Beside the water bag lay her schoolwork, represented by a three-ring binder suffering the indignities of artificial bit-rot, its wire-frame cover festered with digital mung. She’d have to reformat that before she started her new school, she reminded herself. Too juvenile.

Her Lo/Rez collection, albums, compilations and bootlegs, were displayed as the original cased disks. These were stacked up, as casually as possible, beside the archival material she’d managed to assemble since being accepted into the Seattle chapter. This looked, thanks to a fortuitous file-swap with a member in Sweden, like a lithographed tin lunch box, Rez and Lo peering stunned and fuzzy-eyed from its flat, rectangular lid. The Swedish fan had scanned the artwork from the five printed surfaces of the original, then mapped it over wireframe. The original was probably Nepalese, definitely unlicensed, and Chia appreciated the reverse cachet. Zona Rosa coveted a copy, but so far all she’d offered were a set of cheesy tv spots for the fifth Mexico Dome concert. They weren’t nearly cheesy enough, and Chia wasn’t prepared to swap. There was a shadowy Brazilian tour documentary supposed to have been made by a public-access subsidiary of Globo. Chia wanted that, and Mexico was the same direction as Brazil.

She ran a finger down the stacked disks, her hand wireframed, the finger tipped with quivering mercury, and thought about the Rumor. There had been rumors before, there were rumors now, there would always be rumors. There had been the rumor about Lo and that Danish model, that they were going to get married, and that had probably been true, even though they never did. And there were always rumors about Rez and different people. But that was people. The Danish model was people, as much as Chia thought she was a snotbag. The Rumor was something else.

What, exactly, she was on her way to Tokyo to find out.

She selected Lo Rez Skyline.

The virtual Venice her father had sent for her thirteenth birthday looked like an old dusty book with leather covers, the smooth brown leather scuffed in places into a fine suede, the digital equivalent of washing denim in a machine full of golf balls. It lay beside the featureless, textureless gray file that was her copy of the divorce decree and the custody agreement.

She pulled the Venice toward her, opened it. The fish flickered out of phase, her system launching a subroutine.

Venice decompressed.

The Piazza in midwinter monochrome, its facades texturemapped in marble, porphyry, polished granite, jasper, alabaster (the rich mineral names scrolling at will in the menu of peripheral vision). This city of winged lions and golden horses. This default hour of gray and perpetual dawn.

She could be alone here, or visit with the Music Master.

Her father, phoning from Singapore to wish her a happy birthday, had told her that Hitler, during his first and only visit, had slipped away to range the streets alone, in these same small hours, mad perhaps, and trotting like a dog.

Chia, who had only a vague idea who Hitler might have been, and that mainly from references in songs, understood the urge. The stones of the Piazza flowed beneath her like silk, as she raised a silvered finger and sped into the maze of bridges, water, arches, walls.

She had no idea what this place was meant to mean, the how or why of it, but it fit so perfectly into itself and the space it occupied, water and stone slotting faultlessly into the mysterious whole.

The gnarliest piece of software ever, and here came the opening chords of “Positron Premonition.”

Clinton Emory Hillman, twenty-five: hairdresser, sushi chef, music journalist, porno extra, reliable purveyor of proscribed fetal tissue cultures to three of the more endomorphic members of the decidedly meshbacked Dukes of Nuke ’Em, whose “Gulf War Baby” was eighteen with a bullet on the Billboard chart, in heavy rotation on I (heart) America, and had already been the subject of diplomatic protests from several Islamic states.

Kathy Torrance looked as though she might be prepared to be pleased. “And the fetal tissue, Laney?”

“Well,” Laney said, putting the ’phones down beside the computer, “I think that might be the good part.”

“Why?”

“It has to be Iraqi. They make a point of insisting on that. They won’t shoot up any other kind.”

“You’re hired.”

“I am?”

“You must have correlated the calls to Ventura with the parking charges from the garage in the Beverly Center. Although that running gag about ‘Gulf War babies’ would’ve been hard to miss.”

“Wait a minute,” Laney said. “You knew.”

“It’s the top segment on Wednesday’s show.” She closed the computer without bothering to turn off Clint Hillman’s detweaked chin. “But now I’ve had a chance to watch you work, Laney. You’re a natural. I could almost believe there might actually be something to that nodal point bullshit. Some of your moves made no logical sense whatever, but I’ve just watched you hone in, cold, on something it took three experienced researchers a month to excavate. You did it in just under half an hour.”

“Some of that was illegal,” Laney said. “You’re tied into parts of DatAmerican that you aren’t supposed to be.”

“Do you know what a nondisclosure agreement is, Laney?”

Yamazaki looked up from his notebook. “Very good,” he said, probably to Blackwell. “This is very good.”

Blackwell shifted his weight, the chair’s polycarbon frame creaking faintly in protest. “But he didn’t last there, did he?”

“A little over six months,” Laney said.

Six months could be a very long time, at Slitscan.

He used most of his first month’s salary to lease a micro-batchelor in a retrofitted parking structure on Broadway Avenue, Santa Monica. He bought shirts he thought were more like the ones people wore at Slitscan, and kept his Malaysian button-downs to sleep in. He bought an expensive pair of sunglasses and made sure he never displayed as much as a single felt-pen in his shirt pocket.

Life at Slitscan had a certain focused quality. Laney’s colleagues limited themselves to a particular bandwidth of emotion. A certain kind of humor, as Kathy had said, was highly valued, but there was remarkably little laughter. The expected response was eye contact, a nod, the edge of a smile. Lives were destroyed here, and sometimes re-created, careers crushed or made anew in guises surreal and unexpected. Because Slitscan’s business was the ritual letting of blood, and the blood it let was an alchemical fluid: celebrity in its rawest, purest form.

Laney’s ability to locate key data in apparently random wastes of incidental information earned him the envy and grudging admiration of more experienced researchers. He became Kathy’s favorite, and was almost pleased when he discovered that a rumor had spread that they were having an affair.

They weren’t—except for that one time at her place in Sherman Oaks, and that hadn’t been a good idea. Nothing either of them wanted to repeat.

But Laney was still narrowing down, getting focused, pushing the envelope of whatever it was that manifested as this talent, his touch. And Kathy liked that. With his eyephones on and Slitscan’s dedicated landline feeding him the bleak reaches of DatAmerica, he felt increasingly at home. He went where Kathy suggested he go. He found the nodal points.

Sometimes, falling asleep in Santa Monica, he wondered vaguely if there might be a larger system, a field of greater perspective. Perhaps the whole of DatAmerica possessed its own nodal points, info-faults that might be followed down to some other kind of truth, another mode of knowing, deep within gray shoals of information. But only if there were someone there to pose the right question. He had no idea at all what that question might be, if indeed there were one, but he somehow doubted it would ever be posed from an SBU at Slitscan.