Virtual Light

In a near-future California, Chevette Washington, a bicycle messenger, lifts a pair of sunglasses from a man at a party on impulse. She has no idea the glasses hold data worth killing for, and when their owner turns up dead, people with guns start looking for her.

Berry Rydell, a former police officer now working armed security, is pulled into the hunt for the glasses and finds himself drawn toward the woman he was meant to track down. The chase runs through the improvised community that has grown on the earthquake-damaged Bay Bridge and into a scheme to remake San Francisco for the benefit of a few insiders. A Japanese researcher studying life on the Bridge is the third point of view in this first book of William Gibson's Bridge trilogy, a Hugo Award finalist in 1994.