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had spread that they were having an affair.
    They weren't—except for that one time at her place in Sherman Oaks, and that hadn't been a good idea. Nothing either of them wanted to repeat.
    But Laney was still narrowing down, getting focused, pushing the envelope of whatever it was that manifested as this talent, his touch. And Kathy liked that. With his eyephones on and Slitscan's dedicated landline feeding him the bleak reaches of DatAmerica, he felt increasingly at home. He went where Kathy suggested he go. He found the nodal points.
    Sometimes, falling asleep in Santa Monica, he wondered vaguely if there might be a larger system, a field of greater perspective. Perhaps the whole of DatAmerica possessed its own nodal points, info-faults that might be followed down to some other kind of truth, another mode of knowing, deep within gray shoals of information. But only if there were someone there to pose the right question. He had no idea at all what that question might be, if indeed there were one, but he somehow doubted it would ever be posed from an SBU at Slitscan.
    Slitscan was descended from “reality” programming and the network tabloids of the late twentieth century, but it resembled them no more than some large, swift, bipedal carnivore resembled its sluggish, shallow-dwelling ancestors. Slitscan was the mature form, supporting fully global franchises. Slitscan's revenues had paid for entire satellites and built the building he worked in in Burbank.
    Slitscan was a show so popular that it had evolved into some-thing akin to the old idea of a network. It was flanked and buffered by spinoffs and peripherals, each designed to shunt the viewer back to the crucial core, the familiar and reliably bloody altar that one of Laney's Mexican co-workers called Smoking Mirror.
    It was impossible to work at Slitscan without a sense of participating in history, or else in what Kathy Torrance would argue had replaced history. Slitscan itself, Laney suspected, might be one of those larger nodal points he sometimes found himself trying to imagine, an informational peculiarity opening into some unthinkably deeper structure.
    In his quest for lesser nodal points, the sort that Kathy sent him into DatAmerica to locate, Laney had already affected the courses of municipal elections, the market in patent gene futures, abortion laws in the State of New Jersey, and the spin on an ecstatic pro-euthanasia movement (or suicide cult, depending) called Cease Upon The Midnight, not to mention the lives and careers of several dozen celebrities of various kinds.
    Not always for the worst, either, in terms of what the show's subjects might have wished for themselves. Kathy's segment on the Dukes of Nuke 'em, exposing the band's exclusive predilection for Iraqi fetal tissue, had sent their subsequent release instant platinum (and had resulted in show-trials and public hangings in Baghdad, but he supposed life was hard there to begin with).
    Laney had never been a Slitscan viewer, himself, and he suspected that this had counted in his favor when he'd applied as a researcher. He had no strong opinion of the show either way. He accepted it, to the extent that he'd thought of it at all, as a fact of life. Slitscan was how a certain kind of news was done. Slitscan was where he worked.
    Slitscan allowed him to do the one thing he possessed a genuine talent for, so he'd managed to avoid thinking in terms of cause and effect. Even now, attempting to explain himself to the attentive Mr. Yamazaki, he found it difficult to feel any clear linkage of responsibility. The rich and the famous, Kathy had once said, were seldom that way by accident. It was possible to be one or the other, but very seldom, accidentally, to be both.
    Celebrities who were neither were something else again, and Kathy viewed these as crosses she must bear: a mass-murderer, for instance, or his most recent victim's parents. No star quality (though she always held out hope for the murderers,