Pattern Recognition Read online

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

  Pattern Recognition

  A G.P. Putnam’s Sons Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2003 by William Gibson

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 1-101-14641-9

  A G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS BOOK®

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons Books first published by The G. P. Putnam’s Sons Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS and the “G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: April, 2003

  ALSO BY WILLIAM GIBSON

  Neuromancer

  Count Zero

  Burning Chrome

  Mona Lisa Overdrive

  Virtual Light

  Idoru

  All Tomorrow’s Parties

  TO JACK

  Contents

  1. THE WEBSITE OF DREADFUL NIGHT

  2. BITCH

  3. THE ATTACHMENT

  4. MATH GRENADES

  5. WHAT THEY DESERVE

  6. THE MATCH FACTORY

  7. THE PROPOSITION

  8. WATERMARK

  9. TRANS

  10. JACK MOVES, JANE FACES

  11. BOONE CHU

  12. APOPHENIA

  13. LITTLE BOAT

  14. THE GAIJIN FACE OF BIKKLE

  15. SINGULARITY

  16. GOING MOBILE

  17. MAKING MAYHEM

  18. HONGO

  19. INTO THE MYSTIC

  20. UBER-BONES

  21. THE DEAD REMEMBER

  22.TARN

  23. DICKHEADS

  24. CYPRUS

  25. SIGIL

  26. SIGINT

  27. THE SHAPE OF THE ENTHUSIAST

  28. WITHIN THE MEANING

  29. PROTOCOL

  3O. .RU

  31. THE PROTOTYPE

  32. PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE

  33. BOT

  34. Z AMOSKVARECH

  35.

  36. THE DIG

  37. KINO

  38. PUPPENKOPF

  39. RED DUST

  40. THE DREAM ACADEMY

  41. A TOAST TO MR. POLLARD

  42. HIS MISSINGNESS

  43.MAIL

  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 its 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 makers 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 plug, 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 innar
ds 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 maker’s 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.

  Hotmail downloads four messages, none of which she feels like opening. Her mother, three spam. The penis enlarger is still after her, twice, and Increase Your Breast Size Dramatically.

  Deletes spam. Sips the tea substitute. Watches the gray light becoming more like day.

  Eventually she goes into Damien’s newly renovated bathroom. Feels she could shower down in it prior to visiting a sterile NASA probe, or step out of some Chernobyl scenario to have her lead suit removed by rubber-gowned Soviet technicians, who’d then scrub her with long-handled brushes. The fixtures in the shower can be adjusted with elbows, preserving the sterility of scrubbed hands.

  She pulls off her sweater and T-shirt and, using hands, not elbows, starts the shower and adjusts the temperature.

  FOUR hours later she’s on a reformer in a Pilates studio in an upscale alley called Neal’s Yard, the car and driver from Blue Ant waiting out on whatever street it is. The reformer is a very long, very low, vaguely ominous and Weimar-looking piece of spring-loaded furniture. On which she now reclines, doing v-position against the foot rail at the end. The padded platform she rests on wheels back and forth along tracks of angle-iron within the frame, springs twanging softly. Ten of these, ten toes, ten from the heels . . . In New York she does this at a fitness center frequented by dance professionals, but here in Neal’s Yard, this morning, she seems to be the sole client. The place is only recently opened, apparently, and perhaps this sort of thing is not yet so popular here. There is that mirror-world ingestion of archaic substances, she thinks: People smoke, and drink as though it were good for you, and seem to still be in some sort of honeymoon phase with cocaine. Heroin, she’s read, is cheaper here than it’s ever been, the market still glutted by the initial dumping of Afghani opium supplies.

  Done with her toes, she changes to heels, craning her neck to be certain her feet are correctly aligned. She likes Pilates because it isn’t, in the way she thinks of yoga, meditative. You have to keep your eyes open, here, and pay attention.

  That concentration counters the anxiety she feels now, the pre-job jitters she hasn’t experienced in a while.

  She’s here on Blue Ant’s ticket. Relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational, the agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores. Or perhaps as some non-carbon-based life-form, entirely sprung from the smooth and ironic brow of its founder, Hubertus Bigend, a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins’ blood and truffled chocolates.

  The only thing Cayce enjoys about Bigend is that he seems to have no sense at all that his name might seem ridiculous to anyone, ever. Otherwise, she would find him even more unbearable than she already does.

  It’s entirely personal, though at one remove.

  Still doing heels, she checks her watch, a Korean clone of an old-school Casio G-Shock, its plastic case sanded free of logos with a scrap of Japanese micro-abrasive. She is due in Blue Ant’s Soho offices in fifty minutes.

  She drapes a pair of limp green foam pads over the foot rail, carefully positions her feet, lifts them on invisible stiletto heels, and begins her ten prehensile.

  2.

  BITCH

  CPUs for the meeting, reflected in the window of a Soho specialist in mod paraphernalia, are a fresh Fruit T-shirt, her black Buzz Rickson’s MA-1, anonymous black skirt from a Tulsa thrift, the black leggings she’d worn for Pilates, black Harajuku schoolgirl shoes. Her purse-analog is an envelope of black East German laminate, purchased on eBay—if not actual Stasi-issue then well in the ballpark.

  She sees her own gray eyes, pale in the glass, and beyond them Ben Sherman shirts and fishtail parkas, cufflinks in the form of the RAF roundel that marked the wings of Spitfires.

  CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That’s what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.

  What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.

  Around her the bustle of Soho, a Friday morning building toward boozy lunches and careful chatter in all these restaurants. To one of which, Charlie Don’t Sur
f, she will be going for an obligatory post-meeting meal. But she feels herself tipping back down into a miles-long trough of jet lag, and knows that that is what she must surf now: her lack of serotonin, the delayed arrival of her soul.

  She checks her watch and heads down the street, toward Blue Ant, whose premises until recently were those of an older, more linear sort of agency.

  The sky is a bright gray bowl, crossed with raveled contrails, and as she presses the button to announce herself at Blue Ant, she wishes she’d brought her sunglasses.

  SEATED now, opposite Bernard Stonestreet, familiar from Blue Ant’s New York operation, she finds him pale and freckled as ever, with carroty hair upswept in a weird Aubrey Beardsley flame motif that might be the result of his having slept on it that way, but is more likely the work of some exclusive barber. He is wearing what Cayce takes to be a Paul Smith suit, more specifically the 118 jacket and the 11T trouser, cut from something black. In London his look seems to be about wearing many thousand pounds’ worth of garments that appear to have never been worn before having been slept in, the night before. In New York he prefers to look as though he’s just been detailed by a tight scrum of specialists. Different cultural parameters.

  On his left sits Dorotea Benedetti, her hair scraped back from her forehead with a haute nerd intensity that Cayce suspects means business and trouble both. Dorotea, whom Cayce knows glancingly from previous and minor business in New York, is something fairly high up in the graphics design partnership of Heinzi & Pfaff. She has flown in, this morning, from Frankfurt, to present H&P’s initial shot at a new logo for one of the world’s two largest manufacturers of athletic footwear. Bigend has defined a need for this maker to re-identify, in some profound but so far unspecified way. Sales of athletic shoes, “trainers” in the mirror-world, are tanking bigtime, and the skate shoes that had already started to push them under aren’t doing too well either. Cayce herself has been tracking the street-level emergence of what she thinks of as “urban survival” footwear, and though this is so far at the level of consumer repurposing, she has no doubt that commodification will soon follow identification.