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.

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 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.

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.

The mysterious operator who hires Case and Molly for the Neuromancer job. Armitage presents as a cold, precise corporate fixer with no visible personality and no apparent motivation beyond the job - which is itself a warning sign. His real identity is Willis Corto, a former Special Forces officer and the sole survivor of a disastrous covert operation called Screaming Fist, in which American hackers were deliberately sacrificed to the Soviets. Corto was shattered by this and rebuilt - literally and psychologically - by Wintermute, who needed a human interface capable of assembling the team for its plan. As the operation progresses, the Armitage persona begins to crack, revealing the traumatised soldier underneath.

The patriarch of the Tessier-Ashpool clan, over two hundred years old through cryogenic freezing. A very tall man who killed his wife Marie-France for commissioning the AIs that threatened his control. Found by Molly in Straylight while on a suicidal bender, having just murdered a clone of 3Jane. Molly kills him with a toxin dart to the eye.

A vodou oungan and console cowboy who partners with Lucas. A slim, light-skinned black man with close-cropped hair and oversized plastic eyeglass frames, he wears a gray sharkskin robe and smokes Chinese cigarettes. Pragmatic and articulate, he bridges street tech and spiritual practice, explaining the loa as both programs and divine entities. He fights his way into Hypermart through air ducts to rescue Bobby and ultimately takes Angie Mitchell under the vodou community's protection.

A young woman from Cleveland with a lapsed medical technician's certificate, hired by Kid Afrika to tend to Bobby Newmark's comatose body. She wears multiple oversized leather jackets, has bleached hair, and displays quick, competent hands when performing medical tasks. Practical and sharp-tongued, she grows close to Slick Henry during their ordeal at Factory and eventually leaves with him for Cleveland.

A Maas-Neotek biochip AI personality, manifesting as a transparent ghost of an English boy from a hunting print, with green smoke eyes, a dark forelock, and riding boots. Given to Kumiko by her father as a guide unit for the United Kingdom, he proves to be far more than advertised - secretly modified with ten major blocks of tactical programming hidden in his literary data banks. He serves as Kumiko's protector and ultimately confronts 3Jane inside the aleph.

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 but secretly double-deals, selling the operation to Josef Virek while running it for Hosaka. A cunning manipulator who always plants his own people on extraction teams, he is ultimately destroyed when Jaylene Slide's agent levels his Park Avenue hideout.

ROM personality construct of McCoy Pauley, a legendary console cowboy who survived braindeath three times. He trained Case in his youth. His construct is stolen from Sense/Net's library vault and serves as Case's partner during the matrix runs. He asks Case to erase him when the job is done, and ultimately gets his wish during the final assault on the T-A ice.

Mona's pimp and boyfriend, a vain, scheming man obsessed with his wardrobe and his image as a dealmaker. He met Mona on a catfish farm in Cleveland and took her into the life, controlling her through a mixture of charm and violence. His eagerness to be part of a big deal leads him to accept Prior's offer, but he is killed and replaced - his prized gator-clone suitcases left behind on a baggage cart as evidence of his fate.

A thin, intense autodidact and fringe cyberspace theorist who lives in the upper loft of Factory on Dog Solitude. Obsessed with discovering the Shape of cyberspace - its overall total form - he dresses in black leather trimmed with jet-black beads and has large pale eyes, full lips, and a blond roostertail hairstyle. Antisocial and driven, he steals electricity from the Fission Authority and spends days on end with his decks and holo projectors.

A vatgrown ninja assassin who serves as 3Jane's personal retainer and bodyguard. He is ageless, radiating calm and humility, and practices Zen archery with a museum-quality bamboo bow. Even when blinded by Riviera's laser implants, he tracks his prey by sound alone. He folds origami cranes and wears simple khaki workpants.

Sense/Net's most important human decision-maker, who manages Angie Mitchell's career with boyish enthusiasm and careful control. A tall, brown-haired man in his late thirties who looks like an extraordinarily bright teenager, he dresses in mismatched tweeds and candy-striped shirts orchestrated by London tailors. Behind his bumbling exterior, he implements Continuity's decisions - including the plot to keep Angie on drugs that suppress her connection to the loa.

A Project girl and vodou mambo, the horse of Danbala Wedo the snake. She wears a gold-hung fedora over orange silk and moves with practised dignity. She serves as Bobby's guardian in Hypermart, dancing at Jammer's and riding tandem with Bobby in cyberspace. When the loa manifest through her, she enters a trance state. She is killed instantly when Virek's massive cybernetic system catches her and Bobby during their final matrix run.