Neuromancer

Praise for Neuromancer “Freshly imagined, compellingly detailed, and chilling in its implications.”— The New York Times “Kaleidoscopic, picaresque, flashy, decadent...an amazing virtuoso performance.”— The Washington Post “Science fiction of exceptional texture and vision...Gibson opens up a new genre, with a finely crafted grittiness.”— San Francisco Chronicle “Epic in scale...shimmers like chrome in a desert sun.”— The Wall Street Journal “A revolutionary novel.”— Publishers Weekly “In with the ruthless violence, the hyperreality, the betrayal and death, is an unquenchable love of language. Gibson has that in common with Le Guin and with J. G. Ballard. Neuromancer sings to us as a collage of voices, a mixed chorus, some trustworthy and others malicious, some piped through masks.”—James Gleick xa0 “Streetwise SF... one of the most unusual and involving narratives to be read in many an artificially induced blue moon.”— London Times “Unforgettable...the richness of Gibson’s world is incredible.”— Chicago Sun-Times William Gibson ’s first novel, Neuromancer , won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Count Zero , Burning Chrome , Mona Lisa Overdrive , Virtual Light , Idoru , All Tomorrow’s Parties , Pattern Recognition , Spook Country , Zero History , Distrust That Particular Flavor , and The Peripheral . He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1xa0The skyxa0above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “It’s not like I’m using,” Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. “It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency.” It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Ratz was tending bar, h is prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone’s whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal scars. “Wage was in her early, with two joeboys,” Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his good hand. “Maybe some business with you, Case?”xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged him.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 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. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic. “You are too much the artiste, Herr Case.” Ratz grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. “You are the artiste of the slightly funny deal.”xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “Sure,” Case said, and sipped his beer. “Somebody’s gotta be funny around here. Sure the fuck isn’t you.”xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 The whore’s giggle went up an octave.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “Isn’t you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he’s a close personal friend of mine.”xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible spitting sound, her lips barely moving. But she left.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “Jesus,” Case said, “what kinda creepjoint you running here? Man can’t have a drink?”xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “Ha,” Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag, “Zone shows a percentage. You I let work here for entertainment value.”xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause. Then the whore’s giggle rang out, tinged with certain hysteria.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Ratz grunted. “An angel has passed.”xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “The Chinese,” bellowed a drunken Australian, “Chinese bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate…;”xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “Now that,” Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly rising in him like bile, “that is so much bullshit.”xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void…;The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “I saw your girl last night,” Ratz said, passing Case his second Kirin.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “I don’t have one,” he said, and drank.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “Miss Linda Lee.”xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Case shook his head.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “No girl? Nothing? Only biz, friend artiste? Dedication to commerce?” The bartender’s small brown eyes were nested deep in wrinkled flesh. “I think I liked you better, with her. You laughed more. Now, some night, you get maybe too artistic; you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts.”xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 “You’re breaking my heart, Ratz.” He finished his beer, paid and left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rainstained khaki nylon of his windbreaker. Threading his way through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he’d been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He’d been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck hat projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A their, he’d worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 He’s made the classic mistake, the one he’s sworn he’d never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam. He still wasn’t sure how he’d been discovered, not that it mattered now. He’d expected to die, then but they only smiled. Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it. Because––still smiling––they were going to make sure he never worked again.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 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.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through the closed circuit of the world’s black markets like the seashells of the Trobriand islanders. It was difficult to transact legitimate business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already illegal.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 In Japan, he’d known with a clenched and absolute certainty, he’d find his cure. In Chiba. Either in a registered clinic or in the shadowland of black medicine. Synonymous with implants, nerve-splicing, and microbionics, Chiba was a magnet for the Sprawl’s techno-criminal subcultures.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 In Chiba, he’d watched his New Yen vanish in a two-month round of examinations and consultations. The men in the black clinics, his last hope, had admired the expertise with which he’d been maimed, and then slowly shaken their heads.xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0xa0 Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and the Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart. By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.xa0--Reprinted from Neuromancer by William Gibson by permission of Berkley, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright © 1984, William Gibson. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. Read more