She propped her feet on the ledge of a hotdesk. She wore meticulous little reproductions of lineman’s boots, buckled across the instep and stoutly laced to the ankle. He looked at her legs, their taut sweep from wooly sock tops to the sandpapered fringe of cut-off jeans. The tattoo looked like something from another planet, a sign or message burned in from the depths of space, left there for mankind to interpret.

He asked her what she meant. She peeled a mint-flavored toothpick from its wrapper. Eyes he suspected were gray regarded him through mint-tinted contacts.

“Nobody’s really famous anymore, Laney. Have you noticed that?”

“No.”

“I mean reallyfamous. There’s not much fame left, not in the old sense. Not enough to go around.”

“The old sense?”

“We’re the media, Laney. We makethese assholes celebrities. It’s a push-me, pull-you routine. They come to us to be created.” Vibram cleats kicked concisely off the hotdesk. She tucked her boots in, heels against denim haunches, white knees hiding her mouth. Balanced there on the pedestal of the hotdesk’s articulated Swedish chair.

“Well,” Laney said, going back to his screen, “that’s still fame, isn’t it?”

“But is it real?”

He looked back at her.

“We learned to print money off this stuff,” she said. “Coin of our realm. Now we’ve printed too much; even the audience knows. It shows in the ratings.”

Laney nodded, wishing she’d leave him to his work.

“Except,” she said, parting her knees so he could see her say it, “when we decide to destroy one.”

Behind her, past the anodyzed chainlink of the Cage, beyond a framing rectangle of glass that filtered out every tint of pollution, the sky over Burbank was perfectly blank, like a sky-blue paint chip submitted by the contractor of the universe.

The man’s left ear was edged with pink tissue, smooth as wax. Laney wondered why there had been no attempt at reconstruction.

“So I’ll remember,” the man said, reading Laney’s eyes.

“Remember what?”

“Not to forget. Sit down.”

Laney sat on something only vaguely chairlike, an attenuated construction of black alloy rods and laminated Hexcel. The table was round and approximately the size of a steering wheel. A votive flame licked the air, behind blue glass. The Japanese man with the plaid shirt and metal-framed glasses blinked furiously. Laney watched the large man settle himself, another slender chair-thing lost alarmingly beneath a sumo-sized bulk that appeared to be composed entirely of muscle.

“Done with the jet lag, are we?”

“I took pills.” Remembering the SST’s silence, its lack of apparent motion.

“Pills,” the man said. “Hotel adequate?”

“Yes,” Laney said. “Ready for the interview.”

“Well then,” vigorously rubbing his face with heavily scarred hands. He lowered his hands and stared at Laney, as if seeing him for the first time. Laney, avoiding the gaze of those eyes, took in the man’s outfit, some sort of nanopore exercise gear intended to fit loosely on a smaller but still very large man. Of no particular color in the darkness of the Trial. Open from collar to breastbone. Straining against abnormal mass. Exposed flesh tracked and crossed by an atlas of scars, baffling in their variety of shape and texture. “Well, then?”

Laney looked up from the scars. “I’m here for a job interview.”

“Are you?”

“Are you the interviewer?”

“ ‘Interviewer’?” The ambiguous grimace revealing an obvious dental prosthesis.

Laney turned to the Japanese in the round glasses. “Colin Laney.”

“Shinya Yamazaki,” the man said, extending his hand. They shook. “We spoke on the telephone.”

“You’re conducting the interview?”

A flurry of blinks. “I’m sorry, no,” the man said. And then, “I am a student of existential sociology.”

“I don’t get it,” Laney said. The two opposite said nothing. Shinya Yamazaki looked embarrassed. The one-eared man glowered.

“You’re Australian,” Laney said to the one-eared man.

“Tazzie,” the man corrected. “Sided with the South in the Troubles.”

“Let’s start over,” Laney suggested. “ ‘Paragon-Asia Dataflow.’ You them?”

“Persistent bugger.”

“Goes with the territory,” Laney said. “Professionally, I mean.”

“Fair enough.” The man raised his eyebrows, one of which was bisected by a twisted pink cable of scar tissue. “Rez, then. What do you think of him?”

“You mean the rock star?” Laney asked, after struggling with a basic problem of context.

A nod. The man regarded Laney with utmost gravity.

“From Lo/Rez? The band?” Half Irish, half Chinese. A broken nose, never repaired. Long green eyes.

“What do I thinkof him?”

In Kathy Torrance’s system of things, the singer had been reserved a special disdain. She had viewed him as a living fossil, an annoying survival from an earlier, less evolved era. He was at once massively and meaninglessly famous, she maintained, just as he was both massively and meaninglessly wealthy. Kathy thought of celebrity as a subtle fluid, a universal element, like the phlogiston of the ancients, something spread evenly at creation through all the universe, but prone now to accrete, under specific conditions, around certain individuals and their careers. Rez, in Kathy’s view, had simply lasted far too long. Monstrously long. He was affecting the unity of her theory. He was defying the proper order of the food chain. Perhaps there was nothing big enough to eat him, not even Slitscan. And while Lo/Rez, the band, still extruded product on an annoyingly regular basis, in a variety of media, their singer stubbornly refused to destroy himself, murder someone, become active in politics, admit to an interesting substance-abuse problem or an arcane sexual addiction—indeed to do anything at all worthy of an opening segment on Slitscan. He glimmered, dully perhaps, but steadily, just beyond Kathy Torrance’s reach. Which was, Laney had always assumed, the real reason for her hating him so.

“Well,” Laney said, after some thought, and feeling a peculiar compulsion to attempt a truthful answer, “I remember buying their first album. When it came out.”

“Title?” The one-eared man grew graver still.

“ ‘Lo Rez Skyline’,” Laney said, grateful for whatever minute synaptic event had allowed the recall. “But I couldn’t tell you how many they’ve put out since.”

“Twenty-six, not counting compilations,” said Mr. Yamazaki, straightening his glasses.

Laney felt the pills he’d taken, the ones that were supposed to cushion the jet lag, drop out from under him like some kind of rotten pharmacological scaffolding. The walls of the Trial seemed to grow closer.

“If you aren’t going to tell me what this is about,” he said to the one-eared man, “I’m going back to the hotel. I’m tired.”

“Keith Alan Blackwell,” extending his hand. Laney allowed his own to be taken and briefly shaken. The man’s palm felt like a piece of athletic equipment. “ ‘Keithy’. We’ll have a few drinks and a little chat.”

“First you tell me whether or not you’re from Paragon-Asia,” Laney suggested.

“Firm in question’s a couple of lines of code in a machine in a backroom in Lygon Street,” Blackwell said. “A dummy, but you could say it’s our dummy, if that makes you feel better.”

“I’m not sure it does,” Laney said. “You fly me over to interview for a job, now you’re telling me the company I’m supposed to be interviewing for doesn’t exist.”

“It exists,” said Keith Alan Blackwell. “It’s on the machine in Lygon Street.”

A waitress arrived. She wore a shapeless gray cotton boilersuit and cosmetic bruises.

“Big draft. Kirin. Cold one. What’s yours, Laney?”

“Iced coffee.”

“Coke Lite, please,” said the one who’d introduced himself as Yamazaki.

“Fine,” said the earless Blackwell, glumly, as the waitress vanished into the gloom.