Read Online Spook Country by William Gibson - Free Book Online

floor had been marked out in what she guessed were two-meter grid squares, loosely drawn in some white powder delivered by one of those spreaders they use on athletic fields. She could see one of these, in fact, a forest-green uniwheeled hopper, propped against the far wall. This grid didn’t seem to be perfectly aligned with whatever grid system the city and this building were aligned with, and she made a note to ask about that. In the illuminated area stood two twenty-foot folding tables, gray, attended by a scattering of Aeron chairs and by carts loaded with PCs. It looked to her like workspace for two dozen people, though there didn’t seem to be anyone here but this big-nosed Bobby.
    She turned back to him. He was wearing an electrically green Lacoste golf shirt, narrow white jeans, and a pair of rubber-soled black canvas sneakers with peculiarly long, sharply pointed toes. He might be thirty, she decided, but not much older. She thought he looked as though his clothes were cleaner than he was; there was still a vertical crease down either side of the front of the knit cotton shirt, the white jeans were spotless, but Bobby himself looked in need of a shower. “Sorry to turn up unannounced,” she said, “but I wanted to meet you.”
    “Hollis Henry.” He had his hands in the front pockets of the white jeans. It looked as though it took work, getting hands into those pockets.
    “Yes, I am,” she said.
    “Why’d you bring her here, Alberto?” Bobby wasn’t happy.
    “I knew you’d want to meet her.” Alberto walked over to one of the gray tables and put down his laptop and visor rig.
    Beyond the table, something like the shape a child draws to represent a rocket ship had been roughly outlined on the floor in Safety Orange gaffer tape. If she was guessing the size of the grid squares correctly, the pointed shape was a good fifteen meters long. Within it, the white gridlines had been rubbed out.
    “Have you got Archie up?” Alberto was looking in the direction of the orange tape outline. “They animate the new skins yet?”
    Bobby pulled his hands from the pockets of his jeans and rubbed his face. “I can’t believe you did this. Turned up here with her.”
    “It’s Hollis Henry. How cool is that?”
    “I’ll leave,” she said.
    Bobby lowered his hands, tossed his forelock, and rolled his eyes to heaven. “Archie’s up. Maps are on.”
    “Hollis,” said Alberto, “check it.” He was holding what she took to be a VR visor of Bobby’s, one that looked nothing like anything you’d find at a garage sale. “Wireless.” She walked over to him, took it from him, and put it on. “You’re going to love this,” he assured her. “Bobby?”
    “On my one. Three…Two…”
    “Meet Archie,” said Alberto.
    Ten feet above the orange tape outline, the glossy, grayish-white form of a giant squid appeared, about ninety feet in total length, its tentacles undulating gracefully. “Architeuthis,” Bobby said. Its one visible eye was the size of an SUV tire. “Skins,” Bobby said.
    The squid’s every surface flooded with light, subcutaneous pixels sliding past in distorted video imagery, stylized kanji, wide eyes of anime characters. It was gorgeous, ridiculous. She laughed, delighted.
    “It’s for a Tokyo department store,” Alberto said. “Over a street, in Shinjuku. In the middle of all that neon.”
    “They’re already using this, for advertising?” She walked toward Archie, then under him. The wireless visor made a difference in the experience.
    “I have a show there, in November,” said Alberto.
    Yeah, she thought, looking up at the endless rush of imagery along Archie’s distal surface, River would fly, in Tokyo.

12. THE SOURCE
    M ilgrim dreamed he was naked in Brown’s room, while Brown lay sleeping.
    It wasn’t ordinary nakedness, because it involved an occult aura of preternaturally intense awareness, as though the wearer were a vampire in an Anne Rice novel, or a novice cocaine