Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

238Demonic Texts and Textual Demonshim, scratch it. McCoy, he says, its the other goddam thumb.’ When theconstruct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but astab of cold down Case’s spine. ‘Do me a favor, boy.’‘What’s that, Dix?’‘This scam of yours, when it’s over, you erase this goddam thing.’ 153When the android Leon is fighting with Deckard in Blade Runner hesays: “Nothing is worse than having an itch you can never scratch” 154 Theabove quotation from the “quintessential cyberpunk novel” Neuromancer(1984; “N”) by William Gibson, brings the themes of isolated and artificialself to the Baudrillardian territory. As Jon Thompson summarises: “the realis a palimpsest continually rewritten by the simulacra. As such, it becomesindistinguishable from its infinite simulations. [In the circuit of the hyperreal]the boundaries between the true and the false, the real and the imaginary,and the present and the past combine and recombine in a dance ofsigns, reducing all oppositions to an algebra of equivalence.” 155 The confrontationbetween the real and the artificial agency, which still had the capacityto shock in Frankenstein and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, retainsonly vestiges of its unnerving qualities in the world of Neuromancer. Sincethe people in this world encounter each other mostly through various communicationtechnologies, there are no reliable ways to identify the interlocutor;some of them, as “Dix” (McCoy Pauley) here, are just simulation. Inthe cyberpunk dialectic of flesh and prosthesis, he is a terminal point: anagent which is nothing but prosthesis.Still, traces of difference remain, and they are emphasised by narrativemeans; the “stab of cold” that goes down Case’s spine is one such token.Dix is dead, and replaced by a ROM personality construct – a digital ghostof a person that was once alive. The synesthetic replacement of laughterwith the Gothic shivers that Case feels in his spine does not signal any completelyneutral or interchangeable relationship between the “real life” andsimulation. The implied anxieties are present in numerous ways. The openingof Neuromancer establishes the intermingling of natural and artificialboth in the levels of figurative language and characterisation; the openingsentence states that the “sky above the port was the color of television,tuned to a dead channel.” Ritz, the bartender, anticipates in his figure theconspicuous place heterogeny holds in Neuromancer – “his teeth a webworkof East European steel and brown decay,” and his arm “a Russian militaryprosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubbypink plastic.” 156If Neuromancer were a Philip K. Dick novel from the 1960s, the prostheticarm would send signals as a stigma of evil (as in the case of Palmer El-153 N, 130.154 Blade Runner 1:01.155Thompson 1993, 151. – See Baudrillard 1983.156 N, 9. – “Russian” and “eastern” have in Neuromancer their pre-perestroika associationswith communism and the “Empire of Evil.”