Neuromancer Part 4: The Straylight Run

Ch 13

Case interrogated by Turing police. They're looking for "Kolodny" (Molly's assumed--or real?--name). Corto (Armitage) also arrested.
Michele (one of the Turings) explains why dealing with the AI is so dangerous:
"You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men have dreamed of pacts with demons." (163)

While walking across the bridge, the Turing police are attacked and killed by a robotic microlight and a robot gardener--Wintermute.

Ch 14

The Zion tug, Garvey, is captured (via a grapple) by a Japanese "yacht" Haniwa controlled by Armitage. Apparently, W/M killed the Turing police who had arrested Armitage as well.

p 169: W/M appears as the Finn to braindead Case.

W/M explains that he uses memory (a holographic construct: in a holograph, every part contains the whole. If you break a holographic image, each piece retains the entire image.

p171: humans build models, from stone circles, pipe organs, adding machines, to AI. If W/M gets what he wants, humans will have finallysucceeded. Not a model, but the "real thing."
The real thing=a truly independent creation, an autonomous being.

W/M doesn't understand why he's here, but he is.

W/M also returns to the hornet nest dream. It is an image of what TA wanted to be: a hive mind.

p172: exposition in the form of 3Jane's essay, read by the jeweled head display. TA is an ingrown "self." W/M also explains that Molly needs to get "the word" from 3jane to unlock the terminal and complete W/M's plan. W/M cannot know the word. Even if he were told it, he cannot know it--he's been programmed not to know.

Ch 15

Case awakens. Interesting use of POV shifts, as Case "jacks in" to Molly's sensorium.

p 176: plot summary of "Johnny Mnemonic" (a short story in the Sprawl series)

p180: details of W/M's planning. He set things up so that child would lose the key in a drawer, and then he killed the child. Inhuman reasoning.

W/M cannot access mechanical locks, only digital ones.

p182-186: Molly walks in on Ashpool's suicide. He has killed a meatpuppet (3Jane's sister?). The cryogenic cold he complains of was 3Jane (with W/M's help), an attempt to drive him to suicide. Molly kills him with a toxin dart through the eye
Case briefly sees the puppet as Linda (that's N/M again)

Ch 16: Armitage reveals that W/M appears to him as Gen Girling (SCreaming Fist commander and betrayer). W/M tells Case this means Armitage is cracking--Corto is re-emerging

193: Corto appears in Case's display. Armitage is gone. Case's unspoken question: where has Corto been all this time?

The question gets to a central issue of the novel: where does one's identity reside?

Case and Maelcum board the Haniwa to find the place a wreck. Corto launches the bridge (an escape pod) away, but W/M makes overrides the safety lock and it launches with a hatch open. Corto/Armitage is sucked into space.

Ch 17

p203: Case's rumination on "cybernetic memories" and power structures. Corporations as immortal. The cool affect of the criminal as "a gradual accomodation of the machine" (Looks like Gibson read Norbert Wiener)

The Finn appears within the matrix (204-206): explains his plan a bit more: he's part of a larger structure, and if his plan goes through he will achieve a kind of transcendence (though he doesn't use those terms). But the parts of him that Case knows will still be around to pay out (Case still has those toxin sacs)

p206: Molly explains a bit of what W/M told her: 3Jane's mother was Marie-France. W/M has to use personality models ("templates") to speak to them. He has no personality.

Molly gets to 3Jane's complex. Riviera has set up holos, including one of (apparently) his childhood : feral children in the ruins of Bonn, feeding on a dead soldier.

Ch 18

Molly is captured by Hideo while distracted by Riviera's holo display (a display of Riviera and 3Jane). Her leg is broken.

W/M tells Case he and Maelcum must go and finish the job, and kill Riviera too.

217: 3jane explains to Molly about her mother: a hive mind, with little individual consciousness. Forebrain as evolutionary sidetrack (Forebrain is the center of personality).

3Jane has taken a liking to Molly, and is tiring of Riviera. His perversity, while unpredictable to W/M, is getting boring. 3Jane is just looking for kicks.

Ch 19

Case and Maelcum in Straylight. W/M makes it appear to the security system that 8Jean has arrived.

p 229: 3Jane explains more to Molly: Marie-France wanted to live in symbiosis with the AIs. The "ghosts" that spoke to 3jane as a girl are the AIs: Wintermute and another who hasn't spoken in years (the one in Rio: Neuromancer)

Ch 20

The little robotic Braun is controlled by W/M. It tries to keep Case from jacking into the terminal (Finn is onscreen, so case assumes it is W/M)/

p233-244 (into chapter 21): the non-space of the beach. Linda Lee is there. Case realizes this is something the Rio AI has done. In fact, the Rio AI has been trying all alone to stop him, using Linda Lee's image.

239: Linda reveals that she read the RAM she stole from Case. But what she saw there wasn't there, Case explains. That was, in fact, the AI.

"it no longer mattered, what he knew": Case realizes that Linda doesn't know she's dead. Her personality was transplanted (copied) here before she was killed.

Ch 21

Linda mentions the little boy who told her Case was coming. He's Brazilian.
The beach is an "event horizon" (this is a term from astrophysics: the event horizon of a black hole is where time appears to stop, as light falls back into the hole. An object at the event horizon appears to freeze there. If one were inside or part of such an object, time would stop)

The boy arrives. He is Neuromancer. Neuro=nerves. But an echo of Necromancer (one who speaks with the dead). This is the land of the dead. Stay, you won't know the difference.

(Neuromancer abbreviated N/M in these notes)

But Case sees that the ice is cracking. He hears music (Zion dub). He walks away.

Ch 22

Case and Maelcum find 3jane, Molly and Riviera.

p250-251: Case describes the beach. 3Jan recognizes it--a construct of her mothers.

Case notes that the construct is all RAM, not ROM

Dixie is a ROM construct--he cannot form new memories unless he's jacked in. Like a CDROM--it is a recording. Static memory.
RAM is like computer memory. It is read/write, random access. Dynamic. Data isn't stored there, but moves through it. A RAM construct would be a convincing reality.

Riviera blinds Hideo, not realizing that Hideo practices in the dark. Hideo slowly and methodically hunts Riviera down. He's been poisoned anyway by the drugs Molly;s been giving him (a hotshot--a deadly version of his typical dose)

Ch 23

Case goes in with the Kuang. He is chased and merges (with N/M it seems). He sees the beach and Linda.

p258-259: N/M tells him that to live there is to live. It is, for all practical purposes, real. Linda's thoughts are hers, not a program. N/M can't stop her from running into water, when Case tries to stop her.

N/M brought here. He knew she would die, though he didn't kill her. N/M plan was to bring Case there as well, and stop W/M's plan.

N/M is personality, unlike W/M
N/M wants to go on as it has been. But Case has won, by walking away from the beach.

Dixie is gone ("that's hard to explain," says the Finn). The Finn encourages Case's rage to return, and case uses it to avoid the viral subprograms launched by the memory cores (lots of video game imagery here)
Case moves with ultimate grace that "the mind-body interface granted him"--whose body?
p262: the word is a series a three tones--"a true name"

The mythology and magic of the true name is found in many cultures. Knowing the true name if a thing gives complete control of it. If someone discovers your true name, they control you.

The jeweled head responds with bank account numbers, data, Turing codes. It worked.

Neuromancer Coda: Departure and Arrival

Ch 24

Case is back in the hotel. Molly is gone. W/M has merged with N/M. During the interface, W/M had case's brain make the enzymes dissolve the toxin sacs. The Zionites gave him the blood change.

Case realizes that W/M was the "hive mind" created by Marie France; N/M is the personality, "immortality." Marie-France built a compulsion into W/M to drive him to merge. (269).

Personality is immortal when freed from the "body" or hardware.

p269-270: W/M, or whatever he is now, appears on the monitor as the Finn. He is the matrix now.

How are things different? Is he running things? Is he God?

No. "Things are things."

But there are others. He has found another vast intelligence in the Alpha Centauri system

p271: the final image: Case sees, in the matrix of cyberspace, three small figures.

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Background
Part 1: Chiba City Blues
Part 2: The Shopping Expedition
Part 3: Midnight in the Rue Jules Verne
Part 4: The Straylight Run & Coda
Closing and Discussion

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