William Gibson - 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

Gibsons 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. Gibsons most complex, mature gloss on the artists 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 thats 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

Gibsons 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

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 Tomorrows Parties.

Please visit the authors website at
www.williamgibsonbooks.com .

WILLIAM GIBSON

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnams 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 publishers 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

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 Damiens 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 Damiens 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 cant 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 Damiens bedroom, beneath a silvery thing the color of oven mitts, probably never intended by its makers to actually be slept under. Shed 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 its not unpleasant; any physical linkage to a fellow mammal seems a plus at this point.

Damien is a friend.

Their boy-girl Lego doesnt 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 theyve 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.

Damiens 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 boys 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 501s, 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 Damiens 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.