Bridge trilogy

"A faded old picture in a fat gilt frame. Rydell went over for a closer look. A horse pulling a kind of two-wheeled wagon-thing, just a little seat there, with a bearded man in a hat like Abe Lincoln. “Currier & Ives,” it said. Rydell wondered which one was the horse."

"Warbaby wiped the glasses again and put them back on. “It’s a virtual light display,” Freddie said, “Anything can be digitized, you can see it there.” “Telepresence,” Rydell said. “Naw,” Freddie said, “that’s light. That’s photons coming out and hitting on your eye. This doesn’t work like that. Mr. Warbaby walks around and looks at stuff, he can see the data-feed at the same time. You put those glasses on a man doesn’t have eyes, optic nerve’s okay, he can see the input. That’s why they built the first ones. For blind people.”"

"There’s only but two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they’re one kind. We’re the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore."

"“You got eyes” she said, and yawned in the middle of it, “like two piss-holes in a snowbank.”"

"When Rydell clicked into the Republic of Desire’s eyephone-space…he went from looking at the phone company’s logo to being right out there on that glassy plain…And then these figures were there, bigger than skyscrapers, bigger than anything, their chests about even with the edges of the plain. “Welcome to the Republic” said the dinosaur, its voice the voice of some beautiful woman. “You don’t have a third the bandwidth you need,” the dreadlocked mountain said, its voice about what you’d expect from a mountain. “You’re in K-tel space.”"

"And then they were fading, breaking up into those paisley fractal things, and Rydell knew he was losing them. “Wait. Any of you live in San Francisco?” The dinosaur came flickering back. “What if we did?” “Well, do you like it?…Because it’s all going to change. They’re going to do it like they’re doing Tokyo.” “Tokyo? Who told you that?” Now the mountain was back, too. “There’s not a lot of slack, for us, in Tokyo, now…” “Tell us” the dinosaur said. So Rydell did."

"His sister had come over here in 1994, and then he'd come himself, to get away from all the trouble over there. Never regretted it. Said this was a fine country except they let in too many immigrants."

"Somewhere in Utah a dish was turning, targeted out toward the coast, toward the California sky…And then these things came through a long gap in the glass, just south of where the handball-courts were. Rydell hadn’t ever seen anything like them…helicopters, but too small to carry anybody…French Aérospatiale gun-platforms…under the control of the Emergency Command Control Communications System. “Damn” Rydell said, looking up at the future of armed response. “POLICE EMERGENCY. REMAIN CALM.” And mostly they did, all those faces; faces of the residents of this high country, their jawlines firm, their soft clothes fluttering in the dancing downdrafts. The Russians’ mouths were open… “ON YOUR FACES. NOW. OR WE FIRE.” But the residents, slender and mainly blond, stood unmoved, watching, with racquets in their hands…their eyes mildly curious and curiously hard."

"So I wrote a novel called Virtual Light, which was set in 2006, which was then the very near future, and followed it with two more novels, each set a few imaginary years later, in what was really my take on the 1990s. It didn’t seem to make any difference. Lots of people assumed I was still writing about the capital-F future."

"“You haven’t told me what I’m looking for.” “Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan’s audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”"

"The rich and the famous, Kathy had once said, were seldom that way by accident. It was possible to be one or the other, but very seldom, accidentally, to be both."

"“But do they really have singers who don’t exist?” “The idol-singers,” he said. “The idoru. Some of them are enormously popular.” “Do people kill themselves over them?” “I don’t know. They could do, I suppose.” “Do people marry them?”"

"“What did Blackwell mean, about Rez wanting to marry a Japanese girl who isn’t real?” “Rei Toei. She is a personality-construct, a congeries of software agents, the creation of information-designers. She is akin to what I believe they call a ‘synthespian,’ in Hollywood.” Laney closed his eyes, opened them. “Then how can he marry her?”"

"Masahiko’s room…was a boy-nightmare, the sort of environment Chia knew from the brothers of friends, its floor and ledgelike bed long vanished beneath unwashed clothes, ramen-wrappers, Japanese magazines with wrinkled covers…It smelled faintly of boy, of ramen, and of coffee. Though he seemed very clean, now that she was this close, and she had a vague idea that Japanese people generally were. Didn’t they love to bathe?"

"Masahiko pointed along the street, past a fast-food franchise called California Reich, its trademark a stylized stainless-steel palm tree against one of those twisted-cross things like the meshbacks had drawn on their hands in her class on European history…Then two of them had gotten into a fight over which way you were supposed to draw the twisted parts on the cross…and one of them had zapped the other with a stungun…and the teacher had to call the police."

"“Okay,” Arleigh said.“What are the nodal points?” Laney looked at the bubbles on the surface of his beer. “It’s like seeing things in clouds, except the things you see are really there.” “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.”"