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.Armitage, unlike Dix, appears to be flesh and blood, as real as any human being.But, as the novel progresses, the other characters start to have their doubts: ‘that guy doesn’t have any life going, in privatesf and technology131… Sits and stares at the wall man’ (p.117).We slowly realise that‘Armitage’ is a sort of flesh construct, a ROM personality built around the recovered fragments of a ‘real’ personality called Corto, who was nearly killed on the ‘Screaming Fist’ military raid.Corto eventually breaks through Armitage, but Corto is insane where Armitage was rational; Corto sets off and kills himself where Armitage displayed habits of self-preservation.In other words, Corto is less ‘real’ a character than the artificial ‘Armitage’.The novel is full of ‘real’ characters who act like zombies, like the prostitutes in the Freeside brothel who operate with a neural cut-out so that they don’t have to experience the things they do.On the other hand, one of the most vivid ‘characters’in the novel is Wintermute himself, who is not ‘real’, at least until the end.The net effect of all this is to create a situation where ‘real’ and‘construct’ start to blur.Immediately after Wintermute complains to Case that constructs like Dix are predictable and human beings are not, Case asks why the old man Ashpool committed suicide.Wintermute’s reply starts with a standard disavowal that he doesn’t know because humans are simply unpredictable; but he goes on to admit not only that he knows the reason for the suicide, but that he prompted it, in an indirect way.In other words, Ashpool was as ‘predictable’ as any AI:‘Why does anybody kill himself?’ The figure shrugged.‘I guess I know, if anybody does, but it would take me twelve hours to explain the various factors in his history and how they interrelate … 3Jane figured a way to fiddle the program that controlled his cryogenic system … so basically she killed him … Well, actually, I guess I did give 3Jane the odd hint …’(Gibson, Neuromancer (1984): 245)Wintermute frequently comes over in this novel as – a significant pun –virtually omniscient, god-like.This could be an instance of the SF text that plays with secular versions of religious notions, a novel without a god that invents one, a computer one, as it goes on.Or perhaps we should follow the French girl’s analysis and think in terms less of God and more of demons.At one point inside Wintermute, Case gets to the root of the issue of identity that I have been interrogating here,sf and technology132the suggestion that even our own ‘identity’, that sense of ourselves that we prize so dearly, may only be a ‘metaphor’ too:‘Can you read my mind, Finn?’ He grimaced.‘Wintermute, I mean.’‘Minds aren’t read.See, you’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate.I can access your memory, but that’s not the same as your mind.’(Gibson, Neuromancer (1984): 204)Case and Wintermute are here trading different metaphors of consciousness.Case falls back on the idea that consciousness is like a book, like the book we are reading perhaps; this is a suitably self-reflexive notion, because, of course, literally, Case’s consciousness is like a book, in fact it is a book.Wintermute, on the other hand, insists that consciousness is like a computer program.This debate is essentially a philosophical debate, something Neuromancer is full of.For instance, Case, trapped inside Wintermute’s cyberspace imitation of reality, is curious as to whether the computer simulation continues out of the window to include things he can’t see.Wintermute refers to the famous philosophical question associated with English eighteenth-century thinker George Berkeley, who wondered whether a tree that falls in the forest where nobody sees it makes a sound.Case looks out the virtual window and asks, ‘what’s out there? New York? Or does it just stop?’ ‘Well,’ Wintermute replies, ‘it’s like that tree, you know?Falls in the woods, but maybe there’s nobody to hear it’ (p.203).This novel inhabits the philosophical space that argues over the question of‘consciousness’, something philosophers have been arguing over for thousands of years.Neuromancer is a wonderfully tightly controlled work of art.The symbolic novum of the novel reflects lucidly back on our experience of living in the world, whilst allowing the startling and poetic encounter with otherness that is the strength of the science-fictional mode
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