Concept art by Nathan Anderson
Linda Lee is the love interest of Case in Chiba.
Description[]
She is 20 years old. She has dark hair, perpetualy startled gray eyes, rimmed with smudged black paintstick.
Later, after her addiction, the skin below her eyes was pale, and lines of pain starting to etch at the corners of her mouth. Her arms usually had dermadisks and signs of needles. Case noticed white sanpaku underneath her pupils.
She is described wearing faded French orbital fatigues and new white sneakers, a blue zip suit with the sleeves ripped out at the shoulders. Her dark hair was drawn back, by a band of silk printed with soe pattern representing either microcircuits, or a city map. She smokes Yeheyuan filters, put in an ankle pocket.
Bio[]
Her accent put her near Atlanta, south along the Sprawl.
She was in an arcade in Ninsei burning the "Wizard's Castle" and playing Tank War Europa, conquering Munich, and flew in a hologram of New York. Her eyes met Case's as he singled her out in the crowd, and approached her. They ended up together in a portside capsule hotel.
Together they bought tickets at the hoverport and made a first trip to Tokyo and Harajuku, ending up in a pachinko parlor.
However, his lifestyle was toxic to her, and within a month, he made her addicted. He saw her personality fragmenting into pieces, replaced by the raw need apparent in her eyes.
After they broke up Case entered a depressive, self-destructive phase. A part of Case who was aware of his phase, hated the thought of Linda Lee. At the beginning of the story, Ratz tells Case that Linda Lee was in the Chatsubo the other night. Soon after, after having talked with Mona, she finds Case in the Jarre de Thé, offers him a Yeheyuan, telling him that Wage wants him dead. Seeing her troubled, Case offers her 50 New Yen, but she refuses, knowing that he needs them more, but is persuaded to take them. She leaves telling Case to watch out.
As Case found out later it was a lie that Wage was after him, and it is not clear why Linda lied to him; perhaps in order to make him return to his stash , and stalk him to find where he keeps it, in the Cheap Hotel.
She wanted a ticket back to the Sprawl. She went to the Cheap Hotel, to take his Hitachi computer that contains data that she can sell to some fence. There she saw Molly Millions already there, waiting for Case, took the computer and left.
Punks after Linda in the Neuromancer graphic novel. Art by Bruce Jensen.
As she was about to fence the memory, men working for Julius Deane decided that it was cheaper to kill her than buy it. They hunted her to Sammi's where Case was also by coincidence. He saw her running and being shot with three laser rays. Molly explains to him what happened and shows him a ginger candy suggesting a connection to Deane.
Construct[]
When Wintermute caught Case in cyberspace, he used information from the simstim unit wired on his Cyberspace VII deck to access his memories and generated a virtual environment from them. Initially he planned to talk to Case through a construct of Linda and made him wake up in a construct of the Arcade.
Case found her lost in playing Wizard's Castle in the Arcade and hugged her. She noted that he looks wait, but he made her blow the game, the vampires got her in the 7th level dungeon. She gave him a cigarette noticing that he looks bad, and Case didn't know where he was, and she asked if he was drunk or eating Lonny Zone's dex. Case asked when they met last time, and explained that he had a blackout. Linda said that perhaps he was decked, and since he was broke, she offered him to get a coffee and food and take him home, and squeezed his hand. However the emotional charge made Wintermute to slip. Everything froze and disappeared, leaving a scent of burned flesh, as the one Case smelled when Linda was shot.
Later Wintermute appeared as a holo-construct of Lonny Zone and told to Case that it wasn't him who made Julius Deane kill Linda. He said that Linda decided to rip him off because she loved him, and wanted him to care for her.