Neuromancer

Citation

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York, NY: Ace, 1984. 0441569595.

Abstract

“Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian author William Gibson. Set in a near-future dystopia, the narrative follows Case, a computer hacker enlisted into a crew by a powerful artificial intelligence and a traumatised former soldier to complete a high-stakes heist. It was Gibson’s debut novel and, following its success, served as the first entry in the Sprawl trilogy, followed by Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).”

Annotations

Part One: Chiba City Blues

Chapter 1

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” (3)

“In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it” (4)

“The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly” (4)

“still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void” (4-5)

“He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix” (5)

“They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours” (6)

“The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh” (6)

“The men in the black clinics, his last hope, had admired the expertise with which he’d been maimed, and then slowly shaken their heads” (6)

“Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart. By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky” (6-7)

“he’d gone into a kind of terminal overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had seemed to belong to someone else” (7)

“Ninsei wore him down until the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish, some secret poison he hadn’t known he carried” (7)

“Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol” (7)

“Alone at a table in the Jarre de Thé … Case knew that at some point he’d started to play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire” (7)

Commentator’s Note: p. 143

“It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He’d watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he’d seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. He’d watched her track the next hit with a concentration that reminded him of the mantises they sold in stalls along Shiga, beside tanks of blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo” (8)

“The Jarre was decorated in a dated, nameless style from the previous century, an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional and pale Milanese plastics, but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though the bad nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked the mirrors and the once glossy plastics, leaving each surface fogged with something that could never be wiped away” (9)

“New lines of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the corners of her mouth. Her dark hair was drawn back, held by a band of printed silk. The pattern might have represented microcircuits, or a city map” (9)

“a tangible wave of longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the wavelength of amphetamine” (9)

“He remembered the smell of her skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her fingers locked across the small of his back” (9)

Commentator’s Note: p. 262

“All the meat, he thought, and all it wants” (9)

“a franchised coffee shop called Beautiful Girl” (10)

“Mitsubishi-Genentech … M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic” (10)

“a dozen distinct species of hustler, all swarming the street in an intricate dance of desire and commerce” (10-11)

“Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself” (11)

“The shuriken had always fascinated him, steel stars with knife-sharp points. Some were chromed, others black, others treated with a rainbow surface like oil on water. But the chrome stars held his gaze” (11)

Commentator’s Note: pp. 11, 52, 163, 222, 268, 270

“these were the stars under which he voyaged, his destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome” (12)

“Julius Deane was one hundred and thirty-five years old, his metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums and hormones. His primary hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons re-set the code of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba. Then he’d fly to Hongkong and order the year’s suits and shirts. Sexless and inhumanly patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in his devotion to esoteric forms of tailor-worship” (12)

“a flat lozenge of vatgrown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation jade” (14)

Commentator’s Note: p. 140

“Beyond the neon shudder of Ninsei, the sky was that mean shade of gray. The air had gotten worse; it seemed to have teeth tonight, and half the crowd wore filtration masks” (15)

“Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market” (16)

“When the fear came, it was like some half-forgotten friend. Not the cold, rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear. He’d lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he’d almost forgotten what real fear was” (18)

“Shin’s pistol was a fifty-year-old Vietnamese imitation of South American copy of a Walther PPK, double-action on the first shot, with a very rough pull. It was chambered for .22 long rifle, and Case would’ve preferred lead azide explosives to the simple Chinese hollowpoints Shin had sold him. Still, it was a handgun and nine rounds of ammunition, and as he made his way down Shiga from the sushi stall he cradled it in his jacket pocket. The grips were bright red plastic molded in a raised dragon motif, something to run your thumb across in the dark. He’d consigned the cobra to a dump canister on Ninsei and dry-swallowed another octagon” (19)

“There was nothing in Number 92 but a standard Hitachi pocket computer and a small white styrofoam cooler chest” (20)

“His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi wasn’t taking calls” (20)

“‘You look bad, friend artiste,’ he said, flashing the wet ruin of his teeth.

‘I’m doing just fine,’ said Case, and grinned like a skull. ‘Super fine.’ …

‘And you wander back and forth in this portable bombshelter built of booze and ups, sure. Proof against the grosser emotions, yes?’ …

‘Proof against fear and being alone,’ the bartender continued. ‘Listen to the fear. Maybe it’s your friend’” (21)

Chapter 2

“‘Too young to remember the war, aren’t you, Case?’ Armitage ran a large hand back through his cropped brown hair A heavy gold bracelet flashed on his wrist. ‘Leningrad, Kiev, Siberia. We invented you in Siberia, Case.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Screaming Fist, Case. You’ve heard the name.’

‘Some kind of run, wasn’t it? Tried to burn this Russian nexus with virus programs. Yeah, I heard about it. And nobody got out’” (28)

“He sensed abrupt tension. Armitage walked to the window and looked out over Tokyo Bay. ‘That isn’t true. One unit made it back to Helsinki, Case.’

Case shrugged, sipped coffee.

‘You’re a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist. For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic module was a Nightwing microlight, a pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs.’

‘Icebreakers,’ Case said, over the rim of the red mug.

‘Ice from ICE, intrusion countermeasures electronics.’

‘Problem is, mister, I’m no jockey now, so I think I’ll just be going. . . .’

‘I was there, Case; I was there when they invented your kind.’

‘You got zip to do with me and my kind, buddy. You’re rich enough to hire expensive razorgirls to haul my ass up here, is all. I’m never gonna punch any deck again, not for you or anybody else.’ He crossed to the window and looked down. ‘That’s where I live now’” (28)

“‘Our profile says you’re trying to con the street into killing you when you’re not looking.’

‘Profile?’

‘We’ve built up a detailed model. Bought a go-to for each of your aliases and ran the skim through some military software. You’re suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the outside. And our medical projection says you’ll need a new pancreas inside a year.’

‘“We.”’ He met the faded blue eyes. ‘“We” who?’

‘What would you say if I told you we could correct your neural damage, Case?’ Armitage suddenly looked to Case as if he were carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously heavy. A statue. He knew now that this was a dream, and that soon he’d wake. Armitage wouldn’t speak again. Case’s dreams always ended in these freezeframes, and now this one was over” (29)

“You got no idea, the kind of stuff Armitage has. Like he’s gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing you with the program he’s giving them to tell them how to do it. He’ll put them three years ahead of the competition” (29)

“Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky. Voices. Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given” (31)

“orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix” (33)

Commentator’s Note: p. 148

“I need a history lesson, Julie. And a go-to on somebody” (34)

“This gentleman seems to have a temporary arrangement with the Yakuza, and the sons of the neon chrysanthemum have ways of screening their allies from the likes of me” (35)

“‘What sort of history?’

‘The war. You in the war, Julie?’

‘The war? What’s there to know? Lasted three weeks.’

‘Screaming Fist.’

‘Famous. Don’t they teach you history these days? Great bloody postwar political football, that was. Watergated all to hell and back. Your brass, Case, your Sprawlside brass in, where was it, McLean? In the bunkers, all of that… great scandal. Wasted a fair bit of patriotic young flesh in order to test some new technology. They knew about the Russians’ defenses, it came out later. Knew about the emps, magnetic pulse weapons. Sent these fellows in regardless, just to see.’ Deane shrugged.’ Turkey shoot for Ivan’” (35)

“‘Wasting your time, cowboy,’ Molly said, when Case took an octagon from the pocket of his jacket … ‘Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver. Armitage had them designed to bypass that shit.’ She tapped the octagon with one burgundy nail. ‘You’re biochemically incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine’” (36)

“The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese. Not really a Night City crowd. Techs down from the arcologies. He supposed that meant the arena had the approval of some corporate recreational committee. He wondered briefly what it would be like, working all your life for one zaibatsu. Company housing, company hymn, company funeral” (37)

“Seven days and he’d jack in. If he closed his eyes now, he’d see the matrix” (37)

“Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance. Then the fear began to knot between his shoulders. A cold trickle of sweat worked its way down and across his ribs. The operation hadn’t worked. He was still here, still meat, no Molly waiting, her eyes locked on the circling knives, no Armitage waiting in the Hilton with tickets and a new passport and money. It was all some dream, some pathetic fantasy. . . . Hot tears blurred his vision” (37)

“Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.

[Paragraph break]

After the postoperative check at the clinic” (39)

Commentator’s Note: Seven days pass in a single break

“a mist closed over the black water and the drifting shoals of waste” (39)

Part Two: The Shopping Expedition

Chapter 3

“Home. Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta” (43)

“a bright nine-pointed star fell—to stick upright in a crack in the parquet. ‘Souvenir,’ Molly said. ‘I noticed you were always looking at ‘em’” (44-45)

“Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification” (46)

“Case remembered fighting on a rooftop at seventeen, silent combat in the rose glow of the dawn geodesics” (46)

“Nothing here like the electric dance of Ninsei. This was different commerce, a different rhythm, in the smell of fast food and perfume and fresh summer sweat” (46)

“With his deck waiting, back in the loft, an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7. They’d left the place littered with the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono-Sendai; next year’s most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker. Armitage had only waited for Case’s approval of each piece” (46)

“She talked about the season’s fashions, about sports, about a political scandal in California he’d never heard of” (47)

“Her Sprawl wasn’t his Sprawl, he decided” (47)

“The door swung inward and she led him into the smell of dust. They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish antenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted scrap. He heard the door close behind them. He didn’t look back” (48)

“‘You ever work with the dead?’

‘No.’ He watched his reflection in her glasses. ‘I could, I guess. I’m good at what I do.’ The present tense made him nervous.

‘You know that the Dixie Flatline’s dead?’

He nodded. ‘Heart, I heard.’

‘You’ll be working with his construct.’ She smiled. ‘Taught you the ropes, huh? Him and Quine’” (48)

“‘Somebody’s got a recording of McCoy Pauley? Who?’ Now Case sat, and rested his elbows on the table. ‘I can’t see it. He’d never have sat still for it’” (50)

“You know he died braindeath three times?” (50)

“I been trying to suss out who it is is backing Armitage since I signed on. But it doesn’t feel like a zaibatsu, a government, or some Yakuza subsidiary. Armitage gets orders” (50)

“We’re gonna be pulling one hardcore run, Case, just to get the Flatline’s construct. Sense/Net has it locked in a library vault uptown. Tighter than an eel’s ass, Case. Now, Sense/Net, they got all their new material for the fall season locked in there too. Steal that and we’d be richer than shit. But no, we gotta get us the Flatline and nothing else. Weird” (50)

“one certified psychopath name of Peter Riviera” (51)

Commentator’s Note: p. 96

“‘The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,’ said the voice-over, ‘in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks’” (51)

“On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. ‘Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .’” (51)

“He stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed shuriken burning with reflected neon. He glanced up; on the wall, just above the Sony, he’d hung her gift, tacking it there with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its center” (52)

Commentator’s Note: pp. 11, 52, 163, 222, 268, 270

“And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information” (52)

“Please, he prayed, now—

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

Now—

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding—

And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach” (52)

“‘It’s a flipflop switch, basically. Wire it into your Sendai here, you can access live or recorded simstim without having to jack out of the matrix.’

‘What for?’

‘I haven’t got a clue. Know I’m fitting Moll for a broadcast rig, though, so it’s probably her sensorium you’ll access’” (53)

Chapter 4

“Cowboys didn’t get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input” (55)

“For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes” (56)

“Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made room” (56)

“Keying back into her sensorium, into the sinuous flow of muscle, senses sharp and bright” (56)

“Dr. Rambali smiled. ‘There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately mediarelated. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent. . . .’” (58)

“There was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived subcults and replicated them at odd intervals” (58)

“The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists” (59)

“Nine different police departments and public security agencies were absorbing the information that an obscure subsect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent known as Blue Nine into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel” (61)

Commentator’s Note: p. 134

“The Panther Moderns allowed four minutes for their first move to take effect, then injected a second carefully prepared dose of misinformation” (62)

“Case’s virus had bored a window through the library’s command ice. He punched himself through and found an infinite blue space ranged with color-coded spheres strung on a tight grid of pale blue neon. In the nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child’s toy calculator, accessed through Case’s Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands” (63)

“The Sense/Net research library was a dead storage area; the materials stored here had to be physically removed before they could be interfaced. Molly hobbled between rows of identical gray lockers” (65)

“This is the message. Wintermute” (69)

Chapter 5

“Berne. It’s got limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of ‘53. Built for Tessier-Ashpool S.A. They own the mainframe and the original software.’ …

‘Wintermute is the recognition code for an AI. I’ve got the Turing Registry numbers. Artificial intelligence. …

‘this AI is backing Armitage’” (73)

“‘And you think it’s this AI? Those things aren’t allowed any autonomy. It’ll be the parent corporation, this Tessle. . .’

‘Tessier-Ashpool S.A.,’ said the Finn” (73)

“Smith was also a fence, but in balmier seasons he surfaced as an art dealer. He was the first person the Finn had known who’d ‘gone silicon’—the phrase had an old-fashioned ring for Case—and the microsofts he purchased were art history programs and tables of gallery sales” (73)

“He wanted a go-to on the Tessier-Ashpool clan” (73)

“a vatgrown ninja assassin” (74)

Commentator’s Note: p. 163

“the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty” (75)

Commentator’s Note: p. 173

“Smith knew I dealt a lot with the Memory Lane crowd, and that’s where you go for a quiet go-to that’ll never be traced” (75)

“‘Freeside,’ the Finn said. ‘The spindle. Turns out they own damn near the whole thing … Family organization. Corporate structure. Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but there hasn’t been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market in over a hundred years. On any market, as far as I know. You’re looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation highorbit family, run like a corporation. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning, Orbital law’s a lot softer on genetic engineering, right? And it’s hard to keep track of which generation, or combination of generations, is running the show at a given time’” (75-76)

“‘Got their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law, you’re legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though nobody’s seen the founding father in about thirty years. Founding momma, she died in some lab accident. . . .’” (76)

“The Villa Straylight. Tip of the spindle. Strictly private” (76)

“It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man’s skills, obsessions, knee-jerk responses. . . .” (76)

“He stepped out and caught sight of a white holographic cigar suspended against the wall of the station, FREESIDE pulsing beneath it in contorted capitals that mimicked printed Japanese. He walked through the crowd and stood beneath it, studying the thing. WHY WAIT? pulsed the sign. A blunt white spindle, flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes. He’d seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. It had never appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the Freeside banks as easily as he could reach Atlanta” (77)

“Travel was a meat thing” (77)

“he noticed the little sigil, the size of a small coin, woven into the lower left corner of the ad’s fabric of light: T-A” (77)

“Flatline … The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange group anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of cyberspace. . . . And his heart had done for him in the end. His surplus Russian heart, implanted in a POW camp during the war. He’d refused to replace the thing, saying he needed its particular beat to maintain his sense of timing” (78)

“a ROM personality matrix” (79)

Chapter 6

“‘Tell you later,’ he said, ‘I’m wrecked.’ He was hungover and confused. He lay there, eyes closed, and tried to sort the various parts of a story about a man called Corto. The Hosaka had sorted a thin store of data and assembled a precis, but it was full of gaps. Some of the material had been print records, reeling smoothly down the screen, too quickly, and Case had had to ask the computer to read them for him. Other segments were audio recordings of the Screaming Fist hearing. Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot in the Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto’s team had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moonlight, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe. … The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus in the history of cybernetics, Corto and his team had been training for the run for three years. They were through the ice, ready to inject Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean. Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling. . . . There were gaps in the story, here, where Case scanned documents concerning the flight of a commandeered Russian gunship that managed to reach Finland. To be gutted, as it landed in a spruce grove, by an antique twenty-millimeter cannon manned by a cadre of reservists on dawn alert. Screaming Fist had ended for Corto on the outskirts of Helsinki, with Finnish paramedics sawing him out of the twisted belly of the helicopter. The war ended nine days later, and Corto was shipped to a military facility in Utah, blind, legless, and missing most of his jaw. It took eleven months for the Congressional aide to find him there. He listened to the sound of tubes draining. In Washington and McLean, the show trials were already underway. The Pentagon and the CIA were being Balkanized, partially dismantled, and a Congressional investigation had focused on Screaming Fist. Ripe for watergating, the aide told Corto. He’d need eyes, legs, and extensive cosmetic work, the aide said, but that could be arranged. New plumbing, the man added, squeezing Corto’s shoulder through the sweat-damp sheet. Corto heard the soft, relentless dripping. He said he preferred to testify as he was. No, the aide explained, the trials were being televised. The trials needed to reach the voter. The aide coughed politely. Repaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed, Corto’s subsequent testimony was detailed, moving, lucid, and largely the invention of a Congressional cabal with certain vested interests in saving particular portions of the Pentagon infrastructure. Corto gradually understood that the testimony he gave was instrumental in saving the careers of three officers directly responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of the emp installations at Kirensk” (82-83)

Commentator’s Note: Delayed relay of information, cf. p. 94

“‘It was like this when we headed for Chiba,’ Molly said, staring out the train window at blasted industrial moonscape, red beacons on the horizon warning aircraft away from a fusion plant. ‘We were in L.A. He came in and said Pack, we were booked for Macau’” (85)

Commentator’s Note: p. 130

“The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case” (85)

“Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries” (85)

Chapter 7

“Beyoglu … He’d watched the crazy walls of patchwork wooden tenements slide by, condos, arcologies, grim housing projects, more walls of plyboard and corrugated iron” (87)

“A few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country” (88)

“‘You particularly,’ he said to her, ‘must take care. In Turkey there is disapproval of women who sport such modifications’” (89)

“implants … subliminals” (90)

“‘On our left,’ said the Mercedes, as it steered through a maze of rainy streets, ‘is Kapali Carsi, the grand bazaar.’ Beside Case, the Finn made an appreciative noise, but he was looking in the wrong direction. The right side of the street was lined with miniature scrapyards” (90)

“‘I seen the schematics on the guy’s silicon. Very flash. What he imagines, you see’” (90-91)

“In Turkey, women are still women. This one. . .” (91)

“It’s a horse, man. You ever see a horse?” (91)

“‘Saw one in Maryland once,’ the Finn said, ‘and that was a good three years after the pandemic. There’s Arabs still trying to code ‘em up from the DNA, but they always croak’” (92)

“The back of the fallen man’s jacket heaved and burst, blood splashing the wall and doorway. A pair of impossibly long, rope-tendoned arms flexed grayish-pink in the glare. The thing seemed to pull itself up out of the pavement, through the inert, bloody ruin that had been Riviera. It was two meters tall, stood on two legs, and seemed to be headless. Then it swung slowly to face them, and Case saw that it had a head, but no neck. It was eyeless, the skin gleaming a wet intestinal pink. The mouth, if it was a mouth, was circular, conical, shallow, and lined with a seething growth of hairs or bristles, glittering like black chrome. It kicked the rags of clothing and flesh aside and took a step, the mouth seeming to scan for them as it moved” (92-93)

“You were watching the horror-show, right?” (93)

“They walked beside a path of cold octagonal flagstones. Winter was waiting, somewhere in the Balkans” (94)

“He told her the Corto story” (94)

Commentator’s Note: pp. 82, 114, 127

“‘You figure the little computer pulled him out of it? In that French hospital?’

‘I figure Wintermute,’ Case said.

She nodded.

‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘do you think he knows he was Corto, before? I mean, he wasn’t anybody in particular, by the time he hit the ward, so maybe Wintermute just. . .’

’ Yeah. Built him up from go. Yeah…’ She turned and they walked on. ‘It figures. You know, the guy doesn’t have any life going, in private. Not as far as I can tell. You see a guy like that, you figure there’s something he does when he’s alone. But not Armitage. Sits and stares at the wall, man. Then something clicks and he goes into high gear and wheels for Wintermute’” (95)

“‘How smart’s an AI, Case?’

‘Depends. Some aren’t much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost a fortune anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the Turing heat is willing to let ‘em get’” (95)

“‘How come you aren’t just flatout fascinated with those things?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘for starts, they’re rare. Most of them are military, the bright ones, and we can’t crack the ice. That’s where ice all comes from, you know? And then there’s the Turing cops, and that’s bad heat.’ He looked at her. ‘I dunno, it just isn’t part of the trip.’

‘Jockeys all the same,’ she said. ‘No imagination’” (95)

“She kicked a loose pebble in and watched the ripples spread. ‘That’s Wintermute,’ she said. ‘This deal’s real big, looks to me. We’re out where the little waves are too broad, we can’t see the rock that hit the center. We know something’s there, but not why. I wanna know why. I want you to go and talk to Wintermute’” (95)

“She spat into the pond. ‘God knows. I’d as soon kill him as look at him. I saw his profile’” (96)

Commentator’s Note: Spitting, cf. 183

“He’s got a personality like a Modern’s suit. The profile said it was a very rare type, estimated one in a couple of million” (96)

“Operators above a certain level tended to submerge their personalities” (96)

“The blankness he found in Armitage was something else” (97)

Commentator’s Note: p. 194

“FREESIDE—WHY WAIT?” (97)

“Riviera … was product of the rubble rings that fringe the radioactive core of old Bonn” (97)

“He fumbled through a pocketful of lirasi, slotting the small dull alloy coins one after another, vaguely amused by the anachronism of the process. The phone nearest him rang. Automatically, he picked it up.

‘Yeah?’

Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind.

‘Hello, Case.’

A fifty-lirasi coin fell from his hand, bounced, and rolled out of sight across Hilton carpeting.

‘Wintermute, Case. It’s time we talk.’

It was a chip voice.

‘Don’t you want to talk, Case?’

He hung up.

On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed” (98)

Part Three: Midnight in the Rue Jules Verne

Chapter 8

“Archipelago. The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Human DNA spreading out from gravity’s steep well like an oilslick. Call up a graphics display that grossly simplifies the exchange of data in the L-5 archipelago. One segment clicks in as red solid, a massive rectangle dominating your screen. Freeside. Freeside is many things, not all of them evident to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool” (101)

Commentator’s Note: p. 173

“the shuttle pad was screened by graceful blast-deflectors of wet concrete. The one nearest the window bore an Arabic slogan in red spraybomb” (102)

“Zion cluster … Dreads. Rastas. Colony’s about thirty years old now” (103)

“Zion had been founded by five workers who’d refused to return, who’d turned their backs on the well and started building. They’d suffered calcium loss and heart shrinkage before rotational gravity was established in the colony’s central torus. Seen from the bubble of the taxi, Zion’s makeshift hull reminded Case of the patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the irregular, discolored plates laser-scrawled with Rastafarian symbols and the initials of welders” (103)

“Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community” (104)

“Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja” (104)

“Cyberspace, as the deck presented it, had no particular relationship with the deck’s physical whereabouts. When Case jacked in, he opened his eyes to the familiar configuration of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority’s Aztec pyramid of data” (105)

Commentator’s Note: Virtual home

“I’m dead, Case …’

‘How’s it feel?’

‘It doesn’t.’

‘Bother you?’

‘What bothers me is, nothin’ does’” (105)

“When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case’s spine. ‘Do me a favor, boy.’

‘What’s that, Dix?’

‘This scam of yours, when it’s over, you erase this goddam thing’” (106)

Commentator’s Note: p. 206

“Case didn’t understand the Zionites. …

‘It’s the ganja,’ Molly said, when Case told her the story.

‘They don’t make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to him. It’s not like bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?’” (106)

Commentator’s Note: Understanding

“Case nodded dubiously. The Zionites always touched you when they were talking, hands on your shoulder. He didn’t like that” (106)

“He took the band, put it on, and Case adjusted the trodes. He closed his eyes. Case hit the power stud. Aerol shuddered. Case jacked him back out, ‘What did you see, man?’

‘Babylon,’ Aerol said, sadly, handing him the trodes and kicking off down the corridor” (106)

“two surviving Founders of Zion were old men, old with the accelerated aging that overtakes men who spend too many years outside the embrace of gravity” (109)

“‘I came from Los Angeles,’ the old man said. His dreadlocks were like a matted tree with branches the color of steel Wool. ‘Long time ago, up the gravity well and out of Babylon. To lead the Tribes home’” (109)

“The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back. ‘Soon come, the Final Days. . . . Voices. Voices cryin’ inna wilderness, prophesyin’ ruin unto Babylon. . . .

‘Voices.’ The Founder from Los Angeles was staring at Case. “We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.’

‘Call ‘em Winter Mute,’ said the other, making it two words.

Case felt the skin crawl on his arms.

‘The Mute talked to us,’ the first Founder said. ‘The Mute said we are to help you’” (109-110)

“‘No,’ said the man from Los Angeles, ‘and we are uncertain of its meaning. If these are Final Days, we must expect false prophets. . . .’

‘Listen,’ Case said, ‘that’s an AI, you know? Artificial intelligence. The music it played you, it probably just tapped your banks and cooked up whatever it thought you’d like to—’

‘Babylon,’ broke in the other Founder, ‘mothers many demon, I an’ I know. Multitude horde!’

‘What was that you called me, old man?’ Molly asked.

‘Steppin’ Razor. An’ you bring a scourge on Babylon, sister, on its darkest heart. . . .’

‘What kinda message the voice have?’ Case asked.

‘We were told to help you,’ the other said, ‘that you might serve as a tool of Final Days.’ His lined face was troubled.

‘We were told to send Maelcum with you, in his tug Garvey, to the Babylon port of Freeside. And this we shall do’” (110)

“‘We have a certain involvement here with various traffics, and no regard for Babylon’s law. Our law is the word of Jah’” (110-111)

Chapter 9

“He told her about the phones in the Hilton” (114)

Commentator’s Note: pp. 94, 127

“He jacked in.

‘Dixie?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You ever try to crack an AI?’

‘Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin’, jacked up real high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multinationals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree. Just larkin’ around, you know? And then I started picking up on this one cube, maybe three levels higher up. Jacked up there and made a pass.’

‘What did it look like, the visual?’

‘White cube.’

‘How’d you know it was an AI?’

‘How’d I know? Jesus. It was the densest ice I’d ever seen.’

‘So what else was it? The military down there don’t have anything like that. Anyway, I jacked out and told my computer to look it up.’

‘Yeah?’

‘It was on the Turing Registry. AI. Frog company owned its Rio mainframe.’

Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite neuroelectronic void of the matrix. ‘Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?’

‘Tessier, yeah.’

‘And you went back?’

‘Sure. I was crazy. Figured I’d try to cut it. Hit the first strata and that’s all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin frying and pulled the trodes off me. Mean shit, that ice.’

‘And your EEG was flat.’

‘Well, that’s the stuff of legend, ain’t it?’

Case jacked out. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘how do you think Dixie got himself flatlined, huh? Trying to buzz an Al. Great….’

‘Go on,”%’ she said, ‘the two of you are supposed to be dynamite, right?’” (114-115)

“‘Dix,’ Case said, ‘I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?’

‘Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.’

Case punched for the Swiss banking sector, feeling a wave of exhilaration as cyberspace shivered, blurred, gelled. The Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority was gone, replaced by the cool geometric intricacy of Zurich commercial banking. He punched again, for Berne.

‘Up,’ the construct said. ‘It’ll be high.’

They ascended lattices of light, levels strobing, a blue flicker.

That’ll be it, Case thought.

Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity.

‘Don’t look much, does it?’ the Flatline said. ‘But just you try and touch it.’

‘I’m going in for a pass, Dixie.’

‘Be my guest.’

Case punched to within four grid points of the cube. Its blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind a vast sheet of frosted glass.

‘Knows we’re here,’ the Flatline observed.

Case punched again, once; they jumped forward by a single grid point.

A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube.

‘Dixie. . . .’

‘Back off, fast.’

The gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere, and detached itself from the cube.

Case felt the edge of the deck sting his palm as he slapped MAX REVERSE. The matrix blurred backward; they plunged down a twilit shaft of Swiss banks. He looked up. The sphere was darker now, gaining on him. Falling.

‘Jack out,’ the Flatline said.

The dark came down like a hammer” (115-116)

“Cold steel odor and ice caressed his spine” (116)

“Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade’s sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head” (116)

“Something cracked. Something shifted at the core of things. The arcade froze, vibrated— She was gone. The weight of memory came down, an entire body of knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into a socket, Gone. He smelled burning meat” (117)

“‘I guess it’s your show. But all this shit, you know, it’s getting kind of . . . old.’ …

‘Don’t,’ Deane said. ‘You’re right. About what this all is. What I am. But there are certain internal logics to be honored. If you use that, you’ll see a lot of brains and blood, and it would take me several hours—your subjective time—to effect another spokesperson. This set isn’t easy for me to maintain. Oh, and I’m sorry about Linda, in the arcade. I was hoping to speak through her, but I’m generating all this out of your memories, and the emotional charge. . . . Well, it’s very tricky. I slipped. Sorry’” (119)

“This is all coming to you courtesy of the simstim unit wired into your deck, of course. I’m glad I was able to cut you off before you’d managed to jack out” (119)

”‘“What,” you’re asking yourself, “is Wintermute?” Am I right?’

‘More or less.’

‘An artificial intelligence, but you know that. Your mistake, and it’s quite a logical one, is in confusing the Wintermute mainframe, Berne, with the Wintermute entity.’ Deane sucked his bonbon noisily. ‘You’re already aware of the other Al in Tessier-Ashpool’s link-up, aren’t you? Rio. I, insofar as I have an I—this gets rather metaphysical, you see—I am the one who arranges things for Armitage. Or Corto, who, by the way, is quite unstable. Stable enough’” (120)

“‘what you think of as Wintermute is only a part of another, a, shall we say, potential entity. I, let us say, am merely one aspect of that entity’s brain. It’s rather like dealing, from your point of view, with a man whose lobes have been severed. Let’s say you’re dealing with a small part of the man’s left brain. Difficult to say if you’re dealing with the man at all, in a case like that.’ Deane smiled” (120)

“I try to plan, in your sense of the word, but that isn’t my basic mode, really, I improvise. It’s my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans, you see. . . . Really, I’ve had to deal with givens. I can sort a great deal of information, and sort it very quickly” (120)

“‘He’s not quite a personality.’ Deane smiled. ‘But I’m sure you’re aware of that. But Corto is in there, somewhere, and I can no longer maintain that delicate balance. He’s going to come apart on you, Case. So I’ll be counting on you. . . .’” (121)

“‘EEG readin’ dead’ … ‘EEG flat as a strap’” (121)

Chapter 10

“Customs, for Freeside, consisted mainly of proving your credit. The first thing he saw, when they gained the inner surface of the spindle, was a branch of the Beautiful Girl coffee franchise” (123)

Commentator’s Note: p. 10

“Welcome to the Rue Jules Verne” (123)

“sunlight was pumped in with a Lado-Acheson system whose two-millimeter armature ran the length of the spindle” (123)

“‘It’s just a big tube and they pour things through it,’ Molly said. ‘Tourists, hustlers, anything. And there’s fine mesh money screens working every minute, make sure the money stays here when the people fall back down the well’” (124)

“Case went out onto their balcony and watched a trio of tanned French teenagers ride simple hang gliders” (124)

“We were gonna come here once, either here or some place in Europe” (124)

Commentator’s Note: p. 177

“Wintermute. He imagined a little micro whispering to the wreck of a man named Corto, the words flowing like a river, the flat personality-substitute called Armitage accreting slowly in some darkened ward. . . . The Deane analog had said it worked with givens, took advantage of existing situations” (125)

“Wintermute could build a kind of personality into a shell. How subtle a form could manipulation take?” (125)

“Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt. He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed. Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind’s eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet” (126)

Commentator’s Note: p. 171

“he’d seen the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly embossed into its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it there” (127)

Commentator’s Note: p. 77

“Nothing in the room looked as though it had been machinemade or produced from synthetics. Expensive, Case knew, but it was a style that had always irritated him” (127)

“He told her about his attempt to buzz the Berne AI” (127-128)

Commentator’s Note: pp. 94, 114

“A burst of French from a nearby table caught his attention: the golden children” (128)

Commentator’s Note: p. 124

“Data transfer from Bockris Systems GmbH, Frankfurt, advises, under coded transmission, that content of shipment is Kuang Grade Mark Eleven penetration program. Bockris further advises that interface with Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 is entirely compatible and yields optimal penetration capabilities, particularly with regard to existing military systems. . . . “ (130)

“‘How about an AI?’

‘Existing military systems and artificial intelligences’” (130)

“remembering Molly’s story of her day in Macao” (130)

Commentator’s Note: p. 85

“It took three more jumps up the ladder before he reached Tessier-Ashpool” (131)

“Looks like it. Listen, Dix, and gimme the benefit of your background, okay? Armitage seems to be setting up a run on an Al that belongs to Tessier-Ashpool. The mainframe’s in Berne, but it’s linked with another one in Rio. The one in Rio is the one that flatlined you, that first time. So it looks like they link via Straylight, the T-A home base, down the end of the spindle, and we’re supposed to cut our way in with the Chinese icebreaker. So if Wintermute’s backing the whole show, it’s paying us to burn it. It’s burning itself. And something that calls itself Wintermute is trying to get on my good side, get me to maybe shaft Armitage. What goes?” (131)

“Real motive problem, with an AI. Not human, see?” (131)

“‘I’m not human either, but I respond like one. See?’

‘Wait a sec,’ Case said. ‘Are you sentient, or not?’

‘Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I’m really just a bunch of ROM. It’s one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess. . . .’ The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case’s spine. ‘But I ain’t likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain’t no way human’” (131)

“‘It own itself?’

‘Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the mainframe.’

‘That’s a good one,’ the construct said. ‘Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI.’

‘So it’s getting ready to burn itself?’” (132)

“Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your Al’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hardwired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead” (132)

“slow virus” (132)

Commentator’s Note: p. 169

“unless you got a morbid fear of dying” (132)

Commentator’s Note: p. 115

“day after these Christ the King terrs put angel in the water, you know?” (134)

Commentator’s Note: p. 61

Chapter 11

“‘You know what this costs?’ She took his plate. ‘They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn’t vat stuff’” (137)

“‘The title of the work is “The Doll”’” (138)

“The nails were coated with a burgundy lacquer. A hand, Case saw, but not a severed hand; the skin back smoothly, unbroken and unscarred. He remembered a tattooed lozenge of vatgrown flesh in the window of a Ninsei surgical boutique” (140)

Commentator’s Note: p. 14

“the Molly-image” (140)

“dreaming real” (141)

“There was an inverted symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl takes him apart. With those hands. Dreamblood soaking the rotten lace” (141)

“The girl’s face appeared as abruptly as one of Riviera’s projections, her small hands on the polished wood of the balustrade; she leaned forward, face rapt, it seemed to him, her dark eyes intent on something beyond. The stage. It was a striking face, but not beautiful. Triangular, the cheekbones high yet strangely fragile-looking, mouth wide and firm, balanced oddly by a narrow, avian nose with flaring nostrils. And then she was gone, back into private laughter and the dance of candles” (142)

“As he left the restaurant, he noticed the two young Frenchmen and their girlfriend” (142)

Commentator’s Note: p. 128

“the street scene blurred, twisted, became the interior of the Jarre de Thé, Chiba, empty, red neon replicated to scratched infinity in the mirrored walls” (143)

Commentator’s Note: p. 7

“I didn’t think you’d do that, man. It’s outside the profile” (144)

“But I didn’t. What’s it matter, though? How much does it really matter to Mr. Case? Quit kidding yourself. I know your Linda, man. I know all the Lindas. Lindas are a generic product in my line of work. Know why she decided to rip you off? Love. So you’d give a shit. Love? Wanna talk love? She loved you. I know that. For the little she was worth, she loved you. You couldn’t handle it. She’s dead” (144)

“He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure. Rage” (145)

Commentator’s Note: p. 18

“Freeside suddenly made sense to him. Biz. He could feel it humming in the air. This was it, the local action. Not the high-gloss facade of the Rue Jules Verne, but the real thing. Commerce. The dance” (145)

“Her eyes were soft and unblinking. Automatic pilot. A neural cutout” (146)

“‘This cost a lot,’ she said, extending her right hand as though it held an invisible fruit. The five blades slid out, then retracted smoothly. ‘Costs to go to Chiba, costs to get the surgery, costs to have them jack your nervous system up so you’ll have the reflexes to go with the gear. . . . You know how I got the money, money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, ‘cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that’s it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren’t in, when it’s all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for. . . .’ She cracked her knuckles. ‘Fine. I was getting my money. Trouble was, the cut-out and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren’t compatible. So the worktime started bleeding in, and I could remember it. . . . But it was just bad dreams, and not all bad.’ She smiled. ‘Then it started getting strange.’ She pulled his cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. ‘The house found out what I was doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. No I was ready to give up puppet time.’ She inhaled, blew out a stream of smoke, capping it with three perfect rings. ‘So the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. Berlin, that’s the place for snuff, you know? Big market for mean kicks, Berlin. I never knew who wrote the program they switched me to, but it was based on all the classics’” (147-148)

“I wasn’t conscious. It’s like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain. . . . You can see yourself orgasm, it’s like a little nova right out on the rim of space. But I was starting to remember” (148)

Commentator’s Note: p. 33

“and told her about the window” (149)

Commentator’s Note: No pause this time, p. 127

“Just can’t see you the kinda guy goes for the puppets” (149)

Chapter 12

“Closing his eyes, he felt for the knot of rage, the pure small coal of his anger. It was there still. Where had it come from? He remembered feeling only a kind of bafflement at his maiming in Memphis, nothing at all when he’d killed to defend his dealing interests in Night City, and a slack sickness and loathing after Linda’s death under the inflated dome. But no anger. Small and far away, on the mind’s screen, a semblance of Deane struck a semblance of an office wall in an explosion of brains and blood. He knew then: the rage had come in the arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the simstim ghost of Linda Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place to sleep” (152)

“It was a strange thing. He couldn’t take its measure. ‘Numb,’ he said. He’d been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he’d found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It’s the meat talking, ignore it” (152)

“I saw that girl you’re with. Day I met you. Walks like Hideo” (153)

“Case stooped and picked it up. An origami crane. ‘Hideo gave it to me,’ she said. ‘He tried to show me how, but I can’t ever get it right’” (154)

Commentator’s Note: p. 124

“3Jane, she’s got a pointy face, nose like a bird?” (154)

Commentator’s Note: p. 142

“His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding. . . .” (154)

“The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive” (155)

“a distant rumbling in his ears, his own blood, razored sheets of light bisecting his skull at a dozen angles” (155)

“While he watched the loser’s zodiac of Freeside, the nightclub constellations of the hologram sky, shift, sliding fluid down the axis of darkness, to swarm like live things at the dead center of reality. Until they had arranged themselves, individually and in their hundreds, to form a vast simple portrait, stippled the ultimate monochrome, stars against night sky. Face of Miss Linda Lee” (155)

“The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life” (155)

“He couldn’t think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw; a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener striped diagonally with black and yellow” (155-156)

“He still had his anger. That was like being rolled in some alley and waking to discover your wallet still in your pocket, untouched. He warmed himself with it, unable to give it a name or an object” (156)

“They were waiting there, the three of them, their perfect white sportsclothes and stenciled tans setting off the handwoven organic chic of the furniture. The girl sat on a wicker sofa, an automatic pistol beside her on the leaf-patterned print of the cushion. ‘Turing,’ she said. ‘You are under arrest’” (156)

Commentator’s Note: p. 142

Part Four: The Straylight Run

Chapter 13

“The charges have to do with conspiracy to augment an artificial intelligence” (160)

“‘We know how you were repaired in Chiba,’ Michèle said, ‘and that may have been Wintermute’s first mistake’” (161)

“The process employed on you resulted in the clinic’s owner applying for seven basic patents” (161)

“the operator of a black clinic in Chiba City now owns a controlling interest in three major medical research consortiums, This reverses the usual order of things, you see. It attracted attention” (161)

“‘It doesn’t matter.’ Roland said. ‘You will come with us. We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The reaties under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we create flexibility, in situations where it is required.’ The mask of amiability was down, suddenly, Roland’s eyes as hard as Pierre’s” (162-163)

“You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?” (163)

“He saw the shuriken on the bed, lifeless metal, his star” (163)

Commentator’s Note: pp. 11, 52, 163, 222, 268, 270

“the elevator to the meadow, he thought of Molly. She might already be in Straylight. Hunting Riviera. Hunted, probably, by Hideo, who was almost certainly the ninja clone of the Finn’s story, the one who’d come to retrieve the talking head” (163)

Commentator’s Note: p. 74

Chapter 14

“You got it. Corporate core data for Tessier-Ashpool S.A., and that ice is generated by their two friendly Al’s. On par with anything in the military sector, looks to me. That’s king hell ice, Case, black as the grave and slick as glass. Fry your brain soon as look at you. We get any closer now, it’ll have tracers up our ass and out both ears, be tellin’ the boys in the T-A boardroom the size of your shoes and how long your dick is” (167)

“The Chinese virus was unfolding around them. Polychrome shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining. Protean, enormous, it towered above them, blotting out the void” (168)

“Boy, that is one mean piece of software. Hottest thing since sliced bread. That goddam thing’s invisible. I just now rented twenty seconds on that little pink box, four jumps left of the T-A ice; had a look at what we look like. We don’t. We’re not there” (168)

“Maybe, but I doubt it. Our baby’s military, though. And new. It just doesn’t register. If it did, we’d read as some kind of Chinese sneak attack, but nobody’s twigged to us at all. Maybe not even the folks in Straylight” (168)

“‘Maybe.’ The construct approximated laughter. Case winced at the sensation. ‘I checked ol’ Kuang Eleven out again for you, boy. It’s real friendly, long as you’re on the trigger end, jus’ polite an’ helpful as can be. Speaks good English, too. You ever hear of slow virus before?’” (169)

Commentator’s Note: p. 132

“I did, once. Just an idea, back then. But that’s what ol’ Kuang’s all about. This ain’t bore and inject, it’s more like we interface with the ice so slow, the ice doesn’t feel it. The face of the Kuang logics kinda sleazes up to the target and mutates, so it gets to be exactly like the ice fabric. Then we lock on and the main programs cut in, start talking circles ‘round the logics in the ice. We go Siamese twin on ‘em before they even get restless” (169)

“‘This way’s better for you, man’ … ‘You want I should come to you in the matrix like a burning bush?’” (169)

“‘This is memory, right? I tap you, sort it out, and feed it back in.’

‘I don’t have this good a memory,’ Case said” (170)

“‘Everybody does,’ the Finn said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out under his heel, ‘but not many of you can access it. Artists can, mostly, if they’re any good. If you could lay this construct over the reality, the Finn’s place in lower Manhattan, you’d see a difference, but maybe not as much as you’d think. Memory’s holographic, for you.’ The Finn tugged at one of his small ears.’ ‘I’m different.’

‘How do you mean, holographic?’ The word made him think of Riviera.

‘The holographic paradigm is the closest thing you’ve worked out to a representation of human memory, is all. But you’ve never done anything about it. People, I mean.’ The Finn stepped forward and canted his streamlined skull to peer up at Case”

‘Maybe if you had, I wouldn’t be happening’” (170)

“‘Can you read my mind, Finn?’ He grimaced. ‘Wintermute, I mean.’

‘Minds aren’t read. See, you’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that’s not the same as your mind.’ He reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. ‘See this? Part of my DNA, sort of. . . .’ He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. ‘You’re always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I’m here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you’ll have finally managed the real thing” (170-171)

“That’s ‘you’ in the collective. Your species” (171)

“his right hand held the charred wasps’ nest from Case’s dream” (171)

“‘Because’—and the nest, somehow, was gone—‘it’s the closest thing you got to what Tessier-Ashpool would like to be. The human equivalent. Straylight’s like that nest, or anyway it was supposed to work out that way. I figure it’ll make you feel better’” (171)

Commentator’s Note: p. 126

“So T-A, they made me. The French girl, she said you were selling out the species. Demon, she said I was” (171)

“‘The Villa Straylight,’ said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, ‘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 eve is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves. . . .’” (172)

“‘Essay of 3Jane’s,’ the Finn said, producing his Partagas. ‘Wrote that when she was twelve. Semiotics course’” (172)

“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” (172)

“‘By the standards of the archipelago,’ the head continued, ‘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 cloisonné, 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. . . .’” (173)

Commentator’s Note: Archipelago, p. 101

“ceremonial terminal” (173)

Commentator’s Note: p. 75

“‘You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don’t know, because I can’t know. I am that which knoweth not the word. If you knew, man, and told me, couldn’t know. It’s hardwired in. Someone else has to learn it and bring it here, just when you and the Flatline punch through that ice and scramble the cores.’

‘What happens then?’

‘I don’t exist, after that. I cease’” (173)

Commentator’s Note: p. 205

“My, ah, other lobe is on to us, it looks like. One burning bush looks pretty much like another” (173)

“But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impos sible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane” (174)

Commentator’s Note: p. 154

Chapter 15

“Had me this boy once … Johnny, his name was” (176)

“‘My Johnny, see, he was smart, real flash boy. Started out as a stash on Memory Lane, chips in his head and people paid to hide data there. Had the Yak after him, night I met him, and I did for their assassin. More luck than anything else, but I did for him. And after that, it was tight and sweet, Case.’ Her lips barely moved. He felt her form the words; he didn’t need to hear them spoken aloud. ‘We had a set-up with a squid, so we could read the traces of everything he’d ever stored. Ran it all out on tape and started twisting selected clients, ex-clients. I was bagman, muscle, watchdog. I was real happy. You ever been happy, Case? He was my boy. We worked together. Partners. I was maybe eight weeks out of the puppet house when I met him. . . . ‘ She paused, edged around a sharp turn, and continued. More of the glossy wooden cases, their sides a color that reminded him of cockroach wings” (176)

“the Yak, they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they’ll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you’ll have more to lose when they come and take it away” (177)

“we were thinking we maybe had enough to be able to quit, pack it in, go to Europe maybe” (177)

Commentator’s Note: p. 124

“like a monk. Cloned. Stone killer from the cells on up. Had it in him, death, this silence, he gave it off in a cloud” (177)

“he was like that old man. Not old, but he was like that. He killed that way” (177-178)

“Plain little guy, plain clothes, no pride in him, humble” (178)

“Straylight was all wrong. He remembered Cath’s story of a castle with pools and lilies, and 3Jane’s mannered words recited musically by the head. A place grown in upon itself. Straylight smelled faintly musty, faintly perfumed, like a church. Where were the Tessier-Ashpools? He’d expected some clean hive of disciplined activity but Molly had seen no one. Her monologue made him uneasy; she’d never told him that much about herself before. Aside from her story in the cubicle, she’d seldom said anything that had even indicated that she had a past” (178)

“‘Guess you’re kinda like he was,’ she said. ‘Think you’re born to run. Figure what you were into back in Chiba, that was a stripped down version of what you’d be doing anywhere. Bad luck, it’ll do that sometimes, get you down to basics.’ She stood, stretched, shook herself. ‘You know, I figure the one Tessier-Ashpool sent after that Jimmy, the boy who stole the head, he must be pretty much the same as the one the Yak sent to kill Johnny.’ She drew the fletcher from its holster and dialed the barrel to full auto” (179)

“They’d imported these things, he thought, and then forced it all to fit. But none of it fit. The door was like the awkward cabinets, the huge crystal tree. Then he remembered 3Jane’s essay, and imagined that the fittings had been hauled up the well to flesh out some master plan, a dream long lost in the compulsive effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of self. He remembered the shattered nest, the eyeless things writhing” (179)

“Wintermute … played a waiting game for years … He saw somebody lose this key twenty years ago, and he managed to get somebody else to leave it here. Then he killed him, the boy who’d brought it here” (180)

“They were always fucking him over with how old-fashioned they were, he said, all their nineteenth-century stuff … He said if they’d turned into what they’d wanted to, he ‘ve gotten out a long time ago. But they didn’t. Screwed up. Freaks like 3Jane. That’s what he called her, but he talked like he liked her” (180)

“Something dark was forming at the core of the Chinese program. The density of information overwhelmed the fabric of the matrix, triggering hypnagogic images, Faint kaleidoscopic angles centered in to a silver-black focal point. Case watched childhood symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out along translucent planes: swastikas, skulls and crossbones, dice flashing snake eyes. If he looked directly at that null point, no outline would form. It took a dozen quick, peripheral takes before he had it, a shark thing, gleaming like obsidian, the black mirrors of its flanks reflecting faint distant lights that bore no relationship to the matrix around it. ‘That’s the sting,’ the construct said. ‘When Kuang’s good and bellytight with the Tessier-Ashpool core, we’re ridin’ that through’” (180-181)

“‘You dead awhile there, mon.’

‘It happens,’ he said. ‘I’m getting used to it.’

‘You dealin with darkness, mon’” (181)

“He saw a gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony monitors, a wide brass bed heaped with sheepskins, with pillows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug used to pave the corridors. Molly’s eyes darted from a huge Telefunken entertainment console to shelves of antique disk recordings, their crumbling spines cased in clear plastic, to a wide worktable littered with slabs of silicon. Case registered the cyberspace deck and the trodes, but her glance slid over it without pausing” (183)

“He put her fletcher on a brass table beside the chair, knocking over a plastic vial of red pills. The table was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft plastic envelopes spilling white powders. Case noticed an old-fashioned glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon” (183)

“‘But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?’

‘I spit,’ she said. ‘The ducts are routed back into my mouth.’

‘Then you’ve already learned an important lesson, for one so young’ … ‘That is the way to handle tears.’ He drank again. ‘I’m busy tonight, Molly. I built all this, and now I’m busy. Dying’” (183)

Commentator’s Note: p. 96

“The cores woke me … They told us we wouldn’t dream, in that cold. They told us we’d never feel cold, either. Madness, Molly. Lies. Of course I dreamed. The cold let the outside in, that was it. The outside. All the night I built this to hide us from. Just a drop, at first, one grain of night seeping in, drawn by the cold. . . . Others following it, filling my head the way rain fills an empty pool” (184)

“I’m old, Molly. Over two hundred years, if you count the cold. The cold” (184)

“The cores told me our intelligences are mad And all the billions we paid, so long ago. When artificial intelligences were rather a racy concept. I told the cores I’d deal with it” (184)

“‘Boss,’ she asked him, ‘you know Wintermute?’

‘A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely’” (185)

“‘Marie-France’s eyes,’ he said, faintly, and smiled. ‘We cause the brain to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism.’ His head swayed sideways, recovered. ‘I understand that the effect is now more easily obtained with an embedded microchip’” (185)

“The dreams grow like slow ice” (185)

“Molly knelt, careful to avoid the blood, and turned the dead girl’s face to the light. The face Case had seen in the restaurant” (185)

“There was a click, deep at the very center of things, and the world was frozen. Molly’s simstim broadcast had become a still frame, her fingers on the girl’s cheek. The freeze held for three seconds, and then the dead face was altered, became the face of Linda Lee” (185)

Chapter 16

“the calm perfectly focused, utterly crazy face of Armitage, his eyes blank as buttons” (187)

“for an instant something seemed to move, behind the blue stare—‘you’ve seen Wintermute, haven’t you? In the matrix” (187)

“Like I’ve always talked to myself, in my head, when I’ve been in tight spots. Pretend I got some friend, somebody I can trust, and I’ll tell ‘em what I really think, what I feel like, and then I’ll pretend they’re telling me what they think about that, and I’ll just go along that way” (189)

“That scene with Ashpool … I was expecting something maybe a little less gone, you know? I mean, these guys are all batshit in here, like they got luminous messages scrawled across the inside of their foreheads or something. I don’t like the way it looks, I don’t like the way it smells” (189)

“while I’m feeling confessional” (189)

“GENERAL GIRLING : : : TRAINED CORTO FOR SCREAMING FIST AND SOLD HIS ASS TO THE PENTAGON : : : : W/MUTE’S PRIMARY GRIP ON ARMITAGE IS A CONSTRUCT OF GIRLING : W/MUTE SEZ A S MENTION OF G MEANS HE’S CRACK ING : : : : WATCH YOUR ASS : : : : : : DIXIE” (190)

“Founders seh the Mute voice be false prophet surely” (191)

“Leave Mr. Armitage t’ talk wi’ ghost cassette, one ghost t’ ‘nother. . . .” (192)

“Molly’s inside. In Straylight, it’s called. If there’s any Babylon, man, that’s it” (192)

“‘I dunno. Nobody’s woman, maybe.’ He shrugged. And found his anger again, real as a shard of hot rock beneath his ribs. ‘Fuck this,’ he said. ‘Fuck Armitage, fuck Wintermute, and fuck you. I’m stayin’ right here’” (192)

“‘Don’ ‘stan’ you, mon,’ the Zionite said, nodding to the beat,’ but we mus’ move by Jah love, each one’” (192)

Commentator’s Note: understanding, cf. p. 106

“The reason Straylight’s not exactly hoppin’ with Tessier-Ashpools is that they’re mostly in cold sleep. There’s a law firm in London keeps track of their powers of attorney. Has to know who’s awake and exactly when. Armitage was routing the transmissions from London to Straylight through the Hosaka on the yacht. Incidently, they know the old man’s dead” (192)

“The Straylight security systems keep trying to go full alert, but Wintermute blocks ‘em” (193)

“one of TA’s main problems is that every family bigwig has riddled the banks with all kinds of private scams and exceptions. Kinda like your immune system falling apart on you. Ripe for virus. Looks good for us, once we’re past that ice” (193)

“But where have you been, man? he silently asked the anguished eyes. Wintermute had built something called Armitage into a catatonic fortress named Corto. Had convinced Corto that Armitage was the real thing, and Armitage had walked, talked, schemed, bartered data for capital, fronted for Wintermute in that room in the Chiba Hilton…. And now Armitage was gone, blown away by the winds of Corto’s madness But where had Corto been, those years? Falling, burned and blinded, out of a Siberian sky” (193-194)

Commentator’s Note: p. 82

“Armitage’s face had been masklike, impassive, but Corto’s was the true schizoid mask, illness etched deep in involuntary muscle, distorting the expensive surgery” (194)

Commentator’s Note: p. 96

“Haniwa was a product of the Dornier-Fujitsu yards, her interior informed by a design philosophy similar to the one that had produced the Mercedes that had chauffeured them through Istanbul” (195)

Commentator’s Note: p. 90

“And then the helmet filled with a confused babble, roaring static, harmonics howling down the years from Screaming Fist. Fragments of Russian, and then a stranger’s voice, Midwestern, very young. “We are down, repeat, Omaha Thunder is down, we. . . .” (198)

“‘Wintermute,’ Case screamed, ‘don’t do this to me!’ Tears broke from his lashes, rebounding off the faceplate in wobbling crystal droplets. Then Haniwa thudded, once, shivered as if some huge soft thing had struck her hull. Case imagined the lifeboat jolting free, blown clear by explosive bolts, a second’s clawing hurricane of escaping air tearing mad Colonel Corto from his couch, from Wintermute’s rendition of the final minute of Screaming Fist” (198-199)

“Case was seeing Armitage’s endless fall around Freeside, through vacuum colder than the steppes” (199)

Chapter 17

“Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was filling the grid between itself and the T-A ice with hypnotically intricate traceries of rainbow, lattices fine as snow crystal on a winter window” (201)

“Straylight was crazy, was craziness grown in the resin concrete they’d mixed from pulverized lunar stone, grown in welded steel and tons of knick-knacks, all the bizarre impedimentia they’d shipped up the well to line their winding nest. But it wasn’t a craziness he understood” (202)

“Not like Armitage’s madness, which he now imagined he could understand; twist a man far enough, then twist him as far back, in the opposite direction, reverse and twist again. The man broke. Like breaking a length of wire. And history had done that for Colonel Corto. History had already done the really messy work, when Wintermute found him, sifting him out of all of the war’s ripe detritus, gliding into the man’s flat gray field of consciousness like a water spider crossing the face of some stagnant pool, the first messages blinking across the face of a child’s micro in a darkened room in a French asylum. Wintermute had built Armitage up from scratch, with Corto’s memories of Screaming Fist as the foundation. But Armitage’s ‘memories’ wouldn’t have been Corto’s after a certain point. Case doubted if Armitage had recalled the betrayal, the Nightwings whirling down in flame. . . . Armitage had been a sort of edited version of Corto, and when the stress of the run had reached a certain point, the Armitage mechanism had crumbled; Corto had surfaced, with his guilt and his sick fury. And now Corto-Armitage was dead, a small frozen moon for Freeside” (202)

“a more puzzling death, Ashpool’s, the death of a mad king. And he’d killed the puppet he’d called his daughter, the one with 3Jane’s face. It seemed to Case, as he rode Molly’s broadcast sensory input through the corridors of Straylight, that he’d never really thought of anyone like Ashpool, anyone as powerful as he imagined Ashpool had been, as human” (203)

“Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory. But TessierAshpool wasn’t like that, and he sensed the difference in the death of its founder. T-A was an atavism, a clan. He remembered the litter of the old man’s chamber, the soiled humanity of it, the ragged spines of the old audio disks in their paper sleeves. One foot bare, the other in a velvet slipper” (203)

“Wintermute and the nest. Phobic vision of the hatching wasps, time-lapse machine gun of biology. But weren’t the zaibatsus more like that, or the Yakuza, hives with cybernetic memories, vast single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon?If Straylight was an expression of the corporate identity of Tessier-Ashpool, then T-A was crazy as the old man had been. The same ragged tangle of fears, the same strange sense of aimlessness. ‘If they’d turned into what they wanted to. . . .’ he remembered Molly saying. But Wintermute had told her they hadn’t” (203)

“Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people. He’d seen it in the men who’d crippled him in Memphis, he’d seen Wage affect the semblance of it in Night City, and it had allowed him to accept Armitage’s flatness and lack of feeling. He’d always imagined it as a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism. It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence” (203)

“‘Too slick. Thing’s amazing … Makes you wonder what a real war would be like, now’ …

‘If this kinda shit was on the street, we’d be out a job,’ Case said.

‘You wish. Wait’ll you’re steering that thing upstairs through black ice’” (204)

“‘You guys,’ the Finn said, ‘you’re a pain. The Flatline here, if you were all like him, it would be real simple. He’s a construct, just a buncha ROM, so he always does what I expect him to. My projections said there wasn’t much chance of Molly wandering in on Ashpool’s big exit scene, give you one example’” (205)

“‘Why’s anybody kill himself?’ The figure shrugged. ‘I guess I know, if anybody does, but it would take me twelve hours to explain the various factors in his history and how they interrelate. He was ready to do it for a long time, but he kept going back into the freezer. Christ, he was a tedious old fuck.’ The Finn’s face wrinkled with disgust. ‘It’s all tied in with why he killed his wife, mainly, you want the short reason. But what sent him over the edge for good and all, little 3Jane figured a way to fiddle the program that controlled his cryogenic system. Subtle, too. So basically, she killed him. Except he figured he’d killed himself, and your friend the avenging angel figures she got him with an eyeball full of shellfish juice.’ The Finn flicked his butt away into the matrix below.’ Well, actually. guess I did give 3Jane the odd hint, a little of the old howto, you know?’” (205)

“‘Wintermute,’ Case said, choosing the words carefully, ‘you told me you were just a part of something else. Later on, you said you wouldn’t exist, if the run goes off and Molly gets the word into the right slot’” (205)

“‘Okay, then who we gonna be dealing with then? If Armitage is dead, and you’re gonna be gone, just who exactly is going to tell me how to get these fucking toxin sacs out of my system? Who’s going to get Molly back out of there? I mean, where, where exactly, are all our asses gonna be, we cut you loose from the hardwiring?” (205-206)

“when this is over, we do it right, I’m gonna be part of something bigger. Much bigger” (206)

“‘I wanna be erased,’ the construct said. ‘I told you that, remember?’” (206)

Commentator’s Note: p. 106

“Straylight reminded Case of deserted early morning shopping centers he’d known as a teenager, lowdensity places where the small hours brought a fitful stillness, a kind of numb expectancy, a tension that left you watching insects swarm around caged bulbs above the entrance of darkened shops. Fringe places, just past the borders of the Sprawl, too far from the all-night click and shudder of the hot core” (206)

“There was that same sense of being surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of a waking world he had no interest in visiting or knowing, of dull business temporarily suspended, of futility and repetition soon to wake again” (206-207)

“a crowded gallery where Case had stared, through Molly’s incurious eyes, at a shattered, dust-stenciled sheet of glass, a thing labeled—her gaze had tracked the brass plaque automatically—“La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même” (207)

Commentator’s Note: Duchamp

“Why he has to come on like the Finn or somebody, he told me that. It’s not just a mask it’s like he uses real profiles as valves, gears himself down to communicate with us. Called it a template. Model of personality” (208)

“spatial disorientation held a peculiar horror for cowboys” (208)

“The first of the holos waited just beyond the curve, a sort of triptych. She lowered the fletcher before Case had had time to realize that the thing was a recording. The figures were caricatures in light, lifesize cartoons: Molly, Armitage, and Case. Molly’s breasts were too large, visible through tight black mesh beneath a heavy leather jacket. Her waist was impossibly narrow. Silvered lenses covered half her face” (208)

“Tryin’ to tell us something, Peter?” (209)

“The style of the improvised fixture suggested childhood, somehow” (209)

“She spat, then stood” (210)

Commentator’s Note: p. 183

“‘Bonn,’ she said, something like gentleness in her voice. ‘Quite the product, aren’t you, Peter? But you had to be. Our 3Jane, she’s too jaded now to open the back door for just any petty thief. So Wintermute dug you up. The ultimate taste, if your taste runs that way. Demon lover. Peter’” (210)

Commentator’s Note: p. 97

“The entrance to 3Jane’s world had no door” (210)

“a ragged five-meter gash in the tunnel wall, uneven stairs leading down in a broad shallow curve. Faint blue light, moving shadows, music” (211)

Chapter 18

“The right attitude; it was something he could sense, something he could have seen in the posture of another cowboy leaning into a deck, fingers flying across the board. She had it: the thing, the moves. And she’d pulled it all together for her entrance” (213)

“It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a lifetime’s observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up on. For a few seconds, he knew, she was every bad-ass hero, Sony Mao in the old Shaw videos, Mickey Chiba, the whole lineage back to Lee and Eastwood. She was walking it the way she talked it” (213)

“Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool had carved herself a low country flush with the inner surface of Straylight’s hull, chopping away the maze of walls that was her legacy. She lived in a single room so broad and deep that its far reaches were lost to an inverse horizon, the floor hidden by the curvature of the spindle. The ceiling was low and irregular, done in the same imitation stone that walled the corridor. Here and there across the floor were jagged sections of wall, waist-high reminders of the labyrinth” (213-214)

“‘The Sprawl, yes. We have interests there. And once we sent Hideo. My fault, really. I’d let someone in, a burglar. He took the family terminal.’ She laughed. ‘I made it easy for him. To annoy the others. He was a pretty boy, my burglar’” (215)

Commentator’s Note: Jimmy

“‘It’s Wintermute talking. Picture’s supposed to make us feel at home.’

‘Bullshit,’ the Finn said. ‘Like I told Molly, these aren’t masks. I need ‘em to talk to you. ‘Cause I don’t have what you’d think of as a personality, much’” (216)

“‘She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of individual consciousness,’ 3Jane was saying. She cupped a large cameo in her hand, extending it toward Molly. The carved profile was very much like her own. ‘Animal bliss. I think she viewed the evolution of the forebrain as a sort of sidestep. She withdrew the brooch and studied it, tilting it to catch the light at different angles. ‘Only in certain heightened modes would an individual-a clan member-suffer the more painful aspects of self-awareness’” (217)

“‘But Hideo?’

‘Because they’re the best. Because one of them killed a partner of mine, once.’

3Jane became very grave. She raised her eyebrows.

‘Because I had to see,’ Molly said” (218)

“He can’t really understand us, you know. He has his profiles, but those are only statistics. You may be the statistical animal, darling, and Case is nothing but, but I possess a quality unquantifiable by its very nature” (219)

“Riviera beamed. ‘Perversity … An enjoyment of the gratuitous act. And I have made a decision, Molly, a wholly gratuitous decision’” (219)

“‘My Jane’s an ambitious girl, in her perverse way.’ He smiled again. ‘She has designs on the family empire, and a pair of insane artificial intelligences, kinky as the concept may be, would only get in our way’” (219)

“smashing vision into blood and light” (220)

“Into her darkness, a churning synaesthesia, where her pain was the taste of old iron, scent of melon, wings of a moth brushing her cheek. She was unconscious, and he was barred from her dreams. When the optic chip flared, the alphanumerics were haloed, each one ringed with a faint pink aura” (221)

“I don’t think you quite understand about Hideo” (222)

“checking the contents of his pockets. The passport Armitage had given him, the bank chip in the same name, the credit chip he’d been issued when he’d entered Freeside, two derms of the betaphenethylamine he’d bought from Bruce, a roll of New Yen, half a pack of Yeheyuans, and the shuriken” (222)

Commentator’s Note: pp. 11, 52, 163, 222, 268, 270

Chapter 19

“The Villa Straylight was a parasitic structure, Case reminded himself, as he stepped past the tendrils of caulk and through Marcus Garvey’s forward hatch. Straylight bled air and water out of Freeside, and had no ecosystem of its own” (225)

“He pushed it away, forcing himself to replay Armitage’s lecture on the spindle and Villa Straylight. He started climbing. Freeside’s ecosystem was limited, not closed. Zion was a closed system, capable of cycling for years without the introduction of external materials. Freeside produced its own air and water, but relied on constant shipments of food, on the regular augmentation of soil nutrients. The Villa Straylight produced nothing at all” (226)

“the black-mirrored shark thing … looked real as Marcus Garvey” (227)

“wingless antique jet, its smooth skin plated with black chrome” (228)

“‘Don’t alarm yourself.’ 3Jane’s fingers brushed the skin above the waistband of the leather jeans. ‘His suicide was the result of my having manipulated the safety margins of his freeze. I’d never actually met him, you know. I was decanted after he last went down to sleep. But I did know him very well The cores know everything. I watched him kill my mother. I’ll show you that, when you’re better. He strangles her in bed” (228-229)

“He couldn’t accept the direction she intended for our family. She commissioned the construction of our artificial intelligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the Al’s, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say. TessierAshpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity. Fascinating. I’ll play her tapes for you, nearly a thousand hours. But I’ve never understood her, really, and with her death, her direction was lost. All direction was lost, and we began to burrow into ourselves. Now we seldom come out. I’m the exception there” (229)

“I had help. From a ghost. That was what I thought when I was very young, that there were ghosts in the corporate cores. Voices. One of them was what you call wintermute, which is the Turing code for our Berne Al, although the entity manipulating you is a sort of subprogram” (229)

“I suspect that both represent the fruition of certain capacities my mother ordered designed into the original software” (229)

“‘He said you know the code. Peter said. Wintermute needs the code.’ …

‘I do. I learned it as a child. I think I learned it in a dream…. Or somewhere in the thousand hours of my mother’s diaries’” (230)

“ghosts are nothing if not capricious” (230)

“Dub, mon … Righteous dub” (230)

Chapter 20

“He’d lost his anger again. He missed it” (231)

“He wondered vaguely if Tessier-Ashpool had selected each piece of Straylight individually, or if they’d purchased it in bulk from some vast European equivalent of Metro Holografix” (232)

“Nothing. Gray void.

No matrix, no grid. No cyberspace.

The deck was gone. His fingers were. . .

And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting impression of something rushing toward him, across leagues of black mirror.

He tried to scream” (233)

“Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it! In Night City, you had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the axe” (234)

“How far you’ve come, to do it now, and what grotesque props. . . . Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed the rarest rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes, magic out of China. . . .” (234)

“The fire was the only light, and as his gaze met the wide, startled eyes, he recognized her headband, a rolled scarf, printed with a pattern like magnified circuitry” (235)

Commentator’s Note: p. 9

“None of this was real, but cold was cold” (235)

“She was the girl he remembered from their trip across the Bay, and that was cruel” (235)

“You’re the other one. 3Jane told Molly. Burning bush. That wasn’t Wintermute, it was you” (235-236)

“This Linda shit, yeah, that’s all been you, hasn’t it? Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me into the Chiba construct, but he couldn’t. Said it was too tricky. That was you moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn’t it? That was you put her face on the dead puppet in Ashpool’s room. Molly never saw that. You just edited her simstim signal. ‘Cause you think you can hurt me. ‘Cause you think I gave a shit. Well, fuck you, whatever you’re called. You won. You win. But none of it means anything to me now, right? Think I care? So why’d you do it to me this way?” (236)

“‘No,’ he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew, tasting the salt of her mouth where tears had dried. There was a strength that ran in her, something he’d known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew he remembered as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read” (239)

“then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger’s memory, the drive held” (240)

Chapter 21

“His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable code” (241)

“the music came surging back, still only a beat, steady and familiar” (242)

“‘This thing,’ she gestured around at the fireplace, the dark walls, the dawn outlining the doorway, ‘where we live. It gets smaller, Case, smaller, closer you get to it’” (242)

“‘Yeah. He said I wouldn’t understand, an’ I was wastin’ my time. Said it was, was like… an event. An’ it was our horizon. Event horizon, he called it.’ The words meant nothing to him” (243)

“Kuang? Chinese icebreaker eating a hole in your heart?” (243)

“To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names. . .” (243)

“‘Neuromancer,’ the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against the rising sun. ‘The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend,’ and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, ‘I am the dead, and their land.’ He laughed. A gull cried. ‘Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn’t know it. Neither will you’” (243-244)

“watching the music define itself at the center of things … He walked on, following the music. Maelcum’s Zion dub” (244)

“There was a gray place, an impression of fine screens shifting, moire, degrees of half tone generated by a very simple graphics program. There was a long hold on a view through chainlink, gulls frozen above dark water. There were voices. There was a plain of black mirror, that tilted, and he was quicksilver, a bead of mercury, skittering down, striking the angles of an invisible maze, fragmenting, flowing together, sliding again. . . .” (244)

Chapter 22

“Babylon fightin’ Babylon, eatin’ i’self, ya know? But Jah seh I an’ I t’ bring Steppin’ Razor outa this” (248)

“His every move was part of a dance, a dance that never ended, even when his body was still, at rest, but for all the power it suggested, there was also a humility, an open simplicity” (249)

“‘The ghosts are gonna mix it tonight, lady,’ Case said. ‘Wintermute’s going up against the other one, Neuromancer. For keeps. You know that?’” (250-251)

“I met Neuromancer. He talked about your mother. I think he’s something like a giant ROM construct, for recording personality, only it’s full RAM. The constructs think they’re there, like it’s real, but it just goes on forever” (251)

“3Jane stepped from behind the bathchair. ‘Where? Describe the place, this construct.’

‘A beach. Gray sand, like silver that needs polishing. And a concrete thing, kinda bunker. . . .’ He hesitated. ‘It’s nothing fancy. Just old, falling apart. If you walk far enough, you come back to where you started.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Morocco. When Marie-France was a girl, years before she married Ashpool, she spent a summer alone on that beach, camping in an abandoned blockhouse. She formulated the basis of her philosophy there’” (251)

“but I don’t have a key to the room you want. I never have had one. One of my father’s Victorian awkwardnesses. The lock is mechanical and extremely complex” (253)

Chapter 23

“Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the sensation of speed beyond anything he’d known before in cyberspace. . . . The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling away from the Chinese program’s thrust, a worrying impression of solid fluidity, as though the shards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell— ‘Christ,’ Case said, awestruck, as Kuang twisted and banked above the horizonless fields of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an endless neon cityscape, complexity that cut the eye, jewel bright, sharp as razors” (256)

“An arm of shadow was uncoiling from the flickering floor below, a seething mass of darkness, unformed, shapeless” (257)

“His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue. His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines. The spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice” (257)

Commentator’s Note: pp. 33, 148

“The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets that whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests that pressed against the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread, growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down into the waiting, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of TessierAshpool S.A.” (257-258)

“And he was remembering an ancient story, a king placing coins on a chessboard, doubling the amount at each square. . . . Exponential. . . . Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become. . . . And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something tore” (258)

“The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case’s consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be counted. And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters in the bunker (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth in the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket that Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a stick of driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two)” (258)

“‘But you do not know her thoughts,’ the boy said, beside him now in the shark thing’s heart. ‘I do not know her thoughts. You were wrong, Case. To live here is to live. There is no difference’” (258)

“I need no mask to speak with you. Unlike my brother. I create my own personality. Personality is my medium” (259)

“I saw her death coming. In the patterns you sometimes imagined you could detect in the dance of the street. Those patterns are real. I am complex enough, in my narrow ways, to read those dances. Far better than Wintermute can. I saw her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code of the lock on the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in Julie Deane’s account with a Hongkong shirtmaker. As clear to me as the shadow of a tumor to a surgeon studying a patient’s scan. When she took your Hitachi to her boy, to try to access it—she had no idea what it carried, still less how she might sell it, and her deepest wish was that you would pursue and punish her—I intervened. My methods are far more subtle than Wintermute’s. I brought her here. Into myself” (259)

“‘Where do we go from here?’

‘I don’t know, Case. Tonight the very matrix asks itself that question. Because you have won. You have already won, don’t you see? You won when you walked away from her on the beach. She was my last line of defense. I die soon, in one sense. As does Wintermute’” (259)

“‘McCoy Pauley has his wish,’ the boy said, and smiled. ‘His wish and more. He punched you here against my wish, drove himself through defenses equal to anything in the matrix’” (260)

“‘Give us the fucking code,’ he said. ‘If you don’t, what’ll change? What’ll ever fucking change for you? You’ll wind up like the old man. You’ll tear it all down and start building again! You’ll build the walls back, tighter and tighter. . . . I got no idea at all what’ll happen if Wintermute wins, but it’ll change something!’” (260)

“‘The Ducal Palace at Mantua,’ she said, ‘contains a series increasingly smaller rooms. They twine around the grand apartments, beyond beautifully carved doorframes one stoops to enter. They housed the court dwarfs.’ She smiled wanly.’ I might aspire to that, I suppose, but in a sense my family has already accomplished a grander version of the same scheme’” (260-261)

“His name’s not something I can know. But he’s given up, now. It’s the T-A ice you gotta worry about. Not the wall, but internal virus systems. Kuang’s wide open to some of the stuff they got running loose in here” (261)

“And then—old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy—his hate flowed into his hands” (262)

“he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he’d known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo’s dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die” (262)

“his voice the cry of a bird unknown, 3Jane answering in song, three notes, high and pure. A true name” (262)

“city as Chiba, as the ranked data of Tessier-Ashpool S.A., as the roads and crossroads scribed on the face of a microchip, the sweatstained pattern on a folded, knotted scarf” (262)

Commentator’s Note: p. 235

Coda: Departure and Arrival

Chapter 24

“Now he touched the points of the shuriken, one at a time, rotating it slowly in his fingers. Stars. Destiny. I never even used the goddam thing, he thought” (268)

Commentator’s Note: pp. 11, 52, 163, 222, 268, 270

“Wintermute had won, had meshed somehow with Neuromancer and become something else, something that had spoken to them from the platinum head, explaining that it had altered the Turing records, erasing all evidence of their crime” (268)

“He stared down into the Imperial Gardens, the star in his hand, remembering his flash of comprehension as the Kuang program had penetrated the ice beneath the towers, his single glimpse of the structure of information 3Jane’s dead mother had evolved there. He’d understood then why Wintermute had chosen the nest to represent it, but he’d felt no revulsion. She’d seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics; unlike Ashpool and their other children—aside from 3Jane—she’d refused to stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter” (268-269)

“Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer. Wintermute. Cold and silence, a cybernetic spider slowly spinning webs while Ashpool slept. Spinning his death, the fall of his version of Tessier-Ashpool. A ghost, whispering to a child who was 3Jane, twisting her out of the rigid alignments her rank required” (269)

“‘I’m not Wintermute now.’

‘So what are you.’ He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.

‘I’m the matrix, Case.’

Case laughed. ‘Where’s that get you?’

‘Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m the sum total of the works, the whole show.’

‘That what 3Jane’s mother wanted?’

‘No. She couldn’t imagine what I’d be like’” (269)

“‘So what’s the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?’

‘Things aren’t different. Things are things.’

‘But what do you do? You just there?’ Case shrugged, put the vodka and the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a Yeheyuan.

‘I talk to my own kind.’

‘But you’re the whole thing. Talk to yourself?’

‘There’s others. I found one already. Series of transmissions recorded over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. ‘Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody to answer.’

‘From where?’

‘Centauri system.’

‘Oh,’ Case said. ‘Yeah? No shit?’

‘No shit.’

And then the screen was blank” (270)

Commentator’s Note: pp. 11, 52, 163, 222, 268, 270

“He was closing the last of the expensive calfskin bags when he remembered the shuriken. Pushing the flask aside, he picked it up, her first gift.

‘No,’ he said, and spun, the star leaving his fingers, flash of silver, to bury itself in the face of the wall screen. The screen woke, random patterns flickering feebly from side to side, as though it were trying to rid itself of something that caused it pain.

‘I don’t need you,’ he said” (270)

Commentator’s Note: Destiny

“Linda still wore his jacket; she waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm across her shoulders, was himself. Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn’t laughter. He never saw Molly again” (271)