NO SLACK IN TOKYO

In the California "future" of William Gibson's Virtual Light, the whole world is the Third World. The gap between rich and poor has grown so huge that there are two societies: the "haves" and the "have-nots". The haves seek to remove and protect their persons and property from the have-nots. Security is big business. Costa Rica is the new data Switzerland. "They take care of everybody's data...regardless what it is..."

The main characters live on the interface of the two societies. The male main character, Rydell, is a security guard. The female lead character, Chevette-Marie Washington, is a bicycle courier:

"The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous: in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might be easily viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided...she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl's bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere..."

"Shit happens. Happened that night. No signals, no leader, no architects. You think it was politics. That particular dance, boy, that's over."

Sublett is another interesting secondary character. He is allergic to everything. Sublett is a lapsed follower of Reverend Fallon, although his mother is still a believer. Reverend Fallon is the leader of a white-trash TV trailer-park Christian sect.

"Fallonites believe God's just sort of there. On television...What they mostly watch is all these old movies, and they figure if they watch enough of them, long enough, the spirit will sort of enter them."

Eventually God does intervene, in the form of The Republic of Desire. The RoD is an underground gang of uber-hackers extrapolated from such quasi-mythical hacker groups as The Legion of Doom. RoD characters speak from behind gigantic virtual-reality illusions, Wizard of Oz- like. Not content to exist merely in cyberspace, The RoD performs computer-mediated miracles in "meat-space". They assist our heroes Chevette and Rydell at the very last minute. The plot spins around pilfered virtual-reality goggles that contain secret blueprints detailing how a sinister somebody (Japanese?) plans to retool San Francisco: "They're going to to do it like they're doing Tokyo." The RoD is not pleased... "There's not a lot of slack, for us, in Tokyo, now..."

Amidst a bleak future landscape, Virtual Light manages to remain hopeful, or at least humorous. Gibson surmises that an individual can be free, even in an increasingly complex and controlled hi-tech society- if he can laugh. That's something computers haven't yet been programmed to do.

© 2007 Joshua Berlow

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