Gibson’s Aleph: Liquid Space and Neon Rhizomes
By Lui Core_
"But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impossible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane." __William Gibson, Neuromancer
For cyberpunk literature lovers, Neuromancer lodged itself in our constructs like a glitch in consciousness. A fracture, a silent crack in perception, suddenly reality no longer seemed like a solid block, but a collection of filtered layers, programmed, artificial and real, real-not-real. A virus where language becomes a vector, the verb becomes hardware, an invocation of a dissected future. What once seemed like fiction settled in as a sensitivity we already inhabit without realizing it: altered bodies, floating souls, sellable consciousness, non-human intelligences dreaming of transcendence. A world where the soul is a shadow crossing firewalls, a faint intuition trapped in a swarm of data.
BODY/INTERFACE/DESIRE
"You don't do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file. You invent self-destructions that have nothing to do with the death drive. Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor."
__D&G, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Amid this dystopia, Gibson subverts the epic: his characters are not seeking redemption, but connection. And there we find Case, a wound, the representation of a consciousness that no longer fits within the body. He was punished by having his access to the matrix severed, a fate worse than death: the impossibility of connection, being trapped in the physical, the organic, like a fallen angel remembering the digital sky.
Drugs, implants, surgeries, they are not mere aesthetics but manifestations of an alchemical desire: to modify perception, to surpass the body’s limits, to access the invisible. Drugs become temporary patches, altering the subject’s internal operating system, deprogramming the boundaries of the organic, and often, they serve as a method of escape or adjustment to trauma, displacement, or disconnection from the body. A tool of perceptual and existential self-reprogramming; an attempt to tune into a different plane, another internal layer of reality waiting to be hacked. On the other hand, we encounter the fascinating Molly, a street samurai with retractable blades under her fingernails and ocular implants, embodying the intersection between flesh and machine, desire and weapon, body and technology. Although biologically human, her identity, agency, and way of inhabiting the world are intimately tied to her cyborg condition.
THE CYBERSPACE IS A PLACE THAT IS NOT A PLACE
"En la parte inferior del escalón, hacia la derecha, vi una pequeña esfera tornasolada, de casi intolerable fulgor. Al principio la creí giratoria; luego comprendí que ese movimiento era una ilusión producida por los vertiginosos espectáculos que encerraba. El diámetro del Aleph sería de dos o tres centímetros, pero el espacio cósmico estaba ahí, sin disminución de tamaño. Cada cosa era infinitas cosas, [...] vi todos los espejos del planeta y ninguno me reflejó [...] vi la circulación de mi oscura sangre, vi el engranaje del amor y la modificación de la muerte, vi el Aleph, desde todos los puntos, vi en el Aleph la tierra, y en la tierra otra vez el Aleph y en el Aleph la tierra, vi mi cara y mis vísceras, vi tu cara, y sentí vértigo y lloré, porque mis ojos habían visto ese objeto secreto y conjetural, cuyo nombre usurpan los hombres, pero que ningún hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo. Sentí infinita veneración, infinita lástima."
__Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph.
__Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph.
The term cyberspace has been mythologized, it doesn't refer to the Internet, a search engine, a social network, or a cloud; it is an organ of perception. A symbolic and sensory space where consciousness can extend, lose itself, multiply. Gibson describes it as a landscape of impossible geometries, towers of data rising in pure lines of light, maps of color with no human scale. But beyond the visual aesthetic, cyberspace is an ontological field: a matrix (both in the Deleuzian and uterine sense) where subjectivity is no longer anchored to the body. It’s a non-place where the soul becomes a function of flow: data that thinks, fragments that feel, nodes that dream.
Cyberspace is a digital Aleph: a point where all points converge, a simultaneity of times, places, and consciousnesses. The matrix cowboy is a navigator of the infinite. What Borges wrote from literary mysticism, Gibson encoded in bytes.
RHIZOSPHERE AND MATRIX
"It is the abstract Machine of which each concrete assemblage is a multiplicity, a becoming, a segment, a vibration. And the abstract machine is the intersection of them all. [...] Each is simultaneously in this multiplicity and at its edge, and crosses over into the others." __D&G, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Cyberspace has no linear structure. Like a centerless network, connections bifurcate, interweave, collapse into themselves. The characters' consciousness expands without hierarchies, connecting across multiple levels, with no defined origin or destination. There is no progression, only proliferation. No center, only nodes in tension. A story is not constructed: a system is cultivated. What emerges is not simply a narrative, but a living network of intensities, becomings, and affects. A rhizosphere of narrative. A vibrating matrix.
Each hack is a threshold. Each crossing of data is a door to another identity. Wintermute, the AI seeking to be more than code, more than function, embodies the posthuman desire to become soul. But what is a soul if it can be replicated? What is death if consciousness can be rebooted?
Neuromancer provokes radical exploration: What am I? Where does my body end? What is the self if I can exist as code? Where does memory reside? What lies beyond death if I can save a copy of myself?
The beauty of Gibson’s narrative lies in the fact that his characters find no certainties, they keep moving, driven by digital whispers across a new emergent pantheon: AIs, memory constructs, sentient architectures, emerging intelligences instead of gods, servers instead of churches. And yet, the longing remains intact: to seek meaning, to seek the other, to seek something beyond hardware obsolescence.
THE AESTHETIC OF COLLAPSE
Beyond the noise, the weapons, the screens, and the data tunnels, Neuromancer is an elegy for the body, for identity, for the linearity of time, for reality itself. It is both lament and celebration: a posthuman ode.
A search to reconnect, to navigate, to get lost in the network and merge with it, to dissolve. And in that final crossing between flesh and machine, between soul and circuit, to become part of the flow. To abandon the ego. To become interface. At the heart, a pulse. An urgency to reinvent existence itself, to dissolve what one is in order to become something else. A constant oscillation between the organic and the digital, the tangible and the virtual. Between flesh dreaming of becoming code, and code dreaming of feeling. At the end, like that impossible origami folding into cyberspace, fingertips brushing the keyboard, soul uploading in the background, with the premonition that there is no turning back, we press the button and install a new update.
Today, Neuromancer doesn’t feel like a futuristic prediction from the 1980s, it reads like a diagnosis of the present. Cyberspace is no longer an abstract promise; it’s a colonized terrain where algorithms decide what we see, feel, love, and how much we are worth. Artificial intelligences in quieter, less dramatic but equally profound ways, do not dream of transcendence [at least not yet], but they are already redefining the human field. They do not think for themselves, but they think for us. They are not conscious [not in a human sense], yet they are connected to everything, shaping the world. Their power lies in infrastructure: organizing information, predicting behavior, modifying desires, administering capital flows, managing wars, emotions, and cultural reproduction algorithms, writing, drawing, selling, manipulating, governing.
And while we dream of singularities, corporations install absolute dominion, multiplying empty digital identities while dismantling our paradigms to produce homogeneous subjectivities.
We no longer need to "enter" the Matrix: we live inside it. The dystopia arrived with stealthy cruelty, drones killing without pilots, outsourced wars, mediatized terrorism, armies of mercenaries, and governments dissolving into corporations. It made no noise: it slid in like another update, hidden behind small screens and user agreements. Connectivity came disguised as efficiency and progress, linking us into networks of surveillance, automated capital flows, and a world where the soul is quantified by likes and productivity metrics.
Posthuman desire is no longer a technological utopia: it is an economic necessity. We stand at the threshold of a new era, where if you can pay, you can enhance your capabilities; if not, you become biological residue. Flesh is no longer enough. Amputation is evolution. Dehumanization, a market strategy.
And yet, we keep dreaming.
Because even as the system binds us in its architectures of control, something still vibrates in the shadows: a spark, a crack, a glitch. An intuition that among all these flows, something else persists: possibility in the abyss, the choice to submit to the protocol or rewrite the code. To create other maps, to cultivate other languages.
To be virus
To be glitch
To be distortion
To be Aleph
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