William Gibson - All tomorrow's parties

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All Tomorrow's Parties
By
William Gibson
1. CARDBOARD CITY
THROUGH this evenings tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid hurrying black shoes, furled
umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the stations airless heart, comes
Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but
moderately successful marine species.
Evolved to cope with jostling elbows, oversized Ginza shopping bags, ruthless briefcases, Yamazaki
and his small burden of information go down into the neon depths. Toward this tributary of
relative quiet, a tiled corridor connecting parallel escalators.
Central columns, sheathed in green ceramic, support a ceiling pocked with dust-furred ventilators,
smoke detectors, speakers. Behind the columns, against the far wall, derelict shipping cartons
huddle in a ragged train, improvised shelters constructed by the city's homeless. Yamazaki halts,
and in that moment all the oceanic clatter of commuting feet washes in, no longer held back by his
sense of mission, and he deeply and sincerely wishes he were elsewhere.
He winces, violently, as a fashionable young matron, features swathed in Chanel micropore, rolls
over his toes with an expensive three-wheeled stroller. Blurting a convulsive apology, Yamazaki
glimpses the infant passenger through flexible curtains of some pink-tinted plastic, the glow of a
video display winking as its mother trundles determinedly away.
Yamazaki sighs, unheard, and limps toward the cardboard shelters. He wonders briefly what the
passing commuters will think, to see him enter the carton fifth from the left. It is scarcely the
height of his chest, longer than the others, vaguely coffin-like, a flap of thumb-smudged white
corrugate serving as its door.
Perhaps the~~ will not see him, he thinks. Just as he himself has never seen anyone enter or exit
one of these tidy hovels. It is as though their inhabitants are rendered invisible in the
transaction that allows such structures to exist in the context of the station. lie is a student
of
existential sociology, and such transactions have been his particular con-
cern.
And now he hesitates, fighting the urge to remove his shoes and place them beside the rather
greasy-looking pair of yellow plastic sandals arranged beside the entrance flap on a carefully
folded sheet of Parco gift wrap. No, he thinks, imagining himself waylaid within, struggling with
faceless enemies in a labyrinth of cardboard. Best he not be shoeless.
Sighing again, he drops to his knees, the notebook clutched in both hands. He kneels for an
instant, hearing the hurrying feet of those who pass behind him. Then he places the notebook on
the ceramic tile of the station's floor and shoves it forward, beneath the corrugate flap, and
follows it on his hands and knees.
He desperately hopes that he has found the right carton.
He freezes there in unexpected light and heat. A single halogen fixture floods the tiny room with
the frequency of desert sunlight. Unventilated, it heats the space like a reptile's cage.
"Come in," says the old man, in Japanese. "Don't leave your ass hanging out that way." He is naked
except for a sort of breechclout twisted from what may once have been a red T-shirt. He is seated,
cross-legged, on a ragged, paint-flecked tatami mat. He holds a brightly colored toy figure in one
hand, a slender brush in the other. Yamazaki sees that the thing is a model of some kind, a robot
or military exoskeleton. It glitters in the sun-bright light, blue and red and silver. Small tools
are spread on the tatami: a razor knife, a sprue cutter, curls of emery paper.
The old man is very thin, clean-shaven but in need of a haircut. Wisps of gray hair hang on either
side of his face, and his mouth is set in what looks to be a permanent scowl of disapproval. He
wears glasses with heavy black plastic frames and archaically thick lenses. The lenses catch the
light.
Yamazaki creeps obediently into the carton, feeling the door flap drop shut behind him. On hands
and knees, he resists the urge to try to bow.
"He's waiting," the old man says, his brush tip poised above the figure in his hand. "In there."
Moving only his head.
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Yamazaki sees that the carton has been reinforced with mailing tubes, a system that echoes the
traditional post-and-beam architecture of Japan, the tubes lashed together with lengths of
salvaged poly-ribbon. There are too many objects here, in this tiny space. Towels and blankets and
cooking pots on cardboard shelves. Books. A small television.
"In there?" Yamazaki indicates what he takes to be another door, like the entrance to a hutch,
curtained with a soiled square of melon-yellow, foam-cored blanket, the sort of blanket one finds
in a capsule hotel. But the brush tip dips to touch the model, and the old man is lost in the
concentration this requires, soYamazaki shuffles on hands and knees across the absurdly tiny space
and draws the section of blanket aside. Darkness.
"Laney-San?"
What seems to be a crumpled sleeping bag. He smells sickness- "Yeah?" A croak. "In here."
Drawing a deep breath, Yamazaki crawls in, pushing his notebook before him. When the melon-yellow
blanket falls across the entrance, brightness glows through the synthetic fabric and the thin foam
core, like tropical sunlight seen from deep within some coral grotto.
"Laney?"
The American groans. Seems to turn, or sit up. Yamazaki can't see. Something covers Laney's eyes.
Red wink of a diode. Cables. Faint gleam of the interface, reflected in a thin line against
Laney's sweat-slick cheekbone.
"I'm deep in, now," Laney says, and coughs.
"Deep in what?"
"They didn't follow you, did they?"
"I don't think so."
"I could tell if they had."
Yamazaki feels sweat run suddenly from both his armpits, coursing down across his ribs. He forces
himself to breathe. The air here is foul, thick. He thinks of the seventeen known strains of multi-
drug-resistant tuberculosis
Laney draws a ragged breath. "But they aren't looking for me, are they?"
3
I
"No," Yamazaki says, "they are looking for her."
"They won't find her," Laney says. "Not here. Not anywhere. Not now.',
"Why did you run away, Laney?"
"The syndrome," Laney says and coughs again, and Yamazaki feels the smooth, deep shudder of an
incoming maglev, somewhere deeper in the station, not mechanical vibration but a vast pistoning of
displaced air. "It finally kicked in. The 5-SB. The stalker effect." Yamazaki hears feet hurrying
by, perhaps an arm's length away, behind the cardboard wall.
"It makes you cough?" Yamazaki blinks, making his new contact lenses swim uncomfortably.
"No," Laney says and coughs into his pale and upraised hand. "Some bug. They all have it, down
here."
"I was worried when you vanished. They began to look for you, but when she was gone-"
"The shit really hit the fan."
"Shit?"
Laney reaches up and removes the bulky, old-fashioned eyephones. Yamazaki cannot see what outputs
to them, but the shifting light from the display reveals Laney's hollowed eyes. "It's all going to
change, Yamazaki. We're coming up on the mother of all nodal points. I can see it, now. It's all
going to change."
"I don't understand."
"Know what the joke is? It didn't change when they thought it would. Millennium was a Christian
holiday. I've been looking at history, Yamazaki. I can see the nodal points in history. Last time
we had one like this was 1911."
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"What happened in 1911?"
"Everything changed."
"How?"
"It just did. That's how it works. I can see it now"
"Laney," Yamazaki says, "when you told me about the stalker effect, you said that the victims, the
test subjects, became obsessed with one particular media figure."
"Yes."
"And you are obsessed with her?"
Laney stares at him, eyes lit by a backwash of data. "No. Not with her. Guy named Harwood. Cody
Harwood. They're coming together, though. In San Francisco. And someone else. Leaves a sort of
negative trace; you have to infer everything from the way he's not there.
"Why did you ask me here, Laney? This is a terrible place. Do you wish me to help you to escape?"
Yamazaki is thinking of the blades of the Swiss Army knife in his pocket. One of them is serrated;
he could easily cut his way out through the wall. Yet the psychological space is powerful, very
powerful, and overwhelms him. He feels very far from Shinjuku, from Tokyo, from anything. He
smells Laney's sweat. "You are not well."
"Rydell," Laney says, replacing the eyephones. "That rent-a-cop from the Chateau. The one you
knew. The one who told me about you, back in LA."
"Yes?"
"I need a man on the ground, in San Francisco. I've managed to move some money. I don't think they
can trace it. I dcked with DatArnerica's banking sector. Find Rydell and tell him he can have it
as a retainer."
"To do what?"
Laney shakes his head. The cables on the eyephones move in the dark like snakes. "He has to be
there, is all. Something's coming down. Everything's changing."
"Laney, you are sick, Let me take you-"
"Back to the island? There's nothing there. Never will be, now she's gone."
And Yamazaki knows this is true.
"Where's Rez?" Laney asks.
"He mounted a tour of the Kombinat states, when he decided she was gone."
Laney nods thoughtfully, the eyephones bobbing mantis-like in the dark. "Get Rydell, Yamazaki.
I'll tell you how he can get the money"
5
"But why?"
"Because he's part of it. Part of the node."
LATER Yamazaki stands, staring up at the towers of Shinjuku, the walls of animated light, sign and
signifier twisting toward the sky in the unending ritual of commerce, of desire. Vast faces fill
the screens, icons of a beauty at once terrible and banal.
Somewhere below his feet, Laney huddles and coughs in his cardboard shelter, all of DatAmerica
pressing steadily into his eyes. Laney is his friend, and his friend is unwell. The American's
peculiar talents with data are the result of experimental trials, in a federal orphanage in
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Florida, of a substance known as 5-SB. Yamazaki has seen what Laney can do with data, and what
data can do to Laney.
He has no wish to see it again.
As he lowers his eyes from the walls of light, the mediated faces, he feels his contacts move,
changing as they monitor his depth of focus. This still unnerves him.
Not far from the station, down a side street bright as day, he finds the sort of kiosk that sells
anonymous debit cards. He purchases one. At another kiosk, he uses it to buy a disposable phone
good for a total of thirty minutes, Tokyo-LA.
He asks his notebook for Rydell's number.
0
2. Lucky Dragon
'HEROIN." declared Durius Walker, Rydell's colleague in security at the Lucky Dragon on Sunset.
"It's the opiate of the masses."
Durius had finished sweeping up. He held the big industrial dustpan carefully, headed for the
inbuilt hospital-style sharps container, the one with the barbed biohazard symbol. That was where
they put the needles, when they found them.
They averaged five or six a week. Rydell had never actually caught anyone shooting anything up, in
the store, although he wouldn't have put it past them. It just seemed like people dropped used
needles on the floor, usually back by the cat food. You could find other things, sweeping up in
the Lucky Dragon: pills, foreign coins, hospital identification bracelets, crumpled paper money
from countries that still used it. Not that you wanted to go poking around in that dustpan. When
Rydell swept up, he wore the same Kevlar gloves that Durius was wearing now, and latex underneath
that.
He supposed Durius was right though, and it made you wonder: all the new substances around to
abuse, but people didn't forget the ones that had been around forever. Make cigarettes illegal,
say, and people found a way to keep smoking. The Lucky Dragon wasn't allowed to sell rolling
papers, but they did a brisk trade in Mexican hair-curler papers that worked just as well. The
most popular brand was called Biggerhair, and Rydell wondered if anyone had ever actually used any
to curl their hair. And how did you curl your hair with little rectangles of tissue paper anyway?
"Ten minutes to," Durius said over his shoulder. "You wanna do the curb check?"
At four o'clock, one of them got to take a ten-minute break, out back. If Rydell did the curb
check, it meant he got to take his break first, then let Durius take one. The curb check was
something that Lucky Dragon's parent corporation, back in Singapore, had instituted on the advice
of an in-house team of American cultural anthropologists. Mr.
7
I
Park, the night manager, had explained this to Rydell, ticking off points on his notebook. He'd
tapped each paragraph on the screen for emphasis, sounding thoroughly bored with the whole thing,
hut Rydell had supposed it was part of the job, and Mr. Park was a definite stickler. "'In order
to demonstrate Lucky Dragon's concern with neighborhood safety, security personnel will patrol
curb in front of location on a nightly basis.'" Rydell had nodded. "You not out of store too
long," Mr. Park added, by way of clarification. "Five minute. Just before you take break." Pause.
Tap. "Lucky Dragon security presence will be high-profile, friendly, sensitive to local culture.'"
"What's that mean?"
"Anybody sleeping, you make them move. Friendly way. Hooker working there, you say hello, tell
joke, make her move."
"I'm scared of those old girls," Rydell said, deadpan. "Christmastime, they dress up like Santa's
elves."
"No hooker in front of Lucky Dragon."
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"'Sensitive to local culture'?"
"Tell joke. Hooker like joke."
"Maybe in Singapore," Durius had said, when Rydell had recounted Park's instructions.
"He's not from Singapore," Rydell had said. "He's from Korea."
"So basically they want us to show ourselves, clear the sidewalk back a few yards, be friendly and
sensitive?"
"And tell joke."
Durius squinted. "You know what kinda people hang in front of a convenience store on Sunset, four
in the morning? Kids on dancer, tweaked off their dimes, hallucinating monster movies. Guess who
gets to be the monster? Plus there's your more mature sociopaths; older, more complicated,
polypharmic .
"Say what?"
"Mix their shit," Durius said. "Get lateral."
"Gotta be done. Man says."
Durius looked at Rydell. "You first." He was from Compton, and the only person Rydell knew who had
actually been born in Los Angeles.
"You're bigger."
8
"Size ain't everything."
"Sure," Rydell had said.
ALL that summer Rydell and Durius had been night security at the Lucky Dragon, a purpose-built
module that had been coptered into this former car-rental lot on the Strip. Before that, Rydell
had been night security at the Chateau, just up the Street, and before that he'd driven a wagon
for IntenSecure. Still farther back, briefly and he tried not to think about it too often, he'd
been a police officer in Knoxville, Tennessee. Somewhere in there, twice, he'd almost made the cut
for Coiis in Trouble, a show he'd grown up on but now managed never to watch.
Working nights at the Lucky Dragon was more interesting than Rydell would have imagined. Durius
said that was because it was the only place around, for a mile or so, that sold anything that
anyone actually needed, on a regular basis or otherwise. Microwave noodles, diagnostic kits for
most STDs, toothpaste, disposable anything, Net access, gum, bottled water. . . There were Lucky
Dragons all over America, all over the world for that matter, and to prove it you had your
trademark Lucky Dragon Global Interactive Video Column outside. You had to pass it entering and
leaving the store, so you'd see whichever dozen Lucky Dragons the Sunset franchise happened to be
linked with at that particular moment: Paris or Houston or Brazzaville, wherever. These were
shuffled, every three minutes, for the practical reason that it had been determined that if the
maximum viewing time was any more, kids in the world's duller suburbs would try to win bets by
having sex on camera. As it was, you got a certain amount of mooning and flashing. Or, still more
common, like this shit-faced guy in downtown Prague, as Rydell made his exit to do the curb check,
displaying the universal finger.
"Same here," Rydell said to this unknown Czech, hitching up the neon-pink Lucky Dragon fanny pack
he was contractually obligated to wear on duty. He didn't mind that though, even if it did look
like shit: it was bulletproof, with a pull-up Kevlar baby bib to fasten around your neck if the
going got rough. A severely lateral customer with a ceramic
9
switchblade had tried to stab Rydell through the Lucky Dragon logo his second week on the job, and
Rydell had sort of bonded with the thing after that.
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