13. Character Recognition

Yamazaki phoned just before noon. The day was dim and overcast. Laney had closed the curtains in order to avoid seeing the nanotech buildings in that light.

He was watching an NHK show about champion top-spinners. The star, he gathered, was a little girl with pigtails and a blue dress with an old-fashioned sailor’s collar. She was slightly cross-eyed, perhaps from concentration. The tops were made of wood. Some of them were big, and looked heavy.

“Hello, Mr. Laney,” Yamazaki said. “You are feeling better now?”

Laney watched a purple-and-yellow top blur into action as the girl gave the carefully wound cord an expert pull. The commentator held a hand mike near the top to pick up the hum it was producing, then said something in Japanese.

“Better than last night,” Laney said.

“It is being arranged for you to access the data that surrounds ‘our friend’. It is a complicated process, as this data has been protected in many different ways. There was no single strategy. The ways in which his privacy has been protected are complexly incremental.”

“Does ‘our friend’ know about this?”

There was a pause. Laney watched the spinning top. He imagined Yamazaki blinking. “No, he does not.”

“I still don’t know who I’ll really be working for. For him? For Blackwell?”

“Your employer is Paragon-Asia Dataflow, Melbourne. They are employing me as well.”

“What about Blackwell?”

“Blackwell is employed by a privately held corporation, through which portions of our friend’s income pass. In the course of our friend’s career, a structure has been erected to optimize that flow, to minimize losses. That structure now constitutes a corporate entity in its own right.”

“Management,” Laney said. “His management’s scared because it looks like he might do something crazy. Is that it?”

The purple-and-yellow top was starting to exhibit the first of the oscillations that would eventually bring it to a halt. “I am still a stranger to this business-culture, Mr. Laney. I find it difficult to assess these things.”

“What did Blackwell mean, last night, about Rez wanting to marry a Japanese girl who isn’t real?”

“Idoru,” Yamazaki said.

“What?”

“ ‘Idol-singer.’ She is Rei Toei. She is a personality-construct, a congeries of software agents, the creation of information-designers. She is akin to what I believe they call a ‘synthespian,’ in Hollywood.”

Laney closed his eyes, opened them. “Then how can he marry her?”

“I don’t know,” Yamazaki said. “But he has very forcefully declared this to be his intention.”

“Can you tell me what it is they’ve hired youto do?”

“Initially, I think, they hoped I would be able to explain the idoru to them: her appeal to her audience, therefore perhaps her appeal to him. Also, I think that, like Blackwell, they remain unconvinced that this is not the result of a conspiracy of some kind. Now they want me to acquaint you with the cultural background of the situation.”

“Who are they?”

“I cannot be more specific now.”

The top was starting to wobble. Laney saw something like terror in the girl’s eyes. “You don’t think there’s a conspiracy?”

“I will try to answer your questions this evening. In the meantime, while it is being arranged for you to access the data, please study these…”

“Hey,” Laney protested, as his top-spinning girl was replaced by an unfamiliar logo: a grinning cartoon bulldog with a spiked collar, up to its muscular neck in a big bowl of soup.

“Two documentary videos on Lo/Rez,” Yamazaki said. “These are on the Dog Soup label, originally a small independent based in East Taipei. They released the band’s first recordings. Lo/Rez later purchased Dog Soup and used it to release less commercial material by other artists.”

Laney stared glumly at the grinning bulldog, missing the girl with pigtails. “Like documentaries about themselves?”

“The documentaries were not made subject to the band’s approval, They are not Lo/Rez corporate documents.”

“Well, I guess we’ve got that to be thankful for.”

“You are welcome.” Yamazaki hung up.

The virtual POV zoomed, rotating in on one of the spikes on the dog’s collar: in close-up, it was a shining steel pyramid. Reflected clouds whipped past in time-lapse on the towering triangular face as the Universal Copyright Agreement warning scrolled into view.

Laney watched long enough to see that the video was spliced together from bits and pieces of the band’s public relations footage. “Art-warning,” he said, and went into the bathroom to decipher the shower controls.

He managed to miss the first six minutes, showering and brushing his teeth. He’d seen things like that before, art videos, but he’d never actually tried to pay attention to one. Putting on the hotel’s white terry robe, he told himself he’d better try. Yamazaki seemed capable of quizzing him on it later.

Why did people make things like this? There was no narration, no apparent structure; some of the same fragments kept repeating throughout, at different speeds.

In Los Angeles there were whole public-access channels devoted to things like this, and home-made talkshows hosted by naked Encino witches, who sat in front of big paintings of the Goddess they’d done in their garages. Except you could watch that. The logic of these cut-ups, he supposed, was that by making one you could somehow push back at the medium. Maybe it was supposed to be something like treading water, a simple repetitive human activity that temporarily provided at least an illusion of parity with the sea. But to Laney, who had spent many of his waking hours down in the deeper realms of data that underlay the worlds of media, it only looked hopeless. And tedious, too, although he supposed that that boredom was somehow meant to be harnessed, here, another way of pushing back.

Why else would anyone have selected and edited all these bits of Lo and Rez, the Chinese guitarist and the half-Irish singer, saying stupid things in dozens of different television spots, most of them probably intended for translation? Greetings seemed to be a theme. “We’re happy to be here in Vladivostok, We hear you’ve got a great new aquarium!” “We congratulate you on your free elections and your successful dengue-abatement campaign!” “We’ve always loved London!” “New York, you’re… pragmatic!”

Laney explored the remains of his breakfast, finding a half-eaten slice of cold brown toast under a steel plate cover. There was an inch of coffee left in the pot. He didn’t want to think about the call from Rydell or what it might mean. He’d thought he was done with Slitscan, done with the lawyers .

“Singapore, you’re beautiful!” Rez said, Lo chiming in with “Hell-o, Lion City!”

He picked up the remote and hopefully tried the fast-forward, No. Mute? No. Yamazaki was having this stuff piped in for his benefit. He considered unplugging the console, but he was afraid they’d be able to tell.

It was speeding up now, the cuts more frequent, the whole more content-free, a numbing blur. Rez’s grin was starting to look sinister, something with an agenda of its own that jumped unchanged from one cut to the next,

Suddenly it all slid away, into handheld shadow, highlights on rococo gilt. There was a clatter of glassware. The image had a peculiar flattened quality that he knew from Slitscan: the smallest lapel-cameras did that, the ones disguised as flecks of lint.

A restaurant? Club? Someone seated opposite the camera, beyond a phalanx of green bottles. The darkness and the bandwidth of the tiny camera making the features impossible to read. Then Rez leaned forward, recognizable in the new depth of focus. He gestured toward the camera with a glass of red wine.

“If we could ever once stop talking about the music, and the industry, and all the politics of that, I think I’d probably tell you that it’s easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.”