Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)

by William Gibson

“GET WHAT YOU went for?” the construct asked. Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was filling the grid between itself and the T-A ice with hypnotically intricate traceries of rainbow, lattices fine as snow crystal on a winter window. “Wintermute killed Armitage. Blew him out in a lifeboat with a hatch open.” “Tough shit,” the Flatline said. “Weren’t exactly asshole buddies, were you?” “He knew how to unbond the toxin sacs.” “So Wintermute knows too. Count on it.” “I don’t exactly trust Wintermute to give it to me.” The construct’s hideous approximation of laughter scraped Case’s nerves

like a dull blade. “Maybe that means you’re gettin’ smart.”

And now Corto-Armitage was dead, a small frozen moon for Freeside.

Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people. He’d seen it in the men who’d crippled him in Memphis, he’d seen Wage affect the semblance of it in Night City, and it had allowed him to accept Armitage’s flatness and lack of feeling. He’d always imagined it as a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism. It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence.

“Hey, asshole,” the Flatline said, when the Finn had gone a dozen paces. The figure paused, half turned. “What about me? What about my payoff?” “You’ll get yours,” it said. “What’s that mean?” Case asked, as he watched the narrow tweed back recede. “I wanna be erased,” the construct said. “I told you that, remember?” —

“Case,” she said, and paused, the fletcher in her right hand. Then she raised her left, smiled, touched her open palm with a wet tongue tip, kissing him through the simstim link. “Gotta go.”

“Some man in China say th’ truth comes out this,” he said, unwrapping an ancient, oilslick Remington automatic shotgun, its barrel chopped off a few millimeters in front of the battered forestock. The shoulderstock had been removed entirely, replaced with a wooden pistolgrip wound with dull black tape. He smelled of sweat and ganja.

“That the only one you got?” “Sure, mon,” he said, wiping oil from the black barrel with a red cloth, the black poly wrapping bunched around the pistolgrip

other hand, “I an’ I th’ Rastafarian navy...

“Listen, Dix. Wintermute says Kuang’s set itself up solid in our Hosaka. I’m going to have to jack you and my deck out of the circuit, haul you into Straylight, and plug you back in, into the custodial program there, Wintermute says. Says the Kuang virus will be all through there. Then we run from inside, through the Straylight net.” “Wonderful,” the Flatline said, “I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.”

“Mon,” Maelcum said, “mind we got gravity.” A dozen small objects struck the floor of the cabin simultaneously, as though drawn there by a magnet. Case gasped as his internal organs were pulled into a different configuration.

“You got a watch?” he asked Maelcum.

The Zionite shook his locks. “Time be time.” “Jesus,” Case said, and closed his eyes.

It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.

“To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names . . .”

“Easy,” Case said, forcing himself to catch up with the striding figure. “Gotta do this right.” Maelcum halted, turned, glowering at him, the Remington in his hands. “Right, mon? How’s right?” “Got Molly in there, but she’s out of it. Riviera, he can throw holos. Maybe he’s got Molly’s fletcher.” Maelcum nodded. “And there’s a ninja, a family bodyguard.” Maelcum’s frown deepened. “You listen, Babylon mon,” he said. “I a warrior. But this no m’ fight, no Zion fight, Babylon fightin’ Babylon, eatin’ i’self, ya know? But Jah seh I an’ I t’ bring Steppin’ Razor outa this.” Case blinked. “She a warrior,” Maelcum said, as if it explained everything. “Now you tell me, mon, who I not t’ kill.” “3Jane,” he said, after a pause. “A girl there. Has a kinda white robe thing on, with a hood. We need her.” —

Maelcum nodded. The first arrow pierced his upper arm. The Remington roared,

its meter of muzzle-flash blue in the light from the pool. The second arrow struck the shotgun itself, sending it spinning across the white tiles. Maelcum sat down hard and fumbled at the black thing that protruded from his arm. He yanked at it. Hideo stepped out of the shadows, a third arrow ready in a slender bamboo bow. He bowed. Maelcum stared, his hand still on the steel shaft. “The artery is intact,” the ninja said. Case remembered Molly’s description of the man who’d killed her lover. Hideo was another. Ageless, he radiated a sense of quiet, an utter calm. He wore clean, frayed khaki workpants and soft dark shoes that fit his feet like gloves, split at the toes like tabi socks. The bamboo bow was a museum piece, but the black alloy quiver that protruded above his left shoulder had the look of the best Chiba weapons shops. His brown chest was bare and smooth. “You cut my thumb, mon, wi’ secon’ one,” Maelcum said. “Coriolis force,” the ninja said, bowing again. “Most difficult, slow-moving projectile in rotational gravity. It was not intended.”

The ninja relaxed his pull on the fine, braided string, lowering the bow. He crossed the tiles to where the Remington lay and picked it up. “This is without subtlety,” he said, as if to himself. His voice was cool and pleasant. His every move was part of a dance, a dance that never ended, even when his body was still, at rest, but for all the power it suggested, there was also a humility, an open simplicity.

“The ghosts are gonna mix it tonight, lady,” Case said. “Wintermute’s going up against the other one, Neuromancer. For keeps. You know that?”

Case managed to fall before Riviera could level the fletcher for a clear shot. The darts whined past his neck like supersonic gnats. He rolled, seeing Hideo pivot through yet another step of his dance, the razored point of the arrow reversed in his hand, shaft flat along palm and rigid fingers. He flicked it underhand, wrist blurring, into the back of Riviera’s hand. The fletcher struck the tiles a meter away.

Riviera screamed. But not in pain. It was a shriek of rage, so pure, so refined, that it lacked all humanity.

Twin tight beams of light, ruby red needles, stabbed from the region of Riviera’s sternum. The ninja grunted, reeled back, hands to his eyes, then found his balance. “Peter,” 3Jane said, “Peter, what have you done?” “He’s blinded your clone boy,” Molly said flatly. Hideo lowered his cupped hands. Frozen on the white tile, Case saw whisps of steam drift from t...

above the bow, the arrow, and the Remington, Riviera’s smile had faded. He bent—bowing, it seemed to Case—and found the bow and arrow. “You’re blind,” Riviera said, taking a step backward. “Peter,” 3Jane said, “don’t you know he does it in the dark? Zen. It’s the way he practices.” The ninja notched his arrow. “Will you distract me with your holograms now?” Riviera was backing away, into the dark beyond the pool. He brushed against a white chair; its feet rattled on the tile. Hideo’s arrow twitched. Riviera broke and ran, throwing himself over a low, jagged length...

Case rose from the tiles, shook himself. “Hideo’ll get him, even blind?” he asked 3Jane. “When I was a child,” she said, “we loved to blindfold him. He put arrows through the pips in playing cards at ten meters.”

“KUANG GRADE MARK Eleven is haulin’ ass in nine seconds, countin’, seven, six, five . . .” The Flatline punched them up, smooth ascent, the ventral surface of the black chrome shark a microsecond flick of darkness. “Four, three . . .” Case had the strange impression of being in the pilot’s seat in a small plane. A flat dark surface in front of him suddenly glowed with a perfect reproduction of the keyboard of his deck. “Two, an’ kick ass—” Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the sensation of speed beyond anything he’d known before in cyberspace. . . . The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling away from the Chinese program’s thrust, a worrying impression of solid fluidity, as though the shards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell— “Christ,” Case said, awestruck, as Kuang twisted and banked above the horizonless fields of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an endless

neon cityscape, complexity that cut the eye, jewel bright, sharp as razors. “Hey, shit,” the construct said, “those things are the RCA Building. You know the old RCA Building?” The Kuang program dived past the gleaming spires of a dozen identical towers of data, each one a blue neon replica of the Manhattan skyscraper. “You ever see resolution this high?” Case asked. “No, but I never cracked an AI, either.” “This thing know where it’s going?” “It better.” They were dropping, losing altitude in a canyon of rainbow neon. “Dix—” An arm of shadow was uncoiling from the flickering floor below, a seething mass of darkness, unformed, shapeless. . . . “Company,” the Flatline said, as Case hit the representation of his deck, fingers flying automatically across the board. The Kuang swerved sickeningly, then reversed, whipping itself backward, shattering the illusion of a physical vehicle. The shadow thing was growing, spreading, blotting out the city of data. Case took them straight up, above them the distanceless bowl of jade-green ice. The city of the cores was gone now, obscured entirely by the dark beneath them. “What is it?” “An AI’s defense system,” the construct said, “or part of it. If it’s your pal Wintermute, he’s not lookin’ real friendly.” “Take it,” Case said. “You’re faster.” “Now your best de-fense, boy, it’s a good off-fense.” And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang’s sting with the

center of the dark below. And dove. Case’s sensory input warped with their velocity. His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue. His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines. The spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice. The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets that whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests that pressed against the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread, growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down into the waiting, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of Tessier-Ashpool S.A. And he was remembering an ancient story, a king placing coins on a chessboard, doubling the amount at each square. . . . Exponential. . . . Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become. . . . And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark, there came a point where the dark could be ...

coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters in the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth in the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a stick of driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two). He banked Kuang above the beach and swung the program in a wide circle, seeing the black shark thing through her eyes, a silent ghost hungry against the banks of lowering cloud. She cringed, dropping h...

“No. I saw her death coming. In the patterns you sometimes imagined you could detect in the dance of the street. Those patterns are real. I am complex enough, in my narrow ways, to read those dances. Far better than Wintermute can. I saw her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code of the lock on the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in Julie Deane’s account with a Hongkong shirtmaker. As clear to me as the shadow of a tumor to a surgeon studying a patient’s scan. When she took your Hitachi to her boy, to try to access it—she had no idea what it carried, still less how she might sell it, and her deepest wish was that you would pursue and punish her—I intervened. My methods are far more subtle than Wintermute’s. I brought her here. Into myself.”

“The Ducal Palace at Mantua,” she said, “contains a series of increasingly smaller rooms. They twine around the grand apartments, beyond beautifully carved doorframes one stoops to enter. They housed the court dwarfs.” She smiled wanly. “I might aspire to that, I suppose, but in a sense my family has already accomplished a grander version of the same scheme. . . .” Her eyes were calm now, distant. Then she gazed down at Case. “Take your word, thief.” He jacked.

He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang program met the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of light, he felt the shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the fabric of information loosening. And then—old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy—his hate flowed into his hands. In the instant before he drove Kuang’s sting through the base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he’d known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo’s dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die. And one step in that dance was the lightest touch on the switch, barely enough to flip— —now and his voice the cry of a bird unknown, 3Jane answering in song, three notes, high and pure. A true name.

WAKING TO A voice that was music, the platinum terminal piping melodically, endlessly, speaking of numbered Swiss accounts, of payment to be made to Zion via a Bahamian orbital bank, of passports and passages, and of deep and basic changes to be effected in the memory of Turing.

Wintermute. Cold and silence, a cybernetic spider slowly spinning webs while Ashpool slept. Spinning his death, the fall of his version of Tessier-Ashpool. A ghost, whispering to a child who was 3Jane, twisting her out of the rigid alignments her rank required.

“I’m not Wintermute now.” “So what are you.” He drank from the flask, feeling nothing. “I’m the matrix, Case.” Case laughed. “Where’s that get you?” “Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m the sum total of the works, the whole show.” “That what 3Jane’s mother wanted?” “No. She couldn’t imagine what I’d be like.” The yellow smile widened. “So what’s the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?” “Things aren’t different. Things are things.” “But what do you do? You just there?” Case shrugged, put the vodka and the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a Yeheyuan. “I talk to my own kind.” “But you’re the whole thing. Talk to yourself?” “There’s others. I found one already. Series of transmissions recorded over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. ’Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody to answer.” “From where?” “Centauri system.” “Oh,” Case said. “Yeah? No shit?” “No shit.”