William Gibson has been staring over my shoulder since '84. There's a passage in Neuromancer about Ting Ting Jahes that I happened to be reading while enjoying my last packet of bought-on-a-special-roadtrip-to-the-only-asian-market-in-New-Mexico Ting Ting Jahes. I was single-digit age and there that fucker was, plucking my psyche.

All the stuff in Pattern Recognition and all the stuff in Spook Country is close enough to count. It's fair to say that Bigend is Gibson's alter ego; his is a career of break bulk, of exploring the non-packetized information at all costs in a subsidized Blue Ant dream. I recognize all of it and have interacted with it quite closely; I had a ZX-80 and have held Curtas (without being able to afford them). A Klein blue jacket? Obviously that appeals (and my experience with the color is contemporaneous with the publishing of Pattern Recognition).

I had a Lyft driver who was one of the marines tasked with guarding the pallets of cash that got shipped to Iraq. Fifteen years later it still haunted him. There wasn't a day in his life he didn't work through the opportunities he had to disappear with a 23lb duffel full of Benjamins.