Bridge Trilogy Part two
“We had no time to do this right,” the woman said, handing Laney the eyephones. He was sitting on a child-sized pink plastic bench that matched the table. “If there is a way to do it right.”
There are areas we could not arrange access to,” said the
Japanese-American with the ponytail. “Blackwell said you’ve had experience with celebrities.”
“Actors,” Laney said. “Musicians, politicians .
“You’ll probably find this different. Bigger. By a couple oi degrees of magnitude.’
“What cant you access?” Laney asked, settling the ‘phones over
his eyes.
We don’t know,” he heard the woman say. “You’ll get a sense of the scale of things, going in. The blanks might be accountancy, tax-law stuff, contracts . . . We’re just tech support. He has other people someone pays to make sure parts of it stay as private as possible.”
“Then why not bring them in?” Laney asked.
He felt Blackwell’s hand come down on his shoulder like a bag of
sand. “I’ll discuss that with you later. Now get in there and have a
look. What we pay you for, isn’t it?”
In the week following Alison Shires’ death, Laney had used Out of
Control’s DatAmerica account to re-access the site of her personal
data. The nodal point was gone, and a certain subtle reduction had taken place. Not a shrinkage so much as a tidying, a folding in.
But the biggest difference was simply that she was no longer generating data. There was no credit activity. Even her Upful Groupvine account had been canceled. As her estate was executed, and various business affairs terminated, her data began to take on a neat rectilinearity. Laney thought of the dead bundled squarely in their graveclothes, of coffins and cairns, of the long straight avenues of cemeteries in the days when the dead had been afforded their own real estate.
The nodal point had formed where she had lived, while she had lived, in the messy, constantly proliferating interface with the ordinary yet endlessly multiplex world. Now there was no longer an interface.
He’d looked, but only briefly, and very cautiously, to see whether her actor might be undertaking tidying activities of his own. Nothing obvious there, but he imagined Out of Control would have set a more careful watch on that.
Her data was very still. Only a faint, methodical movement at its core: something to do with the ongoing legal mechanism of the execution of her estate.
A catalog of each piece of furniture in the bedroom of a guesthouse in Ireland. A subcatalog of the products provided in the seventeenth-century walnut commode at bedside there: toothbrush, toothpaste, analgesic tablets, tampons, razor, shaving gel. Someone would check these periodically, restock to the inventory. (The last guest had taken the gel but not the razor.) In the first catalog, there was a powerful pair of Austrian binoculars, tripod-mounted, which also functioned as a digital camera.
Laney accessed its memory, discovering that the recording function had been used exactly once, on the day the manufacturer’s warranty had been activated. The warranty was now two months void, 116 William Gibson the single recorded image a view from a white-curtained balcony, looking toward what Laney took to be the Irish Sea. There was an unlikely palm tree, a length of chainlink fence, a railbed with a twin dull gleam of track, a deep expanse of grayish-btown beach, and then the gray and silver sea. Closer to the sea, partially cut off by the image’s border, there appeared to be a low, broad fort of stone, like a truncated tower. Its stones were the color of the beach.
Laney tried to quit the bedroom, the guesthouse, and found himself surrounded by archaeologically precise records of the restoration of five vast ceramic stoves in an apartment in Stockholm. These were like giant chess pieces, towers of brick faced with elaborately glazed, lavishly molded ceramic. They rose to the fourteen-foot ceilings, and several people could easily have stood upright in one. There was a record of the numbering, disassembly, cleaning, restoration, and reassembly of each brick in each stove. There was no way to access the rest of the apartment, but the proportions of the stoves led Laney to assume that it was very large. He clicked to the end of the stove-record and noted the final price of the work; at current rates it was more than several times his former annual salary at Slitscan.