Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)

by William Gibson

In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.

street, and he had a reputation for being able to get whatever you wanted. A part of him knew that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time. And that was the part of him, smug in its expectation of death, that most hated the thought of Linda Lee. He’d found her, one rainy night, in an arcade.

He remembered the smell of her skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her fingers locked across the small of his back. All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.

Seven days and he’d jack in. If he closed his eyes now, he’d see the matrix. Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance. Then the fear began to knot between his shoulders. A cold trickle of sweat worked its way down and across his ribs. The operation hadn’t worked. He was still here, still meat,

“Where’s the meat puppet?”

No way I was ready to give up puppet time.” She inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke, capping it with three perfect rings. “So the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. Berlin, that’s the place for snuff, you know? Big market for mean kicks, Berlin. I never knew who wrote the program they switched me to, but it was based on all the classics.” “They knew you were picking up on this stuff? That you were conscious while you were working?” “I wasn’t conscious. It’s like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain. . . . You can see yourself orgasm, it’s like a little nova right out on the rim of space. But I was starting to remember. Like dreams, you know. And they didn’t tell me. They switched the software and started renting to specialty markets.”

the rage had come in the arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the simstim ghost of Linda Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place to sleep.

But now he’d found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It’s the meat talking, ignore it.

While he watched the loser’s zodiac of Freeside, the nightclub constellations of the hologram sky, shift, sliding fluid down the axis of darkness, to swarm like live things at the dead center of reality.

The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life. He couldn’t think.

to be conscious and unable to think.

Time to give in, to roll with it. . . . He thought of the toxin sacs. “Here comes the meat,” he muttered.

There was a strength that ran in her, something he’d known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. 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.