She no longer has to devote any thought to cabling the iBook to the cell phone. If Boone was right, back in Tokyo, this one isn't passing any keystrokes to the
"Fuck it," aloud, to Damien's robot girls. She can't live that way. Refuses.
Hotmail has three, for her.
The first is from Boone.
Hi. Greetings from LGA, the land of Very Intense Security. Out of here shortly for Colombus and initial meeting with The Firm In Question. Will have to play that completely by ear, of course. How are you? Let me know.
You are not, she thinks, the most eloquent of correspondents. But what, she asks herself, is she expecting? Shakespeare, from a layover at LaGuardia?
Hi yourself. On my laptop, as per our discussion. Okay here. Nothing to report.
Parkaboy next, opening on:
Jesus. (My mother was very religious, in her dysfunctional way. Have I told you that? Hence all my fear-words are blasphemous, I suppose.) Darryl is letting Judy script the Keiko mail, as you said we had no choice other than to do. She's virtually moved in with him now, and has phoned in sick two nights running. She's mesmerized by the extent (she says the heartbreaking purity) of Taki's passion for her. This in spite of the fact that she knows Taki thinks she's a petite Japanese college girl, and that Darryl is translating for her both ways. Actually he indicates to me he's trying as much as possible to tone Judy's script down, and has told her that he doesn't really have that thorough a command of Japanese sexual vernacular. (Not true.) Says she's starting to cry a lot, and to say that the love Taki has to offer her is the love she's waited for all her life. This is, frankly, some of the weirdest shit to wash up my alley in a while, and I suppose it would be darkly funny if only we weren't trying to… BTW, what ARE we trying to do here? By insisting we let Judy do this, we've lost our fulcrum for extracting more Mystic material. Aside from which, we could lose Taki altogether—terminal priapism. Yrs, PB >
Next up, Ivy, F:F:F's founder and owner, whtoi she hasn't heard from since she left New York.
Hello Cayce. Long time no see on the forum. Are you in Japan? Am still here in Seoul, in big numbered building!
Ivy had once sent Cayce a jpeg of her high-rise, with a ten-story "4" painted up the side. Behind it, receding into the distance, you could make out buildings 5 and 6, identical.
Mama Anarchia does not write to me often. That is fine with me. You know she has always gotten on my nerves.
Ivy and Cayce have sometimes had to coordinate diplomacy, to prevent the friction between Parkaboy and la Anarchia from polarizing the site, or simply taking up too much space…
She freezes.
Are you in Japan?
Unless Parkaboy has told Ivy about Cayce's trip, which Cayce cannot imagine him doing, under the circumstances, something is very wrong here.
Today I had a very strange e-mail from her. Very friendly. Thanking me for F:F:F etc. Then asking about you like she is your old friend. From this I think you are in Tokyo? But something about this makes me worry. Here is the only part of her message referring to you. I can send the rest if you want.
> And how is CayceP? She is not posting, recently. You know of
> course that I was an avid lurker, before I began to post, and
> CayceP's insights struck me, from the first post of hers I read, as
> the very shape of the enthusiast. That was the one in which she
> suggested that the maker had the resources of the Russian mafia,
> or some similarly secretive organization. Do you remember it?
> One day I hope to meet her in person, perhaps when she returns
> from Tokyo.
Cayce scowls at the screen. Feels like hurling it at the nearest robot girl. No fair. No fucking fair. She doesn't need this.
But if Mama Anarchia is somehow involved in the recent weird-ness, why would she tip her hand this way to Ivy? To send a message to Cayce? Or?
Because Mama made a mistake? Freudian slip: meant to type "London," not "Tokyo"? The restraint of pen and tongue that Win always advised is difficult to maintain in a medium that involves neither, Cayce knows, and mistakes happen.
She and Mama Anarchia are not friends by any means.
At best they have exchanged a few strained messages. Cayce is too obviously Parkaboy's friend, on the site, and Parkaboy's loathing for Mama Anarchia has been far too vocal, from his scathing assaults on the French philosophers she quotes to deliberately absurd personal attacks (considering he's never met her, and has no idea of what she might look like). This e-mail to Ivy is a fishing expedition of some kind, and a clumsy one. Although Mama Anarchia has no way, that Cayce knows of, to know that she and Ivy are friends, and discuss the site and its more prominent participants in private, and fairly frequently.
Creepy. She takes a deep breath. "He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots."
