Neuromancer

by William Gibson

  Case looked at her. “I gotta lotta choice, huh?”

  She laughed. “You got it, cowboy.”

  “THE MATRIX HAS its roots in primitive arcade games,” said the voice-over, “in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.” On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .”

  “What’s that?” Molly asked, as he flipped the channel selector.

  “Kid’s show.” A discontinuous flood of images as the selector cycled. “Off,” he said to the Hosaka.

  “You want to try now, Case?”

  Wednesday. Eight days from waking in Cheap Hotel with Molly beside him. “You want me to go out, Case? Maybe easier for you, alone. . . .” He shook his head.

  “No. Stay, doesn’t matter.” He settled the black terry sweatband across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai dermatrodes. He stared back at the deck on his lap, not really seeing it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed shuriken burning with reflected neon. He glanced up; on the wall, just above the Sony, he’d hung her gift, tacking it there with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its center.

  He closed his eyes.

  Found the ridged face of the power stud.

  And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

  Please, he prayed, now—

  A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

  Now—

  Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding—

  And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.

  And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

  MOLLY WAS GONE when he took the trodes off, and the loft was dark. He checked the time. He’d been in cyberspace for five hours. He carried the Ono-Sendai to one of the new worktables and collapsed across the bedslab, pulling Molly’s black silk sleeping bag over his head.

  The security package taped to the steel firedoor bleeped twice. “Entry requested,” it said. “Subject is cleared per my program.”

  “So open it.” Case pulled the silk from his face and sat up as the door opened, expecting to see Molly or Armitage.

  “Christ,” said a hoarse voice, “I know that bitch can see in the dark. . . .” A squat figure stepped in and closed the door. “Turn the lights on, okay?” Case scrambled off the slab and found the old-fashioned switch.

  “I’m the Finn,” said the Finn, and made a warning face at Case.

  “Case.”

  “Pleased to meecha, I’m sure. I’m doing some hardware for your boss, it looks like.” The Finn fished a pack of Partagas from a pocket and lit one. The smell of Cuban tobacco filled the room. He crossed to the worktable and glanced at the Ono-Sendai. “Looks stock. Soon fix that. But here’s your problem, kid.” He took a filthy manila envelope from inside his jacket, flicked ash on the floor, and extracted a featureless black rectangle from the envelope. “Goddamn factory prototypes,” he said, tossing the thing down on the table. “Cast ’em into a block of polycarbon, can’t get in with a laser without frying the works. Booby-trapped for x-ray, ultrascan, God knows what else. We’ll get in, but there’s no rest for the wicked, right?” He folded the envelope with great care and tucked it away in an inside pocket.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a flipflop switch, basically. Wire it into your Sendai here, you can access live or recorded simstim without having to jack out of the matrix.”

  “What for?”

  “I haven’t got a clue. Know I’m fitting Moll for a broadcast rig, though, so it’s probably her sensorium you’ll access.” The Finn scratched his chin. “So now you get to find out just how tight those jeans really are, huh?”

  FOUR

  CASE SAT IN the loft with the dermatrodes strapped across his forehead, watching motes dance in the diluted sunlight that filtered through the grid overhead. A countdown was in progress in one corner of the monitor screen.

  Cowboys didn’t get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. The commercial stuff was edited, of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the course of a segment, you didn’t feel it.

  The screen bleeped a two-second warning.

  The new switch was patched into his Sendai with a thin ribbon of fiberoptics.

  And one and two and—

  Cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal points. Smooth, he thought, but not smooth enough. Have to work on it. . . .

  Then he keyed the new switch.

  The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and color. . . . She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices feltpenned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill. For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes.

  The glasses didn’t seem to cut down the sunlight at all. He wondered if the built-in amps compensated automatically. Blue alphanumerics winked the time, low in her left peripheral field. Showing off, he thought.

  Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made room.

  “How you doing, Case?” He heard the words and felt her form them. She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him catch his breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. He had no way to reply.

  Two blocks later, she was threading the outskirts of Memory Lane. Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he would have used to find his way. He began to find the passivity of the situation irritating.

  The transition to cyberspace, when he hit the switch, was instantaneous. He punched himself down a wall of primitive ice belonging to the New York Public Library, automatically counting potential windows. Keying back into her sensorium, into the sinuous flow of muscle, senses sharp and bright.

  He found himself wondering about the mind he shared these sensations with. What did he know about her? That she was another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the thing she did to make a living. He knew the way she’d moved against him, earlier, when she woke, their mutual grunt of unity when he’d entered her, and that she liked her coffee black, afterward. . . .

  Her destination was one of the dubious software rental complexes that lined Memory Lane. There was a stillness, a hush. Booths lined a central hall. The clientele were young, few of them o
ut of their teens. They all seemed to have carbon sockets planted behind the left ear, but she didn’t focus on them. The counters that fronted the booths displayed hundreds of slivers of microsoft, angular fragments of colored silicon mounted under oblong transparent bubbles on squares of white cardboard. Molly went to the seventh booth along the south wall. Behind the counter a boy with a shaven head stared vacantly into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear.

  “Larry, you in, man?” She positioned herself in front of him. The boy’s eyes focused. He sat up in his chair and pried a bright magenta splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail.

  “Hey, Larry.”

  “Molly.” He nodded.

  “I have some work for some of your friends, Larry.”

  Larry took a flat plastic case from the pocket of his red sportshirt and flicked it open, slotting the microsoft beside a dozen others. His hand hovered, selected a glossy black chip that was slightly longer than the rest, and inserted it smoothly into his head. His eyes narrowed.

  “Molly’s got a rider,” he said, “and Larry doesn’t like that.”

  “Hey,” she said, “I didn’t know you were so . . . sensitive. I’m impressed. Costs a lot, to get that sensitive.”

  “I know you, lady?” The blank look returned. “You looking to buy some softs?”

  “I’m looking for the Moderns.”

  “You got a rider, Molly. This says.” He tapped the black splinter. “Somebody else using your eyes.”

  “My partner.”

  “Tell your partner to go.”

  “Got something for the Panther Moderns, Larry.”

  “What are you talking about, lady?”

  “Case, you take off,” she said, and he hit the switch, instantly back in the matrix. Ghost impressions of the software complex hung for a few seconds in the buzzing calm of cyberspace.

  “Panther Moderns,” he said to the Hosaka, removing the trodes. “Five minute precis.”

  “Ready,” the computer said.

  It wasn’t a name he knew. Something new, something that had come in since he’d been in Chiba. Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly. “Go,” he said. The Hosaka had accessed its array of libraries, journals, and news services.

  The precis began with a long hold on a color still that Case at first assumed was a collage of some kind, a boy’s face snipped from another image and glued to a photograph of a paint-scrawled wall. Dark eyes, epicanthic folds obviously the result of surgery, an angry dusting of acne across pale narrow cheeks. The Hosaka released the freeze; the boy moved, flowing with the sinister grace of a mime pretending to be a jungle predator. His body was nearly invisible, an abstract pattern approximating the scribbled brickwork sliding smoothly across his tight onepiece. Mimetic polycarbon.

  Cut to Dr. Virginia Rambali, Sociology, NYU, her name, faculty, and school pulsing across the screen in pink alphanumerics.

  “Given their penchant for these random acts of surreal violence,” someone said, “it may be difficult for our viewers to understand why you continue to insist that this phenomenon isn’t a form of terrorism.”

  Dr. Rambali smiled. “There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent. . . .”

  “Skip it,” Case said.

  CASE MET HIS first Modern two days after he’d screened the Hosaka’s precis. The Moderns, he’d decided, were a contemporary version of the Big Scientists of his own late teens. There was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived subcults and replicated them at odd intervals. The Panther Moderns were a softhead variant on the Scientists. If the technology had been available, the Big Scientists would all have had sockets stuffed with microsofts. It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists.

  The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of diskettes from the Finn was a soft-voiced boy called Angelo. His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous. It was one of the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen. When Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large animal, Case was actually relieved. Toothbud transplants. He’d seen that before.

  “You can’t let the little pricks generation-gap you,” Molly said. Case nodded, absorbed in the patterns of the Sense/Net ice.

  This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He forgot to eat. Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of sushi on the corner of the long table. Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft. Ice patterns formed and reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious traps, and mapped the route he’d take through Sense/Net’s ice. It was good ice. Wonderful ice. Its patterns burned there while he lay with his arm under Molly’s shoulders, watching the red dawn through the steel grid of the skylight. Its rainbow pixel maze was the first thing he saw when he woke. He’d go straight to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in. He was cutting it. He was working. He lost track of days.

  And sometimes, falling asleep, particularly when Molly was off on one of her reconnaissance trips with her rented cadre of Moderns, images of Chiba came flooding back. Faces and Ninsei neon. Once he woke from a confused dream of Linda Lee, unable to recall who she was or what she’d ever meant to him. When he did remember, he jacked in and worked for nine straight hours.

  The cutting of Sense/Net’s ice took a total of nine days.

  “I said a week,” Armitage said, unable to conceal his satisfaction when Case showed him his plan for the run. “You took your own good time.”

  “Balls,” Case said, smiling at the screen. “That’s good work, Armitage.”

  “Yes,” Armitage admitted, “but don’t let it go to your head. Compared to what you’ll eventually be up against, this is an arcade toy.”

  “LOVE YOU, CAT Mother,” whispered the Panther Modern’s link man. His voice was modulated static in Case’s headset. “Atlanta, Brood. Looks go. Go, got it?” Molly’s voice was slightly clearer.

  “To hear is to obey.” The Moderns were using some kind of chickenwire dish in New Jersey to bounce the link man’s scrambled signal off a Sons of Christ the King satellite in geosynchronous orbit above Manhattan. They chose to regard the entire operation as an elaborate private joke, and their choice of comsats seemed to have been deliberate. Molly’s signals were being beamed up from a one-meter umbrella dish epoxy-ed to the roof of a black glass bank tower nearly as tall as the Sense/Net building.

  Atlanta. The recognition code was simple. Atlanta to Boston to Chicago to Denver, five minutes for each city. If anyone managed to intercept Molly’s signal, unscramble it, synth her voice, the code would tip the Moderns. If she remained in the building for more than twenty minutes, it was highly unlikely she’d be coming out at all.

  Case gulped the last of his coffee, settled the trodes in place, and scratched his chest beneath his black t-shirt. He had only a vague idea of what the Panther Moderns planned as a diversion for the Sense/Net security people. His job was to make sure the intrusion program he’d written would link with the Sense/Net systems when Molly needed it to. He watched the countdown in the corner of the screen. Two. One.

  He jacked in and triggered his program. “Mainline,” breathed the link man, his voice the only sound as Case plunged through the glowing strata of Sense/Net ice. Good. Che
ck Molly. He hit the simstim and flipped into her sensorium.

  The scrambler blurred the visual input slightly. She stood before a wall of gold-flecked mirror in the building’s vast white lobby, chewing gum, apparently fascinated by her own reflection. Aside from the huge pair of sunglasses concealing her mirrored insets, she managed to look remarkably like she belonged there, another tourist girl hoping for a glimpse of Tally Isham. She wore a pink plastic raincoat, a white mesh top, loose white pants cut in a style that had been fashionable in Tokyo the previous year. She grinned vacantly and popped her gum. Case felt like laughing. He could feel the micropore tape across her ribcage, feel the flat little units under it: the radio, the simstim unit, and the scrambler. The throat mike, glued to her neck, looked as much as possible like an analgesic dermadisk. Her hands, in the pockets of the pink coat, were flexing systematically through a series of tension-release exercises. It took him a few seconds to realize that the peculiar sensation at the tips of her fingers was caused by the blades as they were partially extruded, then retracted.

  He flipped back. His program had reached the fifth gate. He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck, making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card.

  The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium’s Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms peeled off, meshing with the gate’s code fabric, ready to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived.

  He flipped again. Molly was strolling past the enormous circular reception desk at the rear of the lobby.

  12:01:20 as the readout flared in her optic nerve.

  AT MIDNIGHT, SYNCHED with the chip behind Molly’s eye, the link man in Jersey had given his command. “Mainline.” Nine Moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl, had simultaneously dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones. Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and drifted out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different police departments and public security agencies were absorbing the information that an obscure subsect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.