Escape Velocity (38 page)

This is only nominally science fiction: Gibson carries current trends in corporate culture (mandatory drug testing, health-care-related hiring policies that bar employees from smoking on the job or off, the use of cosmetic surgery by "unemployed males 'competing with younger people' " to gain a competitive edge in the job market) to their ultimate conclusion.^' Even Neuromancer's posthuman zaibatsu kingpins have one foot in the present. The Japanophile W. David Kubiak mentions an Osaka executive who, "before destroying evidence and himself to thwart an investigation of

his firm," wrote, " 'I am but one. The kaisha [corporation] is many. My life is transient. The kaisha is forever!' "^^

The present-day gulf between the information-rich yuppie elite and the swelling ranks of the minimum-wage service industry or the criminalized poor is writ large in Neuromancers body politics. Case inhabits a future-tense version of the two-tiered, neo-Dickensian America of the eighties and nineties, "an age of affordable beauty" where money can buy a "blandly handsome blend of pop faces" or "shoulders bulging with grafted muscle"; haute couture modifications (flesh "tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a subcutaneous chip"); and even practical immortality: A 135-year-old wheeler-dealer named Julius Deane, "his metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums and hormones," has his DNA code reset each year by genetic surgeons.^^ The underclasses, by contrast, undergo anatomical makeovers to improve their salability in the marketplace or as rites of passage into the punk gangs that are the urban jungle's postmodern primitives.

Neuromancer is permeated by a fatalistic resignation to the futility of any attempt at a political power shift: Case and Molly are utterly apolitical, aspiring to the peak of their professions-the glamorized corporate soldier of fortune-and nothing more. Although as quasi-autonomous agents they are arguably better off than the undifferentiated megalopolitan masses ("a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification"), their fleeting tastes of freedom and power consist, ironically, of bodily sensation.^"^ Case's disembodied POV banks and rolls through cyberspace like that of a top-gun pilot ("Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the sensation of speed beyond anything he'd known before").^^ Molly stalks the urban combat zone with predatory speed and off-kilter grace ("She seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made room").®^ Kinesis replaces political action.

But the "horizonless" infinity of the matrix and the endless iterations of the Sprawl-the cityscape that stretches from Boston to Atlanta-offer only the illusion of unrestricted movement: in a world where nation-states have been swallowed up by multinationals and the imaginary geography of the matrix is dominated by icons of corporate capital, the rights of the individual are bounded on every side. In Neuromancer, writes Ross,

the decisions that count are always being made elsewhere, in circumstances well beyond the control of interested stiffs like Case or . . . Molly. . . . Despite the technical education in the workings of power that they undergo, such people are usually even less in control of their futures at the end of a Gibson adventure than they were to begin with.^^

Fusing stoic resignation, existential ennui, and future shock in the flattened affect that characterizes Homo Cyber, Molly shrugs off the directionless violence of her pinball existence with the throwaway line, "I guess it's just the way I'm wired."^^ Like the autistic astronauts in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey or Deckard, the deadpan, monotoned flatfoot in Blade Runner, the borged and morphed humans in Neuromancer are, as Donna Haraway put it, "frighteningly inert"; their machines-especially the self-aware AI, Wintermute, who is behind the novel's machinations-are "disturbingly lively." Ultimately, it is the machines who command their own destinies in the truest sense. The consciousness that is Wintermute attains a sort of godhood when it fuses with an AI called Neuromancer and becomes one with the All-in this case, the matrix.

Case's rewards, at the end of the novel, are a fresh pancreas-the better, presumably, to indulge in the amphetamines that seem to be his greatest carnal pleasure-and a new cyberspace deck that offers instant (if illusory and transitory) escape from meat hell. If religion is the opiate of the masses and Marxism the opiate of the intellectual, then cyberspace is the opiate of the twenty-first-century schizoid man, polarized between mind and body.

Original Syn

This equation serves as the springboard for Pat Cadigan's Synners, a cyberpunk novel about soulless electronic transcendence, among other things. For Visual Mark, a virtuoso virtual reality synthesizer, or "synner," the body is "meat-jail," as it is for Case. Opting for a brain socket, he plugs his mind directly into the worldwide computer network ("the System"), which enables Mark to immerse his audience in his full-sensory, rock-video

dreams. His baptism into unfettered bodilessness sounds unmistakably like being born again: "The sense of having so much space to spread out in-a baby emerging from the womb after nine months must have felt the same thing, he thought."^^

Mark soon decides to remain permanently plugged in, forgoing the bother of removing his brain-vsdres to eat or use the bathroom. He slov^s his metabolism to a near halt in a stunt characterized by a doctor as fakirlike, although his ow^n description of it-"I took the video mainline"-is closer to the Mark. Curled up in a fetal ball, guts locked, he calls to mind William Burroughs's self-portrait in Naked Lunch as a mainlining heroin addict: "I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction."^^

Like Burroughs's "users" (a term shared by smack shooters and Mac owners), Mark-a terminal addict in the literal sense-purchases otherworldly omnipotence at the price of total impotence in the meatworld. In fulfillment of MODERNBODY's fantasy, he "cruise[s] the wires and molest[s] people's appliances" with impunity: Surveillance cameras (ubiquitous in the twenty-first-century L.A. of the novel) become his eyes, computer console speakers his voice boxes, the measureless vastness of global cyberspace his dominion. Meanwhile, perversely, plaintively, his body yearns for his return:

[T]he meat missed him. It sent out feeble signals, dumb animal semaphore: come back to the nest, little Sheba. ... If he could have given the disconnect command from this side, it would be over in a twinkling. So long, meat, write if you get work. But he couldn't access any of the commands from where he was. The commands only took orders from the meat, and that poor old meat wasn't about to cut him loose. ... If he could just get someone ... to come in and yank the connections out of his skull.9'

Ultimately, Mark's prayers are answered by the cerebral stroke he suffers while jacked-in-one of the "intercranial meltdowns" that are a calculated risk among "socket people." The power surge transfers his consciousness to the net, enabling him to abandon the despised meat at last.

254 Mark Dery

When his old flame and fellow synner Gina peers into his body's dying eyes, watching his consciousness drain away, the computer-bound Mark stares back with what is already a partly artificial intelligence. In a secular gloss on the transcendentalist vision of the self united with the Supreme Mind, he has become one with the billions of bytes stored in the System:

[H]e was looking at Gina with what felt like a universe of knowledge within him, everything from every part of the system, databases that outlined every face of human behavior, delineated every emotion, defined every word by tone of human voice and told every story. . . . Joy surged into his configuration, to see so deeply into her, even though she was not on-line with him. . . . Moments later, he seemed to plummet, out of balance because she wasn't there and there could be no reciprocation. The unfairness of it was truer pain than anything he'd ever felt incarnate.^2

Cadigan's evocation of the loneliness of the discarnate mind is unbearably poignant. Virtual Mark is terribly, irrevocably alone in his virtual universe, the only human consciousness in a cosmos of information. The sensation of skin against skin is nothing but a memory, saved to disk. Mark can relive it through a surprisingly lifelike simulation, but he is haunted by the nagging truth that a digital re-creation wall always be the next best thing to being there: "Now all he had to do was reach for it in his memory, and he was there again, in the pleasure. But in the loneliness, too."^^

Visual Mark's transcendental leap is diminished by its egocentrism; rather than dissolving his solipsistic self in a mystical Over-Soul, he has unleashed his all-consuming ego on the infinite (in this case, the System). "[H]is self W3is getting greater all the time, both ways, greater as in more wonderful and greater as in bigger," he exults, early on.^"* In time, however, a painful truth dawns: "Maybe you could make yourself bigger, but you couldn't make yourself any less alone.'"^^ As Joseph Campbell once observed,

[T]he whole aim is to go past. . . one's concept of oneself, to that of which one is but an imperfect manifestation. . . . If you think, "I here, in my physical presence and in my temporal character,

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am God," then you are mad and have short-circuited the experience. You are God, not in your ego, but in your deepest being, where you are at one with the nondual transcendent.^^

The System, hke all computer-generated spaces, is the realm not of the numinous but of the human mind-specifically, memory-metastasized; to become one with such a construct is to disappear into an exteriorized model of one's own cognitive machinery, to become Narcissus falling into his own reflection. The SF novelist and critic Norman Spinrad finds a moral in the book's punning title:

The personal sin [in Synners] is the abandonment of human love in favor of the ultimate solipsistic seduction of total immersion in a virtual reality of which the electronic machineries make you the god. ... In the end, the sin is not that of electronic transcendence but of abandoning human empathy and feeling in the obsessive pursuit of same.^^

Anne Balsamo reminds us that the transcendental world of cyberspace is one half of a duality whose repressed other half is the mundane meatworld. Reading Cadigan's novel as a feminist narrative about "the relation of the material body to cyberspace," she explores the main characters' interactions with the System, taking special note of how gender complicates the equation.^^

To Balsamo, the two female hackers, Gina and Sam (a teenager who likes to pummel her eardrums with "speed-thrash") "actively manipulate the dimensions of cybernetic space in order to communicate with other people," whereas Mark and Gabe (a near-future Walter Mitty who spends much of his time lost in virtual reality fantasies) are ''addicted to cyberspace for the release it offers from the loneliness of their material bodies."^^ This opposition is dramatized in the novel's climax, when all terminals connected to the System crash, infected by the viral entity created when Visual Mark melds with a mysterious AI. Gina and Gabe exorcize cyberspace via a terminal powered by Sam's body: An insulin-pump device, its needles poked into Sam's abdomen, provides the power. Gina, a synner of no small talent, and Sam, a hacker known for her acrobatic exploits in cyberspace, are SF

256 Mark Dery

examples of Haraway's feminist cyborgs: In a cybernetic society, their technological skills have won them at least a modicum of personal and political power.

Then, too, they represent a more holistic vision of Homo Cyber than cyberpunk antiheroes such as Case or Molly: Sam's insulin-powered hacking symbolizes a reconciliation of meat and mind, organic and synthetic-Haraway's cyborg politics at work. Synners "offers an alternative vision of technological embodiment," writes Balsamo, "where technology isn't the means of escape from or transcendence of the body, but rather a means of communication with other bodies."'^^ At the same time, she warns, the very technologies that create new contexts for wraithlike data bodies simultaneously "enable new forms of repression of the material body."'^'

Phantom Limbs

See how computers are getting under our skin. Everything about our bodies is stored in our genes. And someday, everything about our genes will be stored in computers. . . . [0]ur high-tech society is creating more information than ever before. About everything from our chromosomal makeup to our credit history. . . . [S]ee how we go about dealing with a technology that not only has great bodies of knowledge, but a great knowledge of bodies.

-magazine ad for the PBS program Smithsonian World '^^

Her driver's license. Her credit cards. Her bank accounts. Her identity. Deleted.

-poster Jor the movie The Net

In cyberculture, everyone has phantom limbs: digital doppelgangers stand in for all of us in the databases of governmental agencies, transnational banks, insurance companies, credit bureaus, and direct mail marketers, rendering us visible and, increasingly, manipulable.

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As Jeffrey Rothfeder argues in Privacy for Sale: How Computerization Has Made Everyone's Private Life an Open Secret, our physical bodies are now texts in the hteral rather than the poststructurahst sense, open books to all who access the databank in question. It is a little-known fact that the confidentiality of medical records is not guaranteed by law; government workers, prospective employers, educational institutions, the media, private investigators, and what Rothfeder calls "people with a vested interest in uncovering all they can about someone they want to turn a dirty deal on" routinely peruse computerized patient files.'^^ There is much to peruse: Medical records, according to the American Medical Records Association, contain "more intimate details about an individual than can be found in any single document."•^'*

The results of these perusals can be devastating. Rothfeder tells one well-documented horror story after another: David Castle, a freelance artist, was denied disability coverage because information about him in the databanks of the Medical Information Bureau (MIB) incorrectly noted that he had AIDS; John Friedkin, a freelance writer, had difficulty obtaining a life insurance policy because of an MIB clerk's data entry error that coded him as suffering from extreme psychosis. Worse yet, informs Rothfeder, access to the results of genetic tests have compelled insurance companies "to intrude on extremely sensitive and private decisions, even to force their will on a couple trying to decide whether a baby should be born or aborted, or to dictate wdth economic sanctions whether a couple should conceive or not."'^^