In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, it is unusual to see someone who does not have some sort of “enhancement” to his or her body. It is “an age of affordable beauty” (4), and anyone who chooses to forgo enhancing his or her physical appearance, like Ratz, is unusual. But even with his “heraldic” ugliness, Ratz does have a very visible prosthetic arm, so he is still a part of the enhancement culture.
Case was a cyber cowboy whose nervous system was “jacked into a custom cyberspace deck” (5) to hack into corporate computer systems, until his employers caught him stealing and “damaged his nervous system” (6) in retaliation. Case's livelihood was gone since he could no longer jack in until Armitage, controlled by the AI Wintermute, convinced him to accept surgery to repair his nervous system so he could go back to work, this time breaking into the most sophisticated security system Case has ever seen. Wintermute uses the various humans involved in the "run" to his own ends, not minding when some of them die along the way—the more so since Wintermute himself will "die" in the end.
Molly, Case's new partner, is also enhanced. Her glasses are implanted in her skull, shielding her eyes, with her tear ducts rerouted to her throat (183). She has a readout with the time on the glasses, and a “broadcast rig” (53) so that someone—Case—can ride along in her consciousness, seeing, hearing, and feeling right along with her. Armitage has undergone cosmetic surgery, his face “a conservative amalgam of the past decade’s leading media faces” (45), while the persona Armitage is just a “flat personality-substitute” for Corto (125); his whole being is constructed, not just his face.
Other people are also enhanced; many teenagers have “carbon sockets planted behind the left ear” (57) to put in microsoft. The teens were merely keeping up with fashion; Case reflects that in his own day, “if the technology had been available, the Big Scientists would all have had sockets stuffed with microsofts” (59), since in the Sprawl, the culture “carried the coded precepts of various short-lived subcults and replicated them at odd intervals” (58).
The trodes that Case and other cowboys use to get into the matrix are an enhancement as well; connected directly to the nerves, the trodes allow the cowboy’s consciousness to merge with cyberspace, so that the matrix is merely an extension of the nervous system. While the trodes are not permanent or implanted, they are perhaps even more personal, since a cowboy is living in the matrix when he is jacked in; he can’t see what is around him, only what is in the matrix.
As has been pointed out in class, we are already living an “enhanced” life. From the computer into which I can directly spill my thoughts to my fancy running clothes that wick sweat to my glasses (which seem pretty thick to me, but would have been much, much thicker a couple of generations ago), my life is driven by technology. While it seems a bit different because none of these things are permanent attachments to the body, we are already pushing that front, too: Prosthetic limbs, Lasik surgery, pacemakers, joint replacements, tooth fillings—some have been around for a while, some are newer, but these are all permanent adjustments to the body. And even if we were to object that these “enhancements” all fill a medical need, then we have to consider piercings, tattoos, or permanent makeup, which is essentially a tattoo. We have already started down the road of physical enhancement.
If the “enhancement” market did grow to be similar to that described in Neuromancer, it’s interesting to consider how it might be commoditized. Surely there would be a Rodeo Drive version and a Wal-Mart version, just like with clothes or handbags. Instead of saving money for vacation, would people save money for an appearance upgrade? Would it become a factor in hiring practices, that the potential candidates cared enough to choose clothes, hair and face carefully? It’s a bizarre thought that one could pick up a physical alteration in the same errand as picking up the dry cleaning.
And what about technological enhancements? We all know people whose phones or mp3 players, or both, seem to be permanently attached. If someone is willing to interrupt a face-to-face conversation to respond to a text message, is that so different than jacking into the matrix, and being mentally unavailable even though physically present? Or consider those who wear a Bluetooth or similar earpiece everywhere, a practice which is (mostly) accepted as being normal. How is that different than the “enhancements” found in Neuromancer? While I am uncomfortable with the idea of technology being inside my skin—at least, any technology that does anything fancier than an aspirin or an immunization—it seems that humans have started down this road already, too. This is not an unusual theme in the fantasy genre—there was a Doctor Who episode in which people received the news directly transmitted into their brains, for instance—and it is an increasingly familiar theme in real life.
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