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This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.
She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.
Angie remembered Bermuda, night, a hurricane; she and Bobby had ventured out into the eye. Grande Brigitte was like that. The silence, the sense of pressure, of unthinkable forces held momentarily in check.
the neon gridlines of the matrix
the chill flight of the neon cranes.
He couldn’t remember when he hadn’t been able to remember, but sometimes he almost could.
During the very brief wait in the white, plant-filled reception area—surely a matter of ritual, as though a medical appointment that involved no wait might seem incomplete, inauthentic—
ghosting the rainy streets together
the Silver Walks.
It was what Eddy called an art crowd, people who had some money and dressed sort of like they didn’t, except their clothes fit right and you knew they’d bought them new.
You have to have one face around that doesn’t change.
There was something vampiric about the room, she decided, something it would have in common with millions of similar rooms, as though its bewilderingly seamless anonymity were sucking away her personality, fragments of which emerged
A silence followed, and Kumiko heard a sound that might have been the wind, a cold, grit-laden wind scouring the curve of the geodesics far above them.
But did it wake, Kumiko wondered, when the alley was empty? Did its laser vision scan the silent fall of midnight snow?
He grinned, exposing sculpted teeth, streamlined teeth, an avant-garde dentist’s fantasy of what teeth might be like in a faster, more elegant species.
How unthinkably intricate the world was, in sheer detail of mechanism,
He tells a story. In the hard wind of images,
she sees all the banality of human evil.
