| Sumario: | William Gibson's "All Tomorrow's Parties" (1999), a novel completing the Bridge sequence that includes "Virtual Light" (1993) and "Idoru" (1996), provides the opportunity to break a pervasive silence by critically engaging Gibson's post-"Neuromancer" fiction. This essay demonstrates that Gibson's complex Bridge sequence explores such notions as simulation, virtuality, presence, and pattern, tracking their impact upon the ongoing emergence of the post/human. Contrasts between the digital celebrity of Rei Toei and such corporate icons as "Slitscan," rock-star Rez, mogul Cody Harwood, and contemporary digital celebrities Kyoko Date and Lara Croft establish and define the dichotomies of presence/pattern and simulation/virtuality that are foundational to Gibson's work. Through such terminologies, Gibson charts the evolution of the digital figure into the post/human, a growth from simulation to virtuality that simultaneously disrupts the presence/pattern dialectic. The corporeal emergence of Rei Toei that concludes "All Tomorrow's Parties" is a post/human figuration of information theory, the complexity of the digital pattern enwrapped in the presence of analogue flesh. Enabling this post/human emergence, however, is the importance Gibson places upon the digital Walled City of "Idoru" and the San Francisco Bay Bridge of "Virtual Light" and "All Tomorrow's Parties." These interstitial locales are further embodiments of information theory whereby the randomness and complexity of Toei's post/humanity is projected on a larger communal scale. At the same time, Gibson wages a conflict between the molecular (Walled City; the Bridge) and the molar (multinational corporations; DatAmerica), the independence of the former struggling against the homogeneity of the latter. As a whole, Gibson's recent sequence positions the molecular as central to ushering in new potentialities, manifest as the post/human emergence of Toei and/or the foundation of autonomous communities.
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