It struck me yesterday, while reading William Gibson’s Count Zero, how very average most of the book is. The heart of the story grows from the idea of machine as artist, and while Gibson’s prose remains enjoyable, as soon as it strays from this central concept, it begins to dissolve, taking the story with it. Aside from this idea, the book is a fairly generic cyberpunk thriller. He has since revisited the notion of authorship, most notably in Pattern Recognition, and with markedly more success. Even so, his early insights remain keen.
Count Zero is seen through the eyes of three people: Turner, a mercenary specialising in high-level corporate defections; Marly, a disgraced Parisian gallery owner, and the eponymous Count, wannabe hacker Bobby Newmark. Of the three stories, it is Marly’s that commands attention; of the three viewpoint characters, outwardly she does the least, and yet hers is the compelling story.
Hired by the mysterious Herr Virek to locate the maker of seven objets d’art, she pursues her goal through a meeting with the lover who betrayed her, Alain, who claims he has information on the whereabouts of the Boxmaker. Finding him dead, but managing to retrieve the vital information, she takes a flight into orbit; the final confrontation with the boxes’ creator occurs in a derelict data-storage centre, amongst the wreckage of a powerful dynasty. The Boxmaker—the machine, a fragment of an artificial intelligence—speaks.
Once, for a brilliant time, time without duration, I was everywhere as well… But the bright time broke. The mirror was flawed. Now I am the only one… But I have my song, and you have heard it. I sing with these things that float around me, fragments of the family that funded my birth. There are others, but they will not speak to me. Vain, the scattered fragments of myself, like children. Like men. They send me new things, but I prefer the old things. Perhaps I do their bidding. They plot with men, my other selves, and men imagine they are gods…
One might wonder whether the title itself is a reference to this return to an earlier state. Count Zero is short for count zero interrupt, a piece of programming jargon: “On receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero.” But perhaps this is too subtle. What we can be sure of its that time plays a central role in Gibson’s writing. He is not, of course, alone in this; Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, consistently hailed as a seminal work of literature, is renowned for its meditations on time and memory.
It is striking that this thread of story, winding its way through an otherwise unremarkable SF novel, resonates so deeply. Marly is searching for her lost time, when she was happy, curating a gallery in Paris with her lover Alain. But that time never existed; she was deceived in the heart of her happiness. The time is truly lost.
The Boxmaker, too, seems to meditate on that lost past. “My songs are of time and distance”, it says, and its songs evoke those things and more. The climax of Neuromancer, Gibson’s previous work, takes place on a beach seemingly outside time and space; an electronic Eden where the hero must wait, and wait, until the future reveals itself. This scene is revisited afresh at the beginning of Count Zero, but the actors are different, and the beach is real—yet it seems similarly outside time. Sitting on a beach, one can do nothing but watch the endless waves, and think, and remember.
What do these reflections touch to evoke so strong a response in us? Perhaps it is because we can never experience time directly: it is a dimension, a line along which we move, yet seemingly hidden from direct appraisal. Space extends before us, open to our questions, but we can experience time only as the present moment. Its depths are veiled in darkness.
Art, then, can open to us some measure of understanding, a window on the endless past and the empty future. Through its mediations we can experience time itself in some oblique way. Words, through their abstract nature, can bring us closest to the hidden geometry of that dark sea. One could almost imagine that when the Boxmaker speaks of the mirror being flawed, he was talking about stories.
