Angle of transit sets us down in front of this dusty cardtable in an underground mall in the Darwin Free Trade Zone, muzak-buzz of seroanalysis averages for California-Oregon, factoids on EBV mutation rates and specific translocations at the breakpoint near the c-myc oncogene...
Kelsey's second week in Australia and her brother is keeping stubbornly in-condo, doing television, looping Gladiator Skull and a new Japanese game called Torture Garden. She walks miles of mall that could as easily be Santa Barbara again or Singapore, buying British fashion magazines, shoplifting Italian eye-shadow; only the stars at night are different, Southern Cross, and the Chinese boys skim the plazas on carbon-fiber skateboards trimmed with neon.
She pauses in front of the unlicensed vendor, his face notched with pale scars of sun-cancer. He has a dozen cassettes laid out for sale, their plastic cases scratched and dusty. "Whole city in there," he says, "Kyoto, yours for a twenty." She sees the security man, tall and broad, Keviar- vested, blue-eyed, homing in to throw the old man out, as she tosses the coin on impulse and snatches the thing up, whatever it is, and turns, smiling blankly, to swan past the guard. She's a licensed consumer, untouchable, and looking back she sees the vendor squinting, grinning his defiance, no sign of the $20 coin ...
No sign of her brother when she returns to the condo. She puts on the glasses and the gloves and slots virtual Kyoto ...
Once perfected, communication technologies rarely die out entirely; rather, they shrink to fit particular niches in the global info-structure. Crystal radios have been proposed as a means of conveying optimal seed-planting times to isolated agrarian tribes. The mimeograph, one of many recent dinosaurs of the urban office-place, still shines with undiminished samisdat potential in the century's backwaters, the Late Victorian answer to desktop publishing.