Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson

Filament in Strata

I ‘m your ideal audience , Hans — as the recording began for the second time. How could you have a more attentive viewer? And you did capture her , Hans: I know , because I dream her memories. I see how close you came.

Yes, you captured them. The journey out, the building of walls, the long spiral in. They were about walls, weren’t they? The labyrinth of blood, of family. The maze hung against the void, saying, We are that within , that without is other , here forever shall we dwell . And the darkness was there from the beginning. . . . You found it repeatedly in the eyes of Marie-France, pinned it in a slow zoom against the shadowed orbits of the skull. Early on she ceased to allow her image to be recorded. You worked with what you had. You justified her image, rotated her through planes of light, planes of shadow, generated models, mapped her skull in grids of neon. You used special programs to age her images according to statistical models, animation systems to bring your mature Marie-France to life. You reduced her image to a vast but finite number of points and stirred them, let new forms emerge, chose those that seemed to speak to you. . . . And then you went on to the others, to Ashpool and the daughter whose face frames your work, its first and final image.

The second viewing solidified their history for her, allowed her to slot Becker’s shards along a time line that began with the marriage of Tessier and Ashpool, a union commented upon, in its day, primarily in the media of corporate finance. Each was heir to a more than modest empire, Tessier to a family fortune founded on nine basic patents in applied biochemistry and Ashpool to the great Melbourne-based engineering firm that bore his father’s name. It was marriage as merger, to the journalists, though the resulting corporate entity was viewed by most as ungainly, a chimera with two wildly dissimilar heads. But it was possible, then, in photographs of Ashpool, to see the boredom vanish, and in its place a complete surety of purpose. The effect was unflattering — indeed, frightening: the hard, beautiful face grew harder still, merciless in its intent. Within a year of his marriage to Marie-France Tessier, Ashpool had divested himself of 90 percent of his firm’s holdings, reinvesting in orbital properties and shuttle utilities, and the fruit of the living union, two children, brother and sister, were being brought to term by surrogates in their mother’s Biarritz villa. Tessier-Ashpool ascended to high orbit’s archipelago to find the ecliptic sparsely marked with military stations and the first automated factories of the cartels. And here they began to build. Their combined wealth, initially, would barely have matched Ono-Sendai’s outlay for a single process-module of that multinational’s orbital semiconductor operation, but Marie-France demonstrated an unexpected entrepreneurial flare, establishing a highly profitable data haven serving the needs of less reputable sectors of the international banking community. This in turn generated links with the banks themselves, and with their clients. Ashpool borrowed heavily and the wall of lunar concrete that would be Freeside grew and curved, enclosing its creators. When war came, Tessier-Ashpool were behind that wall. They watched Bonn flash and die, and Beograd. The construction of the spindle continued with only minor interruptions, during those three weeks; later, during the stunned and chaotic decade that followed, it would sometimes be more difficult. The children, Jean and Jane, were with them now, the villa at Biarritz having gone to finance construction of a cryogenic storage facility for their home, the Villa Straylight. The first occupants of the vault were ten pairs of cloned embryos, 2Jean and 2Jane, 3Jean and 3Jane. . . . There were numerous laws forbidding or otherwise governing the artificial replication of an individual’s genetic material, but there were also numerous questions of jurisdiction. . . .

She halted the replay and asked the house to return to the previous sequence. Photographs of another cryogenic storage unit built by the Swiss manufacturers of the Tessier-Ashpool vault. Becker’s assumption of similarity had been correct, she knew: these circular doors of black glass, trimmed with chrome, were central images in the other’s memory, potent and totemic. The images ran forward again, into zero-gravity construction of structures on the spindle’s inner surface, installation of a Lado-Acheson solar energy system, the establishment of atmosphere and rotational gravity. . . . Becker had found himself with an embarrassment of riches, hours of glossy documentation. His response was a savage, stuttering montage that sheared away the superficial lyricism of the original material, isolating the tense, exhausted faces of individual workers amid a hivelike frenzy of machinery. Freeside greened and bloomed in a fast-forward flutter of recorded dawns and synthetic sunsets; a lush, sealed land, jeweled with turquoise pools. Tessier and Ashpool emerged for the opening ceremonies, out of Straylight, their hidden compound at the spindle’s tip, markedly uninterested as they surveyed the country they had built. Here Becker slowed and again began his obsessive analysis. This would be the last time Marie-France faced a camera; Becker explored the planes of her face in a tortured, extended fugue, the movement of his images in exquisite counterpoise with the sinuous line of feedback that curved and whipped through the shifting static levels of his soundtrack.

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