The main character is a cyber cowboy, or a person that makes money through computer hacking, named Case who crossed the wrong people. Instead of killing him they made it so that he could never 'jack' in cyberspace again. This is worse than death to Case because I think he doesn't feel alive without the adrenaline that courses through him when he's jacked in. Instead he tries to get his thrills through drugs, alcohol, and walking a thin line between life and death as he becomes a middleman for criminals.
In the beginning you don't know what the hell is happening because it starts with him in a bar and there's just a bunch of phrases and whatnot that are not familiar, but as you read the meaning of everything becomes more and more clear.
Case meets Molly, a hired assasin that has had numerous technical enhancements made to her, and at first thinks someone is finally going to kill him, but instead she is his salvation. The person she works for is Armitage, a robotic, cold person that seems to have no personality, and he wants Case to be his cyber cowboy, trading in something that was worth a lot of money to get Case fixed up and able to jack in.
The rest of the book is filled with odd jobs and Molly and Case trying to find out who they really work for. The find out that it is really an AI (Artificial intelligence) that is controlling Armitage and that Armitage is really just a shattered man that was thrown away by the government who (I think) was the only patient that had gotten his schizophrenia cured by an experimental computer program.
The AI's name is Wintermute and he is owned by Tessier-Ashpool a reclusive family who lives on Zion (which I think is the name of the last standing human colony in the Matrix movie lol) which is some revolving colony in space. Members of Tessier-Ashpool are trying to be immortal by being cryogenically frozen and periodically taking turns being unfrozen but they are one screwed up family. The father, Ashpool, killed the mother, Marie-France Tessier, and the daughter, Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool (or just Lady 3jane) fiddled with the father's cryogenic technology so that the father kills hiimself (or is about to kill himself but then Molly kills him with a dart to the eye...), and the Lady 3jane just seems freakin crazy. The AI's like to play with Case's head and talk to him when he's braindead but Molly and Case find out that they were hired to free the AI, something that I think is illegal in their world. You don't find out that their's two AI's until the end, or maybe there's clues but I didn't see them, and the other AI is Neuromancer.
Turns out that Neuromancer is kind of Marie-France's project. She wanted the AI's to be the decision makers of the family. But the AI's are still governed by people because it seemed that Wintermute knew that he would cease to exist after Case and Molly finish with what he hired them to do, which is to release a virus into the system, and is programmed in a way to want to be free.
Wintermute and Neuromancer are two halves I guess. Neuromancer is the personality, able to take parts from people and make it his/it/her's own whereas Wintermute borrows profile's from other people. Together they make... (cue cheesy music) the matrix!
The one disconcerting thing is I guess the way its written. Its like seeing it from a computer's eyes. There's not much description rather than the facts, its fast paced, and though it does have emotion I felt detached from it when I read some of the more atrocious acts. I didn't even realized it when Case's first love Linda dies in the beginning! I was just like "what just happened". There's a scene in the book where they cause a riot in a building and somehow manipulate the police into thinking that the people screaming and running around in panic, also coerced, were dangerous psychopaths and a lot of people were killed, but that didn't even make a dent on my 'oh my god that's messed up' meter! A little eight year old boy is killed for knowing where a key is, not even a blip on the meter. And that's all you really get to know about the boy, that he was eight and was at the wrong place, time, breathing the wrong air, etc. So yeah... the detachment I got was kind of creepy because there's a lot of 'hey thats kind of wrong' things happening in the book.
So what's so special about Case? Why him? They ask that question, I asked that question, a lot. They even say in the book that there are better people out there, so why him? I think its because he wants to die. Molly makes a point of knowing that as she classifies him as suicidal because his profile (not to creapy) said he was. When he finally gets the ability to jack in back I think he stopped being suicidal, was actually on the verge of being happy again, and in actuality the AI needed that need to die. So throughout the book the AI wants Case to feel rage, and in the end he does finally feel rage. Self-loathing. And he plunges head long into his death like the AI wanted.
But Case doesn't die, Molly leaves so that she doesn't get rusty, and afterwards Case gets everything he wants... kind of... and becomes another normal person (sorta), Armitage is dead (you'll just have to read the book), so is Riveria (Once again, just have to read the book), and he's married (I think, might just be girlfriend) to a girl named Michael.
Sorry this summary was so long, I hope anyone that reads this book and sees something else can comment about what else I've missed or if theres any debate about what I saw.
I kind of recommend this book because it was a really confusing read but definetly one of a kind.
“If you're not confused, you're not paying attention.”
Tom Peters
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~Lynetta
