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

In a dream prompted by Wintermute, Case remembers frying a wasp nest with a flamethrower. Before succeeding, he sees it torn open to reveal a winding labyrinth of horror filled with different stages of wasps, “the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien” (126). The wasps are a hive amalgam of individuals that has become something bigger but more horrible. In this, it seems to be a symbol of The Danger of the AI Singularity that Case has been recruited to release. However, Wintermute tells Case that it actually symbolizes the corrupt Tessier-Ashpool corporation. Tessier-Ashpool treats its executive family members as replaceable drones, thawed or cloned on a whim to run the corporation or even just to be used as sexual objects. Moreover, it is a “parasitic” corporation that harms others and takes without accomplishing any visible good.

Case’s later reflections identify the wasp nest as a symbol for corporate power in general. Case calls corporations “[h]ives with cybernetic memories, vast single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon” (203). Corporations achieve a hive immortality by inhumanely (and, the novel suggests, inhumanly) cycling through executives and drone workers.