Marly Krushkhova, a disgraced art dealer, is hired by the mysterious Josef Virek to find the maker of a strange Cornell-style box. The art world strand of the novel begins in a convincingly rendered Parisian gallery space.
Chapter 3: Bobby Pulls A Wilson
Bobby Newmark, a teenage cowboy from the Sprawl's projects, tries to run a piece of hot ice and nearly dies when something in the matrix saves him. A presence in cyberspace that should not exist has become interested in Bobby.
Chapter 4: Clocking In
Chapter 5: The Job
Turner's extraction of Mitchell goes catastrophically wrong from the start. The operation is a trap, a counter-operation, or something stranger - it is not clear which, which is the point.
Chapter 6: Barrytown
Bobby is recruited by Two-a-Day and introduced to the underground economy of the Sprawl's black market matrix runners. The social texture of cyberspace as a community rather than just a battlefield is established.
Chapter 7: The Mall
Chapter 8: Paris
Chapter 9: Up the Projects
Chapter 10: Alain
Chapter 11: On Site
Chapter 12: Café Blanc
Marly visits Virek in his simulated Barcelona, a vast pastoral simulation sustained by life-support machinery. The meeting establishes Virek as the novel's most unsettling figure: a man who has become something other than human through sheer accumulation of capital.
Chapter 13: With Both Hands
Chapter 14: Night Flight
Chapter 15: Box
Turner discovers that Mitchell's daughter Angie has been modified: biosoft grown into her nervous system that gives her direct access to the matrix without a deck. She is the extraction, not her father.
Chapter 16: Legba
Chapter 17: The Squirrel Wood
The voodoo loa of the matrix appear to Bobby for the first time. Legba, Marinette, Samedi: the fragmented personalities of the post-Neuromancer AI have organised themselves around Haitian religious iconography, and they have plans for Bobby.