Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1)

by William Gibson

there is some carefully insulated module of immaturity in him, some shy and stubborn thing

The Peckinpah people, among the least likely, are still waiting for the guns to be drawn.

like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet.

he’d had them molded from a body cast of his last girlfriend, minus two.

Feels she could shower down in it prior to visiting a sterile NASA probe, or step out of some Chernobyl scenario to have her lead suit removed by rubber-gowned Soviet technicians, who’d then scrub her with long-handled brushes.

the agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores.

a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins’ blood and truffled chocolates.

She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000.

It is an imitation more real somehow than that which it emulates.

My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. Or so she hopes, and doesn’t know, but suspects in her heart that this in fact is what accounts for his long ubiquity.

another nexus of whatever she suffers these reactions to. Laura Ashley, down there, and that can get ugly.

eyeing roasts illuminated like newly minted media faces, and probably of a biologic purity she herself could never hope to attain:

the trough of soul-delay has opened out into horizonless horse latitudes.

the perfect and now perfectly revealed extent of her present loneliness.

She has no internalized surface map of this city, only of the underground and of assorted personal footpaths spreading out from its stations.

his head sunken buzzard-like between his narrow shoulders.

She sits there, unmoving, peering at the browser history the way she once peered at a brown recluse spider in a rose garden in Portland, a drab little thing her host reliably informed her contained enough neurotoxin to kill them both, and horribly.

remembering the experience of lying more or less happily, or at least pleasantly abstracted,

Cayce is one of those slight-looking women who combine considerable wiry strength with low body weight.

what would have come after securing the perimeter,

maintaining the routine of the station. Psychological prophylaxis,

Get on with ordinary business. Mai...

It is the gift of “OT,” Off Topic. Anything other than the footage is Off Topic. The world, really. News. Off Topic.

many chose to believe that they were being shown these bits of a work in progress, and possibly in the order in which they were being completed.

the British have evolved passive-aggressive leverage in much the way they’ve evolved irony.

comes in mothlike, under radar evolved to detect things with massive airframes: a species of ghost,

Belstaff jacket

this stranger may now inhabit the most liminal place of all, poised perhaps on the brink of nonexistence, or about to enter some existence unimagined.

“a Lombard,”

“Loads of money but a real dickhead.”

she remembers these too-bright smiles, eyes flashing flat as glass.

because of some attitudinal tattoo, something people can read.

She is on full sexual alert now,

If Bigend can convince himself that he doesn’t impose his will on others, he must be capable of convincing himself of anything.

I want to make the public aware of something they don’t quite yet know that they know—or have them feel that way. Because they’ll move on that, do you understand? They’ll think they’ve thought of it first. It’s about transferring information, but at the same time about a certain lack of specificity.”

“We’re being social.” And that’s an order.

It is a smile she suspects is meant to indicate that she has made it across at least the first moat of his persona, has become to some extent an insider.

Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves,

“You ‘know’ in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things.”

Heaps of bone. That initial seventeen stories of twisted, impacted girder.

Cayce orders coffee, eggs, and sausage, all in her best bad French. The girl looks at her in amazed revulsion, as though Cayce were a cat bringing up a particularly repellant hairball.

“this favorable mention, associated with an attractive member of the opposite sex. One who’s shown some slight degree of interest in them, whom they’ve lied to in an attempt to favorably impress.”

“I’m devaluing something. In others. In myself. And I’m starting to distrust the most casual exchange.”

She has fewer things in her apartment than anyone,

She feels the things she herself owns as a sort of pressure.

has weaned herself from materialism, is preternaturally adult, requiring no e...

she’d like to get her hands around Dorotea’s throat and shake her till her fucking brains rattle.

Is this the truth, or self-advertisment?

“Each of the segments is of the same resolution, sufficient to allow theatrical projection.

through a doorway into a worn, concrete-walled, oil-stained subterranean realm of machinery and cables, inhabited by glum mechanics,