Laney was not, he was careful to point out, a voyeur. He had a peculiar knack with data-collection architectures, and a medically documented concentration-deficit that he could toggle, under certain conditions, into a state of pathological hyperfocus. This made him, he continued over lattes in a Roppongi branch of Amos ‘n’ Andes, an extremely good researcher. (He made no mention of the Federal Orphanage in Gainesville, nor of any attempts that might have been made there to cure his concentration-deficit. The 5-SB trials or any of that.)

The relevant data, in terms of his current employability, was that he was an intuitive fisher of patterns of information: of the sort of signature a particular individual inadvertently created in the net as he or she went about the mundane yet endlessly multiplex business of life in a digital society. Laney’s concentration-deficit, too slight to register on some scales, made him a natural channel-zapper, shifting from program to program, from database to database, from platform to platform, in a way that was, well, intuitive.

And that was the catch, really, when it came to finding employment: Laney was the equivalent of a dowser, a cybernetic water-witch. He couldn’t explain how he did what he did. He just didn’t know.

He’d come to Slitscan from DatAmerica, where he’d been a research assistant on a project code named TIDAL. It said something about the corporate culture of DatAmerica that Laney had never been able to discover whether or not TIDAL was an acronym, or (even remotely) what TIDAL was about. He’d spent his time skimming vast floes of undifferentiated data, looking for “nodal points” he’d been trained to recognize by a team of French scientists who were all keen tennis players, and none of whom had had any interest in explaining these nodal points to Laney, who came to feel that he served as a kind of native guide. Whatever the Frenchmen were after, he was there to scare it up for them. And it beat Gainesville, no contest. Until TIDAL, whatever it was, had been cancelled, and there didn’t seem to be anything else for Laney to do at DatAmerica. The Frenchmen were gone, and when Laney tried to talk to other researchers about what they’d been doing, they looked at him as though they thought he was crazy.

When he’d gone to interview for Slitscan, the interviewer had been Kathy Torrance. He’d had no way of knowing that she was a department head, or that she would soon be his boss. He told her the truth about himself. Most of it, anyway.

She was the palest woman Laney had ever seen. Pale to the point of translucence. (Later he’d learned this had a lot to do with cosmetics, and in particular a British line that boasted of peculiar light-bending properties.)

“Do you always wear Malaysian imitations of Brooks Brothers blue oxford button-downs, Mr. Laney?”

Laney had looked down at his shirt, or tried to. “Malaysia?”

“The stitch-count’s dead on, but they still haven’t mastered the thread-tension.”

“Oh.”

“Never mind. A little prototypic nerd chic could actually lend a certain frisson, around here. You could lose the tie, though. Definitely lose the tie. And keep a collection of felt-tipped pens in your pocket. Unchewed, please. Plus one of those fat flat highliners, in a really nasty fluorescent shade.”

“Are you joking?”

“Probably, Mr. Laney. May I call you Colin?”

“Yes..

She never did call him “Colin,” then or ever. “You’ll find that humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool. You’ll find the type that’s most viable here is fairly oblique.”

“How do you mean, Ms. Torrance?”

“Kathy. I mean difficult to quote effectively in a memo. Or a court of law.”

Yamazaki was a good listener. He’d blink, swallow, nod, fiddle with the top button of his plaid shirt, whatever, all of it managing to somehow convey that he was getting it, the drift of Laney’s story.

Keith Alan Blackwell was something else. He sat there inert as a bale of beef, utterly motionless except when he’d raise his left hand and squeeze and twiddle the lobe-stump that was all that remained of his left ear. He did this without hesitation or embarrassment, and Laney formed the impression that it was affording him some kind of relief. The scar tissue reddened slightly under Blackwell’s ministrations.

Laney sat on an upholstered bench, his back to the wall. Yamazaki and Blackwell faced him across the narrow table. Behind them, over the uniformly black-haired heads of late-night Roppongi coffee-drinkers, the holographic features of the chain’s namesake floated in front of a lurid sunset vista of snow-capped Andean peaks. The lips of the ’toon-Amos were like inflated red rubber sausages, a racial parody that would’ve earned the place a firebombing anywhere in the L.A. basin. He was holding up a steaming coffee cup, white and smoothly iconic, in a big, white-gloved, three-fingered Disney hand.

Yamazaki coughed, delicately. “You are telling us, please, about your experiences at Slitscan?”

Kathy Torrance began by offering Laney a chance to net-surf, Slitscan style.

She checked a pair of computers out of the Cage, shooed four employees from an SBU, invited Laney in, and closed the door. Chairs, a round table, a large softboard on the wall. He watched as she jacked the computers into dataports and called up identical images of a longhaired dirty-blond guy in his mid-twenties. Goatee and a gold earring. The face meant nothing to Laney. It might have been a face he’d passed on the street an hour before, the face of a minor player in daytime soap, or the face of someone whose freezer had recently been discovered to be packed with his victims’ fingers.

“Clinton Hillman,” Kathy Torrance said. “Hairdresser, sushi chef, music journalist, extra in mid-budget hardcore. This headshot’s tweaked, of course.” She tapped keys, detweaking it. Clint Hillman’s eyes and chin, on her screen, grew several clicks smaller. “Probably did it himself. With a professional job, there’d be nothing to work back from.”

“He acts in porno?” Laney felt obscurely sorry for Hillman, who looked lost and vulnerable without his chin.

“It isn’t the size of his chin they’re interested in,” Kathy said. “It’s mainly motion-capture, in porno. Extreme close. They’re all body-doubles. Map on better faces in post. But somebody’s still gotta get down in the trenches and bump uglies, right?”

Laney shot her a sideways look. “If you say so.”

She handed Laney an industrial-strength pair of rubberized Thomson eyephones. “Do him.”

“Do?”

“Him. Go for those nodal points you’ve been telling me about. The headshot’s a gateway to everything we’ve got on him. Whole gigs of sheer boredom. Data like a sea of tapioca, Laney. An endless vanilla plane. He’s boring as the day is long, and the day is long. Do it. Make my day. Do it and you’ve got yourself a job.”

Laney looked at the tweaked Hillman on his screen. “You haven’t told me what I’m looking for.”

“Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan’s audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”