She attends a humongous dotcom-style-excess party, sponsored by Gabriel Ice on Saturday night, September 8. Everyone is partying like it's 1999. She finds Felix, a teenage programmer also involved with zapper fraud, but he won't say anything about Lester. The following Tuesday, the 9/11 attacks occur. Ex-husband Horst had told Maxine the day before he was going to be working all night, and she now fears the worst. But he and his business partner had watched Monday Night Football and fell asleep, and next morning joined the masses seeking refuge in New Jersey, and was unable to get through. March, a blogger, leans towards low-level conspiracy theories (but nothing close to truther ideas). Maxine takes Horst back. Eric and Driscoll, two programmers, move in with them as temporarily homeless. March finds herself hunted and homeless, but she keeps up her blog using WiFi. Gabriel breaks up with Tallis. Justin and Lucas, designers of the open-source program DeepArcher, find their work a home for numerous 9/11 ghosts. Maxine finds Windust's murdered body, and refuses to get involved. The Russians try a vircator attack on a Gabriel server farm. The book ends with few resolutions. Maxine's children Otis and Ziggy display a new level of maturity and independence, as they walk to school alone. "Bleeding Edge" received generally positive reviews from critics. Critic Michael Dirda, reviewing "Bleeding Edge" for "The Washington Post" wrote, "Full of verbal sass and pizzazz as well as conspiracies within conspiracies, "Bleeding Edge" is totally gonzo, totally wonderful." David Morris Kipen wrote for "Publishers Weekly", "It's a peculiarity of musical notation that major works are, more often than not, set in a minor key, and vice versa. "Bleeding Edge" is mellow, plummy, minor-key Pynchon, his second such in a row since "Against the Day" (2006)... but in its world-historical savvy, its supple feel for the joys and stings of love--both married and parental--this new book is anything but minor. On the contrary, "Bleeding Edge" is a chamber symphony in P major, so generous of invention it sometimes sprawls, yet so sharp it ultimately pierces." Michael Jarvis in his review for the "Los Angeles Review of Books" compared it to modern day cyberpunk literature and wrote, "... all its exuberant visions of transcending the body through cyberspace — lay a deep anxiety about what it would mean to “value the virtual world more” than the material one, perhaps even to lose the ability to discern or enforce the boundaries between the two.