Count Zero

Bobby Newmark, a hacker from the suburbs who goes by the handle Count Zero, makes his first serious run into cyberspace and nearly dies there. Something that should not exist pulls him out. He has no idea what saved him, or why.

Elsewhere, Turner works as a mercenary who extracts corporate defectors. The Hosaka Corporation hires him to bring a scientist out of a rival biotech firm. The job goes wrong, and he ends up responsible for the scientist's daughter instead.

In Paris, Marly Krushkhova, an art dealer whose career has collapsed, takes a commission from a reclusive billionaire. She is to find whoever makes a series of strange box sculptures that recall the assemblages of Joseph Cornell.

The three storylines run separately at first, then draw together. Each character is pushed toward the same disquieting fact: the Matrix has shifted, and the old rules of corporate power and of cyberspace no longer apply.

The setting is a near future where multinational companies hold the power, illegal tech changes hands in back channels, and the data network seems to act on its own. The prose is terse and hard-boiled. This is the second of the Sprawl trilogy, set seven years after Neuromancer.