Yamazaki walked toward the coffee-vendor, remembering the funeral procession, the dancing scarlet figure with its red-painted rifle. The symbol of Shapely's going.
Shapely's murder, some said sacrifice, had taken place in Salt Lake City. His seven killers, heavily armed fundamentalists, members of a white racist sect driven underground in the months following the assault on the airport, were still imprisoned in Utah, though two of them had subsequently died of AIDS, possibly contracted in prison, steadfastly refusing the viral strain patented in Shapely's name.
They had remained silent during the trial, their leader stating only that the disease was God's vengeance on sinners and the unclean. Lean men with shaven heads and blank, implacable eyes, they were God's gunmen, and would stare, as such, from all the tapes of history, forever.
But Shapely had been very wealthy when he had died, Yamazaki thought, joining the line for coffee. Perhaps he had even been happy. He had seen the product of his blood reverse the course of darkness. There were other plagues abroad now, but the live vaccine bred from Shapely's variant had saved uncounted millions.
Yamazaki promised himself that he would observe Shapely's birthday parade. He would rernemher to bring his notchook.
He stood in the smell of fresh-ground coffee, awaiting his turn.
Acknowledgments
This book owes a very special debt to Paolo Polledri, founding Curator of Architecture and Design, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Polledri commissioned, for the 1990 exhibition Visionary San Francisco, a work of fiction which became the short story 'Skinner's Room,' and also arranged for me to collaborate with the architects Ming Fung and Craig Hodgetts, whose redrawn map of the city (though I redrew it once again) provided me with Skywalker Park, the Trap, and the Sunflower towers.
(From another work commissioned for this exhibition, Richard Rodriguez's powerful 'Sodom: Reflections on a Stereotype,' I appropriated Yamazaki's borrowed Victorian and the sense of its melancholy.)
The term Virtual Light was coined by scientist Stephen Beck to describe a form of instrumentation that produces 'optical sensations directly in the eye without the use of photons' (Mondo 2000).
Rydell's Los Angeles owes much to my reading of Mike Davis's City of Quartz, perhaps most particularly in his observations regarding the privatization of public space.
I am indebted to Markus, aka Fur, one of the editors of Mercury Rising, published by and for the San Francisco Bike Messenger Association, who kindly provided a complete file of hack issues and then didn't hear from me for a year or SO (sorry).
Mercury Rising exists 'to inform, amuse, piss off, and otherwise reinforce' the messenger community. It provided me with Chevette Washington's workplace and a good deal of her character. Proj on!
Thanks, too, to the following, all of whom provided crucial assistance, the right fragment at the right time, or artistic support: Laurie Anderson, Cotty Chubb, Samuel Delany, Richard Dorsett, Brian Eno, Deborah Harry, Richard Kadrey, Mark Laidlaw, Tom Maddox, Pat Murphy, Richard Piellisch, John Shirley, Chris Stein, Bruce Sterling, Roger Trilling, Bruce Wagner, Jack Womack.
Special thanks to Martha Millard, my literary agent, ever understanding of the long haul.
And to Deb, Graeme, and Claire, with love, for putting up with the time I spent in the basement.
Vancouver, B.C. January 1993
Thanks
Sogho Ishii, the Japanese director, introduced me to Kowloon Walled City via the photographs of Ryuji Miyamoto. It was Ishiisan's idea that we should make a science fiction movie there. We never did, but the Walled City continued to haunt me, though I knew no more about it than I could gather from Miyamoto's stunning images, which eventually provided most of the texture for the Bridge in my novel Virtual Light.
Architect Ken Vineberg drew my attention to an article about the Walled City in Architectural Revieu~, where I first learned of City of Darkness, the splendid record assembled by Greg Girard and Ian Lambrot (Watermark, London, 1993). From London, John Jarrold very kindly arranged for me to receive a copy.
Anything I know of the toecutting business, I owe to the criminal memoirs of Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read (Chopper from the inside, Sly Ink, Australia, 1991). Mr. Read is a great deal scarier than Blackwell, and has even fewer ears.
Karl Taro Greenfeld's Speed Tribes (HarperCollins, New York, 1994) richly fed my dreams of Laney's jet lag.
Stephen P. ("Plausibility") Brown rode shotgun on the work in progress for many months, commenting daily, sometimes more often, and always with a fine forbearance, as I faxed him a bewildering flurry of disconnected fragments he was somehow expected to interpret as "progress." His constant encouragement and seemingly endless patience were absolutely essential to this book's completion.
My publishers, on both sides of the Atlantic, also demonstrated great patience, and I thank them.
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