Virtual Light (Bridge, #1)

by William Gibson

He got up, put a television on, and saw the Pooky Bear killers for the first time. All three of them. They looked, he thought, pretty much like everybody else, which is how people who do that kind of shit usually do look on television.

Rydell had come to the conclusion that that high crazy thing, that rush of Going For It, was maybe something that wasn’t always quite entirely to be trusted.

to a corridor quiet as the floor of some forest in a dream.

Thomasson was an American baseball player, very handsome, very powerful. He went to the Yomiyuri Giants in 1982, for a large sum of money. Then it was discovered that he could not hit the ball. The writer and artisan Gempei Akasegawa appropriated his name to describe certain useless and inexplicable monuments, pointless yet curiously artlike features of the urban landscape. But the term has subsequently taken on other shades of meaning. If you wish, I can access and translate today’s definitions in our Gendai Yogo Kisochishiki, that is, The Basic Knowledge of Modern Terms.

“Some kind of, like, Costa Rican animals, you know? Ecology theme. She’s real green. Made us take out what was left of the lawn, put in all these groundcover things look like gray spiders. But the shop can’t get those fucking animals to show, man. We got a warranty and everything, but it’s, you know, been a pain in the ass.” He shook his head. Rydell finished his cornflakes. “You ever been to Costa Rica, Rydell?” “No.” “It’s fucking beautiful, man. Like Switzerland.” “Never been there.” “No, I mean what they do with data. Like the Swiss, what they did with money.” “You mean the havens?” “You got it. Those people smart. No army, navy, air force, just neutral. And they take care of everybody’s data.” “Regardless what it is.” “Hey, fucking ‘A.’ Smart people. And spend that money on ecology, man.”

said. His hair was shaped like an upside-down flowerpot with a spiral path sculpted into the side of it. Sort of like a Shriner’s fez, but without the tassel. He was about five feet tall and his triple-oversized shirt made him look nearly as wide. The shirt was lemon-yellow and printed with life-size handguns, in full color, all different kinds. He wore a huge pair of navy blue shorts that came to way below his knees, Raiders socks, sneakers with little red lights embedded in the edges of the soles, and a pair of round mirrored glasses with lenses the size of five-dollar coins.

Separated at Birth was a police program you used in missing persons cases. You scanned a photo of the person you wanted, got back the names of half a dozen celebrities who looked vaguely like the subject, then went around asking people if they’d seen anybody lately who reminded them of A, B, C … The weird thing was, it worked better than just showing them a picture of the subject. The instructor at the Academy in Knoxville had told Rydell’s class that that was because it tapped into the part of the brain that kept track of celebrities. Rydell had imagined that as some kind of movie-star lobe. Did people really have those?

“My grandmother,” Warbaby rumbled, like a tectonic plate giving up and diving for China, “was Vietnamese. Grandaddy, a Detroit boy. Army man. Brought her home from Saigon, but then he didn’t stick around. My daddy, his son, he changed his name to Warbaby, see? A gesture. Sentiment.”

The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous—in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl’s bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit.

There’s only but two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they’re one kind. We’re the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore. How you and I relate to those other people, we proj their messages on. We get paid for it. We try not to drip rain on the carpet. And we get by, okay? But what happens on the interface? What happens when we touch?”

There was this long skinny park that led up to it, called the Panhandle, and that was still public. Way too public, she thought, with people, mostly old or anyway looking that way, stretched out side by side, wrapped in silvery plastic to keep the rays off, this crinkly stuff that glittered like those Elvis suits in a video they’d showed them sometimes, up in Beaverton. It kind of made her think of maggots, like if somebody rolled each one up in its own little piece of foil.

She’d already put messengers down as something to watch for in the city. They had clothes and hair like nobody else, and bikes with neon and light-up wheels, handlebars curved up and over like scorpion-tails. Helmets with little radios built in. Either they were going somewhere fast or they were just goofing, hanging, drinking coffee.

this little Mexican headset taught you every street in San Francisco.

Location noted as place based innovation outside hegemonic govts

Three days and she had it down, pretty much, even though he said that wasn’t like the map in a messenger’s head. You needed to know buildings, how to get into them, how to act, how to keep your wheels from getting stolen.

He said he couldn’t tell the difference anymore between the “programs” and the “commercials,” whatever that meant.

“Time. That’s the total fucking motherfucker, isn’t it?”

But this feeling had come, that day, and swallowed everything up inside it, so big you couldn’t really prove it was there except by an arithmetic of absence and the memory of better days. And she’d moved around in it, whatever it was, from one point to another,

And thereby growing aware of the thing that had swallowed the world, though it was only just visible, and then in sidelong glances. Not a feeling so much as a form of gas, something she could almost smell in the back of her throat, lying chill and inert in the rooms of her subsequent passage.

Allied, it had just come to seem like the emptiness was filled with ordinary things, a whole new world grown up in the socket of the old, one day rolling into the next—whether

“Stormin’,” he said, like he was glad to note the world outside continuing on any recognizable course at all, however drastic. “Stormin’ down rain.”

She saw herself just riding, maybe east, riding forever into whatever country that was, deserts like you saw on television, then flat green farms where big machines came marching along in rows, doing whatever it was they did. But she remembered the road down from Oregon, the trucks groaning past in the night like lost mad animals, and she tried to picture herself riding down that. No, there wasn’t any place out on a road like that, nothing human-sized, and hardly ever even a light, in all the fields of dark. Where you could walk and walk forever and never come to anything, not even a place to sit down. A bike wouldn’t get her anywhere out there.

How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only knew for the first time that you’d ever had them.

You didn’t wake up every morning and say yes and yes to every little thing. But little things were what it was all made of.

about. It looked like a carnival, sort of. Or a state fair midway, except it was roofed over, on the upper level, with crazy little shanties, just boxes, and whole house-trailers winched up and glued into the suspension with big gobs of adhesive, like grasshoppers in a spider-web. You could go up and down, between the two original deck levels, through holes they’d cut in the upper deck, all different kinds of stairs patched in under there, plywood and welded steel, and one had an old airline gangway, just sitting there with its tires flat. Down on the bottom deck, once you got in past a lot of food-wagons, there were mostly bars, the smallest ones Rydell had ever seen, some with only four stools and not even a door, just a big shutter they could pull down and lock. But none of it done to any plan, not that he could see. Not like a mall, where they plug a business into a slot and wait to see whether it works or not. This place had just grown, it looked like, one thing patched onto the next, until the whole span was wrapped in this formless mass of stuff, and no two pieces of it matched. There was a different material anywhere you looked, almost none of it being used for what it had originally been intended for. He passed stalls faced with turquoise Formica, fake brick, fragments of broken tile worked into swirls and sunbursts and flowers. One place, already shuttered, was covered with green-and-copper slabs of desoldered component-board.

And the answer, he guessed, was that he, like anybody else in his position, was just trying to make a living.

They’d run all these tests on him and decided he wasn’t racist. He wasn’t, either, but not because he thought about it particularly. He just couldn’t see the point. It just made for a lot of hassle, being that way, so why be that way? Nobody was going to go back and live where they lived before, were they, and if they did (he vaguely suspected) there wouldn’t be any Mongolian barbecue and maybe we’d all be listening to Pentecostal Metal and anyway the President was black.

Yamazaki crossed to the smooth curve of cable that interrupted the room’s floor. Only an oval segment of it was visible, like some mathematical formula barely breaking a topological surface in a computer representation.

He bent to touch it, the visible segment polished by other hands. Each of the thirty-seven cables, containing four hundred and seventy-two wires, had withstood, and withstood now, a force of some million pounds. Yamazaki felt something, some message of vast, obscure moment, shiver up through the relic-smooth dorsal hump. The storm, surely; the bridge itself was capable of considerable mobility; it expanded and contracted with heat and cold; the great steel teeth of the piers were sunk into bedrock beneath the Bay mud, bedrock that had scarcely moved even in the Little Grande.

There was stuff painted on the brick walls as high as anyone could reach, but it didn’t look like any language he’d ever seen, except maybe the way they wrote cuss-words in a printed cartoon.

maybe Rydell had just crossed over into that point of tiredness where it all flipped around for a while and you started to feel like you were more awake, some ways, than you usually ever were.

Yamazaki thought of his thesis advisor in Osaka. “I don’t care,” Yamazaki said, in English, San Francisco his witness. The whole city was a Thomasson. Perhaps America itself was a Thomasson.

“Has it occurred to you that you wouldn’t be here right now if Lucius fucking Warbaby hadn’t taken up rollerblading last month?” “How’s that?” “He wrecked his knee. Warbaby wrecks his knee, can’t drive, you wind up here. Think about it. What does that tell you about late-stage capitalism?”

Most of the good stuff was sort of grouped around the television, which was big and shiny but the old kind from before they started to get real big and flat. It was on now, showing this black and white movie, but the sound was off.

There were a lot of different ways you could play with it, the most popular one in Knoxville being gunfights, where you got these guns and shot at all kinds of bad guys, and they shot back and then you got the score. Sort of like FATSS at the Academy, but only about half the rez. And none of the, well, color. But the one Rydell had liked most was where you just went in and sort of sculpted things out of nothing, out of that cloud of pixels or polygons or whatever they were, and you could see what other people were doing at the same time, and maybe even put your stuff together with theirs, if you both wanted to. He’d been kind of self-conscious about it, because it seemed like something that mostly girls did. And the girls were always doing these unicorns and rainbows and things, and Rydell liked to do cars, kind of dream-cars, like he was some designer in Japan

somewhere and he could build anything he wanted. You could get these full-color printouts when you were done, or a cassette, if you’d animated it. There’d always be a couple of girls down at the far end, doing plastic surgery on pictures of themselves, fiddling around with their faces and hair, and they’d get printouts of those if they did one they really liked.

Why? Hell. Because. See people dying, you just walk by like it was television?

Chevette didn’t know what to think about Los Angeles. She thought those palm trees were weird, though.

It was built in Barcelona and you just plugged it into the house-current and left it until it was charged. It wouldn’t do much more than forty on a highway,

Rydell’s Los Angeles owes much to my reading of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, perhaps most particularly in his observations regarding the privatization of public space.