According to Vasilou, “the matrix is deception. Human
beings are being actively deceived by the Matrix into believing things about
reality that are not true,” and people would prefer to live inside
the matrix versus the goo-eating ruined world of the year 2199. Vasilou believes that Cypher's choice to live in ignorance is more appealing to the reality shown in The Matrix and he doubts that Neo would so easily refute the world he has known all his life to become the savior of the "real" world that is a post-apocalyptic desert.
In Neuromancer, Case is trapped in his body: “For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh” (6). As Case is trapped in his body, so the human species is trapped in the matrix; they are grown and used as a power source by the AIs of the future. Case is the main protagonist but unlike Neo, who takes on the role of the messiah to the ensnared people, all Case cares about is being able to escape reality.
In this instance, Case is more similar to Cypher. Cypher chooses the matrix over reality; “You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.” Cypher is tired of the struggle, of the truth, and of reality. He feels betrayed that Morpheus did not tell him what was out there first, but the truth is not always what one wants to hear.
Cypher chose ignorance but the choice does not start with the moment of choosing between pills; it starts with questioning. Although Case starts out like Cypher, viewing the world with contempt and the matrix as his playground, when given the opportunity to stay with Linda Lee in Neuromancer's land of the dead, he chooses to return to the land of the living despite his love for her. Although Case can be a coward and remain with Linda Lee in blissful ignorance, in the end he has ties to Molly, Flatline, and Wintermute and he chooses to live outside of the matrix, in reality.
While Case chooses to leave the land of the dead and Linda Lee, the ending of Neuromancer is ambiguous. Even though
Case's mind returned to his body and in real life Case “found work. He found
a girl who called herself Michael,” (270) in cyberspace, in virtual reality,
"Case finds exactly what the Gernsback Continuum says he'll find, a happy
family. This suggest that the function of cyberspace as wholly ideological
space/narrative place is to stabilize the messiness and the perversity
of real life; that the love story of Case and Michael exists somewhere in
its ideological purity as Case and Linda Lee, with their little boy, too” (Stevens). The Matrix ends with most of the conflict solved but it leaves the audience wondering what will happen to Neo in his role as the One, as well as what is his "real" destiny is.
