Cayce Pollard

Cayce Pollard is the fictional protagonist of William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition.

[Cayce] will watch the towers burn, and eventually fall, and though she will know she must have seen people jumping, falling, there will be no memory of it.

It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority.

An experience outside of culture.

Aged 32 during the events of the Pattern Recognition, Cayce lives in New York City. Though named by her parents after Edgar Cayce, she pronounces her given name "Case". She is a freelance marketing consultant, a coolhunter with an unusual intuitive sensitivity for branding, manifested primarily in her physical aversion to particular logos and corporate mascots. A notable exception to her ability to immediately discern semiotic content in imagery is the succession of images of the September 11 attacks in 2001, for her "an experience outside culture". The attacks had added significance to Cayce's backstory in that they encompassed the disappearance of her father, Win, which in turn impelled her mother, Cynthia, to exploring electronic voice phenomena as her own means of divining patterns in the background static. Cayce is left feeling "ungrieved" for her father until she reviews footage and records of that day tracking his movements until he vanishes.

CPUs for the meeting, reflected in the window of a Soho specialist in mod paraphernalia, are a fresh Fruit T-shirt, her black Buzz Rickson's MA-1, anonymous black skirt from a Tulsa thrift, the black leggings she'd worn for Pilates, black Harajuku schoolgirl shoes. Her purse-analog is an envelope of black East German laminate, purchased on eBay if not actual Stasi-issue then well in the ballpark.

She sees her own gray eyes, pale in the glass, and beyond them Ben Sherman shirts and fishtail parkas, cufflinks in the form of the RAF roundel that marked the wings of Spitfires.

CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That's what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.

As a consequence of her sensitivity, Cayce dresses in plain clothing she has either bought or rendered unadorned with brand markings of any kind (one possible exception is her "Luggage Label" hip bag, bought from Parco in Tokyo). These are referred to as "Cayce Pollard Units" or C.P.U.s, a term initially used by her friend Damien, and subsequently by Cayce, although never aloud. They are typically Fruit of the Loom shrunken cotton T-shirts worn with black oversized Levi's 501s, skirts, tights, boots, and a Buzz Rickson MA-1 bomber jacket.

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