Idoru (Bridge, #2)

by William Gibson

And Slitscan would walk away, he knew; they’d drop the sequence on Alison’s actor, if they felt they had to, and the whole thing would settle to the sea floor, silting over almost instantly with the world’s steady accretion of data. And Alison Shires’ life, as he’d known it in all that terrible, banal intimacy, would lie there forever, forgotten and finally unknowable. But if he went with Out of Control, her life might retrospectively become something else, and he wasn’t sure, exactly, sitting there on the hard little chair in Visitors, what that might be. He thought of coral, of the reefs that grew around sunken aircraft carriers; perhaps she’d become something like that, the buried mystery beneath some exfoliating superstructure of supposition, or even of myth. It seemed to him, in Visitors, that that might be a slightly less dead way of being dead. And he wished her that.

“And Slitscan would walk away, he knew; they’d drop the sequence on Alison’s actor, if they felt they had to, and the whole thing would settle to the sea floor, silting over almost instantly with the world’s steady accretion of data. And Alison Shires’ life, as he’d known it in all that terrible, banal intimacy, would lie there forever, forgotten and finally unknowable. But if he went with Out of Control, her life might retrospectively become something else, and he wasn’t sure, exactly, sitting there on the hard little chair in Visitors, what that might be. He thought of coral, of the reefs that grew around sunken aircraft carriers; perhaps she’d become something like that, the buried mystery beneath some exfoliating superstructure of supposition, or even of myth. It seemed to him, in Visitors, that that might be a slightly less dead way of being dead. And he wished her that.” Reference Gibson, William (1996, Sep. 4). “Idoru.” Kindle Edition. Chapter 9 Out of Control, p. 68 of 263, 25%.