Neuromancer

There’s a reason why I keep recommending Neuromancer to friends. For me Neuromancer is a pretext to reason about some human realities under a different light. One of the themes it touches on is one that leads you to reflect on how we live with death, with memories and with the echoes of people who are no longer here.

The first time I read it I absorbed it only as a cyberpunk genre milestone, but I wouldn’t have been able to articulate why I was so struck by it. Over time I’ve explored how Neuromancer shows a much more realistic reality than that of cyberspace, that of the relationship between humanity and AI which then led me to become more interested in the subject. Ironically the plot of Neuromancer closely mirrors the debate I touch on in Perchè si parla di creare Dio

But the reason why years later it continues to hit me straight in the chest is that Neuromancer also talks about living with ghosts, the traces, the fragments of people who continue to live even after they’re gone.

Neuromancer introduces the concept of a flatline, a construct of a person that maintains their personality, skills and memories, a sign left like a footprint on cement, never completely disappeared. There exists in cyberspace a distorted echo of what once was. We live our dead not as whole entities, but as pieces, blurred memories that resurface from time to time. Voices, moments, sensations that never completely disappear. You can imagine the dead as segments of a continuous line of which you only see an orthogonal projection filtered through the cage of your perception and of a memory that is not only fallible but in continuous failure.

Every time I reread Neuromancer I find myself thinking about the people I’ve lost and the moments I’ve left behind. Partly also about all the past versions of myself. Gibson presents us with the idea of ghosts as constructs that can continue to live and help us, but never perfect and never complete.

We too are echoes, fragments of our past that resonate in the present and shape what we will become. It’s as if the versions of ourselves, past, present and future, were connected by these echoes, influencing each other in a cycle that never completely breaks. The demon you eat

This is why I keep coming back to Neuromancer. Because it allows me to reflect on what it means to live in a world where the echoes of the past never leave us. And we’re also there, part of those echoes, continuously reforming our direction, like a wave that reflects and transforms, always incomplete, always partial.

It’s partly a story about how those fragments we remember of people who are no longer here are not perfect, but they’re all we have left. About grief

We live life among the echoes of the fallen, constructs that become part of our armor and that radically modify our direction.