Neuromancer Chapters 1 - 2: Chiba City Blues

William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic, Neuromancer, drops us right into the action in the neon grime of Chiba City. 

Read along with us to find out why the book still feels like the blueprint for hackers, body modification, and the idea of cyberspace itself. 

Along the way we talk about the noir tone, and the genre’s core promise: high tech wrapped around low society.

Transcript

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Windy Ohio And A Darker Book

Michael Kentris 0:00

Welcome back to Brothers Reading Books. I am one of the brothers, Michael, and I'm joined, as always, by my brother. The other brother, Will Kentris. Hey Will. How are you doing? I'm doing pretty good. It's been really windy in Ohio the the past day, but no structural damage on my end. How about you? It's you know, it's some branches down, but nothing big. So it's it's sunny now, the sun is shining, and everything's gonna be alright. So it's uh it's looking good. And I think that is a great contrast for what we are going to be talking about today.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Sure.

What Cyberpunk Really Means

Michael Kentris 0:35

So we're starting a new book out today, the kind of the prototype cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, by William Gibson. So, Will, when you think about cyberpunk, what comes to mind? I feel like there's a lot of sort of hackers, of course, come to mind, some sort of pseudo-matrix style interactive piece where they're they're able to kind of like create a visual space of the internet, things along those lines. Just body modifications, I feel like is also really common in that sort of genre. Right. Yeah, it's uh God, I came across a phrase um when I was I was looking through the Wikipedia, uh, I think they said high tech, low society. Right. So it's like this like veneer of like everything's futuristic and fancy, but also everything's like kind of grimy and grubby and you know, it's very, very associated with dystopia, right? That's the punk side of things, I suppose you would say. I mean, we definitely get that a lot here in these first two chapters. Right. And yeah, so uh so cyberpunk kind of is its own sub-genre in science fiction, and there's there's a couple authors, William Gibson being kind of one of the notable ones in that genre that kind of brought it to the public mind. There were other authors before. But uh it's uh it's definitely an interesting flavor, an interesting milieu, if you will. All those things you said, you know, like the the body modification, and we can kind of see like the effect. Some of the tropes that we read through here will seem very typical, but uh this was written in 1984, and this is where a lot of these things come from. This is coined a lot of the terms, like cyberspace. And so it very much is interesting.

Where The Word Cyber Comes From

Michael Kentris 2:27

Now, I did uh do a little, you know, Google sleuthing as far as the cyber part. So this is kind of interesting. So cyber as a prefix actually comes from uh the word cybernetics, which is like kind of the the study of steering or commanding to pilot. So it's like again from an from an ancient Greek word, Kubernetes. What's the what's the one thing from my big fat Greek wedding? You give me any word, I tell you how it stems from Greek. Well, in this case, so it's interesting because they came up with cybernetics before they came up with cyber. So they basically took like it's this idea of steering or controlling something, right? So you're like in space, right? You're steering space, your cybernetics, like you have your artificial prosthesis and all that stuff. So it's just an interesting thing in terms of the evolution of the prefix cyber, in as much as like it it didn't exist on its own prior to kind of like the 1970s, nineteen eighties. Yeah. It is yeah, interesting. I feel like there's a few rare select scenarios where the prefix is kind of what people are more familiar with and that's what sticks around. So in this case, they just I think it was um gosh, when was it? It was in the 1950s. They basically just took like the Kubernetes, right? They took the whole word and just made it cybernetics. They just you know anglicized it. So it basically was like an entire word that we just poured it over into English, and then they just kind of sliced it in half and took part of it to use for sci-fi. And and remind me real quick, what does Kubernetes mean? To pilot. Okay. That's really interesting. From a steersman, yeah. Because that's that's a very popular container-based software platform. Is it really? Yeah. That's right. And I think we should take a moment to remind our listeners that Will is in fact a computer scientist and has actual bona fides in this topic. So we'll be leaning on him for subject expertise as we go through here. Absolutely. And in this first part, he's also fairly well versed in Japanese uh stuff, too. Yes. Pronunciations will also be falling to Will. So I get to be the uh the back seat driver here, and Will's gonna lead us. But uh to set the scene.

Chiba City Blues And A Perfect Opener

Michael Kentris 4:49

So so we've got this book, Neuromancer, and I do like that in this book we have chapter numbers, so that's great. So for those of reading along with us at home, we're gonna be covering chapters one and two today. And uh this this basically the entirety of part one, what they call uh Chiba City Blues. Now is it is it pronounced Chiba? Yeah, Chiba. It's a city like Tokyo lies on this bay, and Tokyo's like on the northwestern side, and Chiba is like east of it. So it's also on the bay, but it's definitely like less less highfalutin society of Tokyo. So does that fit in with the way that they describe it in in this opening section, or is this a little more uh some artistic license here? I definitely think there's more artistic license, especially with kind of like the black market medical clinics and everything, but it makes sense that it's sort of like on the outskirts of quote unquote proper society. Gotcha. So yeah, we just to kind of I'll set the scene and then I'll let you run with it, Will, here. We we start off with this character, Case. We don't have a last name. We don't even really have much of a physical description initially. He's just a guy sitting in this uh Chetsubo bar, and you know, we find out he's an expat from you know in Japan here. And one thing I had to comment on, the opening line, this you know, some books have just like really great opening lines, and I think this is one of them. The sky above the port was the color of television turned to a dead channel or tuned to a dead channel. So it's it's one of those things that just grabs you, right? That's like the vibe of this book, right? It's just like gray and kind of morose and disconnected. So all these things are just like bam, right from the opening. Yeah, I I will agree with you. There's just so many lines on these first two chapters alone that just make it like highlight them, even though there was no not necessarily any like story relevance. It's like that's a great line. I know. One of the things I remember, because I I read this way back in high school. So it's been a oh god, 20 years, more than 20 years since I've read it. 20 years, yeah. My God. So so his prose is just like so visceral, uh, the way he describes things here. And it's like, like you said, you know, as we come across here, we there's just the way that some things are described in such a strange and bizarre manner that it takes something that's relatively mundane and just makes it very like alien and odd sounding. And it just leaves you with, at least me, with this uh this vague feeling of disorientation throughout like like much of the narrative in a way that you're just kind of like slightly off balance, which again kind of fits the tone of this opening section here. Right. Especially since there is a lot of sort of hallucinogenics and things being used by these characters. So Right, exactly. So you're kind of disjointed narrative. Yeah. Yeah. Doing that close uh follow-up or you know, kind of behind the person's head a little bit here. I think we're this would be like a close third person, if I remember correctly. Yeah. That's fair. Because he's a following case, but we don't get his internal monologue necessarily. Exactly. Yeah.

The Chatsubo Bar And Ratz

Michael Kentris 8:03

All right. So so tell us about this bar, Will. So, like you said before, the name of it is the chatsubo, which again I did look up, which is a traditional ceramic jar for tea leaves. So cha, the first part, is the actual part that means tea. So I think it's kind of interesting that it gets abbreviated to chat in the future, even though it's kind of like this incomplete abbreviation of these characters that it's using. But as we kind of learn here, it is an expatriate bar, and you could spend a week there and never hear two words in Japanese. So it makes a lot of sense that they're just gonna take the parts that make sense to them in English. At the same time, I did think it's very interesting how uh we hear like this use of a sprawl voice telling a sprawl joke, which we have no context really for here, but it sounds like is somewhat related in some capacity to the United States that might be sort of more developed as we go forward, but again, you're just kind of thrown into this bar scene without any additional context. And so we get this description of the bartender, Ratz, who is this sort of bizarre German individual. He's described as having this horrific smile that's like part rotten teeth and part metal, and he's got this super outdated prosthetic arm that is Russian, I believe, in origin, but it's also like clad in this like garish pink plastic. So there's there's a line where basically he more or less like the way that he's so ugly in this age of affordable beauty is his yeah, his ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. So again, just it's a great way to I feel like to bring in this relatively minor character. Right. No, it's very true. Yeah, the again, right, the descriptions here are they just are masterful.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Mm-hmm.

Michael Kentris 10:13

Right. And I feel like if we were to go over all of them, this thing would be several hours long, but try and at least do a highlight, high level. So Case is in this bar, and he's sitting at the bar or the actual counter, and Ratz mentions to him, Wage was in here earlier with two Joe Boys. So I'm assuming again some sort of thugs or minions of his. Maybe some business with you, Case. So as we quickly learn here, Chase does a number of sort of under under the table, shady dealings, and more or less we don't know exactly what it is quite yet, but as we'll find out eventually, he uh is doing some trading in organics. I don't know how would you describe that, Mike. Uh he's a drug dealer. Drug dealer. Yeah, they describe it a little more in-depth later on that he's essentially a kind of a middleman. So he's he's uh he's a go-between between some of the suppliers and the buyers.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

Yeah.

Michael Kentris 11:08

And uh as Rat says here, you are the artiste of the slightly funny deal. So funny deals, right? Uh another way of saying you know, bad deals, right? It's got that kind of Eastern European understated humor to it. So ultimately, we do learn that uh there was some sort of neuro splicing development that the Chinese have done, and more or less uh case is kind of just very derivative towards that. He thinks like, oh, it's all bullshit. That ends that ends this first section. Yeah. And I should, I don't know, content warning. Yes. This book has now, if we were doing content warnings for violence, I guess I'd be like on almost every past episode. But uh there's definitely a lot more swearing and adult themes in this book than some of the past books. So just just as a heads up, that is is present. So that being said, yeah, there's there's just like like yeah, I don't think we've had any like actual just like swears other than like you dog in the past. So not often anyway, sure. Yeah, no, no proper expletives per se. Yeah, I will to the point of violence, I will say, you know, in Conan, sure, you know, it's the brutality that you would expect in something like that. This one I feel uh feels a little more concrete in reality, you know, just not quite as casual. Got more of that up in your face kind of feeling.

Case’s Fall From Cyberspace

Michael Kentris 12:37

So we we learn a little bit more about Chase, right? Like why is he in Japan? And so he kind of goes through we get a little it this this part of the narrative's a little bit jumpy. It kind of goes back and forth without any guidance between kind of the his past and what he's doing presently. So so he's been here for a year and he's dreaming of cyberspace. And I love this phrase here. He was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy, which again, Will and I both enjoy anime, and like this really just was very evocative of like, you know, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop, that kind of classic anime type stuff where they have that kind of I mean, uh essentially a cyberpunk kind of theme to them. They're they're obviously derived from works like this, but uh you can you can see the finger marks. Absolutely. But we we kind of learn through these back and forths that he's sustained some sort of injury, that's why he's in Chiba, is to go to these sort of black clinics that are on these outskirts of society to try and fix whatever injury he sustained and has not had any luck. Uh and more or less he's now kind of stranded here in Chiba trying to make a living doing whatever he can. So, as we said before, that is hustling drugs or whatever comes across his path. Yeah. And there was this this line here, I have to read it because it's another one of those. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night, like live wire voodoo, and he'd cry for it. Cry in his sleep and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel. And I just wrote a note to myself saying like very noir. And I think that's that's uh something that other people have said as well, that that cyberpunk has a lot of kind of noir themes in terms of like like tonal, like tonality and the the kind of descriptions that are used and things like that. Because there is oftentimes like a mystery or a heist element to a lot of these stories. So it does have a lot of parallels, I think. It's kind of like you know, your modern noir detective story in a way. Okay. That's an interesting take. I like it. So we jump back forward again, and we're back, we're back at the chat, the chatsuball. And Ratz has mentioned to Case, I saw your girl last night, and Case, like, I don't got a girl, and he responds, Miss Linda Lee. And again, Case is kind of like, nah, she's she's not my girl. And no girl, nothing, only biz, friend artiste, dedication to commerce. I think I liked you better with her. You laughed more. Now some night you get maybe too artistic, you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts. I love that paragraph, yes. It's great. Reading this whole thing so far has been such a good time. Like I've been enjoying it so much. Right. Yeah, it's it's like all these, like they're talking around around, right? The work. It's just like you're he's the artist of the funny deal. It's like too artistic, too funny of a deal, you're gonna wind up what we learn, right? In the clinic tanks, like kind of like uh yeah, like those stories of people going down to Mexico and waking up in an ice bath with no kidney. So same kind of idea, right? Mm-hmm. I mean, there's even a reference later on where there's yeah, some sort of rich falutin dude walking around. He's like, that guy's gonna end up with spare parts because he's got all these modified pieces to him. So we jump kind of back now to a general backstory of case. So he's 22, had been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the sprawl, and we get kind of this general what that means as far as like the cyberspace projecting his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. And he worked as a thief more or less. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Hence hence the movie. Yeah. Hence the movie name, yeah. And uh basically he would work for other thieves that gave him software to hack into corporate systems to steal data, things of that sort. And unfortunately, he'd made the classic mistake of stealing from his employers. And I like this part a lot. So he'd expected to die then, but they only smiled. Of course he was welcome, they said. Welcome to the money, and he was going to need it because still smiling, they were going to make sure he never worked again. They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. And strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated

Paranoia, Tailings, And Buying A Weapon

Michael Kentris 17:02

for thirty hours. It's just like, dang, that's uh intense, it's evocative, and very succinct. We figure out exactly what's going on with him and get a very vivid detail of how it happened. Yeah. And I thought this was this was interesting. You're the end of this little passage here. The elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. And this is a very kind of like a Gnostic mindset in a way, right? Where the spirit is what matters and freedom from the body, all that kind of stuff. So it's it's very interesting to see them describe it this way because we, on the other hand, right, we've got all these people, like you said, talking about body modification and kind of they call me these uh not quite, but verging on transhumanist elements where people are taking their bodies and changing them in some fashion. So there is a sort of mutability to both consciousness and the flesh in this story. Right? No, I Yeah, it's definitely interesting because it's something that appears over and over again in these two chapters, where since he's stuck in this prison of his own body, he's kind of like sort of disdains all of these things that he has to do to like maintain it or the impulses that his body has. So no, it's it's good. So jump back again. So this is post post-injury. He converted all of his assets to new yen, which I assume is the current currency that Japan uses in this timeline. But uh yeah, he he flies out to Japan to go to all their black markets to try and fix this damage that's been done to him. Now, here's an interesting thing, Will. You know, a lot of science fiction's been known to be kind of predictive of future things, right? The the the meme being like we've created the horrible death laser from the cautionary tale of don't create the horrible death laser. But but here, right, on that uh that note of converting to cash, it was difficult to transact legitimate business with cash in the sprawl. In Japan, it was already illegal. So if you can't use cash, right, you're using like some sort of like digital ID, digital, digital cash, right? Everything's being tracked. It's almost like that's happening in real life right now in some countries.

unknown 19:26

Yeah.

Michael Kentris 19:27

Right. What is it? Life imitates art. Yes, that is very true. But anyway, yeah, it is, right? This is written two.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Over four years, yeah.

Michael Kentris 19:37

Yeah. So, yes, yeah, this book is older than both of us. And yeah, it's still making predictions. Right. Absolutely. So synonymous with implants, nerve splicing, and microbionics. Chiba was a magnet for the sprawls, techno-criminal subcultures. And unfortunately, he did not have any success with these clinics. He ran out of his money in two months after rounds of examinations and consultations, where and I like this, the men in the black clinics, his last hope, had admired the expertise with which he'd been maimed, and then slowly shaken their heads. So now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port. It's interesting here because obviously there are capsule hotels in Japan. And that was what I was initially thinking that these were, because it is kind of very much like a coffin in terms of sounds like it, yeah. Yeah, but I think we get a view of one of these coffins later, and it sounds like it's at least able to be stood in. I think it was like three-ish. Was it three meters tall? Is it something like that? Or maybe one meter. I don't remember. We get a description. Yes, we get a description later. So that's not just like their whatchamacallit, it's not just where they sleep, it's like that's their apartment. That's their living space, yeah. Yeah. So so yeah, but yeah, coffin is very evocative, especially with the like you said, the capsule hotels that they talk about. So yeah, he sleeps in the cheapest coffins on the outskirts of Tokyo, where again we get kind of this very grim description of Tokyo, where you couldn't see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo, the Fuji Electronic Company in Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Yeah. Pretty grim.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

Pretty grim. Pretty pretty dark.

Michael Kentris 21:27

Yeah. Yeah, they they go on a little bit, horror. We learn that they're in this area, city, with how do you say this? Ninsei?

SPEAKER_01 21:35

Yeah, Ninsei.

Michael Kentris 21:36

Ninsei. All right. I'll let you do the pronunciations here. So we we learn, right, uh case is kind of going into everyone has failed. So he's like, I'm not getting it back. And so he goes into this uh what they call terminal overdrive. He's hustling. We learn in his first month there, he'd killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before would have seemed ludicrous. It seemed as if he had had some sort of death wish. So he's taking b and they emphasize this several times over the next couple of chapters that he is taking bigger and bigger risks. He's using more drugs, drinking more, right?

SPEAKER_01 22:14

He's he's just basically trying to get himself killed by taking increasing the escalating his behavior more and more and more. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael Kentris 22:28

So now things start getting a little weird uh because he is taking what is this? A flat pink octagon, a potent species of Brazilian Dex. So it seems like a stimulant. If I was to say Dex, maybe like some sort of like dexamphetamines or something like that. Yeah, something like that. But it definitely gives you like more of a uh an upper kind of flavor uh as far as the description of his state. Absolutely. Especially with the way he's taking it with some espresso. Right. Yes, you know, I haven't had my morning stimulants yet either. So just drinking water at the present time. But yes, so I I am envious of Case's uh stimulation here. He yeah, right, and go on here. He wasn't taking basic precautions, he didn't have a weapon, he had a reputation for being able to get whatever you wanted, and he knew, perhaps subconsciously, that he was in this arc of self-destruction. Yeah, I do think it's interesting how even though he is kind of being a step above suicidal, he he doesn't seem to be doing anything to kind of self-preservation in terms of making sure that it's more or less like he lost his ability to dive into cyberspace and now he's like, nothing else matters. So just gonna live fast and hard while I can. Right. And that's kind of the interesting thing, right? He's he's 24 at this point in time. And if I think back to like my own headspace as a 24-year-old, I'm like, man, that guy was kind of dumb. But yeah, it is one of those things where it's it's very much like kind of a live fast, die hard kind of situation. For real. Again, just the number of drugs and stimulants he's taking. Yes. And so it's this knowledge of his own self-destruction that most hated the thought of Linda Lee. And we get kind of a uh little look back at how he met her and kind of essentially how he corrupted her, it sounds like Right. And they met in an arcade one rainy night. So he kind of ducks into this arcade, and again, just the level of description and detail here is fantastic. So when he first sees her, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code, her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the tank war, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper cannon. And so he kind of singled her out, approached her, they spent the night together, and more or less we learn it took a month for the amount of drugs that he was kind of pushing onto her to kind of fragment her personality. So finally he'd seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. And yeah, not not good, not good. No. Yeah, Case isn't necessarily a good person, right? We he was a thief, and then when he couldn't be a thief, he became a drug dealer. And we know he's killed people, so he's a murderer, right? He's not a good person. Not by any stretch. Yeah. So I think that is important for us to remember as we go through this. And that I think also is kind of a hallmark of a lot of cyberpunk stories, is that your protagonist is not necessarily a hero, like it would be maybe in like the fantasy genre. Yeah, I feel like honestly, a lot of times they're usually kind of like just anti-establishment more than anything. Because usually the upper class is kind of shown as this, I don't know, bourgeoisie, yeah, decadent, and kind of treat the less fortunate as less than human. So it would be kind of hard, I feel like, to portray a person as being from that social class in one of these stories. Right. So we eventually, so after this description of Linda Lee, we pop back again to the present, right? It's just this very disorientation sort of thing where you're kind of like drifting in and out of his own kind of remembrances without any clear demarcation in the text. So it does have this slightly jarring, off-putting effect, which again, right, our protagonist is high on stimulants right now. I think that kind of tracks. Right. Literally, like he said the black grounds, this empty coffee in his empty cup. It was vibrating with the speed he'd taken. So again, yeah. Not not doing great. And so Linda Lee, you know, enters scene. But we find out she's been looking for him, and we learn a little bit here. You sleep in okay, case, you look tired. Her accent put her south along the sprawl toward Atlanta. And I think it was mentioned somewhere in this chapter that the sprawl is essentially kind of the east coast of the United States, becomes some sort of like giant megapolis uh kind of thing, right? That goes from Atlanta up to, I want to say New York. I'll I'll believe it. I yeah, I I don't remember. I don't remember. I think that's correct. If you're listening along, fact check us on that. But I believe that's what they're referring to as the sprawl. We'll double check on that later and we'll get back to you.

SPEAKER_01 27:38

That's right.

Michael Kentris 27:39

But uh yeah, so we find out she's been looking for him, and uh I like this. You're sleeping okay, and he replies, not if I remember to take my pills. So, you know, when you take your uppers, you gotta take your downers. That's what I as it he said, as a tangible wave of longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the wavelength of amphetamine. Again, like just this crazy language that's just very, very visceral. Right. Yeah. And again, that immediate subsequent part. He remembered the smell of her skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her fingers locked across the small of his back, all the meat he thought and all it wants. Right. Like you said, he's kind of resentful of the physical desires of his body. So we kind of find out that uh, you know, wage is looking for him and that uh it might be about the money he owes Wage, and that maybe Wage is going to make an example out of case. And so Case being high on amphetamines that starts getting anxious about this. Right. I mean, I would be anxious too if one of my under underbelly compatriots, colleagues, I'd heard like, oh, yeah, I've kind of screwed him over before in the past, and he wants me dead to pretend to make an example. I would also be, even without any sort of stimulant or mind-altering substances, be like, oh no. And I like this. We get this little word dropped in here near the end of their interaction, Sanpaku. So interesting thing about Sanpaku is it's literally just like the description of how there is uh some of the cornea visible underneath, like the iris. So typically a lot of times with the way the eyelids sit, there's not going to be that. But uh it sounds like it's also the word that's used in Japanese for these three, I call tomoe, but it's used on a lot of sort of ritual uh or traditional sort of drums and templates and things of that sort. It's like those teardrop shapes in a circle, but yeah, same same idea, same concept. In if I remember correctly, in modern use, again, this is more recent, even than this book, uh, people talk about Sunpaku eyes, and they're usually referring to like crazy eyes. Does it have that connotation historically, or is that a relatively modern phenomenon, Will? I don't I don't know. So again, when I was looking this up, it was literally just kind of like how the eye was being shown. So almost like, yeah, like you gotta be almost like looking upward to kind of evoke that effect. So I think they say you can see white on at least three sides of the eye, typically. Yeah. So what happens next? Oh, there's a word here. Uh he you know, he you know, leaves, he goes into the press of people. Uh, we have a sorariman. Am I saying that right, Will? So Sarari, Sarariman. So that's that's kind of your typical businessman in Japan who works like the nine to five, although obviously he's gonna be long on that grind and just works works for the company. Company man, a salary man, if you will. Yeah, exactly. It's what it is, is the Japanese, yeah, transliteration. Gotcha. And this is the guy you were talking about, uh, who is gonna get rolled for the labs. Yes. So yeah, he's uh got a tattoo on his hand indicating that he works for Mitsubishi Genentech, but uh if it's real or not, we don't know. And more or less right, right. More or less cases like uh it serves him right for walking around here, he's gonna get grabbed and struck for parts, which again very bleak. So we we kind of get this description of kind of the the crowd, a lot of a lot of, as they say, gaijin here, so the foreigners in this area here.

unknown 31:15

Yeah.

Michael Kentris 31:16

And uh there were a lot of theories as to why they allowed this enclave, this was Ninsei. Yeah, Ninsei. Ninsei. The Yakuza kept it as a historical park, as a reminder of their humble origins. So I thought that was kind of amusing there. And then I like this, the other theory is that Night City wasn't there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself, kind of a a pressure cooker of experimentation. Yeah, they refer to like some social barwinism earlier as far as you know, who who survives and who doesn't in this in this part of town. And wage, or not wage. Case is still kind of the names are just a little too similar. They're very succinct. They're very short names, like four-letter names for almost everybody. I mean, well, half the letters are the same, too. But so Case obviously still has this warning message from Linda Railing around in his head. Like, is Linda right? Is he gonna try and make an example out of me? And again, like more or less, Case starts getting very paranoid about this whole thing. So, and again, we get a little backstory here about why that might be. There was a deal that he'd done the week before where he had like held out on a deal to get a better buyer, and it's kind of like a series of incidents that might have potentially led to this potential confrontation between Wage and Case. And so Case kind of gets it into his head that maybe he needs a weapon. So he had happens to stop outside of the shop. His eyes are drawn to the shuriken, which I feel like if you ever seen a shuriken at like a flea market or something, it's described the exact same way. Yes. It has like the chrome or black treated with like a rainbow surface, chrome stars, hell his gaze,

Meeting Wage Without Getting Killed

Michael Kentris 33:06

they're mounted against scarlet ultrasuede with nearly invisible loops of nylon fish line, their centers stamped with dragons or yin-yang symbols, and more or less he's like Alright, I need to go talk to Julie. Time to see old Julie. He'll know. Yes. So we we get our a new character here, Julius Dean, 135 years old. And we learn, you know, he's he's engaging, you know, serums, hormones. He goes to the best tailors in Tokyo and Hong Kong and all this. So he's uh he's an esthete, essentially. Uh when they go into his house, it's this old Victorian dollhouse kind of thing. Lots of pretty stone, very, very fancy looking place. And uh we've got a Kandinsky look coffee table, all this kind of stuff. And the whole place smells of preserved ginger, which is just a very odd thing to have here. And so case gets scanned, he's clean, he comes in, and we find out, you know, Julius Dean, import export. So he's a traitor, if you will, someone who brings in things that people want, if you will. A fence Probably, yes. So so he uh he he gets like try one. Was this Tins Ting Jahe? I don't know, that sounds more Chinese, perhaps. Anyway, he does not accept the ginger candy. So he's asking basically for information. Does Wage want to kill me? And he's like, Where did you hear this? And he's like, people. It's like people? What sort of people? Friends? Case nods. Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it? So again, right, this very kind of punchy dialogue. Again, I think it sounds very noir. Like the more you like read these kinds of books with that mindset in place, I think it makes more sense from like a kind of story structure perspective. Right. I mean, and I feel like with a lot of noir dialogue, they're they're dancing around kind of like what it is they're trying to drive at, because again, they're trying to be like a little more subtle about things because it's this very delicate sort of interpersonal politics that they have to like make sure that they don't step on someone important's toes, and yeah, that's very much the vibe I got here. Yes. So essentially they have a little more back and forth here, and he's basically says like, not that I know of, and Case heads on his way. So we learned that I like this part here. Case has uh he realized someone was following him, or as he says here, on his ass and very close. The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took for granted. So the trick lay in not letting it get out of control, but that could be quite a trick behind a stack of octagons. So, yeah, when you're high on stimulants, it it is easy to become paranoid and anxious. Right. But again, he does a pretty good job here. He fights the adrenaline surge and pretends to let himself be kind of carried forward by the crowd. And I thought this was really interesting how he kind of like stops in front of a darkened display to pretend to inspect it, and he uses that window to kind of like look behind him and find out who is tailing him. And he only briefly gets like a quick description, like dark hair, neared glasses, dark clothing, slender, and gone. So after that, I feel like that's when he kind of loses his ability to control it. He's like, Alright, let's run. He starts running to like find a way to find a weapon, more or less. Right. He tracks down some waiter uh at a restaurant named Shin, and he's like, I need I need to rent a gun. And he's like, Come back in two hours. And he's like, I don't got two hours. And he's like, I can get you a taser. And he's like, I don't need a freaking taser. It's like, maybe I want to shoot somebody, understand? So anyway, so then he goes on, he goes to another place, you know, he buys uh some cigarettes, and he tells her, the this lady, I guess at the gas station or wherever he's buying his cigarettes, uh, I want to buy a weapon. And he's like, I don't like knives. And so we we find out he buys this thing called a cobra, which is three oiled telescoping segments of tightly wound coil. And we don't ever learn exactly what it is, but a lot of people say it's quote, mean. It sounds kind of like a whip or something. Yeah. Like, I don't know, it sounds like maybe maybe it's got some sort of toxin or some sort of pain thing to it, like maybe a stimulator. I don't know. Yeah. It's it's evocative without telling you exactly what it is. Right. And real quick, I do like the description of the woman. Uh the Japanese one behind the terminal looked like she had a few years on old Dean, again, who was over 130. None of them with the benefit of science. Yes. She's very old looking. This ancient sort of decractive, we even get a like description of her hand being like modeled, so it's just like we are dealing with a very old woman here without saying that she is necessarily old. Yeah, it was it was well done. So he takes the the cobra with him, he you know, fits it into his waistband and kind of heads off and he heads back to the chat. Right? It's sort of his base of operations where he meets up with contacts. And we had gotten a reference to this one individual earlier, Zone, who is a pimp and his girls will often work the chat with the sailors and whatnot. But uh he starts talking with Zone and more or less kind of trying to figure out if he's seen Wage recently. It's like you've seen Wage tonight, Lonnie, and Zone is under the effects of his own sort of cocktail of drugs, so he's right sort of out of it, sort of very lethargic, but he's still with it enough to be like, maybe I saw him a few hours ago, and he sees like the quote-unquote concealed cobra as like cobra, you want to fuck somebody up? And Case was like, see you later. Right. So as he leaves the bar, he realizes he's being tailed again, and um, you know, he basically he starts like running. Like it gets really erratic from this point forward here. So he's kind of running through these like different hallways and this like place where people get meetups, like these cubicles, and he tells the security lady, you know, the the hostess, I guess, the secretary at the front, like get your security up here. He runs up into one of these rooms where he had had a previous deal with Wage and this other guy, Matsuga, and it's basically an empty room, and he punches the window out of it, this plastic pane, and he kind of hides behind the door, and it sounds like he's gonna get ready to ambush whoever this is, but he crashes, right? He comes down, and like this. When the fear came, it was like some half-forgotten friend, simple animal fear. He'd almost forgotten what real fear was. And like the the next paragraph here, this cubicle was the sort of place where people died. He might die here. And basically, he hears some shouting, footsteps coming closer. He basically just freaks out, jumps out the window, falls, and bangs himself up and kind of like hides under some trash. Mm-hmm. Right? As far as a contingency plan, not not the worst. Right. So, yeah, as he's hiding under this trash, he does see that same head appear framed in the window, backlit by the fluorescence in the corridor. And he couldn't read the features, but he saw a glint of silver across the eyes, and more or less in the accent of Northern Sprawl, she's like shit. Like she lost. She lost or they lost her. We don't know, it's a she. Not yet. So we find out uh I like the Shin's pistol was a 50-year-old Vietnamese imitation of a South American copy of a Walther PPK. Double action the first shot, very rough pull. So it's a copy of a copy of a decent gun. Uh I like this. We're getting lead azide explosives, but he instead he has Chinese hollow points. So anyway, he uh dumped the cobra in a trash can, basically. And then he dry swallowed another octagon. The pill lit his circuits. Right, yeah, there's there's definitely a lot of this sort of imagery of the body as this machine. And so we he heads back to where he's staying. Well, not technically staying, but where he stashes his stuff. A place called Cheap Hotel. All caps. Right. So everyone just calls it cheap hotel. He I like this. He never slept in cheap hotel, he slept in cheaper places. So yeah, we get this description of it. It's and it does sound a lot like one of these whatchamacallit, uh, capsule hotels. Maybe a little bit nicer than some of them. But a little bigger, at the very least. Bigger, yes. So the the coffins were reasonably difficult to open without a key was the main selling point. And so he heads to his place number 92, and basically he finds out that uh all that is in there is a Hitachi pocket computer and a small white styrofoam cooler chest, spun aluminum lab flask with some dry ice around it. And so he punches in this number from Hong Kong, let it ring five times, and I thought you would get tickled by this, Will. His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi wasn't taking calls. Right. Three megabytes. Wow. I mean, again, back then that was a lot. Right. Yeah, it was 40 years ago. Right. That it is amusing. Uh that we'll just upgrade it to like petabytes or something now. Yeah, right. But it's it's very amusing. Although with the way that uh it's getting harder and harder to get a hold of RAM and hard drives, maybe maybe we'll come back around to this being a really hot commodity in another 10 years. If if anything, instead of RAM, it would be like GPUs or something instead. That's true. That's true. I need more gigaflops. That's right. I need I need my graphics. So you know, he gets connected, and essentially you would get this guy Snake Man and he just hangs up on him. So he's not able to move his stuff. Right. At the very least, yeah. He was like, Can you front it? He's like, I really need that money, and then he's like, Nope, no deal. So basically, after the failed sale, he has the flask, he has the pistol, and he's back at back at the chat. And yeah, we'll see, you know, Kurt, Brazilian kid, he is helping bartend, Ratz is there, and Ratz says, You look bad, friend artiste. Uh to which Case replies, I'm doing just fine. And he grinned like a skull.

unknown 43:35

Yeah.

Michael Kentris 43:35

Right, yeah, again, it's like flashing the wet ruin of his teeth. It's just again, this may have is a it reminds me a little bit of the description of um oh gosh, I'm blanking on his name uh from Dune. Uh Gurney Halleck. Yeah. Like the just ugly lump of a man. Right, yeah. It's just ugly. Although I think Case is the skull in this this this issue. Well that's fair.

unknown 44:01

Yeah.

Michael Kentris 44:02

Yes, he did screen like scroll. Sorry. And I like this. Uh it's like super fine. And then Rat's replies here. You wander back and forth in this portable bomb shelter built of boos and ups. Sure. Proof against the grosser emotions, yes. So again, right, we get this reference to the weakness of the body, like you're trying to use the body to distract the mind. So it's it's very nice they've continued this theme of this kind of mind-body dualism.

unknown 44:27

Yeah.

Michael Kentris 44:27

And yeah, Ratz, Ratz is quite the philosopher here, because again, like proof against fear and being alone. Listen to the fear. Maybe it's your friend. And so he's like, we find out, right? He's looking, he's looking for wage. And uh Ratz looking over his shoulder says, I think you're about to. So we we finally meet uh the mysterious wage, right? And we get the description of wage. And it was a tanned, unforgettable mask. The eyes were vat grown, sea green kneecone transplants. He wore a suit of gunmetal silk, simple brace of platinum, and he was flanked by his Joe Boys. Nearly identical young men, their arms and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle. And again, we get kind of this rats enforcing a peace on his establishment. He's like, Gentlemen, I don't want any trouble here. And he picks up this like shatterproof plastic uh cigarette tray, ashtray, crushes it with his plastic hand, and I was like, understand. And then more or less he also has Kurt on the bar with guns trained on everybody. Right. Yes. So I like that. Don't bother aiming for the legs, Kurt. So yeah, he's holding this giant riot gun with a barrel big enough to fit a fist. So I like this. Technically non-lethal, said Rats. And so yeah, case is he pulls out William this is a 22 gauge, which some people say is a little bit of a pee sheer. You can still mess someone up with a 22, though, especially if you're that close to him. So he's like, I hear you want to do me. Uh basically, you know, Wage is like, like, what the F is going on with you? He wigging or something. And he he sends his goons home. And so uh Wage says, Who told you I was going to hit you, Case? Wage asked. And like we get his we do get a little bit of internal monologue here. So kind of like almost shifting into first person briefly. It's like Linda, who told you, man? Somebody trying to set you up. And so uh so yeah, uh he says, like, he gives him the thing, it's like all I got pituitaries, get you 500 if you move it fast, had the rest of my role in some RAM, but that's gone by now. And uh Which is strange, right? Because he just was in his thing. The RAM cell didn't go through. It's in his, it's in his in his place. So basically, Wage is like, yeah, that even that squares us up. And he says, like, you look bad, like hammered shit. You better go somewhere and sleep. Right. And more or less he's like, All right, I gotta go see Shin and get my deposit back. So yeah, he he does that and he heads back to his little coffin. And we get some of his perspective here as he's on his way back home, where he realizes that Linda is the one who kind of initiated this series of events just now. So he knows that she just wanted a ticket home and the ram and its Atachi would buy it for her if she could find the right fence. And that business with the 50, she'd almost turn it down knowing she was about to rip him for the rest of what he had. So he gets back to the cheap hotel, and there's a boy out there previously still there, and he's like, Hey buddy, you don't need to tell me, I know already. Pretty lady came to visit, said she had my key, nice little tip for you, say 50 new ones, and basically the boy like smiles and nods, and he's like, All right. So he goes to his coffin, and there's someone else in there with him.

Molly Appears With Razor Fingers

Michael Kentris 47:50

Yes, uh, we uh we get another person who he's not expecting. She says, Close the hatch real slow. You still got that Saturday night specially rented from the waiter, and we get a description. Uh, well, we get a description of her gun, uh pepper box muzzle of a flushette pistol emerged from her hands. And he's like, Where's Linda? And she just like hit that latch, that your girl. Like, she's gone, took your Hitachi, real nervous kid. Like we said, he took his gun back, sold his bullets back for half price.

SPEAKER_03 48:16

Right.

Michael Kentris 48:16

Um, and he's like, You want the money? And she's like, No, like want some dry ice. That's all I got right now. Right. I like this. And she's just like, Why are you acting like this? Why'd you pull that scene at the arcade? I had to mess up this rent a cop who came after me with nunchucks. So he's like, I thought somebody was trying to kill me. Are you not with wage? And she's like, shakes her head, no. She's just like, I think you screwed up case. I showed up and you just took me right into your reality picture. And we have a nice description. He realized the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets. Silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag. The fingers curled around the Fletcher were slender, white, tipped with polished burgundy. The nails looked artificial. And we learn this woman's name is Molly. Molly. And she has been tailing hound because she is working for a man who wants to talk to him. Which I feel like in this sort of situation is never a great Hey, my boss wants to talk to you. It's like, oh no. Right. She's like, I don't want to nobody wants to hurt you. It's like, except I do hurt people sometimes, case. I guess it's just the way I'm wired. So a little bit of an implied threat there. Right. And she's like, if you if I put this gun away, will you take any stupid chances? He's like, hey, I'm very easy, I'm a pushover, no problem. Yeah, I like this. You look like you like to take stupid chances. Yeah. And that uh because yeah, you try to f around with me, you'll be taking one of the stupidest chances of your life. And again, those fake nails are actually hiding these like four centimeter scalpel blades. And I I chuckle to myself as I made this note, fing nails. Um yeah, yeah, it's a little on the nose. Right. Yes, so she's got razor fingers. She's got razor fingers. End of chapter one. End of chapter one. So so yeah. So we get quite a dramatic, right? That was like a very frenetic chapter, I feel. Yeah. So this this next part, it's a little less jumbly, a little more coherent, I think, and perhaps that reflects the improving clarity of the mental state of our protagonist. I don't know. It's a nice parallel, if if

Armitage’s Offer And The Clinic Fix

Michael Kentris 50:29

so. So she takes him to the Chiba Hilton, so you know, fancy hotel. Everything's nice, it's huge, and we meet a man named Armitage. Molly's employer. Yes. And it's very interesting. So Case has this like cup of coffee that he helped himself to, and as soon as the guy enters, Case like whips his arm sideways, and the man easily ducked the scalding coffee. He sees a ring on his earring. He's like special forces. The man smiled. It's like, get your coffee, Case, you're okay, but you're not going anywhere until Amber just has his say. Right. We get a little description of here. He's wearing a dark robe open to the waist, broad chest, hairless and muscular, stomach flat and hard, blue eyes so pale, they made Case think of Bleach. So a fit fellow.

SPEAKER_00 51:17

Mm-hmm.

Michael Kentris 51:19

And having meetings and bathrobes for some reason. So he's in the Hilton. I guess, yes. So we get some exposition here about the war. So he mentions a lot of kind of Russian and Eastern sort of places, Leningrad, Kyiv, Siberia. Uh he says, We invented you in Siberia case. And you know, he's like, What's that mean? And they talk about screaming fist, and he says, some kind of run. Tried to burn this Russian nexus with virus programs, heard about it, nobody got out. And Armitage says that one unit made it back to Helsinki. And so we get feel free on this part, uh, where he says, like, you're a console cowboy. Does this does this all make sense here, or is this just a bunch of uh techno babble? I mean, some of it makes sense. I mean, like, as far as you know, like a console cowboy, I'm literally just like envisioning him, yeah, kind of just being quote unquote a keyboard warrior type thing. Like as far as the I am not well versed in software security or things of that sort. But uh I feel like as far as what they're talking about here, it makes a lot more sense than say some of the other techno babble you might find in other sci-fi situations. Gotcha. So when they talk about like intrusion countermeasures, electronics, is that like an actual acronym that's used in the in the Biz? Not that I know of. Uh I mean it's to be fair though, uh I feel like I'm not sure if this is the same in other industries, but in the computer field, people will often find an acronym that they like and then work backwards from it to find something that fits it. We do the same thing in medicine. All right. It's annoying as heck. Okay. It's it's good to know that everybody has that. Yeah. You know, everyone loves their acronyms or their especially their TLAs, which is their three-letter acronyms for those who aren't familiar. So anyway, you know, they're looking for a jockey and case says, Well, I'm no jockey anymore. I I can't uh I can't punch at dick. Not for you or anybody else. Punching deck.

SPEAKER_01 53:19

Right. It's visceral. And I like this. Our profile says you're trying to con the street into killing you when you're not looking.

Michael Kentris 53:29

And so we learned that you know he's got some organization, they made a profile on him. Uh our projection says that you got a month on the outside, and our medical projection says you'll need a new pancreas inside a year. So he's drinking a lot if it's that bad. Drinking a lot, doing a lot of drugs, all sorts of bad things for him here. And Armitage has this tempting offer where he's like, what would you say if I told you we could correct your neural damage case? So initially he's very suspicious, just like skeptical. Like, oh, this must be a dream. I'm gonna wake up here any second. And again, Armitage prompts him, what would you say, case? He's like, I'd say you're full of shit. Then I'd ask what your terms were, and then yeah, we just go ahead and case is like, I want to know the terms right now, let's talk. So jump to a clinic. Right. I enjoy these very abrupt scene transitions because it just fits the story so well. Right. And I I do appreciate like there's not the the the story doesn't necessarily explain things explicitly for you. A lot of it is there for you to infer, which I like I I appreciate the succinctity of it. Like it's it is doing a lot of like show, don't tell. Yeah. Yeah. There's no hand holding so far. It's just like, you know, hold on, we're going on an adventure.

unknown 54:53

Right.

Michael Kentris 54:54

So yeah, Molly and Case are at this clinic, and more or less Molly's trying to reassure Case that it'll work. Armitage has like all these crazy resources to more or less guarantee that you'll be able to punch the deck, cyber, whatever terminology you want to use for it here. And we get a little backstory on Molly here, where we find out that she's been working for Armitage for a few months. And she kind of just like thinks it's funny. Like she she feels very close to, or at least knows, feels like she knows Case very well based off the profile that they've built up of him. And you know, Case is very just like, you don't know me. Yeah. And I I like this phrase. There are cases like your street samurai, which is again, it's just cool terms, right? Because I've definitely seen that term pop up in other works, both in like, you know, like anime as well as other sci-fi stuff. So I just enjoyed that. That's all. Absolutely. So as they're waiting at this clinic, apparently there's sort of this uh what is it, a sand garden or stone garden? Like some sort of zen garden type of thing. Some simple so yeah, they've got this little robot crab moving along, cleaning it up. And she just kicks it super hard across. Right. It reminds me of somebody like kicking like a roomba across the room. You know? Kind of, yeah. Yeah. And basically, she kicked it because it was getting close to them. So more or less she's like, I always think about myself first, her own self-preservation. She's like, you worry about you. And more or less she's like, well, Armitage, I'll tell you now, the man's definitely onto something. He's got big money now, he's never had it before, and he gets more all the time. So again, he's probably doing something super shady that again he needs the help of Case with due to his prolific career as a thief, runner, whatever you want to call it.

SPEAKER_01 56:48

Deck jockey. Cowboy, cowboy, uh. Yes. So again, we get this this disjointed flashback.

Michael Kentris 56:59

So we jump back like a day to where he's leaving the hotel, he goes and sleeps, he walks around, and then he comes to the clinic, right? So it's like this weird kind of disjointed thing, right? So maybe it is kind of still like you know, someone coming down from a high kind of flavor there. And then we get the actual procedure itself, which sounds painful. So very invasive. Yes. Black Fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given. And I'm like this, hold still, don't move. As a uh physician myself. I've definitely been in situations where you are doing a procedure and you really need them to not move. So what should they say later here? Like, goddamn you, don't move. So yeah, we we come around and it's actually Molly holding him down. It's like, stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein. You don't lie still, I'll slit your effing throat. You're still full of endorphin inhibitors. So we wake up and he's not in the clinic anymore. He's back in his uh, I think in the coffin hotel now. Yes, yes. Molly and Case in in the coffin. And he wakes up and she tells him that it's Wednesday. So we don't know what day it was before, so but I feel we could infer it's been a few days. Probably, yeah. And he says, Oh, my back hurts. It's like that's where they replaced your fluid, changed your blood too. Blood because you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal, some new tissue patched into your liver, the nerve stuff, I don't know. A lot of injections, but they didn't have to open up anything for the main show. So gave them uh overhaul, kind of like of all these issues that failed. Changed his oil and transmission fluid.

SPEAKER_01 58:35

Right. Rotated the tires.

unknown 58:38

Yes.

Michael Kentris 58:39

Here's what the phrase is I gotta punch deck. Yes. And it's just like she's like, sorry, hot shot, eight day wait, doctor's orders. Right? Yeah, basically she says uh your nervous system would fall out on the floor if you jacked in now. So reasonable after any major surgery. Right. You got you gotta wait. And so uh he's like, Where's Armitage? He's at the Hilton. How come you're not at the Hilton? And then my notes here are literally just because sex. Right. So yeah, we get uh we get a weird sex scene here, uh, which I don't think we're going to recount for the purposes of our but but yeah, it's it's again, right? It's definitely got that noir kind of flavor to it. And it would be more on the modern side of things. Obviously, the old noir novels weren't quite this explicit. It's a pretty explicit scene. So yes, they they have sex, and you know, there was one thing that I thought here, or he reached for her face and unexpected hardness of the implanted lens, don't she said, fingerprints. So I don't know, it's just a weird thing.

SPEAKER_01 59:47

Yeah.

Michael Kentris 59:48

So anyway, but yeah, like again, very powerful language with a lot of this. I'm just gonna read some of the not explicit parts here where he talks about a vastness like the Matrix where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors. I can't read the parts before or after that for the sake of explicitness. Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:09

Read it yourself, you filthy animal.

Michael Kentris 1:00:15

But but yeah, it's uh it's definitely got again that kind of disorienting feeling to it and a lot of the language that's used here. So So yeah, then we kind of jump forward again. Uh it's a weekday. And he basically is saying saying goodbye to like rats and the other folks at the the chat here. Mm-hmm. Right, trying to tie up all these loose ends, so trying to pay back wage, and then more or less Molly is tasked with following case around during the street. Making sure screw himself up. Right, screw himself up, dip away after he's gotten the surgery to fix him up. And so he's trying to convince her to let him go see Julius, because again, Julius will not he's very cautious, as we saw before. Like he's scans people before they're allowed to come in, and obviously she

Julius Dean, War Stories, And Betrayal

Michael Kentris 1:01:06

has all these modifications that would make her very dangerous even without the gun that she tends to carry on her person.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:12

Right.

Michael Kentris 1:01:14

So he's trying to convince her, like, oh I gotta like take care of these loose ends, or else some people are gonna wind up dead that I care about. And she's just like, You're a liar, tight friend's my ass. You're going in there to check us out with your smuggler. And she's right. Yes. Yeah, she's not a dummy. Yeah. But she does eventually concede begrudgingly. She's like, and while you're at it, you try to figure something out, figure out why I'm doing you this favor. So obviously, she has developed some sort of feelings or case at this point in time. Yes. So, yeah, uh, he goes in, you know, uh Dean, Juli Julius Dean has a gun, he's aiming it carefully at Case. And he's like, just taking care, nothing personal, not telling what you want. And he's basically he is. He's asking for information about Armitage. And essentially, he says, don't got anything. He has he seems to have a temporary arrangement with the accusa. I'm like this, the sons of the neon chrysanthemum have a ways of screening their allies from the likes of me. It's like, what a cool name. Sons of the neon chrysanthemum. I don't know. I thought it just got a flair to it. So anyway, yeah, we get a little bit more about uh the screaming fists, you know, it's like, don't they teach you history, kids these days, post-war political football, water gates, you know, to Helen Beck, uh, sprawl side, brass had some problems, big scandal, blah blah blah. EMPs, magnetic pulse weapons, sent these fellows in, turkey shoot for Ivan. Yeah, kind of sent these people on a death mission because they just wanted to test out the capabilities of these weapons. Right. And only one of the teams made it out. Again, as we heard Armitage say. I would assume Armitage has an affiliation with that. One unit. Perhaps so. But uh yeah, they were they were able to get out, got hold of a Soviet gunship, and flew back to Finland, and shot the hell out of the Finnish defense forces in the process. Special forces type. And yeah, case nodded, the smell of preserved ginger was overwhelming. Indeed, I like this comment here. He spent the war in Lisbon. Lovely place, Lisbon. And it's like in the service, like, oh hardly. Wonderful what a war can do for one's markets. So profiteering. Like, what is it, uh, you know, the rules of acquisition from the Ferengi, right? War is good for business. And I think the one after that is peace is good for business.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:39

Yes, yes.

Michael Kentris 1:03:40

So yeah, it's uh it's kind of funny there. So so yeah, we again rapid scene transition back here again. So now we're at some other place. Sammy's.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:50

Mm-hmm.

Michael Kentris 1:03:51

I like this. Uh Heat sensed it. Linda's death, waiting. So they'd gone to the Nomban. Alright, help me out, Will. Yeah, Nambon. What does that mean? Do you know? So, um Let me Google here real quick. Because like the interesting thing is that a lot of these words that he's been using are real things, but don't necessarily have the connotation that they're being used in. Like Ninsei, for example, is apparently like a famous potter from like the 1600s. Other connotations don't really seem to be jumping out from that. But like Nanban is apparently like a popular dish. Like it's it's a deep fried chicken cutlet type of thing. So Okay. Yeah, it's it's that actually makes sense because what are they doing at the Nambon? Well, what were they doing? Oh yeah, having a drink. It's uh knife fights. Yeah, yeah. So grilled chicken cutlets, right? Yeah, I guess so. It's a joke. It's a very dark joke, but it it does make sense, I think. A little bit, sure. Absolutely. Oh, that was great. Thank you for that. So I I like that. So anyway, alright, so they're they're at this place, and as they're walking through the crowd here, you know, Casey's pulling out some some whatchamacallit, some more octagons, and basically she says, They made it so you can't get high anymore, you idiot. Right. And you're pancreas bypasses that. Yeah. Biochemically incapable of getting off on amphetamines or cocaine. And he's like, shit, he said. Um, so that's kind of funny. Right. So Yeah, he eats it. It does nothing. And eventually Molly is asking rats about the fights and where they're being held, and he's like, Oh, they're at Sammy's. And Case has no interest in this. They'll pass, I hear they kill each other down there. But they end up buying tickets to go see the fights anyway. And that's where they end up. So Sammy's. Or is it? No, it looks like the non bon. Um it's just where wage was? Okay. Well, maybe that's just a restaurant then. Could be. Could be. See, even I'm on my second read-through together, I'm getting disoriented here. So I guess uh goal achieved. All right. Well, never mind then. The whole greats illusion there fell fell through because of my my inability to have good reading comprehension. All right.

Knife Fights, Linda’s Death, And Escape

Michael Kentris 1:06:22

So we're at the knife fights now. The knife fights. So yeah, Sammy's is an inflated dome behind a portside warehouse, taut gray fabric reinforced with a net of thin steel cables. So big crowd. A lot of native Japanese folks there, apparently, surrounded around this arena with two men fighting in the center. And like this strata of cigarette smoke rose from the tears, drifting until it struck currents set up by the blowers that supported the dome. And then the two men that are fighting, so obviously they have different sort of hologram magnifications so that everybody can get a good view. But the knives that they're holding are just under a meter long. I feel like at that point it's closer to say that they're swords or like machetes or something. Three feet? Yeah, it's like a short sword, pretty much. Like as long as a gladius, it's pretty short too, isn't it? Let's see what the internet says. Twenty-four to thirty-three inches.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:11

So yeah.

Michael Kentris 1:07:12

Similar size.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:13

Pretty close, yeah. Alright. Well, they're short swords. Okay. They're really short swords.

Michael Kentris 1:07:21

Alright. So yeah, you know, he says, I'll go find us some food, and he sees I I enjoyed this observation here. Working all your life for he sees these salary men, right? These people working all their life for one Zaibatsu. Company housing, company him, company funeral. So I did look this one up earlier. It's like a business conglomeration, essentially. Yeah. Kind of like Samsung. Yeah, right. Being like a company man, right?

unknown 1:07:47

Yeah.

Michael Kentris 1:07:47

Samsung. What is it? Or um, what's the other one that makes a bunch of random stuff like Mitsubishi? It's like, you want a computer? You want uh TV? You want a Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:59

Do you want a uh snow machine? Right. Yeah. How about a car? Right? We got all sorts of different departments. They do all sorts of things.

Michael Kentris 1:08:08

So he he buys some yakatori and some cruddy beer, it looks like. And looking up in the holograms, you see some blaze uh blood lacing on one of the figure's chest, and he's walking back and he has a sudden like pang of fear, like oh, maybe the operation didn't work. He was still here, still meat. It's all a dream, some fantasy. And he starts as this fever pitch is rising in his mind, you know, blood sprays from a jugular, and the the one guy gets like cut down in the arena there. So and all of a sudden he sees Linda Lee walking past and then gone into the shadow. Right. And yeah, she uh her gray eyes were blind with fear. So he throws down his beer and chicken and chases after her, and somebody trips him. He falls down the concrete, tears his palms, and there's this guy standing over him with a knife, a razor actually, and is basically coming in to cut his throat. I like this. Case saw the razor dipping for his throat like a dowser's wand. You know, you know what a dowser is, right, Will?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:14

Yeah.

unknown 1:09:14

Yeah.

Michael Kentris 1:09:15

Dowser browns. Those exactly, those who might not be familiar, uh it's kind of like a like a Y-shaped stick and you hold the short parts of the Y and you're using it to find water. Which, ironically, right, if you're dowsing, you're looking for water underground, and here we have someone dowsing for the blood in his neck. Anyway, uh again, it's just a really good phrase. Yeah. However, that motion is arrested. As his face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic explosions. Molly's Fletchets at twenty rounds per second. The boy coughed once convulsively and toppled across Case's legs. I think he's dead. Yeah, he's not looking good. So he finds Molly. Uh he found her. She was thrown down at the foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed. Linda. Oh, yes, yes, not Molly.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:05

Sorry. Molly's not. Molly's fine. Yeah. She's she's VA. Linda's toast. There was a smell of cooked meat. Yeah, again, right?

Michael Kentris 1:10:17

It's just kind of this um everything around him is still going on. The crowd is chanting, a beer vendor was riping his tap wiping his taps with a dark rag. One of her sneakers had call fallen off. So it's just kind of this she's dead. Like, but nothing in the world has changed. It's continuing on. Like it's just for him, this emotional event, but for the world at large, it's nothing. So the kind of the the cheapness of life is what it feels like is emphasizing to me right here. So we do have Molly exiting from the shadows. Her mirrors emerge from deeper shadow. It's like Casey, okay? Something mulled and bubbled in the dark behind her. Like fights over kicks, time to go home. And so he tries to walk past her to see what happened. And Molly stops him. Friends of your tight friend killed your girl for you. You haven't done too well for friends in this town, have you? We got a partial profile on that old bastard when we did you, man. He'd fry anybody for a few new ones. The one back there said they got on to her when she was trying to fency a ram, just cheaper for them to kill her and take it, save a little money. I got the one who had the laser to tell me all about it. Coincidence we were here, but I had to make sure. And he's like, who? Who sent them? And she passed him a blood flecked bag of preserved ginger. He saw that her hands were sticky with blood. Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds and died. So, as we have alluded to many times before, preserved ginger was a very pungent smell back at Julius Dean's place. Well, that's what I said, your old friend, right? Yeah. He's pretty old. Again, hard scene transition. There's a post-op check at the clinic. Molly took him to the port. Armitage was waiting. He charted a hovercraft. The last case saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcologies, then a mist closed over the black water and the drifting shoals of waste. That's the end of chapter two and part one. Goodbye, Chiba. I think part one's pretty short overall.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:06

Yeah.

Michael Kentris 1:12:07

Looks like part two is the bulk of the story here. But uh now, is this your first time reading Neuromancer Will?

First Impressions And Where To Reach Us

Michael Kentris 1:12:13

Correct. Yes. What's what's your hot take on this? So I don't know if I necessarily have a hot take. I've really been enjoying it, though. I know a lot of folks have mentioned that this is kind of like a difficult read. And I'm sure it might get a little more harder to process what's happening as we get maybe more into the sci-fi side of things. But I thought these first two chapters were fantastic. It does a great job of setting the stage for our main cast, I'm assuming. I'm always a fan of Japanese elements being put into stories. So I was like, oh yeah, Chiba. I know where that is. I've been through there. So yeah, uh, like I had said when we were talking about doing this book together, I remember the vague outline of the story, and I remember being disoriented much of the read. And it's it's more clear this time around, but it still has that jarring effect. Like it you like there's an unsettledness to the way that the story progresses. Like it's got a little jerkiness to it, which feels intentional, like not as a flaw per se, but as something to make you as the read of reader kind of feel more in tune with the environment that the protagonist is in. So it's obviously very masterfully done. And I've obviously read some other cyberpunk stuff, you know, back in the day. Uh probably the most other iconic one that I've read is uh Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson. I don't know if you've read that one before, Will. No, I haven't. It's has a lot of parallels to this. So Neil Stevenson, obviously very famous sci-fi author, but uh but that was that's a great book also, and it has a lot of shared elements with this in terms of even using words like I believe Street Samurai shows up in there.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:59

Okay.

Michael Kentris 1:14:01

So so yeah, it's it's definitely good to go back kind of to the to the source a little bit here. I think some of the other authors I read one other Gibson book which was done with Bruce Sterling, which was I think The Infernal Devices, which was like a proto steampunk kind of novel.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:18

Okay.

Michael Kentris 1:14:19

Back gosh, I want to say it was in the 90s. So uh Bruce Sterling, another famous cyberpunk author. But uh yeah, so it's it's very good to come back to this. And this is part one of a trilogy called like the sprawl series. And I must confess, I have never read the other two books in this series. So someday we might have to actually finish one of these series. One of these series. But uh, but yeah, like you, I am enjoying it. The turns of phrase is just like, again, I keep using this word, but it's because it's true. Like the descriptions are so visceral and evocative, and it just has like a very immediacy to how the things are described. Like I don't know exactly what that means, maybe, but I feel what it means. And I just enjoy that. Right. Yeah, there's definitely times where it's like, I don't know what that phrase means, but I get it. I get what he means. It's more about the the emotionality of it rather than like the hard brass tacks. Absolutely. Yeah. No, this has been great so far. I'm literally looking forward to reading more of this. So, yes, uh, that will be where we end for today. Join us next week as we continue on with Neuromancer. You can always reach out to us on X at Brothers Reading. You can find us online, brothersreadingbooks.com, or you can also send us an email at brothersreadingbooks at gmail.com. Will, I will see you next time. Sounds good. Talk to you later. Take care.