Neuromancer
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.
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.
Alone at a table in the Jarre de Thé, with the octagon coming on, pinheads of sweat starting from his palms, suddenly aware of each tingling hair on his arms and chest, Case knew that at some point he’d started to play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire. He no longer carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions. He ran the fastest, loosest deals on the 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.
Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, holograms of Wizard’s Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline. . . . And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard’s Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon. He was riding high that night, with a brick of Wage’s ketamine on its way to Yokohama and the money already in his pocket. He’d come in out of the warm rain that sizzled across the Ninsei pavement and somehow she’d been singled out for him, one face out of the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she played. The expression on her face, then, had been the one he’d seen, hours later, on her sleeping face in a portside coffin, her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in flight.
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“I know you,” Case said, Linda beside him.
“No,” the boy said, his voice high and musical, “you do not.”
“You’re the other AI. You’re Rio. You’re the one who wants to stop Wintermute. What’s your name? Your Turing code. What is it?”
The boy did a handstand in the surf, laughing. He walked on his hands, then flipped out of the water. His eyes were Riviera’s, but there was no malice there. “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 . . .”
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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 no more, and something tore.
The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case’s consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be counted.
And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number 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 her stick, and ran. He knew the rate of her pulse, the length of her stride in measurements that would have satisfied the most exacting standards of geophysics.
“But you do not know her thoughts,” the boy said, beside him now in the shark thing’s heart. “I do not know her thoughts. You were wrong, Case. To live here is to live. There is no difference.”
Linda in her panic, plunging blind through the surf.
“Stop her,” he said, “she’ll hurt herself.”
“I can’t stop her,” the boy said, his gray eyes mild and beautiful.
“You’ve got Riviera’s eyes,” Case said.
There was a flash of white teeth, long pink gums. “But not his craziness. Because they are beautiful to me.” He shrugged. “I need no mask to speak with you. Unlike my brother. I create my own personality. Personality is my medium.”
Case took them up, a steep climb, away from the beach and the frightened girl. “Why’d you throw her up to me, you little prick? Over and fucking over, and turning me around. You killed her, huh? In Chiba.”
“No,” the boy said.
“Wintermute?”
“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.”
“Why?”
“Hoping I could bring you here as well, keep you here. But I failed.”
“Neuromancer”
William Gibson
Sprawl Trilogy