They hadn't had much to say to each other, on the train to Narita. She'd slept in the lounge, after security measures including a sort of CAT scan for their shoes and answering questions in front of an infrared device that registered minute changes in the temperature of the skin around the eyes, the theory being that lying about having packed one's own bag induced a sort of invisible and inevitable micro-blush. Though the Japanese also believe that personality is determined by blood type, or had when she was last here. Boone had been impressed, though, and had told her to expect the blush machines soon in America.
She'd told him, as they were boarding, that she'd gotten something more from Taki, via Parkaboy, but that she was too tired to explain it, that she'd show it to him when she'd had more sleep.
What is that about, she wonders, that holding back? Something to do with the newness of their working relationship, but also, she knows, something to do with something she'd felt in that apartment. She doesn't want to look at that too closely. But also she wants time to get her head around this idea of the T-bone city. And there's a way in which she simply finds him pushy.
But there's the T-bone to try to figure out, she thinks, powering her bed up into lounger mode and hauling the bag with her iBook up from the floor. She boots up, finds Parkaboy's jpeg, and opens it.
If anything, it's even more enigmatic than when she first saw it.
Taki. Is there any chance that he's just making this all up to impress Keiko? But Parkaboy and Darryl had found him on a Japanese website, where he'd already made some mention of something encrypted in a segment of the footage. They hadn't invented Keiko yet. No, she knows that Taki is for real. Taki is too sad not to be real. She imagines him going to someone, while Keiko emerged more clearly for him through her messages, and somehow, perhaps at some strange cost, obtaining this image, extracted from that white flare.
But in his shyness, his caution, he hadn't brought it to their meeting. He'd brought only the one number. Then the Photoshopped version of Judy Tsuzuki had impacted, and he'd gone home and sent this to Parkaboy, thinking he was sending it to his big-eyed, Clydesdale-ankled love.
She thinks of Ivy, in Seoul, F:F:F's founder. What would Ivy make of this?
She frowns, seeing for the first time how working for Bigend, with Boone Chu, has skewed her relationship to F:F:F and the footagehead community. Even Parkaboy, who's been instrumental in all of this, doesn't know what she's up to, who she's working for.
"What is it?" Boone, looming beside her in the twilit aisle, his black T-shirt and the blindfold slung beneath his chin offering the odd suggestion of a priest's collar. A single one-inch square of white paper and he'd have a costume: the young priest, eyes somewhat swollen with sleep.
She elevates to chair and he joins her, crouching on the little visitor seat at the unit's foot. She passes him her iBook. "Taki really liked the photograph. He couldn't wait to get home. Had to keep stopping in cafes to e-mail her. When he did get home, he sent her this."
"Are there a hundred and thirty-five of these?" Indicating the numbers.
"I haven't counted them myself, but yes. The one that matches the number Taki gave me is near the bottom of the T."
"It looks as though each location corresponds to a segment of footage. Not the way you'd map a virtual world, though. Not if mapping virtual worlds was ordinarily your business."
"What if it weren't?"
"What do you mean?"
"What if you were just making something up as you went along? Why should we assume that the maker knows what he's doing?"
"Or we could assume that he does, but he's just doing it his own way. The people who designed all the early Nintendo games drew them on long rolls of paper. There was no better way to do it, and you could unroll the whole thing and see exactly how it would move. The geography of the game was two-D, scrolling past on the screen…" He falls silent, frowning.
"What?"
He shakes his head. "I need more sleep." He stands up, passing her the iBook, and returns to his seat.
She stares blankly at the jpeg, the iBook slightly warm atop her thighs, and wonders exactly what she should do when they get to Heathrow. She has the new keys to Damien's place in her Stasi envelope, in the Luggage Label bag. That's where she feels like going, really, though the residual ache in her forehead is causing her some doubt.
Would someone have been able to fiddle the locks in the meantime? She has only a very fuzzy idea of who might live in the other two flats, but whoever they are, they seem to go out to work on a regular basis. A burglar might be able to get in, then, during the day, and do whatever it took to open the apartment.
