Count Zero

Marly Krushkhova, a disgraced Paris art dealer, serves as one of the novel’s three protagonists. Her story begins at her lowest point, when she has been emotionally and financially devastated by her lover, Alain, who involved her in an art forgery scandal. Now, her professional reputation is ruined and her financial situation is precarious enough that she is forced to rely on her friend, Andrea, for housing. Her intense despair makes her the perfect candidate for the manipulations of the enigmatic billionaire, Josef Virek, who hires her to find the creator of a series of mysterious, Cornell-like boxes. Marly embarks upon a journey of rediscovery, both of her own intuition and of the very nature of art in this technologically saturated world. Over the course of the novel, she becomes an active agent who challenges the immense power of her employer and learns what it means for art to be authentic.

Initially, Marly is overwhelmed by the influence of Virek’s wealth. After being cast into poverty and precarity, she is suddenly given near-limitless funds and becomes an instrument of Virek’s obsessive quest. His wealth is seductive for the disenfranchised Marly, but her core strength is her innate artistic sensitivity: the very quality that Virek seeks to exploit. Unlike Virek, who views the boxes as a technological key to immortality, Marly connects with them on a deeply emotional level. This intuition guides her as she confronts traditional notions of creativity. She also succeeds at Redefining Art and Artistry in the Digital Age when she closes in on the non-human artist, a machine that paradoxically creates something so fundamentally human that it captivates and enchants her.

Marly’s gradually gains an awareness of the true nature of Virek’s control and responds by asserting her own will. The process of breaking free from Alain empowers her, but her true test comes when she discovers the boxmaker’s identity. Realizing that the artist is a fragmented AI, she makes a conscious choice to align herself with the strange guardians of the artist, defying Virek’s attempt to commodify this unique form of creativity. She therefore reclaims her moral compass and finds a new purpose, transcending her initial role as a pawn in a billionaire’s game.

Bobby Newmark, the third of the novel’s protagonists, is a young, naïve cyberspace “cowboy” from the bleak suburbs of Barrytown. Dubbing himself Count Zero, he is an ambitious but unskilled initiate who plunges into the world of hacking. Although he wants to escape his grim reality by making a name for himself in the matrix, he lacks a true understanding of the dangers involved. His first attempted hack results in a near-fatal encounter with black ice, a lethal security program. His miraculous survival, facilitated by a mysterious entity he perceives as a girl, initiates him into the hidden, mythic dimension of cyberspace, showing him the true dangers of the world he believed to be his escape from poverty. This event propels him into the complex world of Vodou practitioners, Beauvoir and Lucas, who become his mentors.

Given his inexperience, Bobby also serves as the audience’s surrogate; the audience learns alongside Bobby that the matrix is more than just a global information network. Beauvoir and Lucas interpret the strange phenomena of cyberspace through the lens of their faith, revealing that powerful, emergent artificial intelligences have manifested as the loa, or spirits, of Vodou. This revelation is central to The Synthesis of Myth and Technology in Cyberspace, reframing the digital world as a new pantheon for non-human gods. Cyberspace, Bobby discovers, is an actual, tangible space that can be as incomprehensible and as precarious as the real world.

Bobby is soon transformed by his experiences. Initially dogged by his perpetual mistakes, he ultimately gains a deeper understanding of the forces that shape his world. The possible murder of his mother by corporate agents and his direct interactions with the loa force him to mature rapidly and find his place within a new spiritual and technological reality. With his acceptance of Beauvoir’s offer to live in the Projects, he relinquishes his shallow ambitions and becomes a participant in a strange new world order, where faith and code have become inextricably intertwined.

Josef Virek is the primary antagonist of the novel. He is an astronomically wealthy industrialist whose body is dying, so his body is sustained within a massive life-support vat in Stockholm while his consciousness exists in the form of digital projections and simulations. This decaying physical state makes him a symbol of technological transcendence gone wrong, and he is essentially a disembodied and inhuman form of power that seeks to defy the traditional bondage of mortality. Virek tells Marly that he has “been confined for over a decade to a vat” (16), suggesting that this form of existence has become a prison from which he seeks to escape. However, although he is physically immobile, he exerts global influence via a vast network of agents and hyper-advanced technologies, such as the sensory-link construct that he uses to meet Marly. His motivations are complex, yet they do not change. His single-minded goal is to escape his biological prison and achieve true immortality by transferring his consciousness into a new, potentially digital, form: A feat that is possible due to the emergent yet inscrutable technologies that he seeks to control.

Driven by this desire, Virek’s interest in the mysterious art boxes is purely utilitarian. Unlike Marly, Virek has no interest in the boxes as pieces of art. Like the simulated park in Barcelona, they are mere aesthetic representations of a broader, technological demonstration of his power and influence. In essence, Virek believes that the non-human artist who creates the boxes holds the technological key to his transcendence. This ambition represents the ultimate expression of The Corporate Commodification of Identity, wherein the self is a data set to be migrated, and art is merely a tool for achieving it. Even his wealth has become an “autonomous process” (18) that alienates him from humanity, a fact that Marly recognizes as an “instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human” (20). Intent on his quest to achieve a form of corporatized godhood, Virek is willing to manipulate, corrupt, or destroy anyone to achieve this goal. And just as he seeks to overcome the laws of the cosmos, his eventual destruction is the result of cosmic forces within the matrix that he so desperately sought to master. In the end, Virek is ultimately destroyed by the same technology he sought to tame. His fate is a consequence of his hubris, as he respected neither the technology nor the humans enough to comprehend how either might defy him.

Angela “Angie” Mitchell is the critical character who connects the novel’s three disparate plotlines. The daughter of brilliant biochip scientist Christopher Mitchell, she is extracted from Maas by Turner, who was expecting to extract her father. As the characters soon discover, Angie is a living piece of unique technology. Her father implanted a biochip matrix in her brain as a child, which has made her a direct interface for the emergent artificial intelligences of cyberspace. This makes her both the object of intense corporate desire and a vessel for a new form of consciousness, but the novel also presents her as a naïve, scared teenage girl. Angie’s arc is one of discovery, as she moves from being a pawn in a corporate war to understanding her unique and powerful role in a changing world. In the end, she also navigates the fundamentally human fears that such dramatic events invoke.

Angie embodies the novel’s synthesis of the biological and the digital. The device in her head allows the AIs, or loa, to manifest through her, particularly during moments of stress. She becomes a “horse” for these digital spirits, a means of transportation from the digital to the organic worlds. Angie speaks in tongues and accesses knowledge she does not consciously possess, bridging the divide between the real world and cyberspace on an almost unconscious level. This phenomenon blurs the lines between a medical condition, a spiritual possession, and a form of jacking into a cyberspace deck. Through her, Bobby is saved from black ice, and the loa also use her to communicate their intentions to Turner. She is an oracle for the new digital pantheon, a physical link between the human world and the evolving consciousness of the matrix. Whereas Virek believed himself to be the transcendent embodiment of a new type of humanity, Angie emerges as this transcendence in its true form.

Conroy is a high-level corporate operative and a secondary antagonist. He serves as Turner’s initial handler and as a direct foil to him. With his dead-white skin, bleached hair, and emotionally flat voice, Conroy is the embodiment of the amoral, robotic corporate agent, entirely devoid of loyalty or conscience beyond the immediate demands of his contract. Where Turner struggles with trauma and a desire for authenticity, Conroy is ruthlessly pragmatic. His mechanical reasoning is devoid of the humanity which Turner comes to desire. Conroy’s decision to betray his employer, Hosaka, and work for Virek is a simple business calculation, rather than a moral quandary. As a flat, static character, Conroy represents the professional endgame for a mercenary like Turner: a man who has become nothing more than a function of the system he serves. His death is fittingly impersonal, a casualty of the very corporate wars he perpetuates. Ultimately, Conroy serves as a warning to Turner of the fate he might suffer if he were to accept the inhumane morality of the corporate world.

Beauvoir and Lucas are Vodou priests, or oungans, who operate in the Projects and serve as mentors to Bobby Newmark. They are the primary interpreters of the novel’s mystical events, providing a spiritual framework for the technological phenomena occurring in cyberspace. They see the emergent AIs not as rogue programs but as the loa, or spirits of Vodou, who are seeking a new domain. Beauvoir explains their faith as a practical system for navigating a world of powerful, unseen forces, telling Bobby, “What it’s about is getting things done” (98). They are both guides and powerful operators in their own right, equally comfortable in the worlds of street technology and ancient belief. Their worldview guides Bobby toward a greater understanding of the new reality he has stumbled into.

Paco is a key agent of Josef Virek and serves as Marly’s enigmatic handler. His ability to appear in various guises—from a young boy in a sensory simulation to a waiter or a bellman in the real world—highlights the invasive, omnipresent nature of Virek’s surveillance network. Though Paco can be charming and demonstrates a dry wit, he is ultimately the human face of an inhuman corporate machine. He executes his employer’s will with detached professionalism, whether that involves providing Marly with millions in cash or threatening to depressurize a space station. His final, dispassionate message to Marly after Virek’s death confirms his role as a functionary whose loyalty is to the system itself, not to the man who created it.