1) Yeah, Maelcum had to attach a phone line. I personally don't think that that's enough to date the book; wired infrastructure will be around for a long time I'm sure.

2) My book is different, so the pages are different but in Ch. 12 we start seeing Case embracing his humanity. The book seems to be going this way: he gets off cyberspace, gets on drugs, gets back on cyberspace, gets off drugs, gets back on drugs but can't help thinking of Linda Lee.

3) Again, in ch. 14, we get the sense that Case has become afraid of dying when he doesn't want to run the Kuang.

p.s. when he's about to run the Kuang, Case gives Maelcum orders that might save Case's life. Maelcum say's "Sure, mon" and LIGHTS A JOINT!!! Not very reassuring.

1. "They were always fucking him [Wintermute] over with how old fashioned they were, he said, all their nineteenth century stuff" (180). This helps illustrate the limited physical capabilites of machines despite their sophistication and complexity - an incredibly advanced AI is still no match for a simple door lock.

2. Wintermute tells case, "I can access your memory, but that's not the same as your mind" (170). With the mind just an assembly of neurons, how can wintermute have access to Case's memories but not his conscious thinking? Is this a statement on the metaphysical nature of human consciousness? Is wintermute similar - you can access his stored records (memory) but not his 'conscious mind'?

3. The Turing agents tell case, "You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men have dreamed of pacts with demons. Only know are such things possible" (163). In a future as technologically advanced as the one described, why is there such an intense fear towards the capabilities of AI? Why is AI seemingly the one technology that isn't trusted...

-Will

How screwed up is humanity going to become. Cryogenic "naps" that last years obviously made Ashpool completely insane. Case is not exactly the bastion of sanity, half the characters in the book are not what they seem to be - they are either AI's grafted into personality matrixes or have layers of loyalties that directly conflict with one another.
Now, Case is even more desperate since Wintermute killed Corto/Armitage. WM tells him that of course he has the enzyme that Case needs to stop the implants Armitage put in him from killing him. But how much can Case trust Wintermute?

Trevor Wallace,
t_rev2323@yahoo.com

1. pg 203 "he'd never really thought of anyone like Ashpool, anyone as powerful as he imagined Ashpool had been, as human." I guess I wouldn't consider him as human. In Neuromancer, their view of 'human' is different than ours. We don't really consider a clone as human in our society, but I guess in their, a clone is more human than an AI (although Wintermute has many human characteristics).

2. pg 169 "Ol' dead man needs his laughs."- Flatline I like how Gibson gives the construct a very humanistc persona. To me, the construct is more a 'person' than Molly or Case. Since the construct has so many characteristics of a human I sometimes forget that it is a ROM and not a human.

3. pg 133 "He munched on raw tuna and rice and watched people tan." Here is one of the only times we see Case eat without the encouragement from others. Although he often rejects the 'meat' and his flesh and considers it a prison, here he is giving into two forms. He is giving into his physical urges to eat and his physical urges to watch women (in the flesh) tan.

- Mackenzie

1) As Molly is moving through Straylight, she talks to Case about Johnny. While she explains later that she tends to talk like this to calm herself down, when I first encountered this scene, I almost felt like Molly was telling Case all of this because she felt that she wasn't going to make it out of the place alive. It felt as if this was her way of passing on her story or something.
(Gibson, 176)

2) When Armitage cracks and starts acting like Corto again, I find it interesting how he, in a sense, seals Case's fate by shutting him off. True, Corto ends up on the losing side of the deal, but the way he talks about leaving Case behind while he goes off to tell their story makes it sound like he might have left his comrades for dead, when they were still alive, at the end of the mission. It makes me wonder if he actually did that after Screaming Fist.
(Gibson, 198)

3) While all of Riviera's holograms in Straylight are pretty interesting, I find that the one of his own past is the most intriguing. If I'm reading into this correctly, he was once a part of a cannibalistic group of children during a war. Seeing where he comes from, it becomes slightly less bizarre as to where he's coming from. Perhaps his perverse sense of being comes from feeling betrayed by those involved in the war. Maybe parents for dying on him? The city, country, or whatever for taking place in the war?
(Gibson, 210)

~Grace