Mona Lisa Overdrive

The process was random, but the results had to conform to something inside, something he couldn't touch directly.

You've been playing cause and effect, but I've been looking for outlines, shapes in time. You've been looking all over the matrix, but I've been looking at the matrix, the whole thing.

But did it wake, Kumiko wondered, when the alley was empty? Did its laser vision scan the silent fall of midnight snow?

Case, who seemed to Kumiko to have been something more than Sally's partner, never reentered her story.

Thinking of the other's dreams, of corridors winding in upon themselves, muted tints of ancient carpet... An old man, a head made of jewels, a taut pale face with eyes that were mirrors... And a beach in the wind and dark. Not this beach, not Malibu. And somewhere, in a black California morning, some hour before dawn, amid the corridors, the galleries, the faces of dream, fragments of conversation she half-recalled, waking to pale fog against the windows of the master bedroom, she prized something free and dragged it back through the wall of sleep.