“I see what you mean, but I don’t think it’s going to be that way much longer. Not if the world’s Bigends keep at it: no borders, pretty soon there’s no mirror to be on the other side of. Not in terms of the bits and pieces, anyway.” His eyes meet hers.
They each carry a cup of tea-sub back and take their seats again.
“How about you,” he asks, “how do you feel about Bigend?”
And why, she wonders, is she even having this conversation? How much to do with their glancing encounter in the street this morning, which he shows no sign of remembering? Her sense of urban disconnect, then: seeing him as a passing stranger she’d never see again, and now having him turn up this way.
“Hubertus Bigend is a very smart man,” she says, “and I don’t like him very much.”
“Why not?”
“I seem to have an attitude about how he operates as a human being. I don’t feel strongly enough about it to refuse to work for his company, but the idea of working with him on a more personal basis makes me uncomfortable.” Immediately thinking: Why have I told him this, I don’t know him at all, what if he goes back to Bigend and tells him what I just said?
He sits there, his long fingers around his mug of tea-sub, looking at her over it. “He can afford to buy people,” he says. “I don’t want to wind up as a gadget on his key ring. I’m not exactly immune to the kind of money Bigend has to play with. When that start-up was on the fence, teetering back and forth, I found myself doing things I came to regret.”
She looks at him. Is this the truth, or self-advertisment?
He frowns. “Why do you think he wants it?”
“He thinks he can productize it.”
“Then monetize it.” He puts the cup down on the carpet. “He says it’s about excellence, not money.”
“Sure,” Boone Chu says, “the money’s just a sort of side effect. And that lets him keep it vague with us.”
“But if he priced it, it would be less interesting, wouldn’t it? If he put a fixed ticket on it for us, it would just be another job. He’s appealing to something deeper.”
“And treating it as though it’s a done deal.”
“I’ve noticed that.” She watches his eyes. “But would you want to give him the satisfaction?”
“If I don’t, I may never have the satisfaction of getting to the bottom of this,” he says. “And I’ve tried already.”
“You have?”
“Sometimes I can do it sitting around in a hotel room, playing with this.” He nudges the suitcase with his foot. “I couldn’t get anywhere, but that only has a way of getting me going.”
“What do you have in there?”
He picks up the suitcase and clicks its latches. It’s lined with cubes of gray foam, arranged to form a recess for a featureless rectangle of gray metal. He lifts this, a titanium laptop, out, and she sees more recesses, assorted coiled cables, three cell phones, and one of those big, specialist, multi-bit screwdrivers. One of the phones is cased in candy-apple mango.
“What’s that?” she asks, pointing to the mango phone.
“Japan.”
“And you can use a screwdriver too?”
“Never go anywhere without one.”
And this, somehow, she believes completely.
THEY wind up eating noodles together in that pan-Asian place on Parkway, sanded wood and raku bowls, and now he’s deep into the resolution thing. Old hat to the F:F:F veteran but he has a refreshingly clear take on it. “Each of the segments is of the same resolution, sufficient to allow theatrical projection. The visual information, the grain of that imagery, is all there. Footage of a lower resolution couldn’t be enlarged and retain its clarity. If it’s computer-generated, somebody had to put that there.” He raises his chopsticks toward his mouth. “Rendering farms. Ever see one?” He pops the noodles into his mouth and chews.
“No.”
He swallows, puts his chopsticks down. “Big room, lots of stations, renderers working through your footage a frame at a time. Labor intensive. Shakespeare’s monkeys, but working to a plan. Rendering is expensive, human-intensive, involves a lot of people, and would probably be impossible to keep a secret, for very long, in a situation like this. Someone would tell, unless there were unusual constraints in place. These people sit there and massage your imagery a pixel at a time. Sharpen it up. Add detail. Do hair. Hair is a nightmare. And they don’t get paid much.”
“So the Garage Kubrick hypothesis is just a dream?”
“Unless the maker has access to levels of technology that don’t, as far as we know, exist yet. Assuming the footage is entirely computer-generated means that your maker either has de-engineered Roswell CGI capacities or a completely secure rendering operation. If you rule out the alien tech, where can you find that?”
“Hollywood.”
“Yes, but possibly in the more globally distributed sense. You’re doing CGI in Hollywood, your rendering might be being done in New Zealand, say. Or Northern Ireland. Or, maybe, in Hollywood. Point is, that’s still the industry. People talk. Given the interest this stuff has been generating, you’d need a culture of pathological secrecy to keep it from getting out.”
“You’re not in ‘Garage Kubrick,’ then,” she says, “you’re in ‘Spielberg’s Closet’: the supposition that the footage is being produced by someone who already has godlike production resources. Someone who, for some reason, is opting to produce and release very unconventional material in a very unconventional way. Someone with the clout to keep it quiet.”
“You buy it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“How much time have you spent with the actual footage?”
“Not much.”
“How do you feel when you watch it?”
He looks down at his noodles, then up at her. “Lonely?”
“Most people find that that deepens. Becomes sort of polyphonic. Then there’s a sense that it’s going somewhere, that something will happen. Will change.” She shrugs. “It’s impossible to describe, but if you live with it for a while, it starts to get to you. It’s just such a powerful effect, induced by so little actual screen time. I’ve never felt convinced that there’s a recognized filmmaker around who can do that, although if you read the footage boards you’ll see different directors constantly nominated.”
“Or maybe it’s the repetition. Maybe you’ve been looking at this stuff for so long that you’ve read all this into it. And talking with other people who’ve been doing the same thing.”
“I’ve tried to convince myself of that. I’ve wanted to believe it, simply in order to let the thing go. But then I go back and look at it again, and there’s that sense of . . . I don’t know. Of an opening into something. Universe? Narrative?”
“Eat your noodles. Then we can talk.”
AND they do, walking. Up to Camden Lock along the High Street, the weekend’s Crusaders all gone home, passing the window of the designers of Damien’s kitchen cabinets, Boone touching on his childhood in Oklahoma, the highs and lows of his start-up experience, vicissitudes of industry and the broader economy since the previous September. He seems to be making an effort to tell her who he is. Cayce in turn telling him a little about her work and nothing at all about its basis in her peculiar sensitivities.
Until they find themselves on the canal’s shabby towpath, under a sky like a gray-scale Cibachrome of a Turner print, too powerfully backlit. This spot reminding her now of a visit to Disneyland with Win and her mother, when she was twelve. Pirates of the Caribbean had broken down and they’d been rescued by staff wearing hip-waders over their pirate costumes, to be led through a doorway into a worn, concrete-walled, oil-stained subterranean realm of machinery and cables, inhabited by glum mechanics, these backstage workers reminding Cayce of the Morlocks in The Time Machine.
It had been a difficult trip for her because she couldn’t tell her parents that she’d started trying to avoid having Mickey in her field of vision, and
by the fourth and final day she’d developed a rash. Mickey hadn’t subsequently become a problem, but she still avoided him anyway, out of a sense of having had a close shave.
Now Boone apologizes for having to check his e-mail; says he may have incoming he’d like her to see. Sits on a bench and gets out his laptop. She goes to the canal’s edge and looks down. A gray condom, drifting like a jellyfish, a lager can half-afloat, and deeper down swirls something she can’t identify, swathed in a pale and billowing caul of ragged builder’s plastic. She shudders and turns away.
“Have a look at this,” he says, looking up from his screen, the open laptop across his knees. She crosses the towpath and sits beside him. He passes her the laptop. Washed out in the afternoon light, she sees an opened message:
There’s something encrypted in each of these but that’s all I can tell you. Whatever it is, it’s not much data, and that’s uniform from segment to segment. If it were bigger, maybe—but as it is this is the best I can do: definitely a needle in your haystack.
“Who’s it from?”
“Friend of mine at Rice. I had him look at all hundred and thirty-five segments.”
“What’s he do?”
“Math. I’ve never even remotely understood it. Interviews angels for positions on pinheads. We had him onboard for the start-up. Encryption issues, but that’s only a by-product of whatever it is he does theoretically. Seems to find it intensely comical that there’s any practical application whatever.”
And she hears herself say: “It’s a watermark.”
Then he’s looking at her. She can’t read the look at all. “How do you know?”
“There’s someone in Tokyo who claims to have a number that someone else extracted from segment seventy-eight.”
“Who extracted it?”
“Footageheads. Otaku types.”
“Do you have the number?”
“No. I’m not even positive that it’s true. He might be making it up.”
“Why?”
“To impress a girl. But she doesn’t exist either.”
He stares at her. “What would it take to find out if it’s true?”
“An airport,” she says, having to admit to herself now that she’s already worked it out, already gone there, “a ticket. And a lie.”
He takes the laptop back, shuts it down, closes it, leaving his hands resting on the featureless gray metal. Looking down at it, he might be praying. Then he looks up at her. “Your call. If it’s real, and you can get it, it might take us somewhere.”
“I know,” she says, and that’s really all she can say, so she just sits there, wondering what she might have set in motion, where it might go, and why.
12.
APOPHENIA
Climbing the stairs, she realizes she’s forgotten to do the Bond thing, but she finds that recent events have apparently broken the spell of Asian Sluts.
It doesn’t even bother her that she knows what’s stuffed down behind the pile of magazines on the landing. As long she doesn’t dwell on it.
More worried about what she may just now have gotten into. Walking him to the station she’s affirmed that she’s up for it: They’ll work for Bigend, she’ll go to Tokyo and find Taki. Try, with the help of Parkaboy and Musashi, to get the number. Then they’ll see.
There’s no reason, he says, to regard it as a Faustian bargain with Bigend. They’ll be free to end the partnership at any time, and can keep each other honest.
But this argument is somehow familiar from past contexts, past bargains, where things haven’t really worked out that well.
But she knows she’s going now, and she has the two very black, very odd-looking keys around her neck, and right this minute she isn’t worrying about the perimeter.
Fuck Dorotea.
Right now she believes implicitly in German technology.
Which is about to create a problem, she realizes, as she works those fine locks in turn.
She doesn’t know where she can leave the new keys, or who to trust with them. Damien will want to be able to unlock his apartment, should he return, and she won’t be here. He doesn’t have an office, no agency affiliation that she knows of, and she doesn’t know any of their mutual acquaintances here well enough to trust them with the valuable and highly portable music-production gear in the room upstairs. She doesn’t know how constant Damien’s e-mail connection is, at the dig, in Russia. If she e-mails him for advice, will he get it in time, and respond, telling her where to leave the keys?
Then she thinks of Voytek and Magda, who have no idea where this place is. She can leave one set with them, telling Damien how to contact them, and take the other set with her.
And, yes, letting herself in, everything looks fine here, even the knap on the couch, reversed where Boone had sat on it.
The phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Pamela Mainwaring, Cayce. I’m travel for Hubertus. I have you British Airways, Heathrow-Narita, ten fifty-five hours, first class, tomorrow. Works?”
Cayce stares at the robot girls. “Yes. Thanks.”
“Brilliant. I’ll come round now and drop off the ticket. I also have a laptop for you, and a phone.”
She’s always managed not to acquire either, at least in terms of traveling with them. She has a laptop at home, but uses it, with a full-size keyboard and a monitor, only as her desk machine. And the mirror-world has always been a deliberate cellular vacation. But now she remembers Tokyo’s lack of English signage, and her lack of spoken Japanese.
“I’ll be there in ten. I’m calling from the car. Bye.” Click.
She locates the piece of cardboard with Voytek’s address and e-mails him, giving him the number here and asking him to call as soon as he can, that she has a favor to ask and that it’s worth a few ZX 81s. Then she e-mails Parkaboy and tells him she’ll be in Tokyo the day after tomorrow, and to start thinking about what she’ll need to do to deal with Taki.
She pauses, about to open the latest from her mother, and remembering that she still hasn’t replied to the previous two.
Her mother is [email protected], Rose of the World being an intentional community of sorts, back up in the red-dirt country of Maui.
Cayce has never been there but Cynthia has sent pictures. A sprawling, oddly prosaic sixties rancher set back against a red hillside in long sparse grass, that red showing through like some kind of scalp disease. Up there they scrutinize miles of audiotape, some of it fresh from its factory wrap, unused, listening for voices of the dead: EVP freaks, of which Cayce’s mother is one from way back. Used to put Win’s Uher reel-to-reel in their very first microwave. She said that blocked out broadcast interference.
Cayce has long managed to have as little to do with her mother’s penchant for Electronic Voice Phenomena as she possibly can, and this had been her father’s strategy as well. Apophenia, Win had declared it, after due consideration and in his careful way: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things. And had never, as far as Cayce knows, said another word about it.
Cayce hesitates, a mouse-click away from opening her mother’s message, which is titled HELLO???.
No, she isn’t ready.
She goes to the fridge and wonders what she’ll eat before her departure, and what she’ll throw out.
Apophenia. She stares blankly into the cold, beautifully illuminated interior of Damien’s German fridge. What if the sense of nascent meaning they all perceive in the footage is simply that: an illusion of meaningfulness, faulty pattern recognition? She’s been over this with Parkaboy and he’s taken it places (the neuromechanics of hallucination, August Strindberg’s personal account of his psychotic break, and a peak drug experience during his teens in which he, Parkaboy, had felt himself to be “channeling some kind of Linear B angelic machine language”), none of which have really helped.
She sighs and closes the fridge.
The street door buzzes. She goes down to let Pamela Mainwar
ing in, a twenty-something blonde in a black mini and tartan-print tights, a black ballistic nylon briefcase in either hand. Cayce sees a Blue Ant car waiting in the street. Its driver stands beside it, smoking a cigarette, his ear plugged with plastic, conversing with thin air.
Everything about Pamela Mainwaring is fast, efficient, and intimidatingly clear. Not a woman who’d often have to repeat herself. They aren’t even in the apartment yet before she’s gotten Cayce to sign off on a suite in the Park Hyatt, Shinjuku, with a view of the Imperial Palace. “Part of one rooftop, at least,” Pamela says, putting the briefcases down, side by side, on the trestle table.
“That’s a nice yellow,” glancing into the kitchen.
She unzips one case, exposing a laptop and printer.
“I’ll just check this again,” she says, booting up. “You can use the return whenever you like, and on any carrier. But you can also go anywhere you want, anytime. My e-mail and number’s in your laptop here. I do all of Hubertus’s travel, so I’m seven twenty-four.” The screen fills with a dense frieze of flight schedules. “Yes. You’re on.” She takes blank airline tickets from an envelope and feeds them into the rectangular printer. It makes small, energetic buzzing sounds as the tickets emerge from the opposite end. “Minimum two hours check-in.” Adroitly assembling the fresh-minted tickets in a British Airways folder. “We have an iBook for you, loaded, cellular modem. And a phone. It’s good here, anywhere in Europe, Japan, and the States. You’ll be met at Narita by someone from Blue Ant Tokyo. The Tokyo office is at your complete disposal. The best translators, drivers, anything you feel you need. Literally anything.”
“I don’t want to be met.”
“Then you won’t.”
“Is Hubertus still in New York, Pamela?”
Pamela consults an Oakley Timebomb, slightly wider than her left wrist. “Hubertus is on his way to Houston, but he’ll be back in the Mercer tonight. His e-mail and all of his numbers are on your iBook.” She opens the second case, exposing a flat Mac, a gray cell phone large enough to look either passé or unusually powerful, various cables and small gizmos still sealed in the manufacturer’s plastic, and a sheaf of the usual glossy how-to. There’s a Blue Ant envelope on top of the computer. Pamela closes her own computer, zips up the case. Picks up the envelope, tears it open, shakes out a loose credit card. “Sign this, please.”
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