Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of drug use.

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

The opening sentence of the book uses the metaphor of a dead television channel to create a gritty, dark tone for the novel and its setting. The figurative linking of technology and nature foreshadows the conjunction of these two seemingly opposite categories.

“He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.”

This description of Case’s experience as a console cowboy likens his altered state in cyberspace to drug use, using terms such as “high” and “hallucination” to draw an implicit comparison. This begins to introduce the theme of The Artificial Nature of Modern Reality.

“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. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.”

This quotation introduces the theme of Personhood and Embodiment. Case, like his fellow hackers, sees the virtual world of technology as liberating and the human body as part of an animal past.