Count Zero

In Count Zero, the loa represent the way in which traditional mythologies are repurposed for the cyberspace age. When Bobby is first introduced to the Vodou mythology, he is taken aback. He aspires to be a hacker, so he is only versed in the technical jargon of contemporary computing. When people begin to talk to him about figures from the Vodou pantheon, he feels completely lost. Yet his sense of estrangement and dislocation serves as a narrative device that allows Gibson to engage in a deeper explanation of how he has chosen to deploy such mythology. Beauvoir and Lucas are well-versed in Vodou traditions due to their ancestry. They have continued their forebears’ religion, having been educated from a young age to understand the significance of figures such as Baron Samedi. To them, the new and emergent figures in the matrix appear as manifestations of Vodou tradition, and they deliberately use their old mythology to explain the manifestation of AI entities in the cybernetic world. To them, such entities are quasi-mythological in a technical sense, so Beauvoir and Lucas feel at home expressing their understanding of such entities in mythological terms.

The Vodou religion and the loa function as a framework of understanding, a way in which these characters can comprehend phenomena that take on the trappings of the supernatural. Bobby’s initial wariness of the loa reflects the fact that he does not share his new companions’ grounding in the Vodou religion. Yet as the novel unfolds, his growing familiarity with the loa and the mythological framework of Vodou as a whole represents the intersection between the supernatural and the technological. These old structures of understanding are brought into the technological present, like old technology repurposed for a new use.

Though the novel makes use of the loa as the dominant framework of understanding for technological apparitions in the matrix, the novel does not endorse the Vodou religion as being inherently true. Instead, Bobby meets with various characters who have developed similar means of understanding which are rooted in their own respective cultures. When he explains what has happened to the Finn, for example, the Finn begins to talk of ghosts in the matrix. The Finn does not know about the loa, so he latches onto the first cultural archetype which comes to mind: ghosts. This framework of the supernatural feels more comfortable to him and helps him to understand what is happening, as well as helping him to explain this concept to Bobby. Importantly, the Finn’s Eurocentric mythological framework does not necessarily contradict the existence of the Vodou entities. Instead, the loa represent a different expression of the same human desire to comprehend and understand the strange and the supernatural. Religion is being repurposed from first principles in the matrix, as old ideas are being reused to explain new phenomena. Rather than endorsing any specific mythology or religion, the commonality of supernatural traditions blended with technical jargon represents the blending of old cultures with the new technologies.

While the characters use Vodou to contextualize and explain the entities in the matrix, the conversation is not unidirectional. The entities understand the way in which they are being discussed; they speak of the appearance of figures such as Baron Samedi, which manifest as comprehensible and established figures from the human past to make themselves known to the humans. This dynamic represents a dialogue between artificial intelligence and human culture, in which the emergent AIs deliberately present themselves as figures from familiar mythologies so as to convey meaning to the humans in front of them. This symbolic dialogue illustrates the complexity of the artificial intelligence and of the matrix itself.