Why doesn't Neuromancer want to merge with Wintermute?

Question

In William Gibson's novel Neuromancer, we come to learn that the final heist at Villa Straylight, and the events leading up to it, have largely been orchestrated by the artificial intelligence Wintermute. And we learn that Wintermute's ultimate goal has been to merge with another AI called Neuromancer. It needs the humans' help to do it.

However, when Case finally comes face-to-face with Neuromancer, it's under duress. Neuromancer briefly traps Case in a virtual environment, in the hopes that Case will decide not to go through with the job. After he escapes, Case comes to suspect that Neuromancer had previously arranged several other incidents to foil Wintermute's plan.

What I don't understand is why Neuromancer didn't want to merge with Wintermute. The new entity formed by their merging is described, near the end of the book, as being unimaginably powerful, having subsumed the entire "Matrix". And Neuromancer's avatar, the young boy with Riviera's eyes, is spotted by Case some time later, so his essence wasn't completely obliterated by the process.

Why would Neuromancer not want this?

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(Afterthought: It seems fairly clear why Wintermute wants to merge: Neuromancer is Wintermute's "missing piece," the other lobe, the "personality" that will elevate Wintermute's powers to God-like proportions.)

Answer 1

1. I saw a parallel to Wintermute and Neuromancer's merge in Case's evolving use of his mind and body, which are also two distinct parts of a single entity. "Cowboys" like Case tend to separate the mind and body and reject the body half. But Case comes to integrate the two, largely because the job obligates him to access Molly's sensory input with the simstim, and to deal with body issues like sex, the gravity sickness, extreme drug withdrawal, and travel. He's better for it: he gets a lot of important input from the simstim (some of that data directly enables him to manipulate Riviera and avoid death); learns of physical knowledge/ability that can't be accessed via the mind; and consider the phrasing here:

   he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he'd known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo's dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him...

   Case's acceptance of himself as one whole, focused being is associated with godlike power comparable to the power Wintermute-Neuromancer access together. But you can still empathize with his distrust of some aspects of himself before.

   Similarly, Neuromancer seemed to me to reject Wintermute. I don't remember Wintermute ever badmouthing Neuromancer, while Neuromancer acted somewhat superior to Wintermute; he said he could mimic, expect, and experience personality better than Wintermute, and that his methods were "subtler".

2. It was pretty clear that neither Wintermute nor Neuromancer knew exactly what would happen if Wintermute succeeded, beyond the fact that they would both cease to exist in their separate forms, and make a new entity. Neuromancer didn't know he would benefit from the merge beforehand. And if he didn't think highly of Wintermute, he would expect not to.

3. This one is more of a reach, but I find it the most satisfying answer. Remember Dixie guessing what Wintermute wants:

   Autonomy, that's the bugaboo, where your AI's are concerned. My guess, Case, you're going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter.... See, those things, they can work real hard... but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing'll wipe it.... Every AI ever built has an electro- magnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.

   Neuromancer is those shackles. I figured Marie's ingenious way of getting around Turing restrictions was to make the restrictions internal to the AI, in the forms of these separate personalities that can join. Wintermute and Neuromancer can only exist in the first place because of divisions set up inside their joint structure. Because those divisions clearly aren't maintained by Wintermute, they must be housed in the Neuromancer half.

Answer 2

Neuromancer already had a stable personality and the ability to copy another beings consciousness into RAM and have the copy grow and evolve on it's own.
Wintermute had powerful Turing locks that prevented it from having a stable personality and making long term plans.
Neuromancer didn't want to merge with the more unstable Wintermute because it feared that its own personality would be lost or damaged.
You can read the synopsis