Mona Lisa Overdrive

by Willaim Gibson

"A businesswoman."

  "What business?"

  "Hard to say."

  The sky above the Solitude was bright and white.

  "You come for this?" He tapped the aleph.

  "Sort of."

  "What now?"

  "I made a deal. I got Mitchell together with the box."

  "That was her, the one who fell over?"

  "Yeah, that was her."

  "But she died . . ."

  "There’s dying, then there’s dying."

  "Like 3Jane?"

  Her head moved, like she’d glanced at him. "What do you know about that?"

  "I saw her, once. In there."

  "Well, she’s still in there, but so’s Angie."

  "And Bobby."

  "Newmark? Yeah."

  "So what’ll you do with it?"

  "You built those things, right? One in the back, the others?"

  Slick glanced back over his shoulder to where the Judge was folded in the hover’s cargo space, like a big rusty headless doll. "Yeah."

  "So you’re good with tools."

  "Guess so."

  "Okay. I got a job for you." She slowed the hover beside a ragged crest of snow-covered scrap and coasted to a halt. "There’ll be an emergency kit in here, somewhere. Get it, get up on the roof, get me the solar cells and some wire. I want you to rig the cells so they’ll recharge this thing’s battery. Can you do that?"

  "Probably. Why?"

  She sank back in the seat and Slick saw that she was older than he’d thought, and tired. "Mitchell’s in there now. They want her to have some time, is all . . ."

  "They?"

  "I dunno. Something. Whatever I cut my deal with. How long you figure the battery’ll hold out, if the cells work?"

  "Couple months. Year, maybe."

  "Okay. I’ll hide it somewhere, where the cells can get the sun."

  "What happens if you just cut the power?"

  She reached down and ran the tip of her index finger along the thin cable that connected the aleph to the battery. Slick saw her fingernails in the morning light; they looked artificial. "Hey, 3Jane," she said, her finger poised above the cable, "I gotcha." Then her hand was a fist, which opened, as though she were letting something go.

  Cherry wanted to tell Slick everything they were going to do when they got to Cleveland. He was lashing two of the flat cells to the Judge’s broad chest with silver tape. The gray aleph was already fastened to the machine’s back with a harness of tape. Cherry said she knew where she could get him a job fixing rides in an arcade. He wasn’t really listening.

  When he’d gotten it all together, he handed the control unit to the woman.

  "Guess we wait for you now."

  "No," she said. "You go to Cleveland. Cherry just told you."

  "What about you?"

  "I’m going for a walk."

  "You wanna freeze? Maybe wanna starve?"

  "Wanna be by my fucking self for a change." She tried the controls and the Judge trembled, took a step forward, another. "Good luck in Cleveland." They watched her walk out across the Solitude, the Judge clumping along behind her. Then she turned and yelled back, "Hey, Cherry! Get that guy to take a bath!"

  Cherry waved, the zippers of her leather jackets jingling.

  44

  Red Leather

  Petal said that her bags were waiting in the Jaguar. "You won’t want to be coming back to Notting Hill," he said, "so we’ve arranged something for you in Camden Town."

  "Petal," she said, "I have to know what has happened to Sally."

  He started the engine.

  "Swain was blackmailing her. Forcing her to kidnap — "

  "Ah. Well then," he interrupted, "I see. Shouldn’t worry, if I were you."

  "I am worried."

  "Sally, I would say, has managed to extricate herself from that little matter. She’s also, according to certain official friends of ours, managed to cause all record of herself to evaporate, apparently, except for a controlling interest in a German casino. And if anything’s happened to Angela Mitchell, Sense/Net hasn’t gone public with it. All of that is done with, now."

  "Will I see her again?"

  "Not on my parish. Please."

  They pulled away from the curb.

  "Petal," she said, as they drove through London, "my father told me that Swain — "

  "Fool. Bloody fool. Rather not talk about it now."

  "I’m sorry."

  The heater was working. It was warm in the Jaguar, and Kumiko was very tired now. She settled back against red leather and closed her eyes. Somehow, she thought, her meeting with 3Jane had freed her of her shame, and her father’s answer of her anger. 3Jane had been very cruel. Now she saw her mother’s cruelty as well. But all must be forgiven, one day, she thought, and fell asleep on the way to a place called Camden Town.

  45

  Smooth Stone Beyond

  They have come to live in this house: walls of gray stone, roof of slate, in a season of early summer. The grounds are bright and wild, though the long grass does not grow and the wildflowers do not fade.

  Behind the house are outbuildings, unopened, unexplored, and a field where tethered gliders strain against the wind.

  Once, walking alone among the oaks at the edge of that field, she saw three strangers, astride something approximately resembling a horse. Horses are extinct, their line terminated years before Angie’s birth. A slim, tweed-coated figure was in the saddle, a boy like a groom from some old painting. In front of him, a young girl, Japanese, straddled the horse thing, while behind him sat a pale, greasy-looking little man in a gray suit, pink socks and white ankles showing above his brown shoes. Had the girl seen her, returned her gaze?

  She has forgotten to mention this to Bobby.

  Their most frequent visitors arrive in dawn dreams, though once a grinning little kobold of a man announced himself by thumping repeatedly on the heavy oak door, demanding, when she ran to open it, "that little shit Newmark." Bobby introduced this creature as the Finn, and seemed delighted to see him. The Finn’s decrepit jacket exuded a complex odor of stale smoke, ancient solder, and pickled herring. Bobby explained that the Finn was always welcome. "Might as well be. No way to keep him out, once he wants in."

  3Jane comes as well, one of the dawn visitors, her presence sad and tentative. Bobby seems scarcely aware of her, but Angie, the repository of so many of her memories, resonates to that particular mingling of longing, jealousy, frustration, and rage. Angie has come to understand 3Jane’s motives, and to forgive her — though what, exactly, wandering amid these oaks in sunlight, is there to forgive?

  But dreams of 3Jane sometimes weary Angie; she prefers other dreams, particularly those of her young protégé. These often come as the lace curtains billow, as a first bird calls. She rolls closer to Bobby, closes her eyes, forms the name Continuity in her mind, and waits for the small bright images.

  She sees that they have taken the girl to a clinic in Jamaica, to treat her addiction to crude stimulants. Her metabolism fine-tuned by a patient army of Net medics, she emerges at last, radiant with health. With her sensorium expertly modulated by Piper Hill, her first stims are greeted with unprecedented enthusiasm. Her global audience is entranced by her freshness, her vigor, the delightfully ingenuous way in which she seems to discover her glamorous life as if for the first time.

  A shadow sometimes crosses the distant screen, but only for an instant: Robin Lanier has been found strangled, frozen, on the mountainscaped facade of the New Suzuki Envoy; both Angie and Continuity know whose long strong hands throttled the star and threw him there.

  But a certain thing eludes her, one special fragment of the puzzle that is history.

  At the edge of oak shadow, beneath a steel and salmon sunset, in this France that isn’t France, she asks Bobby for the answer to her final question.

  They waited in the drive at midnight, because Bobby had promised her an answer.

  As the clocks in the house struck twelve, sh
e heard the hiss of tires over gravel. The car was long, low and gray.

  Its driver was the Finn.

  Bobby opened the door and helped her in.

  In the backseat sat the young man she recalled from her glimpse of the impossible horse and its three mismatched riders. He smiled at her, but said nothing.

  "This is Colin," Bobby said, climbing in beside her. "And you know the Finn."

  "She never guessed, huh?" the Finn asked, putting the car in gear.

  "No," Bobby said, "I don’t think so."

  The young man named Colin was smiling at her. "The aleph is an approximation of the matrix," he said, "a sort of model of cyberspace . . ."

  "Yes, I know." She turned to Bobby. "Well? You promised you’d tell me the why of When It Changed."

  The Finn laughed, a very strange sound. "Ain’t a why, lady. More like it’s a what. Remember one time Brigitte told you there was this other? Yeah? Well, that’s the what, and the what’s the why."

  "I do remember. She said that when the matrix finally knew itself, there was the other.’ . . ."

  "That’s where we’re going tonight," Bobby began, putting his arm around her. "It isn’t far, but it’s — "

  "Different," the Finn said, "it’s real different."

  "But what is it?"

  "You see," Colin said, brushing aside his brown forelock, a gesture like a schoolboy’s in some antique play, "when the matrix attained sentience, it simultaneously became aware of another matrix, another sentience."

  "I don’t understand," she said. "If cyberspace consists of the sum total of data in the human system . . ."

  "Yeah," the Finn said, turning out onto the long straight empty highway, "but nobody’s talkin’ human, see?"

  "The other one was somewhere else," Bobby said.

  "Centauri," Colin said.

  Can they be teasing her? Is this some joke of Bobby’s?

  "So it’s kinda hard to explain why the matrix split up into all those hoodoos ‘n’shit, when it met this other one," the Finn said, "but when we get there, you’ll sorta get the idea . . ."

  "My own feeling," Colin said, "is that it’s all so much more amusing, this way . . ."

  "Are you telling me the truth?"

  "Be there in a New York minute," said the Finn, "no shit."

  Author’s Afterword

  Ten years have now passed since the inception of whatever strange process it was that led me to write Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. The technology through which you now access these words didn’t exist, a decade ago.

  Neuromancer was written on a "clockwork typewriter," the very one you may recall glimpsing in Julie Deane’s office in Chiba City. This machine, a Hermes 2000 manual portable, dates from somewhere in the 1930’s. It’s a very tough and elegant piece of work, from the factory of E. PAILLARD & Cie S.A. YVERDON (SUISSE). Cased, it weighs slightly less than the Macintosh SE/30 I now write on, and is finished in a curious green-and-black "crackle" paint-job, perhaps meant to suggest the covers of an accountant’s ledger. Its keys are green as well, of celluloid, and the letters and symbols on them are canary yellow. (I once happened to brush the shift-key with the tip of a lit cigarette, dramatically confirming the extreme flammability of this early plastic.) In its day, the Hermes 2000 was one of the best portable writing-machines in the world, and one of the most expensive. This one belonged to my wife’s step-grandfather, who had been a journalist of sorts and had used it to compose laudatory essays on the poetry of Robert Burns. I used it first to write undergraduate Eng. lit. papers, then my early attempts at short stories, then Neuromancer, all without so much as ever having touched an actual computer.

  Some readers, evidently, find this odd. I don’t. Computers, in 1981 (when I began to work with the concept of cyberspace, the word having first seen light on my trusty Hermes) were mostly wall-sized monsters covered with twirling wheels of magnetic tape. I’d once glimpsed one through a window at the university. Friends who did things with computers tended to do them at very odd hours, having arranged to scam time on some large institution’s mainframe.

  Around that time, however, the Apple IIc appeared. For me, it appeared on the miniature billboards affixed to bus-stop shelters. This seductive little unit, looking not that much bigger, really, than your present day Powerbook, was depicted dangling from a handle in the hand of some unseen suit with a nicely-laundered cuff. Portability! Amazing! A whole computer in a package that size! (I didn’t know that you had to lug the monitor around as well, plus a bulky little transformer and another disk-drive that weighed nearly as much as the computer itself.) These Apple ads were the direct inspiration for the cyberspace decks in Neuromancer. Like the Hermes 2000, the IIc, in its day, was quite something.

  Not that I ever experienced it in its day, not quite. My Hermes died. Some tiny pawl or widget caved in to metal-fatigue. No replacement could be found. I’d just started Count Zero. I gave the typewriter man $75 for a reconditioned Royal desk machine, a hideous truck-like lump of a thing with an extended carriage that alone weighed twenty pounds. It had an extended carriage, he said, because it had belonged to a little old lady who’d only ever used it to type mimeograph stencils for Sunday-school programs. (Though I suspect many of you may not know what "mimeograph stencils" were.)

  I stuck with this ghastly clunker through Count Zero, but as it came time to begin Mona Lisa Overdrive, I went shopping for a computer. Bruce Sterling’s father had given him his old Apple II, and Bruce allowed as how it was a pretty convenient way to put words in a row. Remembering those bus-stop ads, I bought myself an Apple IIc. This was around 1986 or so, and the IIc had long-since been eclipsed by various proto-Macs, which everyone assured me were wonderful, but which I regarded as prohibitively expensive. I bought a IIc in an end-of-line sale at a department store, took it home, and learned, to my considerable disappointment, that personal computers stored their data on little circular bits of electromagnetic tape, which were whirled around to the accompaniment of assorted coarse sounds. I suppose I’d assumed the data was just sort of, well, held. In a glittering mesh of silicon. Or something. But silently.

  And that, quite literally, was the first time I ever touched a computer. And I still don’t know very much about them. The revealed truth of which, as I’ve said, sometimes perturbs my readers, or in any case those readers with a peculiarly intense computer-tech bent, of whom I seem to have more than a few.

  But Neuromancer and its two sequels are not about computers. They may pretend, at times, and often rather badly, to be about computers, but really they’re about technology in some broader sense. Personally, I suspect they’re actually about Industrial Culture; about what we do with machines, what machines do with us, and how wholly unconscious (and usually unlegislated) this process has been, is, and will be. Had I actually known a great deal (by 1981 standards) about real computing, I doubt very much I would (or could) have written Neuromancer. Perhaps it all goes to prove that there are situations (literary ones, at least) in which a little knowledge is not only a dangerous thing, but the best tool for the job at hand.

  A mimeograph stencil, by the way, is a piece of tissue-paper impregnated with wax. You punch through the wax with a typewriter, creating a stencil through which ink can be forced onto paper, allowing the reproduction of multiple copies. For many years, and not so long ago, these curious devices were very nearly as common as typewriters. They were what people did before laser printers. The mimeograph is one of many dinosaurs recently brought to the verge of extinction by the computer. They are dead tech, destined to make up part of the litter engulfing the Finn’s back room. As is my Hermes 2000. As is my Apple IIc, which my children play with only reluctantly, its black-and-white graphics no competition for their video-games. As is my old SE/30 here; as is, eventually, whatever sort of unit, however slick and contemporary, you happen to be reading this on.

  It gives me great pleasure to have these three books digitized, data-compressed, and published in this (m
ake no mistake) revolutionary format. We participate, you and I, in the death of print-as-we-knew-it, and should experience thereby an exquisite frisson of ecstasy and dread. So soon, we plunge toward a world in which the word "library" simply means something on the other end of a modem.

  But I confess it gives me greater pleasure still, to contemplate that process whereby every tech, however sharp this morning, is invariably supplanted by the new, the unthinkable, and to imagine these words, unread and finally inaccessible, gathering dust at the back of some drawer in some year far up the road. Nothing in there but a tarnished Yale key, a silver dime, a couple of desiccated moths, and several hundred thousand data-compressed words, all in a row.

  I know; I put them there.

  I’d like to take this opportunity to cite and thank the late Terry Carr, who commissioned the work that became Neuromancer from an unknown and thoroughly unconfident writer, one whose track-record at the time consisted of a handful of short stories. If Terry hadn’t been willing to take a chance with me, when he did, thereby forcing me to write something (a novel) I felt several working years short of being ready to do, it’s most unlikely that these books would exist today.

  —Vancouver, 6/16/92

  About the Author

  William Gibson has received widespread media attention for his "cyberspace trilogy": Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. His first book, Neuromancer won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards — the only science fiction novel to receive all three. His most recent work, co-authored with Bruce Sterling, is entitled The Difference Engine. He is currently living in Vancouver, British Columbia with his family.