`The Chinese,' bellowed a drunken Australian, `Chinese
bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a
nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate...'
`Now that,' Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly
rising in him like bile, `that is _so_ much bullshit.'

The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than
the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were
the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly,
and still they couldn't repair the damage he'd suffered in that
Memphis hotel.
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading
nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the
corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in
his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless
void... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the
Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cow-
boy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the
dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo,
and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the
dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands
clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fin-
gers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

-William Gibson "Neuromancer"-