Pattern Recognition

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

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Authors: William Gibson
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either hand, she positions them, then picks up the tabletop and lowers it, careful not to scuff Damien’s freshly painted wall. Unchains and unlocks the door, opening it the eight centimeters the table now allows. This proves to be not even enough to produce a gap to peer through. Perimeter secured, she closes the door, relocking and chaining it.
    She sees that the Cube is showing her that it wasn’t properly shut down, so she kneels beside it and clicks that that’s okay. When she gets to the desktop, she reopens the browser and looks at the memory again, seeing that Asian Sluts still hasn’t moved itself.
    Seeing it there, this time, causes her a residual hair-prickle, but she gets past that by forcing herself to open it. To her considerable and unexpected relief, it turns out not to be snuff or torture or even anything singularly nasty. What these women deserve, evidently, is active attention from erect penises. These being, in that way of visual porn for men, weirdly disembodied, as though one were to imagine they had arrived at the brink of a particular orifice through no individual human agency whatever. When she exits, she has to click her way past an opportunistic swarm of linked sites, and some of these, in split-second glances, look considerably worse than Asian Sluts.
    Now, in browser memory, F:F:F is followed twice by Asian Sluts, as if to prove a point.
    She’s trying to remember what would have come after securing the perimeter, in Win’s bedtime stories. Probably maintaining the routine of the station. Psychological prophylaxis, she thinks he called it. Get onwith ordinary business. Maintain morale. How many times has she turned to that, in the past year or so?
    Hard to know what that would consist of, here and now, but then she thinks of F:F:F and the frenzy of posts the new footage will have generated. She’ll make a pot of tea-sub, cut up an orange, sit cross-legged on Damien’s carpet, and see what’s going on. Then she’ll decide what she should do about Asian Sluts and Dorotea Benedetti.
    Not the first time she’s used F:F:F that way. She wonders, really, if she ever uses it any other way. It is the gift of “OΤ,” Off Topic. Anything other than the footage is Off Topic. The world, really. News. Off Topic.
    In the kitchen, boiling water, she drifts back to her father’s bedtime descriptions of that perimeter-containment job in Moscow.
    She’d always secretly wanted the KGB spy devices to make it through, because she’d only ever been able to envision them as tiny clockwork brass submarines, as intricate in their way as Fabergé eggs. She’d imagined them evading each of Win’s snares, one by one, and surfacing in the bowls of staff toilets, tiny gears buzzing. But this had made her feel guilty, because it was Win’s job, and his passion, to keep them from doing that. And she’d never been able to imagine exactly what it was they were there to do, or what they’d need to do next in order to get on with it.
    Damien’s kettle starts to whistle.
    Settled in picnic mode before the Cube, she opens F:F:F and sees that the posts have indeed been flying. But also, to a certain extent, that the shit has been hitting the fan.
    Parkaboy and Mama Anarchia are flaming one another again.
    Parkaboy is de facto spokesperson for the Progressives, those who assume that the footage consists of fragments of a work in progress, something unfinished and still being generated by its maker.
    The Completists, on the other hand, a relative but articulate minority, are convinced that the footage is comprised of snippets from a finishedwork, one whose maker chooses to expose it piecemeal and in nonsequential order. Mama Anarchia is the consummate Completist.
    The implications of this, for some F:F:F regulars, border on the theological, but it’s fairly simple for Cayce: If the footage consists of clips from a finished film, of whatever length, every footagehead, for whatever reason, is being toyed with,

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