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.”
Someone, a woman, said something in French. Laney guessed that she was the one wearing the camera.
“Ease up, Rozzer. She doesn't understand half you're saying.” Laney sat forward. The voice had been Blackwell's.
“Doesn't she?” Rez receded, out of focus. “Because if she did, I think I'd tell her about the loneliness of being misunderstood. Or is it the loneliness of being afraid to allow ourselves to be understood?”
And the frame froze on the singer's blurred face. A date and time-stamp. Two years earlier. The word “Misunderstood” appeared.
The phone rang.
“Yeah?”
“Blackwell says there is a window of opportunity. The schedule has been moved up. You can access now.” It was Yamazaki.
“Good,” Laney said. “I don't think I'm getting very far with this first video.”
“Rez's quest for renewed artistic meaning? Don't worry; we will screen it for you again, later.”
“I'm relieved,” Laney said. “Is the second one as good?”
“Second documentary is more conventionally structured. In-depth interviews, biographical detail, BBC, three years ago.”
“Wonderful.”
“Blackwell is on his way to the hotel. Goodbye.”
14. Tokyo Chapter
The site Mitsuko's chapter had erected for the meeting reminded Chia of Japanese prints she'd seen on a school trip to the museum in Seattle; there was a brownish light that seemed to arrive through layers of ancient varnish. There were hills in the distance with twisted trees, their branches like quick black squiggles of ink. She came vectoring in, beside Mitsuko, toward a wooden house with deep overhanging eaves, its shape familiar from anime. It was the sort of house that ninjas crept into in the dark, to wake a sleeping heroine and tell her that all was not as she thought, that her uncle was in league with the evil warlord. She checked how she was presenting in a small peripheral window; put a nudge more depth into her lips.
Nearing the house, she saw that everything had been worked up out of club archives, so that the whole environment was actually made of Lo/Rez material. You noticed it first in the wood-and-paper panels of the walls, where faint image-fragments, larger than life, came and went with the organic randomness of leaf-dappled sun and shadow: Rez's cheekbone and half a pair of black glasses, Lo's hand chording the neck of his guitar. But these changed, were replaced with a mothlike flicker, and there would be more, all the way down into the site's finest resolution, its digital fabric. She wasn't sure if you could do that with enough of the right kind of fractal packets, or if you needed some kind of special computer. Her Sandbenders managed a few effects like that, but mainly in its presentation of Sand-benders software.
Screens slid aside as she and Mitsuko, seated crosslegged, entered the house. Coming to a neat halt side by side, still seated, floating about three inches off the tatami (which Chia avoided focusing on after she'd seen that it was woven from concert-footage; too distracting). It was a nice way to make an entrance. Mitsuko was wearing the kimono and the wide belt-thing, the whole traditional outfit, except there was some low-key animation going on in the weave of the fabric. Chia herself had downloaded thi
s black Silke-Marie Kolb blouson-and-tights set, even though she hated paying for virtual designer stuff that they wouldn't even let you keep or copy. She'd used Kelsey's cashcard number for that, though, which had made her feel better about it.
There were seven girls waiting there, all in kimonos, all floating just off the tatami. Except the one sitting by herself, at the head of the imaginary table, was a robot. Not like any real robot, but a slender, chrome-skinned thing like mercury constrained within the form of a girl. The face was smooth, only partially featured, eyeless, with twin straight rows of small holes where a mouth should have been. That would be Hiromi Ogawa, and Chia immediately decided to believe that she was overweight.
Hiromi's kimono was crawling with animated sepia-tone footage from band interviews.
The introductions took a while, and everyone there definitely had a title, but Chia had stopped paying attention after Hiromi's introduction, except to bow when she thought she was supposed to. She didn't like it that Hiromi would turn up that way for a first meeting. It was rude, she thought, and it had to be deliberate, and the trouble they'd gone to with the space just seemed to make it more deliberate.
“We are honored to welcome you, Chia McKenzie. Our chapter looks forward to affording you every assistance. We are proud to be a part of the ongoing global appreciation of Lo/Rez, their music and their art.”
“Thank you,” Chia said, and sat there as a silence lengthened.
Mitsuko quietly cleared her throat. Uh-oh, Chia thought. Speech time. “Thank you for offering to help,” Chia said. “Thanks for your hospitality. If any of you ever comes to Seattle, we'll find a way to put you up. But mainly thanks for your help, because my chapter's been really worried about this story that Rez claims he wants to marry some kind of software agent, and since he's supposed to have said it when he was over here, we thought—” Chia had had the feeling that she was moving along a little too abruptly, and this was confirmed by another tiny throat-clearing signal from Mitsuko.
“Yes,” Hiromi Ogawa said, “you are welcome, and now Tomo Oshima, our chapter's historian, will favor us with a detailed and accurate account of our chapter's story, how we came, from simple but sincere beginnings, to be the most active, the most respectful chapter in Japan today.”
Chia couldn't believe it.
The girl nearest Hiromi, on Chia's right, bowed and began to recite the chapter's history in what Chia immediately understood would be the most excruciatingly boring detail. The two boarding-school roommates, best friends and the most loyal of buddies, who discovered a copy of the Dog Soup album in a bin in Akihabara. How they returned to school with it, played it, were immediate converts. How their schoolmates mocked them, at one point even stealing and hiding the precious recording… And on, and on, and Chia already felt like screaming, but there was nothing for it but to sit there. She pulled up a clock and stuck it on the mirrored robot's face, where the eyes should have been. Nobody else could see it, but it made her feel a little better.
Now they were into the first Japanese national Lo/Rez convention, snapshots flashing on the white paper walls, little girls in jeans and t-shirts drinking Coca-Cola in some function room in an Osaka airport hotel, a few obvious parents standing around in the background.
Forty-five minutes later, by the red read-out stuck to Hiromi Ogawa's blank metallic face, Tomo Oshima concluded: “Which brings us to the present, and the historic visit of Chia McKenzie, the representative of our sister chapter in Seattle, in the State of Washington. And now I hope that she will honor us by recounting the history of her own chapter, how it was founded, and the many activities it has undertaken to honor the music of Lo/Rez…”
There was a soft burst of applause. Chia didn't join in, uncertain whether it was for her or for Tomo Oshima.
“Sorry,” Chia said. “Our historian put all that together for you, but it got corrupted when they ran my computer through that big scanner at the airport.”
“We are very sorry to hear that,” the silver robot said. “How unfortunate.”
“Yeah,” Chia said, “but I guess it gives us more time to discuss what brings me here, right?”
“We had hoped—”
“To help us understand this whole Rez thing, right? We know. We're glad you do. Because we're all really worried about this rumor. Because it seems like it started here, and this Rei Toei's a local product, so if anybody can tell us what's going on, it's you.”
The silver robot said nothing. It was expressionless as ever, but Chia took the clock away just to be sure.
“That's why I'm here,” Chia said. “To find out if it's true he wants to marry her.”
She sensed a general uneasiness. The six girls were looking at the texture-mapped tatami, unwilling to meet her eye. She wanted to look at Mitsuko, but it would have been too obvious.
“We are an official chapter,” Hiromi said. “We have the honor of working closely with actual employees of the band. Their publicists are also concerned with the rumor you mention, and they have requested that we assist them in seeing that it not spread further.”
“Spread? It's been on the net for a week!”
“It is rumor only.”
“Then they should issue a denial.”
“Denial would add weight to the rumor.”
“The posting said that Rez had announced that he was in love with Rei Toei, that he was going to marry her. There was a long quote.” Chia was definitely starting to get the feeling that something was wrong here. This was not what she'd come all this physical distance for; she might as well have been sitting in her bedroom in Seattle.
“We think that the original posting was a hoax. It would not be the first.”
“You think? Doesn't that mean you don't know?”
“Our sources within the organization assure us there is no cause for concern.”
“Spin control,” Chia said.
“You imply that Lo/Rez employees are lying to us?”
“Look,” Chia said, “I'm as into the band as anybody. I came all this way, right? But the people who work for them are just people who work for them. If Rez gets up in a club one night, takes the mike, and announces that he's in love with this idoru and swears he's going to marry her, the PR people are going to say whatever they think they have to say.”
“But you have no evidence that any of this occurred. Only an anonymous posting, claiming to be a transcription of a recording made in a club in Shinjuku.”
“‘Monkey Boxing.’ We looked it up; it's there.”
“Really? Perhaps you should go there.”
“Why?”
“There is no longer a club called Monkey Boxing.”
“There isn't?”
“Clubs in Shinjuku are extremely short-lived. There is no Monkey Boxing.” All of Hiromi's smug satisfaction came through in the Sandbenders' translation.
Chia stared at the smooth silver face. Stonewalling bitch. What to do? What would Zona Rosa do if she were in Chia's place? Some-thing symbolically violent, Chia decided. But that wasn't her style.
“Thank you,” Chia said. “We just wanted to make sure it wasn't happening. Sorry I hit on you that way, but we had to be certain. If you say it's not happening, we'll accept that. We all care about Rez and the rest of the band, and we know you do too.” Chia added a bow of her own, one that seemed to take Hiromi off guard.
Now it was the robot's turn to hesitate. She hadn't expected Chia to just roll over that way. “Our friends in the Lo/Rez organization are very concerned that this pointless hoax not affect the public's perception of Rez. You are aware that there has always been a tendency to portray him as the most creative but least stable member of the band.”
This last, at least, was true, though Rez's style of instability was fairly mild, compared with most of his pop-cultural forebears. He had never been arrested, never spent a night in jail. But he was still the one most likely to get into trouble. It had always been part of his charm.
“Sure,” Chia sai
d, playing along, relishing the uncertainty she was sure she was causing Hiromi. “And they try to make Lo out as some kind of boring techie, the practical one, but we know that isn't true either.” She tagged it with a smile.
“Yes,” Hiromi said, “of course. But you are satisfied, then? You will explain to your chapter that this was all the result of some prank, and that all is well with Rez?”
“If you say so,” Chia said, “absolutely. And if that settles it, then I've got three more days to kill in Japan.”
“To kill?”
“Idiom,” Chia said. “Free time. Mitsuko says I ought to see Kyoto.”
“Kyoto is very beautiful…”
“I'm on my way,” Chia said. “Thanks for putting this site together for our meeting. It's really great, and if you'll save it, I'd love to access it later with the rest of my chapter. Maybe we could all get together here when I'm back in Seattle, introduce our chapters.”
“Yes…” Hiromi definitely didn't know what to make of Chia's attitude.
So worry about it, Chia thought.
“You knew,” Chia said. “You knew she'd do that.”
Mitsuko was blushing, bright red. Looking at the floor, her jelly-bag computer on her lap. “I am sorry. It was her decision.”
“They got to her, right? They told her to get rid of me, hush it up.”
“She communicates with the Lo/Rez people privately. It is one of the privileges of her position.”
Chia still had her tip-sets on. “I have to talk with my chapter now. Can you give me a few minutes alone?” She felt sorry for Mitsuko, but she was still angry. “I'm not angry with you, okay?”
“I will make tea,” Mitsuko said.
When Mitsuko had closed the door behind her, Chia checked that the Sandbenders was still ported, put the goggles back on, and selected the Seattle chapter's main site.
She never got there. Zona Rosa was waiting to cut her out.
15. Akihabara
Low gray cloud pressing down on the sheer gray city. A glimpse of new buildings, through the scaled-down limo's tinted, lace-curtained windows.
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