Bolded words are links to definitions. Sentences with two stars are links to other documents from class. Regular sentences are merely commentary. One star is a link to an image. Three stars is a link to a video.


The music woke him, and at first it might have been the beat of his own heart.

***This sentence relates music to a heart beat, something tangible and alive in the coded purgatory where Case is stranded. The music becomes a part of Case's being, a driving force of his existence, like a heartbeat.

Woke implies sleep, it also suggests a time of day: morning.

He sat up beside her, pulling his jacket over his shoulders in the predawn chill, gray light from the doorway and the fire long dead.

The time is confirmed as early morning.

Even in virtual reality there are still needs, Case must shield himself from the cold with his jacket. If he can feel it, is it real?

The presence of a doorway suggests that they are in a room, a enclosed space of some sort. Is cyber(space) infinite? Does Case's universe have borders?

Why is the light gray? Overcast skies?

Even the fire is not really alive in this virtual reality dessert.

His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall.

**An imperfection in the interface, it's not quite reality. What is the interface?

bunker:

Ghosts are neither living nor dead, much like everything else in Case's cyberspace world.

hieroglyph:

His vision crawls like a baby (good) or a snake (bad)?

***There is a sense of disjoint from reality and suspense. What are the symbols? What is reality?

Like hieroglyphs, the symbols are merely imitations of what they represent.

He looked at the back of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable code.

Even people can be reduced to code, capable of being disintegrated into the molecules that make us up.

The code behind everything is unknowable, something we can only strive to understand.

He raised his right finger and moved it experimentally.

More uncertainty, Case is unsure of some aspect of the relationship between him telling his finger to move and it moving, it is something that must be done experimentally.

It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages.

**Like the Matrix.

The hair stood along his arms and at the back of his neck.

Case's hair standing on end might imply he is frightened (or maybe just cold?).
Either way it is an reflex of our bodies, is it caused by Case or is the code causing his hair to stand up.

He crouched there with his teeth bared and felt for the music.

**Case is like an animal, crouching and baring his teeth ready to attack. A combination of animal and machine.

The music is something Case feels, not hears (because it is a part of him (a heartbeat)).

The pulse faded, returned, faded....

Is it there or not? (further heightens the mood of suspense and mystery).

The ellipses imply that this process continues...

"What's wrong?" She sat up, clawing hair from her eyes. "Baby..."

She can sense a problem in Case without him saying anything.

She too is an animal which claws rather than brushes and swipes.

"I feel... like a drug... You get that here?"

More examples of needs within cyberspace.

She shook her head, reached for him, her hands on his upper arms.

Reach:

"Linda, who told you? Who told you I'd come? Who?"

More questions, more suspense.

"On the beach," she said something forcing her to look away. "A boy I see him on the beach. Maybe thirteen. He lives here."

A child who lives alone in this place?

A beach, a meeting of two opposites, water and land, life and death.

"And what did he say?"

More questions, no satisfying answers.

"He said you'd come. He said you wouldn't hate me. He said we'd be okay here, and he told me where the rain pool was. He looks Mexican."
"Brazilian," Case said, as a new wave of symbols washed down the wall.
"I think he's from RIo."

*Brazil
*Mexico

The figures wash down the wall in waves, cleansing it, purifying it, bringing life like water. They are pure.

How did Case know where the boy was from?

He got to his feet and began to struggle into his jeans.
"Case," she said, her voice shaking, "Case, where you goin'?"

She is scared of being alone in this empty place.

*Case is still having trouble with menial tasks: putting on his jeans.

*Case wears jeans like a real cowboy.

"I think I'll find that boy," he said, as the music came surging back, still only a beat, steady and familiar, although he couldn't place it in his memory.
"Don't, Case."

Memory is something which has faults, there is trouble accessing things that are stored, not like computer memory.

The music emerges as something to keep Case grounded in reality:, it is steady and familiar.

steady:

"I thought I saw something, when I got here. A city down the beach. But yesterday it wasn't there. You ever seen that?"
He yanked his zipper up and tore at the impossible knot in his shoelaces, finally tossing the shoes into the corner.

*Case needs some new clothes that aren't so much trouble to put on.

Why does the city disappear?

Case gives up on things he sees as too difficult.

She nodded, eyes lowered. "Yeah. I see it sometimes."
"You ever go there, Linda?" He put his jacket on.
"No," she said, "but I tried. After I first , an' I was bored. Anyway, I figured it's a city, maybe I could find some shit."

shit:

She grimaced. "I wasn't even sick, I just wanted it. So I took food in a can, mixed it real wet, because I didn't have another can for water. An' I all day, an' I could see it, sometimes, city, an' it didn't seem too far. But it never got any closer, an I saw what it was. Sometimes that day it had looked kinda like it was wrecked or nobody there, an' at other times I thought I'd see a light flashin' off a machine, cars or somethin'..."
Her voice trailed off.
"What is it?"

She is still subject to her body's limitations, even in cyberspace.

machine:
**machine:

***Why is the city wrecked?
*What happened to it?

Her voice trails off, like she is lost in thought.

"This thing," she gestured around at the fireplace, the walls, the dawn outlining the doorway, "where we live. It gets smaller, Case, closer you get to it."
Pausing one last time at the doorway. "You ask your boy about that?"
"Yeah. He said I wouldn't understand, an' I was wastin' my time. Said it was, was like...an event. An' it was our horizon. Event horizon, he called it."

Their world is a contradiction, things don't get smaller as you near them. This contradiction is possible only in cyberspace.

Event Horizon: