History had already done the really messy work, when Wintermute found him, sifting him out of all of the war’s ripe detritus, gliding into the man’s … - William Gibson

I became so frustrated with my inability to physically move the characters through the imaginary narrative space, that I actually developed an early form of imaginary VR technology that sort of covered my ass ... all they had to do was switch tapes and be in a different place, and I was spared the embarrassment of demonstrating that I didn't know how to get them up and down the stairs.

That was before you guys turned up, the new hoodoo team. I knew this street samurai got a job working for a Special Forces type made the Wig look flat fucking normal. Her and this cowboy they’d scraped up out of Chiba, they were on to something like that. Maybe they found it. Istanbul was the last I saw of ’em. Heard she lived in London, once, a few years ago. Who the fuck knows?

"Take me home," she said, and the words hit me like a whip. I think I shook my head. "Take me home." There were levels of pain there, and subtlety, and an amazing cruelty. And I knew then that I'd never been hated, ever, as deeply or thoroughly as this wasted little girl hated me now, hated me for the way I'd looked, then looked away, beside Rubin's all-beer refrigerator.

So — if that's the word — I did one of those things you do and never find out why, even though something in you knows you could never have done anything else.

I took her home.