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| Character | Role |
|---|---|
3Jane 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. |
| Leader |
Wintermute 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. | Asset |
Neuromancer 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. | Asset |