20

Racing through Straylight in an overtaxed service cart, Case and Maelcum follow a Braun to a library monitor where Wintermute, wearing the Finn’s face, orders Case to jack in. The Braun shorts out as Case connects. Instead of cyberspace, Case experiences a gray void and then a violent transition.

Case awakens on a cold, windswept beach beneath a silver sky, isolated and disoriented. As night falls, he finds a bunker with a fire and encounters a girl who looks and sounds like Linda Lee. He refuses food and comfort, recognizing the scene as a construct and suspecting the other AI—not Wintermute—engineered it to trap or kill him.

Through the night, Case struggles against panic and hunger, insisting to the sleeping Linda that he understands the manipulation: the opposing intelligence has flatlined him, using Linda’s image to hold him while Dixie runs Kuang, likely allowing the AI to anticipate their moves. At dawn, he explores the bunker, discovering water and emergency rations that seem conveniently “washed up,” reinforcing the artifice.

Linda returns and recounts fragmentary memories: stealing Case’s RAM in Chiba, seeing inexplicable childhood images on a monitor, then waking on the beach and never suffering withdrawal. Case tests the reality’s seams—demanding cigarettes and beer from the unseen maker—yet is drawn into intimacy with Linda, recognizing the powerful pull of the body beyond the matrix. He recalls that “he” told Linda Case would come, confirming the other AI’s orchestration.

As they lie together, Case understands that the enemy AI is sustaining a vivid, self-consistent world to delay or end him, threatening Wintermute’s larger objective while exploiting Case’s deepest attachments.