She looks at him. "You can do that?"

"I'm not magic, but I'm handy. Hands-on generalist, you might say."

She pours. "Do you want to do it?"

He picks up his tea-sub. Sniffs. "What is it?"

"I don't know. It's Damien's. No caffeine, though."

He blows to cool it, then sips. Winces. "Hot."

"Well, do you? Want to do it?"

Looks at her, steam rising from the cup he still holds close to his mouth. "I'm of two minds." He lowers the cup. "It's an interesting problem, from a theoretical point of view, and as far as we know no one's solved it yet. I'm available, and Bigend has a lot of money to throw at it."

"That's your upside?"

He nods, sips more tea-sub. Winces again. "Downside is Bigend. Hard to quantify that, isn't it?" He goes to the kitchen window and seems to be looking out, but then he points to the round transparent ventilator fan set into a six-inch hole in one pane of glass. "We don't have those things. They're everywhere, here. Always have been. I'm not even sure what they're supposed to do."

"They're part of the mirror-world," Cayce says.

"Mirror-world?"

"The difference."

"My idea of a mirror-world is Bangkok. Asia somewhere. This is just more of our stuff."

"No," she tells him, "different stuff. That's why you noticed that vent. They invented that here, probably, and made it here. This was an industrial nation. Buy a pair of scissors, you got British scissors. They made all their own stuff. Kept imports expensive. Same thing in Japan. All their bits and pieces were different, from the ground up."

"I see what you mean, but I don't think it's going to be that way much longer. Not if the world's Bigends keep at it: no borders, pretty soon there's no mirror to be on the other side of. Not in terms of the bits and pieces, anyway." His eyes meet hers.

They each carry a cup of tea-sub back and take their seats again.

"How about you," he asks, "how do you feel about Bigend?"

And why, she wonders, is she even having this conversation? How much to do with their glancing encounter in the street this morning, which he shows no sign of remembering? Her sense of urban disconnect, then: seeing him as a passing stranger she'd never see again, and now having him turn up this way.

"Hubertus Bigend is a very smart man," she says, "and I don't like him very much."

"Why not?"

"I seem to have an attitude about how he operates as a human being. I don't feel strongly enough about it to refuse to work for his company, but the idea of working with him on a more personal basis makes me uncomfortable." Immediately thinking: Why have I told him this, I don't know him at all, what if he goes back to Bigend and tells him what I just said?

He sits there, his long fingers around his mug of tea-sub, looking at her over it. "He can afford to buy people," he says. "I don't want to wind up as a gadget on his key ring. I'm not exactly immune to the kind of money Bigend has to play with. When that start-up was on the fence, teetering back and forth, I found myself doing things I came to regret."

She looks at him. Is this the truth, or self-advertisment?

He frowns. "Why do you think he wants it?"

"He thinks he can productize it."

"Then monetize it." He puts the cup down on the carpet.

"He says it's about excellence, not money."

"Sure," Boone Chu says, "the money's just a sort of side effect. And that lets him keep it vague with us."

"But if he priced it, it would be less interesting, wouldn't it? If he put a fixed ticket on it for us, it would just be another job. He's appealing to something deeper."

"And treating it as though it's a done deal."

"I've noticed that." She watches his eyes. "But would you want to give him the satisfaction?"

"If I don't, I may never have the satisfaction of getting to the bottom of this," he says. "And I've tried already."

"You have?"

"Sometimes I can do it sitting around in a hotel room, playing with this." He nudges the suitcase with his foot. "I couldn't get anywhere, but that only has a way of getting me going."

"What do you have in there?"

He picks up the suitcase and clicks its latches. It's lined with cubes of gray foam, arranged to form a recess for a featureless rectangle of gray metal. He lifts this, a titanium laptop, out, and she sees more recesses, assorted coiled cables, three cell phones, and one of those big, specialist, multi-bit screwdrivers. One of the phones is cased in candy-apple mango.

"What's that?" she asks, pointing to the mango phone.

"Japan."

"And you can use a screwdriver too?"

"Never go anywhere without one."

And this, somehow, she believes completely

THEY wind up eating noodles together in that pan-Asian place on Park-way, sanded wood and raku bowls, and now he's deep into the resolution thing. Old hat to the F:F:F veteran but he has a refreshingly clear take on it. "Each of the segments is of the same resolution, sufficient to allow theatrical projection. The visual information, the grain of that imagery, is all there. Footage of a lower resolution couldn't be enlarged and retain its clarity. If it's computer-generated, somebody had to put that there." He raises his chopsticks toward his mouth. "Rendering farms. Ever see one?" He pops the noodles into his mouth and chews.

"No."

He swallows, puts his chopsticks down. "Big room, lots of stations, Tenderers working through your footage a frame at a time. Labor intensive. Shakespeare's monkeys, but working to a plan. Rendering is expensive, human-intensive, involves a lot of people, and would probably be impossible to keep a secret, for very long, in a situation like this. Someone would tell, unless there were unusual constraints in place. These people sit there and massage your imagery a pixel at a time. Sharpen it up. Add detail. Do hair. Hair is a nightmare. And they don't get paid much."

"So the Garage Kubrick hypothesis is just a dream?"

"Unless the maker has access to levels of technology that don't, as far as we know, exist yet. Assuming the footage is entirely computer-generated means that your maker either has de-engineered Roswell CGI capacities or a completely secure rendering operation. If you rule out the alien tech, where can you find that?"

"Hollywood."

"Yes, but possibly in the more globally distributed sense. You're doing CGI in Hollywood, your rendering might be being done in New Zealand, say. Or Northern Ireland. Or, maybe, in Hollywood. Point is, that's still the industry. People talk. Given the interest this stuff has been generating, you'd need a culture of pathological secrecy to keep it from getting out."

"You're not in 'Garage Kubrick,' then," she says, "you're in 'Spielberg's Closet': the supposition that the footage is being produced by someone who already has godlike production resources. Someone who, for some reason, is opting to produce and release very unconventional material in a very unconventional way. Someone with the clout to keep it quiet."

"You buy it?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"How much time have you spent with the actual footage?"

"Not much."

"How do you feel when you watch it?" ,

He looks down at his noodles, then up at her. "Lonely?"

"Most people find that that deepens. Becomes sort of polyphonic. Then there's a sense that it's going somewhere, that something will happen. Will change." She shrugs. "It's impossible to describe, but if you live with it for a while, it starts to get to you. It's just such a powerful effect, induced by so little actual screen time. I've never felt convinced that there's a recognized filmmaker around who can do that, although if you read the footage boards you'll see different directors constantly nominated."

"Or maybe it's the repetition. Maybe you've been looking at this stuff for so long that you've read all this into it. And talking with other people who've been doing the same thing."