Pattern Recognition (21 page)

Feeling much cleaner, if no less exhausted, she wraps herself in a terry robe and checks the room-service menu, deciding on a small pizza and a side of mashed potatoes. Non-Japanese comfort food.

The pizza turns out to be very good, though very Japanese, but the potatoes are amazing, a Rickson’s-like super-simulacrum of a Western classic. She’s also ordered two bottles of Bikkle, opening her second as she finishes the potatoes.

She needs to check her e-mail. She needs to phone Pamela Mainwaring about getting out of here as soon as possible. And really she should phone Parkaboy.

She slugs back her Bikkle and plugs her iBook into the room’s dataport.

One e-mail. As it pops up in her in-box she sees that it’s from Parkaboy.

Wondrous Strange

She opens it. There is an attachment titled WS.jpg.

No rest for the wicked. After e-mailing us, or rather Keiko, from two separate cafes, as soon as Taki got home he sent the attached.

She clicks on the jpeg.

A map. A broken Τ scribed with city streets and strings of numbers. It reminds her of a steaks T-bone, the upright tapering raggedly, the left cross-arm truncated. Within its outline are avenues, squares, circles, a long rectangle suggesting a park. The background is pale blue, the T-bone gray, the lines black, the numbers red.

If Taki was in love before, he is now in lust. Or maybe the other way around. But in his new frenzy of adoration and desire to please, he has sent this, which he explains to Keiko is the latest from Mystic. Darryl, who has otaku DNA himself, is convinced that Taki is not a member of this Mystic, but a peripheral character of some kind—possibly, since he designs games for a Japanese phone system, one of their sources of information. Darryl says that the highest level of play, for techno-obsessives, is always and purely about information itself, and he thinks that Mystic may have battened on the footage not in a footagehead way but simply for the sake of solving a puzzle that no one else has solved. He posits a cell of professional info-theorists, of some kind, who are also, in this ultimate otaku sense, info-junkies. Perhaps employed in the R&D arm of one or more large corporations. Perhaps they need something that Taki knows. It doesn’t matter, really, since Taki seems somehow to have reversed the flow of data, and the psycho-sexual cruise missile that is Judy, tweaked, has found its mark. To save you the trouble of counting them, there are one hundred and thirty-five numbers, here, each number consisting of three groups of four digits.

Her scalp prickles. She gets up, goes into the bathroom, returns with the notepad.

8304 6805 2235

She puts the pad beside her iBook and peers into the red cloud cover of numbers partially masking the T-city.

There it is. The streets directly beneath it are small and twisted, down toward the bottom of the peninsula that forms the T’s upright. Although, she reminds herself, she has no reason to believe this the representation of any island, actual or imaginary. It might be a T-shaped segment extracted from some larger map. Though the streets, if they are streets, align with its borders….

Remember the whiteout, when they kiss? As though something explodes, overhead? If you’ve been following F:F:F you’ll know that that set off major Blitz reverb in our British posters. Various proofs that our story is set in London in the 40s, none ultimately convincing. But that whiteout. Blank screen. Taki says that “Mystic” decrypted this graphic from that whiteness. As to how blankness can yield image, I do not pretend to know, though I suppose that is the question, ultimately, that underlies the entire history of art. Nonetheless, where are we, with this thing? If each segment is watermarked with one of these numbers, then the action in each segment seems to be mapped here, and we have, for the first time, a geography of sorts, and possibly, if we knew the numbers for each segment, a formal order. (I’ve entered them all in a database and don’t see that they are sequential. Suspect random generation and/or random assignment.) Darryl is looking into a graphics bot that only searches maps. Meanwhile, exhausted, baffled, but unhealthily excited, I remain, Parkaboy.

She stares at the T-bone city.

She phones Pamela Mainwaring.

20.
USER – BONES

Her watch wakes her, chirping mercilessly. She sits up in the huge bed, uncertain where she is.

Six in the morning. Pamela Mainwaring has her on a flight out of Narita just after noon.

She makes sure the red light is on, on the oversized kettle-analog, wraps herself in last night s white robe, goes to the window, powers open the drapes, and dimly discovers Tokyo at the bottom of an aquarium of rainy light. Gust-driven moisture shotguns the glass. The lavish lichen of the wooded palace grounds tosses darkly.

Her cell rings. She goes back to the bed, roots through the covers, finding it.

“Hello?”

“Boone. How’s your head?”

“Tired. I called Pamela…”

“I know. So did I. I’ll meet you in the lobby at eight-thirty. JR reservations for both of us.”

Something about a lack of autonomy here that bothers her.

“See you,” he says.

The water reaching boil as she s rummaging through the snacks atop the minibar, looking for a shrink-wrapped filter-coffee unit.

THE
hotels fitness center, a room so large that it seems designed primarily to illustrate interior perspective, has its own Pilates reformer, a faux-classical Japanese interpretation in black-lacquered wood, upholstered
with something that looks like sharkskin. She’s able to get in her workout, then shower and wash her hair, pack, and make the lobby by eight-thirty.

Boone arrives minutes later, in his black horsehide coat, carrying his small leather suitcase and one of those Filson outfitter bags that look like L.L. Bean on steroids.

She picks up her own black generic Korean nylon and they walk out, past the bamboo grove and into the elevator.

SHE
wakes to the offer of a hot washcloth. For an instant believes she’s still on her way to Tokyo, and that it’s all been a dream.

This is terrifying, and she hurts her neck, so quickly does she crane around, to find that Boone Chu is in fact in the nearest seat-nest, in full recline and apparently asleep, looking as strangely canceled as anyone does when wearing a black blindfold.

They hadn’t had much to say to each other, on the train to Narita. She’d slept in the lounge, after security measures including a sort of CAT scan for their shoes and answering questions in front of an infrared device that registered minute changes in the temperature of the skin around the eyes, the theory being that lying about having packed one’s own bag induced a sort of invisible and inevitable micro-blush. Though the Japanese also believe that personality is determined by blood type, or had when she was last here. Boone had been impressed, though, and had told her to expect the blush machines soon in America.

She’d told him, as they were boarding, that she’d gotten something more from Taki, via Parkaboy, but that she was too tired to explain it, that she’d show it to him when she’d had more sleep.

What is that about, she wonders, that holding back? Something to do with the newness of their working relationship, but also, she knows, something to do with something she’d felt in that apartment. She doesn’t
want to look at that too closely. But also she wants time to get her head around this idea of the T-bone city. And there’s a way in which she simply finds him pushy.

But there’s the T-bone to try to figure out, she thinks, powering her bed up into lounger mode and hauling the bag with her iBook up from the floor. She boots up, finds Parkaboy’s jpeg, and opens it.

If anything, it’s even more enigmatic than when she first saw it.

Taki. Is there any chance that he’s just making this all up to impress Keiko? But Parkaboy and Darryl had found him on a Japanese website, where he’d already made some mention of something encrypted in a segment of the footage. They hadn’t invented Keiko yet. No, she knows that Taki is for real. Taki is too sad not to be real. She imagines him going to someone, while Keiko emerged more clearly for him through her messages, and somehow, perhaps at some strange cost, obtaining this image, extracted from that white flare.

But in his shyness, his caution, he hadn’t brought it to their meeting. He’d brought only the one number. Then the Photoshopped version of Judy Tsuzuki had impacted, and he’d gone home and sent this to Parkaboy, thinking he was sending it to his big-eyed, Clydesdale-ankled love.

She thinks of Ivy, in Seoul, F:F:F’s founder. What would Ivy make of this?

She frowns, seeing for the first time how working for Bigend, with Boone Chu, has skewed her relationship to F:F:F and the footagehead community. Even Parkaboy, who’s been instrumental in all of this, doesn’t know what she’s up to, who she’s working for.

“What is it?” Boone, looming beside her in the twilit aisle, his black T-shirt and the blindfold slung beneath his chin offering the odd suggestion of a priest’s collar. A single one-inch square of white paper and he’d have a costume: the young priest, eyes somewhat swollen with sleep.

She elevates to chair and he joins her, crouching on the little visitor
seat at the units foot. She passes him her iBook. “Taki really liked the photograph. He couldn’t wait to get home. Had to keep stopping in cafés to e-mail her. When he did get home, he sent her this.”

“Are there a hundred and thirty-five of these?” Indicating the numbers.

“I haven’t counted them myself, but yes. The one that matches the number Taki gave me is near the bottom of the T.”

“It looks as though each location corresponds to a segment of footage. Not the way you’d map a virtual world, though. Not if mapping virtual worlds was ordinarily your business.”

“What if it weren’t?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if you were just making something up as you went along? Why should we assume that the maker knows what he’s doing?”

“Or we could assume that he does, but he’s just doing it his own way. The people who designed all the early Nintendo games drew them on long rolls of paper. There was no better way to do it, and you could unroll the whole thing and see exactly how it would move. The geography of the game was two-D, scrolling past on the screen…” He falls silent, frowning.

“What?”

He shakes his head. “I need more sleep.” He stands up, passing her the iBook, and returns to his seat.

She stares blankly at the jpeg, the iBook slightly warm atop her thighs, and wonders exactly what she should do when they get to Heathrow. She has the new keys to Damien’s place in her Stasi envelope, in the Luggage Label bag. That’s where she feels like going, really, though the residual ache in her forehead is causing her some doubt.

Would someone have been able to fiddle the locks in the meantime? She has only a very fuzzy idea of who might live in the other two flats,
but whoever they are, they seem to go out to work on a regular basis. A burglar might be able to get in, then, during the day, and do whatever it took to open the apartment.

But her only other option is a London hotel, and, even with Blue Ant footing the bill, she’s feeling hoteled out. She’ll go to Camden, then. Heathrow Express to Paddington, then a cab. Decision out of the way, she closes Taki’s jpeg, puts the iBook away, and returns to bed-mode.

WHEN
they exit immigration, Bigend is waiting, the only smiling face in a scrum of glum chauffeurs holding hand-lettered sheets of cardboard. Bigend’s says “
POLLARD & CHU
” in coarse-tipped red felt pen.

He really does seem to have too many teeth. His Stetson is set too squarely on his head and he’s wearing the raincoat she’d last seen him in.

“Right this way, please.” He makes a point of taking over the luggage trolley from Boone, and they follow him out, throwing glances at each other, past the cab queue and the recent arrivals coughing gratefully over first cigarettes. She sees his Hummer parked where she’s certain no one at all is allowed to park, ever, and watches as he and Boone open the square doors at the rear and load the bags.

Bigend holds the passenger-side door for her as she climbs in. Boone gets the seat behind her.

She watches Bigend fold his enormous plastic parking permission.

“You didn’t need to pick us up, Hubertus,” she says, because she feels the need to say something, and because it seems so abundantly the truth.

“Not at all,” says Bigend, ambiguously, pulling away from the curb. “I want to hear all about it.”

Which he does, mainly via Boone, but, Cayce gradually notes, with two serious omissions. Boone never mentions the head-butting or Taki’s
jpeg. He tells Bigend that they went to Tokyo to follow up a lead suggesting that at least one segment of the footage has an encrypted watermark.

“And does it?” Bigend asks, driving.

“It may,” Boone says. “We have a twelve-digit code that may have been extracted from a specific segment of footage.”

“And?”

“Cayce was followed, in Tokyo.”

“By whom?”

“Two men, possibly Italian.”

“Possibly?”

“I overheard them speaking Italian.”

“Who were they?”

“We don’t know.”

Cayce sees Bigend purse his lips. “Do you have any idea,” he asks her, briefly making eye contact, “why you would be followed? Unfinished business elsewhere? Something unrelated?”

“We were hoping you might be able to answer that one, Hubertus,” Boone says.

“You think I had Cayce followed, Boone?”

“I might myself, Hubertus, if I were in your position.”

“You might well,” says Bigend, “but you aren’t me. I don’t work that way, not in a partnership.” They’re on the evening motorway now, and raindrops suddenly strike the vertical windshield, causing Cayce to imagine that the weather has followed them from Tokyo. Bigend turns on the wipers, spatular things that swing from the top of the glass rather than the bottom. She watches as he touches a button, fractionally reduces air pressure in the tires. “However,” he says, “as I’m sure you understand, partnership with me makes you more likely to be followed. This is an aspect of the downside of a high profile.”