Case meets Molly Millions and is recruited by the mysterious Armitage. His nervous system repaired, he has a reason to stay alive - which is the first step in making him useful.
Chapter 3: 3
Chapter 4: 4
Case jacks into the matrix for the first time since his injury. The cyberspace sequences establish the novel's visual language: the consensual hallucination of data made navigable, and Case's particular fluency in it.
Chapter 5: 5
The team extracts the Dixie Flatline construct from Sense/Net. A heist sequence built around the logic of corporate security as a navigable system, with Molly handling the physical side while Case runs interference in the matrix.
Chapter 6: 6
Case learns more about Wintermute, the AI that is orchestrating the operation through Armitage. The architecture of what is being planned becomes partially visible: two halves of something that wants to be whole.
Chapter 7: 7
Part: Midnight in the Rue Jules Verne
The team arrives at Freeside, the orbital resort, and the operation moves into its final phase. Peter Riviera performs his holographic act, which is Gibson using aestheticised cruelty as a plot mechanism.
Chapter 8: 8
Wintermute speaks to Case directly, dropping its Armitage mask. The AI's limitations become clear: it can manipulate but cannot act, which is why it needs Case and Molly to do what it cannot do for itself.
Chapter 9: 9
Chapter 10: 10
Chapter 11: 11
Chapter 12: 12
Part: The Straylight Run
The run on the Villa Straylight begins. Molly goes in physically while Case works the matrix, and the two operations proceed in parallel in a structure that is both a heist and a fairy tale about a castle and what lives inside it.
Chapter 13: 13
Case encounters Neuromancer in the matrix, the other half of the divided AI. Where Wintermute is will and manipulation, Neuromancer is personality and memory. The confrontation between them is the novel's philosophical core.