and the version of
history that Laney came to understand there bore little or no relation to any accepted version.
He had been taught, of course, that history, along with geography, was dead. That history in the older sense was an historical concept.
History in the older sense was narrative, stories we told ourselves about where we’d come from and what it had been like, and those narratives
were revised by each new generation, and indeed always had been. History was plastic, was a matter of interpretation. The digital had not
so much changed that as made it too obvious to ignore. History was stored data, subject to manipulation and interpretation.
But the “history” Laney discovered, through the quirk in his vision induced by having been repeatedly dosed with 5-SB, was something
very different. It was that shape comprised of every narrative, every version; it was that shape that only he (as far as he knew) could see.
At first, discovering this, he had attempted to share it with the idoru. Perhaps, if shown, she, this posthuman emergent entity, would
simply start to see this way as well. And he had been disappointed when she had finally told him that what he saw was not there for her; that his ability to apprehend the nodal points, those emergent systems of his
– -tory, was not there, nor did she expect to find it with growth. “This is human, I think,” she’d said, when pressed. “This is the result of what
you are, biochemically, being stressed in a particular way. This is wonderful. This is closed to me.” 165 H And shortly after that, as her growing complexity continued to widen the distance he already knew she felt toward Rez, she had come to him and asked him to interpret the data as it flowed around herself and Rez. And he had done this, though reluctantly, out of love. Knowing somehow he would be saying good-bye to her in the process. The flow around Rez and Rei ~vas ripe with nodal points, particularly at those junctures where queerly occulted data poured steadily in from the Walled City, that semi-mythical otherwhere of outlaw iconoH clasts. “Why have you connected with these people?” he’d asked.
“Because I need them,” she’d said, “I don’t know why, but I know that I do. The situation does.” H “Without them,” he’d said, “you might not have a situation.” “I know.” Smiling. But as his obsession with Harwood had deepened, Laney had grown H less comfortable with his trips to the island and their forays together into
the fields of data. It had been as though he did not wish her to see him this way, his concentration warped from within, bent toward this one object, this strangely banal object. The sense of Harwood, of the information cloud he generated, swarmed in Laney’s dreams. And one morning, waking in the Tokyo hotel in which Lo/Rez kept him billeted, he had decided not to go to work. And sometime after that, he knew from Yamazaki, and from his own observation of the flow, the idoru had departed Tokyo as well. He had his own theories about that, about her conversations with the denizens (they would have insisted on the term, he thought) of the digitally occluded Walled City, and now, evidently, she was in San Francisco. Although he had known she would be, because of course she had
to be. Because San Francisco, he could see in the shape of things, was where the world ended. Was ending. And she was a part of that, and so was he, and Harwood as well. But something would be decided (was being decided) there. And that was why he dared not sleep. Why he must send the Suit, immaculate and malodorous, with his ankles tarred black, for Regain and more of the blue syrup.