[7] 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's role in Pattern Recognition begins with her arrival in London in August 2002, commissioned by marketing firm Blue Ant to judge the effectiveness of a proposed corporate logo for a footwear company.
After dinner with some Blue Ant employees, the company founder Hubertus Bigend propositions Cayce with a new mission: to uncover those responsible for distributing a succession of mysterious, anonymous, artistic film clips ("the footage") on the internet.
Through a chance encounter, Cayce meets a pair of London natives dealing in antiquated technological artifacts who put her in contact with a collector, the retired cryptographer and mathematician Hobbs Baranov.
Cayce strikes a deal with Baranov: she buys an artifact he dearly covets but cannot afford (a factory prototype of the earliest Curta calculator) and in return he deciphers the email address to which the watermark code was sent.
The Russians surrender all the information they had collected on her father’s disappearance and the book ends with Cayce coming to terms with his absence; "she was weeping for her century, although whether the one past or the one present she doesn't know".
[11] Ulrike K. Heiser concurs, citing the reassurance Cayce gets from logging into Fetish : Footage : Forum after a flight as indicative that she is the latest in a tradition of technomadic Gibsonian protagonists "with rootedness in the virtual rather than the real" who "find their true homes in the non-spatial reaches of digital networks".
[13][14] Post-structural literary theorist Richard Skeates compared Cayce with Oedipa Maas, the protagonist of Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49, as detectives interpreting clues but with neither the character nor the reader knowing if there actually is a pattern to be found and, if there is one, whether it is real or conspiracy.
[15] Critic Jeremy Pugh proffers that Gibson employs "the precocious Pollard to personify and humanize the uncertain anxiety, optimistic hope, and downright fear many feel when looking to the future.
Like the imagery of 9/11, the footage is free of the hegemonic cultural context of the capitalist superstructure and thereby seems to escape commodification,[7] to be beyond "the reified society of brands in which objects assume the status of social relations in contrast to people's objectified ones ... to which Cayce has such an involuntary affinity".
[17] Philosopher Nikolas Kompridis casts her desire in terms of a novelty which defies contextualization, positing that Cayce is "yearning for the unconsumably and unsubsumably new", citing a line preceding a description of the footage: "It is as if she participates in the very birth of cinema, that Lumière moment, the steam locomotive about to emerge from the screen, sending the audience fleeing, out into the Parisian night.