Claire Sponsler points to this episode in her brief discussion of simstim as a moment of blurred identity and reality boundaries. Case feels the pain as if his own leg were broken, but his leg is not broken. Simstim enables him to feel the pain of the injured female body without any threat to his own, safe male body. Bruhm's argument gives us a tool to examine the way Case's experience of Molly's pain works to overcome his privileging of bodilessness. The spilt between the body undergoing the pain and the subject feeling and narrating that pain is made literal in the construction of simstim.
Case is able to move easily between the experience of pain and the contemplation of that pain.
Gibson uses the female body in pain to put in question the primacy of the technologically disembodied mind in the same way that Romantic writers used pain to challenge rationality. This assimilation parallels the fusion of the two Artificial Intelligence constructs.