How It All Goes Down
- At Freeside, Case and Molly head to their hotel, but Case can't sleep. Turns out seeing your dead girlfriend resurrected by an unscrupulous AI will do that to you.
- When he does get to sleep, he dreams of a time he spent with a girl named Marlene. They'd had a wasp problem, so Marlene egged on Case to kill them. He did so, with a handheld flamethrower no less. In this dream, the wasps have the Tessier-Ashpool logo embossed onto the hive.
- The next morning Molly sprays a fake tan on Case so he'll blend in with all the socialites on Freeside. After breakfast, Armitage hands out assignments to the team. Case's job is to get fitted for a space suit, which is just peachy for a guy with space adaption syndrome.
- Aboard Maelcum's tug, Case gets the Kuang Grade Mark Eleven, a military grade computer virus for hacking into AIs.
- Case talks to Dixie about the virus. Dixie lets Case in on a secret about AIs: motivation. See, you can't tell if an AI is acting on program, its owner's orders, or on its own. However, the second it starts acting on its own, the Turing Police swoop in a wipe it clean.
- That night, Case gets antsy because he wants to get high. He hits the town and runs into a girl named Cath, who might just have the answer to his problem.
- Case follows Cath to her place and meets Bruce. Bruce gives him a "first one's free" hit of betaphenethylamine to see if will pass his pancreas modifications. By the by, betaphenethylamine isn't an actual stimulant, so you can save yourself the five minutes it takes to type it into Google.
- Case returns to the room and gets frisky with Molly.