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"Johnny Mnemonic"

“Johnny Mnemonic,” by William Gibson, is a dystopian short story about a man named Johnny who acts as a living database, storing information for others. After a violent mix-up at a club, he and the girl who caused the death of his client run off and escape to Nighttown, where she and her partners take the information and end up battling in the ruinous town over the Floor. The storyline was a bit hard to follow, and I wasn’t always clear on what was happening or who the characters were. Parts of it felt random, and the chaotic vibe was difficult to unravel.

Something that stuck with me, though, is that the scariest part of this short story wasn’t the blood or the augmented humans and dystopian ruins of society, but the empty shell that Johnny Mnemonic has made his mind. He collects information for others and spits it back out with no memory of what he said. Of course, at the end he decides to stop being a traveling flashdrive of a human being, but to live a life where your brain can be hacked for information is wild. He doesn’t even retain some of his own memories because of this.

I feel like this short story would benefit with a prologue about the world, how and why humans got to this stage of life. What kinds of people end up being data bases? Do you get to decide if you are a data base? I have a lot of questions about the universe and its societal dynamics, and I think there’s a lot of potential in “Johnny Mnemonic” for more.

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