Free Idoru by William Gibson Page A

very excited.”
    “Why?”
    “Out of Control isn't just a series. We think of it as an entirely new paradigm. A new way to do television. Your story—Alison Shires' story—is precisely what we intend to get out there. Our producers are people who want to give something back to the audience. They've done well, they're established, they've proven themselves; now they want to give something back—to restore a degree of honesty, a new opportunity for perspective.” The black ovals drew slightly closer to the scratched plastic. “Our producers are the producers of ‘Cops in Trouble’ and ‘A Calm and Deliberate Fashion.’”
    “A what?”
    “Factual accounts of premeditated violence in the global fashion industry.”

    “‘Counter-investigative’?” Yamazaki's pen hovered over the notebook.
    “It was a show about shows like Slitscan,” Laney explained. “Supposed abuses.” There were no stools at the bar, which might have been ten feet long. You stood. Aside from the bartender, in some kind of Kabuki drag, they had the place to themselves. By virtue of filling it, basically. It was probably the smallest freestanding commercial structure Laney had ever seen, and it seemed to have been there forever, like a survival from ancient Edo, a city of shadows and minute dark lanes. The walls were shingled with faded postcards, gone a uniform sepia under a glaze of accumulated nicotine and cooking smoke.
    “Ah,” Yamazaki said at last, “a ‘meta-tabloid.’”
    The bartender was broiling two sardines on a doll's hotplate. He flipped them with a pair of steel chopsticks, transferred them to a tiny plate, garnished them with some kind of colorless, translucent pickle, and presented them to Laney.
    “Thanks,” Laney said. The bartender ducked his shaven eyebrows.
    In spite of the modest decor, there were dozens of bottles of expensive-looking whiskey arranged behind the bar, each one with a hand-written brown paper sticker: the owner's name in Japanese. Yamazaki had explained that you bought one and they kept it there for you. Blackwell was on his second tumbler of the local vodka-analog, on the rocks. Yamazaki was sticking to Coke Lite. Laney had an untouched shot of surrealistically expensive Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey in front of him, and wondered vaguely what it would do to his jet lag if he were actually to drink it.
    “So,” Blackwell said, draining the tumbler, ice clinking against his prosthetic, “they get you out so they can have a go at these other bastards.”
    “That was it, basically,” Laney said. “They had their own legal team waiting, to do that, and another team to work on the nondisclosure agreement I'd signed with Slitscan.”
    “And the second team had the bigger job,” Blackwell said, shoving his empty glass toward the bartender, who swept it smoothly out of sight, producing a fresh replacement just as smoothly, as if from nowhere.
    “That's true,” Laney said. He'd had no idea, really, of what he'd be getting into when he'd found himself agreeing to the general outlines of Rice Daniels' offer. But there was something in him that didn't want to see Slitscan walk away from the sound of that one single shot from Alison Shires' kitchen. (Produced, the cops had pointed out, by a Russian-made device that was hardly more than a cartridge, a tube to contain it, and the simplest possible firing mechanism; these were designed with suicide almost exclusively in mind; there was no way to aim them at anything more than two inches away. Laney had heard of them, but had never seen one before; for some reason, they were called Wednesday Night Specials.)
    And Slitscan would walk away, he knew; they'd drop the sequence on Alison's actor, if they felt they had to, and the whole thing would settle to the sea floor, silting over almost instantly with the world's steady accretion of data.
    And Alison Shires' life, as he'd known it in all that terrible, banal intimacy, would lie there forever,