Bobby is a hotdogger, a neophyte hacker with aspirations of becoming a big-time cowboy in the worldwide cyberspace construct, the Matrix.
He acquires an ICE breaker, software designed to defeat security systems, from a friend, unaware that it is actually a stolen experimental corporate model and that he is its unwitting test dummy.
At the last moment Bobby is rescued by the apparition of a girl, which releases him from the grasp of the ICE destroying his nervous system.
Seeking the friend who lent him the software, Bobby becomes acquainted with Beauvoir and Lucas, two Matrix cowboys who learned of his salvation at the hands of the mysterious girl, whom they refer to as the Virgin.
In the third Sprawl novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Bobby, now eight years older, plays a less central role: he is comatose and jacked into a large gray box called an aleph, which is actually an unfathomably massive data storage device which contains a virtual reality approximation of the entire world.