I had a cigarette. I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep. 
Do you hear me, you son of a bitch? You hear me?
%
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
%
Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.
%
FREESIDE--WHY WAIT?
%
Miami, joeboy, quick study.
%
The Villa Straylight. Tip of the spindle. Strictly private.
%
Jimmy must've gotten into Straylight, lifted the head,
and Tessier-Ashpool sent their ninja after it.
%
You got a rider, Molly. This says. Somebody else using your eyes.
%
Given their penchant for these random acts of surreal violence,
it may be difficult for our viewers to understand why you continue to
insist that this phenomenon isn't a form of terrorism.
%
Once he woke from a confused dream of Linda Lee,
unable to recall who she was or what she'd ever meant to him.
When he did remember, he jacked in and worked for nine straight hours.
%
Well, boy, never mind me, I'm just dead anyway.
%
Peter says, sit tight. Play Daddy's favorite swing records and 
let Peter call you up a band to match, a floor of dancers,  
a wake for dead King Ashpool.
%
EEG flat as a *strap*
%
Wonderful. I never did like to do anything simple
when I can do it ass-backwards.
%
Come now, mon, if you seh time be mos' precious.
%
Peter has become rather boring. I find drug use in general to be boring. 
In others, at any rate.
%
No, there was Hideo. I don't think you quite understand about Hideo.
She does, evidently.
%
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.
%
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...
%
You needed this world built for you, this beach, this place. To die.
%
W/MUTE 
SEZ A'S
MENTION
OF G
MEANS 
HE'S
CRACK
ING::::
WATCH
YOUR
ASS::::
::DIXIE
%
"Listen, Colonel, okay? I want you to open the, ah...
shit, what's it called, Dix?"
"The midbay lock."
%
"But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?"
"I spit. The ducts are routed back into my mouth."
%
Steppin' Razor. Like unto a whippin' stick.
%
Maelcum a rude boy. An' a righteous tug pilot.
%
Babylon mothers many demon, I an' I know. Multitude horde!
%
Soon come, the Final Days...Voices. Voices cryin' inna wilderness,
prophesyin' ruin unto Babylon...
%
Turing. You are under arrest.
%
"Wish you weren't so damn jolly today, man.
That laugh of yours sort of gets me in the spine."
"Too bad. Ol' dead man needs his laughs."
%
This thing's a ceremonial terminal, sort of. 
I need Molly in here with the right word at the right time.
%
"Dixie, you think this thing'll work?"
"Does a bear shit in the woods?"
%
Bitch, bitch, bitch. Doom. Gloom. All I ever hear.
%
"It won't last."
"But it will. That's what's so *unnatural* about it."
%
So now you get to find out how tight those jeans really are, huh?
%
"You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you
frees you from a dangerous dependency."
"Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency."
%
You'll enjoy this, Case. Like Christmas morning.
%
I saw you stroking that Sendai; man, it was pornographic.
%
"Do me a favor, boy."
"What's that?"
"This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam thing."
%
"You're blind."
"Peter, don't you know he does it in the dark?
Zen. It's the way he practices."
%
Kuang Grade Mark Eleven is haulin' ass in nine seconds, *countin'*,
seven, six, five....
%
"You ever see resolution this high?"
"No, but I never cracked an AI either."
%
     --*now*
     and his voice the cry of a bird
     unknown,
     3Jane answering in song, three
     notes, high and pure.
     A true name.
%
"Where's Dixie? What have you done with the Flatline?"
"McCoy Pauley has his wish. His wish and more."
%
"There's some kind of manual override on the hardwiring 
that keeps Wintermute under control. However much he *is* under control." 
"He. He. Watch that. It. I keep telling you."
%
You're screwing up tonight, Case. The Flatline's ringing bells
all over Freeside. I didn't think you'd do that, man. It's outside
the profile.
%
Don't fuck up the hands, man. Soon you punch deck.
%
"That's it, huh? Big green rectangle off left?"
"You got it. Corporate core data for Tessier-Ashpool,S.A.
and that ice is generated by their two friendly AI's."
%
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.
%
Bet their decks are all over this grid sector like flies on shit.
And your boss, Case, he says go. He says run it and run it now.
%
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.
%
"Case," she said, and paused, the fletcher in her right hand.
Then she raised her left, smiled, touched her open palm with a
wet tongue tip, kissing him through the simstim link. "Gotta go."
%
She had it: the thing, the moves. And she'd pulled it all together
for her entrance. Pulled it together around the pain in her leg and
marched down 3Jane's stairs like she owned the place, elbow of her
gun arm at her hip, forearm up, wrist relaxed, swaying the muzzle of
the fletcher with the studied nonchalance of a Regency duellist.
It was a performance.
%
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.
%
"So what's the word?"
"I don't know. 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, I couldn't *know.*" 
%
But you watch your ass, Case. My, ah, other lobe is on to us, it looks like.
One burning bush looks pretty much like another. And Armitage is starting
to go.
%
"How'd you know it was an AI?"
"How'd I know? Jesus. It was the densest ice I'd ever seen."
%
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 don't think you grasp your situation. You are busted, Mr. Case.
The charges have to do with conspiracy to augment an artificial intelligence.
%
"And then you came here. We were delighted."
"Chance to work on your tan?"
%
But don't let it get to your head. Compared to what you'll eventually
be up against, this is an arcade toy.
%
Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce
acute paranoia and homicidal psychosis in eighty-five percent of
experimental subjects.
%
"You let it get out of control."
"Chaos, Mr. Who. That is our mode and modus. That is our central kick.
Your woman knows."
%
"We coulda bought twenty world class cowboys for what the market was ready to
pay for that surgical program. You were good, but not *that* good..."
"Obviously makes sense to somebody. Somebody big."
"Don't let me hurt your feelings."
%
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers
caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.
%
"Wonder whatever happened to that little ninja, Finn?"
"Probably got him on ice. Thaw when needed."
%
"And for starts, Dix, you and me, we're gonna sleaze over to London grid
and access a little data. You game for that?"
"You gonna tell me I got a choice, boy?"
%
"In Turkey, women are still women. This one..."
"She'd have you wearing your balls for a bow tie
if you looked at her cross-eyed."
%
"He's a speedball artist. Funny class of people you're mixing with, Case."
"Never mind, we'll get the poor fucker a new pancreas or something."
%
"What did you see, man?"
"Babylon."
%
"Don' be long now, m'seh dat."
"You guys ever think in hours?"
"Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean? Dread at control, mon,
an' I an' I come a Freeside when I an' I come..."
%
So that first one that they'd sent, he'd been hot. Reflexes like you never saw,
implants, enough style for ten ordinary hoods. But the second one, he was,
I dunno, 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...
%
"Where did you go tonight, Case?"
"Jules Verne, couple of bars, got high. What about you?"
%
And I assembled the file you accessed in London. 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...
%
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.
%
"Hideo'll get him, even blind?"
"When I  was a child, we loved to blindfold him. He put arrows through the
pips in playing cards at ten meters."
%
"This is without subtlety," he said, as if to himself. His voice was cool
and pleasant. 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.
%
Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer.
I call up the dead.
%
The ghosts are gonna mix it tonight, lady. Wintermute is going up against
the other one, Neuromancer.
%
"Describe the place, this construct."
"A beach. Gray sand, like silver that needs polishing. And a concrete thing,
kinda bunker...It's nothing fancy. Just old, falling apart. If you walk far
enough, you come back to where you started."
"Yes. Morocco."
%
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.
%
'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's just the way I'm wired.
%
and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter
scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.
%
"Who?"
"The Rastafarian navy."
"Is this a test? It's a loyalty check. It must be a loyalty check."
%
You want you a paradise.
%
You have time to do what I'm hiring you for, Case, but that's all.
Do the job and I can inject you with an enzyme that will dissolve the bond
without opening the sacs.
%
Ah, Case, sport, it does lookas though your companion there is 
definitely armed, aside from having a fair amount of silicon in her head.
%
The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games, in early graphics
programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.
%
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.
%
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.
%