Where Things Have Gone Kaput : VIRTUAL LIGHT, <i> By William Gibson (Bantam Books: $21.95; 323 pp.)</i>

Sometime in the not-too-far away in a quasi-anarcho-future, in the land of holograms, light-pens and tele-presence phones, in a world where many wear respirator-masks against the muck of dense viral air, lives Rydell, former police officer turned, by force of circumstance, private cop for the “residential armed response branch” of IntenSecure, a private security organization in Los Angeles.

His is a bungled life. Once a dedicated, fearless police officer in Knoxville, Tenn., Rydell has killed a crazy who’s blasted a closet filled with child hostages and who, for his reward, is suspended from the force for having overreacted and is sued by the children’s mother--and lover of the drug-crazed man Rydell’s plugged in the line of duty.

Rydell is championed up by Cops in Trouble, a TV show dedicated to featuring stories about cases just like Rydell’s. The program flies him to L.A., literally wine and dines him only to drop him in a flash to pursue a bloodier, sexier story of cops and mayhem that has exploded on the news scene.

So, Rydell, young, semi-educated and broke finds himself fit for little except to drive an armored Land Rover patrolling the mansions of the Los Angeles rich. One night, on just such a patrol, Rydell and his partner, Sublet, a runaway from a sect who believe that God reveals himself/herself on TV, are called to help a family held captive by terrorists threatening to kill the children. When Rydell bursts on the scene, crashing his armored car through the front gate and into the house itself, he discovers not the terrorized family but the LAPD guns drawn and ready to blast him and his partner to the next state. For reasons unknown, renegade hackers have filed false information into IntenSecure’s computers, sending Rydell on a near-suicidal mission.

These events begin and drive the premise of William Gibson’s latest fiction, whose title, “Virtual Light,” relates to a stolen technological gadget central to the unfurling of the novel’s twisting but essentially simplistic plot. From here in Rydell, whose career in law enforcement or in anything for that matter has gone kaput, reluctantly and unofficially joins IntenSecure into Shadowy but seemingly legal efforts to retrieve the stolen Virtual Light eyeglasses, holder of secret, valuable information and whose theft is the cause of a grisly death.

Rydell himself disappears from the novel awhile so that Gibson can introduce characters who will eventually turn up in Rydell’s path when he arrives in San Francisco in search of the glasses. You’ve met them before--or feel you have--in other shapes and guises in other fictions and in movies: a pair of bad, corrupt detectives, a professional killer who cuts out people’s tongues, a Japanese social-anthropology student who has come to study a breed of people squatting and selling various wares on the defunct Bay Bridge--among them a crusty old-timer who had been one of the original occupiers of the bridge when the homeless of the city spontaneously rose up and claimed it.

Perhaps the most vivid of the San Francisco group Rydell encounters is Chevette Washington, bike messenger. Yes, they still have them in this version of the future, along with other such familiar items of the late-20th Century as Windex, Goodyear Tires, Seven-Elevens and bagels and cream cheese. Chevette Washington plays the unwitting catalyst for all the chases and violence, the various contrivances of the novel’s action; and, as loner and outsider (she lives and takes care with the old man of the bridge) that she is, Chevette makes the perfect mate-in-waiting for Rydell. On paper, that is, for neither Chevette nor Rydell have anything in them that reminds you much of feelings or of thought. They spin out and are spun by the hectic and not always comprehensible action, pushed about mechanically by the machinery of plot.

If other characters in this novel seem shades of other works, Rydell is a shade unto himself. He acts and reacts without reflection, having next to no internal life. In the novel’s opening chapter we are given some sympathetic glimpse of him--a man in fantasy-love, masturbation over an image of a woman on video cassette he’s kept for a decade--but nothing in the rest of the novel returns to or develops the theme of Rydell’s intense loneliness or in fact develops him in this alienation. As a man pushed to extremes, a man forced to take work for strangers on dark errands, he should engage our sympathy; as a character faced with dangers he should enlist our fears for him, but he does neither.

He’s simply a robot for Gibson’s maneuvers, a stock figure in a novel filled with stock techno-futuristic props (some seeming like exotic toys found in Shaper Image) and assumptions about the future extrapolated form conditions of present-day life.

The further dividing of classes, the Balkanization of countries, the running-down and ruin of the environment and the creation of international cartels with their invisible empires form some of the novel’s assumptions of future life. All plausible, all available to our imagination of disaster--for real-life disaster, and valid as well even for the materials of fiction. But fiction, unlike life, demands that the imagination be fresh, that the images rouse us, frightened us, entertain us. But the images in “Virtual Light” do not do those things. Gibson’s shorthand description of a San Francisco’s future nether-world street, for example, is one we’ve seen before (“Blade Runner” comes easily to mind) and even before: “Combat zone. Ruins. Fires in steel cans. Hunched dark figures, faces vampire white.”

The future as a character in this novel is as thin as are the other characters and is, finally, unimportant. Striped of its high-tech lingo and hardware, “Virtual Light” is just an old fashioned thriller, speedy but without much thrill.