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"Come on. We're going now," he says, those eyes burning into her. She
tries to ignore a sudden warm tense feeling down between her legs.
She starts following him down the cafeteria line, heading for a gap
where she can exit into the dining area. The head babushka bitch comes
stomping out from in back, hollers at her in some incomprehensible language.
Y.T. turns to look back. She feels a pair of big hands sliding up her
sides, coming up into her armpits, and she pulls her arms to her sides,
trying to stop it. But it's no good, the hands come all the way up and keep
lifting, keep rising into the air, bringing her with them. The big guy
hoists her right up over the counter like she's a three-year-old and sets
her down next to him.
Y.T. turns back around to see the head babushka bitch, but she is
frozen in a mixture of surprise, fear, and sexual outrage. But in the end,
fear wins out, she averts her eyes, turns away, and goes to replace Y.T. at
vat position number nine.
"Thanks for the lift," Y.T. says, her voice wowing and fluttering
ridiculously. "Uh, didn't you want to eat something?"
"I was thinking of going out anyway," he says.
"Going out? Where do you go out on the Raft?"
"Come on, I'll show you."
He leads her down passageways and up steep steel stairways and out onto
the deck. It's getting close to twilight, the control tower of the
Enterprise looms hard and black against a deep gray sky that's getting dark
and gloomy so fast that it seems darker, now, than it will at midnight. But
for now, none of the lights are on and that's all there is, black steel and
slate sky.
She follows him down the deck of the ship to the stern. From here it's
a thirty-foot drop to the water, they are looking out across the prosperous,
clean white neighborhood of the Russian people, separated from the squalid
dark tangle of the Raft per se by a wide canal patrolled by gun-toting
blackrobes. There's no stairway or rope ladder here, but there is a thick
rope hanging from the railing. The big Aleut guy hauls up a chunk of rope
and drapes it under one arm and over one leg in a quick motion. Then he
throws one arm around Y.T.'s waist, gathering her in the crook of his arm,
leans back, and falls off the ship.
She absolutely refuses to scream. She feels the rope stop his body,
feels his arm squeeze her so tight she chokes for a moment, and then she's
hanging there, hanging in the crook of his arm.
She's got her arms down to her side, defiant. But just for the hell of
it, she leans into him, wraps her arms around his neck, puts her head on his
shoulder, and hangs on tight. He rappels them down the rope, and soon they
are standing on the sanitized, prosperous Russian version of the Raft.
"What's your name anyway?" she says.
"Dmitri Ravinoff," he says. "Better known as Raven."
Oh, shit.
The connections between boats are tangled and unpredictable. To get
from point A to point B, you have to wander all over the place. But Raven
knows where he's going. Occasionally, he reaches out, grabs her hand, but he
doesn't yank her around even though she's going a lot slower than he is.
Every so often, he looks back at her with a grin, like, I could hurt you,
but I won't.
They come to a place where the Russian neighborhood is joined to the
rest of the Raft by a wide plank bridge guarded by Uzi dudes. Raven ignores
them, takes Y.T.'s hand again, and walks right across the bridge with her.
Y.T. hardly has time to think through the implications of this before it
hits her, she looks around, sees all these gaunt Asians, staring back at her
like she's a five-course meal, and realizes: I'm on the Raft. Actually on
the Raft.
"These are Hong Kong Vietnamese," Raven says. "Started out in Vietnam,
came to Hong Kong as boat people after the war there - so they've been
living on sampans for a couple of generations now. Don't be scared, this
isn't dangerous for you."
"I don't think I can find my way back here," Y.T. says.
"Relax," he says. "I've never lost a girlfriend."
"Have you ever had a girlfriend?"
Raven throws back his head and laughs. "A lot, in the old days. Not as
many in the past few years."
"Oh, yeah? The old days? Is that when you got your tattoo?"
"Yeah. I'm an alcoholic. Used to get in a lot of trouble. Been sober
for eight years."
"Then how come everyone's scared of you?"
Raven turns to her, smiles broadly, shrugs. "Oh, because I'm an
incredibly ruthless, efficient, cold-blooded killer, you know."
Y.T. laughs. So does Raven.
"What's your job?" Y.T. asks.
"I'm a harpooner," he says.
"Like in Moby Dick?" Y.T. likes this idea. She read that book in
school. Most of the people in her class, even the power tools, thought that
the book was totally entrenched. But she liked all the stuff about
harpooning.
"Nah. Compared to me, those Moby Dicksters were faggots."
"What kind of stuff do you harpoon?"
"You name it."
From there on out, she just looks at him. Or at inanimate objects.
Because otherwise she wouldn't see anything except thousands of dark eyes
staring back at her. In that way, it's a big change from being a
slop-slinger for the repressed.
Part of it is just because she's so different. But part of it is that
there's no privacy on the Raft, you make your way around by hopping from one
boat to the next. But each boat is home to about three dozen people, so it's
like you are constantly walking through people's living rooms. And
bathrooms. And bedrooms. Naturally, they look.
They tromp across a makeshift platform built on oil drums. A couple of
Vietnamese dudes are there arguing or haggling over something, looks like a
slab of fish. The one who's turned toward them sees them coming. His eyes
flicker across Y.T. without pausing, fix on Raven, and go wide. He steps
back. The guy he's talking to, who has his back to them, turns around and
literally jumps into the air, letting out a suppressed grunt. Both of them
back well out of Raven's path.
And then she figures out something important: These people aren't
looking at her. They're not even giving her a second glance. They're all
looking at Raven. And it's not just a case of celebrity watching or
something like that. All of these Raft dudes, these tough scary homeboys of
the sea, are scared shitless of this guy.
And she's on a date with him.
And it's just started.
Suddenly, walking through another Vietnamese living room, Y.T. has a
flashback to the most excruciating conversation she ever had, which was a
year ago when her mother tried to give her advice on what to do if a boy got
fresh with her. Yeah, Mom, right. I'll keep that in mind. Yeah, I'll be sure
to remember that. Y.T. knew that advice was worthless, and this goes to show
she was right.
There are four men in the life raft: Hiro Protagonist, self-employed
stringer for the Central Intelligence Corporation, whose practice used to be
limited to so-called "dry" operations, meaning that he sat around and soaked
up information and then later spat it back into the Library, the CIC
database, without ever actually doing anything. Now his practice has become
formidably wet. Hiro is armed with two swords and a nine-millimeter
semiautomatic pistol, known colloquially as a nine, with two ammunition
clips, each carrying eleven rounds.
Vic, unspecified last name. If there was still such a thing as income
tax, then every year when Vic filled out his 1040 form he would put down, as
his occupation, "sniper." In classic sniper style, Vic is reticent,
unobtrusive. He is armed with a long, large-caliber rifle with a bulky
mechanism mounted on its top, where a telescopic sight might be found if Vic
were not at the leading edge of his profession. The exact nature of this
device is not obvious, but Hiro presumes that it is an exquisitely precise
sensor package with fine crosshairs superimposed on the middle. Vic may
safely be presumed to be carrying additional small concealed weapons.
Eliot Chung. Eliot used to be the skipper of a boat called the Kowloon.
At the moment, he is between jobs. Eliot grew up in Watts, and when he
speaks English, he sounds like a black guy. Genetically speaking, he is
entirely Chinese. He is fluent in both black and white English as well as
Cantonese, Taxilinga, and some Vietnamese, Spanish, and Mandarin. Eliot is
armed with a .44 Magnum revolver, which he carried on board the Kowloon
"just for the halibut," i.e., he used it execute halibut before passengers
hauled them on board. Halibut grow very large and can thrash so violently
that they can easily kill the people who hook them; hence it is prudent to
fire a number of shells through their heads before taking them on board.
This is the only reason Eliot carries a weapon; the other defensive needs of
the Kowloon were seen to by crew members who were specialists in that kind
of thing.
"Fisheye." This is the man with the glass eye. He will only identify
himself by his nickname. He is armed with a large, fat black suitcase.
The suitcase is massively constructed, with built-in wheels, and weighs
somewhere between three hundred pounds and a metric ton, as Hiro discovers
when he tries to move it. Its weight turns the normally flat bottom of the
life raft into a puckered cone. The suitcase has a noteworthy attachment: a
flexible three-inch-thick cable or hose or something, a couple of meters
long, that emerges from one comer, runs up the sloping floor of the life
raft, over the edge, and trails in the water. At the end of this mysterious
tentacle is a hunk of metal about the size of a wastebasket, but so finely
sculpted into so many narrow fins and vanes that it appears to have a
surface area the size of Delaware. Hiro only saw this thing out of the water
for a few chaotic moments, when it was being transferred into the life raft.
At that time it was glowing red hot. Since then, it has lurked below the
surface, light gray, impossible to see clearly because the water around it
is forever churning in a full, rolling boil. Fist-sized bubbles of steam
coalesce amid its fractal tracery of hot vanes and pummel the surface of the
ocean, ceaselessly, all day and all night. The powerless life raft, sloshing
around the North Pacific, emits a vast, spreading plume of steam like that
of an Iron Horse chugging full blast over the Continental Divide. Neither
Hiro nor Eliot ever mentions, or even notices, the by-now-obvious fact that
Fisheye is traveling with a small, self-contained nuclear power source -
almost certainly radiothermal isotopes like the ones that power the Rat
Thing. As long as Fisheye refuses to notice this fact, it would be rude for
them to bring it up.
All of the participants are clad in bright orange padded suits that
cover their entire bodies. They are the North Pacific version of life vests.
They are bulky and awkward, but Eliot Chung likes to say that in northern
waters, the only thing a life vest does is make your corpse float.
The lifeboat is an inflatable raft about ten feet long that does not
come equipped with a motor. It has a tentlike, waterproof canopy that they
can zip up all the way around, turning it into a sealed capsule so that the
water stays out even in the most violent weather.
For a couple of days, a powerful chill wind coming down out off the
mountains drives them out of Oregon, out toward the open water. Eliot
explains, cheerfully, that this lifeboat was invented back in the old days,
when they had navies and coast guards that would come and rescue stranded
travelers. All you had to do was float and be orange. Fisheye has a
walkie-talkie, but it is a short-range device. And Hiro's computer is
capable of jacking into the net, but in this regard it functions much like a
cellular telephone. It doesn't work out in the middle of nowhere.
When the weather is extremely rainy, they sit under the canopy. When
it's less rainy, they sit above it. They all have ways of passing the time.
Hiro dicks around with his computer, naturally. Being stranded on a
life raft in the Pacific is a perfect venue for a hacker.
Vic reads and rereads a soaked paperback novel that he had in the
pocket of his MAFIA windbreaker when the Kowloon got blown out from under
them. These days of waiting are much easier for him. As a professional
sniper, he knows how to kill time.
Eliot looks at things with his binoculars, even though there is very
little to look at. He spends a lot of time messing around with the raft,
fretting about it in the way that boat captains do. And he does a lot of
fishing. They have plenty of stored food on the raft, but the occasional
fresh halibut and salmon are nice to eat.
Fisheye has taken what appears to be an instruction manual from the
heavy black suitcase. It is a miniature three-ring binder with pages of
laser-printed text. The binder is just a cheap unmarked one bought from a
stationery store. In these respects, it is perfectly familiar to Hiro: it
bears the earmarks of a high-tech product that is still under development.
All technical devices require documentation of a sort, but this stuff can
only be written by the techies who are doing the actual product development,
and they absolutely hate it, always put the dox question off to the very
last minute. Then they type up some material on a word processor, run it off
on the laser printer, send the departmental secretary out for a cheap
binder, and that's that.
But this only occupies Fisheye for a little while. He spends the rest
of the time just staring off at the horizon, as though he's expecting Sicily
to heave into view. It doesn't. He is despondent over the failure of his
mission, and spends a lot of time mumbling under his breath, trying to find
a way to salvage it.
"If you don't mind my asking," Hiro says, "what was your mission
anyway?"
Fisheye thinks this one over for a while. "Well it depends on how you
look at it. Nominally, my objective is to get a fifteen-year-old girl back
from these assholes. So my tactic was to take a bunch of their bigwigs
hostage, then arrange a trade."
"Who's this fifteen-year-old girl?"
Fisheye shrugs. "You know her. It's Y.T."
"Is that really your whole objective?"
"The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia
way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of
personal relationships. So, for example, when you were a pizza guy you
didn't deliver pizzas fast because you made more money that way, or because
it was some kind of a fucking policy. You did it because you were carrying
out a personal covenant between Uncle Enzo and every customer. This is how
we avoid the trap of self-perpetuating ideology. Ideology is a virus So
getting this chick back is more than just getting a chick back. It's the
concrete manifestation of an abstract policy goal. And we like concrete -
right, Vic?"
Vic allows himself a judicious sneer and a deep grinding laugh.
"What's the abstract policy goal in this case?" Hiro says.
"Not my department," Fisheye says. "But I think Uncle Enzo is real
pissed at L. Bob Rife."
Hiro is messing around in Flatland. He is doing this partly to conserve
the computer's batteries; rendering a three-dimensional office takes a lot
of processors working fulltime, while a simple two-dimensional desktop
display requires minimal power.
But his real reason for being in Flatland is that Hiro Protagonist,
last of the freelance hackers, is hacking. And when hackers are hacking,
they don't mess around with the superficial world of Metaverses and avatars.
They descend below this surface layer and into the netherworld of code and
tangled nam-shubs that supports it, where everything that you see in the
Metaverse, no matter how lifelike and beautiful and three-dimensional,
reduces to a simple text file: a series of letters on an electronic page. It
is a throwback to the days when people programmed computers through
primitive teletypes and IBM punch cards.
Since then, pretty and user-friendly programming tools have been
developed. It's possible to program a computer now by sitting at your desk
in the Metaverse and manually connecting little preprogrammed units, like
Tinkertoys. But a real hacker would never use such techniques, any more than
a master auto mechanic would try to fix a car by sliding in behind the
steering wheel and watching the idiot lights on the dashboard.
Hiro does not know what he is doing, what he is preparing for. That's
okay, though. Most of programming is a matter of laying groundwork, building
structures of words that seem to have no particular connection to the task
at hand.
He knows one thing: The Metaverse has now become a place where you can
get killed. Or at least have your brain reamed out to the point where you
might as well be dead. This is a radical change in the nature of the place.
Guns have come to Paradise.
It serves them right, he realizes now. They made the place too
vulnerable. They figured that the worst thing that could happen was that a
virus might get transferred into your computer and force you to ungoggle and
reboot your system. Maybe destroy a little data if you were stupid enough
not to install any medicine. Therefore, the Metaverse is wide open and
undefended, like airports in the days before bombs and metal detectors, like
elementary schools in the days before maniacs with assault rifles. Anyone
can go in and do anything that they want to.
There are no cops. You can't defend yourself, you can't chase the bad
people. It's going to take a lot of work to change that - a fundamental
rebuilding of the whole Metaverse, carried out on a planetwide, corporate
level.
In the meantime, there may be a role for individuals who know their way
around the place. A few hacks can make a lot of difference in this
situation. A freelance hacker could get a lot of shit done, years before the
giant software factories bestir themselves to deal with the problem.
The virus that ate through Da5id's brain was a string of binary
information, shone into his face in the form of a bitmap - a series of white
and black pixels, where white represents zero and black represents one. They
put the bitmap onto scrolls and gave the scrolls to avatars who went around
the Metaverse looking for victims.
The Clint who tried to infect Hiro in The Black Sun got away, but he
left his scroll behind - he didn't reckon on having his arms lopped off -
and Hiro dumped it into the tunnel system below the floor, the place where
the Graveyard Daemons live. Later, Hiro had a Daemon take the scroll back to
his workshop. And anything that is in Hiro's house is, by definition, stored
inside his own computer. He doesn't have to jack into the global network in
order to access it.
It's not easy working with a piece of data that can kill you. But
that's okay. In Reality, people work with dangerous substances all the time
- radioactive isotopes and toxic chemicals. You just have to have the right
tools: remote manipulator arms, gloves, goggles, leaded glass. And in
Flatland, when you need a tool, you just sit down and write it. So Hiro
starts by writing a few simple programs that enable him to manipulate the
contents of the scroll without ever seeing it.
The scroll, like any other visible thing in the Metaverse, is a piece
of software. It contains some code that describes what it looks like, so
that your computer will know how to draw it, and some routines that govern
the way it rolls and unrolls. And it contains, somewhere inside of itself, a
resource, a hunk of data, the digital version of the Snow Crash virus.
Once the virus has been extracted and isolated, it is easy enough for
Hiro to write a new program called SnowScan. SnowScan is a piece of
medicine. That is, it is code that protects Hiro's system -both his hardware
and, as Lagos would put it, his bioware - from the digital Snow Crash virus.
Once Hiro has installed it in his system, it will constantly scan the
information coming in from outside, looking for data that matches the
contents of the scroll. If it notices such information, it will block it.
There's other work to do in Flatland. Hiro's good with avatars, so he
writes himself an invisible avatar - just because, in the new and more
dangerous Metaverse, it might come in handy. This is easy to do poorly and
surprisingly tricky to do well. Almost anyone can write an avatar that
doesn't look like anything, but it will lead to a lot of problems when it is
used. Some Metaverse real estate - including The Black Sun - wants to know
how big your avatar is so that it can figure out whether you are colliding
with another avatar or some obstacle. If you give it an answer of zero - you
make your avatar infinitely small - you will either crash that piece of real
estate or else make it think that something is very wrong. You will be
invisible, but everywhere you go in the Metaverse you will leave a swath of
destruction and confusion a mile wide. In other places, invisible avatars
are illegal. If your avatar is transparent and reflects no light whatsoever
- the easiest kind to write - it will be recognized instantly as an illegal
avatar and alarms will go off. It has to be written in such a way that other
people can't see it, but the real estate software doesn't realize that it's
invisible.
There are about a hundred little tricks like this that Hiro wouldn't
know about if he hadn't been programming avatars for people like Vitaly
Chernobyl for the last couple of years. To write a really good invisible
avatar from scratch would take a long time, but he puts one together in
several hours by recycling bits and pieces of old projects left behind in
his computer. Which is how hackers usually do it.
While he's doing that, he comes across a rather old folder with some
transportation software in it. This is left over from the very old days of
the Metaverse, before the Monorail existed, when the only way to get around
was to walk or to write a piece of ware that simulated a vehicle.
In the early days, when the Metaverse was a featureless black ball,
this was a trivial job. Later on, when the Street went up and people started
building real estate, it became more complicated. On the Street, you can
pass through other people's avatars. But you can't pass through walls. You
can't enter private property. And you can't pass through other vehicles, or
through permanent Street fixtures such as the Ports and the stanchions that
support the monorail line. If you try to collide with any of these things,
you don't die or get kicked out of the Metaverse; You just come to a
complete stop, like a cartoon character running spang into a concrete wall.
In other words, once the Metaverse began to fill up with obstacles that
you could run into, the job of traveling across it at high speed suddenly
became more interesting. Maneuverability became an issue. Size became an
issue. Hiro and Da5id and the rest of them began to switch away from the
enormous, bizarre vehicles they had favored at first - Victorian houses on
tank treads, rolling ocean liners, mile-wide crystalline spheres, flaming
chariots drawn by dragons - in favor of small maneuverable vehicles.
Motorcycles, basically.
A Metaverse vehicle can be as fast and nimble as a quark. There's no
physics to worry about no constraints on acceleration, no air resistance.
Tires never squeal and brakes never lock up. The one thing that can't be
helped is the reaction time of the user. So when they were racing their
latest motorcycle software, holding wild rallies through Downtown at Mach 1,
they didn't worry about engine capacity. They worried about the user
interface, the controls that enabled the rider to transfer his reactions
into the machine, to steer, accelerate, or brake as quickly as he could
think. Because when you're in a pack of bike racers going through a crowded
area at that speed, and you run into something and suddenly slow down to a
speed of exactly zero, you can forget about catching up. One mistake and
you've lost.
Hiro had a pretty good motorcycle. He probably could have had the best
one on the Street, simply because his reflexes are unearthly. But he was
more preoccupied with sword fighting than motorcycle riding.
He opens up the most recent version of his motorcycle software, gets
familiar with the controls again. He ascends from Flatland into the
three-dimensional Metaverse and practices riding his bike around his yard
for a while. Beyond the boundaries of his yard is nothing but blackness,
because he's not jacked into the net. It is a lost, desolate sensation, -
kind of like floating on a life raft in the Pacific Ocean.
Sometimes they see boats in the distance. A couple of these even swing
close by to check them out, but none of them seems to be in that rescuing
mood. There are few altruists in the vicinity of the Raft, and it must be
evident that they don't have much to steal.
From time to time, they see an old deep-water fishing boat, fifty to a
hundred feet long, with half a dozen or so small fast boats clustered around
it.
When Eliot informs them that these are pirate vessels, Vic and Fisheye
prick up their ears. Vic unwraps his rifle from the collection of Hefty bags
that he uses to protect it from the salt spray, and detaches the bulky sight
so that they can use it as a spyglass. Hiro can't see any reason to pull the
sight off the rifle in order to do this, other than the fact that if you
don't, it looks like you're drawing a bead on whatever you're looking at.
Whenever a pirate vessel comes into view, they all take turns looking
at it through the sight, playing with all the different sensor modes:
visible, infrared, and so on. Eliot has spent enough time knocking around
the Rim that he has become familiar with the colors of the different pirate
groups, so by examining them through the sight he can tell who they are:
Clint Eastwood and his band parallel them for a few minutes one day,
checking them out, and the Magnificent Seven send out one of their small
boats to zoom by them and look for potential booty. Hiro's almost hoping
they get taken prisoner by the Seven, because they have the nicest-looking
pirate ship: a former luxury yacht with Exocet launch tubes kludged to the
foredeck. But this reconnaissance leads nowhere. The pirates, unschooled in
thermodynamics, do not grasp the implications of the eternal plume of steam
coming from beneath the life raft.
One morning, a big old trawler materializes very close to them,
congealing out of nothing as the fog lifts. Hiro has been hearing its
engines for a while, but didn't realize how close it was.
"Who are they?" Fisheye says, choking on a cup of the freeze-dried
coffee he despises so much. He's wrapped up in a space blanket and partly
snuggled underneath the boat's waterproof canopy, just his face and hands
visible.
Eliot scopes them out with the sight. He is not a real demonstrative
guy, but it's clear that he is not very happy with what he sees. "That is
Bruce Lee," he says.
"How is that significant?" Fisheye says.
"Well, check out the colors," Eliot says.
The ship is close enough that everyone can see the flag pretty clearly.
It's a red banner with a silver fist in the middle, a pair of nunchuks
crossed beneath it, the initials B and L on either side.
"What about 'em?" Fisheye says.
"Well, the guy who calls himself Bruce Lee, who's like the leader? He
got a vest with those colors on the back."
"So?"
"So, it's not just embroidered or painted, it's actually done in
scalps. Patchwork, like."
"Say what?" Hiro says.
"There's a rumor, just a rumor man, that he went through the Refu ships
looking for people with red or silver hair so he could collect the scalps he
needed."
Hiro is still absorbing that when Fisheye makes an unexpected decision.
"I want to talk to this Bruce Lee character," he says. "He interests me."
"Why the hell do you want to talk to this fucking psycho?" Eliot says.
"Yeah," Hiro says. "Didn't you see that series on Eye Spy? He's a
maniac."
Fisheye throws up his hands as if to say the answer is, like Catholic
theology, beyond mortal comprehension. "This is my decision," he says.
"Who the fuck are you?" Eliot says.
"President of the fucking boat," Fisheye says. "I hereby nominate
myself. Is there a second?"
"Yup," Vic says, the first time he has spoken in forty-eight hours.
"All in favor say aye," Fisheye says.
"Aye," Vic says, bursting into florid eloquence.
"I win," Fisheye says. "So how do we get these Bruce Lee guys to come
over here and talk to us?"
"Why should they want to?" Eliot says. "We got nothing they want except
for poontang."
"Are you saying these guys are homos?" Fisheye says, his face
shriveling up.
"Shit, man," Eliot says, "you didn't even blink when I told you about
the scalps."
"I knew I didn't like any of this boat shit," Fisheye says.
"If this makes any difference to you, they're not gay in the sense that
we usually think of it," Eliot explains. "They're het, but they're pirates.
They'll go after anything that's warm and concave."
Fisheye makes a snap decision. "Okay, you two guys, Hiro and Eliot,
you're Chinese. Take off your clothes."
"What?"
"Do it. I'm the president, remember? You want Vic to do it for you?"
Eliot and Hiro can't help looking over at Vic, who is just sitting
there like a lump. There is something about his extremely blase attitude
that inspires fear.
"Do it or I'll fucking kill you," Fisheye says, finally driving the
point home.
Eliot and Hiro, bobbing awkwardly on the unsteady floor of the raft,
peel off their survival suits and step out of them. Then they pull off the
rest of their clothes, exposing smooth bare skin to the air for the first
time in a few days.
The trawler comes right alongside of them, no more than twenty feet
away, and cuts its engines. They are nicely equipped: half a dozen Zodiacs
with new outboards, an Exocet-type missile, two radars, and a fifty caliber
machine gun at each end of the boat, currently unmanned. A couple of
speedboats are being towed behind the trawler like dinghys and each of these
also has a heavy machine gun. And there is also a thirty-six-foot motor
yacht, following them under its own power.
There are a couple of dozen guys in Bruce Lee's pirate band, and they
are now lined up along the trawler's railing, grinning, whistling, howling
like wolves, and waving unrolled trojans in the air.
"Don't worry, man, I'm not going to let 'em fuck you," Fisheye says,
grinning.
"What you gonna do," Eliot says, "hand them a papal encyclical?"
"I'm sure they'll listen to reason," Fisheye says.
"These guys aren't scared of the Mafia, if that's what you have in
mind," Eliot says.
"That's just because they don't know us very well."
Finally, the leader comes out, Bruce Lee himself, a fortyish guy in a
Kevlar vest, an ammo vest stretched over that, a diagonal bandolier, samurai
sword - Hiro would love to take him on - nunchuks, and his colors, the
patchwork of human scalps.
He flashes them a nice grin, has a look at Hiro and Eliot, gives them a
highly suggestive, thrusting thumbs-up gesture, and then struts up and down
the length of the boat one time, swapping high fives with his merry men.
Every so often, he picks out one of the pirates at random and gestures at
the man's trojan. The pirate puts his condom to his lips and inflates it
into a slippery ribbed balloon. Then Bruce Lee inspects it, making sure
there are no leaks. Obviously, the man runs a tight ship.
Hiro can't help staring at the scalps on Bruce Lee's back. The pirates
note his interest and mug for him, pointing to the scalps, nodding, looking
back at him with wide, mocking eyes. The colors look much too uniform - no
change in the red from one to the next. Hiro concludes that Bruce Lee,
contrary to his reputation, must have just gone out and gotten scalps of any
old color, bleached them, and dyed them. What a wimp.
Finally, Bruce Lee works his way back to midship and flashes them
another big grin. He has a great, dazzling grin and he knows it; maybe it's
those one-karat diamonds Krazy Glued to his front teeth.
"Jammin' boat," he says. "Maybe you, me swap, huh? Hahaha."
Everyone on the life raft, except for Vic, just smiles a brittle smile.
"Where you goin'? Key West? Hahaha."
Bruce Lee examines Hiro and Eliot for a while, rotates his index finger
to indicate that they should spin around and display their business ends.
They do.
"Quanto?" Bruce Lee says, and all the pirates get uproarious, most of
all Bruce Lee. Hiro can feel his anal sphincter contracting to the size of a
pore.
"He's asking how much we cost," Eliot says. "It's a joke, see, because
they know they can come over and have our asses for free."
"Oh, hilarious!" Fisheye says. While Hiro and Eliot literally freeze
their asses, he's still snuggled up under the canopy, that bastard.
"Poonmissile, like?" Bruce Lee says, pointing to one of the antiship
missiles on the deck. "Bugs? Motorolas?"
"Poonmissile is a Harpoon antiship missile, real expensive," Eliot
says. "A bug is a Microchip. Motorola would be one brand, like Ford or
Chevy. Bruce Lee deals in a lot of electronics - you know, typical Asian
pirate dude."
"He'd give us a Harpoon missile for you guys?" Fisheye says.
"No! He's being sarcastic, shithead!" Eliot says.
"Tell him we want a boat with an outboard motor," Fisheye says,
"Want one zode, one kicker, fillerup," Eliot says.
Suddenly Bruce Lee gets real serious and actually considers it. "Scope
clause, chomsayen? Gauge and gag."
"He'll consider it if they can come and check out the merchandise
first," Eliot says. "They want to check out how tight we are, and whether we
are capable of suppressing our gag reflex. These are all terms from the
Raft brothel industry."
"Ombwas scope like twelves to me, hahaha."
"Us homeboys look like we have twelve-gauge assholes," Eliot says,
"i.e., that we are all stretched out and worthless."
Fisheye speaks up on his own. "No, no, four-tens, totally!"
The entire deck of the pirate ship titters with excitement.
"No way," Bruce Lee says.
"These ombwas," Fisheye says, "still got cherries up in there!"
The whole deck erupts in rude, screaming laughter. One of the pirates
scrambles up to balance on the railing, gyrates one fist in the air, and
hollers: "ba ka na zu ma lay ga no ma la aria ma na po no a ab zu ... " By
that point all the other pirates have stopped laughing, gotten serious looks
on their faces, and joined in, bellowing their own private streams of
babble, rattling the air with a profound hoarse ululation.
Hiro's feet go out from under him as the raft moves suddenly; he can
see Eliot falling down next to him.
He looks up at Bruce Lee's ship and flinches involuntarily as he sees
what looks like a dark wave cresting over the rail, washing over the row of
standing pirates, starting at the stern of the trawler and working its way
forward. But this is just some kind of optical illusion. It is not really a
wave at all. Suddenly, they are fifty feet away from the trawler, not twenty
feet. As the laughter on the railing dies away, Hiro hears a new sound: a
low whirring noise from the direction of Fisheye, and from the atmosphere
around them, a tearing, hissing noise, like the sound just before a
thunderbolt strikes, like the sound of sheets being ripped in half.
Looking back at Bruce Lee's trawler, he sees that the dark wavelike
phenomenon was a wave of blood, as though someone hosed down the deck with a
giant severed aorta. But it didn't come from outside. It erupted from the
pirates' bodies, one at a time, moving from the stem to the bow. The deck of
Bruce Lee's ship is now utterly quiet and motionless except for blood and
gelatinized internal organs sliding down the rusted steel and plopping
softly into the water.
Fisheye is up on his knees now and has torn away the canopy and space
blanket that have covered him until this point. In one hand he is holding a
long device a couple of inches in diameter, which is the source of the
whirring noise. It is a circular bundle of parallel tubes about pencil-sized
and a couple of feet long, like a miniaturized Gatling gun. It whirs around
so quickly that the individual tubes are difficult to make out; when it is
operating, it is in fact ghostly and transparent because of this rapid
motion, a glittering, translucent cloud jutting out of Fisheye's arm. The
device is attached to a wrist-thick bundle of black tubes and cables that
snake down into the large suitcase, which lies open on the bottom of the
raft. The suitcase has a built-in color monitor screen with graphics giving
information about the status of this weapons system: how much ammo is left,
the status of various subsystems. Hiro just gets a quick glimpse at it
before all of the ammunition on board Bruce Lee's ship begins to explode.
"See, I told you they'd listen to Reason," Fisheye says, shutting down
the whirling gun. Now Hiro sees a nameplate tacked onto the control panel.
version 1.0B7
Gatling-type 3-mm hypervelocity railgun system
Ng Security Industries, Inc.
PRERELEASE VERSION - NOT FOR FIELD USE
DO NOT TEST IN A POPULATED AREA
- ULTIMA RATIO REGUM -
"Fucking recoil pushed us halfway to China," Fisheye says
appreciatively.
"Did you do that? What just happened?" Eliot says.
"I did it. With Reason. See, it fires these teeny little metal
splinters. They go real fast - more energy than a rifle bullet. Depleted
uranium."
The spinning barrels have now slowed almost to a stop. It looks like
there are about two dozen of them.
"I thought you hated machine guns," Hiro says.
"I hate this fucking raft even more. Let's go get ourselves something
that goes, you know. Something with a motor on it."
Because of the fires and small explosions going off on Bruce Lee's
pirate ship, it takes them a minute to realize that several people are still
alive there, still shooting at them. When Fisheye becomes aware of this, he
pulls the trigger again, the barrels whirl themselves up into a transparent
cylinder, and the tearing, hissing noise begins again. As he waves the gun
back and forth, hosing the target down with a hypersonic shower of depleted
uranium, Bruce Lee's entire ship seems to sparkle and glitter, as though
Tinkerbell was flying back and forth from stem to stern, sprinkling nuclear
fairy dust over it.
Bruce Lee's smaller yacht makes the mistake of coming around to see
what's going on. Fisheye turns toward it for a moment and its high,
protruding bridge slides off into the water.
Major structural elements of the trawler are losing their integrity.
Enormous popping and wrenching noises are coming from inside as big pieces
of Swiss-cheesed metal give way, and the superstructure is slowly collapsing
down into the hull like a botched souffle. When Fisheye notes this, he
ceases fire.
"Cut it out, boss," Vic says.
"I'm melting!" Fisheye crows.
"We could have used that trawler, asshole," Eliot says, vindictively
yanking his pants back on.
"I didn't mean to blow it all up. I guess the little bullets just go
through everything."
"Sharp thinking, Fisheye," Hiro says.
"Well, I'm sorry I took a little action to save our asses. Come on,
let's go get one of them little boats before they all burn."
They paddle in the direction of the decapitated yacht. By the time they
reach it, Bruce Lee's trawler is just a listing, empty steel hull with
flames and smoke pouring out of it, spiced by the occasional explosion.
The remaining portion of the yacht has many, many tiny little holes in
it, and glitters with exploded fragments of fiberglass: a million tiny
little glass fibers about a millimeter long. The skipper and a crew member,
or rather the stew that they turned into when the bridge was hit by Reason,
slid off into the water along with the rest of the debris, leaving behind no
evidence of their having been there except for a pair of long parallel
streaks trailing off into the water. But there is a Filipino boy down in the
galley, the galley so low, unhurt and only dimly aware of what happened.
A number of electrical cables have been sawn in half. Eliot digs up a
toolbox from belowdecks and spends the next twelve hours patching things
together to the point where the engine can be started and the yacht can be
steered. Hiro, who has a rudimentary knowledge of electrical stuff, acts as
gofer and limp-dicked adviser.
"Did you hear the way the pirates were talking, before Fisheye opened
up on them?" Hiro asks Eliot while they are working.
"You mean in pidgin?"
"No. At the very end. The babbling."
"Yeah. That's a Raft thing."
"It is?"
"Yeah. One guy will start in and the rest will follow. I think it's
just a fad."
"But it's common on the Raft?"
"Yeah. They all speak different languages, you know, all those
different ethnic groups. It's like the fucking Tower of Babel. I think when
they make that sound - when they babble at each other - they're just
imitating what all the other groups sound like."
The Filipino kid starts making them some food. Vic and Fisheye sit down
in the main cabin belowdecks, eating, going through Chinese magazines,
looking at pictures of Asian chicks, and occasionally looking at nautical
charts. When Eliot gets the electrical system back up and running, Hiro
plugs his personal computer in, to recharge its batteries.
By the time the yacht is up and running again, it's dark. To the
southwest, a fluctuating column of light is playing back and forth against
the low overhanging cloud layer.
"Is that the Raft over there?" Fisheye says, pointing to the light, as
all hands converge on Eliot's makeshift control center.
"It is," Eliot says. "They light it up at night so that the fishing
boats can find their way back to it."
"How far away do you think it is?" Fisheye says.
Eliot shrugs. "Twenty miles."
"And how far to land?"
"I have no idea. Bruce Lee's skipper probably knew, but he's been
pureed along with everyone else."
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or
'chop.'"
"The Raft usually stays at least a hundred miles offshore," Hiro says,
"to reduce the danger of snags."
"How we doing on gas?"
"I dipped the tank," Eliot says, "and it looks like we're not doing so
well, to tell you the truth."
"What does that mean, not doing so well?"
"It's not always easy to read the level when you're out to sea," Eliot
says. "And I don't know how efficient these engines are. But if we're really
eighty or a hundred miles offshore, we might not make it."
"So we go to the Raft," Fisheye says. "We go to the Raft and persuade
someone it's in his best interests to give us some fuel. Then, back to the
mainland."
No one really believes it's going to happen this way, least of all
Fisheye. "And," he continues, "while we're there - on the Raft - after we
get the fuel and before we go home - some other stuff might happen, too, you
know. Life's unpredictable."
"If you have something in mind, why don't you just spit it out?" Hiro
says.
"Okay. Policy decision. The hostage tactic failed. So we go for an
extraction."
"Extraction of what?"
"Of Y.T."
"I go along with that," Hiro says, "but I have another person I want to
extract also, as long as we're extracting."
"Who?"
"Juanita. Come on, you said yourself she was a nice girl."
"If she's on the Raft, maybe she's not so nice," Fisheye says.
"I want to extract her anyway. We're all in this together, right? We're
all part of Lagos's gang."
"Bruce Lee has some people there," Eliot says.
"Correction. Had."
"But what I'm saying is, they're going to be pissed."
"'You think they're going to be pissed. I think they're going to be
scared shitless," Fisheye says. "Now drive the boat, Eliot. Come on, I'm
tries to ignore a sudden warm tense feeling down between her legs.
She starts following him down the cafeteria line, heading for a gap
where she can exit into the dining area. The head babushka bitch comes
stomping out from in back, hollers at her in some incomprehensible language.
Y.T. turns to look back. She feels a pair of big hands sliding up her
sides, coming up into her armpits, and she pulls her arms to her sides,
trying to stop it. But it's no good, the hands come all the way up and keep
lifting, keep rising into the air, bringing her with them. The big guy
hoists her right up over the counter like she's a three-year-old and sets
her down next to him.
Y.T. turns back around to see the head babushka bitch, but she is
frozen in a mixture of surprise, fear, and sexual outrage. But in the end,
fear wins out, she averts her eyes, turns away, and goes to replace Y.T. at
vat position number nine.
"Thanks for the lift," Y.T. says, her voice wowing and fluttering
ridiculously. "Uh, didn't you want to eat something?"
"I was thinking of going out anyway," he says.
"Going out? Where do you go out on the Raft?"
"Come on, I'll show you."
He leads her down passageways and up steep steel stairways and out onto
the deck. It's getting close to twilight, the control tower of the
Enterprise looms hard and black against a deep gray sky that's getting dark
and gloomy so fast that it seems darker, now, than it will at midnight. But
for now, none of the lights are on and that's all there is, black steel and
slate sky.
She follows him down the deck of the ship to the stern. From here it's
a thirty-foot drop to the water, they are looking out across the prosperous,
clean white neighborhood of the Russian people, separated from the squalid
dark tangle of the Raft per se by a wide canal patrolled by gun-toting
blackrobes. There's no stairway or rope ladder here, but there is a thick
rope hanging from the railing. The big Aleut guy hauls up a chunk of rope
and drapes it under one arm and over one leg in a quick motion. Then he
throws one arm around Y.T.'s waist, gathering her in the crook of his arm,
leans back, and falls off the ship.
She absolutely refuses to scream. She feels the rope stop his body,
feels his arm squeeze her so tight she chokes for a moment, and then she's
hanging there, hanging in the crook of his arm.
She's got her arms down to her side, defiant. But just for the hell of
it, she leans into him, wraps her arms around his neck, puts her head on his
shoulder, and hangs on tight. He rappels them down the rope, and soon they
are standing on the sanitized, prosperous Russian version of the Raft.
"What's your name anyway?" she says.
"Dmitri Ravinoff," he says. "Better known as Raven."
Oh, shit.
The connections between boats are tangled and unpredictable. To get
from point A to point B, you have to wander all over the place. But Raven
knows where he's going. Occasionally, he reaches out, grabs her hand, but he
doesn't yank her around even though she's going a lot slower than he is.
Every so often, he looks back at her with a grin, like, I could hurt you,
but I won't.
They come to a place where the Russian neighborhood is joined to the
rest of the Raft by a wide plank bridge guarded by Uzi dudes. Raven ignores
them, takes Y.T.'s hand again, and walks right across the bridge with her.
Y.T. hardly has time to think through the implications of this before it
hits her, she looks around, sees all these gaunt Asians, staring back at her
like she's a five-course meal, and realizes: I'm on the Raft. Actually on
the Raft.
"These are Hong Kong Vietnamese," Raven says. "Started out in Vietnam,
came to Hong Kong as boat people after the war there - so they've been
living on sampans for a couple of generations now. Don't be scared, this
isn't dangerous for you."
"I don't think I can find my way back here," Y.T. says.
"Relax," he says. "I've never lost a girlfriend."
"Have you ever had a girlfriend?"
Raven throws back his head and laughs. "A lot, in the old days. Not as
many in the past few years."
"Oh, yeah? The old days? Is that when you got your tattoo?"
"Yeah. I'm an alcoholic. Used to get in a lot of trouble. Been sober
for eight years."
"Then how come everyone's scared of you?"
Raven turns to her, smiles broadly, shrugs. "Oh, because I'm an
incredibly ruthless, efficient, cold-blooded killer, you know."
Y.T. laughs. So does Raven.
"What's your job?" Y.T. asks.
"I'm a harpooner," he says.
"Like in Moby Dick?" Y.T. likes this idea. She read that book in
school. Most of the people in her class, even the power tools, thought that
the book was totally entrenched. But she liked all the stuff about
harpooning.
"Nah. Compared to me, those Moby Dicksters were faggots."
"What kind of stuff do you harpoon?"
"You name it."
From there on out, she just looks at him. Or at inanimate objects.
Because otherwise she wouldn't see anything except thousands of dark eyes
staring back at her. In that way, it's a big change from being a
slop-slinger for the repressed.
Part of it is just because she's so different. But part of it is that
there's no privacy on the Raft, you make your way around by hopping from one
boat to the next. But each boat is home to about three dozen people, so it's
like you are constantly walking through people's living rooms. And
bathrooms. And bedrooms. Naturally, they look.
They tromp across a makeshift platform built on oil drums. A couple of
Vietnamese dudes are there arguing or haggling over something, looks like a
slab of fish. The one who's turned toward them sees them coming. His eyes
flicker across Y.T. without pausing, fix on Raven, and go wide. He steps
back. The guy he's talking to, who has his back to them, turns around and
literally jumps into the air, letting out a suppressed grunt. Both of them
back well out of Raven's path.
And then she figures out something important: These people aren't
looking at her. They're not even giving her a second glance. They're all
looking at Raven. And it's not just a case of celebrity watching or
something like that. All of these Raft dudes, these tough scary homeboys of
the sea, are scared shitless of this guy.
And she's on a date with him.
And it's just started.
Suddenly, walking through another Vietnamese living room, Y.T. has a
flashback to the most excruciating conversation she ever had, which was a
year ago when her mother tried to give her advice on what to do if a boy got
fresh with her. Yeah, Mom, right. I'll keep that in mind. Yeah, I'll be sure
to remember that. Y.T. knew that advice was worthless, and this goes to show
she was right.
There are four men in the life raft: Hiro Protagonist, self-employed
stringer for the Central Intelligence Corporation, whose practice used to be
limited to so-called "dry" operations, meaning that he sat around and soaked
up information and then later spat it back into the Library, the CIC
database, without ever actually doing anything. Now his practice has become
formidably wet. Hiro is armed with two swords and a nine-millimeter
semiautomatic pistol, known colloquially as a nine, with two ammunition
clips, each carrying eleven rounds.
Vic, unspecified last name. If there was still such a thing as income
tax, then every year when Vic filled out his 1040 form he would put down, as
his occupation, "sniper." In classic sniper style, Vic is reticent,
unobtrusive. He is armed with a long, large-caliber rifle with a bulky
mechanism mounted on its top, where a telescopic sight might be found if Vic
were not at the leading edge of his profession. The exact nature of this
device is not obvious, but Hiro presumes that it is an exquisitely precise
sensor package with fine crosshairs superimposed on the middle. Vic may
safely be presumed to be carrying additional small concealed weapons.
Eliot Chung. Eliot used to be the skipper of a boat called the Kowloon.
At the moment, he is between jobs. Eliot grew up in Watts, and when he
speaks English, he sounds like a black guy. Genetically speaking, he is
entirely Chinese. He is fluent in both black and white English as well as
Cantonese, Taxilinga, and some Vietnamese, Spanish, and Mandarin. Eliot is
armed with a .44 Magnum revolver, which he carried on board the Kowloon
"just for the halibut," i.e., he used it execute halibut before passengers
hauled them on board. Halibut grow very large and can thrash so violently
that they can easily kill the people who hook them; hence it is prudent to
fire a number of shells through their heads before taking them on board.
This is the only reason Eliot carries a weapon; the other defensive needs of
the Kowloon were seen to by crew members who were specialists in that kind
of thing.
"Fisheye." This is the man with the glass eye. He will only identify
himself by his nickname. He is armed with a large, fat black suitcase.
The suitcase is massively constructed, with built-in wheels, and weighs
somewhere between three hundred pounds and a metric ton, as Hiro discovers
when he tries to move it. Its weight turns the normally flat bottom of the
life raft into a puckered cone. The suitcase has a noteworthy attachment: a
flexible three-inch-thick cable or hose or something, a couple of meters
long, that emerges from one comer, runs up the sloping floor of the life
raft, over the edge, and trails in the water. At the end of this mysterious
tentacle is a hunk of metal about the size of a wastebasket, but so finely
sculpted into so many narrow fins and vanes that it appears to have a
surface area the size of Delaware. Hiro only saw this thing out of the water
for a few chaotic moments, when it was being transferred into the life raft.
At that time it was glowing red hot. Since then, it has lurked below the
surface, light gray, impossible to see clearly because the water around it
is forever churning in a full, rolling boil. Fist-sized bubbles of steam
coalesce amid its fractal tracery of hot vanes and pummel the surface of the
ocean, ceaselessly, all day and all night. The powerless life raft, sloshing
around the North Pacific, emits a vast, spreading plume of steam like that
of an Iron Horse chugging full blast over the Continental Divide. Neither
Hiro nor Eliot ever mentions, or even notices, the by-now-obvious fact that
Fisheye is traveling with a small, self-contained nuclear power source -
almost certainly radiothermal isotopes like the ones that power the Rat
Thing. As long as Fisheye refuses to notice this fact, it would be rude for
them to bring it up.
All of the participants are clad in bright orange padded suits that
cover their entire bodies. They are the North Pacific version of life vests.
They are bulky and awkward, but Eliot Chung likes to say that in northern
waters, the only thing a life vest does is make your corpse float.
The lifeboat is an inflatable raft about ten feet long that does not
come equipped with a motor. It has a tentlike, waterproof canopy that they
can zip up all the way around, turning it into a sealed capsule so that the
water stays out even in the most violent weather.
For a couple of days, a powerful chill wind coming down out off the
mountains drives them out of Oregon, out toward the open water. Eliot
explains, cheerfully, that this lifeboat was invented back in the old days,
when they had navies and coast guards that would come and rescue stranded
travelers. All you had to do was float and be orange. Fisheye has a
walkie-talkie, but it is a short-range device. And Hiro's computer is
capable of jacking into the net, but in this regard it functions much like a
cellular telephone. It doesn't work out in the middle of nowhere.
When the weather is extremely rainy, they sit under the canopy. When
it's less rainy, they sit above it. They all have ways of passing the time.
Hiro dicks around with his computer, naturally. Being stranded on a
life raft in the Pacific is a perfect venue for a hacker.
Vic reads and rereads a soaked paperback novel that he had in the
pocket of his MAFIA windbreaker when the Kowloon got blown out from under
them. These days of waiting are much easier for him. As a professional
sniper, he knows how to kill time.
Eliot looks at things with his binoculars, even though there is very
little to look at. He spends a lot of time messing around with the raft,
fretting about it in the way that boat captains do. And he does a lot of
fishing. They have plenty of stored food on the raft, but the occasional
fresh halibut and salmon are nice to eat.
Fisheye has taken what appears to be an instruction manual from the
heavy black suitcase. It is a miniature three-ring binder with pages of
laser-printed text. The binder is just a cheap unmarked one bought from a
stationery store. In these respects, it is perfectly familiar to Hiro: it
bears the earmarks of a high-tech product that is still under development.
All technical devices require documentation of a sort, but this stuff can
only be written by the techies who are doing the actual product development,
and they absolutely hate it, always put the dox question off to the very
last minute. Then they type up some material on a word processor, run it off
on the laser printer, send the departmental secretary out for a cheap
binder, and that's that.
But this only occupies Fisheye for a little while. He spends the rest
of the time just staring off at the horizon, as though he's expecting Sicily
to heave into view. It doesn't. He is despondent over the failure of his
mission, and spends a lot of time mumbling under his breath, trying to find
a way to salvage it.
"If you don't mind my asking," Hiro says, "what was your mission
anyway?"
Fisheye thinks this one over for a while. "Well it depends on how you
look at it. Nominally, my objective is to get a fifteen-year-old girl back
from these assholes. So my tactic was to take a bunch of their bigwigs
hostage, then arrange a trade."
"Who's this fifteen-year-old girl?"
Fisheye shrugs. "You know her. It's Y.T."
"Is that really your whole objective?"
"The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia
way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of
personal relationships. So, for example, when you were a pizza guy you
didn't deliver pizzas fast because you made more money that way, or because
it was some kind of a fucking policy. You did it because you were carrying
out a personal covenant between Uncle Enzo and every customer. This is how
we avoid the trap of self-perpetuating ideology. Ideology is a virus So
getting this chick back is more than just getting a chick back. It's the
concrete manifestation of an abstract policy goal. And we like concrete -
right, Vic?"
Vic allows himself a judicious sneer and a deep grinding laugh.
"What's the abstract policy goal in this case?" Hiro says.
"Not my department," Fisheye says. "But I think Uncle Enzo is real
pissed at L. Bob Rife."
Hiro is messing around in Flatland. He is doing this partly to conserve
the computer's batteries; rendering a three-dimensional office takes a lot
of processors working fulltime, while a simple two-dimensional desktop
display requires minimal power.
But his real reason for being in Flatland is that Hiro Protagonist,
last of the freelance hackers, is hacking. And when hackers are hacking,
they don't mess around with the superficial world of Metaverses and avatars.
They descend below this surface layer and into the netherworld of code and
tangled nam-shubs that supports it, where everything that you see in the
Metaverse, no matter how lifelike and beautiful and three-dimensional,
reduces to a simple text file: a series of letters on an electronic page. It
is a throwback to the days when people programmed computers through
primitive teletypes and IBM punch cards.
Since then, pretty and user-friendly programming tools have been
developed. It's possible to program a computer now by sitting at your desk
in the Metaverse and manually connecting little preprogrammed units, like
Tinkertoys. But a real hacker would never use such techniques, any more than
a master auto mechanic would try to fix a car by sliding in behind the
steering wheel and watching the idiot lights on the dashboard.
Hiro does not know what he is doing, what he is preparing for. That's
okay, though. Most of programming is a matter of laying groundwork, building
structures of words that seem to have no particular connection to the task
at hand.
He knows one thing: The Metaverse has now become a place where you can
get killed. Or at least have your brain reamed out to the point where you
might as well be dead. This is a radical change in the nature of the place.
Guns have come to Paradise.
It serves them right, he realizes now. They made the place too
vulnerable. They figured that the worst thing that could happen was that a
virus might get transferred into your computer and force you to ungoggle and
reboot your system. Maybe destroy a little data if you were stupid enough
not to install any medicine. Therefore, the Metaverse is wide open and
undefended, like airports in the days before bombs and metal detectors, like
elementary schools in the days before maniacs with assault rifles. Anyone
can go in and do anything that they want to.
There are no cops. You can't defend yourself, you can't chase the bad
people. It's going to take a lot of work to change that - a fundamental
rebuilding of the whole Metaverse, carried out on a planetwide, corporate
level.
In the meantime, there may be a role for individuals who know their way
around the place. A few hacks can make a lot of difference in this
situation. A freelance hacker could get a lot of shit done, years before the
giant software factories bestir themselves to deal with the problem.
The virus that ate through Da5id's brain was a string of binary
information, shone into his face in the form of a bitmap - a series of white
and black pixels, where white represents zero and black represents one. They
put the bitmap onto scrolls and gave the scrolls to avatars who went around
the Metaverse looking for victims.
The Clint who tried to infect Hiro in The Black Sun got away, but he
left his scroll behind - he didn't reckon on having his arms lopped off -
and Hiro dumped it into the tunnel system below the floor, the place where
the Graveyard Daemons live. Later, Hiro had a Daemon take the scroll back to
his workshop. And anything that is in Hiro's house is, by definition, stored
inside his own computer. He doesn't have to jack into the global network in
order to access it.
It's not easy working with a piece of data that can kill you. But
that's okay. In Reality, people work with dangerous substances all the time
- radioactive isotopes and toxic chemicals. You just have to have the right
tools: remote manipulator arms, gloves, goggles, leaded glass. And in
Flatland, when you need a tool, you just sit down and write it. So Hiro
starts by writing a few simple programs that enable him to manipulate the
contents of the scroll without ever seeing it.
The scroll, like any other visible thing in the Metaverse, is a piece
of software. It contains some code that describes what it looks like, so
that your computer will know how to draw it, and some routines that govern
the way it rolls and unrolls. And it contains, somewhere inside of itself, a
resource, a hunk of data, the digital version of the Snow Crash virus.
Once the virus has been extracted and isolated, it is easy enough for
Hiro to write a new program called SnowScan. SnowScan is a piece of
medicine. That is, it is code that protects Hiro's system -both his hardware
and, as Lagos would put it, his bioware - from the digital Snow Crash virus.
Once Hiro has installed it in his system, it will constantly scan the
information coming in from outside, looking for data that matches the
contents of the scroll. If it notices such information, it will block it.
There's other work to do in Flatland. Hiro's good with avatars, so he
writes himself an invisible avatar - just because, in the new and more
dangerous Metaverse, it might come in handy. This is easy to do poorly and
surprisingly tricky to do well. Almost anyone can write an avatar that
doesn't look like anything, but it will lead to a lot of problems when it is
used. Some Metaverse real estate - including The Black Sun - wants to know
how big your avatar is so that it can figure out whether you are colliding
with another avatar or some obstacle. If you give it an answer of zero - you
make your avatar infinitely small - you will either crash that piece of real
estate or else make it think that something is very wrong. You will be
invisible, but everywhere you go in the Metaverse you will leave a swath of
destruction and confusion a mile wide. In other places, invisible avatars
are illegal. If your avatar is transparent and reflects no light whatsoever
- the easiest kind to write - it will be recognized instantly as an illegal
avatar and alarms will go off. It has to be written in such a way that other
people can't see it, but the real estate software doesn't realize that it's
invisible.
There are about a hundred little tricks like this that Hiro wouldn't
know about if he hadn't been programming avatars for people like Vitaly
Chernobyl for the last couple of years. To write a really good invisible
avatar from scratch would take a long time, but he puts one together in
several hours by recycling bits and pieces of old projects left behind in
his computer. Which is how hackers usually do it.
While he's doing that, he comes across a rather old folder with some
transportation software in it. This is left over from the very old days of
the Metaverse, before the Monorail existed, when the only way to get around
was to walk or to write a piece of ware that simulated a vehicle.
In the early days, when the Metaverse was a featureless black ball,
this was a trivial job. Later on, when the Street went up and people started
building real estate, it became more complicated. On the Street, you can
pass through other people's avatars. But you can't pass through walls. You
can't enter private property. And you can't pass through other vehicles, or
through permanent Street fixtures such as the Ports and the stanchions that
support the monorail line. If you try to collide with any of these things,
you don't die or get kicked out of the Metaverse; You just come to a
complete stop, like a cartoon character running spang into a concrete wall.
In other words, once the Metaverse began to fill up with obstacles that
you could run into, the job of traveling across it at high speed suddenly
became more interesting. Maneuverability became an issue. Size became an
issue. Hiro and Da5id and the rest of them began to switch away from the
enormous, bizarre vehicles they had favored at first - Victorian houses on
tank treads, rolling ocean liners, mile-wide crystalline spheres, flaming
chariots drawn by dragons - in favor of small maneuverable vehicles.
Motorcycles, basically.
A Metaverse vehicle can be as fast and nimble as a quark. There's no
physics to worry about no constraints on acceleration, no air resistance.
Tires never squeal and brakes never lock up. The one thing that can't be
helped is the reaction time of the user. So when they were racing their
latest motorcycle software, holding wild rallies through Downtown at Mach 1,
they didn't worry about engine capacity. They worried about the user
interface, the controls that enabled the rider to transfer his reactions
into the machine, to steer, accelerate, or brake as quickly as he could
think. Because when you're in a pack of bike racers going through a crowded
area at that speed, and you run into something and suddenly slow down to a
speed of exactly zero, you can forget about catching up. One mistake and
you've lost.
Hiro had a pretty good motorcycle. He probably could have had the best
one on the Street, simply because his reflexes are unearthly. But he was
more preoccupied with sword fighting than motorcycle riding.
He opens up the most recent version of his motorcycle software, gets
familiar with the controls again. He ascends from Flatland into the
three-dimensional Metaverse and practices riding his bike around his yard
for a while. Beyond the boundaries of his yard is nothing but blackness,
because he's not jacked into the net. It is a lost, desolate sensation, -
kind of like floating on a life raft in the Pacific Ocean.
Sometimes they see boats in the distance. A couple of these even swing
close by to check them out, but none of them seems to be in that rescuing
mood. There are few altruists in the vicinity of the Raft, and it must be
evident that they don't have much to steal.
From time to time, they see an old deep-water fishing boat, fifty to a
hundred feet long, with half a dozen or so small fast boats clustered around
it.
When Eliot informs them that these are pirate vessels, Vic and Fisheye
prick up their ears. Vic unwraps his rifle from the collection of Hefty bags
that he uses to protect it from the salt spray, and detaches the bulky sight
so that they can use it as a spyglass. Hiro can't see any reason to pull the
sight off the rifle in order to do this, other than the fact that if you
don't, it looks like you're drawing a bead on whatever you're looking at.
Whenever a pirate vessel comes into view, they all take turns looking
at it through the sight, playing with all the different sensor modes:
visible, infrared, and so on. Eliot has spent enough time knocking around
the Rim that he has become familiar with the colors of the different pirate
groups, so by examining them through the sight he can tell who they are:
Clint Eastwood and his band parallel them for a few minutes one day,
checking them out, and the Magnificent Seven send out one of their small
boats to zoom by them and look for potential booty. Hiro's almost hoping
they get taken prisoner by the Seven, because they have the nicest-looking
pirate ship: a former luxury yacht with Exocet launch tubes kludged to the
foredeck. But this reconnaissance leads nowhere. The pirates, unschooled in
thermodynamics, do not grasp the implications of the eternal plume of steam
coming from beneath the life raft.
One morning, a big old trawler materializes very close to them,
congealing out of nothing as the fog lifts. Hiro has been hearing its
engines for a while, but didn't realize how close it was.
"Who are they?" Fisheye says, choking on a cup of the freeze-dried
coffee he despises so much. He's wrapped up in a space blanket and partly
snuggled underneath the boat's waterproof canopy, just his face and hands
visible.
Eliot scopes them out with the sight. He is not a real demonstrative
guy, but it's clear that he is not very happy with what he sees. "That is
Bruce Lee," he says.
"How is that significant?" Fisheye says.
"Well, check out the colors," Eliot says.
The ship is close enough that everyone can see the flag pretty clearly.
It's a red banner with a silver fist in the middle, a pair of nunchuks
crossed beneath it, the initials B and L on either side.
"What about 'em?" Fisheye says.
"Well, the guy who calls himself Bruce Lee, who's like the leader? He
got a vest with those colors on the back."
"So?"
"So, it's not just embroidered or painted, it's actually done in
scalps. Patchwork, like."
"Say what?" Hiro says.
"There's a rumor, just a rumor man, that he went through the Refu ships
looking for people with red or silver hair so he could collect the scalps he
needed."
Hiro is still absorbing that when Fisheye makes an unexpected decision.
"I want to talk to this Bruce Lee character," he says. "He interests me."
"Why the hell do you want to talk to this fucking psycho?" Eliot says.
"Yeah," Hiro says. "Didn't you see that series on Eye Spy? He's a
maniac."
Fisheye throws up his hands as if to say the answer is, like Catholic
theology, beyond mortal comprehension. "This is my decision," he says.
"Who the fuck are you?" Eliot says.
"President of the fucking boat," Fisheye says. "I hereby nominate
myself. Is there a second?"
"Yup," Vic says, the first time he has spoken in forty-eight hours.
"All in favor say aye," Fisheye says.
"Aye," Vic says, bursting into florid eloquence.
"I win," Fisheye says. "So how do we get these Bruce Lee guys to come
over here and talk to us?"
"Why should they want to?" Eliot says. "We got nothing they want except
for poontang."
"Are you saying these guys are homos?" Fisheye says, his face
shriveling up.
"Shit, man," Eliot says, "you didn't even blink when I told you about
the scalps."
"I knew I didn't like any of this boat shit," Fisheye says.
"If this makes any difference to you, they're not gay in the sense that
we usually think of it," Eliot explains. "They're het, but they're pirates.
They'll go after anything that's warm and concave."
Fisheye makes a snap decision. "Okay, you two guys, Hiro and Eliot,
you're Chinese. Take off your clothes."
"What?"
"Do it. I'm the president, remember? You want Vic to do it for you?"
Eliot and Hiro can't help looking over at Vic, who is just sitting
there like a lump. There is something about his extremely blase attitude
that inspires fear.
"Do it or I'll fucking kill you," Fisheye says, finally driving the
point home.
Eliot and Hiro, bobbing awkwardly on the unsteady floor of the raft,
peel off their survival suits and step out of them. Then they pull off the
rest of their clothes, exposing smooth bare skin to the air for the first
time in a few days.
The trawler comes right alongside of them, no more than twenty feet
away, and cuts its engines. They are nicely equipped: half a dozen Zodiacs
with new outboards, an Exocet-type missile, two radars, and a fifty caliber
machine gun at each end of the boat, currently unmanned. A couple of
speedboats are being towed behind the trawler like dinghys and each of these
also has a heavy machine gun. And there is also a thirty-six-foot motor
yacht, following them under its own power.
There are a couple of dozen guys in Bruce Lee's pirate band, and they
are now lined up along the trawler's railing, grinning, whistling, howling
like wolves, and waving unrolled trojans in the air.
"Don't worry, man, I'm not going to let 'em fuck you," Fisheye says,
grinning.
"What you gonna do," Eliot says, "hand them a papal encyclical?"
"I'm sure they'll listen to reason," Fisheye says.
"These guys aren't scared of the Mafia, if that's what you have in
mind," Eliot says.
"That's just because they don't know us very well."
Finally, the leader comes out, Bruce Lee himself, a fortyish guy in a
Kevlar vest, an ammo vest stretched over that, a diagonal bandolier, samurai
sword - Hiro would love to take him on - nunchuks, and his colors, the
patchwork of human scalps.
He flashes them a nice grin, has a look at Hiro and Eliot, gives them a
highly suggestive, thrusting thumbs-up gesture, and then struts up and down
the length of the boat one time, swapping high fives with his merry men.
Every so often, he picks out one of the pirates at random and gestures at
the man's trojan. The pirate puts his condom to his lips and inflates it
into a slippery ribbed balloon. Then Bruce Lee inspects it, making sure
there are no leaks. Obviously, the man runs a tight ship.
Hiro can't help staring at the scalps on Bruce Lee's back. The pirates
note his interest and mug for him, pointing to the scalps, nodding, looking
back at him with wide, mocking eyes. The colors look much too uniform - no
change in the red from one to the next. Hiro concludes that Bruce Lee,
contrary to his reputation, must have just gone out and gotten scalps of any
old color, bleached them, and dyed them. What a wimp.
Finally, Bruce Lee works his way back to midship and flashes them
another big grin. He has a great, dazzling grin and he knows it; maybe it's
those one-karat diamonds Krazy Glued to his front teeth.
"Jammin' boat," he says. "Maybe you, me swap, huh? Hahaha."
Everyone on the life raft, except for Vic, just smiles a brittle smile.
"Where you goin'? Key West? Hahaha."
Bruce Lee examines Hiro and Eliot for a while, rotates his index finger
to indicate that they should spin around and display their business ends.
They do.
"Quanto?" Bruce Lee says, and all the pirates get uproarious, most of
all Bruce Lee. Hiro can feel his anal sphincter contracting to the size of a
pore.
"He's asking how much we cost," Eliot says. "It's a joke, see, because
they know they can come over and have our asses for free."
"Oh, hilarious!" Fisheye says. While Hiro and Eliot literally freeze
their asses, he's still snuggled up under the canopy, that bastard.
"Poonmissile, like?" Bruce Lee says, pointing to one of the antiship
missiles on the deck. "Bugs? Motorolas?"
"Poonmissile is a Harpoon antiship missile, real expensive," Eliot
says. "A bug is a Microchip. Motorola would be one brand, like Ford or
Chevy. Bruce Lee deals in a lot of electronics - you know, typical Asian
pirate dude."
"He'd give us a Harpoon missile for you guys?" Fisheye says.
"No! He's being sarcastic, shithead!" Eliot says.
"Tell him we want a boat with an outboard motor," Fisheye says,
"Want one zode, one kicker, fillerup," Eliot says.
Suddenly Bruce Lee gets real serious and actually considers it. "Scope
clause, chomsayen? Gauge and gag."
"He'll consider it if they can come and check out the merchandise
first," Eliot says. "They want to check out how tight we are, and whether we
are capable of suppressing our gag reflex. These are all terms from the
Raft brothel industry."
"Ombwas scope like twelves to me, hahaha."
"Us homeboys look like we have twelve-gauge assholes," Eliot says,
"i.e., that we are all stretched out and worthless."
Fisheye speaks up on his own. "No, no, four-tens, totally!"
The entire deck of the pirate ship titters with excitement.
"No way," Bruce Lee says.
"These ombwas," Fisheye says, "still got cherries up in there!"
The whole deck erupts in rude, screaming laughter. One of the pirates
scrambles up to balance on the railing, gyrates one fist in the air, and
hollers: "ba ka na zu ma lay ga no ma la aria ma na po no a ab zu ... " By
that point all the other pirates have stopped laughing, gotten serious looks
on their faces, and joined in, bellowing their own private streams of
babble, rattling the air with a profound hoarse ululation.
Hiro's feet go out from under him as the raft moves suddenly; he can
see Eliot falling down next to him.
He looks up at Bruce Lee's ship and flinches involuntarily as he sees
what looks like a dark wave cresting over the rail, washing over the row of
standing pirates, starting at the stern of the trawler and working its way
forward. But this is just some kind of optical illusion. It is not really a
wave at all. Suddenly, they are fifty feet away from the trawler, not twenty
feet. As the laughter on the railing dies away, Hiro hears a new sound: a
low whirring noise from the direction of Fisheye, and from the atmosphere
around them, a tearing, hissing noise, like the sound just before a
thunderbolt strikes, like the sound of sheets being ripped in half.
Looking back at Bruce Lee's trawler, he sees that the dark wavelike
phenomenon was a wave of blood, as though someone hosed down the deck with a
giant severed aorta. But it didn't come from outside. It erupted from the
pirates' bodies, one at a time, moving from the stem to the bow. The deck of
Bruce Lee's ship is now utterly quiet and motionless except for blood and
gelatinized internal organs sliding down the rusted steel and plopping
softly into the water.
Fisheye is up on his knees now and has torn away the canopy and space
blanket that have covered him until this point. In one hand he is holding a
long device a couple of inches in diameter, which is the source of the
whirring noise. It is a circular bundle of parallel tubes about pencil-sized
and a couple of feet long, like a miniaturized Gatling gun. It whirs around
so quickly that the individual tubes are difficult to make out; when it is
operating, it is in fact ghostly and transparent because of this rapid
motion, a glittering, translucent cloud jutting out of Fisheye's arm. The
device is attached to a wrist-thick bundle of black tubes and cables that
snake down into the large suitcase, which lies open on the bottom of the
raft. The suitcase has a built-in color monitor screen with graphics giving
information about the status of this weapons system: how much ammo is left,
the status of various subsystems. Hiro just gets a quick glimpse at it
before all of the ammunition on board Bruce Lee's ship begins to explode.
"See, I told you they'd listen to Reason," Fisheye says, shutting down
the whirling gun. Now Hiro sees a nameplate tacked onto the control panel.
version 1.0B7
Gatling-type 3-mm hypervelocity railgun system
Ng Security Industries, Inc.
PRERELEASE VERSION - NOT FOR FIELD USE
DO NOT TEST IN A POPULATED AREA
- ULTIMA RATIO REGUM -
"Fucking recoil pushed us halfway to China," Fisheye says
appreciatively.
"Did you do that? What just happened?" Eliot says.
"I did it. With Reason. See, it fires these teeny little metal
splinters. They go real fast - more energy than a rifle bullet. Depleted
uranium."
The spinning barrels have now slowed almost to a stop. It looks like
there are about two dozen of them.
"I thought you hated machine guns," Hiro says.
"I hate this fucking raft even more. Let's go get ourselves something
that goes, you know. Something with a motor on it."
Because of the fires and small explosions going off on Bruce Lee's
pirate ship, it takes them a minute to realize that several people are still
alive there, still shooting at them. When Fisheye becomes aware of this, he
pulls the trigger again, the barrels whirl themselves up into a transparent
cylinder, and the tearing, hissing noise begins again. As he waves the gun
back and forth, hosing the target down with a hypersonic shower of depleted
uranium, Bruce Lee's entire ship seems to sparkle and glitter, as though
Tinkerbell was flying back and forth from stem to stern, sprinkling nuclear
fairy dust over it.
Bruce Lee's smaller yacht makes the mistake of coming around to see
what's going on. Fisheye turns toward it for a moment and its high,
protruding bridge slides off into the water.
Major structural elements of the trawler are losing their integrity.
Enormous popping and wrenching noises are coming from inside as big pieces
of Swiss-cheesed metal give way, and the superstructure is slowly collapsing
down into the hull like a botched souffle. When Fisheye notes this, he
ceases fire.
"Cut it out, boss," Vic says.
"I'm melting!" Fisheye crows.
"We could have used that trawler, asshole," Eliot says, vindictively
yanking his pants back on.
"I didn't mean to blow it all up. I guess the little bullets just go
through everything."
"Sharp thinking, Fisheye," Hiro says.
"Well, I'm sorry I took a little action to save our asses. Come on,
let's go get one of them little boats before they all burn."
They paddle in the direction of the decapitated yacht. By the time they
reach it, Bruce Lee's trawler is just a listing, empty steel hull with
flames and smoke pouring out of it, spiced by the occasional explosion.
The remaining portion of the yacht has many, many tiny little holes in
it, and glitters with exploded fragments of fiberglass: a million tiny
little glass fibers about a millimeter long. The skipper and a crew member,
or rather the stew that they turned into when the bridge was hit by Reason,
slid off into the water along with the rest of the debris, leaving behind no
evidence of their having been there except for a pair of long parallel
streaks trailing off into the water. But there is a Filipino boy down in the
galley, the galley so low, unhurt and only dimly aware of what happened.
A number of electrical cables have been sawn in half. Eliot digs up a
toolbox from belowdecks and spends the next twelve hours patching things
together to the point where the engine can be started and the yacht can be
steered. Hiro, who has a rudimentary knowledge of electrical stuff, acts as
gofer and limp-dicked adviser.
"Did you hear the way the pirates were talking, before Fisheye opened
up on them?" Hiro asks Eliot while they are working.
"You mean in pidgin?"
"No. At the very end. The babbling."
"Yeah. That's a Raft thing."
"It is?"
"Yeah. One guy will start in and the rest will follow. I think it's
just a fad."
"But it's common on the Raft?"
"Yeah. They all speak different languages, you know, all those
different ethnic groups. It's like the fucking Tower of Babel. I think when
they make that sound - when they babble at each other - they're just
imitating what all the other groups sound like."
The Filipino kid starts making them some food. Vic and Fisheye sit down
in the main cabin belowdecks, eating, going through Chinese magazines,
looking at pictures of Asian chicks, and occasionally looking at nautical
charts. When Eliot gets the electrical system back up and running, Hiro
plugs his personal computer in, to recharge its batteries.
By the time the yacht is up and running again, it's dark. To the
southwest, a fluctuating column of light is playing back and forth against
the low overhanging cloud layer.
"Is that the Raft over there?" Fisheye says, pointing to the light, as
all hands converge on Eliot's makeshift control center.
"It is," Eliot says. "They light it up at night so that the fishing
boats can find their way back to it."
"How far away do you think it is?" Fisheye says.
Eliot shrugs. "Twenty miles."
"And how far to land?"
"I have no idea. Bruce Lee's skipper probably knew, but he's been
pureed along with everyone else."
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or
'chop.'"
"The Raft usually stays at least a hundred miles offshore," Hiro says,
"to reduce the danger of snags."
"How we doing on gas?"
"I dipped the tank," Eliot says, "and it looks like we're not doing so
well, to tell you the truth."
"What does that mean, not doing so well?"
"It's not always easy to read the level when you're out to sea," Eliot
says. "And I don't know how efficient these engines are. But if we're really
eighty or a hundred miles offshore, we might not make it."
"So we go to the Raft," Fisheye says. "We go to the Raft and persuade
someone it's in his best interests to give us some fuel. Then, back to the
mainland."
No one really believes it's going to happen this way, least of all
Fisheye. "And," he continues, "while we're there - on the Raft - after we
get the fuel and before we go home - some other stuff might happen, too, you
know. Life's unpredictable."
"If you have something in mind, why don't you just spit it out?" Hiro
says.
"Okay. Policy decision. The hostage tactic failed. So we go for an
extraction."
"Extraction of what?"
"Of Y.T."
"I go along with that," Hiro says, "but I have another person I want to
extract also, as long as we're extracting."
"Who?"
"Juanita. Come on, you said yourself she was a nice girl."
"If she's on the Raft, maybe she's not so nice," Fisheye says.
"I want to extract her anyway. We're all in this together, right? We're
all part of Lagos's gang."
"Bruce Lee has some people there," Eliot says.
"Correction. Had."
"But what I'm saying is, they're going to be pissed."
"'You think they're going to be pissed. I think they're going to be
scared shitless," Fisheye says. "Now drive the boat, Eliot. Come on, I'm