Idoru by William Gibson Page B

videos, but he'd never actually tried to pay attention to one. Putting on the hotel's white terry robe, he told himself he'd better try. Yamazaki seemed capable of quizzing him on it later.
    Why did people make things like this? There was no narration, no apparent structure; some of the same fragments kept repeating throughout, at different speeds…
    In Los Angeles there were whole public-access channels devoted to things like this, and home-made talkshows hosted by naked Encino witches, who sat in front of big paintings of the Goddess they'd done in their garages. Except you could watch that. The logic of these cut-ups, he supposed, was that by making one you could somehow push back at the medium. Maybe it was supposed to be something like treading water, a simple repetitive human activity that temporarily provided at least an illusion of parity with the sea. But to Laney, who had spent many of his waking hours down in the deeper realms of data that underlay the worlds of media, it only looked hopeless. And tedious, too, although he supposed that that boredom was somehow meant to be harnessed, here, another way of pushing back.
    Why else would anyone have selected and edited all these bits of Lo and Rez, the Chinese guitarist and the half-Irish singer, saying stupid things in dozens of different television spots, most of them probably intended for translation? Greetings seemed to be a theme. “We're happy to be here in Vladivostok. We hear you've got a great new aquarium!” “We congratulate you on your free elections and your successful dengue-abatement campaign!” “We've always loved London!” “New York, you're… pragmatic! ”
    Laney explored the remains of his breakfast, finding a half-eaten slice of cold brown toast under a steel plate cover. There was an inch of coffee left in the pot. He didn't want to think about the call from Rydell or what it might mean. He'd thought he was done with Slitscan, done with the lawyers…
    “Singapore, you're beautiful!” Rez said, Lo chiming in with “Hell-o, Lion City!”
    He picked up the remote and hopefully tried the fast-forward. No. Mute? No. Yamazaki was having this stuff piped in for his benefit. He considered unplugging the console, but he was afraid they'd be able to tell.
    It was speeding up now, the cuts more frequent, the whole more content-free, a numbing blur. Rez's grin was starting to look sinister, something with an agenda of its own that jumped unchanged from one cut to the next.
    Suddenly it all slid away, into handheld shadow, highlights on rococo gilt. There was a clatter of glassware. The image had a peculiar flattened quality that he knew from Slitscan: the smallest lapel-cameras did that, the ones disguised as flecks of lint.
    A restaurant? Club? Someone seated opposite the camera, beyond a phalanx of green bottles. The darkness and the bandwidth of the tiny camera making the features impossible to read. Then Rez leaned forward, recognizable in the new depth of focus. He gestured toward the camera with a glass of red wine.
    “If we could ever once stop talking about the music, and the industry, and all the politics of that, I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.”
    Someone, a woman, said something in French. Laney guessed that she was the one wearing the camera.
    “Ease up, Rozzer. She doesn't understand half you're saying.” Laney sat forward. The voice had been Blackwell's.
    “Doesn't she?” Rez receded, out of focus. “Because if she did, I think I'd tell her about the loneliness of being misunderstood. Or is it the loneliness of being afraid to allow ourselves to be understood?”
    And the frame froze on the singer's blurred face. A date and time-stamp. Two years earlier. The word “Misunderstood” appeared.
    The phone rang.
    “Yeah?”
    “Blackwell says there is a window of