Escape Velocity (37 page)

© 1992 Kundalini Publishing, Inc. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Orlan, Fourth Operation. Photo:Andre Dhome/SIPA Press

Phallic horror: screwing literalized in Tetsuo. © Kaijju Theater / Toshiba EMI, 1991. Directed by Shiriya Tsukamoto.

The salaryman menaced by the Monstrous Feminine in TetsuoiThe Iron Man. © Kaijyu Theater/ Toshiba EMI, 1991. Directed by Shinya Tsukamoto.

Biomechanical ripper" tattoo, juy Aitchison.

'hoto and tattoo by Guy Aitchison

Techno-tribal tattoo:

biomechanical ornamentation inside primitive motif, Jonathan Shaw. Photo appears courtesy ojJonathan Shaw. Tattoo by Jonathan Shaw, Fun City Studios, NewYork City.

Alien III (1979), H.R. Giger. © 1979 H. R. Giger. Reprinted with permission, through Leslie Barany Communications, NYC.

Giger-inspired

"backpiece."

©1995 B.J Papas.

Model: Rick Healey

00 by Andrea Elston.

H.R. Giger.

© 1992WiIlySpiIler

Blueprint for a winged human, by Dr. Burt Brent. From Burt Brent, M.D.,"Thoracobrachial Vterygoplasty Powered by Muscle Transposition Flaps"in The Artistry of Reconstructive Surgery (St. Louis: C.V. Mosby Co., 1987). Reprinted with permission.

Hans Moravec with robot.

© ; 995 Michael Llewellyn

A robot bush, one of the posthuman beings envisioned by Moravec. © Hans Moravec, Carnegie Mellon University, 1988

Escape Velocity 249

Gibson later clarified this remark when he said that what he calls his " *Lawrentian* take on things" derives from "Lawrence's interpretation of the crucifix," which Gibson sees as "completely appropriate to our society because it's a literal nailing of the body onto a cross of spirit and [mind]." A confirmed sensualist, Lawrence declared, "My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true."^"*

Case would look decidedly out of place in a Lawrence novel. He is an outlaw hacker for hire, a down-on-his-luck information rustler who had once "worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data."^^ His name says it all: A hard case out of a noir novel, a head case banged around by rough living, he is the postmodern descendant of T. S. Eliot's hollow men, all steely exterior, wdth no psychological interior. His body is a spent shell, his mind elsewhere-lost in memories of his exploits as a hotshot console cowboy, when he used a brain socket to physically connect his nervous system to a "custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness" into the neon-streaked matrix, where "data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system" appear as towers, cubes, and pyramids in a virtual reality version of Le Corbusier's Radiant City.''^

For Case, the flesh is literally toxic: In a moment of weakness, he had pilfered something from his employers and in retribution they had "damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin," rendering him physically unable to "jack" into cyberspace:

For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.^^

Salvation comes in the form of a mysterious outfit that recruits Case to crack the security programs of an enigmatic AI (artificial intelligence) for reasons unknown even to the operative who contacts him, a prosthetically enhanced cybermoll named Molly Millions. The outfit's surgeons restore

Case to cyberspace compatibility, guaranteeing his cooperation with a walking-time-bomb scheme familiar from techno-thrillers. If the caper is successful, the slowly dissolving toxin sacs they have planted in his arteries will be removed, enabling Case to roam the matrix freely; should he fail, they will be left to melt, returning him to his fallen state.

Case exemplifies what Andrew Ross has called the "technocoloniz-ation of the body." Bodies, like every square foot of public space and the natural environment, are corporate property in Neuromancer's near-future dystopia. A smooth operator's eyes, "vatgrown" like the genetically engineered eyes of Blade Runner's replicants, say nothing about their owner and everything about brand-name affiliation: "[S]ea-green Nikon transplants" in a "tanned and forgettable mask," they are the furthest thing from windows of the soul.^^ Salaryman serfs in Japanese corporate fiefdoms are tattooed with their company logos and "above a certain level [are] implanted with advanced microprocessors that [monitor] mutagen levels in the bloodstream" to ensure mutation-free employees (the futuristic equivalent of drug-free employees).^^ Meanwhile, in the upper echelons of the zaibatsus— the all-powerful multinationals that are themselves "vast single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon"-the captains of industry have remade themselves through the "gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism" into "both more and less than peop/e."^^ Even Molly, the former "meat puppet" (prostitute) who has bootstrapped herself into the lucrative profession of "street samurai" with the aid of costly surgery, is simply a meat puppet of another sort. Although she exudes the coiled power of the high-tech assassin (her artificial nails conceal scalpel blades, her eye sockets are sealed with mirrored lenses that provide night vision and a constant stream of data), she is still hired muscle, a foot soldier whose body will always be someone else's weapon.