Idoru (Bridge, #2)

by William Gibson

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. Stretching either way to the periphery of vision, and on the high, uneven crest of that ragged facade, a black fur of twisted pipe, antennas sagging under vine growth of cable. And past this scribbled border a sky where colors crawled like gasoline on water. “Hak 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 accele...