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Title: Neuromancer
Authors: William Gibson
Category:supplementals
Number of Highlights: 25
Date: 2026-04-29
Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
For Case, whoād lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars heād 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.
Heād 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.
Tags:scifi,technology
The nature of friendship is such that you never know who will turn out to be your friends, but once you have met them you canāt imagine that you could have gone through life without ever knowing them.
Tags:friendship
But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasnāt there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.
Tags:scifi,technology
āCyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical conceptsĀ . 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.
Tags:technology
Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.
Tags:scifi
Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.
Tags:fad,technology
His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.
Tags:beauty
THE SKY ABOVE the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Tags:scifi
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.
Heād lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that heād almost forgotten what real fear was.
It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead manās skills, obsessions, knee-jerk responses.
Tags:ai
Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity.
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns heād taken and the corners heād cut in Night City, and still heād see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.
The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists.
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 reset the code of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba.
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.
She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.
Case turned his head and looked up into Wageās face. It was a tanned and forgettable mask. The eyes were vatgrown sea-green Nikon transplants. Wage wore a suit of gunmetal silk and a simple bracelet of platinum on either wrist. He was flanked by his joeboys, nearly identical young men, their arms and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.
SUMMER IN THE Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification.
As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause. Then the whoreās giggle rang out, tinged with a certain hysteria. Ratz grunted. āAn angel passed.ā
āYou have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various main arteries, Case. Theyāre dissolving. Very slowly, but they definitely are dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. Youāre already familiar with the effect of that mycotoxin. It was the one your former employers gave you in Memphis.ā
āTHE MATRIX HAS its roots in primitive arcade games,ā said the voice-over, āin early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.ā
āGot their own cryogenic setup. Even under orbital law, youāre legally dead for the duration of a freeze. Looks like they trade off, though nobodyās seen the founding father in about thirty years. Founding momma, she died in some lab accident.