All Tomorrow's Parties

Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Tokyo. His body shakes with fever dreams, but his mind roams free as always, and he knows something is about to happen in San Francisco, and Laney needs a man on the ground there. Rydell has no pressing reason not to go to San Francisco. In fact, his current employer (Lucky Dragon, Sunset Boulevard branch, one of hundreds of franchises operated out of Singapore) has just given strong indication that Rydell is free to go, by ordering him off the premises. This happens to Rydell a lot. Nevertheless, he is trustworthy. Chevette isn't running toward Rydell, though of all her ex-boyfriends he's the only one she might want to run toward. She's actually running away from the most recent one, who likes to hit. But in any case she's running to San Francisco, to her old home on the Bridge, where people live who have no place else to go. She knows enough to survive there. Harwood has been in San Francisco all along. His information, like Laney's, tells him that a change is coming. He means to arrange things in this new world order so that his place on the food chain is just as high as it's been in the old order. He's prepared to kill quite a few people to make certain of this. The mists of San Francisco make it easy to hide, if hiding is what you want, end even at the best of times reality there seems to shift. A gray man moves elegantly through the mists, leaving bodies in his wake, so that a tide of absences alerts Laney to his presence. A boy named Silencio does not speak, but flies through webs of cyber-information in search of the one object that has seized his imagination. And Rei Toi, the Japanese Idoru, continues her study of all things human. She herself is not human, not quite, but she's working on it. And in the mists of San Francisco, at this rare moment in history, who is to say what is or is not impossible…