begins to grow and take shape.
The crowd goes wild.
Hiro runs toward the egg. Raven cuts him off. Raven can't move around
on his feet now, because he's lost a leg. But he can still control the bike.
He's got his long knife out now, and the two blades come together above the
egg, which has become the vortex of a blinding, deafening tornado of light
and sound. Colored shapes, foreshortened by their immense speed, shoot from
the center of it and take positions above their heads, building a
three-dimensional picture.
The hackers are going nuts. Hiro knows that the Hacker Quadrant in The
Black Sun is, at this moment, emptying itself out. They are all cramming
through the exit and running down the Street toward the plaza, coming to see
Hiro's fantastic show of light, sound, swords, and sorcery.
Raven tries to shove Hiro back. It would work in Reality because Raven
has such overpowering strength. But avatars are equally strong, unless you
back them up in just the right way. So Raven gives a mighty push and then
pulls his knife back so that he can take a cut at Hiro's neck when Hiro
flies away from him; but Hiro doesn't fly away. He waits for the opening and
then takes Raven's sword hand off. Then, just in case, he takes Raven's
other hand off. The crowd screams in delight.
"How do I stop this thing?" Hiro says.
"Beats me. I just deliver 'em," Raven says.
"Do you have any concept of what you just did?"
"Yeah. Realized my lifelong ambition," Raven says, a huge relaxed grin
spreading across his face. "I nuked America."
Hiro cuts his head off. The crowd of doomed hackers rises to its feet
and shrieks.
Then they go silent as Hiro abruptly disappears. He has switched over
to his small, invisible avatar. He is hovering in the air now above the
shattered remains of the egg; gravity takes him right down into the center
of it. As he falls, he is muttering to himself "SnowScan." It's the piece of
software he wrote while he was killing time on the liferaft. The one that
searches for Snow Crash.
With Hiro Protagonist seemingly gone from the stage, the hackers turn
their attention toward the giant construction rising up out of the egg. All
that nonsense with the sword fight must have been just a wacky introductory
piece - Hiro's typically offbeat way of getting their attention. This light
and sound show is the main attraction. The amphitheater is now filling up
rapidly as thousands of hackers pour in from all over the place: running
down the Street from The Black Sun, streaming out of the big office towers
where the major software corporations are headquartered, goggling into the
Metaverse from all points in Reality as word of the extravaganza spreads
down the fiber-optic grapevine at the speed of light.
The light show is designed as if late comers were anticipated. It
builds to false climax after false climax, like an expensive fireworks show,
and each one is better. It is so vast and complicated that no one sees more
than 10 percent of it; you could spend a year watching it over and over
again and keep seeing new things.
It is a mile-high structure of moving two- and three-dimensional
images, interlocked in space and time. It's got everything in it. Leni
Riefenstahl films. The sculptures of Michelangelo and the fictional
inventions of Da Vinci made real. World War II dogfights zooming in and out
of the middle, veering out over the crowd, shooting and burning and
exploding. Scenes from a thousand classic films, flowing and merging
together into a single vast complicated story.
But in time, it begins to simplify itself and narrow into a single
bright column of light. By this point, it is the music that is carrying the
show: a pounding bass beat and a deep, threatening ostinato that tells
everyone to keep watching, the best is yet to come. And everyone does watch.
Religiously.
The column of light begins to flow up and down and resolve itself into
a human form. Actually, it is four human forms, female nudes standing
shoulder to shoulder, facing outward, like caryatids. Each of them is
carrying something long and slender in her hands: a pair of tubes.
A third of a million hackers stare at the women, towering above the
stage, as they raise their arms above their heads and unroll the four
scrolls, turning each one of them into a flat television screen the size of
a football field. From the seats in the amphitheater, the screens virtually
blot out the sky; they are all that anyone can see.
The screens are blank at first, but finally the same image snaps into
existence on all four of them at once. It is an image consisting of words;
it says
YOU WOULD BE DEAD NOW
FORTUNATELY IT'S NOT
THE METAVERSE IS A DANGEROUS PLACE;
HOW'S YOUR SECURITY?
CALL HIRO PROTAGONIST SECURITY ASSOCIATES
FOR A FREE INITIAL CONSULTATION
"This is exactly the kind of high-tech nonsense that never, ever worked
when we tried it in Vietnam," Uncle Enzo says.
"Your point is well taken. But technology has come a long way since
then," says Ky, the surveillance man from Ng Security Industries. Ky is
talking to Uncle Enzo over a radio headset; his van, full of electronic
gear, is lurking a quarter of a mile away in the shadows next to a LAX cargo
warehouse. "I am monitoring the entire airport, and all its approaches, with
a three-dimensional Metaverse display. For example, I know that your dog
tags, which you customarily wear around your neck, are missing. I know that
you are carrying one Kongbuck and eighty-five Kongpence in change in your
left pocket. I know that you have a straight razor in your other pocket.
Looks like a nice one, too."
"Never underestimate the importance of good grooming," Uncle Enzo says.
"But I do not understand why you are carrying a skateboard."
"It's a replacement for the one Y.T. lost in front of EBGOC," Uncle
Enzo says. "It's a long story."
"Sir, we have a report from one of our franchulates," says a young
lieutenant in a Mafia windbreaker, jogging across the apron with a black
walkie-talkie in one hand. He is not really a lieutenant; the Mafia is not
very keen on the use of military ranks. But for some reason, Uncle Enzo
thinks of him as the lieutenant. "The second chopper set down in a
strip-mall parking lot about ten miles from here and met the pizza car and
picked up Rife, then took off again. They are on their way in now."
"Send someone out to pick up the abandoned pizza car. And give the
driver a day off," Uncle Enzo says.
The lieutenant looks somewhat taken aback that Uncle Enzo is concerning
himself with such a tiny detail. It is as if the don were going up and down
highways picking up litter or something. But he nods respectfully, having
just learned something: details matter. He turns away and begins talking
into his radio.
Uncle Enzo has serious doubts about this fellow. He is a blazer person,
adept at running the small-time bureaucracy of a Nova Sicilia franchulate,
but lacking in the kind of flexibility that, for example, Y.T. has. A
classic case of what is wrong with the Mafia today. The only reason the
lieutenant is even here is because the situation has been changing so
rapidly, and, of course, because of all the fine men they lost on the
Kowloon.
Ky comes in over the radio again. "Y.T. has just contacted her mother
and asked for a ride," he says. "Would you like to hear their conversation?"
"Not unless it has tactical significance," Uncle Enzo says briskly.
This is one more thing to check off his list; he has been worried about
Y.T.'s relationship with her mother and was meaning to speak with her about
it.
Rife's jet sits on the tarmac, engines idling, waiting to taxi out onto
the runway. In the cockpit are a pilot and copilot. Until half an hour ago,
they were loyal employees of L. Bob Rife. Then they sat and watched out the
windshield as the dozen Rife security drones who were stationed around the
hangar variously got their heads blown off, their throats slit, or else just
plain dropped their weapons and fell to their knees and surrendered. Now the
pilot and copilot have taken lifelong oaths of loyalty to Uncle Enzo's
organization. Uncle Enzo could have just dragged them out and replaced them
with his own pilots, but this way is better. If Rife should, somehow,
actually make it onto the plane, he will recognize his own pilots and think
that everything is fine. And the fact that the pilots are alone there in the
cockpit without any direct Mafia supervision will merely emphasize the great
trust that Uncle Enzo has placed in them and the oath that they have taken.
It will actually enhance their sense of duty. It will amplify Uncle Enzo's
displeasure if they should break their oaths. Uncle Enzo has no doubt about
the pilots at all.
He is less happy with the arrangements here, which were made rather
hastily. The problem is, as usual, the unpredictable Y.T. He was not
expecting her to jump out of a moving helicopter and get free from L. Bob
Rife. He was, in other words, expecting a hostage negotiation somewhat later
on, after Rife had flown Y.T. back to his headquarters in Houston.
But the hostage situation no longer obtains, and so Uncle Enzo feels it
is important to stop Rife now, before he gets back to his home turf in
Houston. He has called for a major realignment of Mafia forces, and right
now, dozens of helicopters and tactical units are hastily replotting their
courses and trying to converge on LAX as quickly as they can. But in the
meantime, Enzo is here with a small number of his own personal bodyguards,
and this technical surveillance man from Ng's organization.
They have shut down the airport. This was easy to do: they just pulled
Lincoln Town Cars onto all the runways, for starters, and then went into the
control tower and announced that in a few minutes they would be going to
war. Now, LAX is probably quieter than it has been at any point since it was
built. Uncle Enzo can actually hear the faint crashing of surf on the beach,
half a mile away. It is almost pleasant here. Weenie-roasting weather.
Uncle Enzo is cooperating with Mr. Lee, which means working with Ng,
and Ng, while highly competent, has a technological bias that Uncle Enzo
distrusts. He would prefer a single good soldier in polished shoes, armed
with a nine, to a hundred of Ng's gizmos and portable radar units.
When they came out here, he was expecting a broad open space in which
to confront Rife. Instead, the environment is cluttered. Several dozen
corporate jets and helicopters are parked on the apron. Nearby is an
assortment of private hangars, each with its own fenced-in parking area
containing a number of cars and utility vehicles. And they are rather close
to the tank farm where the airport's supply of jet fuel is stored. That
means lots of pipes and pumping stations and hydraulic folderol sprouting
out of the ground. Tactically, the area has more in common with a jungle
than with a desert. The apron and runway themselves are, of course, more
desertlike, although they have drainage ditches where any number of men
could be concealed. So a better analogy would be beach warfare in Vietnam: a
broad open area that abruptly turns into jungle. Not Uncle Enzo's favorite
place.
"The chopper is approaching the perimeter of the airport," Ky says.
Uncle Enzo turns to his lieutenant. "Everyone in place?"
"Yes, sir."
"How do you know that?"
"They all checked in a few minutes ago."
"That means absolutely nothing. And how about the pizza car?"
"Well, I thought I would do that later, sir - "
"You need to be capable of doing more than one thing at a time."
The lieutenant turns away, shamed and awed. "Ky," Uncle Enzo says,
"anything interesting happening on our perimeter?"
"Nothing at all," Ng says.
"Anything uninteresting?"
"A few maintenance workers, as normal."
"How do you know they are maintenance workers and not Rife soldiers in
costume? Did you check their IDs?"
"Soldiers carry guns. Or at least knives. Radar shows that these men do
not. Q.E.D."
"Still trying to get all our men to check in," the lieutenant says.
"Having a little radio trouble, I guess."
Uncle Enzo puts one arm around the lieutenant's shoulders. "Let me tell
you a story, son. From the first moment I saw you, I thought you seemed
familiar. Finally I realized that you remind me of someone I used to know: a
lieutenant who was my commanding officer, for a while, in Vietnam."
The lieutenant is thrilled. "Really?"
"Yes. He was young, bright, ambitious, well educated. And well meaning.
But he had certain deficiencies. He had a stubborn inability to grasp the
fundamentals of our situation over there. A sort of mental block, if you
will, that caused those of us who were serving under him to experience the
most intense kind of frustration. It was touch and go for a while, son, I
don't mind telling you that."
"How did it work out, Uncle Enzo?"
"It worked out fine. You see, one day, I took it upon myself to shoot
him in the back of the head."
The lieutenant's eyes get very big, and his face seems paralyzed. Uncle
Enzo has no sympathy for him at all: if he screws this up, people could die.
Some new piece of radio babble comes in over the lieutenant's headset.
"Oh, Uncle Enzo?" he says, very quietly and reluctantly.
"Yes?''
"You were asking about that pizza car?"
"Yes?"
"It's not there."
"Not there?"
"Apparently, when they set down to pick up Rife, a man got out of the
chopper and climbed into the pizza car and drove it away."
"Where did he drive it to?"
"We don't know, sir, we only had one spotter in the area, and he was
tracking Rife."
"Take off your headset," Uncle Enzo says. "And turn off that
walkie-talkie. You need your ears."
"My ears?"
Uncle Enzo drops into a crouch and walks briskly across the pavement
until he is between a couple of small jets. He sets the skateboard down
quietly. Then he unties his shoelaces and pulls his shoes off. He takes his
socks off, too, and stuffs them into the shoes. He takes the straight razor
out of his pocket, flips it open, and slits both of his trouser legs from
the hem up to his groin, then bunches the material up and cuts it off.
Otherwise the fabric will slide over his hairy legs when he walks and make
noise.
"My God!" the lieutenant says, a couple of planes over. "Al is down! My
God, he's dead!"
Uncle Enzo leaves his jacket on, for now, because it's dark, and
because it's lined with satin so that it is relatively quiet. Then he climbs
up onto the wing of one of the planes so that his legs cannot be seen by
someone crouching on the ground. He hunkers down on the end of the wing,
opens his mouth so that he can hear better, and listens.
The only thing he can hear at first is an uneven spattering noise that
wasn't there before, like water falling out of a half-open faucet onto bare
pavement. The sound seems to be coming from a nearby airplane. Uncle Enzo is
afraid that it may be jet fuel leaking onto the ground, as part of a scheme
to blow up this whole section of the airport and take out all opposition at
a stroke. He drops silently to the ground, makes his way carefully around a
couple of adjacent planes, stopping every few feet to listen, and finally
sees it: one of his soldiers has been pinned to the aluminum fuselage of a
Learjet by means of a long wooden pole. Blood runs out of the wound, down
his pant legs, drips from his shoes, and spatters onto the tarmac.
From behind him, Uncle Enzo hears a brief scream that suddenly turns
into a sharp gaseous exhalation. He has heard it before. It is a man having
a sharp knife drawn across his throat. It is undoubtedly the lieutenant.
He has a few seconds to move freely now. He doesn't even know what he's
up against, and he needs to know that. So he runs in the direction the
scream came from, moving quickly from cover of one jet to the next, staying
down in a crouch.
He sees a pair of legs moving on the opposite side of a jet's fuselage.
Uncle Enzo is near the tip of the jet's wing. He puts both hands on it,
shoves down with all his weight, and then lets it go.
It works: the jet rocks toward him on its suspension. The assassin
thinks that Uncle Enzo has just jumped up onto the wingtip, so he climbs up
onto the opposite wing and waits with his back to the fuselage, waiting to
ambush Enzo when he climbs over the top.
But Enzo is still on the ground. He runs in toward the fuselage on
silent, bare feet, ducks beneath it, and comes up from underneath with his
straight razor in one hand. The assassin - Raven - is right where Enzo
expected him.
But Raven is already getting suspicious; he stands up to look over the
top of the fuselage, and that puts his throat out of reach. Enzo's looking
at his legs instead.
It's better to be conservative and take what you can get than take a
big gamble and blow it, so Enzo reaches in, even as Raven is looking down at
him, and severs Raven's left Achilles tendon.
As he's turning away to protect himself, something hits him very hard
in the chest. Uncle Enzo looks down and is astonished to see a transparent
object protruding from the right side of his rib cage. Then he looks up to
see Raven's face three inches from his.
Uncle Enzo steps back away from the wing. Raven was hoping to fall on
top of him but instead tumbles to the ground. Enzo steps back in, reaching
forward with his razor, but Raven, sitting on the tarmac, has already drawn
a second knife. He lunges for the inside of Uncle Enzo's thigh and does some
damage; Enzo sidesteps away from the blade, throwing off his attack, and
ends up making a short but deep cut on the top of Raven's shoulder. Raven
knocks his arm aside before Enzo can go for the throat again.
Uncle Enzo's hurt and Raven's hurt. But Raven can't outrun him anymore;
it's time to take stock of things a little bit. Enzo runs away, though when
he moves, terrible pains run up and down the right side of his body.
Something thuds into his back, too; he feels a sharp pain above one kidney,
but only for a moment. He turns around to see a bloody piece of glass
shattering on the pavement. Raven must have thrown it into his back. But
without Raven's arm strength behind it, it didn't have enough momentum to
penetrate all the way through the bulletproof fabric, and it fell out.
Glass knives. No wonder Ky didn't see him on millimeter wave.
By the time he gets behind the cover of another plane, his sense of
hearing is being overwhelmed by the approach of a chopper.
It is Rife's chopper, settling down on the tarmac a few dozen meters
away from the jet. The thunder of the rotor blades and the blast of the wind
seem to penetrate into Uncle Enzo's brain. He closes his eyes against the
wind and utterly loses his balance, has no idea where he is until he slams
full-length into the pavement. The pavement beneath him is slippery and
warm, and Uncle Enzo realizes that he is losing a great deal of blood.
Staring across the tarmac, he sees Raven making his way toward the
aircraft, limping horrendously, one leg virtually useless. Finally, he gives
up on it and just hops on his good leg.
Rife has climbed down out of the chopper. Raven and Rife are talking,
Raven gesticulating back in Enzo's direction. Then Rife nods his approval,
and Raven turns around, his teeth bright and white. He's not grimacing so
much as he is smiling in anticipation. He begins to hop toward Uncle Enzo,
pulling another glass knife out of his jacket. The bastard is carrying a
million of those things.
He's coming after Enzo, and Enzo can't even stand up without passing
out.
He looks around and sees nothing but a skateboard and a pair of
expensive shoes and socks about twenty feet away. He can't stand up, but he
can do the GI crawl, and so he begins to pull himself forward on his elbows
even as Raven is hopping toward him one-legged.
They meet in an open lane between two adjacent jets. Enzo is on his
belly, slumped over the skateboard. Raven is standing, supporting himself
with one hand on the wing of the jet, the glass knife glittering in his
other hand. Enzo is now seeing the world in dim black and white, like a
cheap Metaverse terminal; this is how his buddies used to describe it in
Vietnam right before they succumbed to blood loss.
"Hope you've done your last rites," Raven says, "because there ain't no
time to call a priest."
"There is no need for one," Uncle Enzo says, and punches the button on
the skateboard labeled "RadiKS Narrow Cone Tuned Shock Wave Projector."
The concussion nearly blows his head off. Uncle Enzo, if he survives,
will never hear well again. But it does wake him up a little bit. He lifts
his head off the board to see Raven standing there stunned, empty-handed, a
thousand tiny splinters of broken glass raining down out of his jacket.
Uncle Enzo rolls over on his back and waves his straight razor in the
air. "I prefer steel myself," he says. "Would you like a shave?"
Rife sees it all and understands it clearly enough. He would love to
see how it all comes out, but he's a very busy man; he would like to get out
of here before the rest of the Mafia and Ng and Mr. Lee and all those other
assholes come after him with their heat-seeking missiles. And there's no
time to wait for the gimpy Raven to hop all the way back. He gives a thumbs
up to the pilot and begins climbing the steps into his private jet.
It's daytime. A wall of billowing orange flame grows up silently from
the tank farm a mile away, like a time-lapse chrysanthemum. It is so vast
and complicated in its blooming, uncontrolled growth that Rife stops halfway
up the stairs to watch.
A powerful disturbance is moving through the flame, leaving a linear
trail in the light, like a cosmic ray fired through a cloud chamber. By the
force of its passage, it leaves behind a shock wave that is clearly visible
in the flame, a bright spreading cone that is a hundred times larger than
the dark source at its apex: a black bulletlike thing supported on four legs
that are churning too fast to be visible. It is so small and so fast that L.
Bob Rife would not be able to see it, if it were not headed directly for
him.
It is picking its way over a broad tangle of open-air plumbing, the
pipes that carry the fuel to the jets, jumping over some obstacles, digging
its metallic claws into others, tearing them open with the explosive thrust
of its legs, igniting their contents with the sparks that fly whenever its
feet touch the pavement. It gathers its four legs under it, leaps a hundred
feet to the top of a buried tank, uses that as a launch pad for another
long, arcing leap over the chain link fence that separates the fuel
installation from the airport proper, and then it settles into a long,
steady, powerful lope, accelerating across the perfect geometric plane of
the runway, chased by a long tongue of flame that extends lazily from the
middle of the conflagration, whorling inward upon itself as it traces the
currents in that Rat Thing's aftershock.
Something tells L. Bob Rife to get away from the jet, which is loaded
with fuel. He turns and half jumps, half falls off the stairs, moving
clumsily because he's looking at the Rat Thing, not at the ground.
The Rat Thing, just a tiny dark thing close to the ground, visible only
by virtue of its shadow against the flames, and by the chain of white sparks
where its claws dig into the pavement, makes a tiny correction in its
course.
It's not headed for the jet; it's headed for him. Rife changes his mind
and runs up the stairway, taking the steps three at a time. The stairway
flexes and recoils under his weight, reminding him of the jet's fragility.
The pilot has seen it coming, doesn't wait to retract the stairway
before he releases the brakes and sends the jet taxiing down the runway,
swinging the nose away from the Rat Thing. He punches the throttles, nearly
throwing the jet onto one wing as it whips around in a tight curve, and
redlines the engines as soon as he sees the center line of the runway. Now
they can only see forward and sideways. They can't see what is chasing them.
Y.T. is the only person who can see it happen. Having easily penetrated
airport security with her Kourier pass, she is coasting onto the apron near
the cargo terminal. From here, she has an excellent view across half a mile
of open runway, and she sees it all happen: the plane roars down the runway,
hauling its door closed as it goes, shooting pale blue flames out its engine
nozzles, trying to build up speed for takeoff, and Fido chases it down like
a dog going after a fat mailman, makes one final tremendous leap into the
air and, turning himself into a Sidewinder missile, flies nose-first into
the tailpipe of its left engine.
The jet explodes about ten feet off the ground, catching Fido and L.
Bob Rife and his virus all together in its fine, sterilizing flame.
How sweet!
She stays for a while and watches the aftermath: Mafia choppers coming
in, doctors jumping out with doc boxes and blood bags and stretchers, Mafia
soldiers scurrying between the private jets, apparently looking for someone.
A pizza delivery car takes off from one of the parking areas, tires
squealing, and a Mafia car peels out after it in hot pursuit.
But after a while it gets boring, and so she skates back to the main
terminal, under her own power mostly, though she manages to poon a fuel
tanker for a while.
Mom's waiting for her in her stupid little jellybean car, by the United
baggage claim, just like they arranged on the phone. Y.T. opens the door,
throws her plank into the back seat, and climbs in.
"Home?" Mom says.
"Yeah, home seems about right."
This book germinated in a collaboration between me and the artist Tony
Sheeder, the original goal of which was to publish a computer-generated
graphic novel. In general, I handled the words and he handled the pictures;
but even though this work consists almost entirely of words, certain aspects
of it stem from my discussions with Tony.
This novel was very difficult to write, and I received a great deal of
good advice from my agents Liz Darhansoff, Chuck Verrill, and Denise
Stewart, who read early drafts. Other people subjected to the early drafts
were Tony Sheeder; Dr. Steve Horst of Wesleyan University, who made
extensive and very lucid comments on everything having to do with brains and
computers (and who suddenly came down with a virus about one hour after
reading it); and my brother-in-law, Steve Wiggins, currently at the
University of Edinburgh, who got me started on Asherah to begin with and
also fed me useful papers and citations as I thrashed around pitifully in
the Library of Congress.
Marco Kaltofen, as usual, functioned in the same quick, encyclopedic
way as the Librarian when I had questions about certain whys and wheres of
the toxic-waste business. Richard Green, my agent in L.A., gave me some help
with the geography of that town.
Bruck Pollock read the galleys attentively, but with blistering speed,
and made several useful suggestions. He was the first and certainly not the
last to point out that BIOS actually stands for "Basic Input/Output System,"
not "Built-In Operating System" as I have it here (and as it ought to be);
but I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the
dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun, so this part of the book is
unchanged.
The idea of a "virtual reality" such as the Metaverse is by now
widespread in the computer-graphics community and is being implemented in a
number of different ways. The particular vision of the Metaverse as
expressed in this novel originated from idle discussion between me and Jaime
(Captain Bandwidth) Taaffe - which does not imply that blame for any of the
unrealistic or tawdry aspects of the Metaverse should be placed on anyone
but me. The words "avatar" (in the sense used here) and "Metaverse" are my
inventions, which I came up with when I decided that existing words (such as
"virtual reality") were simply too awkward to use.
In thinking about how the Metaverse might be constructed, I was
influenced by the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, which is a book that
explains the philosophy behind the Macintosh. Again, this point is made only
to acknowledge the beneficial influence of the people who compiled said
document, not to link these poor innocents with its results.
In a nice twist, which I include only because it is pleasingly
self-referential, I became intimately familiar with the inner workings of
the Macintosh during the early phases of the doomed and maniacal
graphic-novel project when it became clear that the only way to make the Mac
do the things we needed was to write a lot of custom image-processing
software. I have probably spent more hours coding during the production of
this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned
away from the original graphic concept, rendering most of that work useless
from a practical viewpoint.
It should be pointed out that when I wrote the Babel material, I was
standing on the shoulders of many, many historians and archaeologists who
actually did the research; most of the words spoken by the Librarian
originated with these people and I have tried to make the Librarian give
credit where due, verbally footnoting his comments like a good scholar,
which I am not.
Finally, after the first publication of Snow Crash I learned that the
term "avatar" has actually been in use for a number of years as part of a
virtual reality system called Habitat, developed by F. Randall Farmer and
Chip Morningstar. The system runs on Commodore 64 computers, and though it
has all but died out in the U.S., is still popular in Japan. In addition to
avatars, Habitat includes many of the basic features of the Metaverse as
described in this book.
NEAL STEPHENSON issues from a clan of rootless, itinerant hard-science
and engineering professors (mostly Pac 10, Big 10, and Big 8 with the
occasional wild strain of Ivy). He began his higher education as a physics
major, then switched to geography when it appeared that this would enable
him to scam more free time on his university's mainframe computer. When he
graduated and discovered, to his perplexity, that there were no jobs for
inexperienced physicist-geographers, he began to look into alternative
pursuits such as working on cars, unimaginably stupid agricultural labor,
and writing novels. His first novel, The Big U, was published in 1984 and
vanished without a trace. His second novel, Zodiac: the Eco-thriller, came
out in 1988 and quickly developed a cult following among
water-pollution-control engineers. It was also enjoyed, though rarely
bought, by many radical environmentalists. Snow Crash was written in the
years 1988 through 1991 as the author listened to a great deal of loud,
relentless, depressing music. The Diamond Age was his fourth novel and The
Cobweb was his last.
Mr. Stephenson now resides in a comfortable home in the western
hemisphere and spends all of his time trying to retrofit an office into its
generally dark, unlevel, and asbestos-laden basement so that he can attempt
to write more novels. Despite the tremendous amounts of time he devotes to
writing, playing with computers, listening to speed metal, Rollerblading,
and pounding nails, he is a flawless husband, parent, neighbor, and
all-around human being.
The crowd goes wild.
Hiro runs toward the egg. Raven cuts him off. Raven can't move around
on his feet now, because he's lost a leg. But he can still control the bike.
He's got his long knife out now, and the two blades come together above the
egg, which has become the vortex of a blinding, deafening tornado of light
and sound. Colored shapes, foreshortened by their immense speed, shoot from
the center of it and take positions above their heads, building a
three-dimensional picture.
The hackers are going nuts. Hiro knows that the Hacker Quadrant in The
Black Sun is, at this moment, emptying itself out. They are all cramming
through the exit and running down the Street toward the plaza, coming to see
Hiro's fantastic show of light, sound, swords, and sorcery.
Raven tries to shove Hiro back. It would work in Reality because Raven
has such overpowering strength. But avatars are equally strong, unless you
back them up in just the right way. So Raven gives a mighty push and then
pulls his knife back so that he can take a cut at Hiro's neck when Hiro
flies away from him; but Hiro doesn't fly away. He waits for the opening and
then takes Raven's sword hand off. Then, just in case, he takes Raven's
other hand off. The crowd screams in delight.
"How do I stop this thing?" Hiro says.
"Beats me. I just deliver 'em," Raven says.
"Do you have any concept of what you just did?"
"Yeah. Realized my lifelong ambition," Raven says, a huge relaxed grin
spreading across his face. "I nuked America."
Hiro cuts his head off. The crowd of doomed hackers rises to its feet
and shrieks.
Then they go silent as Hiro abruptly disappears. He has switched over
to his small, invisible avatar. He is hovering in the air now above the
shattered remains of the egg; gravity takes him right down into the center
of it. As he falls, he is muttering to himself "SnowScan." It's the piece of
software he wrote while he was killing time on the liferaft. The one that
searches for Snow Crash.
With Hiro Protagonist seemingly gone from the stage, the hackers turn
their attention toward the giant construction rising up out of the egg. All
that nonsense with the sword fight must have been just a wacky introductory
piece - Hiro's typically offbeat way of getting their attention. This light
and sound show is the main attraction. The amphitheater is now filling up
rapidly as thousands of hackers pour in from all over the place: running
down the Street from The Black Sun, streaming out of the big office towers
where the major software corporations are headquartered, goggling into the
Metaverse from all points in Reality as word of the extravaganza spreads
down the fiber-optic grapevine at the speed of light.
The light show is designed as if late comers were anticipated. It
builds to false climax after false climax, like an expensive fireworks show,
and each one is better. It is so vast and complicated that no one sees more
than 10 percent of it; you could spend a year watching it over and over
again and keep seeing new things.
It is a mile-high structure of moving two- and three-dimensional
images, interlocked in space and time. It's got everything in it. Leni
Riefenstahl films. The sculptures of Michelangelo and the fictional
inventions of Da Vinci made real. World War II dogfights zooming in and out
of the middle, veering out over the crowd, shooting and burning and
exploding. Scenes from a thousand classic films, flowing and merging
together into a single vast complicated story.
But in time, it begins to simplify itself and narrow into a single
bright column of light. By this point, it is the music that is carrying the
show: a pounding bass beat and a deep, threatening ostinato that tells
everyone to keep watching, the best is yet to come. And everyone does watch.
Religiously.
The column of light begins to flow up and down and resolve itself into
a human form. Actually, it is four human forms, female nudes standing
shoulder to shoulder, facing outward, like caryatids. Each of them is
carrying something long and slender in her hands: a pair of tubes.
A third of a million hackers stare at the women, towering above the
stage, as they raise their arms above their heads and unroll the four
scrolls, turning each one of them into a flat television screen the size of
a football field. From the seats in the amphitheater, the screens virtually
blot out the sky; they are all that anyone can see.
The screens are blank at first, but finally the same image snaps into
existence on all four of them at once. It is an image consisting of words;
it says
YOU WOULD BE DEAD NOW
FORTUNATELY IT'S NOT
THE METAVERSE IS A DANGEROUS PLACE;
HOW'S YOUR SECURITY?
CALL HIRO PROTAGONIST SECURITY ASSOCIATES
FOR A FREE INITIAL CONSULTATION
"This is exactly the kind of high-tech nonsense that never, ever worked
when we tried it in Vietnam," Uncle Enzo says.
"Your point is well taken. But technology has come a long way since
then," says Ky, the surveillance man from Ng Security Industries. Ky is
talking to Uncle Enzo over a radio headset; his van, full of electronic
gear, is lurking a quarter of a mile away in the shadows next to a LAX cargo
warehouse. "I am monitoring the entire airport, and all its approaches, with
a three-dimensional Metaverse display. For example, I know that your dog
tags, which you customarily wear around your neck, are missing. I know that
you are carrying one Kongbuck and eighty-five Kongpence in change in your
left pocket. I know that you have a straight razor in your other pocket.
Looks like a nice one, too."
"Never underestimate the importance of good grooming," Uncle Enzo says.
"But I do not understand why you are carrying a skateboard."
"It's a replacement for the one Y.T. lost in front of EBGOC," Uncle
Enzo says. "It's a long story."
"Sir, we have a report from one of our franchulates," says a young
lieutenant in a Mafia windbreaker, jogging across the apron with a black
walkie-talkie in one hand. He is not really a lieutenant; the Mafia is not
very keen on the use of military ranks. But for some reason, Uncle Enzo
thinks of him as the lieutenant. "The second chopper set down in a
strip-mall parking lot about ten miles from here and met the pizza car and
picked up Rife, then took off again. They are on their way in now."
"Send someone out to pick up the abandoned pizza car. And give the
driver a day off," Uncle Enzo says.
The lieutenant looks somewhat taken aback that Uncle Enzo is concerning
himself with such a tiny detail. It is as if the don were going up and down
highways picking up litter or something. But he nods respectfully, having
just learned something: details matter. He turns away and begins talking
into his radio.
Uncle Enzo has serious doubts about this fellow. He is a blazer person,
adept at running the small-time bureaucracy of a Nova Sicilia franchulate,
but lacking in the kind of flexibility that, for example, Y.T. has. A
classic case of what is wrong with the Mafia today. The only reason the
lieutenant is even here is because the situation has been changing so
rapidly, and, of course, because of all the fine men they lost on the
Kowloon.
Ky comes in over the radio again. "Y.T. has just contacted her mother
and asked for a ride," he says. "Would you like to hear their conversation?"
"Not unless it has tactical significance," Uncle Enzo says briskly.
This is one more thing to check off his list; he has been worried about
Y.T.'s relationship with her mother and was meaning to speak with her about
it.
Rife's jet sits on the tarmac, engines idling, waiting to taxi out onto
the runway. In the cockpit are a pilot and copilot. Until half an hour ago,
they were loyal employees of L. Bob Rife. Then they sat and watched out the
windshield as the dozen Rife security drones who were stationed around the
hangar variously got their heads blown off, their throats slit, or else just
plain dropped their weapons and fell to their knees and surrendered. Now the
pilot and copilot have taken lifelong oaths of loyalty to Uncle Enzo's
organization. Uncle Enzo could have just dragged them out and replaced them
with his own pilots, but this way is better. If Rife should, somehow,
actually make it onto the plane, he will recognize his own pilots and think
that everything is fine. And the fact that the pilots are alone there in the
cockpit without any direct Mafia supervision will merely emphasize the great
trust that Uncle Enzo has placed in them and the oath that they have taken.
It will actually enhance their sense of duty. It will amplify Uncle Enzo's
displeasure if they should break their oaths. Uncle Enzo has no doubt about
the pilots at all.
He is less happy with the arrangements here, which were made rather
hastily. The problem is, as usual, the unpredictable Y.T. He was not
expecting her to jump out of a moving helicopter and get free from L. Bob
Rife. He was, in other words, expecting a hostage negotiation somewhat later
on, after Rife had flown Y.T. back to his headquarters in Houston.
But the hostage situation no longer obtains, and so Uncle Enzo feels it
is important to stop Rife now, before he gets back to his home turf in
Houston. He has called for a major realignment of Mafia forces, and right
now, dozens of helicopters and tactical units are hastily replotting their
courses and trying to converge on LAX as quickly as they can. But in the
meantime, Enzo is here with a small number of his own personal bodyguards,
and this technical surveillance man from Ng's organization.
They have shut down the airport. This was easy to do: they just pulled
Lincoln Town Cars onto all the runways, for starters, and then went into the
control tower and announced that in a few minutes they would be going to
war. Now, LAX is probably quieter than it has been at any point since it was
built. Uncle Enzo can actually hear the faint crashing of surf on the beach,
half a mile away. It is almost pleasant here. Weenie-roasting weather.
Uncle Enzo is cooperating with Mr. Lee, which means working with Ng,
and Ng, while highly competent, has a technological bias that Uncle Enzo
distrusts. He would prefer a single good soldier in polished shoes, armed
with a nine, to a hundred of Ng's gizmos and portable radar units.
When they came out here, he was expecting a broad open space in which
to confront Rife. Instead, the environment is cluttered. Several dozen
corporate jets and helicopters are parked on the apron. Nearby is an
assortment of private hangars, each with its own fenced-in parking area
containing a number of cars and utility vehicles. And they are rather close
to the tank farm where the airport's supply of jet fuel is stored. That
means lots of pipes and pumping stations and hydraulic folderol sprouting
out of the ground. Tactically, the area has more in common with a jungle
than with a desert. The apron and runway themselves are, of course, more
desertlike, although they have drainage ditches where any number of men
could be concealed. So a better analogy would be beach warfare in Vietnam: a
broad open area that abruptly turns into jungle. Not Uncle Enzo's favorite
place.
"The chopper is approaching the perimeter of the airport," Ky says.
Uncle Enzo turns to his lieutenant. "Everyone in place?"
"Yes, sir."
"How do you know that?"
"They all checked in a few minutes ago."
"That means absolutely nothing. And how about the pizza car?"
"Well, I thought I would do that later, sir - "
"You need to be capable of doing more than one thing at a time."
The lieutenant turns away, shamed and awed. "Ky," Uncle Enzo says,
"anything interesting happening on our perimeter?"
"Nothing at all," Ng says.
"Anything uninteresting?"
"A few maintenance workers, as normal."
"How do you know they are maintenance workers and not Rife soldiers in
costume? Did you check their IDs?"
"Soldiers carry guns. Or at least knives. Radar shows that these men do
not. Q.E.D."
"Still trying to get all our men to check in," the lieutenant says.
"Having a little radio trouble, I guess."
Uncle Enzo puts one arm around the lieutenant's shoulders. "Let me tell
you a story, son. From the first moment I saw you, I thought you seemed
familiar. Finally I realized that you remind me of someone I used to know: a
lieutenant who was my commanding officer, for a while, in Vietnam."
The lieutenant is thrilled. "Really?"
"Yes. He was young, bright, ambitious, well educated. And well meaning.
But he had certain deficiencies. He had a stubborn inability to grasp the
fundamentals of our situation over there. A sort of mental block, if you
will, that caused those of us who were serving under him to experience the
most intense kind of frustration. It was touch and go for a while, son, I
don't mind telling you that."
"How did it work out, Uncle Enzo?"
"It worked out fine. You see, one day, I took it upon myself to shoot
him in the back of the head."
The lieutenant's eyes get very big, and his face seems paralyzed. Uncle
Enzo has no sympathy for him at all: if he screws this up, people could die.
Some new piece of radio babble comes in over the lieutenant's headset.
"Oh, Uncle Enzo?" he says, very quietly and reluctantly.
"Yes?''
"You were asking about that pizza car?"
"Yes?"
"It's not there."
"Not there?"
"Apparently, when they set down to pick up Rife, a man got out of the
chopper and climbed into the pizza car and drove it away."
"Where did he drive it to?"
"We don't know, sir, we only had one spotter in the area, and he was
tracking Rife."
"Take off your headset," Uncle Enzo says. "And turn off that
walkie-talkie. You need your ears."
"My ears?"
Uncle Enzo drops into a crouch and walks briskly across the pavement
until he is between a couple of small jets. He sets the skateboard down
quietly. Then he unties his shoelaces and pulls his shoes off. He takes his
socks off, too, and stuffs them into the shoes. He takes the straight razor
out of his pocket, flips it open, and slits both of his trouser legs from
the hem up to his groin, then bunches the material up and cuts it off.
Otherwise the fabric will slide over his hairy legs when he walks and make
noise.
"My God!" the lieutenant says, a couple of planes over. "Al is down! My
God, he's dead!"
Uncle Enzo leaves his jacket on, for now, because it's dark, and
because it's lined with satin so that it is relatively quiet. Then he climbs
up onto the wing of one of the planes so that his legs cannot be seen by
someone crouching on the ground. He hunkers down on the end of the wing,
opens his mouth so that he can hear better, and listens.
The only thing he can hear at first is an uneven spattering noise that
wasn't there before, like water falling out of a half-open faucet onto bare
pavement. The sound seems to be coming from a nearby airplane. Uncle Enzo is
afraid that it may be jet fuel leaking onto the ground, as part of a scheme
to blow up this whole section of the airport and take out all opposition at
a stroke. He drops silently to the ground, makes his way carefully around a
couple of adjacent planes, stopping every few feet to listen, and finally
sees it: one of his soldiers has been pinned to the aluminum fuselage of a
Learjet by means of a long wooden pole. Blood runs out of the wound, down
his pant legs, drips from his shoes, and spatters onto the tarmac.
From behind him, Uncle Enzo hears a brief scream that suddenly turns
into a sharp gaseous exhalation. He has heard it before. It is a man having
a sharp knife drawn across his throat. It is undoubtedly the lieutenant.
He has a few seconds to move freely now. He doesn't even know what he's
up against, and he needs to know that. So he runs in the direction the
scream came from, moving quickly from cover of one jet to the next, staying
down in a crouch.
He sees a pair of legs moving on the opposite side of a jet's fuselage.
Uncle Enzo is near the tip of the jet's wing. He puts both hands on it,
shoves down with all his weight, and then lets it go.
It works: the jet rocks toward him on its suspension. The assassin
thinks that Uncle Enzo has just jumped up onto the wingtip, so he climbs up
onto the opposite wing and waits with his back to the fuselage, waiting to
ambush Enzo when he climbs over the top.
But Enzo is still on the ground. He runs in toward the fuselage on
silent, bare feet, ducks beneath it, and comes up from underneath with his
straight razor in one hand. The assassin - Raven - is right where Enzo
expected him.
But Raven is already getting suspicious; he stands up to look over the
top of the fuselage, and that puts his throat out of reach. Enzo's looking
at his legs instead.
It's better to be conservative and take what you can get than take a
big gamble and blow it, so Enzo reaches in, even as Raven is looking down at
him, and severs Raven's left Achilles tendon.
As he's turning away to protect himself, something hits him very hard
in the chest. Uncle Enzo looks down and is astonished to see a transparent
object protruding from the right side of his rib cage. Then he looks up to
see Raven's face three inches from his.
Uncle Enzo steps back away from the wing. Raven was hoping to fall on
top of him but instead tumbles to the ground. Enzo steps back in, reaching
forward with his razor, but Raven, sitting on the tarmac, has already drawn
a second knife. He lunges for the inside of Uncle Enzo's thigh and does some
damage; Enzo sidesteps away from the blade, throwing off his attack, and
ends up making a short but deep cut on the top of Raven's shoulder. Raven
knocks his arm aside before Enzo can go for the throat again.
Uncle Enzo's hurt and Raven's hurt. But Raven can't outrun him anymore;
it's time to take stock of things a little bit. Enzo runs away, though when
he moves, terrible pains run up and down the right side of his body.
Something thuds into his back, too; he feels a sharp pain above one kidney,
but only for a moment. He turns around to see a bloody piece of glass
shattering on the pavement. Raven must have thrown it into his back. But
without Raven's arm strength behind it, it didn't have enough momentum to
penetrate all the way through the bulletproof fabric, and it fell out.
Glass knives. No wonder Ky didn't see him on millimeter wave.
By the time he gets behind the cover of another plane, his sense of
hearing is being overwhelmed by the approach of a chopper.
It is Rife's chopper, settling down on the tarmac a few dozen meters
away from the jet. The thunder of the rotor blades and the blast of the wind
seem to penetrate into Uncle Enzo's brain. He closes his eyes against the
wind and utterly loses his balance, has no idea where he is until he slams
full-length into the pavement. The pavement beneath him is slippery and
warm, and Uncle Enzo realizes that he is losing a great deal of blood.
Staring across the tarmac, he sees Raven making his way toward the
aircraft, limping horrendously, one leg virtually useless. Finally, he gives
up on it and just hops on his good leg.
Rife has climbed down out of the chopper. Raven and Rife are talking,
Raven gesticulating back in Enzo's direction. Then Rife nods his approval,
and Raven turns around, his teeth bright and white. He's not grimacing so
much as he is smiling in anticipation. He begins to hop toward Uncle Enzo,
pulling another glass knife out of his jacket. The bastard is carrying a
million of those things.
He's coming after Enzo, and Enzo can't even stand up without passing
out.
He looks around and sees nothing but a skateboard and a pair of
expensive shoes and socks about twenty feet away. He can't stand up, but he
can do the GI crawl, and so he begins to pull himself forward on his elbows
even as Raven is hopping toward him one-legged.
They meet in an open lane between two adjacent jets. Enzo is on his
belly, slumped over the skateboard. Raven is standing, supporting himself
with one hand on the wing of the jet, the glass knife glittering in his
other hand. Enzo is now seeing the world in dim black and white, like a
cheap Metaverse terminal; this is how his buddies used to describe it in
Vietnam right before they succumbed to blood loss.
"Hope you've done your last rites," Raven says, "because there ain't no
time to call a priest."
"There is no need for one," Uncle Enzo says, and punches the button on
the skateboard labeled "RadiKS Narrow Cone Tuned Shock Wave Projector."
The concussion nearly blows his head off. Uncle Enzo, if he survives,
will never hear well again. But it does wake him up a little bit. He lifts
his head off the board to see Raven standing there stunned, empty-handed, a
thousand tiny splinters of broken glass raining down out of his jacket.
Uncle Enzo rolls over on his back and waves his straight razor in the
air. "I prefer steel myself," he says. "Would you like a shave?"
Rife sees it all and understands it clearly enough. He would love to
see how it all comes out, but he's a very busy man; he would like to get out
of here before the rest of the Mafia and Ng and Mr. Lee and all those other
assholes come after him with their heat-seeking missiles. And there's no
time to wait for the gimpy Raven to hop all the way back. He gives a thumbs
up to the pilot and begins climbing the steps into his private jet.
It's daytime. A wall of billowing orange flame grows up silently from
the tank farm a mile away, like a time-lapse chrysanthemum. It is so vast
and complicated in its blooming, uncontrolled growth that Rife stops halfway
up the stairs to watch.
A powerful disturbance is moving through the flame, leaving a linear
trail in the light, like a cosmic ray fired through a cloud chamber. By the
force of its passage, it leaves behind a shock wave that is clearly visible
in the flame, a bright spreading cone that is a hundred times larger than
the dark source at its apex: a black bulletlike thing supported on four legs
that are churning too fast to be visible. It is so small and so fast that L.
Bob Rife would not be able to see it, if it were not headed directly for
him.
It is picking its way over a broad tangle of open-air plumbing, the
pipes that carry the fuel to the jets, jumping over some obstacles, digging
its metallic claws into others, tearing them open with the explosive thrust
of its legs, igniting their contents with the sparks that fly whenever its
feet touch the pavement. It gathers its four legs under it, leaps a hundred
feet to the top of a buried tank, uses that as a launch pad for another
long, arcing leap over the chain link fence that separates the fuel
installation from the airport proper, and then it settles into a long,
steady, powerful lope, accelerating across the perfect geometric plane of
the runway, chased by a long tongue of flame that extends lazily from the
middle of the conflagration, whorling inward upon itself as it traces the
currents in that Rat Thing's aftershock.
Something tells L. Bob Rife to get away from the jet, which is loaded
with fuel. He turns and half jumps, half falls off the stairs, moving
clumsily because he's looking at the Rat Thing, not at the ground.
The Rat Thing, just a tiny dark thing close to the ground, visible only
by virtue of its shadow against the flames, and by the chain of white sparks
where its claws dig into the pavement, makes a tiny correction in its
course.
It's not headed for the jet; it's headed for him. Rife changes his mind
and runs up the stairway, taking the steps three at a time. The stairway
flexes and recoils under his weight, reminding him of the jet's fragility.
The pilot has seen it coming, doesn't wait to retract the stairway
before he releases the brakes and sends the jet taxiing down the runway,
swinging the nose away from the Rat Thing. He punches the throttles, nearly
throwing the jet onto one wing as it whips around in a tight curve, and
redlines the engines as soon as he sees the center line of the runway. Now
they can only see forward and sideways. They can't see what is chasing them.
Y.T. is the only person who can see it happen. Having easily penetrated
airport security with her Kourier pass, she is coasting onto the apron near
the cargo terminal. From here, she has an excellent view across half a mile
of open runway, and she sees it all happen: the plane roars down the runway,
hauling its door closed as it goes, shooting pale blue flames out its engine
nozzles, trying to build up speed for takeoff, and Fido chases it down like
a dog going after a fat mailman, makes one final tremendous leap into the
air and, turning himself into a Sidewinder missile, flies nose-first into
the tailpipe of its left engine.
The jet explodes about ten feet off the ground, catching Fido and L.
Bob Rife and his virus all together in its fine, sterilizing flame.
How sweet!
She stays for a while and watches the aftermath: Mafia choppers coming
in, doctors jumping out with doc boxes and blood bags and stretchers, Mafia
soldiers scurrying between the private jets, apparently looking for someone.
A pizza delivery car takes off from one of the parking areas, tires
squealing, and a Mafia car peels out after it in hot pursuit.
But after a while it gets boring, and so she skates back to the main
terminal, under her own power mostly, though she manages to poon a fuel
tanker for a while.
Mom's waiting for her in her stupid little jellybean car, by the United
baggage claim, just like they arranged on the phone. Y.T. opens the door,
throws her plank into the back seat, and climbs in.
"Home?" Mom says.
"Yeah, home seems about right."
This book germinated in a collaboration between me and the artist Tony
Sheeder, the original goal of which was to publish a computer-generated
graphic novel. In general, I handled the words and he handled the pictures;
but even though this work consists almost entirely of words, certain aspects
of it stem from my discussions with Tony.
This novel was very difficult to write, and I received a great deal of
good advice from my agents Liz Darhansoff, Chuck Verrill, and Denise
Stewart, who read early drafts. Other people subjected to the early drafts
were Tony Sheeder; Dr. Steve Horst of Wesleyan University, who made
extensive and very lucid comments on everything having to do with brains and
computers (and who suddenly came down with a virus about one hour after
reading it); and my brother-in-law, Steve Wiggins, currently at the
University of Edinburgh, who got me started on Asherah to begin with and
also fed me useful papers and citations as I thrashed around pitifully in
the Library of Congress.
Marco Kaltofen, as usual, functioned in the same quick, encyclopedic
way as the Librarian when I had questions about certain whys and wheres of
the toxic-waste business. Richard Green, my agent in L.A., gave me some help
with the geography of that town.
Bruck Pollock read the galleys attentively, but with blistering speed,
and made several useful suggestions. He was the first and certainly not the
last to point out that BIOS actually stands for "Basic Input/Output System,"
not "Built-In Operating System" as I have it here (and as it ought to be);
but I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the
dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun, so this part of the book is
unchanged.
The idea of a "virtual reality" such as the Metaverse is by now
widespread in the computer-graphics community and is being implemented in a
number of different ways. The particular vision of the Metaverse as
expressed in this novel originated from idle discussion between me and Jaime
(Captain Bandwidth) Taaffe - which does not imply that blame for any of the
unrealistic or tawdry aspects of the Metaverse should be placed on anyone
but me. The words "avatar" (in the sense used here) and "Metaverse" are my
inventions, which I came up with when I decided that existing words (such as
"virtual reality") were simply too awkward to use.
In thinking about how the Metaverse might be constructed, I was
influenced by the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, which is a book that
explains the philosophy behind the Macintosh. Again, this point is made only
to acknowledge the beneficial influence of the people who compiled said
document, not to link these poor innocents with its results.
In a nice twist, which I include only because it is pleasingly
self-referential, I became intimately familiar with the inner workings of
the Macintosh during the early phases of the doomed and maniacal
graphic-novel project when it became clear that the only way to make the Mac
do the things we needed was to write a lot of custom image-processing
software. I have probably spent more hours coding during the production of
this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned
away from the original graphic concept, rendering most of that work useless
from a practical viewpoint.
It should be pointed out that when I wrote the Babel material, I was
standing on the shoulders of many, many historians and archaeologists who
actually did the research; most of the words spoken by the Librarian
originated with these people and I have tried to make the Librarian give
credit where due, verbally footnoting his comments like a good scholar,
which I am not.
Finally, after the first publication of Snow Crash I learned that the
term "avatar" has actually been in use for a number of years as part of a
virtual reality system called Habitat, developed by F. Randall Farmer and
Chip Morningstar. The system runs on Commodore 64 computers, and though it
has all but died out in the U.S., is still popular in Japan. In addition to
avatars, Habitat includes many of the basic features of the Metaverse as
described in this book.
NEAL STEPHENSON issues from a clan of rootless, itinerant hard-science
and engineering professors (mostly Pac 10, Big 10, and Big 8 with the
occasional wild strain of Ivy). He began his higher education as a physics
major, then switched to geography when it appeared that this would enable
him to scam more free time on his university's mainframe computer. When he
graduated and discovered, to his perplexity, that there were no jobs for
inexperienced physicist-geographers, he began to look into alternative
pursuits such as working on cars, unimaginably stupid agricultural labor,
and writing novels. His first novel, The Big U, was published in 1984 and
vanished without a trace. His second novel, Zodiac: the Eco-thriller, came
out in 1988 and quickly developed a cult following among
water-pollution-control engineers. It was also enjoyed, though rarely
bought, by many radical environmentalists. Snow Crash was written in the
years 1988 through 1991 as the author listened to a great deal of loud,
relentless, depressing music. The Diamond Age was his fourth novel and The
Cobweb was his last.
Mr. Stephenson now resides in a comfortable home in the western
hemisphere and spends all of his time trying to retrofit an office into its
generally dark, unlevel, and asbestos-laden basement so that he can attempt
to write more novels. Despite the tremendous amounts of time he devotes to
writing, playing with computers, listening to speed metal, Rollerblading,
and pounding nails, he is a flawless husband, parent, neighbor, and
all-around human being.