“‘My God,’ Zona said, staring up at St. Mark’s. ‘Who wrote this?’”

The character, Zona, is, in Gibson’s fantasy, within a region of her friend’s personal consensual cyberspace, staring up at a software representation of St. Mark’s which is part of a software instantiation of Venice. She means, of course, Who wrote the software. The joke is that she has never been to the real Venice, which may, for that matter, no longer exist in the future of Gibson’s novel. But, Zona might just as well, with the same degree of awe, be with us, in the ‘real’ Venice, which is, clearly, just as much an inscription of shared memory.