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.
After seeing a projection of Linda created by Wintermute in the stimulation simulation, Case reflects on how numb his tumultuous life has left him—all the years he spent repressing his emotions and existing in a state of detachment from the horrors he experienced on a daily basis. Even when in bed with Linda, he was unable to realize how much she meant to him. It was only after her death that Case began to understand how deeply he loved her, since at the time they were together, he was numbing everything out with drugs and avoidance.
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.
When Case observes Armitage revert back to his true identity as Colonel Willis Corto, Case realizes that beneath Armitage, all this time, there were the memories of Corto's traumatic failed Screaming Fist operation. Despite Wintermute's attempt to construct Armitage over the psychological trauma that Corto experienced, his shattered psyche could not be fully erased. Corto remained haunted by his past, trapped in the memories of "falling, burned and blinded" out of his shot-down plane.
"She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the AI's, our corporate decisions made for us... Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity."
3Jane explains the future her mother had envisioned for the AIs she built; a future where the AI systems and the family fused together, ensuring their enduring immortality. Even though the family already clones itself to retain control of their corporate empire, 3Jane's mother was fascinated with the possibility of a symbiosis between the machines and the family, and so built Wintermute and Neuromancer. This quote relates to one of the larger themes the novel tackles: the distinctions between human consciousness and AI, and the implications AI could have on our conceptions of free will.
"Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you."
Neuromancer asks Case whether he wants to stay in the projected reality Neuromancer has built. In this reality, Neuromancer has resurrected Linda Lee so realistically that Case cannot decide whether she is real or a "ghost." No matter what she is, Neuromancer emphasizes that this version of Linda Lee doesn't know if she's real or not real, highlighting how we may not be able to distinguish between an artificially resurrected consciousness and the "original" one. This quote builds upon a theme that is central to the novel: how can we tell who, or what, is "real"? From the clones that the Tessier-Ashpool family creates to the ROM of Dixie Flatline, the novel provides the reader with many different examples of consciousness that may not be "real" or "human" as we know it, but is still able to function or act in a way that replicates human agency.
"I wasn't conscious. It's like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain."
Molly describes this dream-like state when recounting to Case how she used to work as a prostitute. Rather than remaining conscious during the encounters, her employers would put her in a drug-induced unconsciousness, thus allowing her to retain no memory or knowledge of what had happened to her body while she was "working." However, the drugs soon began to fail, and she began to regain memories of the nights when she was working. Molly's backstory reveals how drugs in this world are used to manipulate and exploit people like Molly, allowing them to participate in work that they would otherwise never have agreed to.
Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market...
In free-indirect narration, the narrator describes the hustling lifestyle that Case needs to adopt in order to survive Chiba City. If he stops hustling, then he will sink "without a trace," which demonstrates how few friends or reliable connections he has within the city. He is totally isolated, existing in a perpetual, delicate balance between hustling and risking death through his various criminal endeavors. All the while, Case dreams of returning to cyberspace, where he didn't have to rely on drugs or crime to get by. This feeling of desperation is what pushes him to accept Armitage's job offer, since Armitage promises to repair his spinal injury and restore Case's ability to hack.
"Give you a whole life, just so you'll have more to lose when they come and take it away."
While telling Case about the yakuza, Molly explains how the mafia "gave" her and her then-boyfriend, Johnny, "a whole life" by asking them to work as assassins and for-hire hitmen, before then taking that life away by killing Johnny as revenge for a prior time he had killed one of their members. Molly's anecdote brings to the forefront the way that crime destabilizes life for people like her, Johnny, or Case. They have no guaranteed safety. Even when they do manage to regain some sense of stability, it can be taken away at a moment's notice due to the volatile nature of a life of crime.
"Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Neuromancer. I call up the dead... I am the dead, and their land."
Neuromancer explains the etymology of his name, separating it into its two components: "neuro," which references the nerves of the nervous system, and "romancer," which here appears to reference Neuromancer's ability to "call up" the dead. Neuromancer emphasizes his ability to manipulate others by conjuring, through projections and constructed cyber-realities, the dead. He blurs the boundaries between himself and humans by classifying himself as "the dead," pushing us to question the blurred nature of consciousness between artificial intelligence and humans. If Neuromancer can take on the form of a human and resurrect them into a form that passes as life-like, is he human too?
"I talk to my own kind... There's others."
Wintermute tells Case that after unifying with Neuromancer, their combined intelligence has discovered the presence of other AIs in distant galaxies like Alpha Centauri. This quote draws a contrast between the alienated, isolated existence that people like Case and Molly lead, and the community that the artificial intelligence is able to find—reversing our expectation of computers being unable to form bonds, and leaving humans as the species that lives in solitude. It also introduces an unexpected cliffhanger into the novel's conclusion. What will happen once the artificial intelligence is able to potentially unite with other artificial intelligences? What kind of societal disruption may occur?
Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality.
The narrator summarizes the differences between the two artificial intelligences. Wintermute is more outwardly expressive, and is the one who desires to unify with Neuromancer. As Dixie Flatline mentions earlier, Wintermute is unable to make or distinguish its own desires from the desires that are programmed into it. Neuromancer, on the other hand, is a more fully formed intelligence, and as such is capable of creating its own personality. Wintermute has to adopt "masks" of other characters and people, whereas Neuromancer can exist as an entity of its own.
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.
The urban environment that Case lives in during the first few chapters is incredibly hostile. Crime dominates the streets and hustling becomes a necessary way to make ends meet, even when it poses a threat to Case's life and safety. Case is unable to gain any sort of stability and relies on drugs to bring him any sort of happiness. As Case describes in this quote, the street is, in a way, a form of a "death wish," since it is so dangerous that to try and survive means that he risks facing death on every corner, be it through an encounter with the mafia, the Yakuza, or former employers who have an agenda against him.
