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Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through the closed circuit of the world's black markets like the seashells of the Trobriand islanders.

He smoothed it automatically, under the table, folded it in quarters, and passed it to her. You need that, honey.

You watch your back, man. He nodded, anxious to be gone.

Threading his way through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat. Case was twenty-four.

All the meat, he thought, and all it wants. Wage, she said, narrowing her eyes. He wants to see you with a hole in your face. She lit her own cigarette. Who says?

At first, finding himself alone in Chiba, with little money and less hope of finding a cure, he'd gone into a kind of terminal overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had seemed to belong to someone else. In the first month, he'd killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before would have seemed ludicrous. Ninsei wore him down until the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish, some secret poison he hadn't known he carried. Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it.

All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void....

Too many people owe him now, Case. Maybe you get to be the example. You seriously better watch it. Sure. How about you, Linda?

He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd never make.

I saw your girl last night, Ratz said, passing Case his second Kirin. I don't have one, he said, and drank.

Case, good buddy.... He looked up, met gray eyes ringed with paintstick.

He kept something for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam. He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it mattered now. He'd expected to die, then, but they only smiled.

It was a flat pink octagon, a potent species of Brazilian dex he bought from one of Zone's girls. The Jarre was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in red neon.

By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky. Two blocks west of the Chat, in a teashop called the Jarre de The, Case washed down the night's first pill with a double espresso.

He took it, let her light it with a red plastic tube. You sleep in' okay, Case? You look tired. Her accent put her south along the Sprawl, toward Atlanta.

For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat.

Ratz? You been talking to Ratz? No.

But she left. Jesus, Case said, what kind a creep joint you running here? Man can't have a drink. Ha, Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag, Zone shows a percentage.

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through.