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Virginia.
The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip,
videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document.
It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster.
He uploads it to the CIC database - the Library, formerly the Library
of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely
clear on what the word "congress" means. And even the word "library" is
getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old ones. Then
they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all of the
information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say, ones
and zeroes. And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to
date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more
sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive
difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence
Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart
anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering.
Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading millions of other
fragments at the same time. CIC's clients, mostly large corporations and
Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if
they find a use for something that Hiro put into it, Hiro gets paid. A year
ago, he uploaded an entire first-draft film script that he stole from an
agent's wastebasket in Burbank. Half a dozen studios wanted to see it. He
ate and vacationed off of that one for six months.
Since then, times have been leaner. He has been learning the hard way
that 99 percent of the information in the Library never gets used at all.
Case in point: After a certain Kourier tipped him off to the existence
of Vitaly Chernobyl, he put a few intensive weeks into researching a new
musical phenomenon - the rise of Ukrainian nuclear fuzz-grunge collectives
in L.A. He has planted exhaustive notes on this trend in the Library,
including video and audio. Not one single record label, agent, or rock
critic has bothered to access it.
The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a
polished glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using
the machine, this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with
the surface of the computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and
foreshortened on its surface.
Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly
laid in several weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's father, who was
stationed in Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept
bringing them back from his stints in the Far East, encased in many
protective layers, so that when he took them out to show Hiro, it was like
watching an exquisite striptease as they emerged from all that black leather
and nylon, zippers and straps. And once the lens was finally exposed, pure
geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could
only think it was like nuzzling through skirts and lingerie and outer labia
and inner labia.... It made him feel naked and weak and brave.
The lens can see half of the universe - the half that is above the
computer, which includes most of Hiro. In this way, it can generally keep
track of where Hiro is and what direction he's looking in.
Down inside the computer are three lasers - a red one, a green one, and
a blue one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful
enough to burn through the back of your eyeball and broil your brain, fry
your frontals, lase your lobes. As everyone learned in elementary school,
these three colors of light can be combined, with different intensities, to
produce any color that Hiro's eye is capable of seeing.
In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards
of the computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the
use of electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep
back and forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as
the electron beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous
Tube. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality.
By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image
can be made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a
second, it can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional
image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye
can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little
earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic
soundtrack.
So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer generated
universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his
earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse.
Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the
U-Stor-It.
Hiro is approaching the Street. It is the Broadway, the Champs Elysees
of the Metaverse. It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen,
miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses of his goggles. It does
not really exist. But right now, millions of people are walking up and down
it.
The dimensions of the Street are fixed by a protocol, hammered out by
the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing
Machinery's Global Multimedia Protocol Group. The Street seems to be a grand
boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a
radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers. That makes it 65,536
kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than Earth.
The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who
recognizes it more readily than his own mother's date of birth: It happens
to be a power of 2 - 2^16 power to be exact - and even the exponent 16 is
equal to 2^4 , and 4 is equal to 2^2. Along with 256; 32,768; and
2,147,483,648; 65,536 is one of the foundation stones of the hacker
universe, in which 2 is the only really important number because that's how
many digits a computer can recognize. One of those digits is 0, and the
other is 1. Any number that can be created by fetishistically multiplying 2s
by each other, and subtracting the occasional 1, will be instantly
recognizable to a hacker.
Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development.
Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one.
They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist
in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special
neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored,
and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other.
The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist -
it's just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper
somewhere - none of these things is being physically built. They are,
rather, pieces of software, made available to the public over the worldwide
fiber-optics network. When Hiro goes into the Metaverse and looks down the
Street and sees buildings and electric signs stretching off into the
darkness, disappearing over the curve of the globe, he is actually staring
at the graphic representations - the user interfaces - of a myriad different
pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations. In order
to place these things on the Street, they have had to get approval from the
Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buy frontage on the Street,
get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors, the whole bit. The
money these corporations pay to build things on the Street all goes into a
trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays for developing and
expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist.
Hiro has a house in a neighborhood just off the busiest part of the
Street. It is a very old neighborhood by Street standards. About ten years
ago, when the Street protocol was first written, Hiro and some of his
buddies pooled their money and bought one of the first development licenses,
created a little neighborhood of hackers. At the time, it was just a little
patchwork of light amid a vast blackness. Back then, the Street was just a
necklace of streetlights around a black ball in space.
Since then, the neighborhood hasn't changed much, but the Street has.
By getting in on it early, Hiro's buddies got a head start on the whole
business. Some of them even got very rich off of it.
That's why Hiro has a nice big house in the Metaverse but has to share
a 20-by-30 in Reality. Real estate acumen does not always extend across
universes.
The sky and the ground are black, like a computer screen that hasn't
had anything drawn into it yet; it is always nighttime in the Metaverse, and
the Street is always garish and brilliant, like Las Vegas freed from
constraints of physics and finance. But people in Hiro's neighborhood are
very good programmers, so it's tasteful. The houses look like real houses.
There are a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright reproductions and some fancy
Victoriana.
So it's always a shock to step out onto the Street, where everything
seems to be a mile high. This is Downtown, the most heavily developed area.
If you go a couple of hundred kilometers in either direction, the
development will taper down to almost nothing, just a thin chain of
streetlights casting white pools on the black velvet ground. But Downtown is
a dozen Manhattans, embroidered with neon and stacked on top of each other.
In the real world - planet Earth, Reality - there are somewhere between
six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud
bricks or fieldstripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough
money to own a computer; these people have more money than all of the others
put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of
them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines
that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about
sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in
another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway,
by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their
employer, and at any given time the Street is occupied by twice the
population of New York City.
That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a
building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest,
best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.
It is a hundred meters wide, with a narrow monorail track running down
the middle. The monorail is a free piece of public utility software that
enables users to change their location on the Street rapidly and smoothly. A
lot of people just ride back and forth on it, looking at the sights. When
Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago, the monorail hadn't been written
yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motorcycle software in order to
get around. They would take their software out and race it in the black
desert of the electronic night.
Y.T. has been privileged to watch many a young Clint plant his sweet
face in an empty Burbclave pool during an unauthorized night run, but always
on a skateboard, never ever in a car. The landscape of the suburban night
has much weird beauty if you just look.
Back on the paddle again. It rolls across the yard on a set of RadiKS
Mark IV Smartwheels. She upgraded to said magical sprockets after the
following ad appeared in Thrasher magazine.
CHISELED SPAM is what you will see in the mirror
if you surf on a weak plank with dumb, fixed wheels
and interface with a muffler, retread, snow turd, road
kill, driveshaft, railroad tie, or unconscious pedestrian.
If you think this is unlikely, you've been surfing too
many ghost malls. All of these obstacles and more
were recently observed on a one-mile stretch of the
New Jersey Turnpike. Any surfer who tried to groove
that 'vard on a stock plank would have been sneezing
brains.
Don't listen to so-called purists who claim any obstacle
can be jumped. Professional Kouriers know: If you
have pooned a vehicle moving fast enough for fun and
profit, your reaction time is cut to tenths of a second -
even less if you are way spooled.
Buy a set of RadiKS Mark II Smartwheels - it's cheaper
than a total face retread and a lot more fun. Smartwheels
use sonar, laser rangefinding, and millimeter-wave radar
to identify mufflers and other debris before you even
get honed about them.
Don't get Midasized - upgrade today!
These were words of wisdom. Y.T. bought the wheels. Each one consists
of a hub with many stout spokes. Each spoke telescopes in five sections. On
the end is a squat foot, rubber tread on the bottom, swiveling on a ball
joint. As the wheels roll, the feet plant themselves one at a time, almost
glomming into one continuous tire. If you surf over a bump, the spokes
retract to pass over it. If you surf over a chuckhole, the robo-prongs plumb
its asphalty depths. Either way, the shock is thereby absorbed, no thuds,
smacks, vibrations, or clunks will make their way into the plank or the
Converse hightops with which you tread it. The ad was right -you cannot be a
professional road surfer without smartwheels.
Prompt delivery of the pizza will be a trivial matter. She glides from
the dewy turf over the lip of the driveway without a bump, picks up speed on
the 'crete, surfs down its slope into the street. A twitch of the butt
reorients the plank, now she is cruising down Homedale Mews looking for a
victim. A black car, alive with nasty lights, whines past her the other way,
closing in on the hapless Hiro Protagonist. Her RadiKS Knight Vision goggles
darken strategically to cut the noxious glaring of same, her pupils feel
safe to remain wide open, scanning the road for signs of movement. The
swimming pool was at the crest of this Burbclave, it's downhill from here,
but not downhill enough.
Half a block away, on a side street, a bimbo box, a minivan, grinds its
four pathetic cylinders into action. She sees it catercorner from her
present coordinates. The white backup lights flash instantly as the driver
shifts into D by way of R and N. Y.T. aims herself at the curb, hits it at a
fast running velocity, the spokes of the smartwheels see it coming and
retract in the right way so that she glides from street to lawn without a
hitch. Across the lawn, the feet leave a trail of hexagonal padmarks. A
stray dog turd, red with meaty undigestible food coloring, is embossed with
the RadiKS logo, a mirror image of which is printed on the tread of each
spoke.
The bimbo box is pulling away from the curb, across the street.
Squirrelly scrubbing noises squirm from its sidewalls as they grind against
the curb; we are in the Burbs, where it is better to take a thousand clicks
off the lifespan of your Goodyears by invariably grinding them up against
curbs than to risk social ostracism and outbreaks of mass hysteria by
parking several inches away, out in the middle of the street (That's okay,
Mom, I can walk to the curb from here), a menace to traffic, a deadly
obstacle to uncertain young bicyclists. Y.T. has pressed the release button
on her poon's reel/handle unit, allowing a meter of cord to unwind. She
whips it up and around her head like a bolo on the austral range. She is
about to lambada this trite conveyance. The head of the poon, salad-bowl
size, whistles as it orbits around; this is unnecessary but sounds cool.
Pooning a bimbo box takes more skill than a ped would ever imagine,
because of their very road-unworthiness, their congenital lack of steel or
other ferrous matter for the MagnaPoon to bite down on. Now they have
superconducting poons that stick to aluminum bodywork by inducing eddy
currents in the actual flesh of the car, turning it into an unwilling
electromagnet, but Y.T. does not have one of these. They are the trademark
of the hardcore Burbclave surfer, which, despite this evening's
entertainment, she is not. Her poon will only stick to steel, iron, or
(slightly) to nickel. The only steel in a bimbo box of this make is in the
frame.
She makes a low-slung approach. Her poon's orbital plane is nearly
vertical, it almost grinds on the twinkly suburban macadam on the forward
limb of each orbit. When she pounds the release button, it takes off from an
altitude of about one centimeter, angling slightly upward, across the
street, under the floor of the bimbo box, and sucks steel. It's a solid hit,
as solid as you can get on this nebula of air, upholstery, paint, and
marketing known as the family minivan.
The reaction is instantaneous, quick-witted by Burb standards. This
person wants Y.T. gone. The van takes off like a hormone-pumped bull who has
just been nailed in the ass by the barbed probe of a picador. It's not Mom
at the wheel. It's young Studley, the teenaged boy, who like every other boy
in this Burbclave has been taking intravenous shots of horse testosterone
every afternoon in the high school locker room since he was fourteen years
old. Now he's bulky, stupid, thoroughly predictable.
He steers erratically, artificially pumped muscles not fully under his
control. The molded, leather-grained, maroon-colored steering wheel smells
like his mother's hand lotion; this drives him into a rage. The bimbo box
surges and slows, surges and slows, because he is pumping the gas pedal,
because holding it to the floor doesn't seem to have any effect. He wants
this car to be like his muscles: more power than he knows what to do with.
Instead, it hampers him. As a compromise, he hits the button that says
POWER. Another button that says ECONOMY pops out and goes dead, reminding
him, like an educational demonstration, that the two are mutually exclusive.
The van's tiny engine downshifts, which makes it feel more powerful. He
holds his foot steady on the gas and, making the run down Cottage Heights
Road, the minivan's speed approaches one hundred kilometers.
Approaching the terminus of Cottage Heights Road, where it tees into
Bellewoode Valley Road, he espies a fire hydrant. TMAWH fire hydrants are
numerous, for safety, and highly designed, for property values, not the
squat iron things imprinted with the name of some godforsaken Industrial
Revolution foundry and furry from a hundred variously flaked layers of cheap
city paint. They are brass, robot-polished every Thursday morning, dignified
pipes rising straight up from the perfect, chemically induced turf of the
Burbclave lawns, flaring out to present potential firefighters with a menu
of three possible hose connections. They were designed on a computer screen
by the same aesthetes who designed the DynaVictorian houses and the tasteful
mailboxes and the immense marble street signs that sit at each intersection
like headstones. Designed on a computer screen, but with an eye toward the
elegance of things past and forgotten about. Fire hydrants that tasteful
people are proud to have on their front lawns. Fire hydrants that the real
estate people don't feel the need to airbrush out of pictures.
This fucking Kourier is about to die, knotted around one of those fire
hydrants. Studley the Testosterone Boy will see to it. It is a maneuver he
has witnessed on television - which tells no lies - a trick he has practiced
many times in his head. Building up maximum speed on Cottage Heights, he
will yank the hand brake while swinging the wheel. The ass end of the
minivan will snap around. The pesky Kourier will be cracked like a whip at
the end of her unbreakable cable. Into the fire hydrant she will go. Studley
the Teenager will be victorious, free to cruise in triumph down Bellewoode
Valley and out into the greater world of adult men in cool cars, free to go
return his overdue videotape, Raft Warriors IV: The Final Battle.
Y.T. does not know any of this for a fact, but she suspects it. None of
this is real. It is her reconstruction of the psychological environment
inside of that bimbo box. She sees the hydrant coming a mile away, sees
Studley reaching down to rest one hand on the parking brake. It is all so
obvious. She feels sorry for Studley and his ilk. She reels out, gives
herself lots of slack. He whips the wheel, jerks the brake. The minivan goes
sideways, overshooting its mark, and doesn't quite snap her around the way
he wanted; she has to help it. As its ass is rotating around, she reels in
hard, converting that gift of angular momentum into forward velocity, and
ends up shooting right past the van going well over a mile a minute. She is
headed for a marble gravestone that says BELLEWOODE VALLEY ROAD. She leans
away from it, leans into a vicious turn, her spokes grip the pavement and
push her away from that gravestone, she can touch the pavement with one hand
she is heeled over so hard, the spokes push her onto the desired street.
Meanwhile, she has clicked off the electromagnetic force that held her
pooned to the van. The poon head comes loose, caroms off the pavement behind
her as it is automatically reeled in to reunite with the handle. She is
headed straight for the exit of the Burbclave at fantastic speed.
Behind her, an explosive crash sounds, resonating in her gut, as the
minivan slides sideways into the gravestone.
She ducks under the security gate and plunges into traffic on Oahu. She
cuts between two veering, blaring, and screeching BMWs. BMW drivers take
evasive action at the drop of a hat, emulating the drivers in the BMW
advertisements - this is how they convince themselves they didn't get ripped
off. She drops into a fetal position to pass underneath a semi, headed for
the Jersey barrier in the median strip like she's going to die, but Jersey
barriers are easy for the smartwheels. That lower limb of the barrier has
such a nice bank to it, like they designed it for road surfers. She rides
halfway up the barrier, angles gently back down to the lane for a smooth
landing, and she's in traffic. There's a car right there and she doesn't
even have to throw the poon, just reaches out and plants it right on the lid
of the trunk.
This driver's resigned to his fate, doesn't care, doesn't hassle her.
He takes her as far as the entrance to the next Burbclave, which is a White
Columns. Very southern, traditional, one of the Apartheid Burbclaves. Big
ornate sign above the main gate: WHITE PEOPLE ONLY. NON-CAUCASIANS MUST BE
PROCESSED.
She's got a White Columns visa. Y.T. has a visa to everywhere. It's
right there on her chest, a little bar code. A laser scans it as she careens
toward the entrance and the immigration gate swings open for her. It's an
ornate ironwork number, but harried White Columns residents don't have time
to sit idling at the Burbclave entrance watching the gate slowly roll aside
in Old South majestic turpitude, so it's mounted on some kind of
electromagnetic railgun.
She is gliding down the antebellum tree-lined lanes of White Columns,
one microplantation after another, still coasting on the residual kinetic
energy boost that originated in the fuel in Studley the Teenager's gas tank.
The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just
skimming off a tiny bit of it.
The LEDs on the pizza box say: 29:32, and the guy who ordered it - Mr.
Pudgely and his neighbors, the Pinkhearts and the Roundass clan - are all
gathered on the front lawn of their microplantation, prematurely
celebrating. Like they had just bought the winning lottery ticket. From
their front door they have a clear view all the way down to Oahu Road, and
they can see that nothing is on its way that looks like a CosaNostra
delivery car. Oh, there is curiosity - sniffing interest - at this Kourier
with the big square thing under her arm - maybe a portfolio, a new ad layout
for some Caucasian supremacist marketing honcho in the next plat over, but -
The Pudgelys and the Pinkhearts and the Roundasses are all staring at
her, slackjawed. She has just enough residual energy to swing into their
driveway. Her momentum carries her to the top. She stops next to Mr.
Pudgely's Acura and Mrs. Pudgely's bimbo box and steps off her plank. The
spokes, noting her departure, even themselves out, plant themselves on the
top of the driveway, refuse to roll backward.
A blinding light from the heavens shines down upon them. Her Knight
Visions keep her from being blinded, but the customers bend their knees and
hunch their shoulders as though the light were heavy. The men hold their
hairy forearms up against their brows, swivel their great tubular bodies to
and fro, trying to find the source of the illumination, muttering clipped
notations to each other, brief theories about its source, fully in control
of the unknown phenomenon. The women coo and flutter. Because of the magical
influence of the Knight Visions, Y.T. can still see the LEDs: 29:54, and
that's what it says when she drops the pizza on Mr. Pudgely's wing tips.
The mystery light goes off.
The others are still blinded, but Y.T. sees into the night with her
Knight Visions, sees all the way into near infrared, and she sees the source
of it, a double-bladed stealth helicopter thirty feet above the neighbor's
house. It is tastefully black and unadorned, not a news crew though another
helicopter, an old-fashioned audible one, brightly festooned with
up-to-the-minute logos, is thumping and whacking its way across White
Columns airspace at this very moment, goosing the plantations with its own
spotlight, hoping to be the first to obtain this major scoop: a pizza was
delivered late tonight, film at eleven. Later, our personality journalist
speculates on where Uncle Enzo will stay when he makes his compulsory trip
to our Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area. But the black chopper is
running dark, would be nearly invisible if not for the infrared trail coming
out of its twin turbojets.
It is a Mafia chopper, and all they wanted to do was to record the
event on videotape so that Mr. Pudgely would not have a leg to hop around on
in court, should he decide to take his case down to Judge Bob's Judicial
System and argue for a free pizza.
One more thing. There's a lot of shit in the air tonight, a few
megatons of topsoil blowing down from Fresno, and so when the laser beam
comes on it is startlingly visible, a tiny geometric line, a million blazing
red grains strung on a fiber-optic thread, snapping into life instantly
between the chopper and Y.T.'s chest. It appears to widen into a narrow fan,
an acute triangle of red light whose base encompasses all of Y.T.'s torso.
It takes half a second. They are scanning the many bar codes mounted on
her chest. They are finding out who she is. The Mafia now knows everything
about Y.T. - where she lives, what she does, her eye color, credit record,
ancestry, and blood type.
That done, the chopper tilts and vanishes into the night like a hockey
puck sliding into a bowl of India ink. Mr. Pudgely is saying something,
making a joke about how close they came, the others eke out a laugh, but
Y.T. cannot hear them because they are buried under the thunderwhack of the
news chopper, then flash-frozen and crystalized under its spotlight. The
night air is full of bugs, and now Y.T. can see all of them, swirling in
mysterious formations, hitching rides on people and on currents of air.
There is one on her wrist, but she doesn't slap at it.
The spotlight lingers for a minute. The broad square of the pizza box,
bearing the CosaNostra logo, is mute testimony. They hover, shoot a little
tape just in case.
Y.T. is bored. She gets on her plank. The wheels blossom and become
circular. She guides a tight wobbly course around the cars, coasts down into
the street. The spotlight follows her for a moment, maybe picking up some
stock footage. Videotape is cheap. You never know when something will be
useful, so you might as well videotape it.
People make their living that way - people in the intel business.
People like Hiro Protagonist. They just know stuff, or they just go around
and videotape stuff. They put it in the Library. When people want to know
the particular things that they know or watch their video tapes, they pay
them money and check it out of the Library, or just buy it outright. This is
a weird racket, but Y.T. likes the idea of it. Usually, the CIC won't pay
any attention to a Kourier. But apparently Hiro has a deal with them. Maybe
she can make a deal with Hiro. Because Y.T. knows a lot of interesting
little things.
One little thing she knows is that the Mafia owes her a favor,
As Hiro approaches the Street, he sees two young couples, probably
using their parents' computers for a double date in the Metaverse, climbing
down out of Port Zero, which is the local port of entry and monorail stop.
He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the
moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming
down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called
avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with
each other in the Metaverse. Hiro's avatar is now on the Street, too, and if
the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see
him, just as he's seeing them. They could strike up a conversation: Hiro in
the U-Stor-It in L.A. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb
of Chicago, each with their own laptop. But they probably won't talk to each
other, any more than they would in Reality. These are nice kids, and they
don't want to talk to a solitary crossbreed with a slick custom avatar who's
packing a couple of swords.
Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of
your equipment. If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If
you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful
clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a
dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking
down the Street and you will see all of these.
Hiro's avatar just looks like Hiro, with the difference that no matter
what Hiro is wearing in Reality, his avatar always wears a black leather
kimono. Most hacker types don't go in for garish avatars, because they know
that it takes a lot more sophistication to render a realistic human face
than a talking penis. Kind of the way people who really know clothing can
appreciate the fine details that separate a cheap gray wool suit from an
expensive handtailored gray wool suit.
You can't just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk
beaming down from on high. This would be confusing and irritating to the
people around you. It would break the metaphor. Materializing out of nowhere
(or vanishing back into Reality) is considered to be a private function best
done in the confines of your own House. Most avatars nowadays are
anatomically correct, and naked as a babe when they are first created, so in
any case, you have to make yourself decent before you emerge onto the
Street. Unless you're something intrinsically indecent and you don't care.
If you are some peon who does not own a House, for example, a person
who is coming in from a public terminal, then you materialize in a Port.
There are 256 Express Ports on the street, evenly spaced around its
circumference at intervals of 256 kilometers. Each of these intervals is
further subdivided 256 times with Local Ports, spaced exactly one kilometer
apart (astute students of hacker serniotics will note the obsessive
repetition of the number 256, which is 2^8 power-and even that 8 looks
pretty juicy, dripping with 2^2 additional 2s). The Ports serve a function
analogous to airports: This is where you drop into the Metaverse from
somewhere else. Once you have materialized in a Port, you can walk down the
Street or hop on the monorail or whatever.
The couples coming off the monorail can't afford to have custom avatars
made and don't know how to write their own. They have to buy off-the-shelf
avatars. One of the girls has a pretty nice one. It would be considered
quite the fashion statement among the K-Tel set. Looks like she has bought
the Avatar Construction Set (tm) and put together her own, customized model
out of miscellaneous parts. It might even look something like its owner. Her
date doesn't look half bad himself.
The other girl is a Brandy. Her date is a Clint. Brandy and Clint are
both popular, off-the-shelf models. When white-trash high school girls are
going on a date in the Metaverse, they invariably run down to the computer
games section of the local Wal-Mart and buy a copy of Brandy. The user can
select three breast sizes: improbable, impossible, and ludicrous. Brandy has
a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute and sultry;
perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy. Her eyelashes
are half an inch long, and the software is so cheap that they are rendered
as solid ebony chips. When a Brandy flutters her eyelashes, you can almost
feel the breeze.
Clint is just the male counterpart of Brandy. He is craggy and handsome
and has an extremely limited range of facial expressions.
Hiro wonders, idly, how these two couples got together. They are
clearly from disparate social classes. Perhaps older and younger siblings.
But then they come down the escalator and disappear into the crowd and
become part of the Street, where there are enough Clints and Brandys to
found a new ethnic group.
The Street is fairly busy. Most of the people here are Americans and
Asians - it's early morning in Europe right now. Because of the
preponderance of Americans, the crowd has a garish and surreal look about
it. For the Asians, it's the middle of the day, and they are in their dark
blue suits. For the Americans, it's party time, and they are looking like
just about anything a computer can render.
The moment Hiro steps across the line separating his neighborhood from
the Street, colored shapes begin to swoop down on him from all directions,
like buzzards on fresh road kill. Animercials are not allowed in Hiro's
neighborhood. But almost anything is allowed in the Street.
A passing fighter plane bursts into flames, falls out of its
trajectory, and zooms directly toward him at twice the speed of sound. It
plows into the Street fifty feet in front of him, disintegrates, and
explodes, blooming into a tangled cloud of wreckage and flame that skids
across the pavement toward him, growing to envelop him so that all he can
see is turbulent flame, perfectly simulated and rendered.
Then the display freezes, and a man materializes in front of Hiro. He
is a classic bearded, pale, skinny hacker, trying to beef himself up by
wearing a bulky silk windbreaker blazoned with the logo of one of the big
Metaverse amusement parks. Hiro knows the guy; they used to run into each
other at trade conventions all the time. He's been trying to hire Hiro for
the last two months.
"Hiro, I can't understand why you're holding out on me. We're making
bucks here - Kongbucks and yen - and we can be flexible on pay and bennies.
We're putting together a swords-and-sorcery thing, and we can use a hacker
with your skills. Come on down and talk to me, okay?"
Hiro walks straight through the display, and it vanishes. Amusement
parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic, offering a wide selection of
interactive three-dimensional movies. But in the end, they're still nothing
more than video games. Hiro's not so poor, yet, that he would go and write
video games for this company. It's owned by the Nipponese, which is no big
deal. But it's also managed by the Nipponese, which means that all the
programmers have to wear white shirts and show up at eight in the morning
and sit in cubicles and go to meetings.
When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker
could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's
no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a
greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become
managers who never get to write any code themselves.
The prospect of becoming an assembly-line worker gives Hiro some
incentive to go out and find some really good intel tonight. He tries to get
himself psyched up, tries to break out of the lethargy of the long-term
underemployed. This intel thing can be a great racket, once you get yourself
jacked into the grid. And with his connections, it shouldn't be any problem.
He just has to get serious about it. Get serious. Get serious. But it's so
hard to get serious about anything.
He owes the Mafia the cost of a new car. That's a good reason to get
serious.
He cuts straight across the Street and under the monorail line, headed
for a large, low-slung black building. It is extraordinarily somber for the
Street, like a parcel that someone forgot to develop. It's a squat black
pyramid with the top cut off. It has one single door - since this is all
imaginary, there are no regulations dictating the number of emergency exits.
There are no guards, no signs, nothing to bar people from going in, yet
thousands of avatars mill around, peering inside, looking for a glimpse of
something. These people can't pass through the door because they haven't
been invited.
Above the door is a matte black hemisphere about a meter in diameter,
set into the front wall of the building. It is the closest thing the place
has to decoration. Underneath it, in letters carved into the wall's black
substance, is the name of the place: THE BLACK SUN.
So it's not an architectural masterpiece. When Da5id and Hiro and the
other hackers wrote The Black Sun, they didn't have enough money to hire
architects or designers, so they just went in for simple geometric shapes.
The avatars milling around the entrance don't seem to care.
If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn't be
able to reach the entrance. It's way too crowded. But the computer system
that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every
single one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from
running into each other. It doesn't bother trying to solve this incredibly
difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each
other.
So when Hiro cuts through the crowd, headed for the entrance, he really
is cutting through the crowd. When things get this jammed together, the
computer simplifies things by drawing all of the avatars ghostly and
translucent so you can see where you're going. Hiro appears solid to
himself, but everyone else looks like a ghost. He walks through the crowd as
if it's a fogbank, clearly seeing The Black Sun in front of him.
He steps over the property line, and he's in the doorway. And in that
instant he becomes solid and visible to all the avatars milling outside. As
one, they all begin screaming. Not that they have any idea who the hell he
is - Hiro is just a starving CIC stringer who lives in a U-Stor-It by the
airport. But in the entire world there are only a couple of thousand people
who can step over the line into The Black Sun.
He turns and looks back at ten thousand shrieking groupies. Now that
he's all by himself in the entryway, no longer immersed in a flood of
avatars, he can see all of the people in the front row of the crowd with
perfect clarity. They are all done up in their wildest and fanciest avatars,
hoping that Da5id - The Black Sun's owner and hacker-in-chief - will invite
them inside. They flicker and merge together into a hysterical wall.
Stunningly beautiful women, computer-airbrushed and retouched at seventy-two
frames a second, like Playboy pinups turned three-dimensional - these are
would-be actresses hoping to be discovered. Wild-looking abstracts,
tornadoes of gyrating light - hackers who are hoping that Da5id will notice
their talent, invite them inside, give them a job. A liberal sprinkling of
black-and-white people-persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap
public terminals, and who are rendered in jerky, grainy black and white. A
lot of these are run-of-the-mill psycho fans, devoted to the fantasy of
stabbing some particular actress to death; they can't even get close in
Reality, so they goggle into the Metaverse to stalk their prey. There are
would-be rock stars done up in laser light, as though they just stepped off
the concert stage, and the avatars of Nipponese businessmen, exquisitely
rendered by their fancy equipment, but utterly reserved and boring in their
suits.
There's one black-and-white who stands out because he's taller than the
rest. The Street protocol states that your avatar can't be any taller than
you are. This is to prevent people from walking around a mile high. Besides,
if this guy's using a pay terminal -which he must be, to judge from the
image quality - it can't jazz up his avatar. It just shows him the way he
is, except not as well. Talking to a black-and-white on the Street is like
talking to a person who has his face stuck in a xerox machine, repeatedly
pounding the copy button, while you stand by the output tray pulling the
sheets out one at a time and looking at them.
He has long hair, parted in the middle like a curtain to reveal a
tattoo on his forehead. Given the shitty resolution, there's no way to see
the tattoo clearly, but it appears to consist of words. He has a wispy Fu
Manchu mustache.
Hiro realizes that the guy has noticed him and is staring back, looking
him up and down, paying particular attention to the swords.
A grin spreads across the black-and-white guy's face. It is a satisfied
grin. A grin of recognition. The grin of a man who knows something Hiro
doesn't. The black-and-white guy has been standing with his arms folded
across his chest, like a man who is bored, who's been waiting for something,
and now his arms drop to his sides, swing loosely at the shoulders, like an
athlete limbering up. He steps as close as he can and leans forward; he's so
tall that the only thing behind him is empty black sky, torn with the
glowing vapor trails of passing animercials.
"Hey, Hiro," the black-and-white guy says, "you want to try some Snow
Crash?"
A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird
things. You ignore them. But this gets Hiro's attention.
Oddity the first: The guy knows Hiro's name. But people have ways of
getting that information. It's probably nothing.
The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. Which would
be normal in front of a Reality bar. But this is the Metaverse. And you
can't sell drugs in the Metaverse, because you can't get high by looking at
something.
The third: The name of the drug. Hiro's never heard of a drug called
Snow Crash before. That's not unusual - a thousand new drugs get invented
each year, and each of them sells under half a dozen brand names.
But "snow crash" is computer lingo. It means a system crash - a bug -
at such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that
controls the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the
screen, turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard.
Hiro has seen it happen a million times. But it's a very peculiar name for a
drug.
The thing that really gets Hiro's attention is his confidence. He has
an utterly calm, stolid presence. It's like talking to an asteroid. Which
would be okay if he were doing something that made the tiniest little bit of
sense. Hiro's trying to read some clues in the guy's face, but the closer he
looks, the more his shitty black-and-white avatar seems to break up into
jittering, hard-edged pixels. It's like putting his nose against the glass
of a busted TV. It makes his teeth hurt.
"Excuse me," Hiro says. "What did you say?"
The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip,
videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document.
It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster.
He uploads it to the CIC database - the Library, formerly the Library
of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely
clear on what the word "congress" means. And even the word "library" is
getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old ones. Then
they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all of the
information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say, ones
and zeroes. And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to
date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more
sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive
difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence
Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart
anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering.
Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading millions of other
fragments at the same time. CIC's clients, mostly large corporations and
Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if
they find a use for something that Hiro put into it, Hiro gets paid. A year
ago, he uploaded an entire first-draft film script that he stole from an
agent's wastebasket in Burbank. Half a dozen studios wanted to see it. He
ate and vacationed off of that one for six months.
Since then, times have been leaner. He has been learning the hard way
that 99 percent of the information in the Library never gets used at all.
Case in point: After a certain Kourier tipped him off to the existence
of Vitaly Chernobyl, he put a few intensive weeks into researching a new
musical phenomenon - the rise of Ukrainian nuclear fuzz-grunge collectives
in L.A. He has planted exhaustive notes on this trend in the Library,
including video and audio. Not one single record label, agent, or rock
critic has bothered to access it.
The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a
polished glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using
the machine, this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with
the surface of the computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and
foreshortened on its surface.
Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly
laid in several weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's father, who was
stationed in Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept
bringing them back from his stints in the Far East, encased in many
protective layers, so that when he took them out to show Hiro, it was like
watching an exquisite striptease as they emerged from all that black leather
and nylon, zippers and straps. And once the lens was finally exposed, pure
geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could
only think it was like nuzzling through skirts and lingerie and outer labia
and inner labia.... It made him feel naked and weak and brave.
The lens can see half of the universe - the half that is above the
computer, which includes most of Hiro. In this way, it can generally keep
track of where Hiro is and what direction he's looking in.
Down inside the computer are three lasers - a red one, a green one, and
a blue one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful
enough to burn through the back of your eyeball and broil your brain, fry
your frontals, lase your lobes. As everyone learned in elementary school,
these three colors of light can be combined, with different intensities, to
produce any color that Hiro's eye is capable of seeing.
In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards
of the computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the
use of electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep
back and forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as
the electron beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous
Tube. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality.
By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image
can be made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a
second, it can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional
image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye
can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little
earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic
soundtrack.
So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer generated
universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his
earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse.
Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the
U-Stor-It.
Hiro is approaching the Street. It is the Broadway, the Champs Elysees
of the Metaverse. It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen,
miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses of his goggles. It does
not really exist. But right now, millions of people are walking up and down
it.
The dimensions of the Street are fixed by a protocol, hammered out by
the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing
Machinery's Global Multimedia Protocol Group. The Street seems to be a grand
boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a
radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers. That makes it 65,536
kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than Earth.
The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who
recognizes it more readily than his own mother's date of birth: It happens
to be a power of 2 - 2^16 power to be exact - and even the exponent 16 is
equal to 2^4 , and 4 is equal to 2^2. Along with 256; 32,768; and
2,147,483,648; 65,536 is one of the foundation stones of the hacker
universe, in which 2 is the only really important number because that's how
many digits a computer can recognize. One of those digits is 0, and the
other is 1. Any number that can be created by fetishistically multiplying 2s
by each other, and subtracting the occasional 1, will be instantly
recognizable to a hacker.
Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development.
Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one.
They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist
in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special
neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored,
and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other.
The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist -
it's just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper
somewhere - none of these things is being physically built. They are,
rather, pieces of software, made available to the public over the worldwide
fiber-optics network. When Hiro goes into the Metaverse and looks down the
Street and sees buildings and electric signs stretching off into the
darkness, disappearing over the curve of the globe, he is actually staring
at the graphic representations - the user interfaces - of a myriad different
pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations. In order
to place these things on the Street, they have had to get approval from the
Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buy frontage on the Street,
get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors, the whole bit. The
money these corporations pay to build things on the Street all goes into a
trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays for developing and
expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist.
Hiro has a house in a neighborhood just off the busiest part of the
Street. It is a very old neighborhood by Street standards. About ten years
ago, when the Street protocol was first written, Hiro and some of his
buddies pooled their money and bought one of the first development licenses,
created a little neighborhood of hackers. At the time, it was just a little
patchwork of light amid a vast blackness. Back then, the Street was just a
necklace of streetlights around a black ball in space.
Since then, the neighborhood hasn't changed much, but the Street has.
By getting in on it early, Hiro's buddies got a head start on the whole
business. Some of them even got very rich off of it.
That's why Hiro has a nice big house in the Metaverse but has to share
a 20-by-30 in Reality. Real estate acumen does not always extend across
universes.
The sky and the ground are black, like a computer screen that hasn't
had anything drawn into it yet; it is always nighttime in the Metaverse, and
the Street is always garish and brilliant, like Las Vegas freed from
constraints of physics and finance. But people in Hiro's neighborhood are
very good programmers, so it's tasteful. The houses look like real houses.
There are a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright reproductions and some fancy
Victoriana.
So it's always a shock to step out onto the Street, where everything
seems to be a mile high. This is Downtown, the most heavily developed area.
If you go a couple of hundred kilometers in either direction, the
development will taper down to almost nothing, just a thin chain of
streetlights casting white pools on the black velvet ground. But Downtown is
a dozen Manhattans, embroidered with neon and stacked on top of each other.
In the real world - planet Earth, Reality - there are somewhere between
six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud
bricks or fieldstripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough
money to own a computer; these people have more money than all of the others
put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of
them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines
that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about
sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in
another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway,
by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their
employer, and at any given time the Street is occupied by twice the
population of New York City.
That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a
building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest,
best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.
It is a hundred meters wide, with a narrow monorail track running down
the middle. The monorail is a free piece of public utility software that
enables users to change their location on the Street rapidly and smoothly. A
lot of people just ride back and forth on it, looking at the sights. When
Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago, the monorail hadn't been written
yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motorcycle software in order to
get around. They would take their software out and race it in the black
desert of the electronic night.
Y.T. has been privileged to watch many a young Clint plant his sweet
face in an empty Burbclave pool during an unauthorized night run, but always
on a skateboard, never ever in a car. The landscape of the suburban night
has much weird beauty if you just look.
Back on the paddle again. It rolls across the yard on a set of RadiKS
Mark IV Smartwheels. She upgraded to said magical sprockets after the
following ad appeared in Thrasher magazine.
CHISELED SPAM is what you will see in the mirror
if you surf on a weak plank with dumb, fixed wheels
and interface with a muffler, retread, snow turd, road
kill, driveshaft, railroad tie, or unconscious pedestrian.
If you think this is unlikely, you've been surfing too
many ghost malls. All of these obstacles and more
were recently observed on a one-mile stretch of the
New Jersey Turnpike. Any surfer who tried to groove
that 'vard on a stock plank would have been sneezing
brains.
Don't listen to so-called purists who claim any obstacle
can be jumped. Professional Kouriers know: If you
have pooned a vehicle moving fast enough for fun and
profit, your reaction time is cut to tenths of a second -
even less if you are way spooled.
Buy a set of RadiKS Mark II Smartwheels - it's cheaper
than a total face retread and a lot more fun. Smartwheels
use sonar, laser rangefinding, and millimeter-wave radar
to identify mufflers and other debris before you even
get honed about them.
Don't get Midasized - upgrade today!
These were words of wisdom. Y.T. bought the wheels. Each one consists
of a hub with many stout spokes. Each spoke telescopes in five sections. On
the end is a squat foot, rubber tread on the bottom, swiveling on a ball
joint. As the wheels roll, the feet plant themselves one at a time, almost
glomming into one continuous tire. If you surf over a bump, the spokes
retract to pass over it. If you surf over a chuckhole, the robo-prongs plumb
its asphalty depths. Either way, the shock is thereby absorbed, no thuds,
smacks, vibrations, or clunks will make their way into the plank or the
Converse hightops with which you tread it. The ad was right -you cannot be a
professional road surfer without smartwheels.
Prompt delivery of the pizza will be a trivial matter. She glides from
the dewy turf over the lip of the driveway without a bump, picks up speed on
the 'crete, surfs down its slope into the street. A twitch of the butt
reorients the plank, now she is cruising down Homedale Mews looking for a
victim. A black car, alive with nasty lights, whines past her the other way,
closing in on the hapless Hiro Protagonist. Her RadiKS Knight Vision goggles
darken strategically to cut the noxious glaring of same, her pupils feel
safe to remain wide open, scanning the road for signs of movement. The
swimming pool was at the crest of this Burbclave, it's downhill from here,
but not downhill enough.
Half a block away, on a side street, a bimbo box, a minivan, grinds its
four pathetic cylinders into action. She sees it catercorner from her
present coordinates. The white backup lights flash instantly as the driver
shifts into D by way of R and N. Y.T. aims herself at the curb, hits it at a
fast running velocity, the spokes of the smartwheels see it coming and
retract in the right way so that she glides from street to lawn without a
hitch. Across the lawn, the feet leave a trail of hexagonal padmarks. A
stray dog turd, red with meaty undigestible food coloring, is embossed with
the RadiKS logo, a mirror image of which is printed on the tread of each
spoke.
The bimbo box is pulling away from the curb, across the street.
Squirrelly scrubbing noises squirm from its sidewalls as they grind against
the curb; we are in the Burbs, where it is better to take a thousand clicks
off the lifespan of your Goodyears by invariably grinding them up against
curbs than to risk social ostracism and outbreaks of mass hysteria by
parking several inches away, out in the middle of the street (That's okay,
Mom, I can walk to the curb from here), a menace to traffic, a deadly
obstacle to uncertain young bicyclists. Y.T. has pressed the release button
on her poon's reel/handle unit, allowing a meter of cord to unwind. She
whips it up and around her head like a bolo on the austral range. She is
about to lambada this trite conveyance. The head of the poon, salad-bowl
size, whistles as it orbits around; this is unnecessary but sounds cool.
Pooning a bimbo box takes more skill than a ped would ever imagine,
because of their very road-unworthiness, their congenital lack of steel or
other ferrous matter for the MagnaPoon to bite down on. Now they have
superconducting poons that stick to aluminum bodywork by inducing eddy
currents in the actual flesh of the car, turning it into an unwilling
electromagnet, but Y.T. does not have one of these. They are the trademark
of the hardcore Burbclave surfer, which, despite this evening's
entertainment, she is not. Her poon will only stick to steel, iron, or
(slightly) to nickel. The only steel in a bimbo box of this make is in the
frame.
She makes a low-slung approach. Her poon's orbital plane is nearly
vertical, it almost grinds on the twinkly suburban macadam on the forward
limb of each orbit. When she pounds the release button, it takes off from an
altitude of about one centimeter, angling slightly upward, across the
street, under the floor of the bimbo box, and sucks steel. It's a solid hit,
as solid as you can get on this nebula of air, upholstery, paint, and
marketing known as the family minivan.
The reaction is instantaneous, quick-witted by Burb standards. This
person wants Y.T. gone. The van takes off like a hormone-pumped bull who has
just been nailed in the ass by the barbed probe of a picador. It's not Mom
at the wheel. It's young Studley, the teenaged boy, who like every other boy
in this Burbclave has been taking intravenous shots of horse testosterone
every afternoon in the high school locker room since he was fourteen years
old. Now he's bulky, stupid, thoroughly predictable.
He steers erratically, artificially pumped muscles not fully under his
control. The molded, leather-grained, maroon-colored steering wheel smells
like his mother's hand lotion; this drives him into a rage. The bimbo box
surges and slows, surges and slows, because he is pumping the gas pedal,
because holding it to the floor doesn't seem to have any effect. He wants
this car to be like his muscles: more power than he knows what to do with.
Instead, it hampers him. As a compromise, he hits the button that says
POWER. Another button that says ECONOMY pops out and goes dead, reminding
him, like an educational demonstration, that the two are mutually exclusive.
The van's tiny engine downshifts, which makes it feel more powerful. He
holds his foot steady on the gas and, making the run down Cottage Heights
Road, the minivan's speed approaches one hundred kilometers.
Approaching the terminus of Cottage Heights Road, where it tees into
Bellewoode Valley Road, he espies a fire hydrant. TMAWH fire hydrants are
numerous, for safety, and highly designed, for property values, not the
squat iron things imprinted with the name of some godforsaken Industrial
Revolution foundry and furry from a hundred variously flaked layers of cheap
city paint. They are brass, robot-polished every Thursday morning, dignified
pipes rising straight up from the perfect, chemically induced turf of the
Burbclave lawns, flaring out to present potential firefighters with a menu
of three possible hose connections. They were designed on a computer screen
by the same aesthetes who designed the DynaVictorian houses and the tasteful
mailboxes and the immense marble street signs that sit at each intersection
like headstones. Designed on a computer screen, but with an eye toward the
elegance of things past and forgotten about. Fire hydrants that tasteful
people are proud to have on their front lawns. Fire hydrants that the real
estate people don't feel the need to airbrush out of pictures.
This fucking Kourier is about to die, knotted around one of those fire
hydrants. Studley the Testosterone Boy will see to it. It is a maneuver he
has witnessed on television - which tells no lies - a trick he has practiced
many times in his head. Building up maximum speed on Cottage Heights, he
will yank the hand brake while swinging the wheel. The ass end of the
minivan will snap around. The pesky Kourier will be cracked like a whip at
the end of her unbreakable cable. Into the fire hydrant she will go. Studley
the Teenager will be victorious, free to cruise in triumph down Bellewoode
Valley and out into the greater world of adult men in cool cars, free to go
return his overdue videotape, Raft Warriors IV: The Final Battle.
Y.T. does not know any of this for a fact, but she suspects it. None of
this is real. It is her reconstruction of the psychological environment
inside of that bimbo box. She sees the hydrant coming a mile away, sees
Studley reaching down to rest one hand on the parking brake. It is all so
obvious. She feels sorry for Studley and his ilk. She reels out, gives
herself lots of slack. He whips the wheel, jerks the brake. The minivan goes
sideways, overshooting its mark, and doesn't quite snap her around the way
he wanted; she has to help it. As its ass is rotating around, she reels in
hard, converting that gift of angular momentum into forward velocity, and
ends up shooting right past the van going well over a mile a minute. She is
headed for a marble gravestone that says BELLEWOODE VALLEY ROAD. She leans
away from it, leans into a vicious turn, her spokes grip the pavement and
push her away from that gravestone, she can touch the pavement with one hand
she is heeled over so hard, the spokes push her onto the desired street.
Meanwhile, she has clicked off the electromagnetic force that held her
pooned to the van. The poon head comes loose, caroms off the pavement behind
her as it is automatically reeled in to reunite with the handle. She is
headed straight for the exit of the Burbclave at fantastic speed.
Behind her, an explosive crash sounds, resonating in her gut, as the
minivan slides sideways into the gravestone.
She ducks under the security gate and plunges into traffic on Oahu. She
cuts between two veering, blaring, and screeching BMWs. BMW drivers take
evasive action at the drop of a hat, emulating the drivers in the BMW
advertisements - this is how they convince themselves they didn't get ripped
off. She drops into a fetal position to pass underneath a semi, headed for
the Jersey barrier in the median strip like she's going to die, but Jersey
barriers are easy for the smartwheels. That lower limb of the barrier has
such a nice bank to it, like they designed it for road surfers. She rides
halfway up the barrier, angles gently back down to the lane for a smooth
landing, and she's in traffic. There's a car right there and she doesn't
even have to throw the poon, just reaches out and plants it right on the lid
of the trunk.
This driver's resigned to his fate, doesn't care, doesn't hassle her.
He takes her as far as the entrance to the next Burbclave, which is a White
Columns. Very southern, traditional, one of the Apartheid Burbclaves. Big
ornate sign above the main gate: WHITE PEOPLE ONLY. NON-CAUCASIANS MUST BE
PROCESSED.
She's got a White Columns visa. Y.T. has a visa to everywhere. It's
right there on her chest, a little bar code. A laser scans it as she careens
toward the entrance and the immigration gate swings open for her. It's an
ornate ironwork number, but harried White Columns residents don't have time
to sit idling at the Burbclave entrance watching the gate slowly roll aside
in Old South majestic turpitude, so it's mounted on some kind of
electromagnetic railgun.
She is gliding down the antebellum tree-lined lanes of White Columns,
one microplantation after another, still coasting on the residual kinetic
energy boost that originated in the fuel in Studley the Teenager's gas tank.
The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just
skimming off a tiny bit of it.
The LEDs on the pizza box say: 29:32, and the guy who ordered it - Mr.
Pudgely and his neighbors, the Pinkhearts and the Roundass clan - are all
gathered on the front lawn of their microplantation, prematurely
celebrating. Like they had just bought the winning lottery ticket. From
their front door they have a clear view all the way down to Oahu Road, and
they can see that nothing is on its way that looks like a CosaNostra
delivery car. Oh, there is curiosity - sniffing interest - at this Kourier
with the big square thing under her arm - maybe a portfolio, a new ad layout
for some Caucasian supremacist marketing honcho in the next plat over, but -
The Pudgelys and the Pinkhearts and the Roundasses are all staring at
her, slackjawed. She has just enough residual energy to swing into their
driveway. Her momentum carries her to the top. She stops next to Mr.
Pudgely's Acura and Mrs. Pudgely's bimbo box and steps off her plank. The
spokes, noting her departure, even themselves out, plant themselves on the
top of the driveway, refuse to roll backward.
A blinding light from the heavens shines down upon them. Her Knight
Visions keep her from being blinded, but the customers bend their knees and
hunch their shoulders as though the light were heavy. The men hold their
hairy forearms up against their brows, swivel their great tubular bodies to
and fro, trying to find the source of the illumination, muttering clipped
notations to each other, brief theories about its source, fully in control
of the unknown phenomenon. The women coo and flutter. Because of the magical
influence of the Knight Visions, Y.T. can still see the LEDs: 29:54, and
that's what it says when she drops the pizza on Mr. Pudgely's wing tips.
The mystery light goes off.
The others are still blinded, but Y.T. sees into the night with her
Knight Visions, sees all the way into near infrared, and she sees the source
of it, a double-bladed stealth helicopter thirty feet above the neighbor's
house. It is tastefully black and unadorned, not a news crew though another
helicopter, an old-fashioned audible one, brightly festooned with
up-to-the-minute logos, is thumping and whacking its way across White
Columns airspace at this very moment, goosing the plantations with its own
spotlight, hoping to be the first to obtain this major scoop: a pizza was
delivered late tonight, film at eleven. Later, our personality journalist
speculates on where Uncle Enzo will stay when he makes his compulsory trip
to our Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area. But the black chopper is
running dark, would be nearly invisible if not for the infrared trail coming
out of its twin turbojets.
It is a Mafia chopper, and all they wanted to do was to record the
event on videotape so that Mr. Pudgely would not have a leg to hop around on
in court, should he decide to take his case down to Judge Bob's Judicial
System and argue for a free pizza.
One more thing. There's a lot of shit in the air tonight, a few
megatons of topsoil blowing down from Fresno, and so when the laser beam
comes on it is startlingly visible, a tiny geometric line, a million blazing
red grains strung on a fiber-optic thread, snapping into life instantly
between the chopper and Y.T.'s chest. It appears to widen into a narrow fan,
an acute triangle of red light whose base encompasses all of Y.T.'s torso.
It takes half a second. They are scanning the many bar codes mounted on
her chest. They are finding out who she is. The Mafia now knows everything
about Y.T. - where she lives, what she does, her eye color, credit record,
ancestry, and blood type.
That done, the chopper tilts and vanishes into the night like a hockey
puck sliding into a bowl of India ink. Mr. Pudgely is saying something,
making a joke about how close they came, the others eke out a laugh, but
Y.T. cannot hear them because they are buried under the thunderwhack of the
news chopper, then flash-frozen and crystalized under its spotlight. The
night air is full of bugs, and now Y.T. can see all of them, swirling in
mysterious formations, hitching rides on people and on currents of air.
There is one on her wrist, but she doesn't slap at it.
The spotlight lingers for a minute. The broad square of the pizza box,
bearing the CosaNostra logo, is mute testimony. They hover, shoot a little
tape just in case.
Y.T. is bored. She gets on her plank. The wheels blossom and become
circular. She guides a tight wobbly course around the cars, coasts down into
the street. The spotlight follows her for a moment, maybe picking up some
stock footage. Videotape is cheap. You never know when something will be
useful, so you might as well videotape it.
People make their living that way - people in the intel business.
People like Hiro Protagonist. They just know stuff, or they just go around
and videotape stuff. They put it in the Library. When people want to know
the particular things that they know or watch their video tapes, they pay
them money and check it out of the Library, or just buy it outright. This is
a weird racket, but Y.T. likes the idea of it. Usually, the CIC won't pay
any attention to a Kourier. But apparently Hiro has a deal with them. Maybe
she can make a deal with Hiro. Because Y.T. knows a lot of interesting
little things.
One little thing she knows is that the Mafia owes her a favor,
As Hiro approaches the Street, he sees two young couples, probably
using their parents' computers for a double date in the Metaverse, climbing
down out of Port Zero, which is the local port of entry and monorail stop.
He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the
moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming
down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called
avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with
each other in the Metaverse. Hiro's avatar is now on the Street, too, and if
the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see
him, just as he's seeing them. They could strike up a conversation: Hiro in
the U-Stor-It in L.A. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb
of Chicago, each with their own laptop. But they probably won't talk to each
other, any more than they would in Reality. These are nice kids, and they
don't want to talk to a solitary crossbreed with a slick custom avatar who's
packing a couple of swords.
Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of
your equipment. If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If
you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful
clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a
dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking
down the Street and you will see all of these.
Hiro's avatar just looks like Hiro, with the difference that no matter
what Hiro is wearing in Reality, his avatar always wears a black leather
kimono. Most hacker types don't go in for garish avatars, because they know
that it takes a lot more sophistication to render a realistic human face
than a talking penis. Kind of the way people who really know clothing can
appreciate the fine details that separate a cheap gray wool suit from an
expensive handtailored gray wool suit.
You can't just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk
beaming down from on high. This would be confusing and irritating to the
people around you. It would break the metaphor. Materializing out of nowhere
(or vanishing back into Reality) is considered to be a private function best
done in the confines of your own House. Most avatars nowadays are
anatomically correct, and naked as a babe when they are first created, so in
any case, you have to make yourself decent before you emerge onto the
Street. Unless you're something intrinsically indecent and you don't care.
If you are some peon who does not own a House, for example, a person
who is coming in from a public terminal, then you materialize in a Port.
There are 256 Express Ports on the street, evenly spaced around its
circumference at intervals of 256 kilometers. Each of these intervals is
further subdivided 256 times with Local Ports, spaced exactly one kilometer
apart (astute students of hacker serniotics will note the obsessive
repetition of the number 256, which is 2^8 power-and even that 8 looks
pretty juicy, dripping with 2^2 additional 2s). The Ports serve a function
analogous to airports: This is where you drop into the Metaverse from
somewhere else. Once you have materialized in a Port, you can walk down the
Street or hop on the monorail or whatever.
The couples coming off the monorail can't afford to have custom avatars
made and don't know how to write their own. They have to buy off-the-shelf
avatars. One of the girls has a pretty nice one. It would be considered
quite the fashion statement among the K-Tel set. Looks like she has bought
the Avatar Construction Set (tm) and put together her own, customized model
out of miscellaneous parts. It might even look something like its owner. Her
date doesn't look half bad himself.
The other girl is a Brandy. Her date is a Clint. Brandy and Clint are
both popular, off-the-shelf models. When white-trash high school girls are
going on a date in the Metaverse, they invariably run down to the computer
games section of the local Wal-Mart and buy a copy of Brandy. The user can
select three breast sizes: improbable, impossible, and ludicrous. Brandy has
a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute and sultry;
perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy. Her eyelashes
are half an inch long, and the software is so cheap that they are rendered
as solid ebony chips. When a Brandy flutters her eyelashes, you can almost
feel the breeze.
Clint is just the male counterpart of Brandy. He is craggy and handsome
and has an extremely limited range of facial expressions.
Hiro wonders, idly, how these two couples got together. They are
clearly from disparate social classes. Perhaps older and younger siblings.
But then they come down the escalator and disappear into the crowd and
become part of the Street, where there are enough Clints and Brandys to
found a new ethnic group.
The Street is fairly busy. Most of the people here are Americans and
Asians - it's early morning in Europe right now. Because of the
preponderance of Americans, the crowd has a garish and surreal look about
it. For the Asians, it's the middle of the day, and they are in their dark
blue suits. For the Americans, it's party time, and they are looking like
just about anything a computer can render.
The moment Hiro steps across the line separating his neighborhood from
the Street, colored shapes begin to swoop down on him from all directions,
like buzzards on fresh road kill. Animercials are not allowed in Hiro's
neighborhood. But almost anything is allowed in the Street.
A passing fighter plane bursts into flames, falls out of its
trajectory, and zooms directly toward him at twice the speed of sound. It
plows into the Street fifty feet in front of him, disintegrates, and
explodes, blooming into a tangled cloud of wreckage and flame that skids
across the pavement toward him, growing to envelop him so that all he can
see is turbulent flame, perfectly simulated and rendered.
Then the display freezes, and a man materializes in front of Hiro. He
is a classic bearded, pale, skinny hacker, trying to beef himself up by
wearing a bulky silk windbreaker blazoned with the logo of one of the big
Metaverse amusement parks. Hiro knows the guy; they used to run into each
other at trade conventions all the time. He's been trying to hire Hiro for
the last two months.
"Hiro, I can't understand why you're holding out on me. We're making
bucks here - Kongbucks and yen - and we can be flexible on pay and bennies.
We're putting together a swords-and-sorcery thing, and we can use a hacker
with your skills. Come on down and talk to me, okay?"
Hiro walks straight through the display, and it vanishes. Amusement
parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic, offering a wide selection of
interactive three-dimensional movies. But in the end, they're still nothing
more than video games. Hiro's not so poor, yet, that he would go and write
video games for this company. It's owned by the Nipponese, which is no big
deal. But it's also managed by the Nipponese, which means that all the
programmers have to wear white shirts and show up at eight in the morning
and sit in cubicles and go to meetings.
When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker
could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's
no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a
greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become
managers who never get to write any code themselves.
The prospect of becoming an assembly-line worker gives Hiro some
incentive to go out and find some really good intel tonight. He tries to get
himself psyched up, tries to break out of the lethargy of the long-term
underemployed. This intel thing can be a great racket, once you get yourself
jacked into the grid. And with his connections, it shouldn't be any problem.
He just has to get serious about it. Get serious. Get serious. But it's so
hard to get serious about anything.
He owes the Mafia the cost of a new car. That's a good reason to get
serious.
He cuts straight across the Street and under the monorail line, headed
for a large, low-slung black building. It is extraordinarily somber for the
Street, like a parcel that someone forgot to develop. It's a squat black
pyramid with the top cut off. It has one single door - since this is all
imaginary, there are no regulations dictating the number of emergency exits.
There are no guards, no signs, nothing to bar people from going in, yet
thousands of avatars mill around, peering inside, looking for a glimpse of
something. These people can't pass through the door because they haven't
been invited.
Above the door is a matte black hemisphere about a meter in diameter,
set into the front wall of the building. It is the closest thing the place
has to decoration. Underneath it, in letters carved into the wall's black
substance, is the name of the place: THE BLACK SUN.
So it's not an architectural masterpiece. When Da5id and Hiro and the
other hackers wrote The Black Sun, they didn't have enough money to hire
architects or designers, so they just went in for simple geometric shapes.
The avatars milling around the entrance don't seem to care.
If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn't be
able to reach the entrance. It's way too crowded. But the computer system
that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every
single one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from
running into each other. It doesn't bother trying to solve this incredibly
difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each
other.
So when Hiro cuts through the crowd, headed for the entrance, he really
is cutting through the crowd. When things get this jammed together, the
computer simplifies things by drawing all of the avatars ghostly and
translucent so you can see where you're going. Hiro appears solid to
himself, but everyone else looks like a ghost. He walks through the crowd as
if it's a fogbank, clearly seeing The Black Sun in front of him.
He steps over the property line, and he's in the doorway. And in that
instant he becomes solid and visible to all the avatars milling outside. As
one, they all begin screaming. Not that they have any idea who the hell he
is - Hiro is just a starving CIC stringer who lives in a U-Stor-It by the
airport. But in the entire world there are only a couple of thousand people
who can step over the line into The Black Sun.
He turns and looks back at ten thousand shrieking groupies. Now that
he's all by himself in the entryway, no longer immersed in a flood of
avatars, he can see all of the people in the front row of the crowd with
perfect clarity. They are all done up in their wildest and fanciest avatars,
hoping that Da5id - The Black Sun's owner and hacker-in-chief - will invite
them inside. They flicker and merge together into a hysterical wall.
Stunningly beautiful women, computer-airbrushed and retouched at seventy-two
frames a second, like Playboy pinups turned three-dimensional - these are
would-be actresses hoping to be discovered. Wild-looking abstracts,
tornadoes of gyrating light - hackers who are hoping that Da5id will notice
their talent, invite them inside, give them a job. A liberal sprinkling of
black-and-white people-persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap
public terminals, and who are rendered in jerky, grainy black and white. A
lot of these are run-of-the-mill psycho fans, devoted to the fantasy of
stabbing some particular actress to death; they can't even get close in
Reality, so they goggle into the Metaverse to stalk their prey. There are
would-be rock stars done up in laser light, as though they just stepped off
the concert stage, and the avatars of Nipponese businessmen, exquisitely
rendered by their fancy equipment, but utterly reserved and boring in their
suits.
There's one black-and-white who stands out because he's taller than the
rest. The Street protocol states that your avatar can't be any taller than
you are. This is to prevent people from walking around a mile high. Besides,
if this guy's using a pay terminal -which he must be, to judge from the
image quality - it can't jazz up his avatar. It just shows him the way he
is, except not as well. Talking to a black-and-white on the Street is like
talking to a person who has his face stuck in a xerox machine, repeatedly
pounding the copy button, while you stand by the output tray pulling the
sheets out one at a time and looking at them.
He has long hair, parted in the middle like a curtain to reveal a
tattoo on his forehead. Given the shitty resolution, there's no way to see
the tattoo clearly, but it appears to consist of words. He has a wispy Fu
Manchu mustache.
Hiro realizes that the guy has noticed him and is staring back, looking
him up and down, paying particular attention to the swords.
A grin spreads across the black-and-white guy's face. It is a satisfied
grin. A grin of recognition. The grin of a man who knows something Hiro
doesn't. The black-and-white guy has been standing with his arms folded
across his chest, like a man who is bored, who's been waiting for something,
and now his arms drop to his sides, swing loosely at the shoulders, like an
athlete limbering up. He steps as close as he can and leans forward; he's so
tall that the only thing behind him is empty black sky, torn with the
glowing vapor trails of passing animercials.
"Hey, Hiro," the black-and-white guy says, "you want to try some Snow
Crash?"
A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird
things. You ignore them. But this gets Hiro's attention.
Oddity the first: The guy knows Hiro's name. But people have ways of
getting that information. It's probably nothing.
The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. Which would
be normal in front of a Reality bar. But this is the Metaverse. And you
can't sell drugs in the Metaverse, because you can't get high by looking at
something.
The third: The name of the drug. Hiro's never heard of a drug called
Snow Crash before. That's not unusual - a thousand new drugs get invented
each year, and each of them sells under half a dozen brand names.
But "snow crash" is computer lingo. It means a system crash - a bug -
at such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that
controls the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the
screen, turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard.
Hiro has seen it happen a million times. But it's a very peculiar name for a
drug.
The thing that really gets Hiro's attention is his confidence. He has
an utterly calm, stolid presence. It's like talking to an asteroid. Which
would be okay if he were doing something that made the tiniest little bit of
sense. Hiro's trying to read some clues in the guy's face, but the closer he
looks, the more his shitty black-and-white avatar seems to break up into
jittering, hard-edged pixels. It's like putting his nose against the glass
of a busted TV. It makes his teeth hurt.
"Excuse me," Hiro says. "What did you say?"