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He’d grown up in white Jersey stringtowns where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did.
The doctors at the clinic had used chemical pliers to pry the addiction away from receptor sites in her brain.
She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.
Beauvoir had taught her about her dreams. The dreams are real, he’d said, his brown face shining with sweat. He taught her the names of the ones she’d seen in dreams. He taught her that all dreams reach down to a common sea, and he showed her the way in which hers were different and the same. You alone sail the old sea and the new, he said.
She knew the gods, in New Jersey, and love. The loa had guided her, when she’d set out with Bobby to build her third, her current life. They were well matched, Angie and Bobby, born out of vacuums, Angie from the clean blank kingdom of Maas Biolabs and Bobby from the boredom of Barrytown.…
“Sally,” the woman said, “Sally Shears. Eat up, honey. If you’re as bored as I am, you feel like a walk.” As Kumiko stared, her hand came up to touch the glasses, as though she were about to remove them. “Portobello Road’s a couple blocks. I need some air.” The mirrored lenses seemed to have no frames, no ear-pieces.
But Swain’s your old man’s kobun, or anyway one of them. Oyabun-kobun, parent-child.
Slick had once stimmed a Net/Knowledge sequence about what shape the universe was; Slick figured the universe was everything there was, so how could it have a shape? If it had a shape, then there was something around it for it to have a shape in, wasn’t there? And if that something was something, then wasn’t that part of the universe too? This was exactly the kind of thing you didn’t want to get into with Gentry, because Gentry could tie your head in knots. But Slick didn’t think cyberspace was anything like the universe anyway; it was just a way of representing data.
He couldn’t remember when he hadn’t been able to remember, but sometimes he almost could.
“Have you ever considered the relationship of clinical paranoia to the phenomenon of religious conversion?”
We are that within, that without is other, here forever shall we dwell.
Becker explored the planes of her face in a tortured, extended fugue, the movement of his images in exquisite counterpoise with the sinuous line of feedback that curved and whipped through the shifting static levels of his soundtrack.
“What would you like to know, Angie?” “ ‘When It Changed’ …” “The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes. One mode assumes that the cyberspace matrix is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by entities whose characteristics correspond with the primary mythform of a ‘hidden people.’ The other involves assumptions of omniscience, omnipotence, and incomprehensibility on the part of the matrix itself.” “That the matrix is God?” “In a manner of speaking, although it would be more accurate, in terms of the mythform, to say that the matrix has a God, since this being’s omniscience and
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Gomi. Thirty-five percent of the landmass of Tokyo was built on gomi, on level tracts reclaimed from the Bay through a century’s systematic dumping. Gomi, there, was a resource to be managed, to be collected, sorted, carefully plowed under.
Gomi in the Sprawl was something else: a rich humus, a decay that sprouted prodigies in steel and polymer. The apparent lack of planning alone was enough to dizzy her, running so entirely opposite the value her own culture placed on efficient land use.
Something moved behind the slot, its color the unhealthy pink of hot cigarette ash in noon sunlight, and Kumiko’s face was washed with a stutter of light.
he’d explained that the cubes housed the recorded personalities of former executives, corporate directors. Their souls? she’d asked. No, he’d said, and smiled, then added that the distinction was a subtle one. “They are not conscious. They respond, when questioned, in a manner approximating the response of the subject. If they are ghosts, then holograms are ghosts.”
But did it wake, Kumiko wondered, when the alley was empty? Did its laser vision scan the silent fall of midnight snow?
“They dealt. ’Ware, mostly. Buying, selling. Sometimes they bought from me.…” “How were they weird?” “Hoodoos. Thought the matrix was full of mambos ’n’ shit. Wanna know something, Moll?” “What?” “They’re right.”
“You’re horrid.” “Danielle is a horror, missy.” “Look who’s talking.” “Ah,” said the hairdresser, narrowing his eyes, “but my soul is a child’s.”
“You don’t know?” Again subvocally, carefully.
Sometimes he just needed to stand there and look up at the Judge, or squat on the concrete beside the Witch. It held back the memory-stutter, to do that. Not the fugues, the real flashbacks, but this jerky unfocused feeling he got, like the memory tape kept slipping in his head, losing minute increments of experience … So he was doing that now, and it was working, and finally he noticed Cherry was there beside him.
