User Guide

Neuromancer
INTRODUCTION
He closed his eyes.
Found the ridged face of the power stud.
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space,
hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled from random frames.
Symbols, figures,
faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed,
now-
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
NOW-
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding-
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home,
his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity.
Inner eye opening to the stepped
scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of
Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military
systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck,
tears of release streaking his face.
-jacking into cyberspace; from the book NEUROMANCER, by William Gibson
“The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,” said the voice-over, “in early graphics
programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.” On the Sony, a two-dimensional
space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spatial
possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired
into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes.
“Cyberspace.
A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation,
by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphic representation of data abstracted
from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.
Lines of light
ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.
Like city lights,
receding....”
-a kid’s show describing cyberspace; from the book NEUROMANCER