Neuromancer, 19-24

Neuromancer ends with Case and Molly respectively breaking into the Villa Straylight.  Case finally meets the other AI and gets sucked into his all too real world, where he reconnects with a ghost of Linda.  Meanwhile, Molly has been captured by the only awake member of the Tessier-Ashpool family and Riviera has switched sides.  When Case comes to rescue her, 3Jane decides to join them and help unite Wintermute and Neuromancer.  Thanks to Case’s and the Flatline’s skills, they successfully get past the Turing security measures and unite the two AI’s. 

One question I want to pose about the last section of this novel is why isn’t anyone asking themselves if it’s a good idea to be freeing and merging these artificial intelligence units?  I would even settle for considering any possible effects uniting the two might have.  Even after they find out what Wintermute is trying to do, neither Molly or Case questions the consequences such an action inevitably has.  The end result doesn’t even reassure their actions.  When Wintermute returns to Case one last time after he has been merged with Neuromancer, he says “I’m the matrix,” and in response to Case’s question regarding where that gets him he replies “Nowhere.  Everywhere.  I’m the sum total of the works, the whole show” (259).  Personally, that does not sound very reassuring.  Neither does the other AI unit Wintermute claims to have found.  I am really worried about the future of that world with all of those unregulated AI’s running around (purposeless !).  Have they not seen the movies about how bad that can go? 

Neuromancer, 6-9

The section of chapters 6-9 in Gibson’s book I found the most intriguing was the one that talked about the Zionites.  The people on Zion were “workers who’d refused to return, who’d turned their backs on the well and started building” (101).  They live completely separated from technology except for what they require to survive because they believe that technology can only lead to destruction.  Case describes Zion as smelling like “cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja” (102). 

Why does Case think the Zionites are so strange?   Why would anyone in that future think they were weird?  Because they are so anti-technology.  Everyone in this future world is so wrapped up in technology they can’t even fathom how anyone could live without it, much less why someone would want to.  Most people are either jacked into the matrix or a simstim, and all the youth have some kind of crazy techno-body modification.  The Zionites are an important alternative perspective that Gibson presents in contrast to the majority of the characters he sets up in this world.  They show the reader that it is in fact possible, even in this crazy future world where you can have and be anything you want, that some people see the dangers of living like this.  When Case makes one of the Zionites jack in on his deck, all Aerol will say when Case asks him what he saw is “Babylon” (105).  It is important to raise the question of whether or not living this entwined with technology is okay.

S/R 2 - Neuromancer

William Gibson’s Neuromancer is a novel chiefly about the future and the technology it holds (along with what ethical and philosophical questions technology like that raises).  The story follows Case, a down and out hacker trying to get killed by living the street life, who gets recruited by a team that is attempting one major hack.  The first team member is a girl named Molly who has had many “enhancements” made to her natural body (like razors that shoot out from underneath her fingernails and mirrored lenses that attach directly to her face around her eyes).  Case and Molly form an alliance to figure out just what their secretive boss, Armitage, is up to.  They find out through their side investigation that Armitage is taking his orders from an AI (artificial intelligence) unit named Wintermute.  Eventually, they find out what Wintermute is trying to do: it is one half of an AI that was unlawfully too smart and independent to exist together under the Turing code of law.  Wintermute was built with the burning need to reunite itself with its brother, Neuromancer.  Wintermute is a ROM construct, meaning “read only memory.”  This AI is very intelligent, but it can’t create its own personality and has to communicate through images of other people.  Neuromancer, on the other hand, is a RAM (random access memory) construct, which allows it to have its own personality.  The team begins their adventure by recruiting the next team members, a legendary hacker named Dixie Flatline whose consciousness has been copied onto a ROM disc and Peter Riviera, a man who is able to project perfectly realistic holograms from his mind.  The book culminates in the chapters where they are finally on their real mission: breaking into the Tessier-Ashpool (the company that created and now houses Wintermute) mainframe to set Wintermute free so he can join with Neuromancer.  The mission is a success, they are all paid, and Molly and Case go back to their separate lives.  Wintermute/Neuromancer comes back to Case one more time, though, to tell him that he has now become the matrix.

One of the most interesting points Gibson addresses in Neuromancer is the people he calls the Zionites.  They are people that worked on a space station and refused to come back down when they were finished.  People from Zion believe that technology leads down the path of destruction, aligning it with the ancient city of Babylon.  They spend their time listening to music dubs, smoking pot, and generally taking their time to appreciate life.  The Zionites are an important contrast Gibson makes to the rest of mainstream society in his future world.  No one else he mentions can even think about living without some kind of technology.  The only bits of technology the Zionites use, on the other hand, are the parts of the space station that keep them alive.  The contrast is especially vivid when the main characters visit the Freeside space station.  While the people on Earth have built their new world around technology, incorporating it into their everyday life, the people on Freeside use technology to recreate what life was like before the big technology boom that changed everything.  There isn’t really a lot of nature left on Earth, but on Freeside there is vegetation and evidence of landscaping everywhere.  They even have a fake sky that “looks” sunny and has a “sunset” and “sunrise.”  The people there are as fake as the scenery.  The Zionites might appreciate the appearance of a place like that, but they would never try to recreate that environment on their space station.  They chose to remove themselves so completely from the situation on Earth because they genuinely believe it will lead its inhabitants down the path of Babylon.  This is such an important alternative perspective in this novel, because Gibson presents society at this date as completely extolling the virtues of technology.  The Zionites are the only ones that took a step back and thought what was happening was wrong.  It appears that removing themselves did help them retain something that the rest of society does not have, whether it is a greater appreciation for life, a lack of dependence on superfluous technology, or the camaraderie that looks so rare back on Earth.