“Okay,” Chia said, settling the last of her tips, “let’s go. I’ve got to get hold of somebody.
“Yes,” he said. He picked up the black cups, one in either hand, and placed them over his eyes. When he let go, they stayed there. It looked uncomfortable.
Chia reached up and pulled her own glasses down, over her eyes “What do I-”
Something at the core of things moved simultaneously in mutually impossible directions. It wasn’t even like porting. Software conflict? Faint ‘impression of light through a fluttering of rags.
And then the thing before her: building or biomass or cliff face looming there, in countless unplanned strata, nothing about it even or regular. Accreted patchwork of shallow random balconies, thousands of small windows throwing back blank silver rectangles of fog. 26. HakNani Stretching either way to the periphery of vision, and on the high, uneven crest of that ragged facade, a black (hr of twisted pipe, antennas sagging under vine growth of cable. And past this scribbled border a sky where colors crawled like gasoline on water.
“flak Nam,” he said, beside her.
“What is it?”
“‘City of darkness.’ Between the walls of the world.”
She remembered the scarf she’d seen, in his room behind the kitchen, its intricate map of something chaotic and compacted, tiny irregular segments of red and black and yellow. And then they were moving forward, toward a narrow opening. “It’s a MUD, right?” Something like a larger, permanent version of the site the Tokyo chapter had erected for the meeting, or the tropical forest Kelsey and Zona had put up. But people played games in MUDs; they made up characters for themselves and pretended. Little kids did it, and lonely people.
“No,” he said, “not a game.” They were inside now, smoothly accelerating, and the squirming density of the thing was continual visual impact, an optical drumming. “Tai Chang Street.” Walls scrawled and crawling with scrolling messages, spectral doorways passing like cards in a shuffled deck.
And they were not alone: others there, ghost-figures whipping past, and everywhere the sense of eyes .
Fractal filth, bit-rot, the corridor of their passage tented with crazy swoops of faintly flickering lines of some kind. “Alms House Backstreet.” A sharp turn. Another. Then they were ascending a maze of twisting stairwells, still accelerating, and Chia took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Retinal fireworks bursting there, but the pressure was gone.
When she opened her eyes, they were in a much cleaner but no larger version of his room behind the kitchen in the restaurant. No empty ramen bowls, no piles of clothing. He was beside her on the sleeping ledge, staring at the shifting patterns on his computer’s control-face. Beside it on the work-surface, her Sandbenders. The 182 William Gibson texture-mapping was rudimentary, everything a little too smooth and glossy. She looked at him, curious to see how he’d present. A basic scan job, maybe a year out of date: his hair was shorter. He wore the same black tunic.
On the wall behind the computers was an animated version of the printed scarf, its red, black, and yellow bits pulsing slightly. A bright green line traced a route in from the perimeter; where it ended, bright green, concentric rings radiated from one particular yellow square.
She looked back at him, but he was still staring at the control-face.
Something chimed. She glanced at the door, which was mapped in a particularly phoney-looking wood-grain effect, and saw a small white rectangle slide under the door. And keep sliding, straight toward her, across the floor, to vanish under the sleeping ledge. She looked down in time to see it rise, at exactly the same rate, up the edge of the striped mattress and over, coming to a halt when it was in optimum position to be read. It was in that same font they’d used at Whiskey Clone, or one just like it. It said “Ku Klux Klan Kollectibles,” and then some letters and numbers that didn’t look like any kind of address she knew.
Another chime. She looked at the door in time to see a gray blur scoot from under it. Flat, whirling, &st. It was on the white rectangle now, something like the shadow of a crab or spider, two-dimensional and multi-legged. It swallowed it, shot for the door.