In any case, Laney prefers it to the barbershop made of misaligned graphics tiles. You can just look at these girls, in cool monochrome renditions of wooi and flesh and other textures of cities, and he finds that restful. It was strange though, to sit in a bar when you didn’t have a body present.
“They’re coy about it,” the Rooster is saying, of Libia and Paco and how it may be that they’ve succeeded in hacking Cody Harwood’s most intensely private means of communication. “They may have physically introduced an agent into Harwood Levine’s communications satellite. Something small. Very small. But how could they have controlled it? And how long would it have taken, undetected, to effect a physical alteration in the hardware up there?”
“I’m sure they found a more elegant solution,” Klaus says, “but the 208 bottom line is that I don’t care. Access is access. The means to access are academic. We’ve hacked Harwood’s hotline. His red telephone.”
“And you have a tendency to pat yourselves on the back,” Laney says. “We know that Harwood’s had 5-SB, but we don’t know why, or what he’s doing with nodal apprehension. You seem to be convinced it’s something to do with Lucky Dragon and this half-baked Nanofax launch.”
“Aren’t you?” asks Klaus. “Nanofax units are going into every Lucky Dragon in the world. Right now. Literally. Most of them are fully installed, ready to go operational.”
“With the faxing of the first Taiwanese teddy bear from Des Moines to Seattle? What’s he hope to gain?” Laney concentrates on his favorite girl, imagining her thumb on the plunger of a hypodermic-style manual release. “Think network,” the Rooster puts in. “Function, even ostensible function, is not the way to look at this. All function, in these terms, is ostensible. Temporary. What he wants is a network in place. Then he can figure out what to do with it.” “But why does he need to have something to do with it in the first place?” Laney demands. “Because he’s between a rock and a hard place,” responds Klaus. “He’s the richest man in the world, possibly, and he’s ahead of the curve. He’s an agent of change, and massively invested in the status quo. He embodies paradoxical propositions. Too hip to live, too rich to die. Get it?”
“No,” Laney says. “We think he’s like us, basically,” Klaus says. “He’s trying to hack reality but he’s going strictly big casino, and he’ll take the rest of the species with him, however and whatever.” “You have to admire that, don’t you?” says the Rooster, out of the depths of his silent faux-Bacon scream. Laney isn’t sure that you do.
He wonders if the Rooster’s reiteration of The Reason of Life incorporates the tiny, six-seater bar downstairs, the darker one where 209 you can sit beneath very large prints of the pictures the girls themselves were taking: huge abstract triangles of luminous gelatin-printed white panty.
“Can you get me that kind of look-in on Harwood’s stuff anytime?”
“Until he notices you, we can.” 210 52. MY BOYFRIEND’S BACK CHEVETTE had had a boyfriend named Lowell, when she’d first lived on the bridge, who did dancer.
Lowell had had a friend called Codes, called that because he tumbled the codes on hot phones and notebooks, and this Saint Vitus reminded her of Codes. Codes hadn’t liked her either.
Chevette hated dancer. She hated being around people when they were on it, because it made them selfish, too pleased with themselves, and nervous; suspicious, too prone to make things up in their heads, imagining everyone out to get them, everyone lying, everyone talking behind their back. And she particularly hated watching anyone actually do the stuff, rub it into their gums the way they did, all horrible, because it was just so gross. Made their lips numb, at first, so they’d drool a little, and how they always thought that was funny. But what she hated about it most was that she’d ever done it herself, and that, even though she had all these reasons to hate it, she still found herself, watching Saint Vitus vigorously massaging a good solid hit into his gumsT feeling the urge to ask him for some. She guessed that was what they meant by it being addictive. That she’d gotten just that little edge of it off the country singer sticking his tongue in her mouth (and if that was the only way to get it, she thought, she’d pass) and now the actual molecules of diz were twanging at receptor sites in her brain, saying gimme, gimme. And she’d never even been properly strung out on the stuff, not how they meant it when they said that on the street.