Mona Lisa Overdrive (Sprawl, #3)

by William Gibson

This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.

Or they’ll punch a hole in the wall to get to some wiring and you can see all these different layers of tile.…” “Yes?” “Because it’s getting narrower, right? It’s like arterial plaque.…”

The decor of the bar induced a profound sense of cultural dislocation: it managed to simultaneously reflect traditional Japanese design and look as though it had been drawn up by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Gerald’s office had a sign with big old-fashioned letters, fourth floor of a condo rack in what Prior said was Baltimore. The kind of building where they throw up a framework and commercial tenants bring their own modules, plug-ins. Like a highrise trailer camp, everything snaked with bundled cables, optics, lines for sewage and water.

There was a new disease in Singapore; it hadn’t killed anybody yet, but nobody knew how you got it or how to cure it.

Things had gotten to a point where Mona couldn’t get any comfort out of imagining Lanette’s advice. Put Lanette in this situation, Mona figured she’d just eat more Memphis black till she felt like it wasn’t her problem. The world hadn’t ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.

They’d driven all night, with Angie mostly out of it—Mona could definitely credit the drug stories now—and talking, different languages, different voices. And that was the worst, those voices, because they spoke to Molly, challenged her, and she answered them back as she drove, not like she was talking to Angie just to calm her down, but like there really was something there, another person—at least three of them—speaking through Angie. And it hurt Angie when they spoke, made her muscles knot and her nose bleed, while Mona crouched over her and dabbed away the blood, filled with a weird mixture of fear and love and pity for the queen of all her dreams—or maybe it was just the wiz—but in the blue-white flicker of freeway lights Mona had seen her own hand beside Angie’s, and they weren’t the same, not the same, not really the same shape, and that had made her glad.