Idoru (Bridge, #2)

by William Gibson

Laney sat there until dawn came edging in through the tall, arched windows, and Taiwanese stainless could be heard to rattle, but gently, from the darkened cave of the breakfast room.

Routine plastic surgery lent them a hard assembly-line beauty.

She propped her feet on the ledge of a hotdesk.

“Nobody’s really famous anymore, Laney. Have you noticed that?” “No.” “I mean really famous. There’s not much fame left, not in the old sense. Not enough to go around.” “The old sense?” “We’re the media, Laney. We make these assholes celebrities. It’s a push-me, pull-you routine. They come to us to be created.”

“Well,” Laney said, going back to his screen, “that’s still fame, isn’t it?” “But is it real?” He looked back at her. “We learned to print money off this stuff,” she said. “Coin of our realm. Now we’ve printed too much; even the audience knows. It shows in the ratings.”

“We spoke on the telephone.” “You’re conducting the interview?” A flurry of blinks. “I’m sorry, no,” the man said. And then, “I am a student of existential sociology.” “I don’t get it,” Laney said. The two opposite said nothing. Shinya Yamazaki looked embarrassed. The one-eared man glowered.

They met in a jungle clearing. Kelsey had done the vegetation: big bright Rousseau leaves, cartoon orchids flecked with her idea of tropical colors (which reminded Chia of that mall chain that sold “organic” cosmetic products in shades utterly unknown to nature). Zona, the only one telepresent who’d ever seen anything like a real jungle, had done the audio, providing birdcalls, invisible but realistically dopplering bugs, and the odd vegetational rustle artfully suggesting not snakes but some shy furry thing, soft-pawed and curious. The light, such as there was, filtered down through high, green canopies, entirely too Disneyesque for Chia—though there was no real need for “light” in a place that consisted of nothing else.

(Chia herself was presenting currently as an only slightly tweaked, she felt, version of how the mirror told her she actually looked. Less nose, maybe. Lips a little fuller. But that was it. Almost.)

her mother’s “now” was such a narrow and literal thing. News-governed, Chia believed. Cable-fed. A present honed to whatever very instant of a helicopter traffic report. Chia’s “now” was digital, effortlessly elastic, instant recall supported by global systems she’d never have to bother comprehending.

Chia watched as the woman handed over her passport, becoming somehow instantly and up-front sexy, like a lightbulb coming on, with a big smile for the soldier that made him blink and swallow and nearly drop the passport.

Pointless pieces of the self, destined for a cannister in the building’s parking lot. But he’d leave nothing here,

He had a peculiar knack with data-collection architectures, and a medically documented concentration-deficit that he could toggle, under certain conditions, into a state of pathological hyperfocus. This made him, he continued over lattes in a Roppongi branch of Amos ’n’ Andes, an extremely good researcher.

The relevant data, in terms of his current employability, was that 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. Laney’s concentration-deficit, too slight to register on some scales, made him a natural channel-zapper, shifting from program to program, from database to database, from platform to platform, in a way that was, well, intuitive.

Yamazaki was a good listener. He’d blink, swallow, nod, fiddle with the top button of his plaid shirt, whatever, all of it managing to somehow convey that he was getting it, the drift of Laney’s story.

“California plan. People don’t have their own desks. Check a computer and a phone out of the Cage when you come in. Hotdesk it if you need more peripherals.

Chia looked around, feeling disappointed. Things weren’t quite the right size, somehow, or maybe she should’ve used those fractal packets that messed it all up a little, put dust in the corners and smudges around the light switch. Zona Rosa swore by them. When she was home, Chia liked it that the construct was cleaner than her room ever was. Now it made her homesick; made her miss the real thing.

She positioned herself on the Playmobil couch and looked at the programs scattered across the top of the coffee table.

the latest act in one of those obscure and ongoing struggles that made up the background of his world.

She was watching him the way an experienced artisan might watch a valued tool that had shown the first signs of metal-fatigue.

But then he remembered Kathy’s advice, that this was the part of research most prone to produce serious transference, the point at which the researcher’s intimacy with the subject could lead to loss of perspective. “It’s often easiest for us to identify at the retail level, Laney. We’re a shopping species. Find yourself buying a different brand of frozen peas because the subject does, watch out.”

“We’re not talking conscious decision, here?” Blackwell kneaded what was left of his right ear. “No,” Laney said, “I don’t know what I thought I was doing.” “You were trying to save her. The girl.” “It felt like something snapped. A rubber band. It felt like gravity.” “That’s what it feels like,” Blackwell said, “when you decide.”

When Blackwell spoke, Laney was unexpectedly aware of another sort of intelligence, something the man must ordinarily conceal.

Chia already felt like screaming, but there was nothing for it but to sit there. She pulled up a clock and stuck it on the mirrored robot’s face, where the eyes should have been. Nobody else could see it, but it made her feel a little better.

But he’d been a big green, too, and he hated the way consumer electronics were made, a couple of little chips and boards inside these plastic shells. The shells were just point-of-purchase eye-candy, he said, made to wind up in the landfill if nobody recycled it, and usually nobody did. So, before he got sick, he used to tear up her hardware, the designer’s, and put the real parts into cases he’d make in his shop. Say he’d make a solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in something that felt like it was there. . . . And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone. . . . And once you had the case, when the manufacturer brought out a new model, well, if the electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better functions.”

“It’s not crazy. It’s something to do with how I process low-level, broad-spectrum input. Something to do with pattern-recognition.”

But I can’t do that with the kind of data you showed me today.” “Why not?” Laney raised his beer. “Because it’s like trying to have a drink with a bank. It’s not a person. It doesn’t drink. There’s no place for it to sit.”

No place at all, like it could as easily have been on the outskirts of Seattle, the outskirts of anywhere, and the homesickness made her gasp.

their features algorithmically derived from some human mean of proven popularity.

Don’t think of a purple cow. Or was it a brown one? Laney couldn’t remember. Don’t look at the idoru’s face. She is not flesh; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative.

“—the result of an array of elaborate constructs that we refer to as ‘desiring machines.” ’ Rez’s green eyes, bright and attentive. “Not in any literal sense,” Kuwayama continued, “but please envision aggregates of subjective desire. It was decided that the modular array would ideally constitute an architecture of articulated longing . . .”

up. But people played games in MUDs; they made up characters for themselves and pretended. Little kids did it, and lonely people.

Scale is place, yes?

amiable enough, but in about as content-free a way as possible.

“Walled City is of the net, but not on it. There are no laws here, only agreements.” “You can’t be on the net and not be on the net,” Chia said, as they shot up a final flight of stairs. “Distributed processing,” he said. “Interstitial. It began with a shared killfile—”

“Having seen all this, I’m so much more . . . Does it feel like that for you, when you travel?”

“What is all this about?” The question surprised Laney, who hadn’t quite known what it was he was about to ask. Kuwayama’s mild eyes regarded him through the rimless lenses. “It is about futurity, Mr. Laney.” “Futurity?” “Do you know that our word for ‘nature’ is of quite recent coinage? It is scarcely a hundred years old. We have never developed a sinister view of technology, Mr. Laney. It is an aspect of the natural, of oneness. Through our efforts, oneness perfects itself.” Kuwayama smiled. “And popular culture,” he said, “is the testbed of our futurity.”

If there were going to be genuine AI, the argument ran, it was most likely to evolve in ways that had least to do with pretending to be human. Laney remembered screening a lecture in which the Slitscan episode’s subject had suggested that AI might be created accidentally, and that people might not initially recognize it for what it was.

Shaquille had claimed to know the names of some of the gods these things were offered up to, but Laney hadn’t been fooled. The names Shaquille made up, like O’Gunn and Sam Eddy, were obviously just that,

Hak Nam rose before her as she waded nearer, but with a dream’s logic it grew no closer.