Virtual Light

Quotes

1. They’d been putting condos into the shell of this big old Safeway out on Jefferson Davis. The architects wanted the cinder block walls stripped just this one certain way…They were from Memphis and they wore black suits and white cotton shirts…Rydell had figured that that was a way for architects to dress; now he lived in L.A., he knew it was true. He’d overheard one of them explaining to the foreman that what they were doing was exposing the integrity of the material’s passage through time. He thought that was probably bullshit, but he sort of liked the sound of it anyway; like what happened to old people on television.

2. 

   Rydell looked around. That ol’ Rapture was big at Nightmare Folk Art, he decided. Those kind of Christians, his father had always maintained, were just pathetic. There the Millennium had up, come, and gone, no Rapture to speak of, and here they were, still beating that same drum.

3. 

   The women wore clothes Chevette had only seen in magazines. Rich people, had to be, and foreign, too. Though maybe rich was foreign enough.

4. 

   “Jesus, Berry, you shouldn’t oughta watch TV, not unless you’re gonna pay it attention.”

5. 

   “You got eyes” she said, and yawned in the middle of it, “like two piss-holes in a snowbank.”

6. 

   When Rydell clicked into the Republic of Desire’s eyephone-space…he went from looking at the phone company’s logo to being right out there on that glassy plain…And then these figures were there, bigger than skyscrapers, bigger than anything, their chests about even with the edges of the plain.

   “Welcome to the Republic” said the dinosaur, its voice the voice of some beautiful woman.

   “You don’t have a third the bandwidth you need,” the dreadlocked mountain said, its voice about what you’d expect from a mountain. “You’re in K-tel space.”

7. 

   Yamazaki imagined the two spans of the deserted bridge in the downpour, the crowds accumulating. He watched as they climbed the wire fences, the barricades, in such numbers that the chain link twisted, fell. They had climbed the towers, then, more than thirty falling to their deaths. But when the dawn came, survivors clung there, news helicopters circling them in the gray light like patient dragonflies. He had seen this many times, watching the tapes in Osaka. But Skinner had been there.

8. 

   And then they were fading, breaking up into those paisley fractal things, and Rydell knew he was losing them.

   “Wait. Any of you live in San Francisco?”

   The dinosaur came flickering back. “What if we did?”

   “Well, do you like it?…Because it’s all going to change. They’re going to do it like they’re doing Tokyo.”

   “Tokyo? Who told you that?”

   Now the mountain was back, too. “There’s not a lot of slack, for us, in Tokyo, now…”

   “Tell us” the dinosaur said.

   So Rydell did.

9. 

   His sister had come over here in 1994, and then he'd come himself, to get away from all the trouble over there. Never regretted it. Said this was a fine country except they let in too many immigrants.

10. 

    Sublett was Texan, a refugee from some weird trailer-camp video-sect…these people figured video was the Lord’s preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. Whatever form this worship had taken, it was evident that Sublett had absorbed more television than anyone Rydell had ever met.

11. 

    Warbaby wiped the glasses again and put them back on.

    “It’s a virtual light display,” Freddie said, “Anything can be digitized, you can see it there.”

    “Telepresence,” Rydell said.

    “Naw,” Freddie said, “that’s light. That’s photons coming out and hitting on your eye. This doesn’t work like that. Mr. Warbaby walks around and looks at stuff, he can see the data-feed at the same time. You put those glasses on a man doesn’t have eyes, optic nerve’s okay, he can see the input. That’s why they built the first ones. For blind people.”

12. 

    She feels really claustro now, like she does up in offices sometimes when a receptionist makes her wait to pick something up, and she sees the office people walking back and forth, and wonders whether it all means anything or if they’re just walking back and forth.

13. 

    There’s only but two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they’re one kind. We’re the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore.

14. 

    A faded old picture in a fat gilt frame. Rydell went over for a closer look. A horse pulling a kind of two-wheeled wagon-thing, just a little seat there, with a bearded man in a hat like Abe Lincoln. “Currier & Ives,” it said. Rydell wondered which one was the horse.

15. 

    Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography? The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous—in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl’s bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit.

16. 

    Somewhere in Utah a dish was turning, targeted out toward the coast, toward the California sky…And then these things came through a long gap in the glass, just south of where the handball-courts were. Rydell hadn’t ever seen anything like them…helicopters, but too small to carry anybody…French Aérospatiale gun-platforms…under the control of the Emergency Command Control Communications System.

    “Damn” Rydell said, looking up at the future of armed response.

    “POLICE EMERGENCY. REMAIN CALM.”

    And mostly they did, all those faces; faces of the residents of this high country, their jawlines firm, their soft clothes fluttering in the dancing downdrafts.

    The Russians’ mouths were open…

    “ON YOUR FACES. NOW. OR WE FIRE.”

    But the residents, slender and mainly blond, stood unmoved, watching, with racquets in their hands…their eyes mildly curious and curiously hard.

17. 

    So I wrote a novel called Virtual Light, which was set in 2006, which was then the very near future, and followed it with two more novels, each set a few imaginary years later, in what was really my take on the 1990s. It didn’t seem to make any difference. Lots of people assumed I was still writing about the capital-F future.

That’s all the quotes.

17 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more