“Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognise the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film. ”

“The U.S. hundred is the international currency of bad shit, Hollis, and by the same token the number one target of counterfeiters.”

“A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his dreams, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void... The Sprawl was a long, strange way home now over the Pacific, and he was no Console Man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.”

“I did not come to this country for the terror from paramilitary," declared Voytek, hoarsely. "I did not come to this country for motherfucker. But motherfucker is waiting. Always. Is carceral state, surveillance state. Orwell. You have read Orwell?”

“And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled of random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.”

“We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.”

“His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.”