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Nice guy. Loser.
their ecology of celebrity and the terrible and inviolable order of that food chain.
“Interesting,” said the Aztec skull. “Tokyo,” said the mean nymph. Shit, Chia thought.
‘Babed out’ yet, Laney? Allergic reaction to cute? First symptoms are a sort of underlying irritation, a resentment, a vague but persistent feeling that you’re being gotten at, taken advantage of .
he was an intuitive fisher of patterns of information: of the sort of signature a particular individual inadvertently created in the net as he or she went about the mundane yet endlessly multiplex business of life in a digital society.
Slitscan’s audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal
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“There’s a place where it’s always light,” the woman said. “Bright, everywhere. No place dark. Bright like a mist, like something falling, always, every second. All the colors of it. Towers you can’t see the top of, and the light falling. Down below, they pile up bars. Bars and strip clubs and discos. Stacked up like shoe boxes, one on top of the other. And no matter how far you worm your way in, no matter how many stairs you climb, how many elevators you ride, no matter how small a room you finally get to, the light still finds you. It’s a light that blows in under the door, like powder.
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Laney’s colleagues limited themselves to a particular bandwidth of emotion. A certain kind of humor, as Kathy had said, was highly valued, but there was remarkably little laughter. The expected response was eye contact, a nod, the edge of a smile.
he wondered vaguely if there might be a larger system, a field of greater perspective. Perhaps the whole of DatAmerica possessed its own nodal points, info-faults that might be followed down to some other kind of truth, another mode of knowing, deep within gray shoals of information. But only if there were someone there to pose the right question. He had no idea at all what that question might be, if indeed there were one,
Smoking Mirror.
Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn’t have wanted.
Did she design them? No. They were designed in Russia, in Moscow. She was the editor. She selected the suppliers of components. She oversaw manufacture, transport
If the design documents specified something that couldn’t be provided, she either found a new supplier or negotiated a compromise in material or workmanship.
the latest act in one of those obscure and ongoing struggles that made up the background of his world.
There were no windows. Regulations required a light-pump, and reconstituted sunlight sometimes fell from a panel in the ceiling,
He held his cupped hands above the lettuce, willing himself to feel something radiating from its decay, some subtle life force, orgones, particles of an energy unknown to science.
less a power than a territory; in many ways it was a law unto itself.
that was an ironic take on money, on the really ugly things you could do with it if you had too much.
there wasn’t much point in worrying what you might do if you had too much, because most people never even had enough. She said it was better to try to figure out what “enough” actually meant.
counter-investigative journalism.”
“Factual accounts of premeditated violence in the global fashion industry.”
one of the bellmen saw them setting up a camera.”
intercultural girl-code,
Chia kept running up against Mitsuko’s sense of her duty to her chapter, and of her own position, and of Hiromi’s position.
it’s easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.”
the loneliness of being misunderstood.
the loneliness of being afraid to allow ourselves to be understood?”
Laney’s jet lag was back, in some milder but more baroque format. Something compounded of a pervasive sense of guilt and a feeling of physical distance from his own body, as though the sensory signals arrived stale, after too long a passage, through some other country that he himself was never privy to.
It was a boy-nightmare,
its floor and ledgelike bed long vanished beneath unwashed clothes, ramen-wrappers, Japanese magazines with wrinkled covers.
this was probably the only store for miles that sold anything that anyone ever really needed; the others all sold things that he couldn’t even imagine wanting.
She felt like everything, every little detail of Tokyo, was just different enough to create a kind of pressure, something that built up against her eyes, as though they’d grown tired of having to notice all the differences:
They say the world will end when the combined weight of all the human nervous tissue on the planet reaches a specific figure.”
The standover man is a loner, a predator who preys on other, more prosperous criminals, often extremely dangerous ones. He captures them and ‘stands over’ them.
Laney looked back at the scrolling numerals and wondered how much the planet’s combined weight of human nervous tissue had increased while they’d been in the bar.
Goya’s idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine, which along with endless quantities of alcohol was the early Western World’s substance of choice).
There was a definite edged-out quality there, and prolonged eye-contact might have been interesting in some cases, dangerous in others.
it had been clinically proven that celebrity-recognition was handled by one particular area in the brain,
a naked man, crosslegged on an office desk, his mouth open as wide as possible, as if in a silent scream.
an Antarctica, of information.
“The Walled City is a concept of scale. Very important. Scale is place, yes? Thirty-three thousand people inhabited original. Two-point-seven hectares. As many as fourteen stories.
no way you were on to me. I was on to you, right?
women I wouldn’t take to a shit-fight on a dark night,
“He’s way too big. And I’d love to see you try to prove it.”
He remembered hearing something someone had said about mirrors, a long time ago, that they were somehow unnatural and dangerous.
popular culture,” he said, “is the testbed of our futurity.”
The three of them had had Work Experience there,
“Every vehicle in Japan is legally required to be equipped with one of these devices. You speed, it dings.” Laney turned to Yamazaki. “Is that true?” “Of course,” Yamazaki said, over the steady clanging. “And people don’t just disconnect them?” “No,” Yamazaki said, looking puzzled. “Why would they?”
girls who fell in love with Rez in the endless present of the net, where he could still be the twenty-year-old of his earliest hits.
the safest place for you, Laney, in the event you go werewolf on us, would be right here, at the watchful heart of our security apparatus.”
