Free Pattern Recognition by William Gibson Page B

once worked for a very specialized consultancy, in Paris. Founded by a retired and very senior French intelligence type who’d done a lot of that sort of work on his government’s behalf, in Germany and the United States.”
    “She’s… a spy?”
    “‘Industrial espionage,’ though that’s sounding increasingly archaic,isn’t it? I suppose she may still know whom to call, to have certain things done, but I wouldn’t call her a spy. What interested me, though, was how that business seemed in some ways to be the inverse of ours.”
    “Of advertising?”
    “Yes. I want to make the public aware of something they don’t quite yet know that they know—or have them feel that way. Because they’ll move on that, do you understand? They’ll think they’ve thought of it first. It’s about transferring information, but at the same time about a certain lack of specificity.”
    Cayce tries to put this together with what she’s seen of Blue Ant campaigns. It makes a degree of sense.
    “I imagined,” he continues, “that the sort of business Dorotea had been involved in would be about absolutely specific information.”
    “And was it?”
    “Sometimes, yes, but just as often it was simply ‘black PR.’ Painting the competition with the ugly-brush. It wasn’t really very interesting.”
    “But you were considering her for a position?”
    “Yes, though not one she would have chosen for herself. But now we’ve made it clear we aren’t interested. If she thinks that you may get the position she wanted, she could be very angry.”
    What’s he trying to tell her? Should she tell him about the jacket, about Asian Sluts? No. She doesn’t trust him, not at all.
    Dorotea as corporate spook? Bigend as someone who’d be interested in someone like that? Or who claimed he’d been interested. Or claimed he wasn’t still interested. None of it might be true.
    “Well,” Bigend says, leaning slightly forward, “let’s hear it.”
    “Hear what?”
    “The kiss. What you think about it.”
    Cayce instantly knows what kiss he’s talking about, but the contextual shift required to reframe Bigend as a footagehead is so peculiar, so vast a rotation, that she can only sit there, feeling her diaphragm respondingslightly to the bottom end of the music—which until an instant ago she’d ceased entirely to be aware of. Someone, a woman, laughs brightly at another table.
    “What kiss?” Reflex.
    Bigend responds by reaching inside the raincoat he hasn’t taken off and pulling out a dapper-looking matte-silver cigarette case, which when he places it on the table becomes a titanium DVD player that opens as of its own accord, a touch of his fingertip calling up segment #135. She watches the kiss, looks up at Bigend. “That kiss,” he says.
    “What’s your question, exactly?” Stalling for time.
    “I want to know how significant you think it is, in terms of previous uploads.”
    “Since we can only speculate about its position in a hypothetical narrative, how can we judge its relative significance?”
    He turns the player off, closes it.
    “That’s not my question. I’m not asking vis-à-vis segments of a narrative, but in terms of the actual sequential order of uploaded segments.”
    Cayce isn’t used to thinking of the footage in those terms, although she recognizes them. She thinks she knows where Bigend is probably heading with this, but opts to play dumb. “But they clearly aren’t in a logical narrative sequence. Either they’re uploaded randomly—”
    “Or very carefully, intending to provide the illusion of randomness. Regardless, and regardless of everything else, the footage has already been the single most effective piece of guerilla marketing ever. I’ve been tracking hits on enthusiast sites, and searching for mentions elsewhere. The numbers are amazing. Your friend in Korea—”
    “How do you know about that?”
    “I’ve had people look at all the sites. In fact we monitor them on a constant