William Gibson

Quotes

1. Harwood smiles. "A number of major cities have these autonomous zones, and how a given city chooses to deal with the situation can impact drastically on that city's image. Copenhagen, for instance, was one of the first, and has done very well. Atlanta, I suppose, would be the classic example of what not to do." Harwood blinks.

2. 

   In Market Street, the nameless man who haunts Laney's nodal configuration has just seen a girl. Drowned down three decades, she steps fresh as creation from the bronze doors of some brokerage. And he remembers, in that instant, that she is dead, and he is not, and that this is another century.

3. 

   Something moves in the affectless brown depths of the boy's eyes. The watch is very old, purchased from a specialist dealer in a fortified arcade in Singapore. It is military ordnance. It speaks to the man of battles fought in another day. It reminds him that every battle will one day be as obscure, and that only the moment matters, matters absolutely.

4. 

   Perhaps he has been too long in the pay and the company of those who order the wider world. Those whose mills grind increasingly fine, toward some unimaginable omega-point of pure information, some prodigy perpetually on the brink of arrival. Which he senses somehow will never now arrive, or not in the form his career's employers have imagined.

5. 

   Human in every detail but then not so…He could see celebrity here, not like Kathy’s idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the band’s fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos, was the merest fragment of that.

6. 

   Lucky Dragon Nanofax has a hatch on the front Boomzilla could fit through, he wanted to, and he wonders would that make more Boomzillas other places and could he trust those motherfuckers? If he could, he'd have a tight posse but he doesn't trust anybody, why should they?

7. 

   “Chevette,” Tessa said, “she doesn’t exist. There’s no live girl there at all. She’s code. Software.”

   “No way,” Chevette said.

   “You didn’t know that?”

   “But she’s based on somebody, right? Some kind of motion-capture deal.”

   “Nobody” Tessa said. “Nothing. She’s the real deal. Hundred-percent unreal.”

8. 

   "Rei Toei is in it too, and this freelance people-eraser of Harwood's, and an out-of-work rent-a-cop…These people are about to change human history in some entirely new way. There hasn't been a configuration like this since 1911—"

   "What happened in 1911?" the Rooster demands.

   Laney sighs. "I'm still not sure…Madame Curie's husband was run over by a horse-drawn wagon, in Paris, in 1906. It seems to start there."

9. 

   But the one who shines is there, and beside her another, less clear.

   "This is Mister Laney," she says, in the language of Silencio's mother. "You must help him. He needs to find a watch." It is a LeCoultre Futurematic, a back-winder, with wind reserve. Silencio knows its serial number, its bid history, its number in today's auction. "Someone is taking it away, and you must follow it."

   Silencio looks from the beautiful face of the Futurematic to the face of the woman.

   "You must find it for him."

10. 

    Security wants to know you're a player. Otherwise, you'd steal. Boomzilla understands that.

11. 

    What he needed, Rydell thought, was something he could do that they weren't expecting. Something that put the shoe on the other foot, or anyway he should lose them, whoever they were. He'd had an instructor in Knoxville who'd liked to talk about lateral thinking…What it took, sometimes, was just your basic jack move, something nobody, maybe even you, was expecting.

12. 

    Living on the bridge, she’d been used to people being around, but everybody had always had something to do up there. The sharehouse was full of USC media sciences students, and they got on her nerves. They sat around accessing media all day and talking about it, and nothing ever seemed to get done.