Her black hair, rough-cut and shining, brushed pale bare shoulders as she turned her head. She had no eyebrows, and both her lids and lashes seemed to have been dusted with something white, leaving her dark pupils in stark contrast.
And now her eyes met his.
He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows, their lintels traced with snow. A line of shaggy pack ponies, their breath white with cold, followed a trail above a canyon.
The curves of the river below were strokes of distant silver. Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk.
Laney shivered. In his mouth a taste of rotten metal.
The eyes of the idoru, envoy of some imaginary country, met his.
The manner in which life imitates art, or more specifically science fiction, never ceases to amaze me. In William Gibson's 1996 novel Idoru, a musician decides to marry a digital Japanese pop star, or "idoru", who makes her public appearances as a hologram.William Gibson, Idoru
Welcome to the future - literally. Hatsune Miku, whose name is Japanese for "the first sound from the future" is a vocaloid, the public face of a singing synthesizer application. Miku started her virtual career in 2007, and has been doing live holographic appearances since 2009, including a performance as an opening act for Lady Gaga's ArtRave tour and a guest spot on David Letterman.
It's easy to see something like this as the future of pop music - a library of customizable digital performers who can be programmed with the musical style of your choice, and modified to match any audience demographic as desired. Come to think of it, have you ever noticed that when Taylor Swift* is performing live, sometimes you can almost see through her to the drummer...?
- Sid
* Dear Ms. Swift: I tossed a coin and it came up heads, so I went with your name rather than Katy Perry's. Please don't write a song about me.
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