Diversifications purchases the copyright to the sockets in an attempt to capitalize on the next market phenomenon: virtual entertainment. Accordingly, they quickly implant Mark and Gina so the video artists can have product ready when the newly socketed emerge from their operations. For Visual Mark, whose reputation for hot video wars only with his legendary drug use, having sockets provides the opportunity for which has has waited his whole life. With an entire system in which to visualize new scenes to go with new music, Mark quickly leaves his body or "meat" behind, and his advanced imaginative capacity allows him to expand into a new creature, the first synthesized human, existing only in cyberspace. There he meets another cyber-creature--Dr. Art Fish--the unintended product of a chance meeting between an artificial intelligence and a virus vaccine.
The only problem is that when humans access the net, they spread their own frailties, and when Mark's meat suffers a stroke, the spike is transferred into the global system. Like a virus, the stroke spreads contagiously throughout the world, crashing th e network and growing more powerful as it proceeds. The socketed particularly suffer: caught in the seductive lure of the stroke's fatal information pattern, they either die or kill themselves. Only the socketed who are off-line at the time of the strok e, including Gina and Gabe, survive. With Keely's help, the two make the trek from Diversifications to the Mimosa where Gabe is reunited with Sam.
Sam manages to hack a way into the defunct system and in doing so reawakens Art Fish, who has dampened himself down to avoid the stroke's attention. When Art wakes up, he finds Mark alive in the system, too. Theorizing that if on-line brain illness exi sts, then on-line therapy must be possible, the hackers decide to try to cure the system. To protect themselves during the process, Art and Mark retract into a modified hand-held computer that runs off of Sam's body. The two merge in the process, and as Markt, help Gina and Gabe perform the therapy. In the following struggle, Gina and Gabe must both come to terms with their past demons, Gina her quasi-unrequited love for Mark and Gabe his nagging insecurities. In the end, human initiative, as expresse d in Gina and Gabe's commitment to each other, wins out over the stroke's merely viral drive.
The only room for love and morality in this brutally competitive world lies on the Mimosa, where along with the toxed-up bums live the extended families like that of Sam, Rosa, Keely, and Fez. The existence and stability of this family marks one difference between Cadigan and other writers. Where the idea of lasting love is only a bitter irony in Neuromancer or Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net (1988), here it is offered as both definitive of humanness and the necessary antidote to the ills of the tech. Thus, Gabe and Gina's commitment to each other overcomes the neural virus infecting the system. And Gina's love for the real rock 'n roll of sweaty bars rather than sanitized video provides a continuous counterpart to cyberspace's lure.
Philosophically, the novel uses the idea that no data is information unless it has a context to insist on the rootedness of human existence. No people exist without a context of others, Synners argues, else Gabe would not mourn his dead marriage or long for his emancipated daughter. Nor would Gina spend 20 years rescuing Mark from his toxic stupors. As Gina's frustrating love for Mark illustrates, however, real life contexts are more complex than simulated ones. The former cannot be reduced to the data points and decision trees of the latter simply because as humans, we exist in linear time and lead lives with beginnings, middles, and ends, and thus lack that luxury. And that, the novel suggests, is much more human than the sterile if infinite possibilities of cyber-existence.
Published in MacGill's Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press).
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