Lancey noticed something then that he knew from his encounters with celebs at Slitscan: that binary flicker in his mind between image and reality, between the mediated face and the face there in front of you. He'd noticed how it always seemed to speed up, that alternation, until the two somehow merged, the resulting composite becoming your new idea of the person.
It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convulsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. There would be no view of the ruptured city. As the reconstruction began around it, it had already become a benchmark in Tokyo's psychic history, an open secret, an urban legend.
A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene [of the Western World exclusive club], had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya's idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine...).
'Real estate was baroque, here, before the quake; now it's more like occult.'
'But you know [Rez]? You knew him before [this idoru thing hit]?'
'He's the navel of the world I work in, Laney. That has a way of making people unknowable.'
'[T]heir secret was that they'd never cleaned the kettle. In fact, they never stopped cooking the soup. It was the same seafood soup they had been selling for fifty years, but it was never the same, because they added fresh ingredients every day, depending on what was available. [Lo of Rez/Lo] said that's what his career as a musician felt like, and he liked that about it.'
'What *are* the nodal points?'
'It's like seeing things in clouds. Except the things you see are really there.'
She put her sake down. 'Yamazaki promised me you weren't crazy.'
'It's not crazy. It's something to do with how I process low-level, broad-spectrum input. Something to do with pattern recognition
...If I enter a specific area, I don't get any sense of how the data there relates to the rest of it, see? It's got to be *relational. *'
Wonderfully conceptual associative broaching of topics, with the apt atmosphere of a chewing-gum-themed unpopular bar. I haven't read this in over a year since I moved from Baltimore, but I have confirmation this is definitely a city/nightlife/bar/jazz club/rainy day-with-whiskey kind of atmospheric read.
so-soNext up in The Bridge Trilogy - Idoru. I feel like I can see seeds of what eventually became The Peripheral here. #readinglog #sciencefiction #cyberpunk
Idoru | 
pick