“And it always finds me, that light,” Maryalice said. “Always. No matter what I drink, what I take on top of that, It finds me and it wakes me up. It’s like powder, blows in under the door. Nothing to do about it. Gets in your eyes. And all that brightness, falling…”
Eddie was half back through the doorway now, the Russian behind him, actually in the bathroom, and Chia didn’t like that because she couldn’t see the Russian’s hands. She heard the ambient birdsong start as the bathroom sensed the Russian, “And you put me there, Eddie. That Shinjuku. You put me where that light could get me, and I could never get away.”
And then Maryalice pulled the trigger.
Eddie screamed, a weird shrill sound bouncing off the black and white tiles. That must’ve covered the click of the lighter, which hadn’t even produced a flame.
Maryalice didn’t panic.
She held her aim and calmly pulled the trigger again.
She got a light, that time, but Eddie, with a howl of rage, swatted the lighter aside, grabbed Maryalice by the throat, and started pounding her in the face with his fist, the howl resolving into “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!” in sync with each blow.
And that was when Chia, without really thinking about it, came up from where she’d been sitting for so long that, she found, her legs were asleep, and didn’t work, so that she had to turn her lunge into a roll, and roll again, before she could jam the chrome tips of the stun-gun against Eddie’s ankle and push the red stud.
She wasn’t sure it would work on an ankle, or through his sock. But it did. Maybe because Eddie wore those really thin socks.
But it got Maryalice, too, so that they seemed to jerk together, toppling into each other’s arms.
And the dark blur that flew past Chia then was Masahiko, who pulled the door shut on the Russian, grabbed the knob with both hands and jumped up, jamming one paper-slippered foot against the wall, the other against the door, and hung there. “Run,” he said, his arms and legs straining. Then his hands slipped off the round chrome knob and he landed on his ass.
Chia saw the knob start to turn.
She put the fangs of the stungun against the doorknob and pushed the stud. And kept pushing it.
37. Work Experience
Laney sat in the van’s front passenger seat again, the ’phones on his lap, waiting for Arleigh to connect Kuwayama’s gray module, He looked through the windshield at the concrete wall. His side didn’t hurt quite as much now, but the meeting with Kuwayama and the idoru, and then his huddle in the van with Yamazaki, had left him more confused than ever. If Rez and Rei Toei were making decisions in tandem, and if Yamazaki had decided to go along with them, where did that leave him? He couldn’t see that Blackwell was going to wake up to find some innate wonderfulness in the idea of Rez and Rei together. As far as Blackwell was concerned, Rez was still just trying to marry a software agent—whatever that might turn out to mean.
But Laney knew now that the idoru was more complex, more powerful, than any Hollywood synthespian. Particularly if Kuwayama were telling the truth about the videos being her “dreams.” All he knew about artificial intelligence came from work he’d done on a Slitscan episode documenting the unhappy personal life of one of the field’s leading researchers, but he knew that true AI was assumed never to have been achieved, and that current attempts to achieve it were supposed to be in directions quite opposite the creation of software that was good at acting like beautiful young women.
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.
Arleigh opened the door on the driver’s side and got in. “Sorry this is taking so long,” she said.
“You weren’t expecting it,” Laney said.
“It isn’t the software, it’s an optical valve. A cable-tip. They use a different gauge, one the French use.” She curled her hands around the top of the wheel and rested her chin on them. “So we’re dealing with these huge volumes of information, no problem, but we don’t have the right cable to pour it through.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Shannon’s got one in his room, Probably on a porno outfit, but he won’t admit it.” She looked at him sideways. “Shannon’s got a friend on the security team. His friend says that Blackwell ‘questioned’ one of the men who tried to grab Rez tonight.”
“That’s who they were after? Rez?”
“Seems like it. They’re Kombinat, and they claim Rez has hijacked something of theirs.”
“Hijacked what?”
“He didn’t know.” She closed her eyes.
“What do you think happened to him, the one Blackwell questioned?”
“I don’t know,” She opened her eyes, straightened up. “But somehow I don’t think we’ll find out.”
“Can he do that? Torture people? Kill them?”
She looked at Laney. “Well,” she said, finally, “he does have a certain advantage, making us think he might. It’s an established fact that he did that in his previous line of work. You know what scares me most about Blackwell?”
“What?”
“Sometimes I find myself getting used to him.”
Shannon rapped on the door beside her. Held up a length of cable.
“Ready when you are,” she said to Laney, opening the door and sliding from behind the wheel.
Laney looked through the tinted windshield at the concrete wall and remembered policing the steps outside the Municipal Court in Gainesville with Shaquille and Kenny, two others from the orphanage. Shaquille had gone on to the drug-testing program with Laney, but Kenny had been transferred to another facility, near Denver. Laney had no idea what had become of either of them, but it had been Shaquille who’d pointed out to Laney that when the injection had the real stuff in it, your mouth filled with a taste like corroded metal, aluminum or something. Pl-ceeb–o, Shaquille had said, don’t taste. And it was true. You could tell right away.
The three of them had had Work Experience there, five or six times, picking up the offerings people left before their day in court. These were considered to be a health hazard, and were usually carefully hidden, and you often found them by the smell, or the buzzing of flies. Parts of chickens, usually, tied up with colored yarn. What Shaquille said was the head of a goat, once. Shaquille said the people who left these things were drug dealers, and they did it because it was their religion. Laney and the others wore pale green latex gloves with orange Kevlar thimbles on the tips that gave you heat rash. They put the offerings in a white snap-top bucket with peeling Biohazard stickers. Shaquille had claimed to know the names of some of the gods these things were offered up to, but Laney hadnt been fooled. The names Shaquille made up, like O’Gunn and Sam Eddy, were obviously just that, and even Shaquille, dropping a white ball of chicken feathers into the bucket, had said an extra lawyer or two was probably a better investment. “But they do it while they waitin’. Hedge they bet.” Laney had actually preferred this to Work Experiences at fast-food franchises, even though it meant they got body-searched for drugs when they got back.
He’d told Yamazaki and Blackwell about knowing that Alison Shires was going to try to commit suicide, and now they must think he could see the future. But he knew he couldn’t. That would be like those chicken parts the dealers hid around the courthouse steps changing what was going to happen. What would happen in the future came out of what was happening now. Laney knew he couldn’t predict it, and something about the experience of the nodal points made him suspect that nobody could. The nodal points seemed to form when something might be about to change. Then he saw a place where change was most likely, if something triggered it. Maybe something as small as Alison Shires buying the blades for a box-cutter. But if an earthquake had come, that night, and pitched her apartment down into Fountain Avenue… Or if she’d lost the pack of blades… But if she’d used credit to buy that Wednesday Night Special, which she couldn’t do because it was illegal, and required cash, then it would’ve been obvious to anybody what she might be on the verge of doing.