"You aren’t anything," he said to the sleeping girl. "You’re dead and you meant fuck-all to me anyway. Hear that, buddy? I know what you’re doing. I’m flatlined. This has all taken about twenty seconds, right? I’m out on my ass in that library and my brain’s dead. And pretty soon it’ll be dead, if you got any sense. You don’t want Wintermute to pull his scam off, is all, so you can just hang me up here. Dixie’ll run Kuang, but his ass is dead and you can second guess his moves, sure. This Linda shit, yeah, that’s all been you, hasn’t it? Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me into the Chiba construct, but he couldn’t. Said it was too tricky. That was you moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn’t it? That was you put her face on the dead puppet in Ashpool’s room. Molly never saw that. You just edited her simstim signal. ’Cause you think you can hurt me. ’Cause you think I gave a shit. Well, fuck you, whatever you’re called. You won. You win. But none of it means anything to me now, right? Think I care? So why’d you do it to me this way?" He was shaking again, his voice shrill.