Mona Lisa Overdrive (The Neuromancer Trilogy)

by William Gibson

They accelerated past an unmanned Eurotrans freight vehicle, its blunt prow studded with sensors and banks of headlights.

She remembered the deck he’d used, the one he’d taken with him, a grey factory-custom Hosaka with unmarked keys.

‘Angela,’ the house said, its voice quiet but compelling, ‘I have a call from Hilton Swift . . .’ ‘Executive override?’ She was eating baked beans and toast at the kitchen counter. ‘No,’ it said, confidingly. ‘Change your tone,’ she said, around a mouthful of beans. ‘Something with an edge of anxiety.’ ‘Mr Swift is waiting,’ the house said nervously. ‘Better,’ she said, carrying bowl and plate to the washer, ‘but I want something closer to genuine hysteria . . .’ ‘Will you take the call?’ The voice was choked with tension. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but keep your voice that way, I like it.’

Thinking of the other’s dreams, of corridors winding in upon themselves, muted tints of ancient carpet . . . An old man, a head made of jewels, a taut pale face with eyes that were mirrors . . . And a beach in the wind and dark.

Callback

She’d seen a trick fitted for a suit once, a guy who took her to a Holiday Inn. The suit place was off the hotel lobby, and he stood in there in his underwear, cross-hatched with lines of blue light, and watched himself on three big screens. On the screens, you couldn’t see the blue lines, because he was wearing a different suit in each image. And Mona had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing, because the system had a cosmetic program that made him look different on the screens, stretched his face a little and made his chin stronger, and he didn’t seem to notice. Then he picked a suit, got back into the one he’d been wearing, and that was it.

But God, it was pretty, the night so bright, the crowd surging around her, past all the good things you could have if you just got lucky.

She spent several minutes leafing through a pornographic magazine, with Japanese text, which seemed to have mainly to do with the art of knots.

The English valued their gomi in its own right, in a way she had only begun to understand; they inhabited it.

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?

Five minutes later, she’d returned to her room with a large and very British-looking orange; the English seemed to place no special value on the symmetry of fruit.

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