What if Windows 10 Doesn't Support Tragically Flawed Women?

William Gibson’s The Winter Market tackles the concept of immortality and the relationship to one’s body. The story focuses on a girl, Lise, and her talent for creating dreams and experiences that can be processed and distributed to other people for consumption. Lise is a drug addict and relies on an exoskeleton to move because of a progressive disease. She also has a cutthroat attitude and an obsession with being famous. When she is discovered by the main character, Casey, she becomes a start and is eventually given the opportunity to upload herself onto a computer, leaving her old decaying body behind. However, Casey struggles with whether the new computer version of Lise is really her or just a program.

                Lise is a supreme example of the tough, technologically modified, leading lady in a steam punk or cyberpunk story. She seems almost all powerful and Casey’s description of her functions as our tour through the strange futuristic world they inhabit. A world where what makes a person a person is beginning to be questioned. Casey is the editor of Lise’s dreams and function much like a music producer. Her makes her dreams palatable and easily distributable to a wide audience. He becomes so attached to her that he is distraught when she gives herself over to the computer is effectively “dies”. However, is he really gone? He is still expected to edit and release the dreams she produces from the computer. His life remains sort of unchanged. The death of his artist does not put him out of a job.

                I really enjoyed this story and its commentary on humanity in a future where people are becoming less and less human and more computer. Lise is a human at the start of the story but uses cybernetic enhancements to live. She even describes the suffocating feeling she gets when she takes off her exoskeleton. For her, becoming totally computer may not be a huge leap. I don’t think I could ever upload myself to a computer and expect the computer to actually BE the real me. But for someone who is almost all computer already, that may not be as hard of a decision to make.