No Crying

What do they teach at school these days? We were surprised to learn that our friend, The Good Girl, has never met Molly.

Molly the RazorGirl: bodyguard, street samurai, kinky black knight.

We first meet William Gibson's scary take on alternate femininity in the 1981 short story, Johnny Mnemonic, from which quite a bad movie was made:

She pulled up a chair and quickly sat before either of them could stop her. She was barely inside my fixed field of vision, a thin girl with mirrored glasses, her dark hair cut in a rough shag. She wore black leather, open over a T- shirt slashed diagonally with stripes of red and black. [snip]

Lewis snorted his exasperation and tried to slap her out of the chair. Somehow he didn't quite connect, and her hand came up and seemed to brush his wrist as it passed. Bright blood sprayed the table. He was clutching his wrist white-knuckle tight, blood trickling from between his fingers.

But hadn't her hand been empty?

He was going to need a tendon stapler. He stood up carefully, without bothering to push his chair back. The chair toppled backward, and he stepped out of of my line of sight without a word.

"He better get a medic to look at that," she said. "That's a nasty cut."

[snip]

"What I want," she said, snapping her fingers . . ., "is work. A job. Your boy hurt his wrist." [snip]

"Two million," I said.

"My kind of man," she said, and laughed. "What's in the bag?"

"A shotgun."

"Crude."

It might have been a compliment.

"Name's Millions. Molly Millions. You want to get out of here, boss? People are starting to stare." She stood up. She was wearing leather jeans the colour of dried blood.

And I saw for the first time that the mirrored lenses were surgical inlays, the silver rising smoothly from her high cheekbones, sealing her eyes in their sockets, I saw my new face twinned there.

One needn't be a visiting professor of literature to appreciate the significance of the invisible eyes walled off from the world behind mirrorshades.

Molly blossoms in Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer, from 1984:

She sat with her back to the wall, at the far end of the [sleeping] coffin. She had her knees up, resting her wrists on them, the pepper box muzzle of a flechette pistol emerged from her hands.

[snip]

She wore mirrored glasses. Her clothes were black, the heels of black boots deep in the temperfoam.

[snip]

She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers curled around the fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished burgundy. The nails looked artificial.

[snip]

She wore tight black glove leather jeans and a bulky black jacket cut from some matte fabric that seemed to absorb light.

[snip]

She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.

She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.

[snip, snip, snip]

He lay on his side and watched her breathe, her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the functional elegance of a war plane's fuselage. Her body was spare, neat, the muscles like a dancer's.

But of particular significance, we have always thought, is the fact that this model of girl -- her eyes sealed behind one-way glass -- does not (can not, will not) cry:

"How do you cry, Molly?

"I don't cry, much."

"But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?"

"I spit," she said. "The ducts are routed back into my mouth."

My, my. Our kind of girl.