Free Spook Country by William Gibson

emailed her good friend Mari at Dazed, and has it back, on very good authority, that your Node must be closely held indeed, as nobody there has ever heard of it. Keeping a magazine moderately secret until you publish would be fairly odd, but your Node no-shows where any mag should show, even if it were being kept under relative wraps.
    XOX "male
    Another layer added to her general cognitive dissonance, she thought, as she washed her hands. In the mirror, her Mondrian haircut still worked. She put the PowerBook to sleep, and back into her bag.
    Having recrossed the wonky grid of flour, she found Alberto and Bobby sitting at one of the tables in Aeron chairs. These had the down-at-heels look that came of having been purchased for some subsequently failed start-up, seized by deputies, auctioned, resold. There were holes in the carbon-gray see-through mesh, where lit cigarettes had touched the taut material.
    Strata of blue smoke drifted under the bright lights, reminding her of stadium shows.
    Bobby’s knees were drawn up to his chin, the nonexistent heels of his Kedsclone winkle-pickers caught in the gray mesh of the Aeron’s seat. In the litter on the table he’d turned the chair away from, she made out Red Bull cans, oversized waterproof marking pens, and a candy-like scattering of what she rather reluctantly recognized as white Lego bricks.
    “Why white?” She picked one up as she took her own Aeron, twirling on it to face Bobby. “Are these the brown M&Ms of locative computer art?”
    “Was it the brown ones they wanted,” asked Alberto from behind her, “or was it the brown ones they didn’t want?”
    Bobby ignored him. “More like duct tape. They’re handy if you need to patch electronics together and don’t want to scratch-build a chassis. If you stick to one color, it’s less confusing visually, and the white’s easiest on the eye, and easiest to photograph components against.”
    She let the Lego roll back into the palm of her hand. “But you can buy them that way, a bag of just white ones?”
    “Special order.”
    “Alberto says you’re like a producer. You agree?”
    Bobby studied her from behind the forelock. “In some very vague, over-generalized way? Sort of.”
    “How did you get into this?”
    “I was working on commercial GPS technology. I’d gotten into that because I’d thought I wanted to be an astronomer, and I’d gotten fascinated with satellites. The most interesting ways of looking at the GPS grid, what it is, what we do with it, what we might be able to do with it, all seemed to be being put forward by artists. Artists or the military. That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery.”
    “But this one’s military to begin with.”
    “Sure,” he said, “but maybe maps were, too. The grid’s that basic. Too basic for most people to get a handle on.”
    “Someone told me that cyberspace was ‘everting.’ That was how she put it.”
    “Sure. And once it everts, then there isn’t any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction. With the grid, we’re here. This is the other side of the screen. Right here.” He pushed his hair aside and let both blue eyes drill into her.
    “Archie, over there”—she gestured in the direction of empty space—“you’re going to hang him over a street in Tokyo.”
    He nodded.
    “But you could do that and still leave him here, couldn’t you? You could assign him to two physical locations. You could assign him to any number of locations, couldn’t you?”
    He smiled.
    “And who’d know he was here, then?”
    “Right now, if you hadn’t been told it was here, there’d be no way for you to find it, unless you had its URL and its GPS coordinates, and if you have those, you know it’s here. You know something’s here, anyway. That’s