Gibby's #MonaLisaOverdrive giving us glimpses of #AllTomorowsParties, #SpookCountry and Agency (#jackpot)

EARLIER:
Hollis reached up to steady the VR helmet & accidentally encountered a control surface. The Shinjuku squid vanished.
Beyond where it had been…hung a translucent rectangular solid of silvery wireframe, crisp yet insubstantial…
Something about these dimensions seemed familiar & banal.
She was turning, to ask Bobby Chombo what this work-in-progress might become, when he tore the helmet from her head so roughly she nearly fell over.
#SpookCountry

YOUNG RENTAL CAR GUY: "HOLLIS HENRY" Have I seen you on TV?
HH: No.
YRCG: Do you want full collision?
HH: Yes.
YRCG: Signature X, initials twice XX…Movies?
HH: No.
YRCG: Singer. In that #Band.
HH: No.
YRCG: Don’t forget refueling b4 returnin―That was you!
HH: No. It wasn't.
#SpookCountry
#WilliamGibson

BIGEND: They could buy recordings, but they couldn’t reproduce them. The Curfew came in as that monopoly on the means of production was starting to erode. Musicians were paid for performing, published & sold sheet music, or had patrons. he pop star, as we knew her [bows slightly to HH] was actually an artifact of preubiquitous media.
HOLLIS: Of—?
B: Of a state in which "mass" media existed, if you will, within the world.
H: As opposed to?
B: Comprising it.
#SpookCountry

WHEN I WAS READING THIS in '08, I'd read only 1 other Wm Gibson novel (Virtual Light) yrs earlier, which didn't hook me. And #SpookCountry hadn't either, until Bigend unrolled the Secret Flying Dutchman ISO Container Legend. Here was a mythologic device as old as the #Edda.

A part of her business, would be to be that chimney brick behind which the old man had chosen to hide the secret of what he’d done. Which apparently was still very much a secret. They told her to expect that. The whole business had to play out initially in #SpookCountry.
[END]

A part of her business, would be to be that chimney brick behind which the old man had chosen to hide the secret of what he’d done. Which apparently was still very much a secret. They told her to expect that. The whole business had to play out initially in #SpookCountry.
[END]

#SpookCountry
Hollis thought [old man] looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate. Like someone who’d be invited quail shooting w/VP [Cheney], tho too careful to get himself shot. Thin steel spectacle frames. His remaining hair neatly barbered. Seriously good dark #overcoat.

He wore shoes that made her think of old French priests, bicycling.

OLD MAN: Miss Henry [voice like an 🇺🇸consular official she’d met in Gibraltar, when she was 17 & her passport was stolen]

HOLLIS HENRY: You didn’t answer my question.
OLD MAN: Bear with me. There is public history, & there is secret history. I am proposing to make you privy to secret history. Not because you are a journalist, but because you are, to whatever extent, a celebrity.
#SpookCountry

OTHER MAN: Are you any closer to understanding who they are?
BROWN: They’re one of the smallest organized crime families operating in the United States. Maybe literally a family. Illegal facilitators, mainly smuggling. But a kind of boutique operation, very pricey. Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) look like UPS in comparison. They’re Cuban-Chinese and they’re probably all illegals.
OM: Can’t you get ICE to roll them up for you?
B: You have to find them first.
#SpookCountry

There were ghosts in the Civil War trees, past Philadelphia.
#SpookCountry

HOLLIS HENRY: He knows something nobody else does…whatever makes him mark the floor of that factory according to the GPS grid. He won’t sleep in the same square twice.
HUBERTUS BIGEND: And that might be?
HOLLIS: ...
BIGEND: Pirates.
[She looked from Bigend to the crowd around them, feeling like she’d fallen into someone else’s pitch meeting]
BIGEND: Real pirates. Most of them, anyway. Somewere part of a CIA maritime program. Stopping suspect cargo vessels to search for WMD.
#SpookCountry