Neuromancer: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

At dinner that evening with Armitage and Molly, Case has the worst hangover of his life—his hands are shaking, and his brain is “deep fried.” Armitage recognizes that something is off, but Case lies and claims it’s something he ate.

Armitage has arranged dinner so they can watch Riviera’s “audition.” He is performing a “holographic cabaret,” which, he announces as he appears on stage, is called “The Doll,” and is dedicated to Lady 3Jane Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool “and to another lady.”

Riviera performs a one-man holographic show. He projects a worn-down room, with a wooden chair and iron bedstead. In the show he constructs a (holographic) woman, who appears limb by limb—arms, feet, legs, all disconnected. When a torso appears, Case realizes Riviera has created Molly’s body, and then her face, complete with mirror eyes. Riviera moves to the bed, and begins having sex with his projection. The projection of Molly extends its blades, and begins to tear Riviera apart. Case rushes out of the room to vomit over a railing. He misses the ending but guesses it: “Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl takes him apart.” Case returns to see the real Molly has disappeared.

Case asks Armitage where Molly has gone, but Armitage doesn’t answer. Case asks why Riviera did that to her, but Armitage just tells him to get some sleep. Their run is the next day, and he has to prepare. Armitage leaves, and as Case lingers, he notices a woman in a private booth—3Jane. As he leaves the restaurant, he notices the three French teenagers again.

Case returns to his empty hotel room and calls Maelcum, asking to be connected to Dixie. Speaking through the Hosaka voice chip, Case notices the Dixie’s “carefully engineered accent [is] lost entirely.” He asks the Dixie to find Molly for him. Dixie announces she’d registered at the hotel under the name Rose Kolodny but has since checked out. He tells Case it will take a few minutes to track her down. 

Case waits by the phone, staring out at the glass wall of his balcony. As he watches, the wall, which doubles as an audiovisual screen, comes to life and speaks to him in a voice he recognizes as Lonny Zone’s. Case recognizes this as Wintermute’s work. Lonny Zone’s image appears and begins to talk, warning him that having Dixie search for Molly is “Ringing bells all over Freeside.” Zone/Wintermute admits he’s surprised, since his kind of behavior is “outside [Case’s] profile.”

Zone/Wintermute observes that Case can’t “keep too good track of [his] women,” which angers Case. Zone/Wintermute then admits he killed Linda, but asks how much it really matters, arguing that she stole from Case because she loved him and wanted his attention, and that Case couldn’t handle it, so Linda had to die. Case punches the glass and Zone/Wintermute disappears, first warning him not to hurt his hands. On the phone, Dixie calls out to Case. He has an address for Molly.

Case sits on the bed before looking for Molly. He is experiencing a new emotion: rage. Case finds Bruce and Cath and pressures them into helping him find Molly. The address Dixie gave him is for a cubicle in the basement of a nightclub. He has to take an elevator down, and a woman checks his identification chip before assigning him cubicle 35. Although this is not Molly’s cubicle, Case proceeds there anyway. A girl greets him inside. He registers that “her eyes were soft and unblinking. Automatic pilot. A neural cut out.” He leaves and finds Molly’s room.

Case places his chip against Molly’s door, and it miraculously opens. Unsure who has come to see her, Molly attacks Case, apologizing and helping him up when she recognizes her friend. She explains she bought this room so she could prepare for tomorrow’s mission. Wintermute is briefing her from a screen on the wall, and she needed to decompress after Riviera’s performance. She tells Case if she stuck around, she “might have killed Riviera.”

Molly explains to Case that Riviera’s performance disturbed her because it reminded her of when she worked as a sex doll. Molly paid for her body modifications by “renting the goods.” She rented out her body, but a cut-out chip prevented her from remembering any sexual encounters.

As Molly got more modifications, they began to interfere with her cut-out chip, and memories from her time as a sex doll bled into her dreams. As unpleasant as this was, she wasn’t “ready to give up puppet time.” Eventually, her employers switched her to “specialty markets.” She only found out when, after an extensive surgery in Chiba, her surgeons knocked her cut-out chip loose and she woke up in the middle of her next session with a client—returning to consciousness in a room with a corpse and a Senator (whose fetish was apparently murder). Upset, Molly killed the man and ran away, hiding from her former employers who put a hit out on her.

Molly finishes her story, explaining Riviera hit a nerve. She thinks Wintermute somehow set up his show, so that she would hate Riviera and be motivated to go in to Straylight after him. She tells Case she’s going to kill Riviera. Case tells Molly about the Lonny Zone and Linda Lee. Molly wonders if Wintermute is trying to get him to hate something, too. Case leaves the club and gets Cath and Bruce to drop him in Freeside’s bar district.