Count Zero

Three powerful forces vie for the most precious possession in a future earth: information as a life force

"They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair," Thus, begins Count Zero by William Gibson. "It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT."

The first paragraph of this book sets the narrative tone for the rest of the work, indeed, it is the trademark style of William Gibson and his growing body of science fiction work. Turner is a mercenary in a not-to-distant future earth civilization. In this networked world, multinational mega-corporations, with names like Maas Biolabs and Hosaka wield enormous power especially over the network and the cyberspace world it encompasses.

In these corporations, genius scientists have lifetime contracts. They are well-paid prisoners of these giant enterprises. One such scientist, Christopher Mitchell, a man credited with creating the biochip, a replacement for the silicon chip, wants to leave his current employer Mass Biolabs and join rival Hosaka. The latter commissioned a reconstituted Turner with the job of bringing Mitchell safely out. "It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again," the author writes. "They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides. They bought eyes and genitals on the open market. The eyes were green."

Two other forces form the protagonist groups of this novel, a man named Josef Virek, the head of a large multinational corporation who is so powerful, he can create lifelike three-dimensional constructions of himself and each seemingly having wills of their own. Virek, the physical being, is in reality a mass of flesh being kept alive in a huge vat in Stockholm. He has hired Marly Krushkhova, a beautiful young but dishonored art gallery owner to find the artist who has been producing some of the most sought after works of art in the world—a shoebox size composition that makes the observer experience a sense of sadness when viewing it.

The third force in the story is "Legba, the master of roads and pathways," Gibson writes, "the loa of communications." The author has taken the notion of vodoo and transformed it into his future earth. Then, as now, "vodou…isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence," says Beauvoir, Gibson’s street-wise, technology-savvy black man, who serves Legba. "It’s street religion, came out of a dirt-poor place a million years ago. Vodou’s like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don’t go camp on the Yakuza’s doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. Right?"

The battleground for Count Zero is the physical world of the United States sometime in the future, where geographic areas have become sprawling megalopolises, generically referred to as "the sprawl." The term has both the connotation of "the city" when today we refer to a metropolitan area like Manhattan, but with an accompanying negative connotation. The battleground also exists in cyberspace, the vast interconnected network vaguely resembling the World Wide Web of today. But, in Gibson’s world, the surfer actually links his complete neural system into the network and enters a world of pure data: "complex geometric forms began to click into place in the tank, aligned with the nearly visible planes of three-dimensional grid," Gibson writes.

How these three powerful force clash over control of the network is the thrill-ride of a story that Gibson has crafted. Count Zero is the second in a trilogy Gibson has created based on a networked society. The three books explore the notion of information as a life force unto itself that can be stored, manipulated, and evolved into different life forms. In the telling of his tales, Gibson introduces the reader to a rich assortment of unforgettable characters. Turner is one. Josef Virek, another. Bobby Newmark, aka Count Zero, the "handle" Bobby has chosen for himself, is the third. If you’re a science fiction buff, Gibson and Count Zero is a must read.

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