Pattern Recognition(2003)

William Gibson

"We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition…"

Cayce Pollard is an expensive, spookily intuitive American design consultant with an international reputation. In London to evaluate the redesign of a famous corporate logo, she's offered a very different assignment: find the creator of some haunting, enigmatic video clips being uploaded to the internet by a party or parties unknown. Followers of this footage, and Cayce herself is one, are generating massive underground buzz, worldwide—and her new employer values buzz infinitely more than money.

But when her London apartment is burgled, her email hacked, and the records of her Manhattan therapist stolen, she begins to suspect that more is at stake here, to someone, than she could ever have imagined.

Still, Cayce is her father's daughter, and danger makes her stubborn. Win Pollard, Cold War security guru, was never a man to be deterred by the unimaginable. But the Cold War is over, and Win is missing, presumed dead, somewhere in Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Cayce is soon phase-shifting through parallel universes of marketing, globalization, and terror, heading always for the still point where the three converge. From London to Tokyo to Moscow, and finally into the eerie aftermath of a Soviet eco-disaster, she follows the implications of a secret as disturbing, and compelling, as the twenty-first century promises to be.

A secret that may, ultimately, belong to her alone.

"Pattern Recognition is Williams Gibson's best book since he rewrote all the rules in Neuromancer. Gibson casts a master extrapolator's eye on our present, and shows it to us as if for the first time." -- Neil Gaiman