“She remembers her father’s views on paranoia.

Win, the Cold War security expert, ever watchful, had treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained. Like someone who’d learned how best to cope with chronic illness, he never allowed himself to think of his paranoia as an aspect of self. It was there, constantly and intimately, and he relied on it professionally, but he wouldn’t allow it to spread, become jungle. He cultivated it on its own special plot, and checked it daily for news it might bring: hunches, lat-eralisms, frank anomalies.

Is Prion’s presence on this plane a frank anomaly?

Only, she decides, if she thinks of herself as the center, the focal point of something she doesn’t, can’t, understand. That had always been Win’s first line of defense, within himself: to recognize that he was only a part of something larger. Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.

But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.

The danger, she supposes, is a species of apophenia”

http://www.e-reading.club/chapter.php/71785/13/Gibson_-_Pattern_Recognition.html