William Gibson - Spook Country

“Why did you ask about Bobby?”

“I’m writing about your art. Why wouldn’t I ask about the tech end?”

Alberto looked uncomfortable. “Bobby,” he began, stopped. “He’s a very private person.”

“He is?”

Alberto looked unhappy. “The vision’s mine, and I build the work, but Bobby hacks it for me. Gets it to work, even indoors. And he gets the routers installed.”

“Routers?”

“At this point, each piece needs its own wireless.”

“Where’s the one for River?”

“I don’t know. The one for the Newton’s in a flower bed. The Fitzgerald’s really complicated, not always there.”

“He wouldn’t want to talk to me?”

“I don’t think he’d like it that you’ve even heard of him.” He frowned. “How did you?”

“My editor at Node, in London, the one supervising the piece? His name is Philip Rausch. He said he thought you’d know him, but probably Odile wouldn’t.”

“She doesn’t.”

“Can you get Bobby to talk with me, Alberto?”

“It’s not…”

“He’s not a Curfew fan?” Something inside her cringed at playing the card.

Alberto giggled. It came bubbling out of his big frame like carbon dioxide. He grinned at her, happily starstruck again. He took another drink. “Actually,” he said, “he does listen to you. The Curfew’s music is something we were able to bond around.”

“Alberto, I like your work. I like what I’ve seen. I look forward to seeing more. Your River Phoenix piece was my first experience of the medium, a powerful one.” His face went very still, expectant. “I need your help, Alberto. I haven’t done a piece like this before. I’m trying to get a feel for how things work at Node, and Node is asking me to talk with Bobby. There’s no reason I should expect you to trust me—”

“I do,” he said, with a remarkably groomly cadence. Then: “I do trust you, Hollis, it’s just…” He winced. “You don’t know Bobby.”

“Tell me. About Bobby.”

He put a forefinger on the white cloth, tracing a line. Crossed it with another, at a right angle. “The GPS grid,” he said.

She felt minute hairs shift, on the small of her back, just above the waistband.

Alberto leaned forward. “Bobby divides his place up into smaller squares, within the grid. He sees everything in terms of GPS gridlines, the world divided up that way. It is, of course, but…” He frowned. “He won’t sleep in the same square twice. He crosses them off, never goes back to one where he’s slept before.”

“You find that strange?” She did, certainly, but had no idea what passed for eccentric, for Alberto.

“Bobby is, well, Bobby. Strange? Definitely. Difficult.”

This wasn’t going where she wanted it to. “I also need to know more about how you make your pieces.” That should do it, she thought. He brightened immediately.

Their burgers arrived. He looked as though he wanted to brush his aside, now.

“I start with a sense of place,” he began. “With event, place. Then I research. I compile photographs. For the Fitzgerald, of course, there were no images of the event, precious little in the way of accounts. But there were pictures of him taken in roughly the same period. Wardrobe notes, haircut. Other photographs. And everything I could find on Schwab’s. And there was a lot on Schwab’s, because it was the most famous drugstore in America. Partly because Leon Schwab, the owner, kept claiming that Lana Turner was discovered there, sitting on a stool at his soda fountain. She used to deny that there was any truth to the story, and it seems like Schwab made it up to get customers into the store. But it got the place photographed for magazines. Lots of detail.”

“And you make the photographs…3-D?” She wasn’t sure how to put it.

“Are you kidding? I model everything.”

“How?”

“I build virtual models, then cover them with skins, textures I’ve sampled, or created myself, usually for that specific piece. Each model has a virtual skeleton, so I can pose and position the figure in its environment. I use digital lights to add shadows and reflections.” He squinted at her, as if trying to decide whether she was really listening. “The modeling is like pushing and pulling clay. I do that over an inner structure of joints—the skeleton, with a spine, shoulders, elbows, fingers. It’s not that different from designing figures for a game. Then I model multiple heads, with slightly different expressions, and combine them.”

“Why?”

“It’s more subtle. The expressions don’t look made-up, if you do that. I color them, then each surface in the model is wrapped with a texture. I collect textures. Some of my textures are real skin, scanned in. The River piece, I couldn’t get the skin right. Finally I sampled a very young Vietnamese girl. It worked. People who knew him, they said so.”

She put her burger down, swallowed. “I didn’t imagine you doing all that. Somehow I thought it would all just…happen? With…technology?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I get that a lot. All the work I have to do, it seems sort of old-fashioned, archaic. I have to position virtual lights, so shadows will be cast correctly. Then there’s a certain amount of ‘fill,’ atmosphere, for the environment.” He shrugged. “The original only exists on the server, when I’m done, in virtual dimensions of depth, width, height. Sometimes I think that even if the server went down, and took my model with it, that that space would still exist, at least as a mathematical possibility, and that the space we live in…” He frowned.

“Yes?”

“Might work the same way.” He shrugged again, and picked up his burger.

You, she thought, are seriously creeping me out.

But she only nodded gravely and picked up her own burger.

T he message tone woke him. He reached for his phone in the dark, watched Volapuk scroll briefly past. Alejandro was outside, wanting in. It was ten after two in the morning. He sat up, pulled on his jeans, socks, sweater. Then his boots, whose laces he tied carefully: this was protocol.

It was cold in the hallway, as he locked his door behind him, less cold in the elevator. In the narrow, fluorescent-lit foyer below, he rapped once on the street door, heard his cousin’s three raps in reply, then one. When he opened the door, Alejandro stepped in, surrounded by a nimbus of colder air and the smell of whiskey. Tito closed and locked the door behind him.

“You were sleeping?”

“Yes,” Tito said, starting for the elevator.

“I went to Carlito,” Alejandro said, following Tito into the elevator. Tito pushed the button; the door closed. “Carlito and I have our own business.” Meaning separate from family business. “I asked him about your old man.” The door opened.

“Why did you do that?” Tito unlocked his door.

“Because I didn’t think you had taken me seriously.”

They entered the darkness of Tito’s room. He turned on the small shaded lamp attached to his MIDI keyboard. “Shall I make coffee? Tea?”

“Zavarka?”

“Bags.” Tito no longer made tea in the Russian way, though he did steep his tea bags in a cheap Chinese tchainik.

Alejandro seated himself on the foot of Tito’s mattress, knees drawn up before his face. “Carlito brews the zavarka. He takes it with a spoon of jam.” His teeth shone in the light from the MIDI lamp.

“What did he tell you?”

“Our grandfather was the understudy of Semenov,” Alejandro said. Tito turned on his hotplate and filled the kettle.

“Who was that?”

“Semenov was Castro’s first KGB advisor.”

Tito looked back at his cousin. This was something like hearing a fairy tale, though not an entirely unfamiliar one. And then the children met a flying horse, his mother would tell him. And then grandfather met Castro’s KGB advisor. He turned back to the hotplate.