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a lot of time thinking about the possibility of fighting a land war with the
Soviets.
Most of them just look like indolent Third World militia the world
over. But at the entrance to one neighborhood, Hiro sees that the guard in
charge has a whip antenna sticking straight up in the air, sprouting from
his head.
A few minutes later, they get to a point where the beltway is
intersected by a broad street that runs straight into the middle of the
Raft, where the big ships are - the Core. The closest one is a Nipponese
containership - a low, flat-decked number with a high bridge, stacked with
steel shipping containers. It's webbed over with rope ladders and makeshift
stairways that enable people to climb up into this container or that. Many
of the containers have lights burning in them.
"Apartment building " Tranny jokes, noting Hiro's interest. Then he
shakes his head and rolls his eyes and rubs his thumb against his
fingertips. Apparently, this is quite the swell neighborhood.
The nice part of the cruise comes to an end when they notice several
fast skiffs emerging from a dark and smoky neighborhood.
"Vietnam gang," Tranny says. He puts his hand on Hiro's and gently but
firmly removes it from the outboard motor's throttle. Hiro checks them out
on radar. A couple of these guys have the little AK-47s, but most of them
are armed with knives and pistols, obviously looking forward to some
close-up, face-to-face contact. These guys in the boats are, of course, the
peons. More important-looking gents stand along the edge of the
neighborhood, smoking and watching. A couple of them are wireheads.
Tranny revs it up, turns into a sparse neighborhood of loosely
connected Arabian dhows, and maneuvers through the darkness for a while,
occasionally putting his hand on Hiro's head and gently pressing it down so
he doesn't catch a rope with his neck.
When they emerge from the fleet of dhows, the Vietnamese gang is no
longer in evidence. If this happened in daylight, the gangsters could track
them by following Reason's steam. Tranny steers them across a medium-sized
street and into a cluster of fishing boats. In the middle of this area an
old trawler sits, being cut up for scrap, cutting torches illuminating the
black surface of the water all around. But most of the work is being done
with hammers and cold chisels, which radiate appalling noise across the flat
echoing water.
"Home," Tranny says, smiling, and points to a couple of houseboats
lashed together. Lights are still burning here, a couple of guys are out on
the deck smoking fat, makeshift cigars, through the windows they can see a
couple of women working in the kitchen.
As they approach, the guys on the deck sit up, take notice, draw
revolvers out of their waistbands. But then Tranny speaks up in a happy
stream of Tagalog. And everything changes.
Tranny gets the full Prodigal Son welcome: crying, hysterical fat
ladies, a swarm of little kids piling out of their hammocks, sucking their
thumbs and jumping up and down. Older men beaming, showing great gaps and
black splotches in their smiles, watching and nodding and diving in to give
him the occasional hug.
And on the edge of the mob, way back in the darkness, is another
wirehead.
"You come in, too," says one of the women, a lady in her forties named
Eunice.
"That's okay," Hiro says. "I won't intrude."
This statement is translated and moves like a wave through the some
eight hundred and ninety-six Filipinos who have now converged on the area.
It is greeted with the utmost shock. Intrude? Unthinkable! Nonsense! How
dare you so insult us?
One of the gap-toothed guys, a miniature old man and probable World War
II veteran, jumps onto the rocking zodiac, sticks to the floor like a gecko,
wraps his arm around Hiro's shoulders, and pokes a spliff into his mouth.
He looks like a solid guy. Hiro leans into him. "Compadre, who is the
guy with the antenna? A friend of yours?"
"Nah," the guy whispers, "he's an asshole." Then he puts his index
finger dramatically to his lips and shushes.
It's all in the eyes. Along with picking handcuffs, vaulting Jersey
barriers, and fending off perverts, it is one of the quintessential Kourier
skills: walking around in a place where you don't belong without attracting
suspicion. And you do it by not looking at anyone. Keep those eyes straight
ahead no matter what, don't open them too wide, don't look tense. That, and
the fact that she just came in here with a guy that everyone is scared of,
gets her back through the containership to the reception area.
"I need to use a Street terminal," she says to the reception guy. "Can
you charge it to my room?"
"Yes, ma'am," the reception guy says. He doesn't have to ask which room
she's in. He's all smiles, all respect. Not the kind of thing you get very
often when you're a Kourier.
She could really get to like this relationship with Raven, if it
weren't for the fact that he's a homicidal mutant.
Hiro ducks out of Tranny's celebratory dinner rather early, drags
Reason off the zodiac and onto the front porch of the houseboat, opens it
up, and jacks his personal computer into its bios.
Reason reboots with no problems. That's to be expected. It's also to be
expected that later, probably when he most needs Reason to work, it will
crash again, the way it did for Fisheye. He could keep turning it off and on
every time it does this, but this is awkward in the heat of battle, and not
the type of solution that hackers admire. It would be much more sensible
just to debug it.
Which he could do by hand, if he had time. But there may be a better
way of going about it. It's possible that, by now, Ng Security Industries
has fixed the bug - come out with a new version of the software. If so, he
should be able to get a copy of it on the Street.
Hiro materializes in his office. The Librarian pokes his head out of
the next room, just in case Hiro has any questions for him.
"What does ultima ratio regum mean?"
" 'The Last Argument of Kings,' " the Librarian says. "King Louis XIV
had it stamped onto the barrels of all of the cannons that were forged
during his reign."
Hiro stands up and walks out into his garden. His motorcycle is waiting
for him on the gravel path that leads to the gate. Looking up over the
fence, Hiro can see the lights of Downtown rising in the distance again. His
computer has succeeded in jacking into L. Bob Rife's global network; he has
access to the Street. This is as Hiro had expected. Rife must have a whole
suite of satellite uplinks there on the Enterprise, patched into a cellular
network covering the Raft. Otherwise, he wouldn't be able to reach the
Metaverse from his very own watery fortress, which would never do for a man
like Rife.
Hiro climbs on his bike, eases it through the neighborhood and onto the
Street, and then gooses it up to a few hundred miles an hour, slaloming
between the stanchions of the monorail, practicing. He runs into a few of
them and stops, but that's to be expected.
Ng Security Industries has a whole floor of a mile-high neon skyscraper
near Port One, right in the middle of Downtown. Like everything else in the
Metaverse, it's open twenty-four hours, because it's always business hours
somewhere in the world. Hiro leaves his bike on the Street, takes the
elevator up to the 397th floor, and comes face to face with a receptionist
daemon. For a moment, he can't peg her racial background; then he realizes
that this daemon is half-black, half-Asian - just like him. If a white man
had stepped off the elevator, she probably would have been a blonde. A
Nipponese businessman would have come face to face with a perky Nipponese
office girl.
"Yes, sir," she says. "Is this in regard to sales or customer service?"
"Customer service."
"Whom are you with?"
"You name it, I'm with them."
"I'm sorry?" Like human receptionists, the daemon is especially bad at
handling irony.
"At the moment, I think I'm working for the Central Intelligence
Corporation, the Mafia, and Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong."
"I see," says the receptionist, making a note. Also like a human
receptionist, it is not possible to impress her. "And what product is this
in regards to?"
"Reason."
"Sir! Welcome to Ng Security Industries," says another voice.
It is another daemon, an attractive black/Asian woman in highly
professional dress, who has materialized from the depths of the office
suite.
She ushers Hiro down a long, nicely paneled hallway, down another long
paneled hallway, and then down a long paneled hallway. Every few steps, he
passes by a reception area where avatars from all over the world sit in
chairs, passing the time. But Hiro doesn't have to wait. She ushers him
straight into a nice big paneled office where an Asian man sits behind a
desk littered with models of helicopters. It is Mr. Ng himself. He stands
up; they swap bows; the usher lady checks out.
"You working with Fisheye?" Ng says, lighting up a cig. The smoke
swirls in the air ostentatiously. It takes as much computing power
realistically to model the smoke coming out of Ng's mouth as it does to
model the weather system of the entire planet.
"He's dead," Hiro says. "Reason crashed at a critical juncture, and he
ate a harpoon."
Ng doesn't react. Instead, he just sits there motionless for a few
seconds, absorbing this data, as if his customers get harpooned all the
time. He's probably got a mental database of everyone who has ever used one
of his toys and what happened to them.
"I told him it was a beta version," Ng says. "And he should have known
not to use it for infighting. A two-dollar switchblade would have served him
better."
"Agreed. But he was quite taken with it."
Ng blows out more smoke, thinking. "As we learned in Vietnam,
high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to
psychoactive drugs. Like LSD, which can convince people they can fly -
causing them to jump out of windows - weapons can make people overconfident.
Skewing their tactical judgment. As in the case of Fisheye."
"I'll be sure and remember that," Hiro says.
"What kind of combat environment do you want to use Reason in?" Ng
says.
"I need to take over an aircraft carrier tomorrow morning."
"The Enterprise?"
"Yes."
"You know," Ng says, apparently in a conversational mood, "there's a
guy who actually took over a nuclear-missile submarine armed with nothing
more than a piece of glass - "
"Yeah, that's the guy who killed Fisheye. I might have to tangle with
him, too."
Ng laughs. "What is your ultimate objective? As you know, we are all in
this together, so you may share your thoughts with me."
"I'd prefer a little more discretion in this case..."
"Too late for that, Hiro," says another voice. Hiro turns around; it is
Uncle Enzo, being ushered through the door by the receptionist - a striking
Italian woman. Just a few paces behind him is a small Asian businessman and
an Asian receptionist.
"I took the liberty of calling them in when you arrived," Ng says, "so
that we could have a powwow."
"Pleasure," Uncle Enzo says, bowing slightly to Hiro.
Hiro bows back. "I'm really sorry about the car, sir."
"It's forgotten," Uncle Enzo says.
The small Asian man has now come into the room. Hiro finally recognizes
him. It is the photo that is on the wall of every Mr. Lee's Greater Hong
Kong in the world.
Introductions and bows all around. Suddenly, a number of extra chairs
have materialized in the office, so everyone pulls one up. Ng comes out from
behind his desk, and they sit in a circle.
"Let us cut to the chase, since I assume that your situation, Hiro, may
be more precarious than ours," Uncle Enzo says.
"You got that right, sir."
"We would all like to know what the hell is going on," Mr. Lee says.
His English is almost devoid of a Chinese accent; clearly his cute, daffy
public image is just a front.
"How much of this have you guys figured out so far?"
"Bits and pieces Uncle Enzo says. "How much have you figured out?"
"Almost all of it," Hiro says. "Once I talk to Juanita, I'll have the
rest."
"In that case, you are in possession of some very valuable intel,"
Uncle Enzo says. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hypercard and
hands it toward Hiro. It says
MILLION
HONG KONG
DOLLARS
Hiro reaches out and takes the card.
Somewhere on earth, two computers swap bursts of electronic noise and
the money gets transferred from the Mafia's account to Hiro's.
"You'll take care of the split with Y.T.," Uncle Enzo says.
Hiro nods. You bet I will.
"I'm here on the Raft looking for a piece of software - a piece of
medicine to be specific - that was written five thousand years ago by a
Sumerian personage named Enki, a neurolinguistic hacker."
"What does that mean?" Mr. Lee says.
"It means a person who was capable of programming other people's minds
with verbal streams of data, known as nam-shubs."
Ng is totally expressionless. He takes another drag on his cigarette,
spouts the smoke up above his head in a geyser, watches it spread out
against the ceiling. "What is the mechanism?"
"We've got two kinds of language in our heads. The kind we're using now
is acquired. It patterns our brains as we're learning it. But there's also a
tongue that's based in the deep structures of the brain, that everyone
shares. These structures consist of basic neural circuits that have to exist
in order to allow our brains to acquire higher languages."
"Linguistic infrastructure," Uncle Enzo says.
"Yeah. I guess 'deep structure' and 'infrastructure' mean the same
thing. Anyway, we can access those parts of the brain under the right
conditions. Glossolalia - speaking in tongues -is the output side of it,
where the deep linguistic structures hook into our tongues and speak,
bypassing all the higher, acquired languages. Everyone's known that for some
time."
"You're saying there's an input side, too?" Ng says.
"Exactly. It works in reverse. Under the right conditions, your ears -
or eyes - can tie into the deep structures, bypassing the higher language
functions. Which is to say, someone who knows the right words can speak
words, or show you visual symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink
right into your brainstem. Like a cracker who breaks into a computer system,
bypasses all the security precautions, and plugs himself into the core,
enabling him to exert absolute control over the machine."
"In that situation, the people who own the computer are helpless," Ng
says.
"Right. Because they access the machine at a higher level, which has
now been overridden. In the same sense, once a neurolinguistic hacker plugs
into the deep structures of our brain, we can't get him out - because we
can't even control our own brain at such a basic level."
"What does this have to do with a clay tablet on the Enterprise?" Mr.
Lee says.
"Bear with me. This language - the mother tongue - is a vestige of an
earlier phase of human social development. Primitive societies were
controlled by verbal rules called me. The me were like little programs for
humans. They were a necessary part of the transition from caveman society to
an organized, agricultural society. For example, there was a program for
plowing a furrow in the ground and planting grain. There was a program for
baking bread and another one for making a house. There were also me for
higher-level functions such as war, diplomacy, and religious ritual. All the
skills required to operate a self-sustaining culture were contained in these
me, which were written down on tablets or passed around in an oral
tradition. In any case, the repository for the me was the local temple,
which was a database of me, controlled by a priest/king called an en. When
someone needed bread, they would go to the en or one of his underlings and
download the bread-making me from the temple. Then they would carry out the
instructions - run the program - and when they were finished, they'd have a
loaf of bread.
"A central database was necessary, among other reasons, because some of
the me had to be properly timed. If people carried out the
plowing-and-planting me at the wrong time of year, the harvest would fail
and everyone would starve. The only way to make sure that the me were
properly timed was to build astronomical observatories to watch the skies
for the changes of season. So the Sumerians built towers 'with their tops
with the heavens' - topped with astronomical diagrams. The en would watch
the skies and dispense the agricultural me at the proper times of year to
keep the economy running."
"I think you have a chicken-and-egg problem," Uncle Enzo says. "How did
such a society first come to be organized?"
"There is an informational entity known as the metavirus, which causes
information systems to infect themselves with customized viruses. This may
be just a basic principle of nature, like Darwinian selection, or it may be
an actual piece of information that floats around the universe on comets and
radio waves - I'm not sure. In any case, what it comes down to is this: Any
information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected
with viruses - viruses generated from within itself.
"At some point in the distant past, the metavirus infected the human
race and has been with us ever since. The first thing it did was to spawn a
whole Pandora's box of DNA viruses - smallpox, influenza, and so on. Health
and longevity became a thing of the past. A distant memory of this event is
preserved in legends of the Fall from Paradise, in which mankind was ejected
from a life of ease into a world infested with disease and pain.
"That plague eventually reached some kind of a plateau. We still see
new DNA viruses from time to time, but it seems that our bodies have
developed a resistance to DNA viruses in general."
"Perhaps," Ng says, "there are only so many viruses that will work in
the human DNA, and the metavirus has created all of them."
"Could be. Anyway, Sumerian culture - the society based on me -was
another manifestation of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in
a linguistic form rather than DNA."
"Excuse me," Mr. Lee says. "You are saying that civilization started
out as an infection?"
"Civilization in its primitive form, yes. Each me was a sort of virus,
kicked out by the metavirus principle. Take the example of the bread-baking
me. Once that me got into society, it was a self-sustaining piece of
information. It's a simple question of natural selection: people who know
how to bake bread will live better and be more apt to reproduce than people
who don't know how. Naturally, they will spread the me, acting as hosts for
this self-replicating piece of information. That makes it a virus. Sumerian
culture - with its temples full of me - was just a collection of successful
viruses that had accumulated over the millennia. It was a franchise
operation, except it had ziggurats instead of golden arches, and clay
tablets instead of three-ring binders.
"The Sumerian word for 'mind,' or 'wisdom,' is identical to the word
for 'ear.' That's all those people were: ears with bodies attached. Passive
receivers of information. But Enki was different. Enki was an en who just
happened to be especially good at his job. He had the unusual ability to
write new me - he was a hacker. He was, actually, the first modem man, a
fully conscious human being, just like us.
"At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People
were carrying out the same old me all the time, not coming up with new ones,
not thinking for themselves. I suspect that he was lonely, being one of the
few - perhaps the only - conscious human being in the world. He realized
that in order for the human race to advance, they had to be delivered from
the grip of this viral civilization.
"So he created the nam-shub of Enki, a countervirus that spread along
the same routes as the me and the metavirus. It went into the deep
structures of the brain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could
understand the Sumerian language, or any other deep strucure - based
language. Cut off from our common deep structures, we began to develop new
languages that had nothing in common with each other. The me no longer
worked and it was not possible to write new me. Further transmission of the
metavirus was blocked."
"Why didn't everyone starve from lack of bread, having lost the
bread-making me?" Uncle Enzo says.
"Some probably did. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and
figure it out. So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings
of human consciousness - when we first had to think for ourselves. It was
the beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to
think about abstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That's where the
name Babel comes from. Literally it means 'Gate of God.' It was the gate
that allowed God to reach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a
gateway that was opened by the nam-shub of Enki that broke us free from the
metavirus and gave us the ability to think - moved us from a materialistic
world to a dualistic world - a binary world - with both a physical and a
spiritual component.
"There was probably chaos and upheaval. Enki, or his son Marduk, tried
to reimpose order on society by supplanting the old system of me with a code
of laws - The Code of Hammurabi. It was partially successful. Asherah
worship continued in many places, though. It was an incredibly tenacious
cult, a throwback to Sumer, that spread itself both verbally and through the
exchange of bodily fluids - they had cult prostitutes, and they also adopted
orphans and spread the virus to them via breast milk."
"Wait a minute," Ng says. "Now you are talking about a biological virus
again."
"Exactly. That's the whole point of Asherah. It's both. As an example,
look at herpes simplex. Herpes heads straight for the nervous system when it
enters the body. Some strains stay in the peripheral nervous system, but
other strains head like a bullet for the central nervous system and take up
permanent residence in the cells of the brain -coiling around the brainstem
like a serpent around a tree. The Asherah virus, which may be related to
herpes, or they may be one and the same, passes through the cell walls and
goes to the nucleus and messes with the cell's DNA in the same way that
steroids do. But Asherah is a lot more complicated than a steroid."
"And when it alters that DNA, what is the result?"
"No one has studied it, except maybe for L. Bob Rife. I think it
definitely brings the mother tongue closer to the surface, makes people more
apt to speak in tongues and more susceptible to me. I would guess that it
also tends to encourage irrational behavior, maybe lowers the victim's
defenses to viral ideas, makes them sexually promiscuous, perhaps all of the
above."
"Does every viral idea have a biological virus counterpart?" Uncle Enzo
says.
"No. Only Asherah does, as far as I know. That is why, of all the me
and all the gods and religious practices that predominated in Sumer, only
Asherah is still going strong today. A viral idea can be stamped out - as
happened with Nazism, bell bottoms, and Bart Simpson T-shirts - but Asherah,
because it has a biological aspect, can remain latent in the human body.
After Babel, Asherah was still resident in the human brain, being passed on
from mother to child and from lover to lover.
"We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria.
Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until
you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions.
Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational
part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. But
being physically infected with a virulent strain of the Asherah virus makes
you a whole lot more susceptible. The only thing that keeps these things
from taking over the world is the Babel factor - the walls of mutual
incomprehension that compartmentalize the human race and stop the spread of
viruses.
"Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of
Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to
infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely
robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew -
that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a
group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were
the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme
nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign
ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah
and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout
history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it
every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in
copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as
they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled
substance.
"They may have gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned
biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer
Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or
maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take
advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these
people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and
manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the
kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name.
"In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the
subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as
religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example
the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy,
of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to
alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in
preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the
territory where the viral cult had once thrived - from India to Spain - was
under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism.
"But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it
infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to
resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who
imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid
adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested
with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as
stifling.
"The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of
this condition - sort of an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new
nam-shub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of
the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the
message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message
symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles
went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The
message was clear enough: We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas
stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed
among all the people.
"People who were used to the rigid theocracy of the Pharisees couldn't
handle the idea of a popular, nonhierarchical church. They wanted popes and
bishops and priests. And so the myth of the Resurrection was added onto the
gospels. The message was changed to a form of idolatry. In this new version
of the gospels, Jesus came back to earth and organized a church, which later
became the Church of the Eastern and Western Roman Empire - another rigid,
brutal, and irrational theocracy.
"At the same time, the Pentecostal church was being founded. The early
Christians spoke in tongues. The Bible says, 'And all were amazed and
perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?"' Well, I think I
may be able to answer that question. It was a viral outbreak. Asherah had
been present, lurking in the population, ever since the triumph of the
deuteronomists. The informational hygiene measures practiced by the Jews
kept it suppressed. But in the early days of Christianity, there must have
been a lot of chaos, a lot of radicals and free thinkers running around,
flouting tradition. Throwbacks to the days of prerational religion.
Throwbacks to Sumer. And sure enough, they all started talking to each other
in the tongue of Eden.
"The mainline Christian church refused to accept glossolalia. They
frowned on it for a few centuries and officially purged it at the Council of
Constantinople in 381. The glossolalic cult remained on the fringes of the
Christian world. The Church was willing to accept a little bit of
xenoglossia. if it helped convert heathens, as in the case of St. Louis
Bertrand who converted thousands of Indians in the sixteenth century,
spreading glossolalia across the continent faster than smallpox. But as soon
as they were converted, those Indians were supposed to shut up and speak
Latin like everyone else.
"The Reformation opened the door a little wider. But Pentecostalism
didn't really take off until the year 1900, when a small group of
Bible-college students in Kansas began to speak in tongues. They spread the
practice to Texas. There it became known as the revival movement. It spread
like wildfire, all across the United States, and then the world, reaching
China and India in 1906. The twentieth century's mass media, high literacy
rates, and high-speed transportation all served as superb vectors for the
infection. In a packed revival hall or a Third World refugee encampment,
glossolalia spread from one person to the next as fast as panic. By the
eighties, the number of Pentecostals worldwide numbered in the tens of
millions.
"And then came television, and the Reverend Wayne, backed up by the
vast media power of L. Bob Rife. The behavior that the Reverend Wayne
promulgates through his television shows, pamphlets, and franchises can be
traced in an unbroken line back to the Pentecostal cults of early
Christianity, and from there back to pagan glossolalia cults. The cult of
Asherah lives. The Reverend Wayne's Pearly Cates is the cult of Asherah."
"Lagos figured all of this out. He was originally a researcher at the
Library of Congress, later became part of CIC when it absorbed the Library.
He made a living by discovering interesting things in the Library, facts no
one else had bothered to dig up. He would organize these facts and sell them
to people. Once he figured out all of this Enki/Asherah stuff, he went
looking for someone who would pay for it and settled on L. Bob Rife, Lord of
Bandwidth, owner of the fiber-optics monopoly, who at that time employed
more programmers than anyone else on earth.
"Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought
too small. He figured that with a little venture capital, this
neurolinguistic hacking could be developed as a new technology that would
enable Rife to maintain possession of information that had passed into the
brains of his programmers. Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad
idea.
"Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be
much more powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off.
Then he started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a
small church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a
smalltime preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important
than the Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious
franchises all over the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse
campus, to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all
over the Third World and began converting people by the hundreds of
thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand. L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is
the most successful religion since the creation of Islam. They do a lot of
talking about Jesus, but like many self-described Christian churches, it has
nothing to do with Christianity except that they use his name. It's a
postrational religion.
"He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or
enhancer of the cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that
through the use of cult prostitution because it is flagrantly
anti-Christian. But one of the major functions of his Third World
missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and vaccinate people - and
there was more than just vaccine in those needles.
"Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we
don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do
take a lot of drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus
from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.
"In the meantime, he got the Raft going as a way of transporting
hundreds of thousands of his cultists from the wretched parts of Asia into
the United States. The media image of the Raft is that it is a place of
utter chaos, where thousands of different languages are spoken and there is
no central authority. But it's not like that at all. It's highly organized
and tightly controlled. These people are all talking to each other in
tongues. L. Bob Rife has taken xenoglossia and perfected it, turned it into
a science.
"He can control these people by grafting radio receivers into their
skulls, broadcasting instructions - me - directly into their brainstems. If
one person in a hundred has a receiver, he can act as the local en and
distribute the me of L. Bob Rife to all the others. They will act out L. Bob
Rife's instructions as though they have been programmed to. And right now,
he has about a million of these people poised off the California coast.
"He also has a digital metavirus, in binary code, that can infect
computers, or hackers, via the optic nerve."
"How did he translate it into binary form?" Ng says.
"I don't think he did. I think he found it in space. Rife owns the
biggest radio astronomy network in the world. He doesn't do real astronomy
with it - he just listens for signals from other planets. It stood to reason
that sooner or later, one of his dishes would pick up the metavirus."
"How does that stand to reason?"
"The metavirus is everywhere. Anywhere life exists, the metavirus is
there, too, propagating through it. Originally, it was spread around on
comets. That's probably how life first came to the Earth, and that's
probably how the metavirus came here also. But comets are slow, whereas
radio waves are fast. In binary form, a virus can bounce around the universe
at the speed of light. It infects a civilized planet, gets into its
computers, reproduces, and inevitably gets broadcast on television or radio
or whatever. Those transmissions don't stop at the edge of the atmosphere -
they radiate out into space, forever. And if they hit a planet with another
civilized culture, where people are listening to the stars the way Rife was
doing, then that planet gets infected, too. I think that was Rife's plan,
and I think it worked. Except that Rife was smart -he caught it in a
controlled manner. He put it in a bottle. An informational warfare agent for
him to use at his discretion. When it is placed into a computer, it
snow-crashes the computer by causing it to infect itself with new viruses.
But it is much more devastating when it goes into the mind of a hacker, a
person who has an understanding of binary code built into the deep
structures of his brain. The binary metavirus will destroy the mind of a
hacker."
"So Rife can control two kinds of people," Ng says. "He can control
Pentecostals by using me written in the mother tongue. And he can control
hackers in a much more violent fashion by damaging their brains with binary
viruses."
"Exactly."
"What do you think Rife wants?" Ng says.
"He wants to be Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look, it's simple: Once he
converts you to his religion, he can control you with me. And he can convert
millions of people to his religion because it spreads like a fucking virus -
people have no resistance to it because no one is used to thinking about
religion, people aren't rational enough to argue about this kind of thing.
Basically, anyone who reads the National Enquirer or watches pro wrestling
on TV is easy to convert. And with Snow Crash as a promoter, it's even
easier to get converts.
"Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modem
culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or
alliterate and relies on TV - which is sort of an oral tradition. And we
have a small, extremely literate power elite - the people who go into the
Metaverse, basically - who understand that information is power, and who
control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic
computer languages.
"That makes us a big stumbling block to Rife's plan. People like L. Bob
Rife can't do anything without us hackers. And even if he could convert us,
he wouldn't be able to use us, because what we do is creative in nature and
can't be duplicated by people running me. But he can threaten us with the
blunt instrument of Snow Crash. That, I think, is what happened to Da5id. It
may have been an experiment, just to see if Snow Crash worked on a real
hacker, and it may have been a warning shot intended to demonstrate Rife's
power to the hacker community. The message: If Asherah gets broadcast into
the technological priesthood - "
"Napalm on wildflowers," Ng says.
"As far as I know, there's no way to stop the binary virus. But there's
an antidote to Rife's bogus religion. The nam-shub of Enki still exists. He
gave a copy to his son Marduk, who passed it on to Hammurabi. Now, Marduk
may or may not have been a real person. The point is that Enki went out of
his way to leave the impression that he had passed on his nam-shub in some
form. In other words, he was planting a message that later generations of
hackers were supposed to decode, if Asherah should rise again.
"I am fairly certain that the information we need is contained within a
clay envelope that was excavated from the ancient Sumerian city of Eridu in
southern Iraq ten years ago. Eridu was the seat of Enki; in other words,
Enki was the local en of Eridu, and the temple of Eridu contained his me,
including the nam-shub that we are looking for."
"Who excavated this clay envelope?"
"The Eridu dig was sponsored entirely by a religious university in
Bayview, Texas."
"L. Bob Rife's?"
"You got it. He created an archaeology department whose sole function
was to dig up the city of Eridu, locate the temple where Enki stored all of
his me, and take it all home. L. Bob Rife wanted to reverse-engineer the
skills that Enki possessed; by analyzing Enki's me, he wanted to create his
very own neurolinguistic hackers, who could write new me that would become
the ground rules, the program, for the new society that Rife wants to
create."
"But among these me is a copy of the nam-shub of Enki," Ng says, "which
is dangerous to Rife's plan."
"Right. He wanted that tablet, too - not to analyze but to keep to
himself, so no one could use it against him."
"If you can obtain a copy of this nam-shub," Ng says, "what effect
would it have?"
"If we could transmit the nam-shub of Enki to all of the en on the
Raft, they would relay it to all of the Raft people. It would jam their
mother-tongue neurons and prevent Rife from programming them with new me,"
Hiro says. "But we really need to get this done before the Raft breaks up -
before the Refus all come ashore. Rife talks to his en through a central
transmitter on the Enterprise, which I take to be a fairly short-range,
line-of-sight type of thing. Pretty soon he'll use this system to distribute
a big me that will cause all the Refus to come ashore as a unified army with
coordinated marching orders. In other words, the Raft will break up, and
after that it won't be possible to reach all of these people anymore with a
single transmission. So we have to do it as soon as possible."
"Mr. Rife will be most unhappy," Ng predicts. "He will try to retaliate
by unleashing Snow Crash against the technological priesthood."
"I know that," Hiro says "but I can only worry about one thing at a
time. I could use a little help here."
"Easier said than done," Ng says. "To reach the Core, one must fly over
the Raft or drive a small boat through its midst. Rife has a million people
there with rifles and missile launchers. Even high-tech weapons systems
cannot defeat organized small-arms fire on a massive scale."
"Get some choppers out to this vicinity, then," Hiro says. "Something.
Anything. If I can get my hands on the nam-shub of Enki and infect everyone
on the Raft with it, then you can approach safely."
"We'll see what we can come up with," Uncle Enzo says.
"Fine," Hiro says. "Now, what about Reason?"
Ng mumbles something and a card appears in his hand. "Here's a new
version of the system software," he says. "It should be a little less
buggy."
"A little less?"
"No piece of software is ever bug free," Ng says.
Uncle Enzo says, "I guess there's a little bit of Asherah in all of
us."
Hiro finds his own way out and takes the elevator all the way back down
to the Street. When he exits the neon skyscraper, a black-and-white girl is
sitting on his motorcycle, messing with the controls.
"Where are you?" she says.
"I'm on the Raft, too. Hey, we just made twenty-five million dollars."
He is sure that just this one time, Y.T. is going to be impressed by
something that he says. But she's not.
"That'll buy me a really happening funeral when they mail me home in a
piece of Tupperware," she says.
"Why would that happen?"
"I'm in trouble," she admits - for the first time in her life. "I think
my boyfriend is going to kill me."
"Who's your boyfriend?"
"Raven."
If avatars could turn pale and woozy and have to sit down on the
sidewalk, Hiro's would. "Now I know why he has POOR IMPULSE CONTROL tattooed
across his forehead."
"This is great. I was hoping to get a little cooperation or at least
maybe some advice," she says.
"If you think he's going to kill you, you're wrong, because if you were
right, you'd be dead," Hiro says.
"Depends on your assumptions," she says. She goes on to tell him a
highly entertaining story about a dentata.
"I'm going to try to help you," Hiro says, "but I'm not necessarily the
safest guy on the Raft to hang out with, either."
"Did you hook up with your girlfriend yet?"
"No. But I have high hopes for that. Assuming I can stay alive."
"High hopes for what?"
"Our relationship."
"Why?" she asks. "What's changed between then and now?"
This is one of these utterly simple and obvious questions that is
irritating because Hiro's not sure of the answer. "Well, I think I figured
out what she was doing - why she came here."
"So?"
Another simple and obvious question. "So, I feel like I understand her
now."
"You do?"
"Yeah, well, sort of."
"And is that supposed to be a good thing?"
"Well, sure."
"Hiro, you are such a geek. She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not
supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after."
"Well, what is she after, do you suppose - keeping in mind that you've
Soviets.
Most of them just look like indolent Third World militia the world
over. But at the entrance to one neighborhood, Hiro sees that the guard in
charge has a whip antenna sticking straight up in the air, sprouting from
his head.
A few minutes later, they get to a point where the beltway is
intersected by a broad street that runs straight into the middle of the
Raft, where the big ships are - the Core. The closest one is a Nipponese
containership - a low, flat-decked number with a high bridge, stacked with
steel shipping containers. It's webbed over with rope ladders and makeshift
stairways that enable people to climb up into this container or that. Many
of the containers have lights burning in them.
"Apartment building " Tranny jokes, noting Hiro's interest. Then he
shakes his head and rolls his eyes and rubs his thumb against his
fingertips. Apparently, this is quite the swell neighborhood.
The nice part of the cruise comes to an end when they notice several
fast skiffs emerging from a dark and smoky neighborhood.
"Vietnam gang," Tranny says. He puts his hand on Hiro's and gently but
firmly removes it from the outboard motor's throttle. Hiro checks them out
on radar. A couple of these guys have the little AK-47s, but most of them
are armed with knives and pistols, obviously looking forward to some
close-up, face-to-face contact. These guys in the boats are, of course, the
peons. More important-looking gents stand along the edge of the
neighborhood, smoking and watching. A couple of them are wireheads.
Tranny revs it up, turns into a sparse neighborhood of loosely
connected Arabian dhows, and maneuvers through the darkness for a while,
occasionally putting his hand on Hiro's head and gently pressing it down so
he doesn't catch a rope with his neck.
When they emerge from the fleet of dhows, the Vietnamese gang is no
longer in evidence. If this happened in daylight, the gangsters could track
them by following Reason's steam. Tranny steers them across a medium-sized
street and into a cluster of fishing boats. In the middle of this area an
old trawler sits, being cut up for scrap, cutting torches illuminating the
black surface of the water all around. But most of the work is being done
with hammers and cold chisels, which radiate appalling noise across the flat
echoing water.
"Home," Tranny says, smiling, and points to a couple of houseboats
lashed together. Lights are still burning here, a couple of guys are out on
the deck smoking fat, makeshift cigars, through the windows they can see a
couple of women working in the kitchen.
As they approach, the guys on the deck sit up, take notice, draw
revolvers out of their waistbands. But then Tranny speaks up in a happy
stream of Tagalog. And everything changes.
Tranny gets the full Prodigal Son welcome: crying, hysterical fat
ladies, a swarm of little kids piling out of their hammocks, sucking their
thumbs and jumping up and down. Older men beaming, showing great gaps and
black splotches in their smiles, watching and nodding and diving in to give
him the occasional hug.
And on the edge of the mob, way back in the darkness, is another
wirehead.
"You come in, too," says one of the women, a lady in her forties named
Eunice.
"That's okay," Hiro says. "I won't intrude."
This statement is translated and moves like a wave through the some
eight hundred and ninety-six Filipinos who have now converged on the area.
It is greeted with the utmost shock. Intrude? Unthinkable! Nonsense! How
dare you so insult us?
One of the gap-toothed guys, a miniature old man and probable World War
II veteran, jumps onto the rocking zodiac, sticks to the floor like a gecko,
wraps his arm around Hiro's shoulders, and pokes a spliff into his mouth.
He looks like a solid guy. Hiro leans into him. "Compadre, who is the
guy with the antenna? A friend of yours?"
"Nah," the guy whispers, "he's an asshole." Then he puts his index
finger dramatically to his lips and shushes.
It's all in the eyes. Along with picking handcuffs, vaulting Jersey
barriers, and fending off perverts, it is one of the quintessential Kourier
skills: walking around in a place where you don't belong without attracting
suspicion. And you do it by not looking at anyone. Keep those eyes straight
ahead no matter what, don't open them too wide, don't look tense. That, and
the fact that she just came in here with a guy that everyone is scared of,
gets her back through the containership to the reception area.
"I need to use a Street terminal," she says to the reception guy. "Can
you charge it to my room?"
"Yes, ma'am," the reception guy says. He doesn't have to ask which room
she's in. He's all smiles, all respect. Not the kind of thing you get very
often when you're a Kourier.
She could really get to like this relationship with Raven, if it
weren't for the fact that he's a homicidal mutant.
Hiro ducks out of Tranny's celebratory dinner rather early, drags
Reason off the zodiac and onto the front porch of the houseboat, opens it
up, and jacks his personal computer into its bios.
Reason reboots with no problems. That's to be expected. It's also to be
expected that later, probably when he most needs Reason to work, it will
crash again, the way it did for Fisheye. He could keep turning it off and on
every time it does this, but this is awkward in the heat of battle, and not
the type of solution that hackers admire. It would be much more sensible
just to debug it.
Which he could do by hand, if he had time. But there may be a better
way of going about it. It's possible that, by now, Ng Security Industries
has fixed the bug - come out with a new version of the software. If so, he
should be able to get a copy of it on the Street.
Hiro materializes in his office. The Librarian pokes his head out of
the next room, just in case Hiro has any questions for him.
"What does ultima ratio regum mean?"
" 'The Last Argument of Kings,' " the Librarian says. "King Louis XIV
had it stamped onto the barrels of all of the cannons that were forged
during his reign."
Hiro stands up and walks out into his garden. His motorcycle is waiting
for him on the gravel path that leads to the gate. Looking up over the
fence, Hiro can see the lights of Downtown rising in the distance again. His
computer has succeeded in jacking into L. Bob Rife's global network; he has
access to the Street. This is as Hiro had expected. Rife must have a whole
suite of satellite uplinks there on the Enterprise, patched into a cellular
network covering the Raft. Otherwise, he wouldn't be able to reach the
Metaverse from his very own watery fortress, which would never do for a man
like Rife.
Hiro climbs on his bike, eases it through the neighborhood and onto the
Street, and then gooses it up to a few hundred miles an hour, slaloming
between the stanchions of the monorail, practicing. He runs into a few of
them and stops, but that's to be expected.
Ng Security Industries has a whole floor of a mile-high neon skyscraper
near Port One, right in the middle of Downtown. Like everything else in the
Metaverse, it's open twenty-four hours, because it's always business hours
somewhere in the world. Hiro leaves his bike on the Street, takes the
elevator up to the 397th floor, and comes face to face with a receptionist
daemon. For a moment, he can't peg her racial background; then he realizes
that this daemon is half-black, half-Asian - just like him. If a white man
had stepped off the elevator, she probably would have been a blonde. A
Nipponese businessman would have come face to face with a perky Nipponese
office girl.
"Yes, sir," she says. "Is this in regard to sales or customer service?"
"Customer service."
"Whom are you with?"
"You name it, I'm with them."
"I'm sorry?" Like human receptionists, the daemon is especially bad at
handling irony.
"At the moment, I think I'm working for the Central Intelligence
Corporation, the Mafia, and Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong."
"I see," says the receptionist, making a note. Also like a human
receptionist, it is not possible to impress her. "And what product is this
in regards to?"
"Reason."
"Sir! Welcome to Ng Security Industries," says another voice.
It is another daemon, an attractive black/Asian woman in highly
professional dress, who has materialized from the depths of the office
suite.
She ushers Hiro down a long, nicely paneled hallway, down another long
paneled hallway, and then down a long paneled hallway. Every few steps, he
passes by a reception area where avatars from all over the world sit in
chairs, passing the time. But Hiro doesn't have to wait. She ushers him
straight into a nice big paneled office where an Asian man sits behind a
desk littered with models of helicopters. It is Mr. Ng himself. He stands
up; they swap bows; the usher lady checks out.
"You working with Fisheye?" Ng says, lighting up a cig. The smoke
swirls in the air ostentatiously. It takes as much computing power
realistically to model the smoke coming out of Ng's mouth as it does to
model the weather system of the entire planet.
"He's dead," Hiro says. "Reason crashed at a critical juncture, and he
ate a harpoon."
Ng doesn't react. Instead, he just sits there motionless for a few
seconds, absorbing this data, as if his customers get harpooned all the
time. He's probably got a mental database of everyone who has ever used one
of his toys and what happened to them.
"I told him it was a beta version," Ng says. "And he should have known
not to use it for infighting. A two-dollar switchblade would have served him
better."
"Agreed. But he was quite taken with it."
Ng blows out more smoke, thinking. "As we learned in Vietnam,
high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to
psychoactive drugs. Like LSD, which can convince people they can fly -
causing them to jump out of windows - weapons can make people overconfident.
Skewing their tactical judgment. As in the case of Fisheye."
"I'll be sure and remember that," Hiro says.
"What kind of combat environment do you want to use Reason in?" Ng
says.
"I need to take over an aircraft carrier tomorrow morning."
"The Enterprise?"
"Yes."
"You know," Ng says, apparently in a conversational mood, "there's a
guy who actually took over a nuclear-missile submarine armed with nothing
more than a piece of glass - "
"Yeah, that's the guy who killed Fisheye. I might have to tangle with
him, too."
Ng laughs. "What is your ultimate objective? As you know, we are all in
this together, so you may share your thoughts with me."
"I'd prefer a little more discretion in this case..."
"Too late for that, Hiro," says another voice. Hiro turns around; it is
Uncle Enzo, being ushered through the door by the receptionist - a striking
Italian woman. Just a few paces behind him is a small Asian businessman and
an Asian receptionist.
"I took the liberty of calling them in when you arrived," Ng says, "so
that we could have a powwow."
"Pleasure," Uncle Enzo says, bowing slightly to Hiro.
Hiro bows back. "I'm really sorry about the car, sir."
"It's forgotten," Uncle Enzo says.
The small Asian man has now come into the room. Hiro finally recognizes
him. It is the photo that is on the wall of every Mr. Lee's Greater Hong
Kong in the world.
Introductions and bows all around. Suddenly, a number of extra chairs
have materialized in the office, so everyone pulls one up. Ng comes out from
behind his desk, and they sit in a circle.
"Let us cut to the chase, since I assume that your situation, Hiro, may
be more precarious than ours," Uncle Enzo says.
"You got that right, sir."
"We would all like to know what the hell is going on," Mr. Lee says.
His English is almost devoid of a Chinese accent; clearly his cute, daffy
public image is just a front.
"How much of this have you guys figured out so far?"
"Bits and pieces Uncle Enzo says. "How much have you figured out?"
"Almost all of it," Hiro says. "Once I talk to Juanita, I'll have the
rest."
"In that case, you are in possession of some very valuable intel,"
Uncle Enzo says. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hypercard and
hands it toward Hiro. It says
MILLION
HONG KONG
DOLLARS
Hiro reaches out and takes the card.
Somewhere on earth, two computers swap bursts of electronic noise and
the money gets transferred from the Mafia's account to Hiro's.
"You'll take care of the split with Y.T.," Uncle Enzo says.
Hiro nods. You bet I will.
"I'm here on the Raft looking for a piece of software - a piece of
medicine to be specific - that was written five thousand years ago by a
Sumerian personage named Enki, a neurolinguistic hacker."
"What does that mean?" Mr. Lee says.
"It means a person who was capable of programming other people's minds
with verbal streams of data, known as nam-shubs."
Ng is totally expressionless. He takes another drag on his cigarette,
spouts the smoke up above his head in a geyser, watches it spread out
against the ceiling. "What is the mechanism?"
"We've got two kinds of language in our heads. The kind we're using now
is acquired. It patterns our brains as we're learning it. But there's also a
tongue that's based in the deep structures of the brain, that everyone
shares. These structures consist of basic neural circuits that have to exist
in order to allow our brains to acquire higher languages."
"Linguistic infrastructure," Uncle Enzo says.
"Yeah. I guess 'deep structure' and 'infrastructure' mean the same
thing. Anyway, we can access those parts of the brain under the right
conditions. Glossolalia - speaking in tongues -is the output side of it,
where the deep linguistic structures hook into our tongues and speak,
bypassing all the higher, acquired languages. Everyone's known that for some
time."
"You're saying there's an input side, too?" Ng says.
"Exactly. It works in reverse. Under the right conditions, your ears -
or eyes - can tie into the deep structures, bypassing the higher language
functions. Which is to say, someone who knows the right words can speak
words, or show you visual symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink
right into your brainstem. Like a cracker who breaks into a computer system,
bypasses all the security precautions, and plugs himself into the core,
enabling him to exert absolute control over the machine."
"In that situation, the people who own the computer are helpless," Ng
says.
"Right. Because they access the machine at a higher level, which has
now been overridden. In the same sense, once a neurolinguistic hacker plugs
into the deep structures of our brain, we can't get him out - because we
can't even control our own brain at such a basic level."
"What does this have to do with a clay tablet on the Enterprise?" Mr.
Lee says.
"Bear with me. This language - the mother tongue - is a vestige of an
earlier phase of human social development. Primitive societies were
controlled by verbal rules called me. The me were like little programs for
humans. They were a necessary part of the transition from caveman society to
an organized, agricultural society. For example, there was a program for
plowing a furrow in the ground and planting grain. There was a program for
baking bread and another one for making a house. There were also me for
higher-level functions such as war, diplomacy, and religious ritual. All the
skills required to operate a self-sustaining culture were contained in these
me, which were written down on tablets or passed around in an oral
tradition. In any case, the repository for the me was the local temple,
which was a database of me, controlled by a priest/king called an en. When
someone needed bread, they would go to the en or one of his underlings and
download the bread-making me from the temple. Then they would carry out the
instructions - run the program - and when they were finished, they'd have a
loaf of bread.
"A central database was necessary, among other reasons, because some of
the me had to be properly timed. If people carried out the
plowing-and-planting me at the wrong time of year, the harvest would fail
and everyone would starve. The only way to make sure that the me were
properly timed was to build astronomical observatories to watch the skies
for the changes of season. So the Sumerians built towers 'with their tops
with the heavens' - topped with astronomical diagrams. The en would watch
the skies and dispense the agricultural me at the proper times of year to
keep the economy running."
"I think you have a chicken-and-egg problem," Uncle Enzo says. "How did
such a society first come to be organized?"
"There is an informational entity known as the metavirus, which causes
information systems to infect themselves with customized viruses. This may
be just a basic principle of nature, like Darwinian selection, or it may be
an actual piece of information that floats around the universe on comets and
radio waves - I'm not sure. In any case, what it comes down to is this: Any
information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected
with viruses - viruses generated from within itself.
"At some point in the distant past, the metavirus infected the human
race and has been with us ever since. The first thing it did was to spawn a
whole Pandora's box of DNA viruses - smallpox, influenza, and so on. Health
and longevity became a thing of the past. A distant memory of this event is
preserved in legends of the Fall from Paradise, in which mankind was ejected
from a life of ease into a world infested with disease and pain.
"That plague eventually reached some kind of a plateau. We still see
new DNA viruses from time to time, but it seems that our bodies have
developed a resistance to DNA viruses in general."
"Perhaps," Ng says, "there are only so many viruses that will work in
the human DNA, and the metavirus has created all of them."
"Could be. Anyway, Sumerian culture - the society based on me -was
another manifestation of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in
a linguistic form rather than DNA."
"Excuse me," Mr. Lee says. "You are saying that civilization started
out as an infection?"
"Civilization in its primitive form, yes. Each me was a sort of virus,
kicked out by the metavirus principle. Take the example of the bread-baking
me. Once that me got into society, it was a self-sustaining piece of
information. It's a simple question of natural selection: people who know
how to bake bread will live better and be more apt to reproduce than people
who don't know how. Naturally, they will spread the me, acting as hosts for
this self-replicating piece of information. That makes it a virus. Sumerian
culture - with its temples full of me - was just a collection of successful
viruses that had accumulated over the millennia. It was a franchise
operation, except it had ziggurats instead of golden arches, and clay
tablets instead of three-ring binders.
"The Sumerian word for 'mind,' or 'wisdom,' is identical to the word
for 'ear.' That's all those people were: ears with bodies attached. Passive
receivers of information. But Enki was different. Enki was an en who just
happened to be especially good at his job. He had the unusual ability to
write new me - he was a hacker. He was, actually, the first modem man, a
fully conscious human being, just like us.
"At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People
were carrying out the same old me all the time, not coming up with new ones,
not thinking for themselves. I suspect that he was lonely, being one of the
few - perhaps the only - conscious human being in the world. He realized
that in order for the human race to advance, they had to be delivered from
the grip of this viral civilization.
"So he created the nam-shub of Enki, a countervirus that spread along
the same routes as the me and the metavirus. It went into the deep
structures of the brain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could
understand the Sumerian language, or any other deep strucure - based
language. Cut off from our common deep structures, we began to develop new
languages that had nothing in common with each other. The me no longer
worked and it was not possible to write new me. Further transmission of the
metavirus was blocked."
"Why didn't everyone starve from lack of bread, having lost the
bread-making me?" Uncle Enzo says.
"Some probably did. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and
figure it out. So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings
of human consciousness - when we first had to think for ourselves. It was
the beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to
think about abstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That's where the
name Babel comes from. Literally it means 'Gate of God.' It was the gate
that allowed God to reach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a
gateway that was opened by the nam-shub of Enki that broke us free from the
metavirus and gave us the ability to think - moved us from a materialistic
world to a dualistic world - a binary world - with both a physical and a
spiritual component.
"There was probably chaos and upheaval. Enki, or his son Marduk, tried
to reimpose order on society by supplanting the old system of me with a code
of laws - The Code of Hammurabi. It was partially successful. Asherah
worship continued in many places, though. It was an incredibly tenacious
cult, a throwback to Sumer, that spread itself both verbally and through the
exchange of bodily fluids - they had cult prostitutes, and they also adopted
orphans and spread the virus to them via breast milk."
"Wait a minute," Ng says. "Now you are talking about a biological virus
again."
"Exactly. That's the whole point of Asherah. It's both. As an example,
look at herpes simplex. Herpes heads straight for the nervous system when it
enters the body. Some strains stay in the peripheral nervous system, but
other strains head like a bullet for the central nervous system and take up
permanent residence in the cells of the brain -coiling around the brainstem
like a serpent around a tree. The Asherah virus, which may be related to
herpes, or they may be one and the same, passes through the cell walls and
goes to the nucleus and messes with the cell's DNA in the same way that
steroids do. But Asherah is a lot more complicated than a steroid."
"And when it alters that DNA, what is the result?"
"No one has studied it, except maybe for L. Bob Rife. I think it
definitely brings the mother tongue closer to the surface, makes people more
apt to speak in tongues and more susceptible to me. I would guess that it
also tends to encourage irrational behavior, maybe lowers the victim's
defenses to viral ideas, makes them sexually promiscuous, perhaps all of the
above."
"Does every viral idea have a biological virus counterpart?" Uncle Enzo
says.
"No. Only Asherah does, as far as I know. That is why, of all the me
and all the gods and religious practices that predominated in Sumer, only
Asherah is still going strong today. A viral idea can be stamped out - as
happened with Nazism, bell bottoms, and Bart Simpson T-shirts - but Asherah,
because it has a biological aspect, can remain latent in the human body.
After Babel, Asherah was still resident in the human brain, being passed on
from mother to child and from lover to lover.
"We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria.
Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until
you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions.
Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational
part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. But
being physically infected with a virulent strain of the Asherah virus makes
you a whole lot more susceptible. The only thing that keeps these things
from taking over the world is the Babel factor - the walls of mutual
incomprehension that compartmentalize the human race and stop the spread of
viruses.
"Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of
Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to
infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely
robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew -
that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a
group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were
the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme
nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign
ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah
and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout
history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it
every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in
copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as
they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled
substance.
"They may have gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned
biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer
Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or
maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take
advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these
people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and
manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the
kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name.
"In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the
subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as
religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example
the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy,
of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to
alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in
preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the
territory where the viral cult had once thrived - from India to Spain - was
under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism.
"But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it
infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to
resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who
imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid
adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested
with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as
stifling.
"The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of
this condition - sort of an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new
nam-shub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of
the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the
message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message
symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles
went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The
message was clear enough: We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas
stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed
among all the people.
"People who were used to the rigid theocracy of the Pharisees couldn't
handle the idea of a popular, nonhierarchical church. They wanted popes and
bishops and priests. And so the myth of the Resurrection was added onto the
gospels. The message was changed to a form of idolatry. In this new version
of the gospels, Jesus came back to earth and organized a church, which later
became the Church of the Eastern and Western Roman Empire - another rigid,
brutal, and irrational theocracy.
"At the same time, the Pentecostal church was being founded. The early
Christians spoke in tongues. The Bible says, 'And all were amazed and
perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?"' Well, I think I
may be able to answer that question. It was a viral outbreak. Asherah had
been present, lurking in the population, ever since the triumph of the
deuteronomists. The informational hygiene measures practiced by the Jews
kept it suppressed. But in the early days of Christianity, there must have
been a lot of chaos, a lot of radicals and free thinkers running around,
flouting tradition. Throwbacks to the days of prerational religion.
Throwbacks to Sumer. And sure enough, they all started talking to each other
in the tongue of Eden.
"The mainline Christian church refused to accept glossolalia. They
frowned on it for a few centuries and officially purged it at the Council of
Constantinople in 381. The glossolalic cult remained on the fringes of the
Christian world. The Church was willing to accept a little bit of
xenoglossia. if it helped convert heathens, as in the case of St. Louis
Bertrand who converted thousands of Indians in the sixteenth century,
spreading glossolalia across the continent faster than smallpox. But as soon
as they were converted, those Indians were supposed to shut up and speak
Latin like everyone else.
"The Reformation opened the door a little wider. But Pentecostalism
didn't really take off until the year 1900, when a small group of
Bible-college students in Kansas began to speak in tongues. They spread the
practice to Texas. There it became known as the revival movement. It spread
like wildfire, all across the United States, and then the world, reaching
China and India in 1906. The twentieth century's mass media, high literacy
rates, and high-speed transportation all served as superb vectors for the
infection. In a packed revival hall or a Third World refugee encampment,
glossolalia spread from one person to the next as fast as panic. By the
eighties, the number of Pentecostals worldwide numbered in the tens of
millions.
"And then came television, and the Reverend Wayne, backed up by the
vast media power of L. Bob Rife. The behavior that the Reverend Wayne
promulgates through his television shows, pamphlets, and franchises can be
traced in an unbroken line back to the Pentecostal cults of early
Christianity, and from there back to pagan glossolalia cults. The cult of
Asherah lives. The Reverend Wayne's Pearly Cates is the cult of Asherah."
"Lagos figured all of this out. He was originally a researcher at the
Library of Congress, later became part of CIC when it absorbed the Library.
He made a living by discovering interesting things in the Library, facts no
one else had bothered to dig up. He would organize these facts and sell them
to people. Once he figured out all of this Enki/Asherah stuff, he went
looking for someone who would pay for it and settled on L. Bob Rife, Lord of
Bandwidth, owner of the fiber-optics monopoly, who at that time employed
more programmers than anyone else on earth.
"Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought
too small. He figured that with a little venture capital, this
neurolinguistic hacking could be developed as a new technology that would
enable Rife to maintain possession of information that had passed into the
brains of his programmers. Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad
idea.
"Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be
much more powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off.
Then he started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a
small church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a
smalltime preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important
than the Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious
franchises all over the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse
campus, to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all
over the Third World and began converting people by the hundreds of
thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand. L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is
the most successful religion since the creation of Islam. They do a lot of
talking about Jesus, but like many self-described Christian churches, it has
nothing to do with Christianity except that they use his name. It's a
postrational religion.
"He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or
enhancer of the cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that
through the use of cult prostitution because it is flagrantly
anti-Christian. But one of the major functions of his Third World
missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and vaccinate people - and
there was more than just vaccine in those needles.
"Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we
don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do
take a lot of drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus
from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.
"In the meantime, he got the Raft going as a way of transporting
hundreds of thousands of his cultists from the wretched parts of Asia into
the United States. The media image of the Raft is that it is a place of
utter chaos, where thousands of different languages are spoken and there is
no central authority. But it's not like that at all. It's highly organized
and tightly controlled. These people are all talking to each other in
tongues. L. Bob Rife has taken xenoglossia and perfected it, turned it into
a science.
"He can control these people by grafting radio receivers into their
skulls, broadcasting instructions - me - directly into their brainstems. If
one person in a hundred has a receiver, he can act as the local en and
distribute the me of L. Bob Rife to all the others. They will act out L. Bob
Rife's instructions as though they have been programmed to. And right now,
he has about a million of these people poised off the California coast.
"He also has a digital metavirus, in binary code, that can infect
computers, or hackers, via the optic nerve."
"How did he translate it into binary form?" Ng says.
"I don't think he did. I think he found it in space. Rife owns the
biggest radio astronomy network in the world. He doesn't do real astronomy
with it - he just listens for signals from other planets. It stood to reason
that sooner or later, one of his dishes would pick up the metavirus."
"How does that stand to reason?"
"The metavirus is everywhere. Anywhere life exists, the metavirus is
there, too, propagating through it. Originally, it was spread around on
comets. That's probably how life first came to the Earth, and that's
probably how the metavirus came here also. But comets are slow, whereas
radio waves are fast. In binary form, a virus can bounce around the universe
at the speed of light. It infects a civilized planet, gets into its
computers, reproduces, and inevitably gets broadcast on television or radio
or whatever. Those transmissions don't stop at the edge of the atmosphere -
they radiate out into space, forever. And if they hit a planet with another
civilized culture, where people are listening to the stars the way Rife was
doing, then that planet gets infected, too. I think that was Rife's plan,
and I think it worked. Except that Rife was smart -he caught it in a
controlled manner. He put it in a bottle. An informational warfare agent for
him to use at his discretion. When it is placed into a computer, it
snow-crashes the computer by causing it to infect itself with new viruses.
But it is much more devastating when it goes into the mind of a hacker, a
person who has an understanding of binary code built into the deep
structures of his brain. The binary metavirus will destroy the mind of a
hacker."
"So Rife can control two kinds of people," Ng says. "He can control
Pentecostals by using me written in the mother tongue. And he can control
hackers in a much more violent fashion by damaging their brains with binary
viruses."
"Exactly."
"What do you think Rife wants?" Ng says.
"He wants to be Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look, it's simple: Once he
converts you to his religion, he can control you with me. And he can convert
millions of people to his religion because it spreads like a fucking virus -
people have no resistance to it because no one is used to thinking about
religion, people aren't rational enough to argue about this kind of thing.
Basically, anyone who reads the National Enquirer or watches pro wrestling
on TV is easy to convert. And with Snow Crash as a promoter, it's even
easier to get converts.
"Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modem
culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or
alliterate and relies on TV - which is sort of an oral tradition. And we
have a small, extremely literate power elite - the people who go into the
Metaverse, basically - who understand that information is power, and who
control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic
computer languages.
"That makes us a big stumbling block to Rife's plan. People like L. Bob
Rife can't do anything without us hackers. And even if he could convert us,
he wouldn't be able to use us, because what we do is creative in nature and
can't be duplicated by people running me. But he can threaten us with the
blunt instrument of Snow Crash. That, I think, is what happened to Da5id. It
may have been an experiment, just to see if Snow Crash worked on a real
hacker, and it may have been a warning shot intended to demonstrate Rife's
power to the hacker community. The message: If Asherah gets broadcast into
the technological priesthood - "
"Napalm on wildflowers," Ng says.
"As far as I know, there's no way to stop the binary virus. But there's
an antidote to Rife's bogus religion. The nam-shub of Enki still exists. He
gave a copy to his son Marduk, who passed it on to Hammurabi. Now, Marduk
may or may not have been a real person. The point is that Enki went out of
his way to leave the impression that he had passed on his nam-shub in some
form. In other words, he was planting a message that later generations of
hackers were supposed to decode, if Asherah should rise again.
"I am fairly certain that the information we need is contained within a
clay envelope that was excavated from the ancient Sumerian city of Eridu in
southern Iraq ten years ago. Eridu was the seat of Enki; in other words,
Enki was the local en of Eridu, and the temple of Eridu contained his me,
including the nam-shub that we are looking for."
"Who excavated this clay envelope?"
"The Eridu dig was sponsored entirely by a religious university in
Bayview, Texas."
"L. Bob Rife's?"
"You got it. He created an archaeology department whose sole function
was to dig up the city of Eridu, locate the temple where Enki stored all of
his me, and take it all home. L. Bob Rife wanted to reverse-engineer the
skills that Enki possessed; by analyzing Enki's me, he wanted to create his
very own neurolinguistic hackers, who could write new me that would become
the ground rules, the program, for the new society that Rife wants to
create."
"But among these me is a copy of the nam-shub of Enki," Ng says, "which
is dangerous to Rife's plan."
"Right. He wanted that tablet, too - not to analyze but to keep to
himself, so no one could use it against him."
"If you can obtain a copy of this nam-shub," Ng says, "what effect
would it have?"
"If we could transmit the nam-shub of Enki to all of the en on the
Raft, they would relay it to all of the Raft people. It would jam their
mother-tongue neurons and prevent Rife from programming them with new me,"
Hiro says. "But we really need to get this done before the Raft breaks up -
before the Refus all come ashore. Rife talks to his en through a central
transmitter on the Enterprise, which I take to be a fairly short-range,
line-of-sight type of thing. Pretty soon he'll use this system to distribute
a big me that will cause all the Refus to come ashore as a unified army with
coordinated marching orders. In other words, the Raft will break up, and
after that it won't be possible to reach all of these people anymore with a
single transmission. So we have to do it as soon as possible."
"Mr. Rife will be most unhappy," Ng predicts. "He will try to retaliate
by unleashing Snow Crash against the technological priesthood."
"I know that," Hiro says "but I can only worry about one thing at a
time. I could use a little help here."
"Easier said than done," Ng says. "To reach the Core, one must fly over
the Raft or drive a small boat through its midst. Rife has a million people
there with rifles and missile launchers. Even high-tech weapons systems
cannot defeat organized small-arms fire on a massive scale."
"Get some choppers out to this vicinity, then," Hiro says. "Something.
Anything. If I can get my hands on the nam-shub of Enki and infect everyone
on the Raft with it, then you can approach safely."
"We'll see what we can come up with," Uncle Enzo says.
"Fine," Hiro says. "Now, what about Reason?"
Ng mumbles something and a card appears in his hand. "Here's a new
version of the system software," he says. "It should be a little less
buggy."
"A little less?"
"No piece of software is ever bug free," Ng says.
Uncle Enzo says, "I guess there's a little bit of Asherah in all of
us."
Hiro finds his own way out and takes the elevator all the way back down
to the Street. When he exits the neon skyscraper, a black-and-white girl is
sitting on his motorcycle, messing with the controls.
"Where are you?" she says.
"I'm on the Raft, too. Hey, we just made twenty-five million dollars."
He is sure that just this one time, Y.T. is going to be impressed by
something that he says. But she's not.
"That'll buy me a really happening funeral when they mail me home in a
piece of Tupperware," she says.
"Why would that happen?"
"I'm in trouble," she admits - for the first time in her life. "I think
my boyfriend is going to kill me."
"Who's your boyfriend?"
"Raven."
If avatars could turn pale and woozy and have to sit down on the
sidewalk, Hiro's would. "Now I know why he has POOR IMPULSE CONTROL tattooed
across his forehead."
"This is great. I was hoping to get a little cooperation or at least
maybe some advice," she says.
"If you think he's going to kill you, you're wrong, because if you were
right, you'd be dead," Hiro says.
"Depends on your assumptions," she says. She goes on to tell him a
highly entertaining story about a dentata.
"I'm going to try to help you," Hiro says, "but I'm not necessarily the
safest guy on the Raft to hang out with, either."
"Did you hook up with your girlfriend yet?"
"No. But I have high hopes for that. Assuming I can stay alive."
"High hopes for what?"
"Our relationship."
"Why?" she asks. "What's changed between then and now?"
This is one of these utterly simple and obvious questions that is
irritating because Hiro's not sure of the answer. "Well, I think I figured
out what she was doing - why she came here."
"So?"
Another simple and obvious question. "So, I feel like I understand her
now."
"You do?"
"Yeah, well, sort of."
"And is that supposed to be a good thing?"
"Well, sure."
"Hiro, you are such a geek. She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not
supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after."
"Well, what is she after, do you suppose - keeping in mind that you've