Further Cases in Point: the Comedown
“He spent the bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas and liver, the rest of a new Ono-Sendai and a ticket back to the Sprawl.
He found work.
He found a girl who called herself Michael” (270).
-Neuromancer
“Barney said, ‘I’ll live here. As a colonist. I’ll work on my garden up top and whatever else they do. Build irrigation systems and like that.’ He felt tired and the nausea had not left him… ‘Earth,’ Barney said, ‘I’ve had.’ He too had meant what he had said, his anticipations for his own life which lay ahead here on Mars… After a time he climbed the steps to the cab of the dredge which he had been using and started the creaky, sand-impregnated mechanism. It howled mournfully in protest. Happier, he decided, to remain asleep; this, for the machine, was the ear-splitting summons of the last trumpet, and the dredge was not yet ready” (210, 211, 220).
-The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
“He listened to the tiny voice that still leaked out of Providence. It didn’t make too much sense. She sounded hysterical, panicked. He was surprised that she could speak at all; she had just suffered—in losing all her computer connections—something roughly analogous to a massive stroke. To her, the world was now seen through a keyhole, incomplete, unknown, and dark… (297)
The spaces around him, once so rich with detail and colors beyond color, were fading now, replaced by the sensations his true body straining with animal fear in its little house in California… (297)
As per their temporary agreements, he closed off first one and then another of the capabalities that he had so recently acquired. It was like stopping one’s ears, then blinding one’s eyes, but somehow much worse since his very ability to think was being deliberately given up. He was like some lobotomy patient (victim) who only vaguely realizes now what he has lost. Behind him the Federal forces were doing their best to close off the areas he had left, to protect themselves from any change of heart he might have… (302)
He went from day to day feeling a husk of what had once been and trying to imagine what he could barely remember” (305).
-True Names
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