Defining Cyberpunk
Cyberchrist and the God in the Machine
This notion becomes more valid when one considers the possibility that the cyberpunk "creates for himself a new religion of a rational and technical order" (Ellul 324). In the absence of faith in a higher power, the characters in cyberpunk fiction tend to place their beliefs in the machines around them, deifying them. Even Norbert Wiener, in God and Golem, makes technology a god when he says to "render unto the computer the things which are the computer's" (73). Paraphrasing a passage from the bible (Matthew 22: 21), Wiener's statement replaces the word "God" with the word computer. Cyberpunk characters would, I feel, take this statement much more seriously than we might. For them, the computer is a new divinity of sorts.
I cannot help but be reminded of an anecdote, popular among self-proclaimed cyberpunks on the Internet, about a visit President Truman paid to a computer laboratory. Truman asks the computer if there is a God. After a few minutes of whirring and calculating, the computer spits out the answer - Now There Is. The suggestion, obviously, is that the computer itself is now God. Such a meeting might be entirely fictional. However, cyberpunk fiction takes this notion of faith in a machine and raises it to a far greater degree, to the point where machines and computers eventually become new divinities. The greatest of these "higher powers" are probably the AI's, or artificial intelligences. Constructed in the real world by scientists to test cognitive theories, AI's become something much more than mere tools in cyberpunk fiction. Any computer scientist will tell you that artificial intelligence of the sort seen in Star Trek, for instance, is decades away. To create an intelligent creature like Data, an android in that series, is impossible using current technology. Today's AI's are, to put it bluntly, dumb. The AI's of cyberpunk fiction, however, are quite intelligent.
Gibson's character Wintermute, for example, is an AI who goes far beyond the limits of a mere tool, being a "hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside..." (Neuromancer 269). This AI is able to transform itself at the end of Neuromancer and become even more powerful, more godlike. Here, in the closing moments of Gibson's novel, Wintermute speaks to Case:
"I'm not Wintermute now...I'm the matrix, Case...Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works, the whole show...
"So what's the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?" (269-70)
Wintermute becomes one with all of cyberspace by joining with several other AI's in the system. Cyberspace becomes a virtual heaven, and this union becomes the cyberpunk version of godhood. What we are presented with, in essence, is a dual race for transcendence, for even "...as Case tries to transcend his human limits, so too the machine intelligences strive to pass beyond their material restrictions and develop human qualities of consciousness and personality" (Easterbrook 383). In the end, the machines go beyond that step, moving beyond the realm of consciousness into the realm of pure transcendence and union with the universe. In the concluding novel of his sprawl trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gibson expands on his idea of the "god in the net" through a conversation between Mona and her computer:
"The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes. One mode assumes that the cyberspace is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by entities whose characteristics correspond with the primary mythform of a 'hidden people'. The other involves assumptions of omniscience, omnipotence, and incomprehensibility on the part of the matrix itself."This relation between matrix and God descends to the "human" world as well. These AI's are commonly seen as using human agents to do their wills: Gibson's "legba," mythical figures incarnated in the matrix, typically "ride" their human subjects, taking possession of this "priesthood" (Count Zero 78); Williams gives one of his AI's named Reno the ability to attack an enemy through a cyberspace deck and "write himself over" their minds (Hardwired 343); the lead character in The Lawnmower Man can even operate machinery and dial phones from cyberspace.
"Then the matrix is God?" (107)
This last example is different from the others, but hardly unique; in the film, the main character, named Job, has his consciousness thrust into cyberspace. To begin with, however, he is merely human, and after being introduced to the world of cyberspace, he becomes addicted to it, and worships its power. The electronic world he is shown gives him powers he did not have in the "real" world, and he goes so far as to destroy his body and exist solely as an AI in the 'net. Bukatman suggests that "The disembodied fusion with the fields and arrays of electronic space [is a] manifestation of...transcendence" (354). Indeed, once there, Job dubs himself "Cyberchrist," declaring his godhood and transcendence over his human form.
Throughout cyberpunk fiction, we see characters engage in a cycle of worshipping technology, using that technology to attain some sort of divinity, and then desiring worship in some form. Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired provides a vivid example of such thinking:
The coming thing, Cowboy thinks. Live forever in a bodily incarnation of the eye-face [cyberspace], not limited to the speed of artificially enhanced neurotransmitters but approaching the speed of light, extending the limits of the interface, the universe. Brain contained in a perfect liquid-crystal analog. Nerves like the strings of a steel guitar. Heart a spinning turbopump. The Steel Cowboy, his body a screaming monochrome flicker, dispensing justice and righting wrongs. Who was that masked AI?...To transcend the limits of his human body, Cowboy desires to become an AI, to achieve a sort of godhood and immortality. It is interesting that this line of thinking almost directly coincides with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Compare the following, taken from The Gay Science, with the previous quote from Hardwired:
To Cowboy, it sounds pretty good. (130)
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?...Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us - for the sake of this deed he will be a part of a higher history than all history... (95-6)With God dead in the cyberpunk world, some characters take it upon themselves to use technology as a means to achieve divinity for themselves. In some cases, as in Cowboy's, this is a more spiritual or mental godhood, achieved in electronic form in the "I-face"," Hardwired's version of cyberspace. This "godhood" need not be achieved through cyberspace, however - in some cases, the union is quite physical. It always involves a union with man and machine, however, as in Russo's Destroying Angel:
Wings of shining feathers lifted and spread out behind him. He wore no clothes, and as far as Sookie could see he didn't need any. Both legs were metal, up to his waist, and there was nothing between them. Sexless. His body was a crisscross of metal and flesh...Moving beyond the mere use of cybernetics to enhance the human body, this character and others in cyberpunk fiction use the enhancements as an opportunity to achieve a sort of godhood, becoming "cyberchrists" or, in the case of the evil Destroying Angel, a sort of "silicon Satan," who sees himself as divine and righteous even as he commits base atrocities.
"I am...Destroying Angel," he said. The wings flexed...
"This is the future...Man's future. The fusion of metal to flesh, flesh to metal. The organic with the inorganic. Man with Machine." (204)
The idea of self-created divinities in cyberpunk fiction makes one wonder about the nature of this "godhood". Some characters, as in Destroying Angel, may actually consider themselves godlike - characters who use cybernetics often see themselves as superhuman, transcending the human form. More recent cyberpunk works take this quest for godhood to a greater degree; they often try to achieve actual divinity through the use of this technology, complete with worshippers (as seen in The Lawnmower Man). Filled with electronic gods, cyberspace becomes a virtual "heaven," a world of organized lines and lights where the gods, the AI's, dwell in their virtual palaces. In Gibson's Count Zero, for example, a character known as "the Wig" had
...become convinced that God lived in cyberspace, or perhaps that cyberspace was God, or some new manifestation of the same...To the man's credit, the Finn said, he never actually claimed to have met God, although he did maintain that he had on several occasions sensed His presence moving upon the face of the grid. (122)"The Wig," a minor character, is but one of the people who believes that cyberspace is a path towards heaven. The Wig even decides that he must "get up the gravity well, [because] God's up there" (122). Though the Wig is assumed to be crazy, he obviously isn't the only one of Gibson's characters to have thought of cyberspace as heaven, and of AI's as gods, as I've shown earlier.
If we accept that cyberspace is an approximation of heaven, then where exactly are the cyberpunk characters standing as they reach for heaven? The Wig tells us that God is "everywhere but there's too much static down here, it obscures his face" (122); God is distant. If God is in heaven above, it should not surprise us to find the cyberpunk characters in hell. The real world, as I've shown earlier, is a very real hell, full of degradation, sin, and crime. This dichotomy between the physical world of hell and the heavenly world of cyberspace is present throughout cyberpunk fiction; cyberpunk characters all desire entry into cyberspace, or an escape off-planet, out of a hellish, fiery landscape. Trapped in a physical hell, is it any wonder that a cyberpunk character should try to escape from hell, or to at least make his condition more tolerable? It is easy to say that a world is a hellish place, or that "war is hell," but such things are usually meant to be taken figuratively. In cyberpunk fiction, I feel that the word "hell" is a quite literal concept, when one views it from the proper perspective. Consider the words of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost:
The mind is its own place, and in itselfThis statement is, of course, paradoxical: Satan would "reign in hell," but that hell is in his "mind"; does he really rule anything? For Satan, perhaps not; Milton didn't know about cyberspace, after all. Is not the cyberspace of science fiction a way of making a place in the mind, a way of creating a virtual heaven in the wake of a very real hell? Is it not better to be more powerful in the cyberpunk world, where one can be a leader, rather than to serve useless gods and corporations? Both ideas are present in cyberpunk fiction, and both can exist without paradox, since the cyberpunk world has both a physical hell and a virtual cyberspace heaven. Cyberpunks can create a heaven in their own minds while also living in the hell that is the real world, thus echoing Satan's words in each of their actions (though they may not even realize it). Cyberpunks can become gods of cyberspace in a godless world, reigning over their hells. They use cybernetics to become more physically powerful, achieving a superhuman status that aids them in their reign. They construct their own artificial "heav'n" in cyberspace, often compared to a "parallel myth world" (McHale 156). Given a nihilistic world populated with lowlifes, and bereft of both morals and gods, cyberpunk characters strive to create something new for themselves rather than settling for hopelessness and godlessness.
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same...
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n. (PL I:254-263)