Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1)

by William Gibson

The bartender’s smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.

cyberspace,

matrix

For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. 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.

Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.

So, like America?

microsoft,

neat

meat?

“Hey, Aerol,” Case called, an hour later, as he prepared for a practice run in the freefall corridor. “Come here, man. Wanna show you this thing.” He held out the trodes. Aerol executed a slow-motion tumble. His bare feet struck the steel wall and he caught a girder with his free hand. The other held a transparent waterbag bulging with blue-green algae. He blinked mildly and grinned. “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.

Truth.

He called it a Texas catheter, and Case didn’t like it at all.

Mnemonic

Case looked at the shuriken, then tucked it into his jacket pocket, hearing the lining tear.

Chekov’s gun

“No,” he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew, tasting the salt of her mouth where tears had dried. 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.