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his first and only visit, had slipped away to range the streets alone, in these same small hours, mad perhaps, and trotting like a dog.
    Chia, who had only a vague idea who Hitler might have been, and that mainly from references in songs, understood the urge. The stones of the Piazza flowed beneath her like silk, as she raised a silvered finger and sped into the maze of bridges, water, arches, walls.
    She had no idea what this place was meant to mean, the how or why of it, but it fit so perfectly into itself and the space it occupied, water and stone slotting faultlessly into the mysterious whole.
    The gnarliest piece of software ever, and here came the opening chords of “Positron Premonition.”

5. Nodal Points
    Clinton Emory Hillman, twenty-five: hairdresser, sushi chef, music journalist, porno extra, reliable purveyor of proscribed fetal tissue cultures to three of the more endomorphic members of the decidedly meshbacked Dukes of Nuke 'em, whose “Gulf War Baby” was eighteen with a bullet on the Billboard chart, in heavy rotation on I (heart) America, and had already been the subject of diplomatic protests from several Islamic states.
    Kathy Torrance looked as though she might be prepared to be pleased. “And the fetal tissue, Laney?”
    “Well,” Laney said, putting the 'phones down beside the computer, “I think that might be the good part.”
    “Why?”
    “It has to be Iraqi. They make a point of insisting on that. They won't shoot up any other kind.”
    “You're hired.”
    “I am?”
    “You must have correlated the calls to Ventura with the parking charges from the garage in the Beverly Center. Although that running gag about ‘Gulf War babies’ would've been hard to miss.”
    “Wait a minute,” Laney said. “You knew.”
    “It's the top segment on Wednesday's show.” She closed the computer without bothering to turn off Clint Hillman's detweaked chin. “But now I've had a chance to watch you work, Laney. You're a natural. I could almost believe there might actually be something to that nodal point bullshit. Some of your moves made no logical sense whatever, but I've just watched you hone in, cold, on something it took three experienced researchers a month to excavate. You did it in just under half an hour.”
    “Some of that was illegal,” Laney said. “You're tied into parts of DatAmerican that you aren't supposed to be.”
    “Do you know what a nondisclosure agreement is, Laney?”
    Yamazaki looked up from his notebook. “Very good,” he said, probably to Blackwell. “This is very good.”
    Blackwell shifted his weight, the chair's polycarbon frame creaking faintly in protest. “But he didn't last there, did he?”
    “A little over six months,” Laney said.
    Six months could be a very long time, at Slitscan.
    He used most of his first month's salary to lease a micro-batchelor in a retrofitted parking structure on Broadway Avenue, Santa Monica. He bought shirts he thought were more like the ones people wore at Slitscan, and kept his Malaysian button-downs to sleep in. He bought an expensive pair of sunglasses and made sure he never displayed as much as a single felt-pen in his shirt pocket.
    Life at Slitscan had a certain focused quality. Laney's colleagues limited themselves to a particular bandwidth of emotion. A certain kind of humor, as Kathy had said, was highly valued, but there was remarkably little laughter. The expected response was eye contact, a nod, the edge of a smile. Lives were destroyed here, and sometimes re-created, careers crushed or made anew in guises surreal and unexpected. Because Slitscan's business was the ritual letting of blood, and the blood it let was an alchemical fluid: celebrity in its rawest, purest form.
    Laney's ability to locate key data in apparently random wastes of incidental information earned him the envy and grudging admiration of more experienced researchers. He became Kathy's favorite, and was almost pleased when he discovered that a rumor