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any building site, but the building site for the Wildwood Center, no less; the Numero Uno Leisure Shopping Development in the Industrial Northwest.”
    “A building site.”
    “Yeoman.” She waved. In his glass security cabin bolted to the steel exoskeleton of Wildwood, the night-watchman waved back. Razor-wire-topped metal gates slid open on creaking rollers.
    “Shall we?” Bank by bank, section by section, yellow floodlamps kicked on, throwing planes and shafts of light and shadow across the rectilinear frame of girders and floors.
    “Fucking hell,” said Ethan Ring.
    “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Luka showed him into a service elevator. “But not in the biblical sense.” Up: ten twenty thirty meters into the grid of light, “Fourth floor; ladies foundation garments, rubber hosiery, and exotic millinery.” She ducked under the safety gate, pulled Ethan after her into an Escheresque dimension of concrete horizontals interrupted by support piers and prefabricated walls. In places floors and ceilings were incomplete; yawning voids opened and overlapped onto lower levels; above, the cold November sky, threatening rain. The unavoidable debris of Construction Man lay scattered about (“You should hear some of the propositions I’ve had”); his tools, his toys, his topless Page Three girls, his diet Coke cans.
    Luka unhooked a wraparound VR audio-visualizer and paired datagloves from her belt and handed it to Ethan Ring.
    “Watch and learn, lover.”
    The lift into altered perception was terrifying and thrilling.
    Planes and shafts of stabbing color, curves, angles, all connected by rushing lines of force, of velocity. The sense of speed as he moved across the concrete floor sent him reeling. Air compressors, welding equipment, power tools, portable generators, became vibrant vortices of movement. He could see the energy they contained as a rush of images, time dependent action compressed into static timelessness. A discarded bottle opened up into spirals and planes of stored power; a crumpled newspaper became a whirling concatenation of information and vertigo.
    “What is this?” he begged, seeking stability, seeking Luka, seeing a blur of kinesis.
    “The Boccioni-verse.” Her voice was a deep, sure root in the hurtling instability. “Umberto Boccioni; doyenne of the Italian Futurist painters, 1882—1916; obsessed with industry, energy, velocity, and aggression. This place is perfect for him. ‘The City Rises’! Can’t you just smell the testosterone? Would have made a great fascist if he hadn’t fallen on his head while out riding one morning in Verona and prematurely terminated himself.”
    The slightest movement of his head sent lines of colored energy rushing past him.
    “How do you do this?”
    “With computers. Isn’t everything? I remixed an old video image-processing system using retailored commercial enzyme programs to hack it apart and reassemble it.” Shedding planes of hand-shaped light, she picked up a fiber-optic cable, burning, writhing with visible information. “Head-mounted cameras pick up images, the mobile here processes them and feeds them back to the YRs. This one’s visual-only mode. Later I may add extra dimensions. Next, I’m thinking, maybe a Cubist-verse, or even Kandinsky. Miro, perhaps? You fancy me as a squiggly black thing with a little blobby head? Eventually, I want to create my own discrete, personal universes. Luka-verses like no one’s ever seen before. Found sources. Junk aesthetics. Reality overdubs.
    “They can’t see it, Ethan. The others in my class. Because I want to use software remixing to mold reality/virtuality overlays, I’m a fascist. Mechanistic, soulless, irrelevant to the Zeitgeist of twenty-first-century man trapped in a universe of quantum indeterminacy, they say. But at least I care. I love what I do, I love why I do it; I’m not tapping my forehead three times in the shit to Ideology-of-the-Month. They care about