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.