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From Hiro's front yard to L. Bob Rife's black cube at Port 127 is
halfway around the Metaverse, a distance of 32,768 kilometers. The only hard
part, really, is getting out of Downtown. He can ride his bike straight
through the avatars as usual, but the Street is also cluttered with
vehicles, animercials commercial displays, public plazas, and other bits of
solid-looking software that get in his way.
Not to mention a few distractions. Off to his right, about a kilometer
away from The Black Sun is a deep hole in the hyper-Manhattan skyline. It is
an open plaza about a mile wide, a park of sorts where avatars can gather
for concerts and conventions and festivals. Most of it is occupied by a
deep-dish amphitheater that is capable of seating close to a million avatars
at once. Down at the bottom is a huge circular stage.
Normally, the stage is occupied by major rock groups. Tonight, it is
occupied by the grandest and most brilliant computer hallucinations that the
human mind can invent. A three-dimensional marquee hangs above it announcing
tonight's event: a benefit graphics concert staged on behalf of Da5id Meier,
who is still hospitalized with an inexplicable disease. The amphitheater is
half filled with hackers.
Once he gets out of Downtown, Hiro twists his throttle up to the max
and covers the remaining thirty-two thousand and some kilometers in the
space of about ten minutes. Over his head, the express trains are whooshing
down the track at a metaphorical speed of ten thousand miles per hour; he
passes them like they're standing still. This only works because he's riding
in an absolutely straight line. He's got a routine coded into his motorcycle
software that makes it follow the monorail track automatically so that he
doesn't even have to worry about steering it.
Meanwhile, Juanita's standing next to him in Reality. She's got another
pair of goggles; she can see all the same things that Hiro sees.
"Rife's got a mobile uplink on his corporate chopper, just like the one
on commercial airliners, so he can patch into the Metaverse when he's in the
air. As long as he's airborne, that's his only link to the Metaverse. We may
be able to hack our way into that one link and block it or something..."
"That low-level communications stuff is too full of medicine for us to
mess with it in this decade," Hiro says, braking his motorcycle to a stop.
"Holy shit. It's just like Y.T. described it."
He's in front of Port 127. Rife's black cube is there, just as Y.T.
described it. There's no door.
Hiro starts walking away from the Street, toward the cube. It reflects
no light at all, so he can't tell whether it's ten feet or ten miles away
from him until the security daemons begin to materialize. There are half a
dozen of them, all big sturdy avatars in blue coveralls, sort of
quasi-military looking, but without rank. They don't need rank because
they're all running the same program. They materialize around him in a neat
semicircle with a radius of about ten feet, blocking Hiro's way to the cube.
Hiro mumbles a word under his breath and vanishes - he slips into his
invisible avatar. It would be very interesting to hang around and see how
these security daemons deal with it, but right now he has to get moving
before they get a chance to adjust.
They don't, at least not very well. Hiro runs between two of the
security daemons and heads for the wall of the cube. He finally gets there,
slamming into it, coming to dead stop. The security daemons have all turned
around and are chasing him. They can figure out where he is - the computer
tells them that much - but they can't do much to him. Like the bouncer
daemons in The Black Sun, which Hiro helped write, they shove people around
by applying basic rules of avatar physics. When Hiro is invisible, there is
very little for them to shove. But if they are well written, they may have
more subtle ways of messing him up, so he's not wasting any time. He pokes
his katana through the side of the cube and follows it through the wall and
out the other side.
This is a hack. It is really based on a very old hack, a loophole that
he found years ago when he was trying to graft the sword-fighting rules onto
the existing Metaverse software. His blade doesn't have the power to cut a
hole in the wall - this would mean permanently changing the shape of someone
else's building - but it does have the power to penetrate things. Avatars do
not have that power. That is the whole purpose of a wall in the Metaverse;
it is a structure that does not allow avatars to penetrate it. But like
anything else in the Metaverse, this rule is nothing but a protocol, a
convention that different computers agree to follow. In theory, it cannot be
ignored. But in practice, it depends upon the ability of different computers
to swap information very precisely, at high speed, and at just the right
times. And when you are connected to the system over a satellite uplink, as
Hiro is, out here on the Raft, there is a delay as the signals bounce up to
the satellite and back down. That delay can be taken advantage of, if you
move quickly and don't look back. Hiro passes right through the wall on the
tail end of his all-penetrating katana.
Rifeland is a vast, brightly lit space occupied by elementary shapes
done up in primary colors. It is like being inside an educational toy
designed to teach solid geometry to three-year-olds: cubes, spheres,
tetrahedrons polyhedrons, connected with a web of cylinders and lines and
helices. But in this case, it has gone way, way out of control, as if every
Tinkertoy set and Lego block ever made had been slapped together according
to some long-forgotten scheme.
Hiro's been around the Metaverse long enough to know that despite the
bright cheery appearance of this thing, it is, in fact, as simple and
utilitarian as an Army camp. This is a model of a system. A big complicated
system. The shapes probably represent computers, or central nodes in Rife's
worldwide network, or Pearly Gates franchises, or any other kind of local
and regional offices that Rife has going around the world. By clambering
over this structure and, going into those bright shapes, Hiro could probably
uncover some of the code that makes Rife's network operate. He could,
perhaps, try to hack it up, as Juanita suggested.
But there is no point in messing with something he doesn't understand.
He might waste hours fooling around with some piece of code only to find out
that it was the software to control the automatic toilet flushers at Rife
Bible College. So Hiro keeps moving, keeps looking up at the tangle of
shapes, trying to find a pattern. He knows, now, that he has found his way
into the boiler room of the entire Metaverse. But he has no idea what he's
looking for.
This system, he realizes, really consists of several separate networks
all tangled together in the same space. There's an extremely complicated
tangle of fine red lines, millions of them, running back and forth between
thousands of small red balls. Just as a wild guess, Hiro figures that this
may represent Rife's fiber-optics network, with its innumerable local
offices and nodes spread all over the world. There are a number of less
complicated networks in other colors, which might represent coaxial lines,
such as they used to use for cable television, or even voice phone lines.
And there is a crude, heavily built, blocky network all done up in
blue. It consists of a small number - fewer than a dozen - of big blue
cubes. They are connected to each other, but to nothing else, by massive
blue tubes; the tubes are transparent, and inside of them, Hiro can see
bundles of smaller connections in various colors. It has taken Hiro a while
to see all of this, because the blue cubes are nearly obscured; they are all
surrounded by little red balls and other small nodes, like trees being
overwhelmed with kudzu. It appears to be an older, preexisting network of
some kind, with its own internal channels, mostly primitive ones like voice
phone. Rife has patched into it, heavily, with his own, higher-tech systems.
Hiro maneuvers until he can get a closer look at one of the blue cubes,
peering through the clutter of lines that has grown around it. The blue cube
has a big white star on each of its six faces.
"It's the Government of the United States," Juanita says.
"Where hackers go to die," Hiro says. The largest, and yet the least
efficient, producer of computer software in the world.
Hiro and Y.T. have eaten a lot of junk food together in different
joints all over L.A. - doughnuts, burritos, pizza, sushi, you name it - and
all Y.T. ever talks about is her mother and the terrible job that she has
with the Feds. The regimentation. The lie-detector tests. The fact that for
all the work she does, she really has no idea what it is that the government
is really working on.
It's always been a mystery to Hiro, too, but then, that's how the
government is. It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn't
bother with, which means that there's probably no reason for it; you never
know what they're doing or why. Hackers have traditionally looked upon the
government's coding sweatshops with horror and just tried to forget that all
of that shit ever existed.
But they have thousands of programmers. The programmers work twelve
hours a day out of some twisted sense of personal loyalty. Their
software-engineering techniques, while cruel and ugly, are very
sophisticated. They must have been up to something.
"Juanita?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't ask me why I think this. But I think that the government has
been undertaking a big software development project for L. Bob Rife."
"Makes sense," she says. "He has such a love-hate relationship with his
programmers - he needs them, but he won't trust them. The government's the
only organization he would trust to write something important. I wonder what
it is?"
"Hold on," Hiro says. "Hold on."
He is now a stone's throw away from a big blue cube sitting at ground
level. All the other blue cubes sort of feed into it. There is a motorcycle
parked next to the cube, rendered in color, but just one notch above black
and white: big jaggedy pixels and a limited color palette. It has a sidecar.
Raven's standing next to it.
He is carrying something in his arms. It is another simple geometric
construction, a long smooth blue ellipsoid a couple of feet in length. From
the way he's moving, Hiro thinks that Raven has just removed it from the
blue cube; he carries it over to the motorcycle and nestles it into the
sidecar.
"The Big One," Hiro says.
"It's exactly what we were afraid of," Juanita says. "Rife's revenge."
"Headed for the amphitheater. Where all the hackers are gathered in one
place. Rife's going to infect all of them at once. He's going to burn their
minds."
Raven's already on the motorcycle. If Hiro chases him on foot, he might
catch him before he reaches the Street.
But he might not. In that case, Raven would be on his way to Downtown
at tens of thousands of miles per hour while Hiro was still trying to get
back to his own motorcycle. At those speeds, once Hiro has lost sight of
Raven, he's lost him forever.
Raven starts his bike, begins maneuvering carefully through the tangle,
headed for the exit. Hiro takes off as fast as his invisible legs can carry
him, headed straight for the wall
He punches through a couple of seconds later, runs back to the Street.
His tiny little invisible avatar can't operate the motorcycle, so he returns
to his normal look, hops on his bike, and gets it turned around. Looking
back, he sees Raven riding out toward the Street, the logic bomb glowing a
soft blue, like heavy water in a reactor. He doesn't even see Hiro yet.
Now's his chance. He draws his katana, aims his bike at Raven, pumps it
up to sixty or so miles an hour. No point in coming in too fast; the only
way to kill Raven's avatar is to take its head off. Running it over with the
motorcycle won't have any effect.
A security daemon is running toward Raven, waving his arms. Raven looks
up, sees Hiro bearing down on him, and bursts forward. The sword cuts air
behind Raven's head.
It's too late. Raven must be gone now - but turning himself around,
Hiro can see him in the middle of the Street. He slammed into one of the
stanchions that holds up the monorail track - a perennial irritation to
high-speed motorcyclists.
"Shit!" both of them say simultaneously.
Raven gets turned toward Downtown and twists his throttle just as Hiro
is pulling in behind him on the Street, doing the same. Within a couple of
seconds, they're both headed for Downtown at something like fifty thousand
miles an hour. Hiro's half a mile behind Raven but can see him clearly: the
streetlights have merged into a smooth twin streak of yellow, and Raven
blazes in the middle, a storm of cheap color and big pixels.
"If I can take his head off, they're finished," Hiro says.
"Gotcha," Juanita says. "Because if you kill Raven, he gets kicked out
of the system. And he can't sign back on until the Graveyard Daemons dispose
of his avatar."
"And I control the Graveyard Daemons. So all I have to do is kill the
bastard once."
"Once they get their choppers back to land, they'll have better access
to the net - they can have someone else go into the Metaverse and take over
for him," Juanita warns.
"Wrong. Because Uncle Enzo and Mr. Lee are waiting for them on land.
They have to do it during the next hour, or never."
Y.T. suddenly wakes up. She hadn't realized that she was asleep.
Something about the thwop of the rotor blades must have lulled her. She must
be tired as shit, is what it really is.
"What the fuck is going on with my com net?" L. Bob Rife is squalling.
"No one answers," the Russian pilot says. "Not Raft, not L.A., not
Khyooston."
"Get me LAX on the phone, then," Rife says. "I want to take the jet to
Houston. We'll get our butts over to the campus and find out what's going
on."
The pilot messes around on his control panel. "Problem," he says.
"What?"
The pilot just shakes his head forlornly. "Someone is messing with the
skyphone. We're being jammed."
"I might be able to get a line," the President says. Rife just gives
him a look like, right, asshole.
"Anybody got a fucking quarter?" Rife hollers. Frank and Tony are
startled for a minute. "We're gonna have to touch down at the first pay
phone we see and make a goddamn phone call." He laughs. "Can you believe
that? Me, using a telephone?"
A second later, Y.T. looks out the window and is blown away to see
actual land down there, and a two-lane highway winding its way down a warm
sandy coastline. It's California.
The chopper slows, cuts in closer to land, begins following the
highway. Most of it is free of plastic and neon lights, but before long they
home in on a short bit of franchise ghetto, built on both sides of the road
in a place where it has cut away from the beach some distance.
The chopper sets down in the parking lot of a Buy 'n' Fly. Fortunately,
the lot's mostly empty, they don't cut any heads off. A couple of youths are
playing video games inside, and they barely look up at the astonishing sight
of the chopper. She's glad; Y.T. is totally embarrassed to be seen with this
dull assortment of old farts. The chopper just sits there, idling, while L.
Bob Rife jumps out and runs over to the pay phone bolted to the front wall.
These guys were stupid enough to put her in the seat right next to the
fire extinguisher. No reason not to take advantage of that fact. She jerks
it out of its bracket, pulling out the safety pin in virtually the same
motion, and squeezes the trigger, aiming it right into Tony's face.
Nothing happens.
"Fuck!" she shouts, and throws it at him, or rather pushes it toward
him. He's just leaning forward, grabbing at her wrist, and the impact of the
extinguisher hitting his face is enough to put a major dent in his 'tude.
Gives her enough time to swing her legs out of the chopper.
Everything's getting fucked up. One of her pockets is zipped open, and
as she's half-falling, half-rolling out of the chopper, the
fire-extinguisher bracket catches in that pocket and holds her. By the time
she's gotten free of that, Tony's back, now on his hands and knees, reaching
out for her arm.
That she manages to avoid. She's running out freely into the parking
lot. At the back, she's hemmed in by the Buy 'n' Fly, along the sides by the
tall border fence that separates this place from a NeoAquarian Temple on one
side and a Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchulate on the other. The only
way to escape is out onto the road - on the other side of the chopper. But
the pilot and Frank and Tony have already jumped out and are blocking her
exit out onto the road.
NeoAquarian Temple isn't going to help her. If she begs and pleads,
they might just include her in their mantras next week. But Mr. Lee's
Greater Hong Kong is another story. She runs to the fence and starts trying
to climb it. Eight feet of chain link with razor ribbon on top. But her
clothing should stop the razor ribbon. Mostly.
She gets about halfway up. Then, pudgy but strong arms are around her
waist. She's out of luck. L. Bob Rife lifts her right off the fence, both
arms and both legs kicking the air uselessly. He backs up a couple of steps
and starts carrying her back toward the chopper.
She looks back at the Hong Kong franchise. It was a close thing.
Someone's in the parking lot. A Kourier, cruising in off the highway,
just kind of chilling out and taking it real easy.
"Hey!" she screams. She reaches up and punches the lapel switch on her
coverall, turning it bright blue and orange. "Hey! I'm a Kourier! My name's
Y.T.! These maniac scum guys kidnapped me!"
"Wow," the Kourier says. "What a drag." Then he asks her something. But
she can't hear it because the helicopter is whirling up its blades.
"They're taking me to LAX!" she screams at the top of her lungs. Then
Rife slams her into the chopper face first. The chopper lifts off, tracked
precisely by an audience of antennas on the roof of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong
Kong.
In the parking lot, the Kourier watches the chopper taking off. It's
really cool to watch, and it has a lot of bumping guns on it.
But those dudes inside of the chopper were harshing that chick major.
The Kourier pulls his personal phone out of its holster, jacks into
RadiKS Central Command, and punches a big red button. He calls a Code.
Twenty-five hundred Kouriers are massed on the reinforced-concrete
banks of the L.A. River. Down in the bottom trench of the river, Vitaly
Chernobyl and the Meltdowns are just hitting the really good part of their
next major hit single, "Control Rod Jam." A number of the Kouriers are
taking advantage of this sound track to style up and down the banks of the
river; only Vitaly, live, can get their adrenaline pumping hard enough to
enable them to skate a sharp bank at eighty miles per hour plus without
doing a wilson into the crete.
And then the dark mass of Meltdown fans turns into a gyrating,
orange-red galaxy as twenty-five hundred new stars appear. It's a
mind-blowing sight, and at first they think it's a new visual effect put
together by Vitaly and his imageers. It is like a mass flicking of Bics,
except brighter and more organized; each Kourier looks down on his or her
belt to see that a red light is flashing on their personal telephone. Looks
like some poor skater called in a Code.
In a Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchise on the outskirts of Phoenix,
Rat Thing number B-782 comes awake.
Fido is waking up because the dogs are barking tonight.
There is always barking. Much of the barking is very far away. Fido
knows that faraway barks are not as important as close barks, and so he
often sleeps through these.
But sometimes a faraway bark will carry a special sound that makes Fido
excited, and he can't help waking up.
He is hearing one of those barks right now. It comes from far away but
it is urgent. Some nice doggie somewhere is very upset. He is so upset that
his barking has spread to all the other doggies in the pack.
Fido listens to the bark. He gets excited, too. Some bad strangers have
just been very close to a nice doggie's yard. They were in a flying thing.
They had lots of guns.
Fido doesn't like guns very much. A stranger with a gun shot him once
and made him hurt. Then the nice girl came and helped him.
These are extremely bad strangers. Any nice doggie in his right mind
would want to hurt them and make them go away. As Fido listens to the bark,
he sees what they look like and hears the way they sound. If any of these
very bad strangers ever come into his yard, he will be extremely upset.
Then Fido notices that the bad strangers are chasing someone. He can
tell they are hurting her by the way her voice sounds and the way she moves.
The bad strangers are hurting the nice girl who loves him! Fido gets
more angry than he has ever been, even more angry than when a bad man shot
him long ago.
His job is to keep bad strangers out of his yard. He does not do
anything else.
But it's even more important to protect the nice girl who loves him.
That is more important than anything. And nothing can stop him. Not even the
fence.
The fence is very tall. But he can remember a long time ago when he
used to jump over things that were taller than his head.
Fido comes out of his doggie house, curls his long legs beneath him,
and jumps over the fence around his yard before he has remembered that he is
not capable of jumping over it. This contradiction is lost on him, though;
as a dog, introspection is not one of his strong points.
The bark is spreading to another place far away. All the nice doggies
who live in this faraway place are being warned to look out for the very bad
strangers and the girl who loves Fido, because they are going to that place.
Fido sees the place in his mind. It is big and wide and flat and open, like
a nice field for chasing Frisbees. It has lots of big flying things. Around
the edges are a couple of yards where nice doggies live.
Fido can hear those nice doggies barking in reply. He knows where they
are. Far away. But you can get there by streets. Fido knows a whole lot of
different streets. He just runs down streets, and he knows where he is and
where he's going.
At first, the only trace that B-782 leaves of his passage is a dancing
trail of sparks down the center of the franchise ghetto. But once he makes
his way out onto a long straight piece of highway, he begins to leave
further evidence: a spume of shattered blue safety glass spraying outward in
parallel vanes from all four lanes of traffic as the windows and the
windshields of the cars blow out of their frames, spraying into the air like
rooster tails behind a speedboat.
As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are
programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's
in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the
sound barrier. Bring the noise.
"Raven," Hiro says, "let me tell you a story before I kill you."
"I'll listen," Raven says. "It's a long ride."
All vehicles in the Metaverse have voice phones on them. Hiro simply
called home to the Librarian and had him look up Raven's number. They are
riding in lockstep across the black surface of the imaginary planet now,
though Hiro is gaining on Raven, meter by meter.
"My dad was in the Army in World War Two. Lied about his age to get in.
They put him in the Pacific doing scut work. Anyway, he got captured by the
Nipponese."
"So?"
"So they took him back to Nippon. Put him in a prison camp. There were
a lot of Americans there, plus some Brits and some Chinese. And a couple of
guys that they couldn't place. They looked like Indians. Spoke a little
English. But they spoke Russian even better."
"They were Aleuts," Raven says. "American citizens. But no one had ever
heard of them. Most people don't know that the Japanese conquered American
territory during the war - several islands at the end of the Aleutian chain.
Inhabited. By my people. They took the two most important Aleuts and put
them in prison camps in Japan. One of them was the mayor of Attu - the most
important civil authority. The other was even more important, to us. He was
the chief harpooneer of the Aleut nation."
Hiro says, "The mayor got sick and died. He didn't have any immunities.
But the harpooneer was one tough son of a bitch. He got sick a few times,
but he survived. Went out to work in the fields along with the rest of the
prisoners, growing food for the war effort. Worked in the kitchen, preparing
slop for the prisoners and the guards. He kept to himself a lot. Everyone
avoided him because he smelled terrible. His bed stank up the barracks."
"He was cooking up aconite whale poison from mushrooms and other
substances that he found in the fields and secreted in his clothing," Raven
says.
"Besides," Hiro continues, "they were pissed at him because he broke
out a windowpane in the barracks once, and it let cold air in for the rest
of the winter. Anyway, one day, after lunch, all of the guards became
terribly sick."
"Whale poison in the fish stew," Raven says.
"The prisoners were already out working in the fields, and when the
guards began to get sick, they began to march them all back in toward the
barracks, because they couldn't keep watch over them when they were doubled
over with stomach cramps. And this late in the war, it wasn't easy to bring
in reinforcements. My father was last in the line of prisoners. And this
Aleut guy was right in front of him."
Raven says, "As the prisoners were crossing an irrigation ditch, the
Aleut dove into the water and disappeared."
"My father didn't know what to do," Hiro says, "until he heard a grunt
from the guard who was bringing up the rear. He turned around and saw that
this guard had a bamboo spear stuck all the way through his body. Just came
out of nowhere. And he still couldn't see the Aleut. Then another guard went
down with his throat slit, and there was the Aleut, winding up and throwing
another spear that brought down yet another guard."
"He had been making harpoons and hiding them under the water in the
irrigation ditches," Raven says.
"Then my father realized," Hiro continues, "that he was doomed. Because
no matter what he said to the guards, they would consider him to have been a
part of an escape attempt, and they would bring a sword and lop his head
off. So, figuring that he might as well bring down a few of the enemy before
they got to him, he took the gun from the first guard who had been hit,
jumped down into the cover of the irrigation ditch, and shot another couple
of guards who were coming over to investigate."
Raven says, "The Aleut ran for the border fence, which was a flimsy
bamboo thing. There was supposedly a minefield there but he ran straight
across it with no trouble. Either he was lucky or else the mines - if there
were any - were few and far between."
"They didn't bother to have strict perimeter security," Hiro says,
"because Japan is an island - so even if someone escaped, where could they
run to?"
"An Aleut could do it, though," Raven says. "He could go to the nearest
coastline and build himself a kayak. He could take to the open water and
make his way up the coastline of Japan, then surf from one island to the
next, all the way back to the Aleutians."
"Right," Hiro says, "which is the only part of the story that I never
understood - until I saw you on the open water, outrunning a speedboat in
your kayak. Then I put it all together. Your father wasn't crazy. He had a
perfectly good plan."
"Yes. But your father didn't understand it."
"My father ran in your father's footsteps across the minefield. They
were free - in Nippon. Your father started heading downhill, toward the
ocean. My father wanted to head uphill, into the mountains, figuring that
they could maybe live in an isolated place until the war was over."
"It was a stupid idea," Raven says. "Japan is heavily populated. There
is no place where they could have gone unnoticed."
"My father didn't even know what a kayak was."
"Ignorance is no excuse," Raven says.
"Their arguing - the same argument we're having now - was their
downfall. The Nipponese caught up with them on a road just outside of
Nagasaki. They didn't even have handcuffs, so they tied their hands behind
their backs with bootlaces and made them kneel - on the road, facing each
other. Then the lieutenant took his sword out of its sheath. It was an
ancient sword; the lieutenant was from a proud family of samurai, and the
only reason he was on this home-front detail was that he had nearly had one
leg blown off earlier in the war. He raised the sword up above my father's
head."
"It made a high ringing sound in the air," Raven says, "that hurt my
father's ears."
"But it never came down."
"My father saw your father's skeleton kneeling in front of him. That
was the last thing he ever saw."
"My father was facing away from Nagasaki," Hiro says. "He was
temporarily blinded by the light; he fell forward and pressed his face into
the ground to get the terrible light out of his eyes. Then everything was
back to normal again."
"Except my father was blind," Raven says. "He could only listen to your
father fighting the lieutenant."
"It was a half-blind, one-legged samurai with a katana versus a big
strong healthy man with his arms tied, behind his back," Hiro says. "A
pretty interesting fight. A pretty fair one. My father won. And that was the
end of the war. The occupation troops got there a couple of weeks later. My
father went home and kicked around for a while and finally had a kid during
the seventies. So did yours."
Raven says, "Amchitka, 1972. My father got nuked twice by you
bastards."
"I understand the depth of your feelings," Hiro says. "But don't you
think you've had enough revenge?"
"There's no such thing as enough," Raven says.
Hiro guns his motorcycle forward and closes on Raven, swinging his
katana. But Raven reaches back - watching him in the rearview mirror - and
blocks the blow; he's carrying a big long knife in one hand. Then Raven cuts
his speed down to almost nothing and dives in between a couple of the
stanchions. Hiro overshoots him, slows down too much, and gets a glimpse of
Raven screaming past him on the other side of the monorail; by the time he's
accelerated and cut through another gap, Raven has already slalomed over to
the other side.
And so it goes. They run down the length of the Street in an
interlacing zigzag pattern, cutting back and forth under the monorail. The
game is a simple one. All Raven has to do is make Hiro run into a stanchion.
Hiro will come to a stop for a moment. By that time Raven will be gone, out
of visual range, and Hiro will have no way to track him.
It's an easier game for Raven than for Hiro. But Hiro's better at this
kind of thing than Raven is. That makes it a pretty even match. They slalom
down the monorail track at speeds from sixty to sixty thousand miles per
hour; all around them, low-slung commercial developments and high-tech labs
and amusement parks sprawl off into the darkness. Downtown is before them,
as high and bright as the aurora borealis rising from the black water of the
Bering Sea.
The first poon smacks into the belly of the chopper as they are coming
in low over the Valley. Y.T. feels it rather than hears it; she knows that
sweet impact so well that she can sense it like one of those supersensitive
seismo-thingies that detects earthquakes on the other side of the planet.
Then half a dozen other poons strike in quick succession, and she has to
force herself not to lean over and look out the window. Of course. The
chopper's belly is a solid wall of Soviet steel. It'll hold poons like glue.
If they just keep flying low enough to poon - which they have to, to keep
the chopper under the Mafia's radar.
She can hear the radio crackling up front. "Take it up, Sasha, you're
picking up some parasites."
She looks out the window. The other chopper, the little aluminum
corporate number, is flying alongside them, a little bit higher in the air,
and all the people inside of it are peering out the windows, watching the
pavement underneath them. Except for Raven. Raven is still goggled into the
Metaverse.
Shit. The pilot's pulling the chopper to a higher altitude.
"Okay, Sasha. You lost 'em," the radio says. "But you still got a
couple of them poon things hanging off your belly, so make sure you don't
snag 'em on anything. The cables are stronger than steel."
That's all Y.T. needs. She opens the door and jumps out of the chopper.
At least that's how it looks to the people inside. Actually she grabs a
handhold on her way down and ends up dangling from the swinging, open door,
looking inward toward the belly of the chopper. A couple of poons are stuck
to it; thirty feet below, she can see the handles dangling on the ends of
their lines, fluttering in the airstream. Looking into the open door she
can't hear Rife but she can see him, sitting there next to the pilot,
motioning: Down, take it down!
Which is what she figured. This hostage thing works two ways. She's no
good to Rife unless he's got her, and she's in one piece.
The chopper starts losing altitude again, heading back down toward the
twin stripe of loglo that marks out the avenue beneath them. Y.T. gets
swinging back and forth on the door a little, finally swings in far enough
that she can hook one of the poon cables with her foot.
This next bit is going to hurt like hell. But the tough fabric of the
coverall should prevent her from losing too much skin. And the sight of Tony
lunging at her, trying to grab her sleeve, reinforces her own natural
tendency not to think about it too hard. She lets go of the chopper's door
with one of her hands, grabs the poon cable, winds it around the outside of
her glove a couple of times, then lets go with the other hand.
She was right. It does hurt like hell. As she swings down under the
belly of the chopper, out of Tony's grasp, something pops inside her hand -
probably one of those dinky little bones. But she gets the poon cable
wrapped around her body the same way Raven did when he rappeled off the ship
with her, and manages a controlled, burning slide down to the end.
Down to the handle, that is. She hooks it onto her belt so she can't
fall and then thrashes around for what seems like a whole minute until she's
not tangled up in the cable anymore, just dangling by the waist, twisting
around and around between the chopper and the street, out of control. Then
she gets the handle in both hands and unhooks it from her belt so she's
hanging by the arms again, which was the whole point of the exercise. As she
rotates, she sees the other chopper above her and off to the side, glimpses
the faces watching her, knows that all of this is being relayed, over the
radio, to Rife.
Sure enough. The chopper cuts to about half its former speed, loses
some altitude.
She clicks another control and reels out the line all the way to the
end, dropping twenty feet in one thrill-packed moment. Now she's flying
along, ten or fifteen feet above the highway, doing maybe forty-five miles
an hour. The logo signs shoot past her on either side like meteors. Other
than a swarm of Kouriers, traffic is light.
The RARE chopper comes thwacking in, dangerously close, and she looks
up at it, just for an instant, and sees Raven looking at her through the
window. He's pulled his goggles up on his forehead, just for a second. He's
got a certain look on his face, and she realizes that he's not pissed at her
at all. He loves her.
She lets go of the handle and goes into free fall.
At the same time, she jerks the manual release on her cervical collar
and goes into full Michelin Man mode as tiny gas cartridges detonate in
several strategic locations around her bod. The biggest one goes off like an
M-80 at the nape of her neck, unfurling the coverall's collar into a
cylindrical gasbag that shoots straight up and encases her entire head.
Other airbags go off around her torso and her pelvis, paying lots of
attention to that spinal column. Her joints are already protected by the
armorgel.
Which is not to say that it doesn't hurt when she lands. She can't see
anything because of the airbag around her head, of course. But she feels
herself bouncing at least ten times. She skids for a quarter of a mile and
apparently caroms off several cars along the way; she can hear their tires
squealing. Finally, she goes butt first through someone's windshield and
ends up sprawled across their front seat; they veer into a Jersey barrier.
The airbag deflates as soon as everything stops moving, and she claws it
away from her face.
Her ears are ringing or something. She can't hear anything. Maybe she
busted her eardrums when the airbags went off.
But there's also the question of the big chopper, which has a talent
for making noise. She drags herself out onto the hood of the car, feeling
little hunks of safety glass beneath her carving parallel scratches into the
paint job.
Rife's big Soviet chopper is right there, hovering about twenty feet
above the avenue, and by the time she sees it, it has already accumulated a
dozen more poons. Her eyes follow the cables down to street level, and she
sees Kouriers straining at the lines; this time, they're not letting go.
Rife gets suspicious, and the chopper gains altitude, lifting the
Kouriers off their planks. But a passing double-bottom semi sheds a small
army of Kouriers - there must be a hundred of them pooned onto the poor
thing - and within a few seconds, all their MagnaPoons are airborne and at
least half of them stick to the armor plating on the first try. The chopper
lurches downward until all of the Kouriers are on the ground again. Twenty
more Kouriers come flying in and nail it; those that can't, grab onto
someone else's handle and add their weight. The chopper tries several times
to rise, but it may as well be tethered to the asphalt by this point.
It starts to come down. The Kouriers fan out away from it so that the
chopper comes down in the middle of a radial burst of poon cables.
Tony, the security guy, climbs down out of the open door, moving
slowly, high-stepping his way through the web of cables but somehow
retaining his balance and his dignity. He walks away from the chopper until
he is out from under the rotor blades, then pulls an Uzi out from under his
windbreaker and fires a short air burst.
"Get the fuck away from our chopper!" he is shouting.
The Kouriers, by and large, do. They're not stupid. And Y.T. is now
walking around safe on the pavement, the mission is accomplished, the Code
is finished, there's no reason to hassle these chopper dudes anymore. They
detach their poons from the belly of the chopper and reel in the cables.
Tony looks around and sees Y.T. She's walking directly toward the
chopper. Her sprained body moves awkwardly.
"Get back in the chopper, you lucky bitch!" he says.
Y.T. picks up a loose poon handle that no one has bothered to reel in
yet. She hits the button that turns off the electromagnet and its head drops
off the chopper's armor. She reels it in until about four feet of slack is
there between the reel and the head.
"There was this dude named Ahab that I read about," she says, whirling
the poon around her head. "He got his poon cable all wrapped up around the
thing he was trying to poon. It was a big mistake."
She lets the poon fly. It passes up through the plane of the rotor
blades, near the center, and she can see the unbreakable cable start to wind
itself around the delicate parts of the rotor's axle, like a garrote around
a ballerina's neck. Through the chopper's windshield she can see Sasha
reacting, flipping switches frantically, pulling levers, his mouth making a
long string of Russian curses. The poon's handle gets snapped out of her
hand, and she sees it get whipped into the center like it's a black hole.
"I guess he just didn't know when to let go, like some people," she
says. Then she turns around and walks away from the chopper. Behind her, she
can hear large pieces of metal going the wrong way, running into one another
at high speed.
Rife has figured it out a long time ago. He's already running down the
middle of the highway with a submachine gun in one hand, looking for a car
to commandeer. Above, the RARE chopper hovers and watches; Rife looks up to
it and motions forward with one hand, shouting, "Go to LAX! Go to LAX!"
The chopper makes one last orbit over the scene, watching as Sasha puts
the ruined gunship into cold shutdown, watching furious Kouriers
overwhelming and disarming Tony and Frank and the President, watching as
Rife stands in the middle of the left lane and forces a CosaNostra Pizza car
to a stop, forces the driver out. But Raven isn't watching any of these
things. He's looking out the window at Y.T. And as the chopper finally tilts
forward and accelerates into the night, he grins at her and gives her the
thumbs up. Y.T. bites her lower lip and flips him the bird. With that, the
relationship is over, hopefully for all time.
Y.T. borrows a plank from an awed skater and pushes herself across the
street to the nearest Buy 'n' Fly and starts trying to call Mom for a ride
home.
Hiro loses Raven a few miles outside of Downtown, but it doesn't matter
by this point; he goes straight to the plaza and then starts to orbit the
rim of the amphitheater at high speed, a one-man picket fence. Raven makes
his approach within a few seconds. Hiro breaks out of his orbit and heads
straight for him, and they come together like a couple of medieval jousters.
Hiro loses his left arm and Raven drops a leg. The limbs topple to the
ground. Hiro drops his katana and uses his remaining arm to draw his
one-handed sword - a better match for Raven's long knife anyway. He cuts
Raven off just as he's about to plummet over the lip of the amphitheater and
forces him aside; Raven's momentum takes him half a mile away in half a
second. Hiro chases him down by following a series of educated guesses - he
knows this territory like Raven knows the currents of the Aleutians - and
then they are blasting through the narrow streets of the Metaverse's
financial district, waving long knives at each other, slicing and dicing
hundreds of pinstriped avatars who happen to get in their way.
But they never seem to hit each other. The speeds are just too great,
the targets too small. Hiro's been lucky so far - he has got Raven caught up
in the thrill of competition, made him spoil for a fight. But Raven doesn't
need this. He can get back to the amphitheater pretty easily without
bothering to kill Hiro first.
And finally, he realizes it. He sheathes his knife and dives into an
alley between skyscrapers. Hiro follows him, but by the time he's gotten
into that same alley, Raven's gone.
Hiro goes over the lip of the amphitheater doing a couple of hundred
miles per hour and soars out into space, in free fall, above the heads of a
quarter of a million wildly cheering hackers.
They all know Hiro. He's the guy with the swords. He's a friend of
Da5id's. And as his own personal contribution to the benefit, he's
apparently decided to stage a sword fight with some kind of hulking,
scary-looking daemon on a motorcycle. Don't touch that dial, it's going to
be a hell of a show.
He lands on the stage and bounces to a halt next to his motorcycle. The
bike still works, but it's worthless down here. Raven is ten meters away,
grinning at him.
"Bombs away," Raven says. He pulls the glowing blue lozenge out of his
sidecar with one hand and drops it on the center of the amphitheater. It
breaks open like the shell of an egg and light shines out of it. The light
halfway around the Metaverse, a distance of 32,768 kilometers. The only hard
part, really, is getting out of Downtown. He can ride his bike straight
through the avatars as usual, but the Street is also cluttered with
vehicles, animercials commercial displays, public plazas, and other bits of
solid-looking software that get in his way.
Not to mention a few distractions. Off to his right, about a kilometer
away from The Black Sun is a deep hole in the hyper-Manhattan skyline. It is
an open plaza about a mile wide, a park of sorts where avatars can gather
for concerts and conventions and festivals. Most of it is occupied by a
deep-dish amphitheater that is capable of seating close to a million avatars
at once. Down at the bottom is a huge circular stage.
Normally, the stage is occupied by major rock groups. Tonight, it is
occupied by the grandest and most brilliant computer hallucinations that the
human mind can invent. A three-dimensional marquee hangs above it announcing
tonight's event: a benefit graphics concert staged on behalf of Da5id Meier,
who is still hospitalized with an inexplicable disease. The amphitheater is
half filled with hackers.
Once he gets out of Downtown, Hiro twists his throttle up to the max
and covers the remaining thirty-two thousand and some kilometers in the
space of about ten minutes. Over his head, the express trains are whooshing
down the track at a metaphorical speed of ten thousand miles per hour; he
passes them like they're standing still. This only works because he's riding
in an absolutely straight line. He's got a routine coded into his motorcycle
software that makes it follow the monorail track automatically so that he
doesn't even have to worry about steering it.
Meanwhile, Juanita's standing next to him in Reality. She's got another
pair of goggles; she can see all the same things that Hiro sees.
"Rife's got a mobile uplink on his corporate chopper, just like the one
on commercial airliners, so he can patch into the Metaverse when he's in the
air. As long as he's airborne, that's his only link to the Metaverse. We may
be able to hack our way into that one link and block it or something..."
"That low-level communications stuff is too full of medicine for us to
mess with it in this decade," Hiro says, braking his motorcycle to a stop.
"Holy shit. It's just like Y.T. described it."
He's in front of Port 127. Rife's black cube is there, just as Y.T.
described it. There's no door.
Hiro starts walking away from the Street, toward the cube. It reflects
no light at all, so he can't tell whether it's ten feet or ten miles away
from him until the security daemons begin to materialize. There are half a
dozen of them, all big sturdy avatars in blue coveralls, sort of
quasi-military looking, but without rank. They don't need rank because
they're all running the same program. They materialize around him in a neat
semicircle with a radius of about ten feet, blocking Hiro's way to the cube.
Hiro mumbles a word under his breath and vanishes - he slips into his
invisible avatar. It would be very interesting to hang around and see how
these security daemons deal with it, but right now he has to get moving
before they get a chance to adjust.
They don't, at least not very well. Hiro runs between two of the
security daemons and heads for the wall of the cube. He finally gets there,
slamming into it, coming to dead stop. The security daemons have all turned
around and are chasing him. They can figure out where he is - the computer
tells them that much - but they can't do much to him. Like the bouncer
daemons in The Black Sun, which Hiro helped write, they shove people around
by applying basic rules of avatar physics. When Hiro is invisible, there is
very little for them to shove. But if they are well written, they may have
more subtle ways of messing him up, so he's not wasting any time. He pokes
his katana through the side of the cube and follows it through the wall and
out the other side.
This is a hack. It is really based on a very old hack, a loophole that
he found years ago when he was trying to graft the sword-fighting rules onto
the existing Metaverse software. His blade doesn't have the power to cut a
hole in the wall - this would mean permanently changing the shape of someone
else's building - but it does have the power to penetrate things. Avatars do
not have that power. That is the whole purpose of a wall in the Metaverse;
it is a structure that does not allow avatars to penetrate it. But like
anything else in the Metaverse, this rule is nothing but a protocol, a
convention that different computers agree to follow. In theory, it cannot be
ignored. But in practice, it depends upon the ability of different computers
to swap information very precisely, at high speed, and at just the right
times. And when you are connected to the system over a satellite uplink, as
Hiro is, out here on the Raft, there is a delay as the signals bounce up to
the satellite and back down. That delay can be taken advantage of, if you
move quickly and don't look back. Hiro passes right through the wall on the
tail end of his all-penetrating katana.
Rifeland is a vast, brightly lit space occupied by elementary shapes
done up in primary colors. It is like being inside an educational toy
designed to teach solid geometry to three-year-olds: cubes, spheres,
tetrahedrons polyhedrons, connected with a web of cylinders and lines and
helices. But in this case, it has gone way, way out of control, as if every
Tinkertoy set and Lego block ever made had been slapped together according
to some long-forgotten scheme.
Hiro's been around the Metaverse long enough to know that despite the
bright cheery appearance of this thing, it is, in fact, as simple and
utilitarian as an Army camp. This is a model of a system. A big complicated
system. The shapes probably represent computers, or central nodes in Rife's
worldwide network, or Pearly Gates franchises, or any other kind of local
and regional offices that Rife has going around the world. By clambering
over this structure and, going into those bright shapes, Hiro could probably
uncover some of the code that makes Rife's network operate. He could,
perhaps, try to hack it up, as Juanita suggested.
But there is no point in messing with something he doesn't understand.
He might waste hours fooling around with some piece of code only to find out
that it was the software to control the automatic toilet flushers at Rife
Bible College. So Hiro keeps moving, keeps looking up at the tangle of
shapes, trying to find a pattern. He knows, now, that he has found his way
into the boiler room of the entire Metaverse. But he has no idea what he's
looking for.
This system, he realizes, really consists of several separate networks
all tangled together in the same space. There's an extremely complicated
tangle of fine red lines, millions of them, running back and forth between
thousands of small red balls. Just as a wild guess, Hiro figures that this
may represent Rife's fiber-optics network, with its innumerable local
offices and nodes spread all over the world. There are a number of less
complicated networks in other colors, which might represent coaxial lines,
such as they used to use for cable television, or even voice phone lines.
And there is a crude, heavily built, blocky network all done up in
blue. It consists of a small number - fewer than a dozen - of big blue
cubes. They are connected to each other, but to nothing else, by massive
blue tubes; the tubes are transparent, and inside of them, Hiro can see
bundles of smaller connections in various colors. It has taken Hiro a while
to see all of this, because the blue cubes are nearly obscured; they are all
surrounded by little red balls and other small nodes, like trees being
overwhelmed with kudzu. It appears to be an older, preexisting network of
some kind, with its own internal channels, mostly primitive ones like voice
phone. Rife has patched into it, heavily, with his own, higher-tech systems.
Hiro maneuvers until he can get a closer look at one of the blue cubes,
peering through the clutter of lines that has grown around it. The blue cube
has a big white star on each of its six faces.
"It's the Government of the United States," Juanita says.
"Where hackers go to die," Hiro says. The largest, and yet the least
efficient, producer of computer software in the world.
Hiro and Y.T. have eaten a lot of junk food together in different
joints all over L.A. - doughnuts, burritos, pizza, sushi, you name it - and
all Y.T. ever talks about is her mother and the terrible job that she has
with the Feds. The regimentation. The lie-detector tests. The fact that for
all the work she does, she really has no idea what it is that the government
is really working on.
It's always been a mystery to Hiro, too, but then, that's how the
government is. It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn't
bother with, which means that there's probably no reason for it; you never
know what they're doing or why. Hackers have traditionally looked upon the
government's coding sweatshops with horror and just tried to forget that all
of that shit ever existed.
But they have thousands of programmers. The programmers work twelve
hours a day out of some twisted sense of personal loyalty. Their
software-engineering techniques, while cruel and ugly, are very
sophisticated. They must have been up to something.
"Juanita?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't ask me why I think this. But I think that the government has
been undertaking a big software development project for L. Bob Rife."
"Makes sense," she says. "He has such a love-hate relationship with his
programmers - he needs them, but he won't trust them. The government's the
only organization he would trust to write something important. I wonder what
it is?"
"Hold on," Hiro says. "Hold on."
He is now a stone's throw away from a big blue cube sitting at ground
level. All the other blue cubes sort of feed into it. There is a motorcycle
parked next to the cube, rendered in color, but just one notch above black
and white: big jaggedy pixels and a limited color palette. It has a sidecar.
Raven's standing next to it.
He is carrying something in his arms. It is another simple geometric
construction, a long smooth blue ellipsoid a couple of feet in length. From
the way he's moving, Hiro thinks that Raven has just removed it from the
blue cube; he carries it over to the motorcycle and nestles it into the
sidecar.
"The Big One," Hiro says.
"It's exactly what we were afraid of," Juanita says. "Rife's revenge."
"Headed for the amphitheater. Where all the hackers are gathered in one
place. Rife's going to infect all of them at once. He's going to burn their
minds."
Raven's already on the motorcycle. If Hiro chases him on foot, he might
catch him before he reaches the Street.
But he might not. In that case, Raven would be on his way to Downtown
at tens of thousands of miles per hour while Hiro was still trying to get
back to his own motorcycle. At those speeds, once Hiro has lost sight of
Raven, he's lost him forever.
Raven starts his bike, begins maneuvering carefully through the tangle,
headed for the exit. Hiro takes off as fast as his invisible legs can carry
him, headed straight for the wall
He punches through a couple of seconds later, runs back to the Street.
His tiny little invisible avatar can't operate the motorcycle, so he returns
to his normal look, hops on his bike, and gets it turned around. Looking
back, he sees Raven riding out toward the Street, the logic bomb glowing a
soft blue, like heavy water in a reactor. He doesn't even see Hiro yet.
Now's his chance. He draws his katana, aims his bike at Raven, pumps it
up to sixty or so miles an hour. No point in coming in too fast; the only
way to kill Raven's avatar is to take its head off. Running it over with the
motorcycle won't have any effect.
A security daemon is running toward Raven, waving his arms. Raven looks
up, sees Hiro bearing down on him, and bursts forward. The sword cuts air
behind Raven's head.
It's too late. Raven must be gone now - but turning himself around,
Hiro can see him in the middle of the Street. He slammed into one of the
stanchions that holds up the monorail track - a perennial irritation to
high-speed motorcyclists.
"Shit!" both of them say simultaneously.
Raven gets turned toward Downtown and twists his throttle just as Hiro
is pulling in behind him on the Street, doing the same. Within a couple of
seconds, they're both headed for Downtown at something like fifty thousand
miles an hour. Hiro's half a mile behind Raven but can see him clearly: the
streetlights have merged into a smooth twin streak of yellow, and Raven
blazes in the middle, a storm of cheap color and big pixels.
"If I can take his head off, they're finished," Hiro says.
"Gotcha," Juanita says. "Because if you kill Raven, he gets kicked out
of the system. And he can't sign back on until the Graveyard Daemons dispose
of his avatar."
"And I control the Graveyard Daemons. So all I have to do is kill the
bastard once."
"Once they get their choppers back to land, they'll have better access
to the net - they can have someone else go into the Metaverse and take over
for him," Juanita warns.
"Wrong. Because Uncle Enzo and Mr. Lee are waiting for them on land.
They have to do it during the next hour, or never."
Y.T. suddenly wakes up. She hadn't realized that she was asleep.
Something about the thwop of the rotor blades must have lulled her. She must
be tired as shit, is what it really is.
"What the fuck is going on with my com net?" L. Bob Rife is squalling.
"No one answers," the Russian pilot says. "Not Raft, not L.A., not
Khyooston."
"Get me LAX on the phone, then," Rife says. "I want to take the jet to
Houston. We'll get our butts over to the campus and find out what's going
on."
The pilot messes around on his control panel. "Problem," he says.
"What?"
The pilot just shakes his head forlornly. "Someone is messing with the
skyphone. We're being jammed."
"I might be able to get a line," the President says. Rife just gives
him a look like, right, asshole.
"Anybody got a fucking quarter?" Rife hollers. Frank and Tony are
startled for a minute. "We're gonna have to touch down at the first pay
phone we see and make a goddamn phone call." He laughs. "Can you believe
that? Me, using a telephone?"
A second later, Y.T. looks out the window and is blown away to see
actual land down there, and a two-lane highway winding its way down a warm
sandy coastline. It's California.
The chopper slows, cuts in closer to land, begins following the
highway. Most of it is free of plastic and neon lights, but before long they
home in on a short bit of franchise ghetto, built on both sides of the road
in a place where it has cut away from the beach some distance.
The chopper sets down in the parking lot of a Buy 'n' Fly. Fortunately,
the lot's mostly empty, they don't cut any heads off. A couple of youths are
playing video games inside, and they barely look up at the astonishing sight
of the chopper. She's glad; Y.T. is totally embarrassed to be seen with this
dull assortment of old farts. The chopper just sits there, idling, while L.
Bob Rife jumps out and runs over to the pay phone bolted to the front wall.
These guys were stupid enough to put her in the seat right next to the
fire extinguisher. No reason not to take advantage of that fact. She jerks
it out of its bracket, pulling out the safety pin in virtually the same
motion, and squeezes the trigger, aiming it right into Tony's face.
Nothing happens.
"Fuck!" she shouts, and throws it at him, or rather pushes it toward
him. He's just leaning forward, grabbing at her wrist, and the impact of the
extinguisher hitting his face is enough to put a major dent in his 'tude.
Gives her enough time to swing her legs out of the chopper.
Everything's getting fucked up. One of her pockets is zipped open, and
as she's half-falling, half-rolling out of the chopper, the
fire-extinguisher bracket catches in that pocket and holds her. By the time
she's gotten free of that, Tony's back, now on his hands and knees, reaching
out for her arm.
That she manages to avoid. She's running out freely into the parking
lot. At the back, she's hemmed in by the Buy 'n' Fly, along the sides by the
tall border fence that separates this place from a NeoAquarian Temple on one
side and a Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchulate on the other. The only
way to escape is out onto the road - on the other side of the chopper. But
the pilot and Frank and Tony have already jumped out and are blocking her
exit out onto the road.
NeoAquarian Temple isn't going to help her. If she begs and pleads,
they might just include her in their mantras next week. But Mr. Lee's
Greater Hong Kong is another story. She runs to the fence and starts trying
to climb it. Eight feet of chain link with razor ribbon on top. But her
clothing should stop the razor ribbon. Mostly.
She gets about halfway up. Then, pudgy but strong arms are around her
waist. She's out of luck. L. Bob Rife lifts her right off the fence, both
arms and both legs kicking the air uselessly. He backs up a couple of steps
and starts carrying her back toward the chopper.
She looks back at the Hong Kong franchise. It was a close thing.
Someone's in the parking lot. A Kourier, cruising in off the highway,
just kind of chilling out and taking it real easy.
"Hey!" she screams. She reaches up and punches the lapel switch on her
coverall, turning it bright blue and orange. "Hey! I'm a Kourier! My name's
Y.T.! These maniac scum guys kidnapped me!"
"Wow," the Kourier says. "What a drag." Then he asks her something. But
she can't hear it because the helicopter is whirling up its blades.
"They're taking me to LAX!" she screams at the top of her lungs. Then
Rife slams her into the chopper face first. The chopper lifts off, tracked
precisely by an audience of antennas on the roof of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong
Kong.
In the parking lot, the Kourier watches the chopper taking off. It's
really cool to watch, and it has a lot of bumping guns on it.
But those dudes inside of the chopper were harshing that chick major.
The Kourier pulls his personal phone out of its holster, jacks into
RadiKS Central Command, and punches a big red button. He calls a Code.
Twenty-five hundred Kouriers are massed on the reinforced-concrete
banks of the L.A. River. Down in the bottom trench of the river, Vitaly
Chernobyl and the Meltdowns are just hitting the really good part of their
next major hit single, "Control Rod Jam." A number of the Kouriers are
taking advantage of this sound track to style up and down the banks of the
river; only Vitaly, live, can get their adrenaline pumping hard enough to
enable them to skate a sharp bank at eighty miles per hour plus without
doing a wilson into the crete.
And then the dark mass of Meltdown fans turns into a gyrating,
orange-red galaxy as twenty-five hundred new stars appear. It's a
mind-blowing sight, and at first they think it's a new visual effect put
together by Vitaly and his imageers. It is like a mass flicking of Bics,
except brighter and more organized; each Kourier looks down on his or her
belt to see that a red light is flashing on their personal telephone. Looks
like some poor skater called in a Code.
In a Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchise on the outskirts of Phoenix,
Rat Thing number B-782 comes awake.
Fido is waking up because the dogs are barking tonight.
There is always barking. Much of the barking is very far away. Fido
knows that faraway barks are not as important as close barks, and so he
often sleeps through these.
But sometimes a faraway bark will carry a special sound that makes Fido
excited, and he can't help waking up.
He is hearing one of those barks right now. It comes from far away but
it is urgent. Some nice doggie somewhere is very upset. He is so upset that
his barking has spread to all the other doggies in the pack.
Fido listens to the bark. He gets excited, too. Some bad strangers have
just been very close to a nice doggie's yard. They were in a flying thing.
They had lots of guns.
Fido doesn't like guns very much. A stranger with a gun shot him once
and made him hurt. Then the nice girl came and helped him.
These are extremely bad strangers. Any nice doggie in his right mind
would want to hurt them and make them go away. As Fido listens to the bark,
he sees what they look like and hears the way they sound. If any of these
very bad strangers ever come into his yard, he will be extremely upset.
Then Fido notices that the bad strangers are chasing someone. He can
tell they are hurting her by the way her voice sounds and the way she moves.
The bad strangers are hurting the nice girl who loves him! Fido gets
more angry than he has ever been, even more angry than when a bad man shot
him long ago.
His job is to keep bad strangers out of his yard. He does not do
anything else.
But it's even more important to protect the nice girl who loves him.
That is more important than anything. And nothing can stop him. Not even the
fence.
The fence is very tall. But he can remember a long time ago when he
used to jump over things that were taller than his head.
Fido comes out of his doggie house, curls his long legs beneath him,
and jumps over the fence around his yard before he has remembered that he is
not capable of jumping over it. This contradiction is lost on him, though;
as a dog, introspection is not one of his strong points.
The bark is spreading to another place far away. All the nice doggies
who live in this faraway place are being warned to look out for the very bad
strangers and the girl who loves Fido, because they are going to that place.
Fido sees the place in his mind. It is big and wide and flat and open, like
a nice field for chasing Frisbees. It has lots of big flying things. Around
the edges are a couple of yards where nice doggies live.
Fido can hear those nice doggies barking in reply. He knows where they
are. Far away. But you can get there by streets. Fido knows a whole lot of
different streets. He just runs down streets, and he knows where he is and
where he's going.
At first, the only trace that B-782 leaves of his passage is a dancing
trail of sparks down the center of the franchise ghetto. But once he makes
his way out onto a long straight piece of highway, he begins to leave
further evidence: a spume of shattered blue safety glass spraying outward in
parallel vanes from all four lanes of traffic as the windows and the
windshields of the cars blow out of their frames, spraying into the air like
rooster tails behind a speedboat.
As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are
programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's
in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the
sound barrier. Bring the noise.
"Raven," Hiro says, "let me tell you a story before I kill you."
"I'll listen," Raven says. "It's a long ride."
All vehicles in the Metaverse have voice phones on them. Hiro simply
called home to the Librarian and had him look up Raven's number. They are
riding in lockstep across the black surface of the imaginary planet now,
though Hiro is gaining on Raven, meter by meter.
"My dad was in the Army in World War Two. Lied about his age to get in.
They put him in the Pacific doing scut work. Anyway, he got captured by the
Nipponese."
"So?"
"So they took him back to Nippon. Put him in a prison camp. There were
a lot of Americans there, plus some Brits and some Chinese. And a couple of
guys that they couldn't place. They looked like Indians. Spoke a little
English. But they spoke Russian even better."
"They were Aleuts," Raven says. "American citizens. But no one had ever
heard of them. Most people don't know that the Japanese conquered American
territory during the war - several islands at the end of the Aleutian chain.
Inhabited. By my people. They took the two most important Aleuts and put
them in prison camps in Japan. One of them was the mayor of Attu - the most
important civil authority. The other was even more important, to us. He was
the chief harpooneer of the Aleut nation."
Hiro says, "The mayor got sick and died. He didn't have any immunities.
But the harpooneer was one tough son of a bitch. He got sick a few times,
but he survived. Went out to work in the fields along with the rest of the
prisoners, growing food for the war effort. Worked in the kitchen, preparing
slop for the prisoners and the guards. He kept to himself a lot. Everyone
avoided him because he smelled terrible. His bed stank up the barracks."
"He was cooking up aconite whale poison from mushrooms and other
substances that he found in the fields and secreted in his clothing," Raven
says.
"Besides," Hiro continues, "they were pissed at him because he broke
out a windowpane in the barracks once, and it let cold air in for the rest
of the winter. Anyway, one day, after lunch, all of the guards became
terribly sick."
"Whale poison in the fish stew," Raven says.
"The prisoners were already out working in the fields, and when the
guards began to get sick, they began to march them all back in toward the
barracks, because they couldn't keep watch over them when they were doubled
over with stomach cramps. And this late in the war, it wasn't easy to bring
in reinforcements. My father was last in the line of prisoners. And this
Aleut guy was right in front of him."
Raven says, "As the prisoners were crossing an irrigation ditch, the
Aleut dove into the water and disappeared."
"My father didn't know what to do," Hiro says, "until he heard a grunt
from the guard who was bringing up the rear. He turned around and saw that
this guard had a bamboo spear stuck all the way through his body. Just came
out of nowhere. And he still couldn't see the Aleut. Then another guard went
down with his throat slit, and there was the Aleut, winding up and throwing
another spear that brought down yet another guard."
"He had been making harpoons and hiding them under the water in the
irrigation ditches," Raven says.
"Then my father realized," Hiro continues, "that he was doomed. Because
no matter what he said to the guards, they would consider him to have been a
part of an escape attempt, and they would bring a sword and lop his head
off. So, figuring that he might as well bring down a few of the enemy before
they got to him, he took the gun from the first guard who had been hit,
jumped down into the cover of the irrigation ditch, and shot another couple
of guards who were coming over to investigate."
Raven says, "The Aleut ran for the border fence, which was a flimsy
bamboo thing. There was supposedly a minefield there but he ran straight
across it with no trouble. Either he was lucky or else the mines - if there
were any - were few and far between."
"They didn't bother to have strict perimeter security," Hiro says,
"because Japan is an island - so even if someone escaped, where could they
run to?"
"An Aleut could do it, though," Raven says. "He could go to the nearest
coastline and build himself a kayak. He could take to the open water and
make his way up the coastline of Japan, then surf from one island to the
next, all the way back to the Aleutians."
"Right," Hiro says, "which is the only part of the story that I never
understood - until I saw you on the open water, outrunning a speedboat in
your kayak. Then I put it all together. Your father wasn't crazy. He had a
perfectly good plan."
"Yes. But your father didn't understand it."
"My father ran in your father's footsteps across the minefield. They
were free - in Nippon. Your father started heading downhill, toward the
ocean. My father wanted to head uphill, into the mountains, figuring that
they could maybe live in an isolated place until the war was over."
"It was a stupid idea," Raven says. "Japan is heavily populated. There
is no place where they could have gone unnoticed."
"My father didn't even know what a kayak was."
"Ignorance is no excuse," Raven says.
"Their arguing - the same argument we're having now - was their
downfall. The Nipponese caught up with them on a road just outside of
Nagasaki. They didn't even have handcuffs, so they tied their hands behind
their backs with bootlaces and made them kneel - on the road, facing each
other. Then the lieutenant took his sword out of its sheath. It was an
ancient sword; the lieutenant was from a proud family of samurai, and the
only reason he was on this home-front detail was that he had nearly had one
leg blown off earlier in the war. He raised the sword up above my father's
head."
"It made a high ringing sound in the air," Raven says, "that hurt my
father's ears."
"But it never came down."
"My father saw your father's skeleton kneeling in front of him. That
was the last thing he ever saw."
"My father was facing away from Nagasaki," Hiro says. "He was
temporarily blinded by the light; he fell forward and pressed his face into
the ground to get the terrible light out of his eyes. Then everything was
back to normal again."
"Except my father was blind," Raven says. "He could only listen to your
father fighting the lieutenant."
"It was a half-blind, one-legged samurai with a katana versus a big
strong healthy man with his arms tied, behind his back," Hiro says. "A
pretty interesting fight. A pretty fair one. My father won. And that was the
end of the war. The occupation troops got there a couple of weeks later. My
father went home and kicked around for a while and finally had a kid during
the seventies. So did yours."
Raven says, "Amchitka, 1972. My father got nuked twice by you
bastards."
"I understand the depth of your feelings," Hiro says. "But don't you
think you've had enough revenge?"
"There's no such thing as enough," Raven says.
Hiro guns his motorcycle forward and closes on Raven, swinging his
katana. But Raven reaches back - watching him in the rearview mirror - and
blocks the blow; he's carrying a big long knife in one hand. Then Raven cuts
his speed down to almost nothing and dives in between a couple of the
stanchions. Hiro overshoots him, slows down too much, and gets a glimpse of
Raven screaming past him on the other side of the monorail; by the time he's
accelerated and cut through another gap, Raven has already slalomed over to
the other side.
And so it goes. They run down the length of the Street in an
interlacing zigzag pattern, cutting back and forth under the monorail. The
game is a simple one. All Raven has to do is make Hiro run into a stanchion.
Hiro will come to a stop for a moment. By that time Raven will be gone, out
of visual range, and Hiro will have no way to track him.
It's an easier game for Raven than for Hiro. But Hiro's better at this
kind of thing than Raven is. That makes it a pretty even match. They slalom
down the monorail track at speeds from sixty to sixty thousand miles per
hour; all around them, low-slung commercial developments and high-tech labs
and amusement parks sprawl off into the darkness. Downtown is before them,
as high and bright as the aurora borealis rising from the black water of the
Bering Sea.
The first poon smacks into the belly of the chopper as they are coming
in low over the Valley. Y.T. feels it rather than hears it; she knows that
sweet impact so well that she can sense it like one of those supersensitive
seismo-thingies that detects earthquakes on the other side of the planet.
Then half a dozen other poons strike in quick succession, and she has to
force herself not to lean over and look out the window. Of course. The
chopper's belly is a solid wall of Soviet steel. It'll hold poons like glue.
If they just keep flying low enough to poon - which they have to, to keep
the chopper under the Mafia's radar.
She can hear the radio crackling up front. "Take it up, Sasha, you're
picking up some parasites."
She looks out the window. The other chopper, the little aluminum
corporate number, is flying alongside them, a little bit higher in the air,
and all the people inside of it are peering out the windows, watching the
pavement underneath them. Except for Raven. Raven is still goggled into the
Metaverse.
Shit. The pilot's pulling the chopper to a higher altitude.
"Okay, Sasha. You lost 'em," the radio says. "But you still got a
couple of them poon things hanging off your belly, so make sure you don't
snag 'em on anything. The cables are stronger than steel."
That's all Y.T. needs. She opens the door and jumps out of the chopper.
At least that's how it looks to the people inside. Actually she grabs a
handhold on her way down and ends up dangling from the swinging, open door,
looking inward toward the belly of the chopper. A couple of poons are stuck
to it; thirty feet below, she can see the handles dangling on the ends of
their lines, fluttering in the airstream. Looking into the open door she
can't hear Rife but she can see him, sitting there next to the pilot,
motioning: Down, take it down!
Which is what she figured. This hostage thing works two ways. She's no
good to Rife unless he's got her, and she's in one piece.
The chopper starts losing altitude again, heading back down toward the
twin stripe of loglo that marks out the avenue beneath them. Y.T. gets
swinging back and forth on the door a little, finally swings in far enough
that she can hook one of the poon cables with her foot.
This next bit is going to hurt like hell. But the tough fabric of the
coverall should prevent her from losing too much skin. And the sight of Tony
lunging at her, trying to grab her sleeve, reinforces her own natural
tendency not to think about it too hard. She lets go of the chopper's door
with one of her hands, grabs the poon cable, winds it around the outside of
her glove a couple of times, then lets go with the other hand.
She was right. It does hurt like hell. As she swings down under the
belly of the chopper, out of Tony's grasp, something pops inside her hand -
probably one of those dinky little bones. But she gets the poon cable
wrapped around her body the same way Raven did when he rappeled off the ship
with her, and manages a controlled, burning slide down to the end.
Down to the handle, that is. She hooks it onto her belt so she can't
fall and then thrashes around for what seems like a whole minute until she's
not tangled up in the cable anymore, just dangling by the waist, twisting
around and around between the chopper and the street, out of control. Then
she gets the handle in both hands and unhooks it from her belt so she's
hanging by the arms again, which was the whole point of the exercise. As she
rotates, she sees the other chopper above her and off to the side, glimpses
the faces watching her, knows that all of this is being relayed, over the
radio, to Rife.
Sure enough. The chopper cuts to about half its former speed, loses
some altitude.
She clicks another control and reels out the line all the way to the
end, dropping twenty feet in one thrill-packed moment. Now she's flying
along, ten or fifteen feet above the highway, doing maybe forty-five miles
an hour. The logo signs shoot past her on either side like meteors. Other
than a swarm of Kouriers, traffic is light.
The RARE chopper comes thwacking in, dangerously close, and she looks
up at it, just for an instant, and sees Raven looking at her through the
window. He's pulled his goggles up on his forehead, just for a second. He's
got a certain look on his face, and she realizes that he's not pissed at her
at all. He loves her.
She lets go of the handle and goes into free fall.
At the same time, she jerks the manual release on her cervical collar
and goes into full Michelin Man mode as tiny gas cartridges detonate in
several strategic locations around her bod. The biggest one goes off like an
M-80 at the nape of her neck, unfurling the coverall's collar into a
cylindrical gasbag that shoots straight up and encases her entire head.
Other airbags go off around her torso and her pelvis, paying lots of
attention to that spinal column. Her joints are already protected by the
armorgel.
Which is not to say that it doesn't hurt when she lands. She can't see
anything because of the airbag around her head, of course. But she feels
herself bouncing at least ten times. She skids for a quarter of a mile and
apparently caroms off several cars along the way; she can hear their tires
squealing. Finally, she goes butt first through someone's windshield and
ends up sprawled across their front seat; they veer into a Jersey barrier.
The airbag deflates as soon as everything stops moving, and she claws it
away from her face.
Her ears are ringing or something. She can't hear anything. Maybe she
busted her eardrums when the airbags went off.
But there's also the question of the big chopper, which has a talent
for making noise. She drags herself out onto the hood of the car, feeling
little hunks of safety glass beneath her carving parallel scratches into the
paint job.
Rife's big Soviet chopper is right there, hovering about twenty feet
above the avenue, and by the time she sees it, it has already accumulated a
dozen more poons. Her eyes follow the cables down to street level, and she
sees Kouriers straining at the lines; this time, they're not letting go.
Rife gets suspicious, and the chopper gains altitude, lifting the
Kouriers off their planks. But a passing double-bottom semi sheds a small
army of Kouriers - there must be a hundred of them pooned onto the poor
thing - and within a few seconds, all their MagnaPoons are airborne and at
least half of them stick to the armor plating on the first try. The chopper
lurches downward until all of the Kouriers are on the ground again. Twenty
more Kouriers come flying in and nail it; those that can't, grab onto
someone else's handle and add their weight. The chopper tries several times
to rise, but it may as well be tethered to the asphalt by this point.
It starts to come down. The Kouriers fan out away from it so that the
chopper comes down in the middle of a radial burst of poon cables.
Tony, the security guy, climbs down out of the open door, moving
slowly, high-stepping his way through the web of cables but somehow
retaining his balance and his dignity. He walks away from the chopper until
he is out from under the rotor blades, then pulls an Uzi out from under his
windbreaker and fires a short air burst.
"Get the fuck away from our chopper!" he is shouting.
The Kouriers, by and large, do. They're not stupid. And Y.T. is now
walking around safe on the pavement, the mission is accomplished, the Code
is finished, there's no reason to hassle these chopper dudes anymore. They
detach their poons from the belly of the chopper and reel in the cables.
Tony looks around and sees Y.T. She's walking directly toward the
chopper. Her sprained body moves awkwardly.
"Get back in the chopper, you lucky bitch!" he says.
Y.T. picks up a loose poon handle that no one has bothered to reel in
yet. She hits the button that turns off the electromagnet and its head drops
off the chopper's armor. She reels it in until about four feet of slack is
there between the reel and the head.
"There was this dude named Ahab that I read about," she says, whirling
the poon around her head. "He got his poon cable all wrapped up around the
thing he was trying to poon. It was a big mistake."
She lets the poon fly. It passes up through the plane of the rotor
blades, near the center, and she can see the unbreakable cable start to wind
itself around the delicate parts of the rotor's axle, like a garrote around
a ballerina's neck. Through the chopper's windshield she can see Sasha
reacting, flipping switches frantically, pulling levers, his mouth making a
long string of Russian curses. The poon's handle gets snapped out of her
hand, and she sees it get whipped into the center like it's a black hole.
"I guess he just didn't know when to let go, like some people," she
says. Then she turns around and walks away from the chopper. Behind her, she
can hear large pieces of metal going the wrong way, running into one another
at high speed.
Rife has figured it out a long time ago. He's already running down the
middle of the highway with a submachine gun in one hand, looking for a car
to commandeer. Above, the RARE chopper hovers and watches; Rife looks up to
it and motions forward with one hand, shouting, "Go to LAX! Go to LAX!"
The chopper makes one last orbit over the scene, watching as Sasha puts
the ruined gunship into cold shutdown, watching furious Kouriers
overwhelming and disarming Tony and Frank and the President, watching as
Rife stands in the middle of the left lane and forces a CosaNostra Pizza car
to a stop, forces the driver out. But Raven isn't watching any of these
things. He's looking out the window at Y.T. And as the chopper finally tilts
forward and accelerates into the night, he grins at her and gives her the
thumbs up. Y.T. bites her lower lip and flips him the bird. With that, the
relationship is over, hopefully for all time.
Y.T. borrows a plank from an awed skater and pushes herself across the
street to the nearest Buy 'n' Fly and starts trying to call Mom for a ride
home.
Hiro loses Raven a few miles outside of Downtown, but it doesn't matter
by this point; he goes straight to the plaza and then starts to orbit the
rim of the amphitheater at high speed, a one-man picket fence. Raven makes
his approach within a few seconds. Hiro breaks out of his orbit and heads
straight for him, and they come together like a couple of medieval jousters.
Hiro loses his left arm and Raven drops a leg. The limbs topple to the
ground. Hiro drops his katana and uses his remaining arm to draw his
one-handed sword - a better match for Raven's long knife anyway. He cuts
Raven off just as he's about to plummet over the lip of the amphitheater and
forces him aside; Raven's momentum takes him half a mile away in half a
second. Hiro chases him down by following a series of educated guesses - he
knows this territory like Raven knows the currents of the Aleutians - and
then they are blasting through the narrow streets of the Metaverse's
financial district, waving long knives at each other, slicing and dicing
hundreds of pinstriped avatars who happen to get in their way.
But they never seem to hit each other. The speeds are just too great,
the targets too small. Hiro's been lucky so far - he has got Raven caught up
in the thrill of competition, made him spoil for a fight. But Raven doesn't
need this. He can get back to the amphitheater pretty easily without
bothering to kill Hiro first.
And finally, he realizes it. He sheathes his knife and dives into an
alley between skyscrapers. Hiro follows him, but by the time he's gotten
into that same alley, Raven's gone.
Hiro goes over the lip of the amphitheater doing a couple of hundred
miles per hour and soars out into space, in free fall, above the heads of a
quarter of a million wildly cheering hackers.
They all know Hiro. He's the guy with the swords. He's a friend of
Da5id's. And as his own personal contribution to the benefit, he's
apparently decided to stage a sword fight with some kind of hulking,
scary-looking daemon on a motorcycle. Don't touch that dial, it's going to
be a hell of a show.
He lands on the stage and bounces to a halt next to his motorcycle. The
bike still works, but it's worthless down here. Raven is ten meters away,
grinning at him.
"Bombs away," Raven says. He pulls the glowing blue lozenge out of his
sidecar with one hand and drops it on the center of the amphitheater. It
breaks open like the shell of an egg and light shines out of it. The light