How It All Goes Down
- Case goes to tell Molly about the strange encounter with Lupus. She takes him to lunch instead and forces him to be quiet until they make their way to the Finn's place.
- The Finn informs Case and Molly that Wintermute is an artificial intelligence owned by Tessier-Ashpool SA.
- The Finn tells them a story about a fence he calls Smith. Smith once received a stolen bust from a con named Jimmy. The bust was unusual in that it contained a synthetic voice inside of it. As Smith was attempting to find a buyer, he was visited by a ninja assassin. Yes, you read that right, ninja assassin. Awesome. The assassin paid for the bust, and a week later Smith learned Jimmy was dead.
- Smith and the Finn hired a console cowboy to do some digging around, and they discovered the assassin worked for Tessier-Ashpool SA, a family run corporation operating the space resort Freeside. Smith decided to drop the investigation after that discovery, believing it too dangerous to pursue.
- Molly gives Case a side job: crack a database owned by Armitage and find out how he, Wintermute, and the Tessier-Ashpool are connected.
- Case walks back to the loft. He thinks about when he was nineteen and first met McCoy Pauly, who was already a legend after having suffered brain death or "flatlining" during a very difficult hack.
- Back at the loft, Case boots up the ROM construct. Since the construct is a ROM (read-only memory), Dixie only has the memories recorded before his death. He can't form new memories, and when he's shut down, he forgets everything that happened, forcing his memories to restart from the same place. In other words, he's the computer equivalent of Drew Barrymore's character from 50 First Dates.
- Case and Dixie get ready to crack Armitage's London database.