AMERICAN BEST FURNITURE

A report from Bruce Sterling / 2030 ;

Thirty long years had overpassed our rolling globe since the unveiling of Roche's legendary web-house. The inspector and I almost missed the place, which was, of course, the architect's original intention.

I stroked the cracked screen of my vintage iPhone. "The GPS coordinates of this structure seem to have been deliberately mis-allocated."

"Typical," sniffed the inspector.

I knew the place from photos, but not from recent ones. The sturdy poles were moss-eaten, their guywires festooned with vines, and the trees on the site had grown huge. Given that the plastic mesh was integrated into the forest, the web-house was all parabolic arcs and delirious sagging. Much-stained by years of fallen foliage, the structure had the spotty look of forest camou. An army could have marched by it and never seen a thing. The inspector hefted her tricorder. "Aging plastics tend to offgas," she sniffed. Locating the entrance with difficulty, we entered the dense fabric maze. The visual effect was literally indescribable, a fact I attributed to the stark exhaustion of conventional architectural rhetoric. "Visionary interventions of this sort were sadly rare during the culturally retrograde epoch of the War on Terror."
The inspector's face soured. English was not her first language.
"Worse yet, the regulatory environment was so rigid and harsh that Francois Roche was forced to disguise his ingenious designs as 'conceptual-art installations.'"
"I *love* conceptual art," the inspector insisted, wincing.
The sun was setting. Faithful solar-charged globes flicked on. We emerged from the glowing labyrinth to confront a drained swimming pool. "Tres J.G. Ballard," I remarked, but the inspector wasn't having any of that.
The original owner had kept the place in good shape, but then it had passed into the hands of the creature who made it notorious: one Novalis Nico, the "Spider of Geneva," a legendary Swiss currency speculator. Nico had holed-up for years in these forests of southern France, hunched over his busy laptop. When not obsessively collecting glamour photos of high-tech street junk, the reclusive mogul used thousands of sock-puppet fake identities to pervert the seething rumors in investment weblogs.
So, with one Fantomas - Mabuse stroke of hacker cunning, Nico could send the Euro spinning right out of control. Within this lair he had reaped heaps of electronic wealth beyond the dreams of 20th-century mankind.
Except for the many rusting satellite dishes, Nico's long, secretive haunt hadn't much affected the vicinity. The dead zillionaire's wealth had always been entirely virtual. He'd sold off the original owner's tastefully minimalist furniture and replaced it all with inflatable chairs. Their deflated rags draped every room, like discolored pools of hippie candle-wax.
"It looks very 'pop-up' in here," I told the inspector.
"It's very 'plug-in city.'"
The inspector brushed dead leaves from her padded shoulders. "I think I smell bats."
"Come on, you can't mix bats and e-commerce fanatics."
The inspector examined her tricorder. "That guano gives off a definite spectral emission." She pursed her lips and scanned the walls and floors with her radar nozzle. "At least the structural members are still sound."
"So you're really gonna let the new buyer live here?"
She took offense. "It is not up to me to declare that!
I'm not a housing dictator! I'm just a simple, everyday
Environmental Sustainability Inspector from the Heritage Bureau of the Euro-Parliamentary Commission for the Regulation of the Creative-Economy."
I gazed around the sleekly barren cells where the Spider had passed his days, weeks, years. It had taken four or five years for mankind to even realize the guy was dead; he'd lurked inside here with profound success, and his automated trading systems had given him veritable Osama bin Laden global-media brand-extension.

Who had dared to penetrate the legendary web-house?
Anybody? Until just now?

I set my heavy backpack on the curving stairs. "Well darling," I told her, "this is where we finally celebrate our secret love’’

My "dreamy diana" lens arrived from Photojojo yesterday. If you don't know what it is, it's the 38mm Diana F+ (plastic toy camera) lens with an adaptor for an SLR. The plastic in the lens gives things a sort of dreamy look. I have to manually meter and focus this lens on my Nikon D40.

On today's walk I left my other lenses at home so I was forced to use the new one. It's interesting -- the shots I thought would work well with it (tacky lawn furniture sorts of shots) didn't work as well for me as I expected. I preferred these shots of snow and reflections. It's going to take me a while to figure this out.

Yesterday we had a big storm. Today was supposed to be the same, but it rained and melted all day.

We're walking into town here, on our way to the library. That's my 13-year-old daughter.