Mona Lisa Overdrive (36 page)

“Yes, I know.” She turned to Bobby. “Well? You promised you’d tell me the
why
of When It Changed.”

The Finn laughed, a very strange sound. “Ain’t a why, lady. More like it’s a what.
Remember one time Brigitte told you there was this other? Yeah? Well, that’s the what,
and the what’s the why.”

“I do remember. She said that when the matrix finally knew itself, there was ‘the
other.’ …”

“That’s where we’re going tonight,” Bobby began, putting his arm around her. “It isn’t
far, but it’s—”

“Different,” the Finn said, “it’s real different.”

“But what is it?”

“You see,” Colin said, brushing aside his brown forelock, a gesture like a schoolboy’s
in some antique play,
“when the matrix attained sentience, it simultaneously became aware of
another
matrix, another sentience.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “If cyberspace consists of the sum total of data in
the human system …”

“Yeah,” the Finn said, turning out onto the long straight empty highway, “but nobody’s
talkin’
human
, see?”

“The other one was somewhere else,” Bobby said.

“Centauri,” Colin said.

Can they be teasing her? Is this some joke of Bobby’s?

“So it’s kinda hard to explain why the matrix split up into all those hoodoos ’n’
shit, when it met this other one,” the Finn said, “but when we get there, you’ll sorta
get the idea.…”

“My own feeling,” Colin said, “is that it’s all so much more amusing, this way.…”

“Are you telling me the truth?”

“Be there in a New York minute,” said the Finn, “no shit.”

William Gibson is the Hugo and Nebula award-winning author of the Cyberspace trilogy:
Neuromancer
,
Count Zero
, and
Mona Lisa Overdrive
, and is the co-author (with Bruce Sterling) of
The Difference Engine
. Gibson’s widely acclaimed short stories are collected in
Burning Chrome. Virtual Light
was a
New York Times
bestseller in hardcover. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his family.