Burning Chrome
Chapters - William Gibson
Story 1: Johnny Mnemonic
Johnny, a human data courier with a cybernetic storage implant in his head, is hunted through the Sprawl's underworld after a data upload goes wrong and the Yakuza want what he is carrying. He enlists the help of Molly Millions, a razorgirl bodyguard, and the Finn, a black-market tech dealer, as they seek out the Lo Teks, a tribe living in a makeshift bridge-city above the streets. With the help of Jones, a cyborg Navy dolphin who can crack encrypted data, Johnny fights to get the implant's kill-switch codes before time runs out and the data destroys his brain.
POV: Johnny·On page: Molly Millions, The Finn
Story 2: The Gernsback Continuum
A freelance photographer is hired by publisher Cohen and pop-art historian Dialta Downes to document surviving examples of 1930s American Streamlined Moderne architecture across California. While immersed in this retro-futurist imagery, the narrator begins experiencing vivid hallucinations of the future that never was: giant flying-wing airliners, gleaming Art Deco cities, and disturbingly perfect blond citizens. His friend Merv Kihn, a journalist specialising in UFO sightings and paranormal phenomena, diagnoses these as 'semiotic ghosts' and prescribes immersion in trashy media as a cure. The photographer eventually shakes off the visions by grounding himself in the grim realities of the actual present.
POV: The Photographer·On page: Merv Kihn, Dialta Downes, Cohen
Story 3: Fragments of a Hologram Rose
Parker, a continuity writer for the ASP (Apparent Sensory Perception) broadcast industry, struggles with insomnia and a recent breakup during a city-wide power brownout. He patches his sleep-inducer to an ASP deck to cope with power failures, reliving recorded sensory experiences while fragments of his own chaotic past - indentured labour, the New Secessionist wars in California, survival in Texas shantytowns - surface in his restless mind. When he finally plays Angela's personal ASP cassette, most of it has been erased, leaving only a brief sequence of a trip to Athens. Drifting toward sleep, Parker reflects on the nature of memory and identity, comparing their scattered shared experiences to fragments of a hologram, each one containing the whole image of the rose.
POV: Parker
Story 4: The Belonging Kind
Michael Coretti, a socially awkward linguistics lecturer who can never quite fit in at bars or parties, becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman he spots in the Backdoor Lounge. Following her through the city's nightlife, he witnesses her physically transform between venues - changing hair, clothing, even body shape - to blend seamlessly into each establishment's social ecosystem. He discovers she is one of the 'belonging kind', entities that have evolved to live as perfect social chameleons in bars, feeding on alcohol and producing money from slits in their own flesh. Despite his horror at discovering their alien nature when he finds a roomful of them roosting, Coretti is eventually drawn back, loses his job, and undergoes a transformation himself, finally becoming one of the belonging kind.
POV: Michael Coretti·On page: Antoinette
Story 5: Hinterlands
Toby Halpert is a surrogate aboard a space station positioned near the Highway, a mysterious singularity in space discovered when Soviet cosmonaut Olga Tovyevski vanished and returned catatonic with an alien seashell. Now humanity sends people down the Highway hoping they will return with alien technologies, but most come back dead or insane. Toby's job is to be the first human contact for returning travellers, paired with handler Hiro Nagashima through a bone-phone implant, using drugs and carefully constructed false identities to coax information from traumatised returnees. When physical chemist Leni Hofmannstahl returns, Toby faces the Fear - the overwhelming existential dread that all surrogates eventually encounter - only to find that Leni has used the ship's surgical manipulator to dissect her own arm and bleed to death, leaving behind ballpoint diagrams of molecular-scale computers. Toby retreats to the comfort of his partner Charmian, another surrogate who shares his compulsive desire to travel the Highway despite knowing they never will.
POV: Toby Halpert·On page: Hiro Nagashima, Charmian, Leni Hofmannstahl, Olga Tovyevski, Hillary
Story 6: Red Star, Winter Orbit
Colonel Korolev, the aging last inhabitant of the abandoned Soviet space station Kosmograd, clings to his decaying orbital home as political manoeuvring on Earth threatens to bring it down. A young American cosmonaut named Grishkin arrives on a mission that Korolev suspects is meant to facilitate the station's deorbiting, but Grishkin proves sympathetic to the old colonel's attachment to the place. As Korolev discovers that Kosmograd's orbit is already decaying and the station is secretly being sold for scrap, he and Grishkin must navigate Cold War-era bureaucratic treachery while the walls literally close in around them. The story ends with Korolev choosing to stay aboard as Kosmograd becomes a pirate radio station and squatter haven, embracing a new life rather than returning to an Earth he no longer recognises.
POV: Colonel Korolev·On page: Grishkin, Yefremov, Nikita Stoiko, Romanenko, Valentina, Tatjana
Story 7: New Rose Hotel
The unnamed narrator and his partner Fox, a corporate headhunter, recruit Sandii, a beautiful young woman, to seduce and lure Hiroshi, a brilliant biotechnologist, away from the Maas corporation so that rival zaibatsu Hosaka can acquire his research. The plan succeeds but spirals into betrayal when Sandii double-crosses them, selling Hiroshi's secrets to a third party, and Hiroshi commits suicide. Fox is killed by Maas operatives in retaliation, and the narrator holes up in a cheap capsule hotel called the New Rose Hotel, replaying events obsessively, trying to pinpoint where everything went wrong. Haunted by memories of Sandii and paralysed by the knowledge that Maas assassins are closing in, the narrator awaits his fate in the hotel's coffin-like sleeping cubicle.
POV: The Narrator·On page: Fox, Sandii, Hiroshi
Story 8: The Winter Market
Casey, an editor and producer of Apparent Sensory Perception recordings, discovers the extraordinary talent of Lise, a young woman crippled by a degenerative neural disease who creates intensely powerful and deeply personal ASP artworks from her powered exoskeleton. With the help of their friend Rubin, a junk-artist and tech scavenger, Lise's work catapults her to fame as a recording artist whose raw emotional output resonates with millions. When Lise's body finally fails, she chooses to have her consciousness uploaded into a computer matrix, becoming a digital entity that continues to create. Casey is left grappling with whether what persists in the machine is truly Lise, and what it means that the version of her in the matrix keeps on going while the flesh is gone.
Story 9: Dogfight
Deke, a drifting young hustler, discovers a talent for holographic dogfighting - a competitive arcade game in which players project mental images of World War I fighter planes that battle in a holographic arena. He enters the orbit of Nance, a savvy street woman who becomes his manager and lover, and together they plan to take on Tiny Montgomery, the reigning champion at the Air Force bar circuit. After gruelling practice and a near-disastrous warm-up bout, Deke faces Tiny in the climactic match, winning through a creative trick but only after Nance has been severely beaten by Tiny's entourage. The victory is pyrrhic: Deke pockets the prize money and abandons the injured Nance, revealing his fundamental selfishness.
POV: Deke·On page: Nance, Tiny Montgomery, Bobby Earl Cline
Story 10: Burning Chrome
Jack, a hardware expert known as Automatic Jack, and his partner Bobby Quine, a brilliant young console cowboy, plan an audacious hack into the systems of Chrome, a ruthless and powerful operator who runs a vast criminal empire from behind layers of black ice. Bobby's motivation is partly personal - he is infatuated with Rikki Wildside, a young woman saving up for Zeiss Ikon eye implants, who has become entangled with Chrome's world. Using a piece of rare Russian military-grade ice-breaking software, Jack and Bobby penetrate Chrome's defences, draining her accounts and crashing her operation in a frenzied run through cyberspace. They succeed in destroying Chrome, but Rikki leaves for Hollywood with her new eyes, and Bobby drifts away, leaving Jack alone with the memory of what they built and burned together.
POV: Jack·On page: Bobby Quine, Rikki Wildside, Chrome, The Finn, Miles·Mentioned: Tally Isham