Tessier-Ashpool
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Tessier-Ashpool is a powerful family appearing in William Gibson's The Sprawl trilogy. The family owns Freeside, a space station shaped like a spindle constructed in high orbit. The family resides in the Villa Straylight, which occupies one end of the spindle.
The family is organized and run like a corporation. Family members are kept under cryogenic stasis and thawed out periodically so that governance of the family is cycled between members. According to the "orbital law", they are legally dead while cryogenically preserved.
The Tessier-Ashpool family own the mainframe to which one of their two artificial intelligences, Wintermute, is attached. This computer is in Berne, Switzerland and has limited Swiss Citizenship. The other AI, Neuromancer, is housed in another family-owned mainframe located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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[edit] Family history
The family was founded by the marriage of the scions of two powerful families - Marie-France Tessier and John Harness Ashpool. After the two were married, Ashpool began construction of Freeside in high orbit due to the relatively relaxed laws governing construction.
The family became extremely successful financially, developing the attached space station, sponsoring human colonization of space, and acquiring a number of other firms, all of which grew. By the time of Neuromancer, an ownership search on one of their subsidiary firms required tracing through four larger corporations, although a share of their common stock has not been traded on the open market for more than a hundred years.
Tessier and Ashpool had two children - "Jane" and "Jean". Made possible by less-stringent orbital laws they were able to clone their remaining family from these two. Their children are known by a combination of their first name and the number of clone they are (i.e., "3Jane" or "8Jean"). By the time of Neuromancer, these names suggest there are at least three "Janes" and eight "Jeans." All have the hyphenated last name "Tessier-Ashpool."
However, following the death of Marie-France, the family became extremely reclusive. Family members, including Ashpool, tended to place themselves in cryogenic sleep. At any one given time, only one or two of the children would be awake. They are also known for cloning their own assassins, elite ninja who follow their orders without question.
The family brought a large number of antiques with them, and tried to make them fit the orbital environment, but failed aesthetically. A representational image presented to that effect is the Door. It is briefly mentioned that the door was ugly. It had been a beautiful door, but to make it fit the room, the Tessier-Ashpools had cut it down. This, combined with the fact that it was the only rectilinear part of the room, made it look ugly in the new environment.
[edit] Family secrets
Without telling her new husband, Marie-France embarked on a plan to create artificial intelligences and envisioned a future whereby the family and the AIs would create a sort of symbiosis to expand and run the family corporation. However, upon finding out about this plan, Ashpool strangled his wife to death, leaving the plan unfinished.
Nonetheless, one of the AIs, Wintermute, plotted over the years on a way to complete the plan. The culmination of Wintermute's schemes constitute the plot of Neuromancer.
By the time of Neuromancer, the family has become extremely degenerate and partially insane. The patriarch, Ashpool, spends almost all of his time in cryogenic stasis, is a heavy drug user, and when awakened, has sex with and subsequently murders a clone of his daughter. 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool is the only member of the family not to have fallen prey to such insanity, since Wintermute apparently communicated with her and provided her with copies of her mother's journals and plans. Nonetheless, she is described as "jaded" and is extremely disconnected from the world outside the Villa Straylight.
[edit] Destruction of the family
Ashpool is killed during the events of Neuromancer, leaving 3Jane in charge of the corporation. By the time of Mona Lisa Overdrive, 3Jane and the company are described as bankrupt, although this is only part of the book's plot.
[edit] Members of the family appearing in books
- Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool: Marie-France's genetic daughter
- 8Jean
- Ashpool: Father of 3Jane and husband of Marie-France
[edit] The essay
Most of the background information for the family is revealed in the novel Neuromancer in the form of a semiotics essay written by 3Jane when she was 12 years old. The unfinished essay is printed in full:
- The Villa Straylight is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves. The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man's hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage.
- By the standards of the archipelago, ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull. Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight.
- We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self. The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise. At the Villa's silicon core is a small room, the only rectilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonne, studded with lapis and pearl. The bright marbles of its eyes were cut from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the first Tessier up the well, and returned for the first Ashpool...
