Wake up, Blackwell said. Youre falling asleep in your bowl. Time you tell us how you lost your last job, if were going to offer you another.
Coffee, Laney said.
Laney was not, he was careful to point out, a voyeur. He had a peculiar knack with data-collection architectures, and a medically documented concentration-deficit that he could toggle, under certain conditions, into a state of pathological hyperfocus. This made him, he continued over lattes in a Roppongi branch of Amos n Andes, an extremely good researcher. (He made no mention of the Federal Orphanage in Gainesville, nor of any attempts that might have been made there to cure his concentration-deficit. The 5-SB trials or any of that.)
The relevant data, in terms of his current employability, was that he was an intuitive fisher of patterns of information: of the sort of signature a particular individual inadvertently created in the net as he or she went about the mundane yet endlessly multiplex business of life in a digital society. Laneys concentration-deficit, too slight to register on some scales, made him a natural channel-zapper, shifting from program to program, from database to database, from platform to platform, in a way that was, well, intuitive.
And that was the catch, really, when it came to finding employment: Laney was the equivalent of a dowser, a cybernetic water-witch. He couldnt explain how he did what he did. He just didnt know.
Hed come to Slitscan from DatAmerica, where hed been a research assistant on a project code named TIDAL. It said something about the corporate culture of DatAmerica that Laney had never been able to discover whether or not TIDAL was an acronym, or (even remotely) what TIDAL was about. Hed spent his time skimming vast floes of undifferentiated data, looking for nodal points hed been trained to recognize by a team of French scientists who were all keen tennis players, and none of whom had had any interest in explaining these nodal points to Laney, who came to feel that he served as a kind of native guide. Whatever the Frenchmen were after, he was there to scare it up for them. And it beat Gainesville, no contest. Until TIDAL, whatever it was, had been cancelled, and there didnt seem to be anything else for Laney to do at DatAmerica. The Frenchmen were gone, and when Laney tried to talk to other researchers about what theyd been doing, they looked at him as though they thought he was crazy.
When hed gone to interview for Slitscan, the interviewer had been Kathy Torrance. Hed had no way of knowing that she was
a department head, or that she would soon be his boss. He told her the truth about himself. Most of it, anyway.
She was the palest woman Laney had ever seen. Pale to the point of translucence. (Later hed learned this had a lot to do with cosmetics, and in particular a British line that boasted of peculiar light-bending properties.)
Do you always wear Malaysian imitations of Brooks Brothers blue oxford button-downs, Mr. Laney?
Laney had looked down at his shirt, or tried to. Malaysia?
The stitch-counts dead on, but they still havent mastered the thread-tension.
Oh.
Never mind. A little prototypic nerd chic could actually lend a certain frisson, around here. You could lose the tie, though. Definitely lose the tie. And keep a collection of felt-tipped pens in your pocket. Unchewed, please. Plus one of those fat flat highliners, in a really nasty fluorescent shade.
Are you joking?
Probably, Mr. Laney. May I call you Colin?
Yes..
She never did call him Colin, then or ever. Youll find that humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool. Youll find the type thats most viable here is fairly oblique.
How do you mean, Ms. Torrance?
Kathy. I mean difficult to quote effectively in a memo. Or a court of law.
Yamazaki was a good listener. Hed blink, swallow, nod, fiddle with the top button of his plaid shirt, whatever, all of it managing to somehow convey that he was getting it, the drift of Laneys story.
Keith Alan Blackwell was something else. He sat there inert as a bale of beef, utterly motionless except when hed raise his left hand and squeeze and twiddle the lobe-stump that was all that remained of his left ear. He did this without hesitation or embarrassment, and Laney formed the impression that it was affording him some kind of relief. The scar tissue reddened slightly under Blackwells ministrations.
Laney sat on an upholstered bench, his back to the wall. Yamazaki and Blackwell faced him across the narrow table. Behind them, over the uniformly black-haired heads of late-night Roppongi coffee-drinkers, the holographic features of the chains namesake floated in front of a lurid sunset vista of snow-capped Andean peaks. The lips of the toon-Amos were like inflated red rubber sausages, a racial parody that wouldve earned the place a firebombing anywhere in the L.A. basin. He was holding up a steaming coffee cup, white and smoothly iconic, in a big, white-gloved, three-fingered Disney hand.