Neuromancer

“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.”

This description of Case’s experience as a console cowboy likens his altered state in cyberspace to drug use, using terms such as “high” and “hallucination” to draw an implicit comparison. This begins to introduce the theme of The Artificial Nature of Modern Reality.

“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.”

This quotation introduces the theme of Personhood and Embodiment. Case, like his fellow hackers, sees the virtual world of technology as liberating and the human body as part of an animal past.

“Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, holograms of Wizard’s Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline […] And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard’s Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon.”

Case’s first impression of Linda Lee as she plays video games in an arcade gives another glimpse into what it means to think of cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination.” Linda is mentally immersed in her video world, and the way that the light plays around her makes it look like she is truly part of the computer code. This foreshadows her later existence as a recorded person living only in the matrix.

“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.”

This description of Linda’s growing drug addiction illustrates the negative effects of addiction and raises the question of how much Case himself has lost to his substance use disorder. The image of a fragmenting personality foreshadows the ways that the characters’ personalities prove to be unstable, ranging from the collapse of Armitage to the question of what happens to Wintermute’s personality after merging with Neuromancer.

“I gotta punch deck,” he heard himself say. He was groping for his clothes. “I gotta know […].”

When Case first wakes up from surgery, he has an immediate urge to see if he can once again enter cyberspace. This reinforces the idea that hacking is like an addiction. It also highlights that the identity of both people and AIs is based on what they do instead of something intrinsic to who they are.

“The handsome, inexpressive features offered the routine beauty of the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past decade’s leading media faces. The pale glitter of his eyes heightened the effect of a mask.”

This characterization of Armitage foreshadows that his personality is artificial and concealing who he really is. It also vividly paints a future where media pressures people to conform to a certain template (in this case appearance-related) and technology gives people the tools to do so even at the cost of losing their individuality.

“Anyone good at what they do, that’s what they are, right? You gotta jack, I gotta tussle.”

Molly’s self-characterization foreshadows the separate paths to which she and Case return at the book’s resolution. It also suggests that personhood can be reduced to what someone does. If that is all there is to being a person, then AIs and recorded personalities in the matrix might be people too.

“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. Unthinking complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding […].”

The repetition of the idea of a consensual hallucination emphasizes the importance of this concept in explaining people’s engagement with computers and each other online. The broader description of cyberspace suggests the physical nonreality of the space in ironically visual terms, suggesting the difficulty humans have in conceiving of such experiences except in terms of embodiment.

“You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?”

Dixie is the most developed of the dead characters still living online. The question of whether these characters are truly people enjoying a kind of immortality is never fully resolved. Dixie’s question is the final sentence of a chapter that concludes without Case answering. It isn’t clear at this point whether the Dixie-recording has free will anymore; that will only emerge as his later actions unfold.

“Archipelago. The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Human DNA spreading out from gravity’s steep well like an oilslick.”

Gibson describes the inhabited orbital space stations in terms that once again blur the distinction between nature and technology. These very artificial environments are described as normal geography, but also like the older technology of oil being pumped. The comparison of these stations to an oilslick is unflattering and suggests pollution, contradicting traditional science fiction’s optimism regarding human progress.

 “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.”

Freeside gets compared to the ancient world (the hanging gardens of Babylon) and the modern (Las Vegas). Both are examples of decadence that quickly but vividly characterize Freeside. The combination of the two echoes the ways in which old technology litters the homes and offices of the novel’s technologically advanced characters, suggesting that progress has not fundamentally changed important parts of society (or human nature).

“What bothers me is, nothin’ does.”

Dixie answers Case’s question about how he feels about being dead by claiming to be angry that nothing makes him angry. He lacks some normal part of being a person but is also sentient and self-aware enough to know it. This self-reflection continues to prompt questions about the nature of personhood.

“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.”

Molly describes how the people of Zion think about drug-based hallucinations as subjectively real. By way of analogy, this suggests interactions in cyberspace are also subjectively real for the computer users who enter into it.

“‘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 AI 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.’”

Wintermute asserts that it has an existence apart from its “body”—the mainframe and servers located in Switzerland. This establishes that if Wintermute is an online person, one cannot solve the problem of personhood and embodiment simply by referring to the hardware in which it is based. Wintermute’s reluctance to simply call itself “I” also highlights the alien and unpredictable nature of an AI being.

“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.”

This image of a wasp nest serves as an important symbol of corporations. Even as computers evolve into something potentially dangerous, so too have these groups of humans, becoming a kind of hive organism that survives the death of individuals and preys on people outside the hive.

“‘And it was like real?’ she asked, her mouth full of cheese croissant. ‘Like simstim?’

He said it was. ‘Real as this,’ he added, looking around. ‘Maybe more.’”

Case and Molly’s exchange asserts the artificial nature of modern reality. His virtual experience in the matrix is no less real for being a product of technology than is the space station on which they hold this conversation, even as that station itself tries to mimic nature.

“‘Motive,’ the construct said. ‘Real motive problem, with an AI. Not human, see?’

‘Well, yeah, obviously.’

‘Nope. I mean, it’s not human. And you can’t get a handle on it. Me, 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 […].’”

Dixie and Case continue to debate The Danger of the AI Singularity and whether a dead person saved on a computer can truly be a person. Dixie asserts that an AI being is beyond human comprehension. His own existence as a sentient being is uncertain as well, but he increasingly acknowledges that it feels real.

“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.”

Case rediscovers his “meat” side thanks to Wintermute’s manipulations. At this point, he still considers his body and emotions to be “primitive” animal existence (as the last line indicates). However, if he still does not value them much, he is beginning to reintegrate them into his identity.

“The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. 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 thing static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding […].”

Case’s experience of a drug high shows how disorienting the feeling is. It also continues to blur the line between the physical body and the virtual world of technology, emphasizing the way that drugs serve for him as an escape from his physical existence.

 “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.”

Wintermute tries to explain to Case why he should embrace the AI singularity. It asserts that the singularity is the natural culmination of people trying to manipulate their environment and understand their own minds. Wintermute asserts that the new super-AI will for the first time be another true mind rather than a mere model.

“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.”

For most of Neuromancer, corporations like Sense/Net and the zaibatsus with their drone workers (sararimen) operate in the background (with the exception of Tessier-Ashpool). In this passage, Case consciously reflects on corporations’ pervasive power and realizes that Tessier-Ashpool’s alien hive existence is the norm rather than the exception. All the big corporations have evolved into this kind of new, dangerous organism that feeds off humanity.

“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.”

This comparison of different stations makes a point about the health of their societies. Zion, the anti-corporate Rastafarian commune, is sustainable. The corporate Straylight produces nothing and exists only as a parasite feeding off others.

“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’d 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.”

This climactic moment of sex with Linda Lee in the matrix is the point at which Case acknowledges that he was wrong to mock his body; it is complex, beautiful, and strong. This heightens the emotional conflict in his decision to part with virtual Linda to rescue Molly. The fact that this breakthrough occurs in a virtual reality emphasizes that cyberspace is subjectively real despite being artificially created.