The Bridge by Gibson William

Author:Gibson, William [Gibson, William]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: #genre
Published: 2010-10-03T13:00:00+00:00

Laney poured his beer. "Ever hear of something called TIDAL?"

"Tidal'?"

"Acronym. Maybe."

"No." She lifted the china cup and blew, like a child cooling tea.

"It was another DatAmerica tool, or the start of one. I don't think it reached the market. But that was how I learned to find the nodal points."

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"Okay,' she said."What are the nodal points?" I

Laney looked at the bubbles on the surface of his beer. "It's like seeing things in clouds," Laney said. "Except the things you see are really there."

She put her sake down. "Yamazaki promised me you weren't crazy."

"It's not crazy It's something to do with how I process low-level, broad-spectrum input. Something to do with pattern-recognition."

"And Slitscan hired you on the basis of that?"

"They hired me when I demonstrated that it works, But I can't do that with the kind of data you showed me today"

"Why not?"

Laney raised his beer. "Because it's like trying to have a drink with a bank. It's not a person. It doesn't drink. There's no place for it to sit." He drank. "Rez doesn't generate patterns I can read, because everything he does is at one remove. It's like looking in an annual report for the personal habits of the chairman of the board. It's not going to be there. From the outside, it just looks like that Realtree stuff. If I enter a specific area, I don't get any sense of how the data there relates to the rest of it, see? It's got to be relational." He drummed his fingers on the laminated gum wrappers. "Somewhere in Ireland. Guesthouse with a beach view. Nobody there. Records of how it was kept stocked: stuff for the bathroom, toothpaste, shaving foam.

"I've been there," she said. "That's on an estate he bought from an older musician, an Irishman. It's beautiful. Like Italy, in a way."

"You think he'll take this idoru back there, when they get hitched?"

"Nobody has any idea what he's talking about when he says he wants to 'marry' her."

"Then an apartment in Stockholm. Huge. Great big stoves in each room, made of glazed ceramic bricks."

"I don't know that one. He has places all over, and some of them are kept very quiet. There's another country place in the south of

148 William Gibson

France, a house in London, apartments in New York, Paris, Barcelona. . . . I was working out of the Catalan office, reformatting all their stuff and Spain's as well, when this idoru thing hit, I've been here ever since."

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