William Gibson - All Tomorrow's Parties

Tessa had her own special glasses on, and Chevette knew she'd be seeing the output from God's Little Toy, adjusting angle and focus with her black glove. Creedmore had launched into another song, its tempo faster, and people were tapping their feet and bobbing up and down in time.

Couple of men in those meshback caps, drinking beer out of cans, by that ladder, but she ducked under their arms and climbed up, ignoring the one who laughed and swatted her butt with the flat of his hand.

Up through the square hole, her nose level with dusty, beer-soaked brown carpet. 'Tessa. Hey.

'Chevette? Tessa didn't turn, lost in the view in her glasses. 'Where'd you go?

'I saw Carson, Chevette said, climbing up through the hole. 'I took off.

'This is amazing footage, Tessa said. 'The faces on these people. Like Robert Frank. I'm going to treat it as mono and grain it down-

'Tessa, Chevette said, 'I think we should get out of here.

'Who the fuck are you? said the baldie, turning. He was wearing a sleeveless tube shirt and his upper arms were no thicker than Chevette's wrists, his bare shoulders looking fragile as the bones of a bird.

'This is Saint Vitus, Tessa said, as if absently bidding to forestall hostilities, attention elsewhere. 'He does the lights in here, but he's the sound man at two other clubs on the bridge, Cognitive Dissidents and something else Tessa's hand dancing with itself in the black control glove.

Chevette knew Cog Diss from before. 'That's a dancer bar, Tessa, she said.

'We're going over there after this, Tessa said. 'He says it'll just be getting going, and it'll be a lot more interesting than this.

'Anything would, Saint Vitus said with infinite weariness.

'Blue Ahmed cut a single there, Tessa said, 'called 'My War Is My War.

'It sucked, Chevette said.

'You're thinking of the Chrome Koran cover, said Saint Vitus, his voice dripping with contempt. 'You've never heard Ahmed's version.

'How the fuck would you know? Chevette demanded.

'Because it was never released, Saint Vitus declared smugly.

'Well, maybe it fucking escaped, Chevette said, feeling like she wanted to deck this diz-monkey, and thinking it might not be that hard to do, although you never knew what would happen if somebody tightened on dancer got really upset. All those stories about twelve-year-olds getting so dizzed they'd grab the bumper of a cop car and flip the whole thing, though these usually involved the kids' muscles popping out through their skins, which she sincerely hoped was impossible. Had to be: what Carson called urban legends.

Creedmore's song ended with a steely clash of guitar that drew Chevette's attention to the stage. Creedmore looked completely tightened now, staring triumphantly out as though across a sea of faces in some vast stadium.

The big guitarist unslung his red guitar and handed it to a boy with sideburns and a black leather vest, who passed him a black guitar with a skinnier body.

'This here's called 'Pine Box, ' Creedmore said, as the big guitarist began to play. Chevette couldn't catch the words as Creedmore began to sing, except that it sounded old and doleful and was about winding up in a pine box, by which she took him to mean a coffin, like what they used to bury people in, but she guessed it could just as easily apply to this sound booth she was stuck in here, with Tessa and this asshole. She looked around and saw an old chrome stool with its pad of upholstery split and taped over, so she planted herself on that and decided she was just going to keep quiet until Tessa had taped as much as she wanted of Creedmore's act. Then she'd see about getting them out of here.

LIBIA and Paco have shown Laney to a barbershop in Sai Shing Road. He has arrived here, of course, with no knowledge of the route involved; Sai Shing is in the Walled City, and he is a visitor, not a resident. The Walled City's whereabouts, the conceptual mechanisms by which its citizens have opted to secede from the human datascape at large are the place's central and most closely held secret. The Walled City is a universe unto itself, a subversive rumor, the stuff of legend.

Laney has been here before, although not to this specific construct, this barbershop, and he dislikes the place. Something in the underlying code of the Walled City's creation induces a metaphysical vertigo, and the visual representation is tediously aggressive, as though one were caught in some art school video production with infinitely high production values. Nothing is ever straightforward, in the Walled City; nothing is ever presented as written, but filtered instead through half a dozen species of carefully cultivated bit rot, as though the inhabitants were determined to express their massive attitude right down into the least fractal texture of the place. Where a clever website might hint at dirt, at wear, the Walled City luxuriates in apparent frank decay, in texture maps that constantly unravel, revealing of other textures, equally moth-eaten.

This barbershop, for instance, is shingled from overlapping tiles of texture, so that they don't quite match up at their edges, deliberately spoiling any illusion of surface or place. And everything here is done in a palette of rain-wet Chinatown neon: pink, blue, yellow, pale green, and the authoritatively faded red.

Libia and Paco depart immediately, leaving Laney to wonder how he, were he to bother, might choose to present himself in this environment: perhaps as a large cardboard carton?

Klaus and the Rooster put an end to this surmise, however, abruptly appearing in two of the shop's four barber chairs. They look as he remembers them, except that Klaus now wears a black leather version of his snap-brim fedora, its brim turned up all around, and the Rooster somehow looks even more like one of Francis Bacon's screaming popes.

'Whole new game here, Laney opens.

'How so? Klaus appears to suck his teeth.

'Harwood's had 5-SB. And you know it too, because those chilango kids of yours just told me. How long have you known?

'We operate on a need-to-know basis, the Rooster begins, in full geek-pontificator mode, but Klaus cuts him off: 'About ten minutes longer than you have. We're anxious to know what you make of it.

'It changes everything, Laney says. 'The way he's been successful all these years: the public relations empire, advertising, the rumors that he was pivotal in getting President Millbank elected, that he was behind the partition of Italy..

'I thought that was his girlfriend, the Rooster says sullenly, 'that Padanian princess-

'You mean he's only picking winners? Klaus demands. 'You're suggesting that he's in nodal mode and simply gets behind emerging change? If that's all it is, my friend, why aren't you one of the richest men in the world?

'It doesn't work that way, Laney protests. 5-SB allows the apprehension of nodal points, discontinuities in the texture of information. They indicate emerging change, but not what that change will be.

'True, agrees Klaus and purses his lips.

'What I want to know, Laney says, 'what I need to know, and right now, is what Harwood is up to. He's sitting at the cusp of some unprecedented potential for change. He appears to be instrumental in it. Rei Toei is in it too, and this freelance people-eraser of Harwood's, and an out-of-work rent-a-cop… These people are about to change human history in some entirely new way. There hasn't been a configuration like this since 1911-

'What happened in 1911? the Rooster demands.

Laney sighs. 'I'm still not sure. It's complicated and I haven't had the time to really look at it. Madame Curie's husband was run over by a horse-drawn wagon, in Paris, in 1906. It seems to start there. But if Harwood is the strange attractor here, the crucial piece of weirdness things need to accrete around, and he's self-aware in that role, what is it he's trying to do that has the potential to literally change everything?