"Milgrim, wearing the Paul Stuart overcoat he’d stolen the month before from a Fifth Avenue deli, watched Brown unlock the oversized steel-sheathed door with a pair of keys taken from a small transparent Ziploc bag..."
"The Standard had an all-night restaurant off its lobby--a long, glass-frosted operation with wide booths upholstered in matte-black tuck-and-roll punctuated by the gnarled phalli of half a dozen San Pedro cacti.""See-bare-espace... it is everting." - Odile Richards
Chapter summaries (may contain plot and character teaser / "spoiler" information):
Chapter 3. VOLAPUK
Brown (cop? FBI? DEA?) supplies his "hostage," East Village attic Milgrim, with just enough Ativan to keep him "not there," protected from Dennis Birdwell (Milgrim's former dealer)... and cooperative. Brown is tracking IFs (Illegal Facilitators) "whose crimes facilitated the crimes of others"
In the United Kingdom, there is now the Serious Crime Bill legislation being introduced which attempts to criminalise such illegal facilitator behaviour, even where there is no actual proof of conspiracy or involvement or prior knowledge of any actual crime.
and needs Milgrim's rare ability to translate Volapuk, an artificial Russian language using Roman letters to approximate Cyrillic ones.Brown’s IF of focus is a Russian-speaking "ethnic (Cuban-Chinese? Filipino?) version of a younger Johnny Depp," Alejandro’s cousin Tito. [566 characters]
Chapter 4. INTO THE LOCATIVE
Over breakfast with Odile and Alberto, Hollis (former "singer in an early-nineties cult band" The Curfew) learns of other locative art installations, "spatially tagged hypermedia." "virtual shrines" to the past made possible by geohacking and "(v)isible to all" on special devices such as those designed by Alberto.
Are these the "head up display" devices the pre-cursors of the sunglasses in Virtual Light ?
Hollis realizes that she has something to write about for Node, "though she was still a long way from knowing what it was." [439 characters]