Pattern Recognition

"The Curta. Wonderful, yes? Ngemi and Hobbs hope for combined sale, Japanese collector. Difficult, Hobbs. Always."

"Another dealer?"

"Mathematician. Brilliant sad man. Crazy for Curta, but cannot afford. Buys and sells."

"Didn't seem very pleasant." Cayce puts her facility with entirely left-field conversations down to her career of actual on-the-street cool-hunting, such as it's been, and as much as she hates to call it that. She's done a bit, too. She's been dropped into neighborhoods like Dogtown, which birthed skateboarding, to explore roots in hope of finding whatever the next thing might be. And she's learned it's largely a matter of being willing to ask the next question. She's met the very Mexican who first wore his baseball cap backward, asking the next question. She's that good. "What does this ZX 81 look like?"

He stops, rummages in his pouch, and produces a rather tragic-looking rectangle of scuffed black plastic, about the size of a videocas-sette. It has one of those stick-on keypads that somehow actually work, something Cayce knows from the cable boxes in the sort of motel where guests might be expected to try to steal them.

"That's a computer?"

"One K of RAM!"

"One?"

They've come out into a street called Westbourne Grove now, with a sprinkling of trendy retail, and she can see a crowd down at the intersection with Portobello. "What do you do with them?"

"Is complicated."

"How many do you have?"

"Many."

"Why do you like them?"

"Of historical importance to personal computing," he says seriously, "and to United Kingdom. Why there are so many programmers, here."

"Why is that?"

But he excuses himself, stepping into a narrow laneway where a battered van is being unloaded. Some quick exchange with a large woman in a turquoise raincoat and he is back, tucking two more of the things into his pouch.

Walking on, he explains to her that Sinclair, the British inventor, had a way of getting things right, but also exactly wrong. Foreseeing the market for affordable personal computers, Sinclair decided that what people would want to do with them was to learn programming. The ZX 81, marketed in the United States as the Timex 1000, cost less than the equivalent of a hundred dollars, but required the user to key in programs, tapping away on that little motel keyboard-sticker. This had resulted both in the short market-life of the product and, in Voytek's opinion, twenty years on, in the relative preponderance of skilled programmers in the United Kingdom. They had had their heads turned by these little boxes, he believes, and by the need to program them. "Like hackers in Bulgaria," he adds, obscurely.

"But if Timex sold it in the United States," she asks him, "why didn't we get the programmers?"

'You have programmers, but America is different. America wanted Nintendo. Nintendo gives you no programmers. Also, on launch of product in America, RAM-expansion unit did not ship for three months. People buy computer, take it home, discover it does almost nothing. A disaster."

Cayce is pretty certain that England wanted Nintendo too, and got it, and probably shouldn't be looking too eagerly forward to another bumper crop of programmers, if Voytek's theory holds true. "I need coffee," she says.

He leads her into a ramshackle arcade at the corner of Portobello and Westbourne Grove. Past small booths where Russians are laying out their stocks of spotty old watches, and down a flight of stairs, to buy her a cup of what turns out to be the "white" coffee of her childhood visits to England, a pre-Starbucks mirror-world beverage resembling weak instant bulked up with condensed milk and industrial-strength sugar. It makes her think of her father, leading her through the London Zoo when she was ten.

They sit on folding wooden chairs that look as though they date from the Blitz, taking tentative sips of their scalding white coffee.

But she sees that there is a Michelin Man within her field of vision, its white, bloated, maggot-like form perched on the edge of a dealer's counter, about thirty feet away. It is about two feet tall, and is probably meant to be illuminated from within.

The Michelin Man was the first trademark to which she exhibited a phobic reaction. She had been six.

"He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots," she recites, softly.

Voytek blinks. "You say?"

"I'm sorry," Cayce says.

It is a mantra.

A friend of her father's, an airline pilot, had told her, in her teens, of a colleague of his who had impacted a duck, on climbout from Sioux City. The windscreen shattered and the inside of the cockpit became a hurricane. The plane landed safely, and the pilot had survived, and returned to flying with shards of glass lodged permanently within his left eye. The story had fascinated Cayce, and eventually she had discovered that this phrase, repeated soon enough, would allay the onset of the panic she invariably felt upon seeing the worst of her triggers. "It's a verbal tic."

"Tick?"