William Gibson - Pattern Recognition

“This is something else.”

“But you've just gotten off the plane from Tokyo. You're here, there's a bed upstairs, and I'm back tomorrow. If you go to a hotel, we won't see one another at all. Go upstairs, sleep if you can, and I'll deal with Marina.” He smiles. “I'm used to it.”

Suddenly the idea of actually having to find a hotel room and go there seems far too difficult. “You've convinced me. I can't see straight. But if you go back to Russia without waking me, I'll kill you.”

“Go up and lie down. Where did you find this Voytek, anyway?”

“Portobello Row.”

“I like him.”

Cayce's legs feel like they belong to someone else, now. She'll have to try to communicate with them more deliberately, to get them to carry her upstairs. “He's harmless,” she says, wondering what that means, and heads for her bag and the stair to the room overhead.

She manages to get the futon unfolded, up there, and collapses on it. Then remembers Boone asking her to phone him. She gets out her cell and speed-dials the first of his numbers.

“Hello?”

“Cayce.”

“Where are you?”

“Damien's. He's here.”

A pause. “That's good. I was worried about you.”

“I was worried about me too, when I heard you bullshitting Bigend on the way in from Heathrow. What was that about?”

“Playing it by ear. There's a chance he knows, you know.”

“How?”

“How is academic. It's possible. Who gave you the cell you're using?”

He's right. “And you thought he might give something away?”

“I thought I'd take the chance.”

“I don't like it. It makes me complicit, and you didn't give me the opportunity to decide whether or not I wanted to be.”

“Sorry.” She doesn't think he is. “I need that jpeg,” he tells her. “Email it to me.”

“Is that safe?” she asks.

“Taki's e-mailed it to your friend, and your friend e-mailed it to you. If anyone is keeping track of us that way, they already have it.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Count angels on pinheads, with a friend of mine.”

“Seriously.”

“Improvise. Poke at it. Show it to a couple of people smarter than I am.”

“Okay.” She doesn't like the way she winds up doing what he tells her to do. “Your address in the iBook?”

“No. This one. Chu-dot-B, at …”

She writes it down. “What's that domain?”

“My former company. All that's left of it.”

“Okay. I'll send it. Good night.”

“Good night.”

Sending the jpeg to Boone requires getting out the iBook and cabling it to the phone. She does this on automatic pilot, apparently remembering how to do it correctly, because her message to chub sends immediately.

Automatically, she checks her mail. Another from her mother, this one with unfamiliar-looking attachments.

Without really thinking about it, she opens Cynthia's latest.

These four ambient segments were accidentally recorded by a CCNY anthropology student making a verbal survey of missing-person posters and other signs near the Houston and Varick barricade on September 25th. We've found this particular tape to be remarkably rich in EVP, and have recovered several dozen messages by a variety of methods.

“He took a duck in the face,” Cayce says, closing her eyes. Eventually she has to open them.

Four of them, I believe, are from your father. I know that you aren't a believer, but it seems to me that Win is addressing you, dear, and not me (he quite clearly, twice, says “Cayce”) and that there's some urgency to whatever it might be that he's trying to tell you.

Messages of this sort do not yield very easily to conventional studio techniques; those on the other side are best able to modulate those aspects of a recording that we ordinarily think of as “noise,” so improvement of the signal to noise ratio amounts to the erasure of the message. However, if you use headphones, and concentrate, you will be able to hear your father say the following:

File #1: Grocery store … [??] The tower of light … [life?]

File #2: Cayce … One hundred and … [start of your address?]

File #3 Cold here … Korea … [core error?] Ignored …

File #4 Cayce, the bone … In the head, Cayce … [headcase, someone here suggested, but frankly it isn't an expression your father would have used]

I know this isn't your reality but I've long since come to accept that. It doesn't matter. It's mine, though, and that's why I'm here at ROTW, doing what I can to help with this work. Your father is trying to tell you something. Frankly, at this point, I wish he would tell us exactly when, and how, and most importantly exactly where he crossed over, as we'd then have a shot at some DNA and proof that he is in fact gone. The legal aspects of his disappearance are not progressing, although I've changed lawyers and had them obtain a writ of…

Cayce looks at her hand, which has closed Cynthia's message as if of its own accord.

It isn't that her mother is mad (Cayce doesn't believe that) or that her mother believes in this stuff (though she does, utterly) or even the banal, inchoate, utterly baffling nature of the supposed messages (she's used to that, when EVP are quoted) but that it leaves Win somehow doubly undead.

To have someone disappear in Manhattan on the morning of September 11, with no proven destination in the vicinity of the WTC, not even a known reason why they might have gone there, is proving to be an ongoing nightmare of its own peculiar sort. They had only been alerted to the fact of Win's disappearance on the nineteenth, ordinary police procedures having been disrupted, and Win's credit card company having been slow to provide next-of-kin information. Cayce herself had dealt alone with all of the initial phases of the hunt for her father, Cynthia having stayed in Maui, afraid to fly, until well after commercial flights had resumed. On the nineteenth, Win's face had joined the others, so many of them, that Cayce had been living with daily in the aftermath, and very likely his had been among those the CCNY anthropology student had been surveying when (in Cynthia's universe) Win had whispered through the membrane from whatever Other Side it was that Cynthia and her cronies in Hawaii imagined for him. Cayce herself had put up several, carefully sheathed in plastic, near the barricade at Houston and Varick, having run them off at the Kinko's nearest her apartment uptown. Win, deeply and perhaps professionally camera-shy, had left remarkably few full-face images, and the best she'd been able to do had been one that her friends had sometimes mistaken for the younger William S. Burroughs.

Still more missing strangers had become familiar, then, as she'd made the stations of some unthinkable cross.

She had, while producing her own posters, watched the faces of other people's dead, emerging from adjacent copiers at Kinko's, to be mounted in the yearbook of the city's loss. She had never, while putting hers up, seen one face pasted over another, and that fact, finally, had allowed her to cry, hunched on a bench in Union Square, candles burning at the base of a statue of George Washington.

She remembered sitting there, prior to her tears, looking from the monument that was still taking shape at the base of Washington's statue to that odd sculpture across Fourteenth Street, in front of the Virgin Megastore, a huge stationary metronome, constantly issuing steam, and back again to the organic accretion of candles, flowers, photographs, and messages, as though the answer, if there was one, lay in somehow understanding the juxtaposition of the two.

And then she had walked home, all the way, to her silent cave with its blue-painted floors, and had trashed the software that had allowed her to watch CNN on her computer. She hadn't really watched television since, and never, if she could help it, the news.