Count Zero by William Gibson

“Angie,” he said, “when Rudy scanned you, he found something in your head.” She stopped chewing. “He didn’t know what it was. Something someone put there, maybe when you were a lot younger. Do you know what I mean?” She nodded. “Do you know what it is?” She swallowed. “No.” “But you know who put it there?” “Yes.” “Your father?” “Yes.” “Do you know why?” “Because I was sick.” “How were you sick?” “I wasn’t smart enough.”

Count Zero is the second in what gets called Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, but you can read it all alone, as an interruption of sorts.

The Kirkus review that came out just as Count Zero was finishing its run in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine said “the ideas that gave Neuromancer its sparkle are, here, just about played out.” But if you read it now, in 2026, there’s a lot that sounds pretty darn prophetic.

He says this about cash (which pretty much nails its trajectory):

What he did want now, and very badly, was food. He touched his credit chip through the denim of his jeans. He’d go across the street and get a sandwich…Then he remembered why he was here, and suddenly it didn’t seem very smart to use his chip. If he’d been sussed, after his attempted run, they’d have his chip number by now; using it would spotlight him for anyone tracking him in cyberspace, pick him out in the Barrytown grid like a highway flare in a dark football stadium. He had his cash money, but you couldn’t pay for food with that. It wasn’t actually illegal to have the stuff,it was just that nobody ever did anything legitimate with it.

That last bit sounds familiar.

And even though we haven’t got the metaverse yet, there’s something about how he describes it that makes me think I have quite the advantage on the Kirkus reviewer who read Count Zero:

That space that wasn’t space, mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline.

Then there was this bit about tokenized content creator coins (this is exactly what Base and Zora were trying and failing at these last few years):

Picard, if that was the man’s name, was speaking with a broker in New York, arranging the purchase of a certain number of “points” of the work of a particular artist. A “point” might be defined in any number of ways, depending on the medium involved, but it was almost certain that Picard would never see the works he was purchasing. If the artist enjoyed sufficient status, the originals were very likely crated away in some vault, where no one saw them at all. Days or years later, Picard might pick that same phone and order the broker to sell.

As to the story? It’s fun, it’s action-packed, Marly is cool and the Count himself is very fun, I only wished Gibson had spent a bit more time with him than all the others.

The only other thing is the epigraph, and where the Count gets his name:

COUNT ZERO INTERRUPT – On receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero.

There’s a different definition of this term in Charles Sippl’s 1982 SAMS Computer Dictionary:

count zero interrupt — An interrupt level that is triggered when an associated (clock) counter pulse interrupt has produced a zero result in a clock counter.

I’m stuck on this and I didn’t even get to all the stuff about AI, which is probably what the book is most about.