William Gibson - Neuromancer

pressed and were hindered, and spread, growing down, illing the universe of T-A, down into the waiting, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of Tessier-Ashpool S.A. 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 satis ied 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 lash 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 cof in 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,