A disgraced art dealer hired by the reclusive billionaire Josef Virek to find the source of mysterious Cornell-style boxes appearing on the black market - assemblages of such beauty and strangeness that Virek is convinced they represent something new in human art. Marly's storyline in Count Zero is the most overtly literary of the three - a slow, atmospheric investigation that takes her from Paris to the orbital where the boxes are being made. She is observant, intelligent, and out of her depth in ways she gradually understands. Her thread provides most of the novel's beauty.

A pale-skinned Hosaka operative with bleached white hair, dark-ringed hooded eyes, and a flat, uninflected voice. He recruits Turner for the Mitchell extraction - a cunning manipulator who always plants his own people on extraction teams, and whose particular interests in the operation's outcomes the novel takes its time to set out.