Pattern Recognition

PENGUIN BOOKS

PATTERN RECOGNITION

‘Gibson s most mature novel to date… the language is lyrical in places’
Daily Telegraph

‘Gibson s eye for detail and his way with a phrase remain exquisite’
Guardian

‘The best for ages from the godfather of cyberpunk’
FHM

‘One of the most visionary, original and influential writers currently working’
Boston Globe

‘Gibson’s most mature book to date: strongly written, suspenseful, thoughtfully structured. More than this, it is both a serious meditation on the act of creation and an exploration of postmodern consciousness’
The Times Literary Supplement

‘An exciting thriller, a modern fable. A masterful performance from a major novelist hitting his peak’
Chicago Tribune

‘Elegant, entrancing. Gibson’s most complex, mature gloss on the artist’s relationship to our ever more commercialized globe’
New York Times

‘Gibson expertly evokes the shiny, brittle surfaces of life at the cutting edge, the nostalgic poetry of junked technology, and the buzzing connectedness of a world that’s very small. He slyly reminds us that we already live in a science-fictional future and Cayce is a true denizen of the twenty-first century; her story glows with SF verve and glitter as future shock overtakes the present’
New Scientist

‘Gibson’s sentences slide from silk to steel, and take tonal joyrides from the ironic to the earnest’
New York Times Book Review

‘Gibson is one of the most reliable guides to what might be going on… he has seen the future, and he knows how it works’
Sunday Times

‘An imaginative, thrilling adventure to strike the conscience of an ad-man near you’
I-D

‘Gibson at his best… so good it defies all the usual superlatives’
Seattle Times

‘One of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century’
Washington Post

‘Gibson is an American Ballard, using the tropes of science fiction to satirical and productively alienating effect’
Guardian

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WILLIAM GIBSON
lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife and their two children. He is the author of
Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, Virtual Light, Idoru,
and
All Tomorrow’s Parties.

Please visit the author’s website at
www.williamgibsonbooks.com
.

PATTERN RECOGNITION

WILLIAM GIBSON

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA), Inc.. 375 Hudson Street. New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany. Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue. Rosebank 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons 2003
First published in Great Britain by Viking 2003
Published in Penguin Books 2004
9

Copyright © William Gibson, 2003

All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out. or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN-13: 978-0-14-026614-6

TO JACK

1.
THE WEBSITE OF DREADFUL NIGHT

Five hours’ New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now.

Not even food, as Damien’s new kitchen is as devoid of edible content as its designers’ display windows in Camden High Street. Very handsome, the upper cabinets faced in canary-yellow laminate, the lower with lacquered, unstained apple-ply. Very clean and almost entirely empty, save for a carton containing two dry pucks of Weetabix and some loose packets of herbal tea. Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that it’s interior smells only of cold and long-chain monomers.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

She wonders if this gets gradually worse with age: the nameless hour deeper, more null, its affect at once stranger and less interesting?

Numb here in the semi-dark, in Damien’s bedroom, beneath a silvery thing the color of oven mitts, probably never intended by its maker’s to actually be slept under. She’d been too tired to find a blanket. The sheets between her skin and the weight of this industrial coverlet are silky, some luxurious thread count, and they smell faintly of, she guesses,
Damien. Not badly, though. Actually it’s not unpleasant; any physical linkage to a fellow mammal seems a plus at this point.

Damien is a friend.

Their boy-girl Lego doesn’t click, he would say.

Damien is thirty, Cayce two years older, but there is some carefully insulated module of immaturity in him, some shy and stubborn thing that frightened the money people. Both have been very good at what they’ve done, neither seeming to have the least idea of why.

Google Damien and you will find a director of music videos and commercials. Google Cayce and you will find “coolhunter,” and if you look closely you may see it suggested that she is a “sensitive” of some kind, a dowser in the world of global marketing.

Though the truth, Damien would say, is closer to allergy, a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace.

Damien’s in Russia now, avoiding renovation and claiming to be shooting a documentary. Whatever faintly lived-in feel the place now has, Cayce knows, is the work of a production assistant.

She rolls over, abandoning this pointless parody of sleep. Gropes for her clothes. A small boy’s black Fruit Of The Loom T-shirt, thoroughly shrunken, a thin gray V-necked pullover purchased by the half-dozen from a supplier to New England prep schools, and a new and oversized pair of black 501’s, every trademark carefully removed. Even the buttons on these have been ground flat, featureless, by a puzzled Korean locksmith, in the Village, a week ago.

The switch on Damien’s Italian floor lamp feels alien: a different click, designed to hold back a different voltage, foreign British electricity.

Standing now, stepping into her jeans, she straightens, shivering.

Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different
weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money.

Pupils contracted painfully against sun-bright halogen, she squints into an actual mirror, canted against a gray wall, awaiting hanging, wherein she sees a black-legged, disjointed puppet, sleep-hair poking up like a toilet brush. She grimaces at it, thinking for some reason of a boyfriend who’d insisted on comparing her to Helmut Newton’s nude portrait of Jane Birkin.

In the kitchen she runs tap water through a German filter, into an Italian electric kettle. Fiddles with switches, one on the kettle, one on the socket. Blankly surveys the canary expanse of laminated cabinetry while it boils. Bag of some imported Californian tea substitute in a large white mug. Pouring boiling water.

In the flat’s main room, she finds that Damien’s faithful Cube is on, but sleeping, the night-light glow of its static switches pulsing gently. Damien’s ambivalence toward design showing here: He won’t allow decorators through the door unless they basically agree to not do that which they do, yet he holds on to this Mac for the way you can turn it upside down and remove its innards with a magic little aluminum handle. Like the sex of one of the robot girls in his video, now that she thinks of it.

She seats herself in his high-backed workstation chair and clicks the transparent mouse. Stutter of infrared on the pale wood of the long trestle table. The browser comes up. She types Fetish:Footage:Forum, which Damien, determined to avoid contamination, will never bookmark.

The front page opens, familiar as a friend’s living room. A frame-grab from #48 serves as backdrop, dim and almost monochrome, no characters in view. This is one of the sequences that generate comparisons with Tarkovsky. She only knows Tarkovsky from stills, really, though she did once fall asleep during a screening of
The Stalker,
going under on an endless pan, the camera aimed straight down, in close-up, at a puddle
on a ruined mosaic floor. But she is not one of those who think that much will be gained by analysis of the makers imagined influences. The cult of the footage is rife with subcults, claiming every possible influence. Truffaut, Peckinpah… The Peckinpah people, among the least likely, are still waiting for the guns to be drawn.

She enters the forum itself now, automatically scanning titles of the posts and names of posters in the newer threads, looking for friends, enemies, news. One thing is clear, though; no new footage has surfaced. Nothing since that beach pan, and she does not subscribe to the theory that it is Cannes in winter. French footageheads have been unable to match it, in spite of countless hours recording pans across approximately similar scenery.

She also sees that her friend Parkaboy is back in Chicago, home from an Amtrak vacation, California, but when she opens his post she sees that he’s only saying hello, literally.

She clicks Respond, declares herself CayceP.

Hi Parkaboy. nt

When she returns to the forum page, her post is there.

It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar café that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones.

There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F, and some much larger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat, but there’s no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It’s strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. The hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counter-purposes, deter her.

The Cube sighs softly and makes subliminal sounds with its drive, like a vintage sports car downshifting on a distant freeway. She tries a sip of tea substitute, but it’s still too hot. A gray and indeterminate light is starting to suffuse the room in which she sits, revealing such Damieniana as has survived the recent remake.

Partially disassembled robots are propped against one wall, two of them, torsos and heads, like elfin, decidedly female crash-test dummies. These are effects units from one of Damien’s videos, and she wonders, given her mood, why she finds them so comforting. Probably because they are genuinely beautiful, she decides. Optimistic expressions of the feminine. No sci-fi kitsch for Damien. Dreamlike things in the dawn half-light, their small breasts gleaming, white plastic shining faint as old marble. Personally fetishistic, though; she knows he’d had them molded from a body cast of his last girlfriend, minus two.