Count Zero

Count Zero is a science fiction novel by the American-Canadian writer William Gibson, published in 1986 and the second volume of the Sprawl trilogy, between Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

The book presents a near future in which a network of supercomputers has produced the matrix, a three-dimensional space that people enter through cyberspace, and in which the competition between a small number of very rich individuals and the multinational corporations they run has become the ordinary condition of life. Gibson tells three stories that converge: a mercenary called Turner, whose mind and body are in the hands of the company that employs him; a woman working in the art trade who is offered a piece with an unusual history; and a teenager who is drawn into the matrix by something that behaves like an intelligence with intentions of its own. The earlier novel established the space, and this one is about what has begun to live in it.

Gibson wrote the book in the 1980s, and the Sprawl novels are among the works that gave cyberpunk its shape.