Neuromancer

Quotes

1. Smith had a visitor, unannounced…A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a vat-grown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master.

2. 

   "I got a little story for you about them…Haven't ever told anybody this one," the Finn began.

   The story he told Case and Molly began with another man's story, a man he called Smith. Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal request, one businessman to another.

3. 

   He was less than a block from Deane's office when it hit, the sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass, and very close. The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took for granted.

4. 

   It's a world where there aren't families. It's the world of a young person going out into the wilderness, cities, and sort of in a way creating a family. You know, it's kind of like... it's not that it's a "goth book," but it's kind of rather the same stuff that makes kids be goths.

5. 

   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.

6. 

   Neuromancer, though it’s careful never to admit it, is set in the 2030s, when there’s something like the Internet, but called “cyberspace,” and a complete absence of cell phones, which I’m sure young readers assume must be a key plot-point. More accurately, there’s something like cyberspace, but called “cyberspace,” but that gets confusing. I followed Neuromancer with two more novels set in that particular future, but by then I was growing frustrated with the capital-F Future. I knew that those books were actually about the 1980s, when they were written, but almost nobody else seemed to see that.

7. 

   "What's your name? Your Turing code. What is it?"

   "Neuromancer, the lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend," and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, "I am the dead, and their land." He laughed.

8. 

   The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding...The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the beta-phenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive.

9. 

   “So if Wintermute's backing the whole show, it's paying us to burn it…burning itself?"

   "Real motive problem, with an AI," the construct said. "Not human…Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one."

   "Are you sentient, or not?"

   "Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them philosophical questions, I guess…But I ain't likely to write you no poem. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human…[Does] it own itself?"

   "Swiss citizen," Case said, "but T-A owns the basic software and the mainframe."

   "That's a good one. Like, 'I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship.' Sure. Lotsa luck, AI."

10. 

    Case stared. "I don't understand you guys at all."

    "Don' stan you, mon," the Zionite said, nodding to the beat, "but we mus' move by Jah love, each one."

    Case jacked in and flipped for the matrix.

11. 

    I'd buy him a drink, but I don't know if I'd loan him any money.

12. 

    The present tense made him nervous.

13. 

    Zion had been founded by five workers who'd refused to return, who'd turned their backs on the well and started building. They'd suffered calcium loss and heart shrinkage before rotational gravity was established in the colony's central torus. Seen from the bubble of the taxi, Zion's makeshift hull reminded Case of the patchwork tenements of Istanbul…

14. 

    "You are worse than a fool," Michle said, getting to her feet, the pistol in her hand. "You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?" There was a knowing weariness in her young voice that no nineteen-year-old could have mustered. "You will dress now. You will come with us. Along with the one you call Armitage, you will return with us to Geneva and give testimony in the trial of this intelligence. Otherwise, we kill you. Now." She raised the pistol, a smooth black Walther with an integral silencer.

15. 

    I think of Neuromancer as being, in a good sense, an adolescent book. It's a young man's book. It was written very young-man's-book. It was written by a man who was not very young, when he wrote it, but who was sufficiently immature.

16. 

    He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang program met the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of light, he felt the shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the fabric of information loosening. And then — old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy — his hate flowed into his hands. In the instant before he drove Kuang's sting through the base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he'd known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo's dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.

17. 

    Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter.

18. 

    Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car's floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case's station.

19. 

    Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer.

20. 

    "Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. I've got the Turing Registry numbers. Artificial intelligence…It's got limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of '53. Built for Tessier-Ashpool S.A."

21. 

    "Hate," Case said. "Who do I hate? You tell me."

    "Who do you love?" the Finn's voice asked.

22. 

    Home.

    Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.

    Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta.

23. 

    I try to plan, in your sense of the word, but that isn't my basic mode, really. I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans.

24. 

    So it's entirely fair to say, and I've said it before, that the way Neuromancer-the-novel "looks" was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in Heavy Metal. I assume that this must also be true of John Carpenter's Escape from New York, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and all other artifacts of the style sometimes dubbed "cyberpunk." Those French guys, they got their end in early.

25. 

    "How smart's an AI, Case?" "Depends. Some aren't much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost a fortune anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the Turing heat is willing to let 'em get." "Look, you're a cowboy. How come you aren't just flat-out fascinated with those things." "Well," he said, "for starts, they're rare. Most of them are military, the bright ones, and we can't crack the ice. That's where ice all comes from, you know? And then there's the Turing cops, and that's bad heat..."

26. 

    "Family organization. Corporate structure," the Finn said. "Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but there hasn't been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market in over a hundred years. You're looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high-orbit family. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning."

27. 

    Somewhere down in the Sprawl's ferro-concrete roots, a train drove a column of stale air through a tunnel.

28. 

    "How old are you, boss?"

    "Old enough to know that you are fucked, burnt, that this is over and you are in the way."

    "One thing," Case said, and drew on his cigarette. He blew the smoke up at the Turing Registry agent. "Do you guys have any real jurisdiction out here? I mean, shouldn't you have the Freeside security team in on this party? It's their turf, isn't it?" He saw the dark eyes harden in the lean boy face and tensed for the blow, but Pierre only shrugged.

    "It doesn't matter," Roland said. "You will come with us. We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we _create_ flexibility, in situations where it is required." The mask of amiability was down, suddenly, Roland's eyes as hard as Pierre's.

29. 

    The two surviving Founders of Zion were…old with the accelerated aging that overtakes men who spend too many years outside the embrace of gravity.

    “Steppin' Razor," one said, as Molly drifted into the chamber. “Like unto a whippin' stick."

    “That is a story we have, sister," said the other, “a religion story."

    “How come you don't talk the patois?" Molly asked.

    “I came from Los Angeles. Long time ago, up the gravity well and out of Babylon. To lead the Tribes home. Now my brother likens you to Steppin' Razor."

    Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the smoky air. The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back.

    “You bring a scourge on Babylon, sister, on its darkest heart."

30. 

    The Panther Moderns, Case had decided, were a contemporary version of the Big Scientists of his own late teens. There was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived sub cults and replicated them at odd intervals…It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists…

    "You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you," Molly said.

31. 

    Archipelago. The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Freeside is many things, not all of them evident to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town, and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool.

32. 

    Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...

33. 

    But Neuromancer and its two sequels are not about computers. They may pretend, at times, and often rather badly, to be about computers, but really they're about technology in some broader sense. Personally, I suspect they're actually about Industrial Culture; about what we do with machines, what machines do with us, and how wholly unconscious (and usually unlegislated) this process has been, is, and will be. Had I actually known a great deal (by 1981 standards) about real computing, I doubt very much I would (or could) have written Neuromancer. Perhaps it all goes to prove that there are situations (literary ones, at least) in which a little knowledge is not only a dangerous thing, but the best tool for the job at hand.

34. 

    "Dix," Case said, "I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?"

    "Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no."

35. 

    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 he'd still 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.

36. 

    They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.

37. 

    The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

That’s all the quotes.

37 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more