Angie Mitchell is the biggest simstim star in the world, haunted by visions sent by the loa and quietly falling apart. Her fame is shown as a kind of captivity: total visibility as a form of erasure.
Chapter 4: Squat
Mona Lisa, a young woman from the Sprawl's lowest economic tier, is recruited for a job that requires her to become someone else. Her strand is the novel's most grounded and the most quietly devastating.
Chapter 5: Portobello
Chapter 6: Morning Light
Chapter 7: No There, There
Slick Henry and his junkyard sculptures in the Factory. The fourth strand: a burned-out artist and his community of marginal people, and the mysterious cargo they have been paid to store.
Chapter 8: Texas Radio
Chapter 9: Underground
Chapter 10: The Shape
Chapter 11: Down on the Drag
Chapter 12: Antarctica Starts Here
Chapter 13: Catwalk
Chapter 14: Toys
Chapter 15: The Silver Walks
Chapter 16: Filament in Strata
Chapter 17: Jump City
Chapter 18: Jail Time
Chapter 19: Under the Knife
Mona Lisa's transformation. The job she has been recruited for requires her to become Angie Mitchell, a substitution that is both practical and thematically central to the novel's interest in identity, fame, and what it means to be a self.