Idoru (bridge, #2)

Idoru, the second installment in William Gibson's Bridge trilogy, is set in a near-future world shaped by pervasive digital networks, nanotechnology, and the blurring of virtual and physical reality. The novel follows two protagonists whose separate paths converge in a post-earthquake Tokyo rebuilt partly by nanoscale machines.

Colin Laney, a disgraced former researcher for Slitscan, a globally powerful tabloid television show, is living in a Los Angeles hotel he can no longer afford when Rydell, the night security man, passes him a lead on a job in Tokyo. Laney possesses an unusual talent: He can detect "nodal points," meaningful patterns hidden in enormous data-streams, a form of pattern recognition he compares to seeing faces in clouds, except the faces are real. This ability traces back to experimental drug trials involving a substance called 5-SB, administered during his childhood in a Federal Orphanage in Gainesville, Florida.

At Slitscan, Laney's supervisor, Kathy Torrance, exploited his talent to mine celebrities' private data. His most significant case involved Alison Shires, a young woman linked to a famous married actor. Laney perceived a nodal point in Shires's data and became convinced she intended to kill herself. Kathy dismissed his concern. Laney broke into Shires's apartment using illegally obtained security codes, found her with slashed wrists, and bandaged them, but Shires retrieved a single-shot suicide device and shot herself. Laney was arrested and freed by producers of a counter-investigative show who wanted to expose Slitscan. The episode never aired: Slitscan's lawyers discovered Laney's history with 5-SB, known to turn male subjects into homicidal celebrity stalkers, and reframed Laney as a predator.

In Tokyo, Laney meets his employers at Death Cube K, a Kafka-themed bar. Keith Alan Blackwell, an enormous, heavily scarred Australian, is Lo/Rez's chief of security. Shinya Yamazaki, a Japanese existential sociologist, assists him. Blackwell reveals that Rez, singer of the globally famous band Lo/Rez, has declared his intention to marry Rei Toei, a Japanese idoru: an entirely virtual idol-singer, a personality construct made of software agents. Blackwell suspects the Kombinat, a Russian mafia-state organization, has manipulated Rez and wants Laney to use his nodal-point ability to discover who is behind it.

The novel's parallel storyline follows Chia Pet McKenzie, a 14-year-old member of the Seattle Lo/Rez fan club. When rumors spread that Rez plans to marry the idoru, Kelsey, a wealthy fellow member from Houston, proposes that Chia fly to Tokyo to investigate, offering her father's frequent-flyer points to fund the trip. On the flight, a woman named Maryalice takes the adjacent seat. At the Tokyo airport, Maryalice asks Chia to carry one of her suitcases, and Chia unknowingly passes through customs with it. Maryalice's boyfriend Eddie, an American club owner, collects them. At Eddie's club, an employee urgently warns Chia to leave as a violent argument erupts from Eddie's office. Chia flees into the Tokyo subway.

Chia contacts Mitsuko Mimura, the Tokyo chapter's social secretary, and stays above her father's restaurant. A virtual meeting with the chapter president proves fruitless: The president claims the marriage rumor is a hoax. Chia's online friend Zona Rosa, who claims to lead a girl gang in Mexico City, warns that someone is tracing Chia through her cashcard and deduces that Maryalice used Chia as a smuggling mule. Chia discovers a heavy rectangular object hidden in her bag.

Meanwhile, Laney's first attempt to analyze Rez's data fails. Blackwell's security protocols have so effectively insulated Rez from his own data trail that the information reads as impersonal. Laney asks to meet Rez. Arleigh McCrae, a Lo/Rez technician who becomes Laney's ally, explains Blackwell's past: Blackwell was a "standover man," an Australian criminal who tortured and extorted other criminals, serving a nine-year sentence when Rez gave a concert in his prison. During a riot, Blackwell killed three hostage-takers with a tomahawk to rescue Rez, and Rez's lawyers secured his release.

Chia enlists Masahiko, Mitsuko's 17-year-old brother, an otaku (an obsessive tech-recluse) who lives almost entirely inside Walled City, a mysterious virtual domain modeled on the historical Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. Walled City exists within the internet through distributed processing, with no fixed address. When Masahiko detects surveillance and learns that Kombinat-connected Russians are watching them, they flee to Hotel Di, a love hotel whose systems make digital connections untraceable. A Walled City hacker called the Etruscan accesses Chia's father's expense account to fund their room.

At the Western World, an underground club, Laney dines with Rez; Lo, the band's guitarist; the drummer Willy Jude; and representatives of the idoru, including Michio Kuwayama, the chief executive of Famous Aspect, the idoru's corporate entity. Rei Toei is projected as a high-bandwidth hologram. Laney cannot look at her without triggering overwhelming nodal visions; her face functions as a density of information that overwhelms his perception. Kombinat thugs attack the dinner party, and Blackwell kills the lights to engage them. Laney cracks his ribs in the chaos, and Willy Jude, whose video glasses allow infrared vision, guides him to safety.

Yamazaki proposes layering fan-club data over the corporate data to give Laney the human dimension he needs. The approach works. Kuwayama then proposes adding the idoru's own data as a third layer. Laney perceives the converging trajectories of Rez and Rei Toei as intertwined forms, and at their point of convergence sees a three-dimensional object the idoru identifies as a nanotech module located in Suite 17, Hotel Di.

In that same room, Maryalice reappears and explains that the planted object is a primary biomolecular programming module, a lab prototype of Class 1 nanotechnology proscribed under international law. Possession in Japan carries an automatic life sentence. Eddie was smuggling it to the Kombinat. Eddie and a Russian operative named Yevgeni Starkov arrive, stunning Masahiko and demanding the device. Chia stuns Eddie with his own weapon, but she and Masahiko cannot hold off the Russian for long.

Blackwell and Rez burst in. The idoru, communicating through a monocle device Rez wears, has directed them to the room through the data Laney accessed. Rez takes the nanotech module and proposes trading undeveloped landfill islands in Tokyo Bay, owned by Famous Aspect, for the Kombinat's claim on the device. From Mexico City, Zona Rosa hacks the Tokyo fan chapter's website and posts a false announcement of Rez's death at Hotel Di, mobilizing thousands of grieving fans to surround the hotel as protective witnesses. The group escapes in Arleigh's van.

Kathy Torrance, who arrived in Tokyo to blackmail Laney with fabricated video, is dealt with by Blackwell, who promises a conversation so unforgettable that she will never trouble them again. Kathy subsequently disappears. Blackwell accepts Rez's relationship with the idoru as inevitable and remains as his protector. Laney stays on with Lo/Rez and begins a relationship with Arleigh.

Chia learns in the Walled City that Zona Rosa is gone. "Zona Rosa" was the persona of Mercedes Purissima Vargas-Gutierrez, a 26-year-old woman in Mexico City severely affected by an environmental syndrome, who lived in denial of her physical self. When her hacking exposed her location, the owners of the abandoned website she had colonized pursued her, forcing her to discard the persona. Arleigh consoles Chia: The woman in Mexico City needed most of all to be someone else, and someone new will eventually appear.

In a closing chapter, Chia is back in Seattle, less active in the fan club but deeply involved in the Walled City, where the Etruscan has hinted she might receive a room of her own. The project is underway: Rez and Rei Toei plan to use the nanotech module to build a physical structure on a landfill island in Tokyo Bay, a real-world incarnation of the Walled City where they will live together. Chia keeps the key to Suite 17 and resolves that if they build it, she will go.