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properly, she was a waking dream, a love object sprung from an approximation
of the global mass unconscious. And this was not, Laney understood, a matter
of sexual desire exclusively (though of course he felt that, to his great
confusion) but of some actual and initially painful opening of his heart.
He loved her, and in loving her understood that his most basic sense of what
that word might mean had changed, supplanting every previous concept. An
entirely new feeling, and he had held it close, sharing it with no one, least
of all the idoru.
And it had been toward the end of this that Cody Harwood, shy and smiling and
gently elusive, someone Laney had never felt the least interest in, had begun
to obsess him. Harwood, most often depicted as a twenty-first-century
synthesis of Bill Gates and Woody Allen, had never previously been any more to
Laney than a vague source of irritation, one
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of those familiar icons who loom regularly on the horizons of media, only to
drop away until they next appear. Laney had had no opinion of 1-larwood, other
than that he felt he had been glimpsing him all his life, and didn't quite
know why, and was vaguely tired of it. But as he spent more time cruising the
aspects of the flow that were concerned with Harwood, and with the activities
of his firm, Harwood Levine, it had begun to become apparent that this was a
locus of nodal points, a sort of meta-node, and that, in some way he had been
unable to define, something very large was happening here. His compulsive
study of Harwood and things
Harwoodian had led him to the recognition that history too was subject to the
nodal vision, and the version of history that Laney came to understand there
bore little or no relation to any accepted version.
He had been taught, of course, that history, along with geography, was dead.
That history in the older sense was an historical concept.
History in the older sense was narrative, stories we told ourselves about
where we'd come from and what it had been like, and those narratives were
revised by each new generation, and indeed always had been. History was
plastic, was a matter of interpretation. The digital had not so much changed
that as made it too obvious to ignore. History was stored data, subject to
manipulation and interpretation.
But the "history" Laney discovered, through the quirk in his vision induced by
having been repeatedly dosed with 5-SB, was something very different. It was
that shape comprised of every narrative, every version; it was that shape that
only he (as far as he knew) could see.
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At first, discovering this, he had attempted to share it with the idoru.
Perhaps, if shown, she, this posthuman emergent entity, would simply start to
see this way as well. And he had been disappointed when she had finally told
him that what he saw was not there for her; that his ability to apprehend the
nodal points, those emergent systems of his
- -tory, was not there, nor did she expect to find it with growth. "This is
human, I think," she'd said, when pressed. "This is the result of what you
are, biochemically, being stressed in a particular way. This is wonderful.
This is closed to me."
165
H And shortly after that, as her growing complexity continued to widen
the distance he already knew she felt toward Rez, she had come to him and
asked him to interpret the data as it flowed around herself and Rez. And he
had done this, though reluctantly, out of love. Knowing somehow he would be
saying good-bye to her in the process.
The flow around Rez and Rei ~vas ripe with nodal points, particularly at those
junctures where queerly occulted data poured steadily in from the Walled City,
that semi-mythical otherwhere of outlaw iconoH clasts. "Why have you connected
with these people?" he'd asked.
"Because I need them," she'd said, "I don't know why, but I know that I do.
The situation does."
H "Without them," he'd said, "you might not have a situation."
"I know." Smiling.
But as his obsession with Harwood had deepened, Laney had grown H less
comfortable with his trips to the island and their forays together into the
fields of data. It had been as though he did not wish her to see him this way,
his concentration warped from within, bent toward this one object, this
strangely banal object. The sense of Harwood, of the information cloud he
generated, swarmed in Laney's dreams. And one morning, waking in the Tokyo
hotel in which Lo/Rez kept him billeted, he had decided not to go to work.
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And sometime after that, he knew from Yamazaki, and from his own observation
of the flow, the idoru had departed Tokyo as well. He had his own theories
about that, about her conversations with the denizens (they would have
insisted on the term, he thought) of the digitally occluded Walled City, and
now, evidently, she was in San Francisco. Although he had known she would be,
because of course she had to be. Because San Francisco, he could see in the
shape of things, was where the world ended. Was ending. And she was a part of
that, and so was he, and Harwood as well.
But something would be decided (was being decided) there. And that was why he
dared not sleep. Why he must send the Suit, immaculate and malodorous, with
his ankles tarred black, for Regain and more of the blue syrup.
~160~LIAMGI~ON
SOMETIMES, now, beyond the point of exhaustion, he has started to enter, for
what may be seconds but can feel like hours or days, some new mode of being.
It is as though he becomes a single retina, distributed evenly across the
inner surface of a sphere. Unblinking, he stares, globally, into that eye,
seeing that with which he sees, while from a single invisible iris appear
individual, card-like images of Harwood, one after another.
Yamazaki has brought him pillows and fresh sleeping bags, bottles of water, an
unused change of clothes. He is vaguely aware of these things, but when he
becomes the eye that looks in upon itself, and upon the endless string of
images, he has no awareness beyond that interiority, infinite and closed.
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