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Explorations of the ‘Transhuman’ Dimension of Artificial Intelligence 333

not easily guess at by merely using a computer. An ‘idoru’ is an ‘artificially intelligent’
entity inhabiting virtual reality — an “Idol-singer”, or “personality-construct, a congeries
of software agents, the creation of information-designers”, or what “they call a
‘synthespian’ in Hollywood” (Gibson 1996: 92). They already exist in Japan, as virtual
pop stars who, in holographic mode, give concerts attended by throngs of fans. The
following passage from Idoru is a demonstration of what I mean by Gibson’s prose being
able to generate cyber-realities that don’t yet, but may soon exist. When Colin Laney, the
“netrunner” of the story, first locks eyes with virtual Rei Toei, the idoru, this is what
happens (Gibson 1996: 175-176, 178):

He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of
underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations.
He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows, their lintels traced with snow. A line of
shaggy pack ponies, their breath white with cold, followed a trail above a canyon.
The curves of the river below were strokes of distant silver. Iron harness bells
clanked in the blue dusk.
Laney shivered. In his mouth the taste of rotten metal.
The eyes of the idoru, envoy of some imaginary country, met his …
Don’t look at the idoru’s face. She is not flesh; she is information. She is the tip
of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it
again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal
vision [Laney’s special talent] in some unprecedented way; she induced it as
narrative.

Laney, who is gifted with singular pattern-recognition powers, perceives this galaxy
of information embodied in the holographic image of the idoru as narrative, musical
narrative. Rei Toei’s performances are not ordinary, recorded music videos, however.
What she ‘dreams’ — that is, ‘retrieves’ from the mountains of information of which she,
as idoru, is the epiphenomenon — comes across as a musical performance. Gibson seems
to understand in a particularly perspicacious manner that reality in its entirety, and in
detail, can ‘present’, or manifest itself in digital format. It is like a parallel universe, and
what is more, just like Lacan’s ‘real’ (which surpasses symbolic representation), it has
concrete effects in everyday social reality (Lacan 1997: 20). This is what the Chinese-
Irish pop singer in the story, Rez (member of the group, Lo/Rez), understands better than
everyone else in his entourage, who are all trying their level best to dissuade him from
‘marrying’ the idoru, for obvious reasons. How does one marry a virtual creation,
anyway? But Rez and Rei Toei understand it. Commenting on Rei Toei’s ontological
mode, Rez tells Laney (Gibson 1996: 202):