“But do they really have singers who don’t exist?” “The idol-singers,” he said. “The idoru. Some of them are… — William Gibson

Human in every detail but then not so…He could see celebrity here, not like Kathy’s idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the band’s fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos, was the merest fragment of that.

If Laney had anticipated her at all, it had been as some industrial-strength synthesis of Japan’s last three dozen top female media faces.

She was nothing like that…And now her eyes met his.

He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows…Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk.

“Walled City is of the net, but not on it," Masahiko said. "There are no laws here, only agreements.”

“You can’t be on the net and not be on the net,” Chia said.

“Distributed processing,” he said. “Interstitial. It began with a shared killfile.”