"Johnny Mnemonic" by William Gibson - Summary

Johnny packs a gun that he made bullets for himself into a bag. He tries to get to the Drome without being seen. He is trying to get close to Ralfi Face without the latter noticing. Ralfi has been evading Johnny, because the former owes Johnny money for a service Johnny provides- storing information he has no access to, retrievable only by Ralfi. Johnny heard that Ralfi hired a hitman to kill him so he changed his appearance and arranged a meeting with him under the pseudonym Edward Bax.

Johnny, with his altered appearance, manages to sit next to Ralfi and his security guard. Ralfi recognizes Johnny and notices the gun. He triggers a neural disruptor which paralyzes Johnny. Ralfi reveals that the information stored in Johnny's brain he bought from someone who stole it from the Yakuza, a dangerous gang. Johnny understands that Ralfi is trying to kill him to end his involvement with the Yakuza. There are programs, called Squids, which can hack the brains of idiot savants, even after the information has been removed. This is why Johnny cannot be left alive.

Molly Millions, pretending to deal drugs, injures Ralfi and steals the neural disruptor from the security guard. She wants to sell Ralfi the stolen merchandise back. United against Ralfi, Molly and Johnny kidnap Ralfi but before they get far Ralfi is killed by a Yakuza agent who was mostly made in a factory, and Johnny is saved by luck. Molly says she will kill him- she, too, was mostly made in a factory.

Johnny and Molly go to Nighttown, which is populated by Lo Teks, people who reject technology, to hide from the Yakuza. Molly takes Johnny to her friend Jones, a junkie cyborg dolphin who was a squid in the last war. He is residing in a tank in an abandoned amusement park, and can communicate only through creating images from differently colored lightbulbs. They give Jones drugs and in return he reveals the password.

Afterwards Molly speaks the password. Johnny transitions to idiot-savant mode and speaks the stolen program for three hours. They pay a pirate to send the Yakuza a message: " Call off the dogs or we wideband your program". They send the program via snailmail to an address in Sydney for safekeeping.

Then they go to what used to be a mall. It is in disrepair and covered entirely in graffiti. They meet Dog, who lacks an eye and has Doberman canine implants. From Molly and Dog's conversation Johnny realizes that the assassin is tracking them. Dog leads them to the Killing Floor, an eight by eight meter floor of wood, assembled over generations. The assassin appears at the edge of the floor. He approaches Johnny, and then Molly. His prediction of the motion of the rickety floor is perfect. Molly begins to dance, her dancing stunning the assassin into disbelief. He miscalculates the movements of the floor and she defeats him.

Johnny decides to stay in Nighttown. He doesn't know whether the Yakuza accepted his terms, but no-one else has come looking for him. He and Molly and Jones partner up, to retrieve traces of information stored in Johnny by Johnny's former clients in order to blackmail them. He intends to one day remove the alterations made to his brain to reverse his idiot savant status and "live with my own memories and nobody else's, the way other people do. But not for a while."

William Gibson. Image source