Case is 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 the cyberspace matrix he lived for. When a mysterious operator called Armitage offers to fix him in exchange for one last job, Case takes it - he has nothing left to lose. The job involves Molly, a street samurai with mirror-lens eyes and retractable razor blades under her fingernails, a dead mercenary whose personality has been recorded and lodged in Case's head, and a target that turns out to be an artificial intelligence of terrifying power, owned by the Tessier-Ashpool clan from their orbital station above the Swiss Alps. William Gibson's debut novel won the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards and invented cyberpunk. Its prose style - terse, elliptical, dense with invented slang - was as influential as its ideas.