Pattern Recognition

Resolving Web Video Fragments Riddles, Cayce Unravels Her Own Enigma

Cayce, pronounced “Case”, —named after the psychic Edgar Cayce—Pollard suffers from an acute sensitivity to commercial logos—at six she had a phobic reaction to the Michelin man. She meticulous removes all such items from everything she possesses—clothing, jewelry, shoes, etc. In the real world, this might have been a disability, but in the world of advertising and image creation, it is an asset that enables her to live as she pleases, coming into an agency, meeting with a creative team, and giving her reaction to a symbol. If she doesn’t react, you could pretty much tell that the campaign would have to go back to the drawing board. Pattern Recognition, William Gibson’s latest novel—the first outside the realm of science fiction, begins with Cayce awakening in Damien’s (an absent male friend) apartment in London’s Camden Town after a flight from New York.

She has come to London on an assignment from Blue Ant, a So Ho-based ad agency run by Hubertus Bigend—a Tom Cruise handsome Belgium with a knack for producing successful ad campaigns. As the story begins Cayce visits the Blue Ant’s office to evaluate a design from the German graphic design firm, Heinzi & Pfaff. The representative from H&P is Dorotea Benedetti and she is looking for Cayce’s reaction to a design for one of the world’s largest athletic footwear makers. The lack of a reaction results in Dorotea having to return to her team with orders to start again and get it right this time. During the course of the meeting, Dorotea—Cayce is sure of it—burns with a cigarette Cayce’s prized Buzz Rickson jacket hung over the back of her chair in the Blue Ant conference room where they are meeting. The discovery comes after lunch at a chic eatery called Charlie Don’t Surf—California Vietnamese cuisine—after the meeting. Cayce is the guest of Bernard Overstreet, a Blue Ant executive and minor character in the story. Dorotea, another minor character in the story, begins as enemies and remain so throughout the narrative.

While evaluating symbols is Cayce’s day job, her passion is a web forum that has formed to discuss fragments of a video being posted anonymously on the web. As Cayce returns to Damien’s flat and fires up his Apple Cube PC (curiously Cayce has no reaction to the Apple logo), one of her fellow forum members—or footageheads, Parkaboy, has just sent her the 135th fragment now being circulated. The fragments have created a growing cult following attracted by something that the fragments’ creator has imbued in them. The power of the fragments to engender this kind of fascination has not been lost on cowboy-hat-wearing, Hummer-driving Hubertus Bigend. “My passion is marketing, advertising, media strategy and when I first discovered the footage, that’s what responded in me,” he explains to Cayce over dinner. His ulterior motive in summoning Cayce to Blue Ant headquarters is to charge her with the job of locating the creator. Bigend partners Cayce with unemployed Asian programmer and failed entrepreneur—a casualty of the dotcom implosion—Boone Chu. His failing company had been in the security business. The two click, each sharing a suspicion of Bigend, but each willing to work together for their own reasons: Chu to get back into the game and Cayce to find the maker of the fragments.

Pattern Recognition examines the impact that symbols have on all our lives and how the purveyors of these symbols attempt to influence our behavior. Magda sister of Voytek—both minor characters, the latter Cayce meets wandering the streets of Notting Hill in London—is in advertising, her evening job to supplement her other job selling hats. “Looks sorted, go to clubs and wine bars and chat people up,” she explains. “While I’m at it, I mention a client’s product, of course, favorably.” Magda works for a firm called Trans, which Cayce discovers is affiliated with Blue Ant. Voytek Biroshak is collecting Sinclair ZX81—handheld PCs developed by Sir Clive Sinclair in the early 1980s—hoping to mount an exhibition. His innocence is beguiling as seen in a response to one of Cayce’s questions regarding his conversation with an ex-rock star she sees him with: “owns gallery. I need space to show ZX 81 project.” But, Voytek is also the character that helps Cayce find the man who can decipher the secret to the fragments, the latest of which contains a watermark that requires a key to extract.

Cayce asks of Voytek. “Would it be possible for someone to detect or extract, a secret watermark? Without knowing the code, or who place it there, or even being sure it’s there in the first place?” Voytek replies. “Difficult, but might be done. Hobbs knows these things.” Hobbs is the reclusive ex-British military intelligence math genius that will become critical in recognizing the pattern that will reveal the secret of the fragments.

As is Gibson’s way, Pattern Recognition contains elements found in other of his works. A strong female character is typical of earlier works including Mona Lisa Overdrive and Idoru. What Alfred Hitchcock referred to as the McGuffin—the object whatever it is that the main character seeks—is in Gibson’s stories tied up in a work of art. In Count Zero, the art was a delicate box a computer produced. “It contained seven objects… The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wings of some large bird. Three archaic circuit boards, faced with maze of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An aged blackened fragment of lace. A finger length segment of what she assumed was bone. From a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must have ridden flush with the surface of the skin—but the thing’s face was seared and blackened” (from Count Zero.)

In Pattern Recognition, the McGuffin are fragments of a video, the latest showing a man and a woman. “He might be a sailor, stepping onto a submarine in 1914 or a jazz musician entering a club in 1957. There is a lack of evidence, an absence of stylistic clues, that Cayce understands to be utterly masterful. His black coat is usually read as leather, though it might be dull vinyl, or rubber. He has a way of wearing its collar up.” Then the girl in the fragment is described thus. She “wears a longer coat, equally dark but seemingly of fabric, its shoulder-padding the subject of hundreds of posts. The architecture of padding in a woman’s coat could yield possible periods, particular decades, but there has been no agreement, only controversy.”

The work is riddled with patterns as its title suggest. There are the symbols that the advertising world uses to sway the public—something Cayce easily recognizes. There are the subtle patterns in the fragments that the footageheads spend infinite energy trying to interpret. Then there are the hidden patterns contained within the watermarks used to track the fragments in their endless journey throughout the net. Finally, there are the patterns in the character’s lives that add yet another hidden dimension to Cayce’s world. “Her mother is Cynthia@roseoftheworld.com. Rose of the World being an intentional community of sorts, back up in the red-dirt country of Maui…” Her mother is among a group studying Electronic Voice Phenomena, something Cayce father Wingrove labeled “apophenia”—“the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.” Wingrove, yet another puzzle, disappeared in the 9/11 twin towers disaster.

Gibson’s latest novel is a great read, with excursions to Japan and Russia as well as expeditions around London—the mirror world of Cayce’s Manhattan. And the language that I’ve come to find so enjoyable to read is still an integral part of his work. You will not be disappointed in this latest work.

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