Count Zero, William Gibson

2.5 stars

First Sentence: They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair.

Thoughts: The Sprawl series hits its sophomore slump in Count Zero. Instead on focusing on one group of characters, this time we have three different plots that are supposed to fit together at the end but don’t.

The first plot is about Turner. He’s a mercenary for Hosaka Corporation who gets blown up in the first paragraph. The various bits of him are rescued and put back together in the Chiba City labs. Once he’s back together he goes to Mexico to recuperate. There he meets a nice lady and has a relationship with her. Then a Hosaka corporate ship appears on the horizon. Turns out the nice lady was actually a corporate psych and she’s just released Turner back to active duty. And what is that duty? Go to Arizona to pick up a scientist who’s defecting from Maas Biolabs. This particular scientist, Mitchell, has developed a biochip that will allow people to access the Matrix without a cyberdeck. Off Turner goes to the Arizona desert to meet his motley crew.

The second story is about Marly, a disgraced Parisian art dealer. She was in all the newsfeeds recently when she got caught selling a counterfeit collage box. Now she has a chance at a new job hunting down a mysterious artist who creates anonymous collage boxes. Her new employer is notorious billionaire Herr Josef Virek. Virek only meets Marly in a reality he’s constructed within the Matrix for the excellent reason that his physical form is a pile of goo in a vat in the vast metropolis of Undisclosed Location. Marly takes the job and quickly realizes that Virek’s motives for finding the artist are increasingly sinister.

The third plot is about Count Zero himself. His real name is Bobby Newmark and he’s a teenager in over his head. He wants to be a cyber cowboy and now, thanks to his contact Two-a-Day, he has his first job cracking corporate ice. Unfortunately it goes bad and Bobby dies. Fortunately his death was noted by something within the Matrix and it revives him. Now Bobby’s on the run because he knows the company he tried to hack knows what he did and where he lives. His fears are confirmed when the apartment complex he lived in blows up shortly after he leaves. He goes into the slums of New Jersey to find Two-a-Day and ask him what the hell. When he finds him, Two-a-Day is very nervous and not because of the two crimelords in his apartment with him. They want to talk to Bobby about the voice that revived him. Why? Because the voice was one of the loas that have appeared in the Matrix.

These plots meander around separately until Angela Mitchell shows up. She’s the daughter of the defecting scientist in Arizona. Turns out her father never planned to get out himself, he just wanted to get Angie away from Maas Biolabs. He had implanted his biochips in her brain, which gives her strange powers as far as the Matrix goes. For instance, she can connect with the loas that the bosses that caught Bobby are interested in. Eventually Turner, Angie, and Bobby end up in New York to find out more about the gods in the machine while Marly goes to the Spire from Neuromancer where she supposedly ties up a few loose ends from the rogue AI plot. According to legend, this is where the three plots all snap together but I’ll be darned if I can figure out how.