The daughter of a Maas-Neotek biochip researcher who had illegal wetware implanted in her brain as a child - hardware that gives her the ability to jack into cyberspace without a deck, something that should be impossible. Angie becomes a central figure in Count Zero and the protagonist of Mona Lisa Overdrive, where she has reinvented herself as a Sense/Net simstim star while her dreams are being manipulated by the voodoo entities of the matrix. She is passive in Count Zero - things happen to her and around her - but in Mona Lisa Overdrive she is trying to understand what she is and what she is being used for.

A teenage hacker from the rustbelt who nearly dies on his first serious run into the matrix and is saved by something he cannot explain - one of the new entities that emerged when Wintermute and Neuromancer merged. Bobby is the most ordinary character in Count Zero - not a professional, not a soldier, just a kid who wanted to be good at something - which makes him the reader's guide into a world that has become stranger than anyone realised. His storyline is the most grounded of Count Zero's three threads and the most affecting.

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.

An editor and producer of ASP (Apparent Sensory Perception) recordings who discovers and champions Lise's extraordinary talent. He narrates the story of her rise to fame and her eventual decision to upload her consciousness, left grappling with questions of identity and authenticity.

The aging last permanent inhabitant of the decaying Soviet space station Kosmograd. A stubborn old cosmonaut who refuses to abandon his orbital home even as political forces conspire to bring the station down.

A drifting young hustler who discovers a natural talent for holographic dogfighting, a competitive arcade game where players project mental images of World War I fighter planes. Fundamentally selfish, he abandons his injured partner Nance after winning the championship.

Known as Automatic Jack, a hardware expert and the narrator of 'Burning Chrome'. He partners with Bobby Quine to hack into Chrome's criminal empire using rare Russian military-grade ice-breaking software. A quiet, practical technician haunted by the aftermath of their audacious run.

A human data courier with a cybernetic memory implant in his brain, capable of storing and transporting massive quantities of encrypted data. Hunted by the Yakuza after a dangerous upload, he must decode the data before a built-in kill-switch destroys his mind.

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 socially awkward linguistics lecturer at a community college who dresses badly and can never fit in at bars or parties. His obsessive pursuit of a shape-shifting woman leads him to abandon his career and ultimately transform into one of the belonging kind.

A thirty-year-old continuity writer for broadcast ASP (Apparent Sensory Perception) who suffers from chronic insomnia and has recently gone through a painful breakup with Angela. A former indentured worker who survived the New Secessionist wars.

An unnamed corporate operative and partner of Fox who helps recruit Sandii to lure Hiroshi away from Maas. After the scheme unravels and Fox is killed, he retreats to a capsule hotel to await Maas assassins, replaying events obsessively.

An unnamed freelance photographer hired to document American Streamlined Moderne architecture across California. While immersed in retro-futurist imagery, he begins hallucinating visions of an alternate 1980s that never existed.

A surrogate aboard a space station near the Highway singularity. His job is to be the first human contact for traumatised returning space travellers. Paired through a bone-phone implant with his handler Hiro, he uses drugs and deception to coax data from returnees.

A corporate mercenary who specialises in the extraction of high-value defectors - moving scientists and executives from one megacorporation to another without them being killed in the process. Turner is the protagonist of Count Zero, hired by Hosaka Corporation to extract Maas-Neotek's chief of R&D, a job that goes wrong in ways that expose him to the strange new entities operating in the matrix. He is competent, professional, and emotionally hollowed out by his work - a man whose skills are available to whoever pays. His backstory, including a destroyed relationship and a brother living off the grid, gives him more interiority than the role might suggest.

A ruthless and powerful criminal operator who runs a vast empire from behind layers of defensive software (black ice). She controls money laundering, illegal operations, and wields enormous influence across the Sprawl. Jack and Bobby's hack destroys her operation.

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.

Marly's former lover, a handsome, dishevelled Frenchman who orchestrated the forged Cornell that destroyed her gallery career. He smokes Gauloise nonfilters, carries a leather attache case, and lies with passionate conviction. Maas Biolabs feeds him the coordinates of the boxmaker's location, but when he attempts to sell the information to third parties, they murder him with a fine wire inserted into his ear.

Marly's close friend and flatmate in Paris, a pale-haired woman who works as an assistant editor in the book-printing business. Practical, warm, and sensible, she shelters Marly after the gallery scandal and loans her fare for the Brussels interview. She serves as Marly's anchor to normality, offering affectionate advice and good cooking while Marly navigates Virek's world.

A beautiful, animal-eyed woman who is one of the 'belonging kind' - mysterious entities that perfectly mimic human bar-goers, changing their appearance and mannerisms to blend into any social setting. She feeds on alcohol and produces money from slits in her own body.