[...] already a couple of very dicey factors in play [...]

"The kind of software someone like you would rent from Two-a-Day, that's nothin'. I mean, it'll work, but it's nothing anybody heavy would ever bother with. You've seen a lot of cowboy kinos, right? Well, the stuff they make up for those things isn't much, compared with the kind of shit a real heavy operator can front. Particularly when it comes to icebreakers. Heavy icebreakers are funny to deal in, even for the big boys. You know why? Because ice, all the really hard stuff, the walls around every major store of data in the matrix, is always the produce of an AI, an artificial intelligence. Nothing else is fast enough to weave good ice and constantly alter and upgrade it. So when a really powerful icebreaker shows up on the black market, there are already a couple of very dicey factors in play. Like, for starts, where did the product come from? Nine times out of ten, it came from an AI, and the AIs are constantly screened, mainly by the Turing people, to make sure they don't get too smart. So maybe you'll get the Turing machine after your ass, because maybe an AI somewhere wants to augment its private cash flow. Some AIs have citizenship, right? Another thing you have to watch out for, maybe it's a military icebreaker, and that's bad heat, too, or maybe it's taken a walk out of some zaibatsu's industrial espionage arm, and you don't want that either. You takin' this shit in, Bobby?"

Bobby nodded. He felt like he'd been waiting all his life to hear Beauvoir explain the workings of a world whose existence he'd only guessed at before.

William Gibson, Count Zero




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