Cayce Pollard is an expensive, spookily intuitive market-research consultant. In London on a job, she is offered a secret assignment: to investigate some intriguing snippets of video that have been appearing on the Internet. An entire subculture of people is obsessed with these bits of footage, and anybody who can create that kind of brand loyalty would be a gold mine for Cayce's client. But when her borrowed apartment is burgled and her computer hacked, she realizes there's more to this project than she had expected.
And right now there are three people in Chat, but there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. The hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counter-purposes, deter her.
He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots
William Gibson is a father of cyberpunk (in it's true, "punk" sense) This book is sort of that - a cyberpunk with "modern", not a flashy neon sci-fi, but a book about how virtuality is now as real as the physical world. And also one of my favorite books of all times. The entire "Bigend" trilogy is nice, too.