A Consensual Hallucination

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

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.

Case: Are you sentient, or not? Dixie Flatline: Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess… But I ain't likely to write…

You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible.

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...

For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh…