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 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.

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 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 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.

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.

A retired console cowboy who now runs a nightclub on the top floor of Hypermart. He has a long face, thinning dark hair, and small, unnaturally even teeth that seem too numerous. His custom-built black cyberspace deck, assembled by the legendary Automatic Jack, is ten years old but still extraordinary. He loses two fingers to a laser shot through his club door but remains sharp-witted throughout the siege, and holds an uncollected favour from the Yakuza.

A top console jockey from Los Angeles, formerly Ramirez's partner on the offshore rig during the Mitchell extraction. She projects herself in cyberspace as a sensuous brush-sketch cartoon in a pale blue apartment. After Ramirez is killed, she hunts obsessively through the matrix for his killer, and when Bobby delivers Conroy's name, she immediately orders her agent Bunny to destroy Conroy's Park Avenue location.

The single wealthiest individual on the planet, confined for over a decade to an enormous vat in a Stockholm industrial suburb due to a catastrophic cellular disease. He manifests through constructs and doubles, most memorably in a simulation of Barcelona's Guell Park. He hires Marly to find the boxmaker and secretly funds Conroy's double-cross, seeking to upload his consciousness into the old Tessier-Ashpool cores. His wealth operates as an autonomous force, but he is destroyed when Baron Samedi manifests in his virtual construct.

A large, imposing black man in an immaculate black suit who carries a brass-knobbed cane concealing razor-sharp splines. He is one of the two Sprawl oungans alongside Beauvoir, and also works as a bigtime lawyer. Calm, dignified, and soft-spoken, he drives a vintage Damascus-built Rolls-Royce called Ahmed. He takes Bobby to meet the Finn and introduces him to the Sprawl, but is killed on the Jersey freeway by a Maas rocket launcher.

Virek's lifelong personal agent, a serious, dark-eyed Spaniard with deep lines at the corners of his mouth. He appears first as a child subprogram in Virek's Guell Park construct, then as a waiter, a bellman, and finally as a well-dressed operative managing Virek's field operations. He follows Marly through Paris, handles cash deliveries, and later travels to orbit to secure the Tessier-Ashpool cores for Virek. After Virek's death, he announces the reorganisation of Virek's interests.

Turner's younger brother, a brilliant but troubled rural polymath with multiple degrees including a doctorate in biotechnology from Tulane. He lives in their family homestead surrounded by vehicles he restores and augmented guard dogs he has fitted with infrared sensors. He drinks too much and cooks drugs in his lab, but his scanning equipment reveals the mysterious biochip structures laced through Angie's brain.

Rudy's on-again, off-again partner, a tanned blonde woman with cropped hair who cooks and keeps house. She moved back in to help Rudy straighten out his drinking. Direct and compassionate, she tends to Angie's injuries and eventually becomes Turner's partner, raising a red-haired son with him in the countryside.

A fence and information broker operating out of Nighttown, the Sprawl's underworld district. The Finn appears across multiple Gibson works - Neuromancer, the short stories, and the Count Zero era. He deals in hardware, information, and anything else with value, operating through a network of contacts that extends from street level to corporate espionage. He is one of Case's few reliable contacts - not trustworthy in the conventional sense, but consistent in his unreliability, which amounts to the same thing. Wintermute uses his face and voice as one of its preferred communication personas.

A black software dealer from the Projects who hustles hot programmes to Barrytown hotdoggers. He acts as a go-between for Beauvoir and Lucas, passing along their mysterious icebreaker to Bobby without warning him of the risks. Outwardly a smooth-talking hustler, he is revealed to be terrified and in deep trouble with the oungans for letting the icebreaker get stolen when Lobes mugged Bobby.

A young Australian fugitive with wide blue eyes and curly brown hair who lives in the derelict Tessier-Ashpool cores with Wigan Ludgate. He arrived while on the run and stayed to look after the increasingly mad Ludgate, helping with his scavenging business. He guides Marly through the knotted corridors to the boxmaker's dome and shows genuine concern for both her safety and Ludgate's welfare.

A bearded young member of the site team who Turner correctly identifies as Conroy's spy. He carries a fletcher pistol and wears a silver death's-head belt buckle. Turner shoots him dead with the Smith and Wesson just before the extraction begins, confirming his suspicions about the man's divided loyalties.