Chapter 1 Summary

Neuromancer opens in The Chatsubo, a bar in the Night City zone of Chiba City. Case, the protagonist, is a bar regular and has an easy rapport with Ratz, the owner and sometimes bartender of The Chatsubo. Case was once a cyberspace cowboy, an exceptionally gifted individual who was able to enter a computerized shared reality, referred to as cyberspace or the matrix, and manipulate the digital world. Cyberspace has many millions of users, but only a select handful have the skill to be able to access any part of the matrix and obtain nearly any data on any system. Case "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" (p. 6).

For about two years, Case had worked for a...