Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)

by William Gibson

There had been a room filled with shelves of books, a million flat leaves of yellowing paper pressed between bindings of cloth or leather, the shelves marked at intervals by labels that followed a code of letters and numbers; a crowded gallery where Case had stared, through Molly’s incurious eyes, at a shattered, dust-stencilled sheet of glass, a thing labelled – her gaze had tracked the brass plaque automatically – ‘La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même.’ She’d reached out and touched this, her artificial nails clicking against the Lexan sandwich protecting the broken glass. There had been what was obviously the entrance to Tessier-Ashpool’s cryogenic compound, circular doors of black glass trimmed with chrome.

She lived in a single room so broad and deep that its far reaches were lost to an inverse horizon, the floor hidden by the curvature of the spindle. The ceiling was low and irregular, done in the same imitation stone that walled the corridor. Here and there across the floor were jagged sections of wall, waist-high reminders of the labyrinth. There was a rectangular turquoise pool centred ten metres from the foot of the stairway, its underwater floods the apartment’s only source of light – or it seemed that way, to Case, as Molly took her final step. The pool threw shifting blobs of light across the ceiling above it.

And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting impression of something rushing toward him, across leagues of black mirror.

‘Night City is not a place one returns to, artiste,’ he said,