The matrix had its own logic. Corporate AIs ruled from the global web of data that was cyberspace. The construct was a kind of piloting program that let Case operate the deck with his mind. Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.

He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.