Neuromancer

“People,” Deane said, around a ginger bonbon. “What sort of people? Friends?”
Case nodded.
“Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?”

Julius Deane was one hundred and thirty-five years old, his metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums and hormones. His primary hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons re-set the code of his DNA, a procedure unavailable in Chiba.

Genetic materials and hormones trickled down to Ninsei along an intricate ladder of fronts and blinds.

There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of historical park, a reminder of humble origins. But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.

It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He’d watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he’d seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction

The sky above the port

Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it!

‘Wonderful,’ the Flatline said, ‘I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.

I like it, you know? Like I’ve always talked to myself, in my head, when I’ve been in tight spots. Pretend I got some friend, somebody I can trust, and I’ll tell ’em what I really think, what I feel like, and then I’ll pretend they’re telling me what they think about that, and I’ll just go along that way. Having you in is kinda like that.

That is the way to handle tears.’ He drank again