William Gibson's Neuromancer is a dark, romantic depiction of a future full of isolation and information. Heaps of information are organized in a massive virtual analog known as the matrix. For the main character of Neuromancer, Case, however, the matrix is much more than a place of information storage. It is not just the object of a career or an adventure, it is a way of life. Case experiences the matrix--cyberspace--as "a place of rapture and erotic intensity, or powerful desire and even self-submission (Heim, 62)." Early on in Neuromancer, Case, exiled from the matrix, exhibits and erotic yearning for it. In the matrix, things attain a supervivid hyperreality, and ordinary experience seems dull and unreal by comparison. For Case, the matrix is a perfect, erotic utopia, a return to the womb (the word matrix comes from the Latin for mother). Throughout the course of the novel, all that Case does is in terms of the Matrix. Neuromancer provides with a striking and pessimistic view of the future, one where information overshadows, and then infiltrates the individual. Case is among the first of a new breed of cybercowboys who embrace the matrix and thrive in it, able to manipulate it for their own purposes.
Filtered through the computer matrix, all reality becomes patterns of information--even bodily sex appears to be no more than an exchange of signal blips. The conclusion of Neuromancer shows us the transformation of sex and personality into the language of information and technology. As the presence of obscure, controlling Artificial Intelligences (AIs) and other imposing forces becomes prevalent in the novel, we begin to see all exchanges are described in terms of information and technology, not just inside the matrix, but outside as well. It is this blurring of the boundary between the "real" and the "virtual" that culminates in the plot of Neuromancer and Gibson's later novels.
At the computer interface, the spirit migrates from the body to a world of total representation, total simulation. When Case has been exiled from the matrix, he feels as if he is imprisoned in his only flesh,and that his physical manifestation is a mere shadow of what he truly is.
Heim maintains that Gibson raises a profound ontological question by suggesting that the Neuromancer master-computer simulates the body and personality of Case's beloved. What are the implications of a computer that attempts to simulate an embodied personality and provoke the sexual encounter? Heim wonders, "Perhaps because the cyberspace system, which depends on the physical space of bodies for its initial impetus, now seeks to undermine the separate existence of human bodies that make it dependent and secondary. The ultimate revenge of the information system comes when the system absorbs the very identity of the human personality, absorbing the opacity of the body, grinding the meat into information, and deriding erotic life by reducing it to a transparent play of puppets. In an ontological turnabout, the computer counterfeits the silent and private body from which mental life originated. The machinate mind disdainfully mocks the meat (Heim, 66)."