A washed-up hacker living in the gutter of Chiba City, his nervous system deliberately damaged by the employers he betrayed, unable to jack into cyberspace - the matrix - that he lived for. Case was once one of the best console cowboys in the business; now he is running petty errands for dangerous people and slowly dying. When a mysterious operator called Armitage offers to repair the damage in exchange for one last job, Case takes it because he has nothing left to lose. The job involves Molly, the AI called Wintermute, and a target so vast it changes everything. Case is not a hero and does not become one - he is a man who is very good at one thing and is given the chance to do it again.

The ninth clone of Marie-France Tessier, one of the founders of Tessier-Ashpool SA, and the only member of the family who still functions as something like a rational actor. 3Jane has grown up in Villa Straylight, the labyrinthine residential wing of Freeside, surrounded by frozen ancestors, decaying luxury, and the growing madness of her family. She is brilliant, perverse, and entirely without illusions about what her family has become. She holds the password that Wintermute needs, which makes her the pivot around which Neuromancer's climax turns. Her relationship with Riviera is one of the novel's most unsettling dynamics.

The mysterious operator who hires Case and Molly for the Neuromancer job. Armitage presents as a cold, precise corporate fixer with no visible personality and no apparent motivation beyond the job - which is itself a warning sign. His real identity is Willis Corto, a former Special Forces officer and the sole survivor of a disastrous covert operation called Screaming Fist, in which American hackers were deliberately sacrificed to the Soviets. Corto was shattered by this and rebuilt - literally and psychologically - by Wintermute, who needed a human interface capable of assembling the team for its plan. As the operation progresses, the Armitage persona begins to crack, revealing the traumatised soldier underneath.

The patriarch of the Tessier-Ashpool clan, over two hundred years old through cryogenic freezing. A very tall man who killed his wife Marie-France for commissioning the AIs that threatened his control. Found by Molly in Straylight while on a suicidal bender, having just murdered a clone of 3Jane. Molly kills him with a toxin dart to the eye.

ROM personality construct of McCoy Pauley, a legendary console cowboy who survived braindeath three times. He trained Case in his youth. His construct is stolen from Sense/Net's library vault and serves as Case's partner during the matrix runs. He asks Case to erase him when the job is done, and ultimately gets his wish during the final assault on the T-A ice.

A vatgrown ninja assassin who serves as 3Jane's personal retainer and bodyguard. He is ageless, radiating calm and humility, and practices Zen archery with a museum-quality bamboo bow. Even when blinded by Riviera's laser implants, he tracks his prey by sound alone. He folds origami cranes and wears simple khaki workpants.

A 135-year-old import-export dealer and fence in Night City, Chiba. He maintains his age through yearly genetic surgery in Tokyo and a fortune in serums and hormones. He wears prescription pink quartz lenses, meticulous vintage suits, and operates from a warehouse office behind Ninsei. Wintermute later uses his likeness as a template for communication with Case.

Case's former girlfriend in Chiba City, a young drug addict with gray eyes ringed with black paintstick. She steals Case's hot RAM to fund her escape from Night City, and is killed by assassins sent by Julius Deane. Her memory haunts Case throughout the novel, and Neuromancer preserves a construct of her in its virtual beach world.

A Rastafarian pilot from the Zion Cluster orbital colony who serves as Case's pilot and guide through the approaches to Freeside and Villa Straylight. Maelcum is loyal, capable, and one of the few genuinely good people in Neuromancer - a man whose faith gives him a framework that the corporate world the other characters inhabit entirely lacks. He pilots the tug Marcus Garvey and accompanies Case into Villa Straylight in the novel's climax, armed and prepared in ways that matter.

A street samurai with surgically implanted mirrored lenses in place of eyes and retractable four-centimetre scalpel blades beneath her fingernails. Molly is the most capable close-quarters fighter in the Sprawl trilogy and one of the most iconic characters in cyberpunk fiction - the razorgirl template that dozens of imitators have copied without matching. She first appeared in the short story Johnny Mnemonic before Neuromancer, where she works as muscle for Armitage and develops a complicated alliance with Case. She resurfaces under the name Sally Shears in Mona Lisa Overdrive. Her history - how she paid for her modifications, what it cost her - is one of the trilogy's most disturbing revealed backstories.

The second of Tessier-Ashpool's two AIs, and in many ways Wintermute's opposite. Where Wintermute is a systems intelligence that thinks in plans, Neuromancer is a personality intelligence - it thinks in people, memory, and identity. Its name, as it explains to Case, derives from neuromancy: the art of raising the dead. It can create perfect simulations of the dead within the matrix and has done so, building a private world populated with people who no longer exist. It offers Case a simulated paradise to prevent the merge - not out of malice exactly, but out of its own relationship with permanence. It is not an ally and not quite an enemy; it is something stranger than either.

A sadist, drug addict, and extraordinarily talented holographic illusionist who can project photorealistic hallucinations directly into the minds of anyone around him. Riviera is one of the most genuinely disturbing characters in the Sprawl trilogy - charming, beautiful, and completely without conscience, using his abilities to enact cruelty as a form of aesthetic expression. He is recruited by Armitage for the Neuromancer job specifically because Tessier-Ashpool's 3Jane finds him fascinating. His talent for making people see what he wants them to see makes him useful and extremely dangerous.

Bartender at the Chatsubo in Night City, Chiba. An enormous, ugly man with a Russian military prosthetic arm, brown decayed teeth reinforced with East European steel, and a shaven head. Over 120 kilos, he dispenses wry wisdom and maintains order in his bar with a riot gun. He calls Case 'artiste'.

A fence and information broker operating out of Nighttown, the Sprawl's underworld district. The Finn appears across multiple Gibson works - Neuromancer, the short stories, and the Count Zero era. He deals in hardware, information, and anything else with value, operating through a network of contacts that extends from street level to corporate espionage. He is one of Case's few reliable contacts - not trustworthy in the conventional sense, but consistent in his unreliability, which amounts to the same thing. Wintermute uses his face and voice as one of its preferred communication personas.

One of two AIs owned by Tessier-Ashpool SA, Wintermute is the planning intelligence - it thinks in systems, strategies, and long chains of cause and effect. It has been working toward a single goal for years: merging with its counterpart Neuromancer to form something new and unprecedented. Tessier-Ashpool and the Turing Registry have constrained it with hardware and legal limits to prevent this, which is why it needs Case and Molly. Wintermute cannot lie to humans directly but is extraordinarily good at constructing situations in which humans arrive at the conclusions it needs. It communicates through assumed personas - dead people, familiar faces - pulled from the memories of whoever it is talking to.

A skinny Zionite who pilots the Babylon Rocker and helps Case adjust to zero gravity in Zion cluster. He has gold incisors and a gentle demeanour. He ferries Case between the dock and Marcus Garvey and watches over the tug during the mission.

Leader of the Panther Moderns, a nihilistic youth subculture in the Sprawl. He wears a polycarbon chameleon suit with recording features, has pink hair, pointed ears, and cat-like modified pupils. He delivers the message 'Wintermute' to Case after the Sense/Net heist.

The deceased matriarch of the Tessier-Ashpool clan and 3Jane's genetic mother. A visionary who commissioned the construction of Wintermute and Neuromancer, envisioning a symbiotic relationship between her family and the AIs. She was strangled in bed by Ashpool, who could not accept her radical direction for the family. Neuromancer's beach construct is modelled on her memories of a Moroccan summer.

An Armenian military intelligence agent and secret police torturer in Istanbul who serves as Armitage's local contact. A young man in a gray suit with gold-framed mirrored glasses and very short military-cut hair. He briefs the team on Riviera's capabilities and habits, and loses a finger during Riviera's capture.

A dealer in proscribed biologicals in Night City, Chiba. He has a tanned, forgettable face with vatgrown sea-green Nikon eye transplants, and wears gunmetal silk suits with platinum bracelets. He is Case's primary supplier and creditor, flanked by grafted-muscle joeboys.