Count Zero

Count Zero, the second work of the trilogy set in the same fictional dystopian future as the Neuromancer, is very similar to the first work of the Trilogy, in that, it

is mainly the story of a young cyberspace hacker, Bobby Newmark and his adventures in the virtual world. Bobby contributes in a business intrigue unwillingly, and he opens his eyes in a hospital after an explosion that injures most parts of his body. He appears in the “zero line” (which means nearly dead fallen into vegetative state), since he appears physically dead at the beginning of the novel but he is still going on to live connected to the matrix. The title of the novel, like that of the first novel, has various connotations as a kind of trope of Cyberpunk in that, the zero point can be regarded as a sort of purgatory, in which people are neither in the world of the dead nor alive. On the other hand, the matrix is made up of “1”s and “0”s, which create all meaning in the virtual world. Therefore, the title connotes both meanings and creates a Cyberpunk atmosphere and directs reader‟s expectations at the beginning of the novel.

Gibson employs multiple storylines which become interwoven through the end of this work, which are again introduced as parallel computer programs familiar in the Cyberpunk world. The plot of Count Zero is as follows: Turner is a mercenary and he accepts the job to “shift” (Count Zero, p.19) the top researcher – “head hybridoma man” (Count Zero, p.19) of Maas Biolabs – Christopher Mitchell to the Hosaka Corporation. However, instead of this duty, he becomes guardian to his daughter on a foreign journey. The sub-plot takes place in France and presents a small gallery owner, Marly. She is engaged to the enormously wealthy art collector and patron Herr Josef Virek, to find out the unknown creator of his futuristic, mysterious Joseph Cornell-style boxes. These boxes are depicted as powerful art objects that are kept in the marketplace out of the underground of the Sprawl. In the last story, Bobby Newmark, a young Jersey-suburb computer hacker, nicknamed

“Count Zero”, flatlines (a term which is central to Cyberpunk works and which may function both as a verb and a noun, attributing to word‟s meaning in slang which is being in the border of death and life, or having a paralyzed body in the real world while continuing to exist the cyberspace) while hacking into a corporate computer with a piece of important black market software. Bobby plugs himself into the matrix and almost dies. What saves him in the matrix is the vision of a young girl who is composed of light. This girl is Angie Mitchell, who appears briefly in the first and the third novels as well. Her nervous system has been altered by her father, Christopher Mitchell to allow her direct access in her head to the cyberspace matrix, though she is not conscious of it at the beginning. The work is similar to Neuromancer in that the protagonists try to survive in a struggle in cyberspace, through a series of adventures. Its plot structure, although more complicated with three interwoven stories that unite at the end, is still an example of conventional narrative technique.

Count Zero is a particular example of the genre, since choosing of characters from low life and presenting them in high technological settings is the basic feature of Cyberpunk works. Gibson followed his own choice of characters and setting in the Neuromancer by employing the same themes. However, Count Zero is remarkable in its character development when it is compared to the first novel of the trilogy, in that it presents a more developed character representation which creates a sort of Cyberpunk prototype. Larry McCaffery also points out this development in his interview with William Gibson:

a mixture of eccentric lowlifes and nonconformists who find themselves confronting representatives of vast

egomaniacal individuals whose wealth and power result directly from their ability to control information (MacCaffery, 1990:131).

The subject of multinational corporations that dominate the world instead of governments and states comes to the fore in the Count Zero as in Neuromancer.

There are many references to the relationship of the individual to these corporations in the work. For instance, in one case, the narrator explains how these corporations are powerful and how they benefit from individuals as long as these people are useful for them: “The multinationals he worked for would never admit that a man like Turner existed” (Count Zero, 14). This quotation also presents how such people are annihilated when they are not needed. This situation shows that determination of value in the postmodern society is not the same as previous perceptions that appear as a result of tension between such poles as good or evil, true or false etc. However, the values are depolarized in the postmodern world as Baudrillard argues, and truth or reality depends on how capital owners interpret it (Baudrillard, 1996:67).

Therefore, subjects lose importance to profit and people like Turner become the playthings of powerful companies. In other words, the subject is seduced by the object in Baudrillard‟s terms (Baudrillard, 2005:82). The subject is no more important, but merely the operator, as the user of data. Thus, he loses his freedom in the illusionary endless virtual life in which they regard themselves to be free. This illusion can be accepted as the seduction of the subject by the object.

In the trilogy, the wars are fought in cyberspace by these multinational corporations that control the individuals instead of governments or armies. Survival of the individual in such a world is a matter of harmonising with technological

advancements. The individuals who are in touch with technology might be a part of power system. People‟s fascination with new machines and technology is referred to frequently in Count Zero:

„What‟s this? The console had the blank, half-finished look of a factory prototype.

„Maas-Neotek cyberspace deck.‟

Turner raised his eyebrows. „Yours?‟

„We got two. One‟s on site. From Hosaka. Fastest thing in the matrix, evidently, and Hosaka can‟t even de-engineer the chips to copy them. Whole other technology‟ (Count Zero, 37).

Paul Virilio‟s term “dromology”, that was mentioned in the First Chapter, can be used to explain this quotation, since it denotes a society that measures life with speed. Speed becomes one of the most important issues in the postmodern Cyberpunk world, in that quality and benefit depend on speed. Speed in cyberspace marks power as well.

Cyberspace, dominates the real world in the trilogy. As has been pointed out in the First Chapter, in the postmodern world where illusion is no longer possible because the real is no longer possible, as Baudrillard also mentions, simulation overcomes the real. Law and order themselves are also nothing more than simulation (Baudrillard, 1998: 180) and the moral system and accepted norms are defined or framed by the owners of the capital as in the case of order established in Count Zero by the multinational corporations. In such a world dominated by giant companies, individuals cannot gain much power. Only a few of them, whose existence is open to

question, may have money and power: "Virek? ... If you believe the journalists, he's the single wealthiest individual, period. As rich as some zaibatsu. But there's the catch, really: is he an individual? In the sense that you are, or I am? No” (Count Zero, 144). As seen stated in Count Zero, only the Third World countries still have traditional governments. This means that third world countries do not have enough power to take their place in the cyberworld. The authority of the security forces has been overtaken by Ice (the most powerful artificial intelligence), so Ice lays down the rules, which take the place of laws. “…ice, all the really hard stuff, the walls around every major store of data in the matrix, is always the product of an AI, an artificial intelligence” (Count Zero, 114). It is represented in cyberspace as having the sensory properties one associates with materiality. Hayles explains existence in cyberspace as follows:

Literalizing abstractions, cyberspace creates a level playing field where abstract entities, data constructs and physically embodied consciousnesses interact on an equal basis. All forms are equivalent in this space; none is more physically real or immediate than any other. The signifiers representing an actually existing person cannot claim more materiality than those representing the shape of a data bank or construct generated by a computer program, because all signifiers within this space – include those generating the space itself – operate according to a logic of literalization (Hayles, 1996: 111-112).

As it is clear in the quotation, cyberspace includes all forms and all types of signifiers representing existing people in the real world. Thus, reaching data related to power, that is equal to economic prosperity, is also possible in relation to technological competence.

Gibson continues to display the economic structure of cyberspace in Count Zero. The “conglomerate of traffic in information systems‟ hardware and software”

(Bell and Kennedy, 2000:176), and the “configurations of data organized in matrix form in cyberspace” (ibid, p. 176) are two principal zones of illegal economic activity in this world. The individuals, who make up clans and live in these zones, are prosthetically and genetically improved. Gibson explains the nuance between a clan and a corporation in Count Zero: “The difference between a clan and a corporation, however, is that you don‟t literally need to marry into a corporation”

(Count Zero, 145).

Baudrillard argues that the difference between real life and simulated life or simulacrum has decreased to a point where it becomes hard to distinguish one from the other in the postmodern world in “The Precession of Simulacra” (1983). In Count Zero, the matrix or cyberspace is defined as “the world”: “„Okay,‟ Bobby said, getting the hang of it, „then what's the matrix? If she's a deck, and Danbala's a program, what's cyberspace?‟ „The world,‟ Lucas said” (Count Zero, 163). Thus, as it is clearly seen in the quotation, the whole system becomes a “weightless gigantic simulacrum” (Baudrillard, 1998:173) as cyberspace replaces the real world.

Baudrillard‟s discussions of hyperreality, in which reality and simulation are perceived as being no different from one another, are presented in Count Zero.

Although the whole world is recreated as replica in the virtual world, the real body is also still being re-created. Gibson employs genetic engineering or genetic manipulation, a theme frequently put forward by the Cyberpunk authors, in Count Zero in a quite prominent way. In Count Zero, Turner wakes in a reconstructed body at the beginning of the work:

It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysac-charides. They bought eyes and genitals on the open market The eyes were green (Count Zero, 9).

Turner, “a soldier in his own right”, “a mercenary” for various employers is recreated by this team after he has been blown up during a dangerous mission in India (Count Zero, p.7). The mercenaries who have a good contract with their employers are lucky to be recreated after their task. Turner is recreated in three months: “you can go home now, Turner. We‟re done with you. You‟re good as new now” (Count Zero, 10). Thus, how the powerful multinational companies disregard individuals and use them for their own profits in such a world of technology is presented. In this highly technological world, the human being is regarded as a simple object or machine that can be fixed when needed. The parts of the body can be bought and sold in the open market, like the eyes and the genitals of Turner. His brain is also open to operations;

they can load information of any kind into it:

Among the dozen-odd microsofts the Dutchman had given him was one that would allow a limited fluency in

Spanish but in Vallarta he‟d fumbled behind his left ear and inserted a dustplug instead, hiding the socket and plug behind a squire of fleshtone micropope (Count Zero, 11).

Computer systems also make use of human flesh and blood to create new combinations, which were referred to as androids or cyborgs at the beginning of this section of the book. For instance, Armitage is created by Wintermute by using the remains of the body of Corto. Technology is also used as a means to attain immortality in the works of Cyberpunk authors. Gibson presents powerful characters who maintain an immortal life in the “orbit”, although being dead in the real world:

He says, if I remember all this correctly, and I‟m not at all certain that I do, that Virek is an even greater fluke than the industrial clans in orbit. The clans are transgenerational, and there‟s usually a fair bit of medicine involved: cryogenics, genetic manipulation, various ways to combat aging (Count Zero, 145).

Gibson deals with the theme of the difficulty of separating the human from the technological both rhetorically and phenomenologically as a central issue in his novels as seen in Count Zero as well as in the two other works of the Trilogy. This subject matter is also a major concern of Postmodernism, for instance such scholars as Jameson who tries to explain the cultural logic of late capitalism while describing a new electronically defined reality. Both postmodernist arguments and Cyberpunk fiction present similar anxieties regarding the status and power of the human in a technologically advanced world. Since technology became a means of superiority

and power in the world in the second half of the twentieth century especially the United States of America and Russia aimed to use the technology to become the only dominating power, as Scott Bukatman also underlines in Terminal Identity, in which he discusses the relationship of Postmodernism and Cyberpunk fiction, the citizen is defined within a techno-political system, “reinforcing a view of the human that arose with the advent of cybernetics (post-WWII) and its „functional analogy‟ between human and computer” (Bukatman, 1993: 3). The human body appears as a rhetorical figure in Cyberpunk works as in the case of Bobby‟s body in Count Zero. As Bukatman also underlines, by referring to the writings of cultural theorists such as Baudrillard, Haraway and Krokers who are interested in “the dissolution of boundaries” and “the electronic challenge to the definition of the subject”, the human body turns out to be a “sign” or “rhetorical figure” in the postmodern discourse (Bukatman, 93:16). As in the case of the protagonists of the Neuromancer and Count Zero , the body is “mere flesh” (Neuromancer, 6), and its existence depends upon its place in the electronic world as a part of the world of data, instead of being part of the solid world as matter. Hence the writer questions the relationship of man and technology in its simplest situation, by presenting the pure body into the centre of discussion. What will become of man‟s body when it totally interacts with advanced technology is the question the author discusses in his work. The answer of this anxious questioning is not clear but there are some suppositions like man will try to get rid of the limits of solid body to become a part of data world as in the case of Case and Bobby.

Gibson‟s depiction of cyberspace, the futuristic society and the people who live in it, turns out to be a common element of Cyberpunk science fiction. Gibson

offers his own suggestion of “cyberspace” in the Sprawl trilogy. He plays with the idea of space in order to present an ultra-technological future in which reality turns into illusion, while illusion appears as reality.

The concept of “cyberspace” and the literature on it has a very significant place in the popular culture of recent decades. According to Featherstone and Burrows this concept is:

best considered as a generic term which refers to a cluster of different technologies, some familiar, some only recently available, some being developed and some still fictional, all of which have in common the ability to simulate environments within which humans can interact (Featherstone and Burrows, 1995: 5).

This definition is followed with a classification through which cyberspace is categorized under three headlines. These are Barlovian cyberspace, virtual reality and Gibsonian cyberspace. The first one is named after John Barlow, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and refers to the real high communication models such as international networks. This is defined as a simpler form of cyberspace, which is little more than the telephone systems that are being used today. The second term, “virtual reality”, was coined by Jaron Lanier, and it is defined as “a real or simulated environment in which the perceiver experiences telepresence” (Steuer, 1992: 76-7). And the third one is Gibsonian cyberspace as presented in the Trilogy.

Beside these definitions of cyberspace by Featherstone and Burrows, Michael Benedikt presents a long list of detailed definitions of “cyberspace” in his article entitled “Cyberspace: First Steps”. For example, he defines cyberspace as:

a new universe, a parallel universe created and sustained by the world‟s computers and communication lines. A world in which the global traffic of knowledge, secrets, measurements, indicators, entertainments and alter-human agency takes on form: sights, sounds, presences never seen on the surface of the Earth blossoming in a vast electronic night

(Benedikt, 2000: 29).

Another definition in the list emphasizes its mental geographical place:

A common mental geography, built, in turn, by consensus and revolution canon and experiment; a territory swarming with data and lies, with mind stuff and memories of nature, with a million voices and two million eyes in a silent, invisible concert to enquiry, deal-making, dream sharing and simple beholding (Benedikt, 2000: 29).

Therefore, as Benedikt underlines, cyberspace does not simply exist but it is everywhere “wherever electricity runs with intelligence” (Benedikt, 2000: 30).

Gibson defines the concept of cyberspace as “a consensual hallucination” in Neuromancer (51) and the concept of cyberspace has started to be an accepted term due to the advancements in computer and information technologies, the approach of

Gibson resulted in discussions about virtual reality. Cyberspace is defined as:

“everything remotely connected to the Internet, 3-D animation and telecommunications, a combination of all three and so on. In short, it is used to name any kind of modern information transfer” by the Project Cyberpunk Group (www.project.cyberpunk.ru/ Retrieved 2008.10.15, 11:25). In this world or “the matrix” there are operators like Henry Dorsett Case in the Neuromancer, Molly Millions in Mona Lisa Overdrive, or Bobby Newmark in Count Zero, who can enter into any part of the vast three-dimensional system of data and move in it by using their “deck”. These operators or “hackers” are in a way free soldiers working for multinational corporations, the evolved forms of governments that engage in a battle for control over a powerful new technology and the “matrix” is their battlefield.

Cyberspace is presented as “a replica of the real world, a kind of simulation with certain geological distances and proportions” (www.project.cyberpunk.ru/

Retrieved 2008.10.15, 11:25). The images of buildings and cities have no real restrictions to be regarded as fantastic or surreal. The copy is no longer a copy, but where the subjects identify themselves with and define their existence according to these images. The description of cities as neon coloured data glows hanging in the

"air" is very much like Virilo‟s description of postmodern city. “Now and ever was, fast forward, Jammer‟s deck jacked up so high above the neon hotcores, a typography of data he didn‟t know. Big stuff, mountain-high, sharp and corporate in the non-place that was cyberspace” (Count Zero, 230).

Thus, the constructed “Gibsonian Cyberpunk cyberspace” is inhabited by computer programs and simulacra created by artificial intelligences such as the Wintermute constructed by the plutocratic Tessier-Ashpool clan in the Sprawl

trilogy. It lets characters move free from the boundaries of real space, as Bobby opts to do for the rest of his life in Count Zero. The characters like Case or Bobby “jack”

themselves into a computer deck and leave the concrete world behind, losing themselves in a mental landscape. The process has a drug-like result, through which people abandon the decadence of the body and penetrate into the mind.

As Cyberpunk authors use the theme of combination of advanced technology and the common life and common people, they also like employing exotic elements in their works. For example, in this work, Gibson presents a relation between Haitian Voodoo and the urban hyperreality of his fictional Sprawl. The religion he chooses for this urban dystopia is influenced by African traditions. The work presents two groups in struggle with each other: Beauvoir's group and the Yakuza, the Japanese gangs. This struggle appears as a battle between two traditions - one of power, corruption, and influence; the other of passion, magic, and sensuality (www.project.cyberpunk.ru/ Retrieved 2008.10.15, 11:25). Since ornamenting the narratives with oriental or exotic elements is a common technique used by Cyberpunk readers, Gibson creates a magical atmosphere by means of Haitian Voodoo elements with use of words such as Loa and Legba that refer to spirits of the Voodoo. In Neuromancer, for example, the damaging of Case‟s nervous system is likened to voodoo. In Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, Legba and other Loa appear as the human perception of the fragments of the Wintermute/Neuromancer super-intelligence in the Matrix. Voodoo, as an ancestral religion, is regarded as an ecstatic religion by western anthropologists (Simpson, 1978). The virtual experience described in these novels is also depicted like moments of ecstasy. This similarity draws an interesting and expletive element to the novels.

Hence, Count Zero presents several Cyberpunk themes and concerns such as the discussion of cyberspace or virtual reality, genetic manipulation, organ transplantation, and surgeries that combine the human body to machines through prosthesis, computer networks and control of information and power relations through these nets, changing economic systems due to new formations, computer pirates known as “hackers”, artificial intelligence and cybernetics.