Pattern Recognition (11 page)

“Is Billy Prion a friend of yours?”

“Owns gallery. I need space to show ZX 81 project.”

“Is it finished?”

“I am still collecting ZX 81.”

“How many do you need?”

“Many. Patronage also.”

“Is Billy in the patronage business as well?”

“No. You work for large corporation? They wish to learn of my project?”

“I’m freelance.”

“But you are here to work?”

“Yes. For an advertising agency.”

He adjusts the pouch on his lap. “Saatchi?”

“No. Voytek, do you know anything about watermarking?”

He nods. “Yes?”

“Steganography?”

“Yes?”

“What might it mean if something, say a segment of digitized video, is watermarked with a number?”

“Is visible?”

“Not ordinarily, I don’t think. Concealed?”

“That is the steganography, the concealment. Multi-digit number?”

“Maybe.”

“Can be code supplied to client by watermarking firm. Firm sells client stego-encrypted watermark and means to conceal. Check web for that number. If client’s image or video has been pirated, that is revealed by search.”

“You mean you could use the watermark to follow the dissemination of a given image or video clip?”

He nods.

“Who does this, the actual watermarking?”

“There are companies.”

“Could a watermark be traced to a particular company, its number?”

“Would not be so good for client security.”

“Would it be possible for someone to detect, or extract, a secret watermark? Without knowing the code, or who placed it there, or even being sure it’s there in the first place?”

Voytek considers. “Difficult, but might be done. Hobbs knows these things.”

“Who’s Hobbs?”

“You meet. Man with Curtas.”

Cayce remembers the mean Beckett face, the filthy fingernails. “Really? Why?”

“Maths. Trinity, Cambridge, then works for United States. NSA. Very difficult.”

“The work?”

“Hobbs.”

THE
Children’s Crusade is remounting in force, this sunny morning.

She stands in Inverness with Voytek, watching them troop past, looking dusty in this sunlight and medieval, slouching not toward Bethlehem but Camden Lock.

Voytek has put on a pair of shades with small round lenses. They remind Cayce of coins placed on the eyes of a corpse.

“I must meet Magda,” he announces.

“Who is she?”

“Sister. She is selling hats, in Camden Lock. Come.” Voytek pushes off into the current of bodies, clockwise, “Saturday sells in Portobello,
the fashion market. Sunday, here.” Cayce follows, thinking, framing questions about watermarking.

The sun on this shuffling press is soothing, and they soon arrive at the lock, carried along by a current of feet responsible for all those billions in athletic-shoe sales.

Voytek has implied that Magda, aside from designing and making hats, does something in advertising herself, although Cayce can’t quite make out what it is.

The market is set back in a maze of Victorian brick.

Warehouses, she supposes, and subterranean stables for the horses that drew the barges down the canals. She isn’t certain she’s ever really gotten to the bottom of the labyrinth, though she’s been here many times. Voytek leads the way, past sheet-hung stalls of dead men’s clothes, film posters, recordings on vinyl, Russian alarm clocks, sundries for smokers of anything but tobacco.

Deeper into the brickwork vaults, away from the sun, illuminated by Lava lamps and fluorescents in nonstandard colors, they find Magda, who aside from those cheekbones looks nothing at all like her brother. Short, pretty, hennaed, laced into a projectile bodice that seems to have been retrofitted from some sort of pressurized flying gear, she is happily packing her goods and preparing to close her stall.

Voytek asks her something in whatever their native tongue is. She answers, laughing.

“She says men from France buy wholesale,” Voytek explains.

“‘She speak good English,’” Magda says to Cayce. “I’m Magda.”

“Cayce Pollard.” They shake hands.

“Casey is advertising too.”

“Probably not the way I am, but don’t remind me,” says Magda, wrapping another hat in tissue and putting it into a cardboard carton with the rest.

Cayce starts to help. Magda’s hats are hats that Cayce could wear, if she wore hats. Gray or black only, knit, crocheted, or yarn-stitched with a sailors needle from thick industrial felt, they are without period or label. “These are nice.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re in advertising? What do you do?”

“Look sorted, go to clubs and wine bars and chat people up. While I’m at it, I mention a clients product, of course favorably. I try to attract attention while I’m doing it, but attention of a favorable sort. I haven’t been doing it long, and I don’t think I like it.”

Magda does indeed speak good English, and Cayce wonders at the difference in their fluencies. But says nothing.

Magda laughs. “I really am his sister,” she says, “but our mother brought me here when I was five, thank God.” Putting away the last hat, she closes the carton and hands it to Voytek.

“You’re paid to go to clubs and mention products?”

“Firm’s called Trans. Doing very well, apparently. I’m a design student, need something to make ends meet, but it’s getting to be a bit much.” She’s lowering a sheet of tattered transparent plastic to indicate that her makeshift stall is now closed. “But I’ve just sold twenty hats! Time for a drink!”

“
YOU’RE
in a bar, having a drink,” Magda says, the three of them wedged into one darkly varnished corner of an already raucous Camden pub, drinking lager.

“I know,” says Voytek, defensively.

“No! I mean you’re in a bar, having a drink, and someone beside you starts a conversation. Someone you might fancy the look of. All very pleasant, and then you’re chatting along, and she, or he, we have men as well, mentions this great new streetwear label, or this brilliant little film
they’ve just seen. Nothing like a pitch, you understand, just a brief favorable mention. And do you know what you do? This is what I can’t bloody stand about it: Do you know what you do?”

“No,” Cayce says.

“You say you like it too! You lie! At first I thought it was only men who’d do that, but women do it as well! They lie!”

Cayce has heard about this kind of advertising, in New York, but has never run across anyone who’s actually been involved in it. “And then they take it away with them,” she suggests, “this favorable mention, associated with an attractive member of the opposite sex. One who’s shown some slight degree of interest in them, whom they’ve lied to in an attempt to favorably impress.”

“But they buy jeans,” Voytek demands, “see movie? No!”

“Exactly,” Cayce says, “but that’s why it works. They don’t buy the product: They recycle the information. They use it to try to impress the next person they meet.”

“Efficient way to disseminate information? I don’t think.”

“But it is,” Cayce insists. “The model’s viral. ‘Deep niche.’ The venues would be carefully selected—”

“Bloody brilliantly! That’s the thing, I’m every night to these bleeding-edge places, cab fare, cash for drinks and food.” She takes a long pull on her half pint. “But it’s starting to do something to me. I’ll be out on my own, with friends, say, not working, and I’ll meet someone, and we’ll be talking, and they’ll mention something.”

“And?”

“Something they like. A film. A designer. And something in me stops.” She looks at Cayce. “Do you see what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“I’m devaluing something. In others. In myself. And I’m starting to distrust the most casual exchange.” Magda looks glum. “What sort of advertising do you do?”

“I consult on design.” Then, because this is not exactly the stuff of interesting conversation: “And I hunt ‘cool,’ although I don’t like to describe it that way. Manufacturers use me to keep track of street fashion.”

Magda’s eyebrows go up. “And you like my hats?”

“I really like your hats, Magda. I’d wear them, if I wore hats.”

Magda nods, excited now.

“But the ‘cool’ part—and I don’t know why that archaic usage has stuck, by the way—isn’t an inherent quality. It’s like a tree falling, in the forest.”

“It cannot hear,” declares Voytek, solemnly.

“What I mean is, no customers, no cool. It’s about a group behavior pattern around a particular class of object. What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does.”

“And then?”

“I point a commodifier at it.”

“And?”

“It gets productized. Turned into units. Marketed.” She takes a sip of lager. Looks around the pub. The crew in here aren’t from the Children’s Crusade. She guesses they are the folks who live nearby, probably back behind this side of the street, a neighborhood less gentrified than Damien’s. The wood of the bar is worn the way old boats can be worn, virtually to splinters, held together by a thousand coats of coffin-colored varnish.

“So,” Magda says, “I am being used to establish a pattern? To fake that? To bypass a part of the process.”

“Yes,” Cayce says.

“Then why are they trying to do it with bloody video clips from the Internet? This couple kissing in a doorway? Is it a product? They won’t even tell us.”

And Cayce can only stare.

*  *  *

“
HELENA
. It’s Cayce. Thank you for dinner. It was lovely.”

“How was Hubertus? Bernard thought he might have the hots for you, to put it bluntly.”

“Bluntness appreciated, Helena, but I don’t think that’s the case. We had a drink. I’d never really had a one-on-one with him before.”

“He’s brilliant, isn’t he?” Something in her tone. A sort of resignation?

“Yes. Is Bernard there, Helena? Hate to disturb him, but I have a question about work.”

“Sorry, but he’s out. Take a message?”

“Do you know if there’s a branch, a subsidiary of some kind, of Blue Ant, called Trans? As in—lation? Or—gressive?”

Silence. “Yes. There is. Laura Dawes-Trumbull has it. Lives with a cousin of Bernard’s, oddly. In lawn care.”

“Pardon?” A place name?

“The cousin. Lawn care. Lawn products. But Laura heads Trans, I do know that. One of Hubertus’s pet projects.”

“Thanks, Helena. Have to run.”

“Bye, dear.”

“Bye.”

Cayce removes her card from the pay phone and hangs up, the receiver being immediately taken by a dreadlocked Crusader waiting on the sidewalk behind her.

The sunlight seems not so pleasant now. She’s made her excuses, come out here, bought a phone card, waited in line. And now it seems that Magda is indeed employed, by a sub-unit of Blue Ant, to encourage interest in the footage. What is Bigend doing?

She fords the stream of the Crusade, making it to the opposite bank
and heading back down toward Parkway. The street-wide flood of kids seems strangely removed, as though they themselves are footage.

A suggestion of autumn is in the light, now, and she wonders where she’ll be this winter. Will she be here? In New York? She doesn’t know. What is that, to be over thirty and not know where you’ll be in a month or two?

She reaches a point where the Crusade flows around a stationary, drinking knot of Camden’s resident, revenant alcoholics. They are why Damien had been able to afford to rent here, years before he’d made any money or bought his house. Somewhere nearby is a Victorian doss house, a vast red brick pile of a hostel for the homeless, purpose-built and hideous, and its inhabitants, however individually transitory, have congregated in the High Street since the day it first opened. Damien had shown it to her one full-moon night, out walking. It stood as a bulwark against gentrification, he’d explained. The re-purposers, the creators of loft spaces, saw the inhabitants, these units dedicated to the steady-state consumption of fortified lagers and sugary ciders, and turned back. And these defenders stand now, drinking, amid the Children’s Crusade, rocks in a river of youth.

A peaceful people for the most part, when their spells weren’t on them, but now one, younger perhaps than the others, looks at her out of blue and burning eyes, acetylene and ageless, from the depths of his affliction, and she shivers, and hurries on, wondering what it was he’d seen.

In Inverness the market men are locking green-painted shutters across their stalls, closing early, and the place where she’d had breakfast is in full bistro swing, a spill of laughing, drinking children out across the pavement.

She walks on, feeling not foreign but alien, made so by this latest advent of something that seems to be infecting everything. Hubertus, and Trans…

You’re not exactly bouncing them back to me, are you? What are you doing over there, anyway? Do you know that the Pope is a footage-head? Well, maybe not the Pope himself, but there’s someone in the Vatican running the segments. Turns out that down Brazil way, where folks don’t distinguish much between TV, the Net, and other stuff anyway, there is some kind of cult around the footage. Or not so much around it as desirous of burning it, since these illiterate but massively video-consumptive folk believe that it is none other than the Devil himself who is our auteur. Very strange, and there has apparently been a statement issued, to these Brazilians, from Rome, to the effect that it is the Vatican’s business to say which works are the works of Satan, nobody else’s, that the matter of the footage is being taken under consideration, and in the meantime don’t mess with the franchise. I wish I’d thought of it myself, just to irritate la Anarchia.

She closes Parkaboy’s latest, gets up now and goes into the yellow kitchen. Puts the kettle on. Coffee or tea? “I hate the domestication,” Donny had confided, once, insofar as he was capable.

She wonders if an absent friend’s flat in London is perhaps preferable to her own, back in New York, as carefully cleansed of extraneous objects as she can keep it, and why? Does she hate the domestication? She has fewer things in her apartment than anyone, her friend Margot says.