Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)

by William Gibson

Ninsei wore him down until the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish, some secret poison he hadn’t known he carried.

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

Case knew that at some point he’d started to play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire. He no longer carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions.

A millimeter of white showed beneath each of her pupils. Sanpaku.

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta . . . —

Case remembered fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the rose glow of the dawn geodesics.

“THE MATRIX HAS its roots in primitive arcade games,” said the voice-over, “in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.” On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .”

Please, he prayed, now— A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky. Now— Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding— And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach. And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant

AT MIDNIGHT, SYNCHED with the chip behind Molly’s eye, the link man in Jersey had given his command. “Mainline.” Nine Moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl, had simultaneously dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones. Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and drifted out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different police departments and public security

agencies were absorbing the information that an obscure subsect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.

“Chicago,” she said, “I’m on my way.” And then she was falling,

not to the marble floor, slick with blood and vomit, but down some bloodwarm well, into silence and the dark.

Armitage crossed stiffly to the table and took three fat bundles of New Yen from the pockets of his trenchcoat. “You want to count it?” he asked Yonderboy. “No,” the Panther Modern said. “You’ll pay. You’re a Mr. Who. You pay to stay one. Not a Mr. Name.”

The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car’s floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case’s station.

The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange group anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of cyberspace. . . .

And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus Russian heart, implanted in a POW camp during the war. He’d refused to replace the thing, saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing.

You’ll have a caller in about fifteen minutes. His name is Terzibashjian.” The phone bleated softly. Armitage was gone. “Wake up, baby,” Case said. “Biz.” “I’ve been awake an hour already.” The mirrors turned. “We got a Jersey Bastion coming up.” “You got an ear for language, Case. Bet you’re part Armenian. That’s the eye Armitage has had on Riviera.

“I have followed him in the street and seen a dozen cycles fall, near him, in a day. Find the cyclist in a hospital, the story is always the same. A scorpion poised beside a brake lever. . . .” “

Operators above a certain level tended to submerge their personalities, he knew. But Wage had had vices, lovers. Even, it had been rumored, children. The blankness he found

in Armitage was something else.

He was a product of the rubble rings that fringe the radioactive core of old Bonn.

Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind.

Molly leaned across him and slapped Riviera’s face, once. “No,

baby. No games. You play that subliminal shit around me, I’ll hurt you real bad. I can do it without damaging you at all. I like that.”

We’re getting this taxi out to Zion, Zion cluster.” She touched the release plate on her harness and began to free herself from the embrace of the foam. “Funny choice of venue, you ask me.” “How’s that?” “Dreads. Rastas. Colony’s about thirty years old now.” “What’s that mean?” “You’ll see. It’s an okay place by me. Anyway, they’ll let you smoke your cigarettes there.” —

A few hours after their arrival, Armitage had sent him into the yellow maze to call Riviera out for a meal. He’d found him curled like a cat on a thin pad of temperfoam, naked, apparently asleep, his head orbited by a revolving halo of small white geometric forms, cubes, spheres, and pyramids. “Hey, Riviera.” The ring continued to revolve. He’d gone back and told Armitage. “He’s stoned,” Molly said, looking up from the disassembled parts of her fletcher. “Leave him be.”

“How you doing, Dixie?” “I’m dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that one.” “How’s it feel?” “It doesn’t.” “Bother you?” “What bothers me is, nothin’ does.” “How’s that?” “Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later he’s tossin’ all night. Elroy, I said, what’s eatin’ you? Goddam thumb’s itchin’, he says. So I told him, scratch it. McCoy, he says, it’s the other goddam thumb.” When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case’s spine. “Do me a favor, boy.” “What’s that, Dix?” “This scam of yours, when it’s over, you erase this goddam thing.” —

“It’s the ganja,” Molly said, when Case told her the story. “They don’t make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to him. It’s not like bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?”

“Try it,” Case said. He took the band, put it on, and Case adjusted the trodes. He closed his eyes. Case hit the power stud. Aerol shuddered. Case jacked him back out. “What did you see, man?” “Babylon,” Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and kicking off down the corridor.

“Mountain effect, as it narrows. Ground seems to get higher, more rocky, but it’s an easy climb. Higher you climb, the lower the gravity. Sports up there. There’s a velodrome ring here.” He pointed. “A what?” Case leaned forward. “They race bicycles,” Molly said. “Low grav, high-traction tires, get up over a hundred kilos an hour.” “This end doesn’t concern us,” Armitage said with his usual utter seriousness. “Shit,” Molly said, “I’m an avid cyclist.”

“Steppin’ Razor,” one said, as Molly drifted into the chamber. “Like unto a whippin’ stick.”

The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back. “Soon come, the Final Days. . . . Voices. Voices cryin’ inna wilderness, prophesyin’ ruin unto Babylon. . . .” “Voices.” The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at Case. “We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.”

“Maelcum a rude boy,” said the other, “an’ a righteous tug pilot.”

“DIX,” CASE SAID, “I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?”

“Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.”

Case punched to within four grid points of the cube. Its blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind a vast sheet of frosted glass. “Knows we’re here,” the Flatline observed.

“MON,” MAELCUM WAS saying, “I don’t like this. . . .” “It’s cool,” Molly said. “It’s just okay. It’s something these guys do, is all. Like, he wasn’t dead, and it was only a few seconds. . . .” “I saw th’ screen, EEG readin’ dead. Nothin’ movin’, forty second.” “Well, he’s okay now.” “EEG flat as a strap,” Maelcum protested.

He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed. Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind’s eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet. When he did hit the ignition, it exploded with a thump, taking an eyebrow with it. Five floors above him, from the open window, he heard Marlene laughing.

“What is this thing?” he asked the Hosaka. “Parcel for me.” “Data transfer from Bockris Systems GmbH, Frankfurt, advises, under coded transmission, that content of shipment is Kuang Grade

Mark Eleven penetration program. Bockris further advises that interface with Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is entirely compatible and yields optimal penetration capabilities, particularly with regard to existing military systems. . . .” “How about an AI?” “Existing military systems and artificial intelligences.” “Jesus Christ. What did you call it?” “Kuang Grade Mark Eleven.” “It’s Chinese?”

“...

good side, get me to maybe shaft Armitage. What goes?” “Motive,” the construct said. “Real motive problem, with an AI. Not human, see?” “Well, yeah, obviously.” “Nope. I mean, it’s not human. And you can’t get a handle on it. Me, I’m not human either, but I respond like one. See?” “Wait a sec.” Case said. “Are you sentient, or not?” “Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I’m really just a bunch of ROM. It’s one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess. . . .” The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case’s spine. “But I ain’t likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain’t no way human.”

“So you figure we can’t get on to its motive?” “It own itself?” “Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the mainframe.” “That’s a good one,” the construct said. “Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI.”

“So it’s getting ready to burn itself?” Case began to punch the deck nervously, at random. The matrix blurred, resolved, and he saw the complex of pink spheres representing a Sikkim steel combine. “Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AI’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.” Case glared at the pink spheres of Sikkim. “Okay,” he said, finally, “I’m slotting this virus. I want you to scan its instruction face and tell me what you think.” The half sense of someone reading over his shoulder was gone for a ...

“Man,” she said, “if whatever that is can get in past what those surgeons did to you in Chiba, you are gonna be in sad-ass shape when it wears off.”

Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the whole thing. “Jesus,” Molly said, her own plate empty, “gimme that. You know what this costs?” She took his plate. “They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn’t vat stuff.”

mouthful up and chewed. “Not hungry,” Case managed. His brain was deep-fried. No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there, and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the wrinkled lobes, shot through with

greenish-purple flashes of pain. “You look fucking awful,” Molly said cheerfully. Case tried the wine. The aftermath of the betaphen...

Case had seen the medium before; when he’d been a teenager in the Sprawl, they’d called it “dreaming real.” He remembered thin Puerto Ricans under East Side streetlights, dreaming real to the quick beat of a salsa, dreamgirls shuddering and turning, the onlookers clapping in time. But that had needed a van full of gear and a clumsy trode helmet.

She seemed to hit him, somehow, before he’d actually gotten the door open. He was on his knees, the steel door against his back, the blades of her rigid thumbs quivering centimeters from his eyes. . . . “Jesus Christ,” she said, cuffing the side of his head as she rose. “You’re an idiot to try that. How the hell you open those locks, Case? Case? You okay?” She leaned over him.