Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1)

by William Gibson

It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

CPUs for the meeting, reflected in the window of a Soho specialist in mod paraphernalia, are a fresh Fruit T-shirt, her black Buzz Rickson’s MA-1, anonymous black skirt from a Tulsa thrift, the black leggings she’d worn for Pilates, black Harajuku schoolgirl shoes. Her purse-analog is an envelope of black East German laminate, purchased on eBay—if not actual Stasi-issue then well in the ballpark.

CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That’s what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.

Cayce has hung her Buzz Rickson’s over the back of her chair, and now she catches Dorotea looking at it. The Rickson’s is a fanatical museum-grade replica of a U.S. MA-1 flying jacket, as purely functional and iconic a garment as the previous century produced. Dorotea’s slow burn is being accelerated, Cayce suspects, by her perception that Cayce’s MA-1 trumps any attempt at minimalism, the Rickson’s having been created by Japanese obsessives driven by passions having nothing at all to do with anything remotely like fashion. Cayce knows, for instance, that the characteristically wrinkled seams down either arm were originally the result of sewing with pre-war industrial machines that rebelled against the slippery new material, nylon. The makers of the Rickson’s have exaggerated this, but only very slightly, and done a hundred other things, tiny things, as well, so that their product has become, in some very Japanese way, the result of an act of worship. It is an imitation more real somehow than that which it emulates. It is easily the most expensive garment Cayce owns, and would be virtually impossible to replace.

THERE IS NO GRAVITY THE WORLD SUCKS

SHIT ON MY DICK OR BLOOD ON MY BLADE

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.

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.

Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.

The largest, though not the tallest, a black man with a shaven head, is zipped like a sausage into something shiny, black, and only approximately leatherlike. Beside him is a taller, gray-faced man, hunched within the greasy folds of an ancient Barbour waterproof, its waxed cotton gone the sheen and shade of day-old horse dung. The third, younger, is close-cropped and blond, in baggy black skater shorts and a frayed jean jacket. He wears something like a mailman’s pouch, slung across his chest.

“He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots,” she recites, softly.

Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.”

more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films. That is why I founded Blue Ant: that one simple recognition. In that regard alone, the footage is a work of proven genius.”

It’s as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.”

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.”

He’s wearing a black horsehide car coat, its seams scuffed gray, like a piece of vintage luggage, and he’s actually carrying, she now sees, a piece of vintage luggage. A very small suitcase, brown cowhide, that someone has waxed to a russet glow, reminding her of the shoes of the old men in the home in which her grandfather, Win’s dad, had died.

Apophenia, Win had declared it, after due consideration and in his careful way: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.

Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.

The designer’s door opens as she raises her hand to knock. He is pale, young, unshaven. Glasses with heavy black frames. She sees that he is in his stocking feet, his freshly laundered shirt buttoned in the wrong holes. His fly is open and he is staring at her as though at something he has never seen before.

She looks down into the street, where odd-sized vehicles break the flow of spotless but otherwise non-foreign-looking cars (so many cars everywhere being Japanese) and sees a silver scooter go past, its driver wearing a matching silver helmet with a mirrored visor and what she recognizes as an M-1951 U.S. Army fishtail parka, an embroidered red-white-and-blue RAF roundel on its back, like a target. Flashing back to that morning in Soho, the window of the mod shop, before her Blue Ant meeting. It’s somehow her nature, she thinks, to pick out this one detail, this errant meme: a British military symbol re-purposed by postwar style-warriors, and recontextualized again, here, via cross-cultural echo. But the rider has it right: the ’51 fishtail is the one.

Now it’s been Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution, edges of concrete worn porous as coral. Dusk comes early, under here, and she spies signs of homeless encampment: plastic-wrapped blankets tucked back into an uncharacteristically littered scrim of struggling municipal shrubs. Vehicles blast past, overhead, a constant drumming of displaced air, particulates sifting invisibly.

“It’s more the way it is now than it’s ever been,”

History erased via the substitution of an identical object. Just now she wishes lives could be replaced as easily, but knows that that isn’t right. However odd things seem, mustn’t it be to exactly that extent of oddness that a life is one’s own, and no one else’s?

And then she’s watching him go out the door, past a girl with Maharishi parachute pants embroidered with tigers who, seeing the expression, whatever it is, on Cayce’s face, smiles at her and winks.

When the boy from the counter sorts it for her, she writes:

she’d found herself, out of some need she hadn’t understood, down in one of the trenches, furiously shoveling gray muck and bones, her face streaked with tears. Neither Peter nor Damien had asked her why, but she thinks now that if they had she might have told them she was weeping for her century, though whether the one past or the one present she doesn’t know.