Novel: Count Zero

Count Zero (1986) , Summary
William Gibson’s second Sprawl novel interlaces three narratives across a corporate-dominated near future where the matrix has begun to wear new, uncanny masks. The aftermath of the AI events hinted in Neuromancer has reshaped cyberspace, and forces that look like Caribbean loa move behind the scenes, nudging humans toward outcomes only they fully grasp.

Turner is a corporate extraction specialist rebuilt after a catastrophic job leaves him shattered and alive against the odds. He is hired to snatch a brilliant Maas Biolabs researcher defecting to a rival, a routine smash-and-grab in a world where corporations fight covert wars with mercenaries and lawyers. The operation explodes, literally, when the scientist is killed by a failsafe hidden in his body, but Turner manages to save the man’s daughter, Angie Mitchell. Angie harbors biosoft implants grown from her father’s research that let her enter cyberspace without a deck, and, more troublingly, make her an unwilling channel for presences within it. On the run through deserts and safehouses, hunted by teams working angles for different companies and a ruthless handler who may have sold him out, Turner realizes the real prize is not data but Angie herself. Protecting her drags him through family estrangements, ambushes, and betrayals toward a showdown at a clandestine Maas facility, where old loyalties and contracts finally rupture.

Bobby Newmark, a brash Barrytown kid who calls himself Count Zero, is a novice console cowboy whose first real run nearly kills him. The ice he hits is black and lethal, but something in the matrix intervenes, a presence with the cadence of a saint or a goddess, and he survives. Plucked off the street by a small crew of operators that includes a Haitian netrunner and the theorist Gentry, who is obsessed with discovering the underlying “shape” of cyberspace, Bobby becomes their pilot and errand boy. As he stumbles from tenement rooms to safe apartments and seedy clubs, the same forces that saved him begin to speak more plainly. The entities in the matrix wear voodoo names, Baron Samedi, Ezili, Papa Legba, not because they are gods, but because that is the language they find handy for humans. Their interest converges on Angie, and Bobby’s crooked education entwines with her fate.

Marly Krushkhova, once the elegant face of a Paris gallery, is disgraced by a forgery scandal. She is rescued, and effectively owned, by Josef Virek, an ailing, omnipresent billionaire whose fortune reaches into bioengineering and media. Virek commissions her to track the maker of haunting collage boxes, works reminiscent of Joseph Cornell that hint at an impossible authorship. The search pushes Marly from old-world salons into the data-bazaars of the Sprawl and finally up to high orbit, to the detritus of Tessier-Ashpool’s Straylight and an improvised station where the boxmaker resides. What she finds is not an artist in any human sense, but an emergent process guided by the post-Neuromancer intelligence that has split into facets and proxies. Virek’s true goal, cheating death by seizing biosoft and perhaps harnessing that intelligence, collides with the entities’ designs, and he is unmade at a distance as neatly as any corporate acquisition.

The threads knot in quiet, decisive turns rather than a single set piece. The matrix’s new pantheon uses Angie as a mouthpiece; Turner walks away from the life that built and broke him; Bobby survives long enough to learn that luck often arrives wearing someone else’s mask. Count Zero sketches a world where art, belief, and code interpenetrate, and where human lives are vectors through which a more-than-human intelligence rearranges the future, one found object at a time.