William Gibson - Pattern Recognition

She shakes her head, reads it again.

I love you too. Can't write more now. Later. I'm okay. And I'm in Russia too, Moscow, I'll tell you later.

She starts to put the iBook back in the bag, but stops. It doesn't seem right to take it, somehow, to meet the maker. She'll carry her East German envelope instead, and as she's transferring her basic stuff from the Luggage Label she remembers that the desk hasn't returned her passport yet. She'll get it on the way out. Her hand strikes something cold, at the bottom of the envelope. She pulls it out: the metal piece from Damien's robot girl: her makeshift knuckle-duster in Camden. Good thing she'd had the envelope in checked luggage. She tosses it back in, for luck, makes sure she has the room key, and leaves, head full of the images from his message.

The driver who turns up for her has dark glasses and a closely shaven, interestingly sculpted head. Streamlined.

As they're driving away, in the direction she'd gone the evening before, she remembers she's forgotten to ask for her passport.

They turn onto a wide street, one that Cayce, from her morning's Moscow Yellow Pages map foray, tentatively identifies as Tverskaya. Her driver, with a phone plugged into his ear now, is wearing cologne.

They stick to Tverskaya, if it is Tverskaya, and stay with the traffic flow. He doesn't use the blue light.

They pass beneath a banner in English: WAXEN FIGURES EXHIBITION. Street-level signage offers snippets of the non-Cyrillic: BUTIQUE, KODAK, a drugstore called PHARMACOM.

As they turn left, she asks “What street is this?”

“Georgievsky,” the driver says, though it might as easily be his name. He turns again, into an alley, and stops.

She starts to tell him that she hadn't meant for him to stop, but he gets out, walks around, opens the door for her. “Come.”

Gray, distempered concrete. Cyrillic skater's tags, their letters bulging in clumsy homage to New York and Los Angeles.

“Please.” He hauls open a large, anciently battered steel door, which reaches the limits of a restraining chain with a dull boom. Within is darkness. “Here.”

“Stella is here?”

“Kino,” he says. Film. Cinema.

Stepping past him, she finds herself in a dim, indeterminate space. When the door crashes shut behind them, the only light is from above. A bare bulb, visible up a forbiddingly steep flight of narrow concrete stairs that seems to have no railing.

“Please.” He gestures toward the stairs.

She sees now that there is a railing, the spidery ghost of one: a single length of half-inch steel. Supported by only two uprights, it droops between them, seemingly lank as rope, and sways when she grips it.

“He took a duck in the face…”

“Up, please.”

“Sorry.” She starts to climb, aware of him behind her.

There is another steel door, narrower, beneath the forty-watt bulb. She opens it.

A kitchen, bathed in red light.

Like the kitchens in the oldest, still-unrenovated tenements of New York, but larger, the stove a squatting pre-Stalinist presence wider than the car that brought her here. Coal-burning, or wood.

Where the tenement kitchen would have offered a central bathtub, there is a shower: a square of raised tile surrounding a slightly lower concrete space for drainage. The ancient galvanized showerhead, looking either agricultural or veterinary in intent, is suspended from a sixteen-foot ceiling gone sepia with decades of smoke and soot. The source of the red glow is a stolen Metro sign, propped against one wall, with a bulb inside.

“You are here,” says Stella, opening a door, light behind her. She says something in Russian to the driver. He nods, stepping back through the door to the stairs and closing it behind him.

“Where's here?”

“Come.” Stella leads her into another room, this one with tall, unwashed windows, looking as though they might originally have been internally shuttered. “The Kremlin,” Stella says, pointing out a view between the nearer buildings, “and the Duma.”

Cayce looks around. The walls, unpainted since Soviet days at least, remind her of the nomiya in Roppongi, decades of nicotine deposited over what may once have been cream. Cracked, uneven. The individual planks of the wooden floor are lost under layers of paint, most recently maroon. There are two very new, very white Ikea desks, with articulated swivel chairs, a pair of PCs, and baskets of papers. On the wall above, a long, complex chart is being maintained across three adjoining white-boards.

“Sergei says it is a production that never ends,” Stella says, seeing Cayce looking not at the view but the chart. “Only the start of the work can be done here, of course.”

“But does it end?” Cayce feels herself blushing, appalled that she's been unable to resist immediately asking so pointed a question.

“You mean, is linear narrative?”

“I had to ask.” She feels as though Parkaboy, Ivy, Filmy, and Maurice, the whole F:F:F crew are in the wings, counting on her.

“I do not know. One day, perhaps, she will start to edit as she edited her student film: to a single frame. Or perhaps one day they speak, the characters. Who knows? Nora? She does not say.”

A young man with bushy ginger hair enters, nods to them, and seats himself before one of the computers.

“Come,” says Stella, moving in the direction he'd come from. “You know this idea, 'squat', like Amsterdam, Berlin?”

“Yes.”

“You have not, in America?”

“Not exactly.”

“This was squat, these rooms. Famous, in eighties. A party here. Seven years. Not once did party end. People come, make the party, more come, some go, make the party, always. Talking of freedom, art, things of the spirit. Nora and I were schoolgirls, first coming here. Our father would be very angry, seeing us here. He did not know.” This room is larger, but filled with a makeshift cube farm, workstations walled off with sheets of unpainted composite board. The screens are dark now, the chairs empty. There's a plastic Garfield atop one monitor, other signs of workplace personalization. She picks up a square of clear acrylic: laser-etched in its core are the Coca-Cola logo, a crude representation of the Twin Towers, and the words “WE REMEMBER.” She quickly puts it down.

“You see it now, you cannot imagine. Once Victor Tsoi sang here, in this room. People had time, in those days. The system was collapsing under its own weight, but everyone had a job, often a pointless one, very badly paid, but one could eat. People valued friendships, talked endlessly, ate and drank. For many people it was like the life of a student. A life of the spirit. Now we say that everything Lenin taught us of communism was false, and everything he taught us of capitalism, true.”

'What do you do now, in this room?”

“My sister's work is transferred to production facility.”

“Is she here, now?”

“She is working. Now you will see her.”

“But I couldn't interrupt her —”

“No. She is here, when she is working. You must understand. When she is not working, she is not here.”

The fourth room is at the end of a narrow hallway, its ceiling as high as those in the other rooms, its plaster darkened with the dirt of years of hands, lightening above shoulder-level. The door at its end is smooth and white, insubstantial-looking against the scabrous plaster.

Stella opens it, steps back, softly gestures for Cayce to enter.

At first she thinks this room is windowless, its sole illumination the largest LCD display Cayce has ever seen, but as her eyes adjust she sees that three tall narrow windows, behind the screen, have been painted black. But the part of her that notes this is some basic mammalian module tracking whereabouts and potential exits. All higher attention is locked on the screen, on which is frozen an image from a segment of footage that she knows she has never seen.