William Gibson - Pattern Recognition

“And what do you do when you get there?”

“Shoulder-surf. Social engineering.”

“Are you good at that?”

“In certain contexts,” he says, and sips his coffee.

“You sent your friend Taki's T-bone?”

“Yes. Using what he's learned about seventy-eight, he can try a number of different things. It might link each one to a point on the map. If it is a map.”

“It looks like a map. I know someone,” thinking of Darryl, “who's going to try giving it to a bot that only looks for maps. If it's been lifted from some actual city, we might get a match.”

“That would be good, but what I'm after, now, is the nature of Sigil's involvement. Do they get each segment from somewhere, watermark it, and send it back? If they do, and we can find out where it comes from, or where they send it, we might have your maker.”

“Would they have to actually view it, to watermark it?”

“I don't think so, but I want to find out.”

“How do you propose to do that?”

“I'm turning up on their doorstep as the representative of a small but very successful firm that's recently developed a need for nondetectable digital watermarking. That'll be a start. Why do you want to know whether they'd look at it?”

“There are footageheads everywhere. Or someone doing that work could become one, through exposure. There might be someone who already knows what you're looking for.”

“There might be. But we'd have to advertise, wouldn't we?” He's right.

He checks the time on his phone again. “I've got to go.”

“Where?”

“Selfridge's. I need a suit, fast.”

“I can't imagine you in a suit.”

“You don't need to,” he says, standing, small leather suitcase already in his hand. “You're unlikely to ever see me in one.” He smiles.

But I'll bet you'd look good in one, something in her says. It makes her blush. Now it's her turn to stand, feeling incredibly awkward. “Good luck in Ohio,” she offers, reaching to shake hands.

He squeezes, rather than shakes, simultaneously leaning quickly forward to kiss her lightly on the cheek. “Take care of yourself. I'll be in touch.”

And then she's watching him go out the door, past a girl with Maharishi parachute pants embroidered with tigers who, seeing the expression, whatever it is, on Cayce's face, smiles at her and winks.

Cleaning Damien's flat becomes more of a project than she'd anticipated, but she keeps at it, trusting that manual labor, and the effort required to stay on task, somehow furthers soul-retrieval. Several video cameras have been unpacked, here, leaving the main room littered with abstract white foam shapes, innumerable foam peanuts, torn and crumpled shrink-wrap, empty Ziploc bags, warranties and instruction manuals. It looks as though a spoiled child has torn through a stack of very expensive presents, and she supposes that that might actually be seen to be the case, depending on how one looked at Damien.

Beer bottles, a saucer serving as an impromptu ashtray for lipsticked Marlboros, dirty dishes with remains of the tandoori take-away, a pair of very expensive-looking panties that she cheerfully bins, ditto various discarded makeup articles in the bathroom. She changes the sheets on the downstairs bed, straightens the giant oven mitt, dusts, and does a pass with a bright red upright German vacuum that's obviously never seen use before.

Goes upstairs to see what needs to be done, and a big cartoon hammer of sheer exhaustion comes down on her, slamming her into the waiting softness of the futon.

When she wakes, the phone is ringing, downstairs, and the light outside is different. She looks at her watch and sees that it's eight hours later.

She hears the phone stop ringing, then start again.

When she gets to it, it's Magda, asking if she'd like to have dinner.

EXPECTING only Magda, she sees Voytek and the large African as well, when she reaches the agreed meeting point near the station. They all seem wonderfully cheerful to her, but she supposes that that's because they aren't lagged and don't have lives as complicated as hers has recently become. Ngemi in particular, hugely zipped into his tight coat of black faux leather, is grinning enormously, and as they walk to a Greek restaurant somewhere behind the station, she hears why.

He has sold the calculators she'd seen near Portobello to the expected representative of that same Japanese collector, for what is evidently a very nice sum. He has the air of a man whose lost cause has most unexpectedly panned out, although at one point he does sigh, hugely. “Now I must go to Poole, and collect them from Hobbs.”

She remembers the unpleasant man with the filthy little car.

“I don't like him,” Magda says, bluntly, and seems to Cayce to be addressing mainly Voytek.

“He is a brilliant man,” Voytek responds, shrugging.

“A horrid drunken old spy.”

Attuned now to words like “spy,” Cayce notes this but almost immediately forgets it.

The restaurant they've chosen is a homey, quiet little Greek place that shows every sign of predating the Children's Crusade. With its white-painted walls, bits of Aegean blue, and utterly characteristic Greek tourist tat, it somehow reminds Cayce of the experience of being in a Chinese restaurant in Roanoke, Virginia.

“I love your hair,” Magda tells her, as retsina is being poured, and she quite evidently does. “Did you have it cut in Tokyo?”

“Thank you. I did.”

“But you were only there for such a short time.”

“Yes. Business.” Cayce stifles a yawn that seems to come out of nowhere. “Excuse me.”

“Are you still on their time? You must be exhausted.”

“I think I'm all on my own time, now,” Cayce says. “But I don't know what time that is.”

Ngemi brings up yen devaluation, as this might affect his business, and that leads into a conversation about a classmate of Magda's who's recently been hired as part of a team designing clothing for the characters in a new Japanese video game. Ngemi and Voytek both find this slightly unbelievable, but Cayce assures them that it's utterly normal; that in fact it's a rapidly growing aspect of the design industry.

“But they don't wear hats, these anime characters,” Magda laments, pouring herself another glass of the resinous yellow wine, then wincing at its bite. “They all have haircuts — exactly like yours!” She's laced into a leather bodice in a color called Turbo Blue, more traditionally used for painting large pieces of electrical equipment in factories. Her eye shadow matches.

“Life is more difficult for the serious artist,” allows Voytek, who's seeming morose now. “Time is money, but also money is money”

“You'll get your scaffolding,” Magda says. “It will work out.” She explains to Cayce that her brother, having assembled close to three hundred ZX 81s, faces the daunting task of individually altering their cases to accept connections of some kind, each connection having to be painstakingly soldered into the actual Sinclair circuitry, such as it is. Voytek listens keenly, taking an evident pleasure in hearing his sister recount the tribulations of the serious artist.

He is creating, Cayce is starting to gather, some sort of lungfish-primitive connection machine. He draws it on a napkin for her: a representation of a three-dimensional grid, this to be made up from a batch of third-hand builder's scaffolding that Ngemi has located in Bermondsey.

She watches the lines of ink spread into the paper, widening, and thinks of Taki, in the little bar in Roppongi.

It is very rusty, paint-spattered scaffolding, Ngemi has assured him, exactly what he wants for the texture of the piece. But if he's to do each Sinclair modification himself, he faces weeks if not months of work. The scaffolding is not expensive, but neither is it free, and must be transported, measured, sawed, assembled, probably re-sawed, then assembled again, then stored somewhere until a gallery can be secured. “A patron must be found,” he says.