Pattern Recognition

by William Gibson

  She’d told him, as they were boarding, that she’d gotten something more from Taki, via Parkaboy, but that she was too tired to explain it, that she’d show it to him when she’d had more sleep.

  What is that about, she wonders, that holding back? Something to do with the newness of their working relationship, but also, she knows, something to do with something she’d felt in that apartment. She doesn’t want to look at that too closely. But also she wants time to get her head around this idea of the T-bone city. And there’s a way in which she simply finds him pushy.

  But there’s the T-bone to try to figure out, she thinks, powering her bed up into lounger mode and hauling the bag with her iBook up from the floor. She boots up, finds Parkaboy’s jpeg, and opens it.

  If anything, it’s even more enigmatic than when she first saw it.

  Taki. Is there any chance that he’s just making this all up to impress Keiko? But Parkaboy and Darryl had found him on a Japanese website, where he’d already made some mention of something encrypted in a segment of the footage. They hadn’t invented Keiko yet. No, she knows that Taki is for real. Taki is too sad not to be real. She imagines him going to someone, while Keiko emerged more clearly for him through her messages, and somehow, perhaps at some strange cost, obtaining this image, extracted from that white flare.

  But in his shyness, his caution, he hadn’t brought it to their meeting. He’d brought only the one number. Then the Photoshopped version of Judy Tsuzuki had impacted, and he’d gone home and sent this to Parkaboy, thinking he was sending it to his big-eyed, Clydesdale-ankled love.

  She thinks of Ivy, in Seoul, F:F:F’s founder. What would Ivy make of this?

  She frowns, seeing for the first time how working for Bigend, with Boone Chu, has skewed her relationship to F:F:F and the footagehead community. Even Parkaboy, who’s been instrumental in all of this, doesn’t know what she’s up to, who she’s working for.

  “What is it?” Boone, looming beside her in the twilit aisle, his black T-shirt and the blindfold slung beneath his chin offering the odd suggestion of a priest’s collar. A single one-inch square of white paper and he’d have a costume: the young priest, eyes somewhat swollen with sleep.

  She elevates to chair and he joins her, crouching on the little visitor seat at the unit’s foot. She passes him her iBook. “Taki really liked the photograph. He couldn’t wait to get home. Had to keep stopping in cafés to e-mail her. When he did get home, he sent her this.”

  “Are there a hundred and thirty-five of these?” Indicating the numbers.

  “I haven’t counted them myself, but yes. The one that matches the number Taki gave me is near the bottom of the T.”

  “It looks as though each location corresponds to a segment of footage. Not the way you’d map a virtual world, though. Not if mapping virtual worlds was ordinarily your business.”

  “What if it weren’t?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if you were just making something up as you went along? Why should we assume that the maker knows what he’s doing?”

  “Or we could assume that he does, but he’s just doing it his own way. The people who designed all the early Nintendo games drew them on long rolls of paper. There was no better way to do it, and you could unroll the whole thing and see exactly how it would move. The geography of the game was two-D, scrolling past on the screen . . .” He falls silent, frowning.

  “What?”

  He shakes his head. “I need more sleep.” He stands up, passing her the iBook, and returns to his seat.

  She stares blankly at the jpeg, the iBook slightly warm atop her thighs, and wonders exactly what she should do when they get to Heathrow. She has the new keys to Damien’s place in her Stasi envelope, in the Luggage Label bag. That’s where she feels like going, really, though the residual ache in her forehead is causing her some doubt.

  Would someone have been able to fiddle the locks in the meantime? She has only a very fuzzy idea of who might live in the other two flats, but whoever they are, they seem to go out to work on a regular basis. A burglar might be able to get in, then, during the day, and do whatever it took to open the apartment.

  But her only other option is a London hotel, and, even with Blue Ant footing the bill, she’s feeling hoteled out. She’ll go to Camden, then. Heathrow Express to Paddington, then a cab. Decision out of the way, she closes Taki’s jpeg, puts the iBook away, and returns to bed-mode.

  WHEN they exit immigration, Bigend is waiting, the only smiling face in a scrum of glum chauffeurs holding hand-lettered sheets of cardboard. Bigend’s says “POLLARD & CHU” in coarse-tipped red felt pen.

  He really does seem to have too many teeth. His Stetson is set too squarely on his head and he’s wearing the raincoat she’d last seen him in.

  “Right this way, please.” He makes a point of taking over the luggage trolley from Boone, and they follow him out, throwing glances at each other, past the cab queue and the recent arrivals coughing gratefully over first cigarettes. She sees his Hummer parked where she’s certain no one at all is allowed to park, ever, and watches as he and Boone open the square doors at the rear and load the bags.

  Bigend holds the passenger-side door for her as she climbs in. Boone gets the seat behind her.

  She watches Bigend fold his enormous plastic parking permission.

  “You didn’t need to pick us up, Hubertus,” she says, because she feels the need to say something, and because it seems so abundantly the truth.

  “Not at all,” says Bigend, ambiguously, pulling away from the curb. “I want to hear all about it.”

  Which he does, mainly via Boone, but, Cayce gradually notes, with two serious omissions. Boone never mentions the head-butting or Taki’s jpeg. He tells Bigend that they went to Tokyo to follow up a lead suggesting that at least one segment of the footage has an encrypted watermark.

  “And does it?” Bigend asks, driving.

  “It may,” Boone says. “We have a twelve-digit code that may have been extracted from a specific segment of footage.”

  “And?”

  “Cayce was followed, in Tokyo.”

  “By whom?”

  “Two men, possibly Italian.”

  “Possibly?”

  “I overheard them speaking Italian.”

  “Who were they?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Cayce sees Bigend purse his lips. “Do you have any idea,” he asks her, briefly making eye contact, “why you would be followed? Unfinished business elsewhere? Something unrelated?”

  “We were hoping you might be able to answer that one, Hubertus,” Boone says.

  “You think I had Cayce followed, Boone?”

  “I might myself, Hubertus, if I were in your position.”

  “You might well,” says Bigend, “but you aren’t me. I don’t work that way, not in a partnership.” They’re on the evening motorway now, and raindrops suddenly strike the vertical windshield, causing Cayce to imagine that the weather has followed them from Tokyo. Bigend turns on the wipers, spatular things that swing from the top of the glass rather than the bottom. She watches as he touches a button, fractionally reduces air pressure in the tires. “However,” he says, “as I’m sure you understand, partnership with me makes you more likely to be followed. This is an aspect of the downside of a high profile.”

  “But who would know that we’re your partners?” Cayce asks.

  “Blue Ant is an advertising agency, not the CIA. People talk. Even the ones who’ve been hired not to. Secrecy, when we’re planning a campaign, for instance, can be of the utmost importance. But still things leak. I’ll look at that, at exactly who would have reason to believe the two of you are working for me, but now I’m more curious about these putative Italians.”

  “We lost them,” Boone says. “Cayce had just received the code from her contact, and I thought it was the right time to get her out of there. When I had a look for them, later, they were gone.”

  “And
this contact?”

  “Someone I turned up through the footagehead network,” Cayce says.

  “Exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for.”

  “We doubt he has anything further to offer us,” Boone says, causing Cayce to glance back at him, “but if this watermark is genuine, it may be a good start.”

  Cayce looks straight ahead, forcing herself to concentrate on the arcing of the wipers. Boone is lying to Bigend, or withholding information, and now she feels that she is too. She briefly considers bringing up Dorotea and Asian Sluts at this point, just to send things in a direction Boone isn’t expecting, but she has no idea of his agenda in lying. He may be doing it for a reason she’d approve of. The next time they’re alone together, she needs to have this out with him.

  She blinks, as they abruptly leave the motorway, entering London’s maze. Streetlights coming on.

  After Tokyo, everything here feels so differently scaled. A different gauge of model railroad. Though if asked, she’d have to admit that the two do have something mysteriously in common. Perhaps if London had been built, until the war, primarily of wood and paper, and then had burned, the way Tokyo had burned, and then been rebuilt, the mystery she’s always sensed in these streets would remain somehow, coded in steel and concrete.

  To her considerable embarrassment, and confusion, they have to wake her when the Hummer pulls up outside of Damien’s.

  Boone carries her bag to the door. “I’ll go in with you.”

  “It isn’t necessary,” she says. “I’m tired. I’ll be fine.”

  “Call me.” On the plane, approaching Heathrow, he’d tapped his various cell numbers into her phone. “Let me know you’re okay.”

  “I will,” she says, feeling like an idiot. She unlocks the front door, manages a smile, and goes in.

  On the landing, she sees that the bundles of magazines have been removed, and with them the black bin liner.

  She’s up the last flight and almost to Damien’s door, the second German key in hand, before she realizes that light is showing, from the crack at the foot of his door.

  She stands there, the key in one hand, her bag in the other, hearing voices. One is Damien’s.

  She knocks.

  A young woman, taller than she is, opens the door. Enormous cornflower-blue eyes, tilted slightly above extraordinary cheekbones, regard her coldly. “Yes? What do you want?” the blonde asks, with what Cayce assumes is a stage accent, some aspect of a joke, but as this woman’s mouth, with its perfectly outlined, extravagantly full underlip, sets itself in grim distaste, she realizes that it isn’t.

  Damien, stubble-headed after a recent shaving and for an instant quite unrecognizable, appears behind uber-bones and playfully squeezes her shoulders, grinning over one at Cayce.

  “It’s Cayce, Marina. My friend. Where on earth have you been then, Cayce?”

  “Tokyo. I didn’t know you were back. I’ll go to a hotel.”

  But Damien will have none of that.

  21.

  THE DEAD REMEMBER

  Marina Chtcheglova, whom Cayce quickly gathers is Damien’s Russian line producer, is not the first of his girlfriends to have taken an immediate dislike to her. Seeing the torsos of the robot girls again, she remembers that the one from whom those had been so fetchingly cast had been the most vicious of cows—till now, anyway.

  Fortunately she and Marina are almost immediately separated, conversationally, by Voytek, whose presence here Cayce initially accepts as a function of the Great Whatever of multiply impacted jet lag, and by Fergal Collins, Damien’s Irish accountant and tax advisor, someone Cayce knows from several previous occasions. Voytek re-engages la Chtcheglova in whatever rant he must have embarked on prior to Cayce’s arrival, this conducted in what Cayce assumes is Russian, and with a tempo and apparent fluid assurance very unlike his delivery in English. Marina doesn’t seem to like this, particularly, but seems compelled to listen.

  Voytek wears his usual orphaned skateboard gear, but Marina is wearing what Cayce is trying not to admit to herself is probably this season’s Prada exclusively, everything black. Her cheekbones actually make Voytek’s look relatively non-Slavic. It’s as though she somehow has an extra pair folded in, behind the first set; Caucasian in some primordial, almost geological sense.

  She looks, Cayce decides, like a prop from one sequel or another of The Matrix; if her boobs were bigger she could get work on the covers of role-playing games for adolescent boys of any age whatever.

  Fergal, some genially carnivorous species of businessman draped in the pelt of an art-nerd, works mainly in music but has been with Damien for as long as Cayce has known him. “What’s it like in Tokyo, after the devaluations?” he asks, seated beside her on Damien’s brown couch.

  “It’s more the way it is now than it’s ever been,” Cayce replies, a line of Dwight David Eisenhower’s that she sometimes resorts to when she has nothing whatever to offer. Fergal frowns slightly. “Sorry, Fergal. I was hardly even there. Has Damien finished his film?”

  “Would to God he had, but no. He’s back to re-up financing, collect three more cameras and additional crew, and, I think,” he lowers his voice slightly, “because herself fancied a visit to the capital.”

  “She’s his line producer?”

  “We call her that but really it’s more post-Soviet. She’s the blat girl.”

  “The what?”

  “Blat. What the old boys in your country called juice, I think. She’s connected, Marina is. Her father was the head of an aluminum plant, back in the dreamtime. When they privatized, somehow he wound up owning it outright. Still does, and a brewery and a merchant bank as well. The brewery’s been a godsend, actually. They’ve been trucking beer to the site since the day we started shooting. Makes Damien a very popular fellow, and otherwise they’d be drinking vodka.”

  “Have you been there?”

  “For an afternoon.” He winces.

  “What’s it like?”

  “Somewhere between a three-month 1968 rock concert, mass public grave-robbing, and Apocalypse Now. Hard to say, really, which is of course the big draw for our boy here. Do you know that Pole, there?”

  “Voytek.”

  “Who is he?”

  “An artist. I’ve been staying here, and when I went to Tokyo I left the keys with him.”

  “He can certainly occupy Marina in her native tongue, which keeps her out of ours, but do you think he’s chatting her up?”

  “No,” Cayce says, seeing Voytek produce one of his notebooks from his pouch, “he’s trying to get her to fund a project.” Marina makes a dismissive gesture and goes into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. Voytek crosses to the couch, smiling, notebook in one hand, bottle of beer in the other. “Casey, where have you been?”

  “Away. Have you met Fergal?”

  “Yes!” He sits on the couch. “Damien calls me from airport, asks me to meet here with keys and tandoori and beer. This producer, Marina, she is very interesting. Has gallery connections in Moscow.”

  “You speak Russian?”

  “Of course. Magda, she was born there. Myself, Poland. Our father was Moscow civil engineer. I do not remember Poland.”

  “Christ,” cries Damien from the kitchen, “this khoorma is heaven!”

  “Excuse me,” Cayce says, standing. She goes into the yellow kitchen and finds Damien transfixed with joy, half a dozen foil dishes open on the counter in front of him.

  “It’s not fucking stew,” Damien says. “At the dig we live on stew. No refrigeration. Stew’s been simmering for the better part of two months. Just keep tossing things in. Lumps of mystery meat and boiled potato in what looks like gray Bisto. That and bread. Russian bread’s brilliant, but this khoorma—”

  She gives him a hug. “Damien, I can’t stay here.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “No. I’m pissing off your girlfriend, being here.”

  Damien grins. “No you aren’t. It’s her default settin
g. Nothing to do with you.”

  “You aren’t making a lot of progress in your relationship choices, since I last saw you, are you?”

  “I can’t make this film without her.”

  “Don’t you think it might be easier if you weren’t in a relationship as well?”

  “No. In fact, it wouldn’t be at all. She’s like that. When are you coming?”

  “Where?”

  “The dig. You have to see this. It’s amazing.”

  The tower of gray bone. “I can’t, Damien. I’m working.”

  “For Blue Ant again? I thought you said that that was over, when you e-mailed me about the keys.”

  “This is something else.”

  “But you’ve just gotten off the plane from Tokyo. You’re here, there’s a bed upstairs, and I’m back tomorrow. If you go to a hotel, we won’t see one another at all. Go upstairs, sleep if you can, and I’ll deal with Marina.” He smiles. “I’m used to it.”

  Suddenly the idea of actually having to find a hotel room and go there seems far too difficult. “You’ve convinced me. I can’t see straight. But if you go back to Russia without waking me, I’ll kill you.”

  “Go up and lie down. Where did you find this Voytek, anyway?”

  “Portobello Row.”

  “I like him.”

  Cayce’s legs feel like they belong to someone else, now. She’ll have to try to communicate with them more deliberately, to get them to carry her upstairs. “He’s harmless,” she says, wondering what that means, and heads for her bag and the stair to the room overhead.

  She manages to get the futon unfolded, up there, and collapses on it. Then remembers Boone asking her to phone him. She gets out her cell and speed-dials the first of his numbers.

  “Hello?”

  “Cayce.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Damien’s. He’s here.”

  A pause. “That’s good. I was worried about you.”

  “I was worried about me too, when I heard you bullshitting Bigend on the way in from Heathrow. What was that about?”