Whodunit cloaks issues of marketing, technology

Cayce Pollard is the cutting edge of contemporary culture. An uber-cool young urban woman, Cayce is able to recognize hip trends before they take off, thereby allowing her marketing clients to "commodify" those trends and reap abundant profits. "It's about group behavior pattern around a particular class of object," Cayce explains in William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition," an intriguing novel of technology, art, marketing manipulation and mystery.

"I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does," Cayce explains, and then "I point a commodifier at it."

There are two particular developments, though, that Cayce can't decipher. First, the whereabouts of her father, a security expert with possible ties to the CIA who went missing in New York on Sept. 11. She can't pin down what he was doing in the city that day and where he might have been at the fateful hour. Did he perish in the tragedy or simply disappear?

And what, exactly, is the story behind the anonymous footage that's been popping up on the Web?

Cayce, we learn, is a "footagehead," one of a group of fanatics obsessed with a series of video clips that have begun to show up on the Internet. The footageheads gather in an online conference to watch and track each segment as it appears, spending hours in cyberspace debating the footage's possible creator, and whether the film is a work in progress or a completed narrative simply awaiting a perceptive arrangement of its pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle whose shape is known to the creator alone. (The segments have appeared in what seems to be a random order, telling no particular story but offering such compelling images that people become hooked on trying to figure out how it all fits together.)

The footage offers Cayce a respite from brand names and iconographic images in the world of trend forecasting and marketing, since the footage's two main characters offer no clues via fashion or hairstyle as to their location or era: "He might be a sailor, stepping onto a submarine in 1914, or a jazz musician entering a club in 1957," Gibson writes of one of the characters. "There is a lack of evidence, an absence of stylistic cues, that Cayce understands to be utterly masterful."

In these cinematic segments, Cayce glimpses a world more real, perhaps, than the actual world she knows, and wants nothing more than to see the whole film. Yet the "one hundred and thirty-four previously discovered fragments, having been endlessly collated, broken down, reassembled, by whole armies of the most fanatical investigators, have yielded no period and no particular narrative direction."