Mona Lisa Overdrive Quotes

Her fingers found a random second stud and she was catapulted through the static wall, into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the bright grid of the matrix ranged around her like an infinite cage.

The world hadn’t ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.

But did it wake, Kumiko wondered, when the alley was empty? Did its laser vision scan the silent fall of midnight snow?

It worked okay.

This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.

I am no spy.” “Then start being your own. If Tokyo’s the frying pan, you may just have landed in the fire.

How were they weird?” “Hoodoos. Thought the matrix was full of mambos ’n’ shit. Wanna know something, Moll?” “What?” “They’re right.

Now Sally plunged her abruptly into the full strangeness of this place, with its rot and randomness rooting towers taller than any in Tokyo, corporate obelisks that pierced the sooty lacework of overlapping domes.

He couldn’t remember when he hadn’t been able to remember, but sometimes he almost could. That was why he had built the Judge, because he’d done something—it hadn’t been anything much, but he’d been caught doing it, twice—and been judged for it, and sentenced, and then the sentence was carried out and he hadn’t been able to remember, not anything, not for more than five minutes at a stretch. Stealing cars. Stealing rich people’s cars. They made sure you remembered what you did.

Gomi. Thirty-five percent of the landmass of Tokyo was built on gomi, on level tracts reclaimed from the Bay through a century's systematic dumping. Gomi, there, was a resource to be managed, to be collected, carefully plowed under. London's relationship to gomi was more subtle, more oblique. To Kumiko's eyes, the bulk of the city consisted of gomi, of structures the Japanese economy would long ago have devoured in its relentless hunger for space in which to build. Yet these structures revealed, even to Kumiko, the fabric of time, each wall patched by generation of hands in an ongoing task of restoration. The English valued their gomi in its own right, in a way she had only begun to understand; they inhabited it. Gomi in the Sprawl was something else: a rich humus, a decay that sprouted prodigies in steel and polymer. The apparent lack of planning alone was enough to dizzy her, running so entirely opposite the value her own culture placed on efficient land use. Her tax ride from the airport had already shown her decay, whole blocks in ruins, unglazed windows gaping above sidewalks heaped with trash. And faces staring as the armoed hover made its way through the streets.

And somewhere, in a black California morning, some hour before dawn, amid the corridors, the galleries, the faces of dream, fragments of conversation she half-recalled, waking to pale fog against the windows of the master bedroom, she prized something free and dragged it back through the wall of sleep. Rolling over, fumbling through a bedside drawer, finding a Porsche pen, a present from an assistant grip, she inscribed her treasure on the glossy back of an Italian fashion magazine:

Perhaps Legba, the loa Beauvoir credited with almost infinite access to the cyberspace matrix, could alter the flow of data as it was obtained by the scanners, rendering the vévés transparent.…

Porphyre followed her to the base of the stairs. He’d stayed near her during the meal, as though he sensed her new unease. No, she thought, not new; the old, the always, the now and ever was.

Now Gentry went to the big display unit, the projection table. “There are worlds within worlds,” he said. “Macrocosm, microcosm.

Now Gentry went to the big display unit, the projection table. “There are worlds within worlds,” he said. “Macrocosm, microcosm. We carried an entire universe across a bridge tonight, and that which is above is like that below.… It was obvious, of course, that such things must exist, but I’d not dared to hope.…

Angie called pause again, rose from the bed, went to the window. She felt an elation, an unexpected sense of strength and inner unity.

He could have anything in there,” Gentry said, pausing to look down at the unconscious face. He spun on his heel and began his pacing again. “A world. Worlds. Any number of personality-constructs …

The portraits were monochrome photographs of men in dark suits and ties, four very sober gentlemen whose lapels were decorated with small metal emblems of the kind her father sometimes wore. Though her mother had told her that the cubes contained ghosts, the ghosts of her father’s evil ancestors, Kumiko found them more fascinating than frightening.

Not that I know of. He had this idea that it was gone, sort of; not gone gone, but gone into everything, the whole matrix. Like it wasn’t in cyberspace anymore, it just was.

London,” Bobby said. “She had to trade me this to get the serious voodoo shit. Thought they wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Fuck of a lot of good it did her. They’ve been fading, sort of blurring. You can still raise em, sometimes, but their personalities run together.…

It would be more accurate, in terms of the mythform, to say that the matrix has a God, since this being's omniscience and omnipresence are assumed to be limited to the matrix.

está cambiando las cosas. Redistribuye el poder a su conveniencia. Información. Poder. Datos duros y puros. Pon la cantidad suficiente en manos de un solo hombre y...

He'd grown up in white Jersey stringtowns where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did.

Continuity could generate video images of Angie, animate them with templates compiled from her stims. Viewing them induced a mild but not unpleasant vertigo, one of the rare times she was able to directly grasp the fact of her fame. 'Public statement on your decision to go to Jamaica, praise for the methods of the clinic, the dangers of drugs, renewed enthusiasm for your work, gratitude to your audience, stock footage of the Malibu place...

18 Jail-Time He was in Gentry's loft. He was watching Cherry do nurse-things to Gentry. Cherry looked over at him from where she sat on the edge of Gentry's bed. 'How y'doin', Slick?' 'Okay... I'm okay.' 'Remember me asking you before?' He was looking down at the face of the man Kid Afrika called the Count. Cherry was fiddling with something on the stretcher's superstructure, a bag of fluid the color of oatmeal. 'How y'feel, Slick?' 'Feel okay.' 'You're not okay. You keep for-' He was sitting on the floor of Gentry's loft. His face was wet. Cherry was kneeling beside him, close, her hands on his shoulders. 'You did time?' He nodded. 'Chemo-penal unit?' 'Yeah.' 'Induced Korsakov's?' He - 'Episodes?' Cherry asked him. He was sitting on the floor in Gentry's loft. Where was Gentry? 'You get episodes like this? Short term-memory goes?' How did she know? Where was Gentry? 'What's the trigger?' 'What triggers the syndrome, Slick? What kicks you into jail-time?' He was sitting on the floor in Gentry's loft and Cherry was practically on top of him. 'Stress,' he said, wondering how she knew about that. 'Where's Gentry?' 'I put him to bed.' 'Why?' 'He collapsed. When he saw that thing...' 'What thing?' Cherry was pressing a pink derm against his wrist. 'Heavy trank,' she said. 'Maybe get you out of it...' 'Out of what?' She sighed. 'Never mind.

...maybe the kid was losing his concern with image.

As Kumiko listened to Sally condense fourteen years of personal history for the Finn's benefit, she found herself imagining this younger Sally as a bishonen hero in a traditional romantic video: fey, elegant, and deadly. While she found Sally's matter-of-fact account of her life difficult to follow, with its references to places and things she didn't know, it was easy to imagine her winning the sudden, flick-of-the-wrist victories expected of bishonen.

It’s not the Ritz,’ he said, ‘but we’ll try to make you comfortable.’ Mona made a non-committal sound. The Ritz was a burger place in Cleveland and she couldn’t see what that had to do with anything.

Because there were so many companies already that the good names had been used up. He had a computer that knew all the names of all the companies, and another one that made up words you could use for names, and another one that checked if the made-up words meant 'dickhead' or something in Chinese or Swedish.

in the blue-white flicker of freeway lights Mona had seen her own hand beside Angie's, and they weren't the same, not the same, not really the same shape, and that had made her glad.

Everything changed.

Slick stayed where he was, looking up at Gentry’s pale eyes, gray in this light, his taut face. Why did he put up with Gentry anyway? Because you needed somebody, in the Solitude. Not just for electricity; that whole landlord routine was really just a shuck. He guessed because you needed somebody around.

Because sometimes it feels good to shake it all off, get out from under. Chances are, we haven’t. But maybe we have. Maybe nobody, nobody at all, knows where we are. Nice feeling, huh? You could be kinked, you ever think of that? Maybe your dad, the Yak warlord, he’s got a little bug planted in you so he can keep track of his daughter. You got those pretty little teeth, maybe Daddy’s dentist tucked a little hardware in there one time when you were into a stim. You go to the dentist?” “Yes.” “You stim while he works?” “Yes …” “There you go. Maybe he’s listening to us right now.…

Pretty soon the crash would come on, and before then she’d have to figure out a way to get back to the hotel, and suddenly it seemed like everything was too complicated, too many things to do, angles to figure, and that was the crash, when you had to start worrying about putting the day side together again.

If there were such a being,” she said, “you’d be a part of it, wouldn’t you?” “Yes.” “Would you know?” “Not necessarily.” “Do you know?” “No.” “Do you rule out the possibility?” “No.

Gentry was convinced that cyberspace had a Shape, an overall total form . . . Slick figured the universe was everything there was, so how could it have a shape? If it had a shape then there was something around it for it to have a shape in, wasn't there? And if that something was something, then wasn't that part of the universe, too? . . . But Slick didn't think cyberspace was anything like the universe anyway; it was just a way of representing data. . . . Big companies had copyrights on how their stuff looked. So how could you figure the whole matrix had a particular shape? And why should it mean anything if it did?

The bartender pursed his lips and nodded when she showed him one of her bills, so she told him to get her a shot of bourbon and a beer on the side, which was what Eddy always got if he was paying for it himself. If somebody else was paying, he'd order mixed drinks the bartender didn't know how to make, then spend a lot of time explaining exactly how you made the thing. Then he'd drink it and bitch about how it wasn't as good as the ones they made in L.A. or Singapore or some other place she knew he'd never been.

No,' [Angie] said, 'not like mine. Do you know anything about Africa religions, Porphyre?' He smirked, 'I'm not African.' 'But when you were a child...' 'When I was a child,' Porphyre said, 'I was white.