Neuromancer is a novel deeply entrenched in themes of individual identity and relevance of physical human embodiment. In the beginning of the story, Case associates his identity wholly with his job. He sees himself only as a useless thug-for-hire without his ability to jack into cyberspace. The character of Armitage turns out to be a reprogrammed version of Corto. As the book explains, “Armitage had been a sort of edited version of Corto, and when the stress of the run had reached a certain point, the Armitage mechanism had crumbled; Corto had surfaced” (195). This distinction suggests that true identity lies outside of the physical body. Wintermute exists as a mental identity with no defined physical form, borrowing figures from Cases’s memory to be able to communicate. Wintermute makes the distinction, “Your mistake… is in confusing the Wintermute mainframe, Berne, with the Wintermute entity.” This idea of Wintermute describing its own software and hardware identities as distinct ties in directly with Case referring to himself as ‘meat’ throughout the novel, which suggests that true identity or consciousness of a person could actually be commutative. This idea of the consciousness as fluid, not tied down to a singular body, is further explored in the novel when characters can jack into another person’s consciousness as a ‘rider’ and experience the same sensations as they do yet not control the physical embodiment of the other person, as when Case jacks into Molly while she was in the black market.