Neuromancer Chapters 3 - 5: Armitage Assembles the Crew

We continue William Gibson’s Neuromancer with chapters 3 through 5 where we learn that we are in a heist story. Assemble the crew, buy the gear, test the tools, then do the heist before the heist. 

We learn about The Sprawl and BAMA and what Armitage has done that ties Case to the completion of this job.

We also talk about the SimStim feature and the interesting narrative perspectives it introduces into the story. 

Transcript

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Welcome Back And Reading Plan

Michael Kentris 0:05

Hello and welcome back to Brothers Reading Books. We are your brothers. I am Michael. Well. Hey Well, how's it going? I'm good. I'm good. How are you? I I'm doing all right. You know, uh, before we were recording, we were just bemoaning all of our various woes. But now that I'm here with you talking about books, these are better. And I hope our listeners feel the same. On the up and up. On the up and up. So what are we reading today? So we're continuing with Neuromancer, and today we'll be covering chapters three through five. You know, after Dune, I am just so happy we have numbered chapters. It is a luxury that one would not expect uh to be that useful, you know? Yeah, it's it's nice. So not only is it chapters three through five, we're moving into part two of what they call here the shopping expedition. Although the shopping only really is kind of the first little bit here. So do you uh I don't know if you're if you have this ready off the cuff, do you have your 50,000-foot view summary in store for us? Aaron Ross Powell Not at the moment, but I can I can wing it. So, like you said, kind of this first uh chapter very much is kind of laying the groundwork for some shopping, but also their first heist is kind of how I was envisioning it. And then in chapter four is the heist, and then chapter five is some aftercare. Yes, very heisty uh this go-around. So we we meet a lot of new characters, and uh it can get a little dizzying because everyone's got like nicknames and lots of weird appearances and so

The Sprawl And Data Scale

Michael Kentris 1:46

on. But jumping into it, we we learn home is Bama, and we are not talking about Alabama. So it is uh is an acronym for the sprawl, which is the Boston Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, which I think we talked a little bit about last time. They referenced Bama, but I think this is the first time they gave us the full name, which is basically so basically it's like a giant mega city going from Boston to Atlanta, so like almost the entire eastern coast. Right. No, when I heard it was funny because when I saw Bama, it made me think of that country road song. It's like that's not even the right state. But I mean, I guess it would kind of fall in there, right? West Virginia is probably somewhere in that Boston Atlanta range. Well, I mean, Virginia is, I think. Definitely Baltimore. We get Baltimore later.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Yes.

Michael Kentris 2:35

But uh yeah, they talk about eating eating crab there, I think, which is still very much a thing, you know, Baltimore renowned for its seafood. So I have to ask your opinion, as a computer person. We we get this map. They tell if they're kind of telling us about the density of the interconnectedness of the sprawl here. So we get uh, you know, every thousand megabytes. Can you conceive of such a volume of data with a You know, maybe once I could have, but no longer So It's one of those things where it's like so many there there are these small things that kind of data story a little bit, you know. Obviously now correct me, that's a gig, right? A million megabytes or a thousand megabytes. A thousand, yes. A thousand megabytes can't be. A gigabyte. A gigabyte, I guess. But but yeah, right, you know, going around, our phones have on average over two hundred and fifty gigabytes. That's like kind of a low-end phone these days. And it's just carrying it around in your pocket. So it's it's one of those things where there is a little bit of a disconnect sometimes. But if we think back, right, this this book is older than both of us. Um and it it was somewhat prescient for the time. Because if you think back, like I remember back like the the first home computer that we had, I think the whole hard drive was like 500 megabytes or something like that. Probably. Yeah. The combat the off-white, yellowish. Right. Yeah, and had like like 120 megabytes of RAM, something like that. Real, real early stuff. So it it does make sense in that context, I suppose. Yeah. Right, yeah. Especially when it, like you said, when this was written, something like 128 kilobytes was like high end. So yeah, kilobytes, god, I didn't even think of going going down in order of magnitude. Kilobytes, that's right. I misspoke completely. So so anyway, they're just trying to emphasize the the population density, right? Because everyone's jacked in, as they say. And uh all these communications going back and forth. So

Airports And The Shopping Expedition

Michael Kentris 4:50

we uh we kind of get this this bouncing around, right? They're they're traveling here through a bunch of different airports, Narita, Chipotle, Orley, so on and so forth. So they're just kind of like bouncing around internationally here until they get to a place. Right? And that that was kind of something I was wondering was was this like a leisurely trip back to where they needed to go? I I assume. Personally, someone who has flown from the Narita airport in Japan, like, we were able to go more or less straight back to where we needed to go. I don't know if this is like a diversionary sort of thing to lose any potential tales or well, I think this is the quote unquote shopping trip, right? Because they say, you know, Amsterdam, Paris, where else various other places. So Armitage would always kind of go off to these different places, have have deals, and they talk about he would buy things here, Molly would buy things, books, tapes, a sim stim deck, which we'll uh we'll talk more about later, I think, different clothing, etc. etc. And uh amongst all these shopping trips, Molly gets Case a souvenir. Right. Yeah, she got him one of those nine-pointed shuriken. So which it kind of makes me think now this is a book I haven't read, and I think it's I want to say by William Gibson called Burning Chrome. Is that right? Uh I don't know about Burning Chrome, but I'm pretty sure that's correct. But it's another one of these very early cyberpunk types of novels. Maybe I should read that at some point. Listeners, let us know. Should we read Burning Chrome on our own here? But uh yeah, it it I don't know, it kind of gives me like it's uh maybe a callback a little bit there. Although I don't know if these were published in that order. But in my mind, that's what it is. So we kind of have this shopping trip and they're kind of going through these emotions here. Kind of it's a again, right? A lot of oh wait, did I say it's not by William Gibson, is it? It's uh it's by somebody else. William Gibson, Burning Crow? Is it? Short story by William Gibson. Oh, jeez. All right, yeah, I guess that was correct. All right then. I stand corrected. Stand corrected by your Richard Ova. But uh but yeah, so we get some some and it his writing is very kind of like you feel like you're almost in a dream state to an extent, right? It's very ephemeral. Lots of things kind of coming, going, like you get just like an impression of a place. Not enough to really anchor you down concretely. Yeah, it's definitely got a very distinct style, as far as, like you said, how much you are actually given versus what's going on. So it's you're here, you're there, you're everywhere. At the same time, you're not really sure what's going on. And sometimes that's okay, because right now it is just a shopping trip. It's establishing that Molly and Case are still building up this relationship. They had another dally on this on this shopping trip. So yeah, right.

Armitage’s Leverage And Toxin Sacs

Michael Kentris 7:57

So we eventually come to this interplay between Case and Armitage. And he asks Armitage if basically uh like if he was a cop or security or like what what what his background is. And he says, that number you had them do in my pancreas, that's like a cop routine. And uh Armitage basically comes over and stands in front of him and says, You're a lucky boy, Case, you should thank me. And uh and Case just says, Should I? And he's like, You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency. And this is the line that I really liked here. Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency. And then we get an important plot point here, Armitage replies, good, because you have a new one. And this is where we learn about the toxin sacs, which just sounds unpleasant. So through various arteries in his body, he has these toxin sacs implanted into him, the same mycotoxin that uh his former employer gave him in Memphis, and they are dissolving slowly, and it should be enough time for him to do this job that Armitage needs done. But and then they'll be able to inject him with some thing that gets rid of them without causing him any harm. But if he double crosses or doesn't finish the job, he's toast again. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's very much an insurance policy to make sure that Case does the job that he hired him to do. Right, because it's one of those things where it's like, if a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Well, here's the it's not perhaps too good to be true. And then we get kind of the same sort of confusing sort of narrative style again, where that's that's kind of the end of this interaction. And as he kind of goes outside, he's getting all these sort of memories that are reminding him of previous stages of his life. He mentions seeing like a young street boy, and then he like sees another teenager, and it kind of like reminisces about these fights that he was doing when he was not that much younger. I think he's like what still in his early twenties at this point. He's 22, 24, something like that. Right. But he's reminiscing about when he was 17. It's just like ages ago. Five years ago was a year after COVID. It's just like But I I do think, right, like if I think back when I was twenty two, I had just graduated college, and I compare this to when I was seventeen, still in high school, it did, right? It's one of those things where as as a a youth, a youth, uh you uh you feel the passage of time more more acutely, and it kind of right, there's a both a slowing down and a speeding up as you get older. I think I can say that now that I'm squarely in middle age. But uh right, unless I lived in ninety, yeah, this is it, baby. So but uh but that that's really what it is. And it is about all these new experiences and things in life. And so there have been some interesting studies about the perception of the passage of time. Like why does it feel like it speeds up as you get older? So this would have felt, right, like a very long time at that point in somebody's life, especially with all the stuff that he's been through. Sure, absolutely. But they are contrasting kind of the concrete feeling. This is more like kind of the Western sprawl versus the neon Tokyo kind of vibes. And it makes me very much think about like the way that uh like Eastern versus Western settings are kind of visually depicted in in like anime and things like that. So we learn a little bit more. Oh, go ahead, Will. I was gonna say, so yeah, we learn a little bit kind of like what they've acquired on the shopping trip, specifically case's gear. So he's got this fancy new computer, the Ono Sendai Cyberspace 7. Next year's most expensive Osaka computer, a Sony monitor, a dozen discs of corporate grade ice, and a brawn coffee maker. Hey, you gotta get your stims in, right? That's right, he needs some stimming. And he can't do uh can't do amphetamines anymore, so right. So yeah, I had to remind myself of this as well, right? But ice. Uh they they talk about right the intrusion countermeasures electronics. So basically like this uh his hacking software. Yeah, I'm thinking of it literally as like a suite of software, more or less. Right. It's like the opposite of Norton antivirus. Exactly. Do people still know what Norton is? You know, sometimes I feel like Norton Antivirus is a virus. Is a virus. It does. So we uh we get a little conversation between Case and Molly here, and he asks her, like they're they're out on a walk, and he's like, Did you know about this, basically? So he's just trying to find out who can he trust, who's got his back, that kind of thing. So they are talking a little bit, and eventually they they go on a little bit of a a walk, and they we meet some of these new characters here, and it's some contacts that that Molly has essentially.

Gear Up And Meet The Finn

Michael Kentris 13:00

Right. Yeah. Uh it's this fence known as the Finn, who basically lives in this sort of derelict building called the Metro Holographics. So derelict. Isn't that uh isn't that from Zoolander? That is from Zoolander. Nice. Uh but uh more or less, you know, she goes to this building. She does some equivalent of Thieves Can't with some intricate sequence of Jive that he couldn't follow. Yes. Jive is definitely one of those phrases that I don't think I don't think the kids are using will. No. I was definitely, I feel like, more of a 70s and some jive. Yeah, so if you want to go older school thieves can't, as you said. Go medieval with it. And he can't he can't follow what is that she is sort of signing and saying, so more or less all he catches is like cash. So the person at the door lets them in, and the place is just kind of overrun with various pieces of junk. So the junk looks like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. And eventually they walk past it and go to this blank white plastic room, ceiling to floor, hot white hospital tile. And this is where the real reason that Molly has come here again is where they run into the Finn, who is this man of various talents, but one of them specifically is kind of being this fence for Molly, like selling software and things. So she is here to procure some of his services without the knowledge of Armitage. Right. So basically they they do a scan on case here, looking for implants, and basically uh they say the guy's a virgin, so they don't find any implants in him. So I think they would they would contrast this with, say, Molly, right, who we know has tons of implants. Mm-hmm. And uh like this, you read for biologicals, and he replies, You think this is the mayo? So I I enjoyed that reference. Uh you know, Mayo Clinic, obviously. And it's like, nah. Finn's words, sweep me. You got no little bugs, no cortex bombs. So then he steps out and they have a private conversation. So they kind of set it up, I think, to like screen for bug, like like I said, uh bugs and uh espionage type stuff. Yeah. Eavesdropping, yeah. And so this is where they have that more in-depth conversation about do we have each other's backs? And they they have this interesting sentence here. Molly asks, Case, do you ever work with the dead? Right. No, I thought this was very interesting. So But the purpose of this heist that they're going to be committing here pretty soon is they are going to be stealing this, and like you said, they call it a construct for this individual that Case actually worked with before, trained under Dixie Flatline. And so he's apparently locked away in this secure vault. Uh I forget the name of the building specifically. What is it? Sense net. But Sensenet. Very future.net. Yes. Yeah. But uh yeah, so that's that's the main thing is they're going to be breaking out his construct to go ahead and help with another heist. It's just kind of it reminded me a little bit of in the Conan stories, where it was like, ah yes, I went to this place to steal this thing, and that's a story of its own. This is that story. Right. So yeah, it's it's interesting that we see this convention. Again, I don't know if if William Gibson was the first person to do it in terms of the idea of a computer that could make a copy of someone's like thought patterns and so forth. But you see this echoed again. I think probably one of the more famous examples would be like Ghost in the Shell. Um, and then you also get some other famous sci-fi series. I know there was a one by Tad Williams. Did you ever read that one, Will? No. I think it was the Pyramid of Black Glass was the first book in the series. Or was it, yeah. Pyramid of Black Glass. I think that's what it is. Uh I'll have to double check myself on that in the future. But the idea of like uploading your brain consciousness into a computer so that you like, quote unquote, live forever, even though it's not you. So it's one of these conceits that that is pretty early on in the like the sci-fi genre. I don't know if it was any of the kind of golden age of sci-fi type authors. I'd have to do a little research to see if that pre-existed, but but it's it's interesting that it's showing up here as a, as you said, a construct, as a non-person entity. Uh that's under lock and key. Mm-hmm. Right. And I do have some thoughts on that when we inevitably do talk to the construct, but while they're here, they also talk a little bit about Armitage. Like uh we had said earlier, Case was kind of asking Armitage about his history. Like, hey, were you ever a cop? And he doesn't know anything about Armitage, Molly doesn't know anything about him, and Molly is a very suspicious person, so she's already tried looking into it a little bit, and more or less doesn't know anything. More or less just kind of like that it sounds like there's some sort of AI that might be kind of running the show behind the scenes, giving him his orders for where they were going, things that they were doing. One thing in particular that kind of stands out is the technology that they were using to cure case of his previous burnout. She says like that was expensive enough, we could have sold it to buy like 20 cowboys, not you know, you're great and all, but we could have gotten something much better for that value. It's like you're good, but you're not that good. Right, right. So again, just like a lot of sort of suspicious activity, including the fact that in this heist that they're about to pull, in addition to the construct that they're going to be breaking into, there's all this expensive material that they could take and sell, but they are only stealing the construct that is specifically the only target in this heist. Right. So just someone doesn't add up. Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn't comment, right, Dixie Flatline, why they he has the nickname, right? He flatlined his EEG, died brain death three times. So uh I like this case says, showed me the tapes, quote, boy I was dayed, which I assume is supposed to be like kind of a southern accent for Dixie flatline. But uh so it's an interesting thing, Will. As as you know, I read EEGs as part of my day job, and there's been an interesting development. So for those who aren't familiar, an EEG is an electroencephalogram or a brainwave monitoring test. We primarily are doing it for epilepsy, but uh in this story they talk about the trodes, which I assume they mean electrodes that go on the scalf. Our current EEG electrodes are very much a one-way street as far as reading things. We don't necessarily we're not sending any signals into the brain, with rare exceptions. There are some that you have surgically implanted into the brain, but that's a very unique situation. They're definitely not something you just put on your scalf.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Right.

Michael Kentris 20:23

But actually, we we recently removed EG as a confirmatory brain death test in the last couple of years. So because it is kind of unreliable for calling brain death, so it's kind of funny. Like when this was written, it probably would have been one of the tests that was used. But it it isn't anymore, uh, because it has proven to be unreliable in those cases, especially when we talk about things like like medication effects, like certain drugs can suppress your brain activity periodically and make it look like your brain dead, uh particularly in a situation of like overdoses or Ivy uh anesthesia, stuff like that. So it's just kind of an interesting thing as we learn more about the way the brain functions. Some things hold true if we learn new things, other things get proven false. So it's just uh an interesting little little aside there. So we wouldn't necessarily say someone was brain dead just based on a flat EEG at this point in time. But that's his nickname. That is his nickname, yes. You know. That's fair, that's fair. Alright, moving on. But uh, so yeah. As far as Molly was saying, again, she's already looked into kind of the uh story that he's given being part of that what is it, secret fist? Screaming fist. Screaming fist. Secret screaming fist. Secret screaming fist. And it's like there was nobody name arbitraged, there's nobody that looked like him. And she's just like, don't know what's going on, but hey, maybe you could look around, Mr. Cowboy Man. And then Yeah, they have one other item on the list, a person named Peter Riviera, who they dub a certified psychopath, a real ugly customer. And so yeah, that's like you said, they kind of reaffirm that they're in it together. Right. So we get uh a little break here, and it's almost like um like we're getting a little infomercial.

Cyberspace Explained Through TV Noise

Michael Kentris 22:22

And that's kind of how they how they they have it here, right? It's like Molly's flipping through the TV channels, and we say, like, oh, it's uh it's a kid's show. But uh again, we get it seems old hat to us, but they they say here The Matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games, said the voiceover. Wait, I should use my 1950s narrative. 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. Cyberspace, a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. So yeah, it it does feel like very much like uh, hey, you reader, you need information. Cyberspace exposition. Right, right. And this is one of those words I we talked about before that he coined. Uh is this cyberspace. It's really funny. Megan and I just watched an older Godzilla movie, Godzilla versus Beolante. And I this is right around when you know 3D graphics are kind of like first becoming a thing. So they have all these like wireframe images that they have like generated in their like various military combats with Godzilla. Literally, as I was reading this, I couldn't help but think of that, which is like very primitive, like you can count the number of points on the polygon type. Well, this is one of those things, right? Uh, from like a cinematography perspective, like the folks who are using like models still, and then maybe using some CGI just to kind of like put a graphic on the side of the model or what have you, right? Those hold up a lot better than a lot of people who just were doing straight CGI. Like I think the Lord of the Rings movies are a great example of that. You know, they're I think they're around 20 years old at this point, but they still look like amazing. And they definitely use CGI in there. Yeah. Yeah. Same with uh Jurassic Park, I believe, as far as the uh the amateurs. Yeah. Yep. So so yeah, it's one of those things where you like you like even look at computer games now in 2026 versus gosh, when when we were using like the Super Nintendo back in 1996. Um God, 30 years ago. Oof. Um and it's like, you know, you have 2D sprites versus kind of the 3D renderings that we have now, but in another 10 years, are those gonna look outdated too? Right? They have their own unique uncanny valley effect to them also. And that kind of makes you think like, is it better to go like with an animated style or a deliberately unrealistic style of art, which I know we're kind of veering off topic a little bit, but but I think it's it's relevant in as much as the thing, the piece of art that you're creating, it looks okay now. Will it look the same decades from now or a hundred years from now? Or will people think, like, oh, what a quaint idea? I've always been a fan of style over realism. Yeah, I agree. Anyway. All right, so they they flip the TV off here after our exposition, which I I enjoy this. Uh what do they call it? Uh oh gosh, exegetic music, I think is the phrase. Like it uh an example would be like in Star Wars, where you walk into the cantina and you hear the band playing, right? But that's also the soundtrack, right? So you and the character are listening to the same music. I think they call that exegetical music. Exegetical? Or exa exos something, oh my god. But the idea being to like increase immersion. So, right, you and the character are listening to this whatchamacallit. Same commercial. Yes, exactly, exactly. I might have my words wrong, but you get the idea. I get the idea. We are experiencing the same point of view as the character in the case of the commercial. And so now we jump to Case finally getting his chance to try decking.

Case Decks Again And Feels Alive

Michael Kentris 26:24

So it's been a full eight days since the surgery, and he is now ready to go and launch off into cyberspace. And so we get some. I have to apologize. It's not exegetical, it's diegetic. Totally different. Diegetic. Yes. Exegetics are biblical interpretations. So that's on me. That would make sense. All right. All right. So anyway, diegetic music. Okay. Please return to your point. And we kind of get this very disjointed psychedelic description of the decking process. And I just have like some bits and pieces kind of highlighted here because ultimately it doesn't make any sense. But he closed his eyes, he found the rigid face of the power stud, and the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphines boiling in from the edge of space, hypnog hypnagog hyp I don't know. Images jerking how much what's that? Hypnagogic. Hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames, symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information. And all that to say is that he is able to successfully get into cyberspace and somewhere he was laughing in a white painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face. Man, talk about addiction. Right? But yeah, so like some of these words, phosphenes. So everyone knows what phosphenes are. Everybody. Or if you if you don't, you have seen them. So if you've ever been tired and you ha close your eyes and you rub your fingers and you get those little blossoms of color around the corners of your vision, you've seen phosphanes essentially. And they can look different for different people, but uh and then hypnagogic images. So contrast it with hypnopampic. So it's basically things that happen while you're either going to sleep or waking up. Um and so you can have uh actually you can have what they call like hypnagogic hallucinations. So like as you're falling asleep, you start like hallucinating things. Um and uh it's just an interesting phenomenon. Our brains are weird, basically. To put it simply. But uh yeah, and you can have like obviously the the inverse is true. So going to and from sleep. And that's kind of the idea right here. It's like this he's going into this. So there's like this this mental state transition, like we're in those liminal spaces of like, you know, are we awake, are we asleep? And uh a lot of these, as they were saying here, these random images and and all these things, I think emphasize that ephemeral n ephemerality? Is that the right word? The impermanence of of all of this. So yeah, we get now our our first description of cyberspace, which is weird. Yeah, so you mentioned like Did you already read the part here where they're talking about the scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Vision Authority? No, no, I'll go for it. Yeah. So, as I just said, beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and hi and very far away, the spiral arms of military systems forever beyond his reach. So it very much makes me think of the show reboot, to be honest.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

Yeah.

Michael Kentris 29:49

Where they live in a computer. But uh, like all of these software things are like have a visual spatial representation. But space is also kind of weird here because it's also limitless. So it's kind of one of those weird things there. Right. Only limited by the hardware. And uh something so basically he's he's in there for some period of time, long enough that Molly's gone by the time he jacks out, and uh the room's dark, someone's knocking or pushing a button, whatever it is, security, bing. Yeah, right. It's the Finn, and we learn that the Finn was supposed to develop a package, uh, but they weren't supposed to know each other, so they have to pretend not to know each other at this point in time. Right. Again, the whole interaction earlier where Molly took him to the what was it, the holographics place? Is it holographics? Yes. It was hush, hush, arbitrage was not to know. And so literally, he like makes a face at case to be like, don't say nothing. Yeah. This place is wiretamped. And he even says, like, pleased to meet you, I'm sure I'm doing some hardware for your ho for your boss, it looks like. Right. And he has for him this he's described as a featureless black rectangle, and it's a flip-flop switch. So basically, he is going to be able to access the live slash recorded SIM STEM that Molly has embedded in her. So he will be able to see and experience everything that C is she is seeing and experiencing. So kind of like a live feed during the heist. Yeah. So this is kind of interesting here, right? They say that she's going to be having a broadcast rig. So, as you said. And then he says, so it's probably her sensorium you'll access. And that is another medical term that we use sometimes. Sensorium just means like basically all of your sensory input. Right? Touch, smell, vision, etc. So very interesting stuff. Great. And then that's the end of chapter three. Bom bum bum.

SimStim And The Panther Moderns

Michael Kentris 32:07

Heist time. So heist. Yes. So yeah, Case is like looking at the uh the SimSTEM thing, and he's like, Cowboys didn't get into SimSTEM, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. So again, it's a this very weird diversion, right? It's like very much like all about the mind and the matrix and cyberspace and my body is a prison, which I believe that is kind of a it's like a very platonic thing, right? Mm-hmm. Where they describe the body as the prison house of the soul, and the the goal is get the soul to be free. So it has very much like those echoes of like like ancient Platonic thought in this, like to to a dangerous excess, but what is the term? Ascetic? Almost ascetic. Almost. But but like kind of in a negative way. Right. So yeah, I like this. Simsdom itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. I like this. We get this reference again to this uh Tally Isham. If she got a headache, Tally Isham got a headache in the course of a segment, you didn't feel it. So they're able to like block certain things, right? Like pain and so you don't feel everything per se. Can. Just yeah, right. So basically this is a practice session. So he's he's in the matrix and he flips a switch and he abruptly jolts into other flesh. And so we get this right. It's again, it's another one of these ways that the perspectives are very much shifting and fluid and disjointed to an extent. I don't know if this was like somewhat jarring at times for you to follow Will. At first, definitely. Like during the heist itself, it feels a little more controlled because usually it talks specifically like he flipped the switch, and I was like, okay, we're going back and forth. But initially here, when you're getting introduced to the idea, it's like, what's happening? Right. Right. Because it's one of the again, it's one of those sci-fi things where it's like they don't really tell you what's going on. They just expect you to figure it out. Which you eventually do, but there is. And it it right, it's a really clever way of mirroring the disjointed effect that Case is having, right? Because he hasn't done this before. So it's just a very clever writing technique so that you feel more like your protagonist, also. Right. A lot of being able to insert yourself into the main point of view. But he doesn't like it. Case doesn't like this because, again, you have no input, you cannot do anything. It is a one-way channel. So he is literally seeing things through her point of view, and it's just like trying to not walk or do things the way that he would try and do from how he would be experiencing this. So he's able to eventually kind of will himself into a passivity of becoming a passenger, but again, he's he's not the biggest fan of it. Right. Yeah, I like that what she said, her body language was disorienting, right? We know everybody walks differently, but it would be unsettling to be walking differently and not being controlling it. Uh it's definitely interesting for a a perspective shift. And then he flips back to cyberspace again. So he's back just looking at some primitive ice belonging to the New York Public Library, and he's kind of reflecting, you know, what does he know about Molly, that she was a professional like him, uh, that she liked her coffee black afterward. I know, right? So then he's thinking, again, right? This is one of the things. Like it doesn't say he shifted back, but he does shift back here. So we go back to Molly's perspective again, and we learn that there's a bunch of young folks, uh a few of them out of their teens, all with carbon sockets planted behind the left ear, a dozen spikes of Microsoft protruding from the socket behind his ear. So she's basically finding this guy, Larry. It's a heck of a sci-fi name. We've got Molly and Larry here talking. I mean, but one's like a uh what do they call her? A street samurai and a guy with basically uh these weird computer chips coming out the side of his head. Yeah. So that does make it a little more sci-fi. But yeah, it's interesting. This guy, Larry, like you said, he has all these different pieces of software more or less kind of protruding from the socket behind his ear, which reminded me a lot kind of of the Matrix in this capacity, how they would always like plug into things. But he doesn't really seem to be with it, or at the very least, it's very confusing how he talks, because it's very much in the third person. Well, it makes you wonder, right? Because he digs out this other chip, plugs that in, and then his like his affect and personality changes. So he's someone else controlling via that chip.

SPEAKER_00 37:06

Mm-hmm.

Michael Kentris 37:08

And so they're able to be sensitive enough, Larry or whoever is in there, to say, like, you've got a writer, which we can assume he means case, and basically tells him to bug off, and we find out she's looking for the Panther Moderns, and they have some work. She has some work for them. And so eventually she does tell K stuff to bug off, and he does. And during that time, he uses that to kind of get a little more information about the Panther moderns, and we get a brief kind of montage almost of different pieces of information regarding them. So again, I was thinking about this when I was reading this the other day, and uh they call this a precise or it's a precise without the E on the end, so precise. Yeah. It seems like kind of like a like a little dossier. Yeah. And looking through this, there was line the Hosaka had accessed its array of libraries, journals, and news services. I'm like, this is like a proto web search, basically. That's and it's so weird to for us to think that it's like he had to explain the idea of a web search in this novel. Whereas like today, that would be considered ridiculous to do because it's such a part of the cultural milieu. It just I don't know, it's one of those weird things, just like, oh, it's like it's it almost seems foreign. And then you realize what what they're doing, and it's like, oh, okay. No, absolutely. So yeah, this dossier starts off with kind of like this information regarding this boy who's experienced a lot of cosmetic surgery. So Yeah, what do we got? He's epicanthic folds, dark eyes, an angry dusting of acne. And then there was a part here specifically about him looking like he had skin grafted from a shark. Just yeah. It seems like they they very much indulge in a lot of cosmetic surgery to make them look very bizarre and intimidating. So, yes, yeah, he's he's walking, and then all of a sudden it cuts to this uh sociologist from NYU, Dr. Virginia Rambali. And we get, again, kind of like almost This reminds me a lot of the um the little cutaways that you would get in the movie Starship Troopers, where there'd be like like almost like little propaganda type things. Uh and we get a little blurb on on the terrorism. So that we find out, like, hey, oh, this is a terrorist group that we're contacting here. And uh she says, given their penchant penchant penchant what what is wrong with me today? Penchant for these random acts of penchant. Yeah, I can't speak French worth a lick. So these random acts of surreal violence, it may be difficult for our viewers to understand why you continue to insist that this phenomenon isn't a form of terrorism. Dr. Rembali smiled. There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt, a point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. What do you think of all that, Will? I kind of like how case is like skip it. Because that was honestly, like, I understand kind of the high level what it's trying to say here is that it's they don't necessarily have an agenda that they're working towards here with their violence, at least as far as like how terrorism is typically interpreted here. But at the same time, it's told in such a verbose way, it's kind of like, what are you talking about? And yes. Excellent representation of academic speech. But um but yeah, I I think it does make sense though, in as much as we think of like terrorism at large, what is the purpose of it? Well, it's to instill fear in a population, and so the better able your message, quote unquote, is able to be spread, the more potentially effective your terrorist acts are going to be. But, you know, they're I mean, were there terrorists prior to mass media? Yeah. But it would be on a much more much more limited scale, generally speaking, right? Yeah. I think they would have called them like resistance groups back then. Sure. Brigands. You go back further, right? So revolutionaries. So I I definitely think those those things existed, but probably not on the scale that we see kind of in the modern day. I don't know. My my uninformed two cents. I think there's uh a lot of validity to what you just said. It would be hard to be a terrorist group without a way to disseminate that information to make your message known. Right. And I mean I guess that's what she's saying here with the media relationship and why I think you sometimes see people saying, like, oh, we're not going to like someone who did like shot up a building or something, we're not going to display this person's name or face so that they can't get what they want out of this act. Anyway. But uh Case comes to the conclusion that they're a contemporary version of the big scientist of his own late teens. And uh like the subcults, uh was at the sprawl uh had this code that creates various short-lived subcults and replicated them at odd intervals, which I think makes sense also if we just think of culture in general. I only this kind of like loop. Mm-hmm. Very cyclical. Yes, I know, like like fashion, for example. When we were youths, bell bottoms came back around. I mean, at least for for women they did. And I think they're coming around again at this point in time. And we're I'm we're seeing like clothing from like when we were teenagers that's also becoming like vintage, and it's like coming around again. I'm like, oh my god, this is so weird. So you kinda you do see this uh in all aspects of things, right? It's a whole Shakespeare, there's nothing new under the sun kind of idea. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yeah, which he stole from yeah, he paraphrased from the Bible, but yeah, case case says the moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic techno fetishists. Which yes makes sense. Okay, this is this is the piece that I was referring to earlier. So the first modern that he encounters is this soft voiced boy called Angelo. His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous. It was one of the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen. He's got razor sharp canines, it's just yeah, just very very distinct impression. When uh when he smiled, Case was actually relieved. Toothbed. Transplants. He'd seen that before. He's in his twenties and he's like, ah, I feel so old compared to these kids. Right. Stuff keeps changing. And I do like the comment from Molly, you can't let the little pricks generation gap you. Right. And they're yeah, right? I mean, we must be like I must be a freaking fossil over here. But uh it's yeah, it's it's very funny that they're only like in their early twenties and they're like, like, all right, cramps. Right. So so yeah, we kind of get a little bit of an idea. Case is very much ignoring his f his flesh, his meat, if you will. Yes, the meat. So, right, he's forgetting to eat, he's resentful of having to use the toilet, the chemical toilet they set up in the corner of the loft. He first thing goes to the deck, he doesn't dress, he just jacks in, uh, he's losing track of days, falling asleep at random times. Right, so all this dysregulation. Like this is the I mean, basically they're all signs of addiction. It's just well, I guess would you consider this a precursor for computer addiction like what we have now? To an extent, sure. I mean, the the difference literally is just the user interface, right? As opposed to being sort of physically quote unquote sort of in cyberspace nowadays, you know, you just have an array of monitors that you have connected into all these different websites and everything. So many people got addicted to that. Right, right. Same same exact idea. Yeah, you don't hear about the MMO addiction as much as you used to, like a decade ago.

SPEAKER_00 45:38

It's true.

Michael Kentris 45:39

Maybe I wonder. Maybe people got their fill. No, I I think uh COVID happened and people just I think it just got I think different problems started happening. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, alright.

SenseNet Heist Goes Loud

Michael Kentris 45:54

So we're moving forward on our timeline for this initial heist here. And so we find out it took a total of nine days to get through SenseNet's ice. And I just want to say SenseNet, right? It's got a little slash between sense and net, which is still a convention that we see in a light of a lot of cyber junk cyber cyberpunk uh type works, where you just like random, you know, typographic things in the middle of words. Nothing says computer like a forward slash. I'll have to defer to your expertise on that. Anytime you do anything on a command line, which I do literally have like up on a separate monitor, is like you got your drive, and then you got a forward slash, and you can just like start typing stuff. So it's like boom. There you go. There we go. I'm decking. I'm jockeying. You're a you're a cyberspace cowboy, Will. Something like that. Alright. So we start getting some communications between the Panther moderns and Molly. And they have code names here, which Molly's is Cat Mother. I did like that. Yes. Very, very fierce sounding. Somebody who has a cat literally on the desk in front of him right now. That's true. If anyone's hearing some meowing, Will's Will's cats are demanding his attention. We have four cats. Four cats. I thought you only had two. No, no, there's four of them. That's that's a few. Yeah. Too many. So as we go on here, they are basically they're they're trying to scramble this signal, they're bouncing it around from various satellites. Uh, what do they say here? There's a chicken wire dish in New Jersey bouncing off a scrambled signal from the Sons of Christ the King satellite in geosynchronous orbit above Manhattan, and they consider the thing in an basically the entire operation an elaborate private joke. Right. Again, they were described as joksters earlier. So it's like we're gonna use this religious one to commit this heist. Right, right. So basically, uh they're all it's all this is all just like prepping. So case pounds some coffee, doesn't really know what they're playing as the diversion. His job is just to make sure the intrusion program he'd written would link with the sense net systems when Molly needs it to. So he's he's like the uh what do they call him? The cutter. Yeah. So like kind of like a like a s he's the safe guy. He's a safe cracker, basically. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So like you said, everybody's got a job to do, and it's on a need-to-no basis, and he doesn't need to know what the diversion is. So he goes ahead, he hits the hymn stim. Stim stim stem. I know, right? Say that ten times fast. It's uh he flips, yeah, he flips into Molly's sensorium, and she is in the SenseNet Lobby Buildings Lobby.

unknown 48:53

Right?

Michael Kentris 48:54

Just SenseNet Sim Stim Sensorium. Go ahead, listener. Right. When you're reading it, not out loud. You doesn't register, but Yeah. Well it's not a tongue twister if you don't have to make the sounds, right? Right. So we get a description. Molly, she's dressed up like a tourist here. Pink plastic raincoat, white mesh top, loose white pants, cut in a style that had been fashionable in Tokyo the previous year, large pair of sunglasses covering her insets. So, right, she kind of she sounds like like a Japanese tourist. I mean, I think this is still not too far off from like a lot of stereotypical kind of Tokyo styles. Is that accurate, Will? I couldn't tell you. I don't know fashion. Well, I mean, I don't I shouldn't say fashion as much as like a a stereotype of fashion, if you will. Okay. I mean, maybe if she wasn't chewing gum, I could I could see that. Right. Again, right? Like I could, in my mind's eye, I could see this as like an anime character, just drawn out. Yeah. Especially uh I don't know, like the pink raincoat or whatever it is that she's wearing. Like very bold, dramatic. Yeah. But yeah, I thought it was interesting how we learn here in a little bit that it's like midnight at the moment, or at least approaching midnight. So the fact that there's a tourist in this building, this SenseNet building, it seemed a little counterintuitive to myself, but again, I don't know necessarily who this Tally Isham is, who she's pretending to hope to get a glimpse of. But she's playing the part, you know, grinning vacantly, popping her gum, and just has like her accoutrement of sort of sneaky time heist tools. Right. So we kind of flash back to case again. We get an update on his uh his icebreaker, and it's kind of moving through here. He kind of equates it to like doing a magician's card trick. And we start getting these timestamps. So it is now 120120. And uh we kind of get these just to give an idea of like the the sense of how fast the action is going. And it is it starts to be like really fast here.

unknown 51:10

Right.

Michael Kentris 51:10

So even they do mention just a little bit before this, like if she's in there for longer than twenty minutes, which is kind of the timeline that they were saying for how long it would take to crack where the signals are coming from. Exactly. So we start getting all this other information, right? The MaxEmerge, which I can only assume is the cyber version of 911, something like that, I don't know. From nine different nine different moderns along 200 miles of the sprawl, simultaneously dialed it, uh, delivered a short speech, and basically they said that they're they were part of an obscure subsect of militant Christian fundamentalists, and they had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the SenseNet Pyramid, also known in California as Grievous Angel, known to produce acute paranoia, homicidal psychosis in 85% of experimental subjects. So yeah. So, right, they're gonna make this entire building full of like psychotic, homicidal people, basically. Or at least at least that's what they're reporting. That's that's what they're saying, right. And I I like this. I'll let you take this next part away. Yeah, so again, case. Most of us were doing it from more or less his point of view, but again, he's flipping the switch into Molly's sensorium every now and then, so now he's flipping back into that. And he found himself slipping into an elevator, and it's like, excuse me, but are you an employee? There's a guard there, and she's like, no. And just she just punches him straight into his solar plexus and slams his head sideways and takes him out. So that's her first that's her first part of infiltrating SenseNet is taking out this elevator security guard. Right. Yes, and so the Panther moderns, we kind of again flip again. Uh it's 12.04, and every screen in the building strobes for 18 seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a susceptible segment of SenseNet employees. So, you know, photosensitive epilepsies is fairly uncommon compared to epilepsy at large. But who knows? Like they have implants, is there some sort of like backdoor frequency? Again, I think of I think of Ghosts in the Shell with the Laughing Man, how they're able to kind of like affect people's like eye implants and stuff like that. Absolutely. Yeah. So is this the same kind of thing? Is this like a precursor to that whole like that whole idea, that whole arc? You can kind of see the echoes of it, right? That's great. Like one thing that I like about this sort of thing is that there's a little bit of hand waving to it, but it doesn't necessarily like explicitly say this is how it's working. And I I feel like that's very useful when you're trying to spend disbelief. Rather than trying to concretely say, like, this is how we did it, and we hacked in, we did this, X, Y, and Z. It's like they're they're sensitive. You mentioned, like, hey, they're sensitive to it, and now they're gonna be exposed to it. It's like, all right, cool. That's all I need to know. Right. I think it's like when we talk about like hard sci-fi versus soft sci-fi. You know, it's like, how how hard do you need your sci-fi to be? I find not very, generally speaking. Although I've read some some hard sci-fi. I have to be in the right mood for it, you know. I feel like it has to be done by somebody who actually knows material very well, or else it just comes off as very unrealistic. Yes. Yeah. Yes, I would agree with that. All right. So uh we get this weird, obscene face, it's all misshapen, uh, on the screen, rapid images of contamination, and then I get this audio message uh talking about the use of HSG, a biochemical governing the human skeletal growth factor. So just weird stuff, basically. And now it is 1205. Right. And now Case is triggering his second program. So before we do that, at this point in time, basically the it's like the riot squads are showing up at the Cincinnati Pyramid outside. So yeah, as uh what was it, Bama Rapid Deployment and the NYPD tactical hovercraft. So we get all these people showing up. So the cops are here. Yes. And different groups also probably worth mentioning. Right. One seems more like federal, one's more local. Ish. I mean, it's not a complete analogy, but whatever. Anyway. But yeah, so we're with Case. And we're following Molly Molly downstairs in the elevator. And ultimately, it's 12.06 now at this point. And Case releases his second virus to go ahead and bore a window through the library's command ice. And so he's able to kind of cut through this next layer of security protocols and make it seem like nothing happened. Yeah. I don't know. But you know. Punching his way into it's it's all very abstract. It is, right? It's kind of like putting a physical act onto an abstract concept. But yeah, so she's Molly is putting on this modem suit, which they don't again, they don't explain what that is. Now it's 1206, and again, we kind of get this, like you were saying, like this infinite blue space. He punches through again the non-space of the matrix. And they talk about like the interior of a given data construct possessed in limited subjective dimension. So a child's toy calculator accessed through Case's Sendai would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands. So it doesn't matter what you're in, it'll look like an infinite horizon, is what it sounds like to me at least. I don't know. Um he begins punching at codes that they got from a mid-echelon salary man with severe drug problems, so they find out where, and he kind of heads towards it in this virtual space and punches through, and now he's basically just coming back out. Bingo bingo. Bingo bingo. There's your virus. And quick jump back to the lobby of the Sensenet building. So we have two Panther moderns who are sitting in there, kind of like tracking things, so they have these chameleon suits on, which kind of says what they are. Change with the background to kind of hide them. Some camouflage. Yeah. So they're they're providing some general updates about what's going on up there. And we mentioned tacticals are spraying foam barricades now. Rabbits are still trying to land their copter. Things are getting a little dicey upstairs. Yep, it's getting hot. Or as they say later, juicy. They do say that. So uh he flips into uh Molly again, right? Burning pain in his left thigh. They you know he reaches out to the to the contact person brood, and they say, We don't know what's going on with her, she's not talking. And so he flips back, and uh we get again this perspective of case through Molly, and so kind of this this weird disconnect here. Where you know she's basically got a busted leg, and you see these uniforms lying on the ground, fresh blood, and then a shattered fiberglass shock stave, which I I thought a stave, which is an interesting word, because you tend to think of it with like more fantasy novels.

SPEAKER_00 58:50

Yeah.

Michael Kentris 58:51

It's just something that just catches the eye a little bit right there. Like a staff. Yes. So I mean, a busted femur is like real bad. That's probably one of the most painful things that can happen to you. And so she's trying to walk on it. Yes. And it's not going well. But uh she reaches through, she's got this sheet of plastic, set with a rainbow of derma discs. So she takes three, thumbs them against her left wrist, over the veins, and six thousand micrograms of endorphin analog came down on the pane like a hammer. So she's like, I'm okay now, but I'm gonna need a medical team. So she starts making her way out. And uh, you know, as he's looking through her eyes, right, he sees three crumpled bodies of three Sensenet security guards. One of them seemed to have no eyes. As we'll recall, she got those finger blades. Right, that's why she's cat mother. That's right. She got the claws. She has the claws. So and they they wore her phone barricades, lobby's getting juicy. And she says it's also pretty juicy down here. Right, but thankfully, she's getting very close to the target. So there's a map more or less tracking where she is in the building, where their target is, the construct again of Dixie Flapp, and now that she is drugged up a little bit, she's actually able to continue with the mission. So she does encounter a librarian down there, but apparently the Panther moderns did something to incapacitate her, and she is not a problem, so she is not paying her any attention. But she eventually reaches the actual kind of place where the construct is being stored, and Case goes ahead and runs various programs to more or less disable some alarm systems and then kind of cover their tracks. So again, the whole idea of these distractions that the Panther models are doing was to, hey, look over here while we come and do when we really wanted to.

unknown 1:00:50

Right.

Michael Kentris 1:00:50

And so he's trying to magician's trick. Right, right. So he's trying to like, hey, this guy got moved a while ago. We're covering up the request of that happening, and just trying to make it take as long as possible before they realize that. Dixie flat lines construct is missing. Yeah, and I liked this little that that section you're talking about where we get case passing commands, and then that's relayed by the link man brood, and then we get Molly doing it. And so it's this weird meshing of like three different perspectives all simultaneously. It was yeah, again, right? That whole kind of jacked-in, disorienting kind of vibe. Right. Yeah, it's like a one-way path of being able to interact as far as who who can say and do what. So I thought that was very interesting. So yeah, we get uh the unit number 0467839, pulls it out. It's resembled the magazine of a large assault rifle, surfaces covered with warning decals and security ratings. So basically uh she closes the locker door, case flips back into cyberspace, starts closing everything down, the gate snapping shut behind him, and basically everyone starts exiting at this point. Okay. So again, Molly's little collection of things. She's now going to sneak back into the lobby to head out with the general chaos that's going on there. But things are very chaotic at the moment. Case had seen panic before. So again, with the uh panic of these various terrorists' threats, the Sensen employees are spilling out of the elevators and they're trying to run out, but there's barricades from the various military groups that are trying to keep everything in, people are getting killed. It's just scary. Yes. So they're like, we've got to contain this. So uh so yeah, all these poor workers are just getting like blasted with sandbags as they try and escape from the building that's under attack. Right. And then thankfully, one of the Panther Moderns goes over to Molly and helps her exit the building. Right. And that's the end of the heist. That is the end of the heist.

Aftermath With Lupus Yonderboy

Michael Kentris 1:03:18

And Molly, we basically get her passing out. Yes. So we we now meet the leader of the Panther Moderns, Lupus Yonderboy. I don't know if that's his real name. It might be affected. Yeah, might be. Might be. So yeah, he's he's a weird-looking fella. State of the art gargoyle, as they say here. He's got pink hair, rainbow forest of Microsoft's behind his left ear. The ear was pointed, tufted with more pink hair. Pupils been modified to catch the light like a cat's. And he's got a chameleon suit on, also. And uh Lupus keeps calling Armitage Mr. Who, and uh it's like chaos was what we were before, and with our medical team, Molly's got the stuff, and uh Case is just like saying, Pay, pay him, and Armitage says, We don't have the goods, and she's like, Your mo your woman has it, and gives him a stack of new yen, and Armitage asks him, You want to count it? And he says, No, you'll pay. You're a Mr. Who. You pay to stay one, not a Mr. Name. And Armitage just says, I hope that isn't a threat. So some nice little byplay there. No, I thought that was a great interaction. Just like, yeah, you pay to stay one, not a mr. Name. Right. And then, yeah, we get a phone call from Molly before this scene cuts to a different scene. Yeah, right. So now we're we're back with Case. He's just wandering the streets essentially. He's in a new leather jacket, smoking, thinking about those toxin sacks dissolving inside his body. So he was thinking about his experience with Molly, the fear and agony he'd seen through her eyes, and then trying to remember the faces of the three people he'd killed in Shiba. The men were blanks, the woman reminded him of Linda Lee, which, as we recall, is the woman who he got addicted to drugs. And while he's reminiscing, that lupus yonder boy makes another visit and has a another message for him. And again, he's just trying to like not let Amitage be aware of this because it sounds like, again, this is a message from Molly, but the message is Winter Mute. And he's like, from you? It's like, no, for you. Which I thought I didn't quite know how to interpret that. Yeah. It's like who from Wintermute? Wintermute. Yeah, he he executed a strange little dance. His thin black arm was whirling, and then he was gone. Like Sheshire Cat style. Right. I mean, definitely, like with the way that he got his eyes modified and just pink, and his ears are pointed, just Yeah. Do you think that was a deliberate I mean it didn't occur to me until I just said it, but I'm like, it is kind of Cheshire Cat like. It's very Cheshire Cat like. Interesting. No. There have been stranger things. Right. Um like this. The last line of this chapter, Ninsei had been a lot simpler. Yeah. So Molly is released from the the medical team here, and she's got uh like this. The logo says Gerald Chin, dentist. Obviously that's who you go to for your broken leg. But she says, if I he says if I kick anything, it'll fall off. Gosh. And then he goes ahead and lets Molly know about the message that Lupus Mondurboy gave him. And before he can like ask anymore, she's like, get us some crab. Right. Yeah, she does the hand jive silence. I don't know if that's like sh uh I like this. Molly dissecting her crab with alarming ease. Because again, they were in Baltimore. That was that was where the uh dentist was, apparently.

Wintermute And Tessier-Ashpool Revealed

Michael Kentris 1:06:56

Right. Right. So we make our way back to the fin, and basically they're waiting to get, again, like the kind of this private conversation area. And I like this. There's a glass jar of pickled herring there, which as they are waiting, Molly extrudes a blade from her index finger and speared a grayish slab of herring. So she's really on the seafood today. I mean, you gotta get those protein calories up to fix your broken bones, right? Omega omega-3s? Yeah. Is that fish? It is fish. I don't know if it's herring as much, but anyway. So they uh So they asked the Finn to do a little search, right, to find out what what is Wintermutte. And they find out that we get a lot of exposition right here. So the Finn says it's an AI, and it's from Bern, Switzerland. It's got limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of 53. I like that they don't give us the first two digits, so we don't know what year we're in. That's a nice little touch. Built for Tessier Ashpool SA. Or it's in Swiss, it could be French like Tessier. But we're just gonna go Tessier because we're American. They they own the mainframe. We say our letters, gosh darn it, except for except for GHs. Except for a lot of them. That's right. We speak English, we do what we want with our letters. So Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. I've got the Turin registry numbers, right? Everyone remembers the Turing test, although who knows how valid that is with AIs these days. Right. Registry numbers, artificial intelligence. So they find out this AI is backing an Armitage. Which I accidentally alluded to earlier. Right. Yes, you did, but that's okay. That's all right. It's still the same episode.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:41

That's right.

Michael Kentris 1:08:44

So we get this interesting story about Tesser Ashpool, right? So it starts with this man called Smith. I don't know if you wanted to tell this story well. Sure. So yeah, this is an anecdote by the Finn. So the Smith was another fence that the Finn knows. And he came into contact with this one gentleman named Jimmy, who came across this intricately worked bust cloisonet over platinum studded with seed pearls and lapis. And he's looking to fence it, because again, that's what fences do. And uh it's a very weird piece, apparently. It could talk, but not in the synth voice. It had a very bizarre arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes. It could make very, very nice and human, melodious voices. And so uh the Finn has like a few ideas of who he could reach out to about this, and he reaches out to him to contact him. But before he can act on any of those, he has an unannounced Dudley visitor, a small Japanese man who was very polite, but bore all the marks of a vat grown ninja assassin. And so, more or less, he explains, This belongs to my employer. And he asks, How much were you hoping to get for it? And the Smith is very much aware of how much danger he's in, so he's like it's a very low amount that he was like far less than he was actually expecting to get, but he gets paid for it. The ninja takes the bust, and he learns within a few days that the uh Jimmy who had given him the bust had died. Right. Yes, the burglar. The burglar. So so they start investigating who who who hired this guy, whose assassin was this? So they hired a cowboy to do some some looking around. Was it Yakuza? No, they kill the the receiver too. Was it a spook? They didn't think so. Spookbiz has a vibe, you get so you can smell it. And eventually they did the lawyer's ice and they got a family address. And they we learn this is they're in a place called Freeside, which is the spindle. Turns out they own damn near the whole thing, and so you find out this is a family organization you can buy into an essay, but there hasn't been a share of Tessier Ashpool traded on the open market in over a hundred years. Right. It's yeah, it's given it's given Zaibatsu. Right. So yeah, they find out like orbital law is softer on genetic engineering, hard to keep track of which generation or combination of generations is running the show at a given time. And they're like, how's that, Mollyas? They've got their own cryogenics setup. Even under I like this, this is like some weird world-building stuff. Even under orbital law, you're legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though nobody's seen the founding father in about thirty years. Founding mama, she died in some lab accident. You got a little bit good lab accident in the history, right? It's got lots of mysteries there. If you don't have a lab accident in your history, are you even doing science? My god. So we find out there's this neighborhood up there, stray lights. Jimmy must have lifted it from there, then the Tesser Ashpool sent their ninja after it. The villa stray light, tip of the spindle, strictly private. So kind of like the creme de la creme, mega rich types. Right, right, especially in a world like this. So that's basically the information we get about this group for the moment. We kind of find out Molly has some coordinates, and what's this? This is Armitage, some database of his based in London, and she says, crack it, earn your keep for a change. So they head back after this, and uh we kind of start thinking about Flatline himself.

Dixie Flatline Construct Meets Case

Michael Kentris 1:12:34

And so they're kind of heading back, and we're kind of getting his he's he's reminiscing about it. It's hard to think of him as a ROM cassette. Will, what is a rom cassette for our young listeners? Oh my gosh, it's a magnetic tape disc. You know, it you embed information in binary on these on these tapes, and then you're able to, yeah, go ahead and read it off that. Right. If you've ever wondered what the save icon in Microsoft Suite is, it's a ROM cassette. Yeah. All right, I know. But you never thought you had to explain that. Oh my gosh. Magnetic tapes. Magnetic tape. It's it is wild to think about like what people came up with in the decades leading up to now, as far as technology. It's it's pretty cool. Pretty cool. So they're riding back on the train. We get some what do you call here? Predatory-looking Christian scientists, and there's some young office techs with for some reason they have holographic vagina bracelets. I don't know. Weird detail. I don't know. Anyway, they get off. He gets off, Case gets off at his stop on Freeside here, and they see a this is an interesting thing, right? It's just kind of emphasizing into the the meat aspect, if you will. Um, it's like, why wait? There's a sign outside there, like about traveling to Freeside, and he's like, why travel? With my deck, I could reach Freeside as easily as Atlanta. Travel was a meat thing. And then he noticed, however, the size of a small coin in the left lower corner of the ad's Fabric of Light TA. So start seeing signs at this this corporations everywhere. And then we get a little bit of reminiscing about Flatline. So again, he was 19 when he first encountered Dixie. And it's interesting because he'd never touched a deck at that point in time, but he was wanting to learn. Apparently, the only way to really learn was to kind of apprentice after another one. And so uh this was this was the guy that he apprenticed with, Flatline, and so unfortunately, he ends up dying. Right. I like this. Uh you find that you like your apprentice, you're a working Joe boy for some cowboy. So I guess you're a Joe boy before you're a cowboy. Is kind of like what I'm getting here. Right. Hierarchy. Yes. Yeah, we get a little bit of a flavor of uh Flatline's character. He says that he's going to try and avoid most of the swearing. I'm like them huge effing lizards, had themselves two GD brains, one in the head and one by the tailbone, kept the hind legs moving, hit that black stuff in old tail brain, just kept right on keeping on. So what do they call him? McCoy Pauli, Lazarus of Cyberspace. I like this. His heart had done for him in the end, his surplus Russian heart implanted in a POW camp during the war. He'd refused to replace the thing, saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing. I thought it was interesting. Yeah, that was a really fun, colorful way to like I don't know, explain why he died. Right. I gotta keep my my old janky Russian heart like some sort of like Eastern block car, basically. Right. So alright, so we we come back to the present again, and uh's got a transparent cast on her leg, this transdermal unit by Akai. Probably to stimulate bone healing or something, I would assume. And so he he logs in to his deck, the Hosaka, and he said uh he slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in. It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder. Right. And then again he's he's able to talk with him. It's like Dix, McCoy, that you man. It's like, hey bro. It's case man, remember? Miami, Joe Boy, quick study. He's like, what's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix? Nothing. And he disconnects, reconnects, and it seems like this construct does not have any sort of functioning long-term memory, you know. In in this case, it is a read-only, nothing is being written to the construct. So the only working memory he has is what's more or less been told to him in the current session. Right. Which is interesting. But then Case kind of goes a little bit into this, right? Do you know how a ROM personality matrix works? And he's like, sure, bro, it's a firmware construct. So if I jack into the so I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential real-time memory. So kind of to your point, Will, he needs it to learn so they can do this job together, right? Right. He's like, okay, Dix, you are a ROM construct. Got me? If you say so. Who are you? Case. Miami, Joe Boy, quick study. So is he learning? He's like, right. And for starts, Dix, you and me were gonna sleeze over to London Grid and access a little data. You game for that? It's like, you gonna tell me I got a choice, boy? So that's the end of the chapter. It's kind of interesting because for me, I feel like honestly, this construct functions very similarly to how large language models function in today's society. Because as opposed to, you know, having to train it off of a large corpus of text, you know, this is sort of supposed to be an imprint of someone's memories. And to your point, we can train these models to learn specific things off of new data. It's called fine-tuning. So it seems very similar, especially with the way, you know, he's like A on case, and he responds in the exact same way because more or less that's what he was trained to more or less recognize. Yeah, it's it's sort of reminiscent of kind of what we've been seeing over the last year or two with uh the rise of AI agents and chatbots for like specific companies. Yeah. You know, like if you're troubleshooting a problem for a product, they have you go through your chatbot sequence or and can answer most of the basic questions. So it it's like that, but to kind of a higher degree. At least that's how it seems. So I don't know. Weird stuff. Oddly, oddly prescient. It really is. Even like 10 years ago, I'd be like, oh, this was really cool. And now it's like, oh yeah, this is this is very on point. Something is existing that is similar to this. Yes. Creepy. Right. Yeah. So yeah, what did you think of uh uh of this block, Will? I thought it was great. So it definitely reminds me a lot more as I was reading it of kind of like an Oceans 11 movie. We have our characters that we're assembling, we've got this initial heist that we have to do to prepare for the next bigger heist, the bigger haul. So and I'm always a fan of a heist film. So heists are usually pretty good. Having this in like a sci-fi setting that I feel like is really well defined has been a very fun time. Yeah. Yes, I'm this is this is good revisiting it for me as well, because uh things get in my memory a little fuzzy in the middle part of this story. Okay. I mean, to be fair, they're fuzzy at the end of the story too. Yeah. But that might be more just because things get weird. But it could just be my poor memory. So I'm looking forward to revisiting it again.

What We’re Reading Next And Farewell

Michael Kentris 1:19:52

And uh yeah, any any other side books you're reading at the present time? So I just finished the what's it called? Isles of the Umberdark. So it's another Sanders Brain and Sanderson book in that Secret Projects that he releases every now and then. Yes. And I liked it a lot. It kind of extends off of a short story that he had written a while ago, and he kind of works it as flashbacks into this bigger book, and just kind of starts fleshing out the overarching Cosmere like world that he's built out, which is always fun. There's also some really cool book formatting decisions this isn't decisions that were made that made it kind of a lot of fun to read a physical copy of. Oh, neat. Yeah. How about you? So not as much in genre at the moment, but uh I've been reading a book called The Way of a Pilgrim recently, which it's a relatively short, short book, but it was written by an anonymous nineteenth-century Russian saint. And so if you're a Russian literature type of person, like if you've been looking to get into like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and that kind of stuff, I think and you're not necessarily as familiar with like kind of the spiritual landscape of kind of 19th century Russia, Russian Orthodoxy, then I think it gives a little bit of an insight into what that might look like. So it's it's definitely something I would recommend. And it's a pretty quick read, as you would guess. It's about a pilgrim who is traveling around 18, I think 1860s Russia. I might be a little off on my decade, but sometime in the late, mid to late 19th century. Um but I'm I'm about halfway through. It's been very good so far, very interesting. Lots of uh lots of highlights I've been making in terms of things to revisit. So it's essentially a book on uh what we call a kind of Christian mystical internal prayer, kind of the idea to pray without ceasing, even when you're not talking. So it's it's kind of a lot of that idea and uh how to how to achieve that. So this sort of ascetical, almost monastic-ish kind of flavor, although he's not a monastic necessarily for most of the story, um, or at least any of it that I've read so far. But but a lot of conversations with various people from different classes and so on. So it's it's been interesting. And it has it it does. Some of the conversations have that same flavor like you would get from like a Dostoyevsky, inasmuch as like the timbre of speech. But uh yeah, I think it's it's been very interesting so far. Well, thank you everybody for listening in, and we will continue next time with Neuromancer once again, and we'll see how things progress there. Probably two to three chapters. I haven't looked at the page count, but three seems to be a sweet spot with this book. So we'll probably be doing six, seven, eight, most likely. So check in next time, and in the meanwhile, you can find our old stuff. We've didn't done the entire book of Dune, and we've done some Conan short stories, so you can always look back and find those on our podcast feed or on our website, brothersreadingbooks.com, or you can find us online at brothersreading. Yeah, that's all I got. Alright, well, talk to you next time. Till next time.