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.

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.

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.

ROM personality construct of McCoy Pauley, a legendary console cowboy who survived braindeath three times. He trained Case in his youth; in Neuromancer his construct is stolen from Sense/Net's library vault and serves as Case's partner during the runs against the Tessier-Ashpool ice. A console-cowboy ghost whose particular requests of his living partner Case give the novel one of its quietest, most affecting moments.

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.