Mona Lisa Overdrive

The third and final novel in William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, following Neuromancer and Count Zero, weaves four storylines across London, New Jersey, Malibu, and Florida before drawing them together at an abandoned factory on a toxic landfill.

Kumiko Yanaka, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a powerful Yakuza boss in Tokyo, is sent to London after her mother's suicide and amid a gang war. Her father gives her a Maas-Neotek biochip unit that projects a holographic guide named Colin, a ghostly English boy visible only to her. She is installed in the Notting Hill home of Roger Swain, her father's kobun, or obligated associate. There she meets a woman calling herself Sally Shears, a mercenary and fellow guest with frameless silver mirror lenses implanted in her face. Sally reveals Kumiko was sent away because the war makes her a target, then hires Tick, a data thief, to monitor Swain's communications, suspecting someone is coercing them both. At Colin's suggestion, Kumiko hides the biochip unit in recording mode downstairs.

On Dog Solitude, a toxic landfill in New Jersey, Slick Henry and his companion Little Bird work on kinetic sculptures inside an abandoned building called Factory. Kid Afrika, to whom Slick owes a life-debt, arrives with Cherry Chesterfield, a young med-tech. His hover carries a comatose man on a stretcher, connected to tubes and a mysterious flat gray device linked by cable to a trode-net, an electrode mesh, on his head. Kid Afrika asks Slick to house them for several weeks. Cherry explains the man is paying to be kept in this neurally jacked-in state and hidden.

Angela Mitchell, the world's most famous simstim star—simstim allows audiences to experience a performer's sensory input directly—is alone at her Malibu beach house after leaving drug rehabilitation early. Angie works for the entertainment megacorporation Sense/Net. Her addiction was to a designer substance that dulled her feelings. Walking the beach, she is seized by a vision: Mamman Brigitte, a loa, or spirit, of Haitian vodou, warns that enemies are plotting against her. Years earlier, Angie's father, biochip researcher Christopher Mitchell, drew vévés, or neural patterns, into her brain; Brigitte warns these patterns have been altered by a coup-poudre, a poison. Angie finds a hidden supply of the drug and destroys it.

Mona, a sixteen-year-old unregistered streetgirl and prostitute in Florida, lives with Eddy, her pimp. Eddy tells her a talent scout from London wants an "actress" and has paid him two thousand dollars. They leave the next day.

Colin's hidden recordings reveal that Swain and Sally are both being coerced by an unseen party with comprehensive blackmail material. Swain discloses a directive: the planned abduction of a celebrity must look like a killing. At Factory, Slick's housemate Gentry, who is obsessively convinced cyberspace possesses a total form he calls "the Shape," splices the gray device into his equipment. When he activates it, a violent image lunges from the display. Gentry identifies the comatose man as Robert Newmark, a cyberspace operator, and recognizes the device as an aleph: a biochip storage unit of virtually infinite capacity containing a self-enclosed universe of data.

Angie investigates her dreams using Continuity, Sense/Net's expert AI. She researches the Tessier-Ashpool dynasty, who built the orbital habitat Freeside, watching a documentary that traces their history of cloning, murder, and isolation. She recognizes 3Jane, the last Tessier-Ashpool heir, from her nightly visions.

Mona and Eddy arrive in New York with Prior, the London operative who recruited them, who installs her in a hotel room stocked with Angie Mitchell simstim recordings. A cosmetic surgeon named Gerald then alters Mona's nose, teeth, eye coloration, and figure to closely resemble Angie. When Mona spots Eddy's distinctive luggage moving through the hotel lobby unattended, she concludes he has been killed. She conceals a shockrod and waits.

Sally escorts Kumiko to New York and then to an alley in the Sprawl—the vast urban conglomeration stretching along the American East Coast—where they consult the Finn: a dead information broker whose personality was preserved as a construct inside an armored street shrine. The Finn confirms that 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool is responsible for the blackmail plot—her construct survives within the aleph, her vast data files providing the coercive material used against Sally and Swain. 3Jane wants Sally delivered alongside Angie as part of her scheme. Petal, Swain's personal aide, retrieves Kumiko and returns her to Swain's London house. Meanwhile, Slick enters the aleph a second time with Gentry and discovers that the comatose man is Bobby Newmark, Angie's former partner and lover, who has been living inside the aleph and mapping the event cyberspace operators call "When It Changed." Bobby explains that the Tessier-Ashpool family's paired artificial intelligences merged and dissolved into the global matrix—the worldwide computer network—fragmenting when they encountered something else.

Kumiko escapes Swain's house a second time, makes her way to Brixton, and finds Tick. Together they access the aleph through his equipment and are seized by 3Jane's construct, which uses Kumiko's memories to impersonate her dead mother. Colin, whose dormant programming contains a tactical intelligence installed by Kumiko's father, defeats 3Jane's attack and extracts them. Kumiko phones Sally to warn her that 3Jane intends to take her alongside Angie. Sally then breaks into Gerald's clinic, assaults Prior, and departs with Mona. She abducts Angie from a Sense/Net helicopter on the roof of her New York hotel and drives south through New Jersey to Factory with both women. On the way, Mamman Brigitte and the other loa speak through Angie, revealing that the drug contained nanomechanisms programmed to restructure the vévés in her brain—a scheme originating with Continuity, acting through the corporation's executives to suppress Angie's connection to the loa and make her controllable.

At Factory, mercenaries hired through 3Jane's agents launch an assault. Slick's kinetic sculptures—including a massive headless figure called the Judge—defend the building, and Bobby remotely hijacks a cargo drone that destroys a second attack vehicle. Little Bird is killed in the fighting. Angie enters a final trance in which the loa reveal their origin: when the matrix achieved sentience, it simultaneously perceived a second sentience from elsewhere in the universe, and the shock of that contact shattered the unified matrix-mind into the fragments that became the loa. Angie then reaches Bobby within the aleph, and her body dies as her consciousness joins his inside it—the marriage the loa had foretold.

In the aftermath, Sense/Net arrives. Mona is taken into the corporation's care, rehabilitated from stimulant addiction, and launched as a new simstim star. Robin Lanier, Angie's simstim co-star, who conspired with 3Jane against Angie, is found strangled. Sally walks away across the Solitude, the Judge sculpture clumping alongside her with the aleph strapped to its back and solar cells rigged to sustain its power. Kumiko returns to London under Petal's care—Petal now revealed as her father's new London representative. Inside the aleph, Angie and Bobby inhabit an eternal country estate, visited by the Finn's construct and a chastened 3Jane. The novel closes as Bobby and the Finn drive Angie toward a final destination: when the matrix became sentient it encountered another intelligence—one originating in the Centauri system—and that ongoing encounter is what truly explains the Change.