Страница:
"You want to try some Snow Crash?"
He has a crisp accent that Hiro can't quite place. His audio is as bad
as his video. Hiro can hear cars going past the guy in the background. He
must be goggled in from a public terminal alongside some freeway.
"I don't get this," Hiro says. "What is Snow Crash?"
"It's a drug, asshole," the guy says. "What do you think?"
"Wait a minute. This is a new one on me," Hiro says. "You honestly
think I'm going to give you some money here? And then what do I do, wait for
you to mail me the stuff?"
"I said try, not buy," the guy says. "You don't have to give me any
money. Free sample. And you don't have to wait for no mail. You can have it
now."
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hypercard.
It looks like a business card. The hypercard is an avatar of sorts. It
is used in the Metaverse to represent a chunk of data. It might be text,
audio, video, a still image, or any other information that can be
represented digitally.
Think of a baseball card, which carries a picture, some text, and some
numerical data. A baseball hypercard could contain a highlight film of the
player in action, shown in perfect high-def television; a complete
biography, read by the player himself, in stereo digital sound; and a
complete statistical database along with specialized software to help you
look up the numbers you want.
A hypercard can carry a virtually infinite amount of information. For
all Hiro knows, this hypercard might contain all the books in the Library of
Congress, or every episode of Hawaii Five-O that was ever filmed, or the
complete recordings of Jimi Hendrix, or the 1950 Census.
Or - more likely - a wide variety of nasty computer viruses. If Hiro
reaches out and takes the hypercard, then the data it represents will be
transferred from this guy's system into Hiro's computer. Hiro, naturally,
wouldn't touch it under any circumstances, any more than you would take a
free syringe from a stranger in Times Square and jab it into your neck.
And it doesn't make sense anyway. "That's a hypercard. I thought you
said Snow Crash was a drug," Hiro says, now totally nonplussed.
"It is," the guy says. "Try it."
"Does it fuck up your brain?" Hiro says. "Or your computer?"
"Both. Neither. What's the difference?"
Hiro finally realizes that he has just wasted sixty seconds of his life
having a meaningless conversation with a paranoid schizophrenic. He turns
around and goes into The Black Sun.
At the exit of White Columns sits a black car, curled up like a
panther, a burnished steel lens reflecting the loglo of Oahu Road. It is a
Unit. It is a Mobile Unit of MetaCops Unlimited. A silvery badge is embossed
on its door, a chrome-plated cop badge the size of a dinner plate, bearing
the name of said private peace organization and emblazoned
All Major Credit Cards
MetaCops Unlimited is the official peacekeeping force of White Columns,
and also of The Mews at Windsor Heights, The Heights at Bear Run, Cinnamon
Grove, and The Farms of Cloverdelle. They also enforce traffic regulations
on all highways and byways operated by Fairlanes, Inc. A few different
FOQNEs also use them: Caymans Plus and The Alps, for example. But franchise
nations prefer to have their own security force. You can bet that Metazania
and New South Africa handle their own security; that's the only reason
people become citizens, so they can get drafted. Obviously, Nova Sicilia has
its own security, too. Narcolombia doesn't need security because people are
scared just to drive past the franchise at less than a hundred miles an hour
(Y.T. always snags a nifty power boost in neighborhoods thick with
Narcolombia consulates), and Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, the grandaddy of
all FOQNEs, handles it in a typically Hong Kong way, with robots.
MetaCops' main competitor, WorldBeat Security, handles all roads
belonging to Cruiseways, plus has worldwide contracts with Dixie
Traditionals, Pickett's Plantation, Rainbow Heights (check it out - two
apartheid Burbclaves and one for black suits), Meadowvale on the [insert
name of river] and Brickyard Station. WorldBeat is smaller than MetaCops,
handles more upscale contracts, supposedly has a bigger espionage arm -
though if that's what people want, they just talk to an account rep at the
Central Intelligence Corporation.
And then there's The Enforcers - but they cost a lot and don't take
well to supervision. It is rumored that, under their uniforms, they wear
T-shirts bearing the unofficial Enforcer coat of arms: a fist holding a
nightstick, emblazoned with the words SUE ME.
So Y.T. is coasting down a gradual slope toward the heavy iron gate of
White Columns, waiting for it to roll aside, waiting, waiting - but the gate
does not seem to be opening. No laser pulse has shot out of the guard shack
to find out who Y.T. is. The system has been overridden. If Y.T. was a
stupid ped she would go up to the MetaCop and ask him why. The MetaCop would
say, "The security of the city-state," and nothing more. These Burbclaves!
These city-states! So small, so insecure, that just about everything, like
not mowing your lawn, or playing your stereo too loud, becomes a national
security issue.
No way to skate around the fence; White Columns has eight-foot iron,
robo-wrought, all the way around. She rolls up to the gate, grabs the bars,
rattles it, but it's too big and solid to rattle.
MetaCops aren't allowed to lean against their Unit - makes them look
lazy and weak. They can almost lean, look like they're leaning, they can
even brandish a big leaning-against-the-car 'tude like this particular
individual, but they can't lean. Besides, with the complete, glinting
majesty of their Personal Portable Equipment Suite hanging on their Personal
Modular Equipment Harness, they would scratch the finish of the Unit.
"Jack this barrier to commerce, man, I got deliveries to make," Y.T.
announces to the MetaCop.
A wet, smacking burst, not loud enough to be an explosion, sounds from
the back of the Mobile Unit. It is the soft thup of a thick wrestler's
loogie being propelled through a rolled-up tongue. It is the distant,
muffled splurt of a baby having a big one. Y.T.'s hand, still gripping the
bars of the gate, stings for a moment, then feels cold and hot at the same
time. She can barely move it. She smells vinyl.
The MetaCop's partner climbs out of the back seat of the Mobile Unit.
The window of the back door is open, but everything on the Mobile Unit is so
black and shiny you can't tell that until the door moves. Both MetaCops,
under their glossy black helmets and night-vision goggles, are grinning. The
one getting out of the Mobile Unit is carrying a Short-Range Chemical
Restraint Projector - a loogie gun. Their little plan has worked. Y.T.
didn't think to aim her Knight Visions into the back seat to check for a
goo-firing sniper.
The loogie, when expanded into the air like this, is about the size of
a football. Miles and miles of eensy but strong fibers, like spaghetti. The
sauce on the spaghetti is sticky, goopy stuff that stays fluid for an
instant, when the loogie gun is fired, then sets quickly.
MetaCops have to tote this kind of gear because when each franchulate
is so small, you can't be chasing people around. The perp - almost always an
innocent thrasher - is always a three-second skateboard ride away from
asylum in the neighboring franchulate. Also, the incredible bulk of the
Personal Modular Equipment Harness - the chandelier o' gear - and all that
is clipped onto it slows them down so bad that whenever they try to run,
people just start laughing at them. So instead of losing some pounds, they
just clip more stuff onto their harnesses, like the loogie gun.
The snotty, fibrous drop of stuff has wrapped all the way around her
hand and forearm and lashed them onto the bar of the gate. Excess goo has
sagged and run down the bar a short ways, but is setting now, turning into
rubber. A few loose strands have also whipped forward and gained footholds
on her shoulder, chest, and lower face. She backs away and the adhesive
separates from the fibers, stretching out into long, infinitely thin
strands, like hot mozzarella. These set instantly, become solid, and then
break, curling away like smoke. It is not quite so grotendous, now that the
loogie is off her face, but her hand is still perfectly immobilized.
"You are hereby warned that any movement on your part not explicitly
endorsed by verbal authorization on my part may pose a direct physical risk
to you, as well as consequential psychological and possibly, depending on
your personal belief system, spiritual risks ensuing from your personal
reaction to said physical risk. Any movement on your part constitutes an
implicit and irrevocable acceptance of such risk," the first MetaCop says.
There is a little speaker on his belt, simultaneously translating all of
this into Spanish and Japanese.
"Or as we used to say," the other MetaCop says, "freeze, sucker!"
The untranslatable word resonates from the little speaker, pronounced
"esucker" and "saka" respectively.
"We are authorized Deputies of MetaCops Unlimited. Under Section 24.5.2
of the White Columns Code, we are authorized to carry out the actions of a
police force on this territory."
"Such as hassling innocent thrashers," Y.T. says.
The MetaCop turns off the translator. "By speaking English you
implicitly and irrevocably agree for all our future conversation to take
place in the English language," he says.
"You can't even rez what Y.T. says," Y.T. says.
"You have been identified as an Investigatory Focus of a Registered
Criminal Event that is alleged to have taken place on another territory,
namely, The Mews at Windsor Heights."
"That's another country, man. This is White Columns!"
"Under provisions of The Mews at Windsor Heights Code, we are
authorized to enforce law, national security concerns, and societal harmony
on said territory also. A treaty between The Mews at Windsor Heights and
White Columns authorizes us to place you in temporary custody until your
status as an Investigatory Focus has been resolved."
"Your ass is busted," the second MetaCop says.
"As your demeanor has been nonaggressive and you carry no visible
weapons, we are not authorized to employ heroic measures to ensure your
cooperation," the first MetaCop says.
"You stay cool and we'll stay cool," the second MetaCop says.
"However, we are equipped with devices, including but not limited to
projectile weapons, which, if used, may pose an extreme and immediate threat
to your health and well-being."
"Make one funny move and we'll blow your head off," the second MetaCop
says.
"Just unglom my fuckin' hand," Y.T. says. She has heard all this a
million times before.
White Columns, like most Burbclaves, has no jail, no police station. So
unsightly. Property values. Think of the liability exposure. MetaCops has a
franchise just down the road that serves as headquarters. As for a jail,
some place to habeas the occasional stray corpus, any halfdecent franchise
strip has one.
They are cruising in the Mobile Unit. Y.T.'s hands are cuffed together
in front of her. One hand is still half-encased in rubbery goo, smelling so
intensely of vinyl fumes that both MetaCops have rolled down their windows.
Six feet of loose fibers trail into her lap, across the floor of the Unit,
out the door, and drag on the pavement. The MetaCops are taking it easy,
cruising down the middle lane, not above issuing a speeding ticket here and
there as long as they're in their jurisdiction. Motorists around them drive
slowly and sanely, appalled by the thought of having to pull over and listen
to half an hour of disclaimers, advisements, and tangled justifications from
the likes of these. The occasional CosaNostra delivery boy whips past them
in the left lane, orange lights aflame, and they pretend not to notice.
"What's it gonna be, the Hoosegow or The Clink?" the first MetaCop
says. From the way he is talking, he must be talking to the other MetaCop.
"The Hoosegow, please," Y.T. says.
"The Clink!" the other MetaCop says, turning around, sneering at her
through the antiballistic glass, wallowing in power.
The whole interior of the car lights up as they drive past a Buy 'n'
Fly. Loiter in the parking lot of a Buy 'n' Fly and you'd get a suntan. Then
WorldBeat Security would come and arrest you. All that security-inducing
light makes the Visa and MasterCard stickers on the driver's-side window
glow for a moment.
"Y.T. is card-carrying," Y.T. says. "What does it cost to get off?"
"How come you keep calling yourself Whitey?" the second MetaCop says.
Like many people of color, he has misconstrued her name.
"Not whitey. Y.T.," the first MetaCop says.
"That's what Y.T. is called," Y.T. says.
"That's what I said," the second MetaCop says. "Whitey."
"Y.T.," the first one says, accenting the T so brutally that he throws
a glittering burst of saliva against the windshield. "Let me guess - Yolanda
Truman?"
"No."
"Yvonne Thomas?"
"No."
"Whatsit stand for?"
"Nothing."
Actually, it stands for Yours Truly, but if they can't figure that out,
fuck 'em.
"You can't afford it," the first MetaCop says. "You're going up against
TMAWH here."
"I don't have to officially get off. I could just escape."
"This is a class Unit. We don't support escapes," the first MetaCop
says.
"Tell you what," the second one says. "You pay us a trillion bucks and
we'll take you to a Hoosegow. Then you can bargain with them."
"Half a trillion," Y.T. says.
"Seven hundred and fifty billion," the MetaCop says. "Final. Shit,
you're wearing cuffs, you can't be bargaining with us."
Y.T. unzips a pocket on the thigh of her coverall, pulls out the card
with her clean hand, runs it through a slot on the back of the front seat,
puts it back in her pocket.
The Hoosegow looks like a nice new one. Y.T. has seen hotels that were
worse places to sleep. Its logo sign, a saguaro cactus with a black cowboy
hat resting on top of it at a jaunty angle, is brand-new and clean.
Premium incarceration and restraint services
We welcome busloads!
There are a couple of other MetaCop cars in the lot, and an Enforcer
paddybus parked across the back, taking up ten consecutive spaces. This
draws much attention from the MetaCops. The Enforcers are to the MetaCops
what the Delta Force is to the Peace Corps.
"One to check in," says the second MetaCop. They are standing in the
reception area. The walls are lined with illuminated signs, each one bearing
the image of some Old West desperado. Annie Oakley stares down blankly at
Y.T., providing a role model. The check-in counter is faux rustic; the
employees all wear cowboy hats and five-pointed stars with their names
embossed on them. In back is a door made of hokey, old-fashioned iron bars.
Once you got through there, it would look like an operating room. A whole
line of little cells, curvy and white like prefab shower stalls - in fact,
they double as shower stalls, you bathe in the middle of the room. Bright
lights that turn themselves off at eleven o'clock. Coin-operated TV. Private
phone line. Y.T. can hardly wait.
The cowboy behind the desk aims a scanner at Y.T., zaps her bar code.
Hundreds of pages about Y.T.'s personal life zoom up on a graphics screen.
"Huh," he says. "Female."
The two MetaCops look at each other like, what a genius - this guy
could never be a MetaCop.
"Sorry, boys, we're full up. No space for females tonight."
"Aw, c'mon."
"See that bus in back? There was a riot at Snooze 'n' Cruise. Some
Narcolombians were selling a bad batch of Vertigo. Place went nuts.
Enforcers sent in a half dozen squads, brought in about thirty. So we're
full up. Try The Clink, down the street."
Y.T. does not like the looks of this.
They put her back in the car, turn on the noise cancellation in the
back seat, so she can't hear anything except squirts and gurgles coming from
her own empty tummy, and the glistening crackle whenever she moves her
glommed-up hand. She was really looking forward to a Hoosegow meal -
Campfire Chili or Bandit Burgers.
In the front seat, the two MetaCops are talking to each other. They
pull out into traffic. Up in front of them is a square illuminated logo, a
giant Universal Product Code in black-on-white with BUY 'N' FLY underneath
it.
Stuck onto the same signpost, beneath the Buy 'n' Fly sign, is a
smaller one, a narrow strip in generic lettering: THE CLINK.
They are taking her to The Clink. The bastards. She pounds on the glass
with cuffed-together hands, leaving sticky handprints. Let these bastards
try to wash the stuff off. They turn around and look right through her, the
guilty scum, like they heard something but they can't imagine what.
They enter the Buy 'n' Fly's nimbus of radioactive blue security light.
Second MetaCop goes in, talks to the guy behind the counter. There's a fat
white boy purchasing a monster trucks magazine, wearing a New South Africa
baseball cap with a Confederate flag, and overhearing them he peers out the
window, wanting to lay his eyes on a real perp. A second man comes out from
back, same ethnicity as the guy behind the counter, another dark man with
burning eyes and a bony neck. This one is carrying a three-ring binder with
the Buy 'n' Fly logo. To find the manager of a franchise, don't strain to
read his title off the name tag, just look for the one with the binder.
The manager talks to the MetaCop, nods his head, pulls a keychain out
of a drawer.
Second MetaCop comes out, saunters to the car, suddenly whips open the
back door.
"Shut up," he says, "or next time I fire the loogie gun into your
mouth."
"Good thing you like The Clink," Y.T. says, "cause that is where you
will be tomorrow night, loogie-man."
"'Zat right?"
"Yeah. For credit card fraud."
"Me cop, you thrasher. How you gonna make a case at judge Bob's
judicial System?"
"I work for RadiKS. We protect our own."
"Not tonight you don't. Tonight you took a pizza from the scene of a
car wreck. Left the scene of an accident. RadiKS tell you to deliver that
pizza?"
Y.T. does not return fire. The MetaCop is right; RadiKS did not tell
her to deliver that pizza. She was doing it on a whim.
"So RadiKS ain't gonna help you. So shut up."
He jerks her arm, and the rest of her follows. The three-ringer gives
her a quick look, just long enough to make sure she is really a person, not
a sack of flour or an engine block or a tree stump. He leads them around to
the fetid rump of the Buy 'n' Fly, dark realm of wretched refuse in teeming
dumpsters. He unlocks the back door, a boring steel number with jimmy marks
around the edges like steel-clawed beasts have been trying to get in.
Y.T. is taken downstairs into the basement. First MetaCop follows,
carrying her plank, banging it heedlessly against doorways and stained
polycarbonate bottle racks.
"Better take her uniform - all that gear," the second MetaCop suggests,
not unlewdly.
The manager looks at Y.T., trying not to let his gaze travel sinfully
up and down her body. For thousands of years his people have survived on
alertness: waiting for Mongols to come galloping over the horizon, waiting
for repeat offenders to swing sawed-off shotguns across their check-out
counters. His alertness right now is palpable and painful; he's like a
goblet of hot nitroglycerin. The added question of sexual misconduct makes
it even worse. To him it's no joke.
Y.T. shrugs, trying to think of something unnerving and wacky. At this
point, she is supposed to squeal and shrink, wriggle and whine, swoon and
beg. They are threatening to take her clothes. How awful. But she does not
get upset because she knows that they are expecting her to.
A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable
law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box
in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that
little box.
Y.T. is not fond of boxes. Y.T. establishes her space on the pavement
by zagging mightily from lane to lane, establishing a precedent of scary
randomness. Keeps people on their toes, makes them react to her, instead of
the other way round. Now these men are trying to put her in a box, make her
follow rules.
She unzips her coverall all the way down below her navel. Underneath is
naught but billowing pale flesh.
The MetaCops raise their eyebrows.
The manager jumps back, raises both hands up to form a visual shield,
protecting himself from the damaging input. "No, no, no!" he says.
Y.T. shrugs, zips herself back up.
She's not afraid; she's wearing a dentata.
The manager handcuffs her to a cold-water pipe. Second MetaCop removes
his newer, more cybernetic brand of handcuffs, snaps them back onto his
harness. First MetaCop leans her plank against the wall, just out of her
reach. Manager kicks a rusty coffee can across the floor, caroming it
expertly off her skin, so she can go to the bathroom.
"Where you from?" Y.T. asks.
"Tadzhikistan," he says.
A jeek. She should have known.
"Well, shitcan soccer must be your national pastime."
The manager doesn't get it. The MetaCops emit rote, shallow laughter.
Papers are signed. Everyone else goes upstairs. On his way out the
door, the manager turns off the lights; in Tadzhikistan, electricity is
quite the big deal.
Y.T. is in The Clink.
The Black Sun is as big as a couple of football fields laid side by
side. The decor consists of black, square tabletops hovering in the air (it
would be pointless to draw in legs), evenly spaced across the floor in a
grid. Like pixels. The only exception is in the middle, where the bar's four
quadrants come together (4 = 2^2). This part is occupied by a circular bar
sixteen meters across. Everything is matte black, which makes it a lot
easier for the computer system to draw things in on top of it - no worries
about filling in a complicated background. And that way all attention can be
focused on the avatars, which is the way people like it.
It doesn't pay to have a nice avatar on the Street, where it's so
crowded and all the avatars merge and flow into one another. But The Black
Sun is a much classier piece of software. In The Black Sun, avatars are not
allowed to collide. Only so many people can be here at once, and they can't
walk through each other. Everything is solid and opaque and realistic. And
the clientele has a lot more class - no talking penises in here. The avatars
look like real people. For the most part, so do the daemons.
"Daemon" is an old piece of jargon from the UNIX operating system,
where it referred to a piece of low-level utility software, a fundamental
part of the operating system. In The Black Sun, a daemon is like an avatar,
but it does not represent a human being. It's a robot that lives in the
Metaverse. A piece of software, a kind of spirit that inhabits the machine,
usually with some particular role to carry out. The Black Sun has a number
of daemons that serve imaginary drinks to the patrons and run little errands
for people.
It even has bouncer daemons that get rid of undesirables - grab their
avatars and throw them out the door, applying certain basic principles of
avatar physics. Da5id has even enhanced the physics of The Black Sun to make
it a little cartoonish, so that particularly obnoxious people can be hit
over the head with giant mallets or crushed under plummeting safes before
they are ejected. This happens to people who are being disruptive, to anyone
who is pestering or taping a celebrity, and to anyone who seems contagious.
That is, if your personal computer is infected with viruses, and attempts to
spread them via The Black Sun, you had better keep one eye on the ceiling.
Hiro mumbles the word "Bigboard." This is the name of a piece of
software he wrote, a power tool for a CIC stringer. It digs into The Black
Sun's operating system, rifes it for information, and then throws up a flat
square map in front of his face, giving him a quick overview of who's here
and whom they're talking to. It's all unauthorized data that Hiro is not
supposed to have. But Hiro is not some bimbo actor coming here to network.
He is a hacker. If he wants some information, he steals it right out of the
guts of the system - gossip ex machina.
Bigboard shows him that Da5id is ensconced in his usual place, a table
in the Hacker Quadrant near the bar. The Movie Star Quadrant has the usual
scattering of Sovereigns and wannabes. The Rock Star Quadrant is very busy
tonight; Hiro can see that a Nipponese rap star named Sushi K has stopped in
for a visit. And there are a lot of record-industry types hanging around in
the Nipponese Quadrant - which looks like the other quadrants except that
it's quieter, the tables are closer to the floor, and it's full of bowing
and fluttering geisha daemons. Many of these people probably belong to Sushi
K's retinue of managers, flacks, and lawyers.
Hiro cuts across the Hacker Quadrant, headed for Da5id's table. He
recognizes many of the people in here, but as usual, he's surprised and
disturbed by the number he doesn't recognize - all those sharp, perceptive
twenty-one-year-old faces. Software development, like professional sports,
has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.
Looking up the aisle toward Da5id's table, he sees Da5id talking to a
black-and-white person. Despite her lack of color and shitty resolution,
Hiro recognizes her by the way she folds her arms when she's talking, the
way she tosses her hair when she's listening to Da5id. Hiro's avatar stops
moving and stares at her, adopting just the same facial expression with
which he used to stare at this woman years ago. In Reality, he reaches out
with one hand, picks up his beer, takes a pull on the bottle, and lets it
roll around in his mouth, a bundle of waves clashing inside a small space.
Her name is Juanita Marquez. Hiro has known her ever since they were
freshmen together at Berkeley, and they were in the same lab section in a
freshman physics class. The first time he saw her, he formed an impression
that did not change for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who
dressed like she was interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral
parlor. At the same time, she had a flamethrower tongue that she would turn
on people at the oddest times, usually in some grandiose, earth-scorching
retaliation for a slight or breach of etiquette that none of the other
freshmen had even perceived.
It wasn't until a number of years later, when they both wound up
working at Black Sun Systems, Inc., that he put the other half of the
equation together. At the time, both of them were working on avatars. He was
working on bodies, she was working on faces. She was the face department,
because nobody thought that faces were all that important - they were just
flesh-toned busts on top of the avatars. She was just in the process of
proving them all desperately wrong. But at this phase, the all-male society
of bitheads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems said that
the face problem was trivial and superficial. It was, of course, nothing
more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who
sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.
That first impression, back at the age of seventeen, was nothing more
than that - the gut reaction of a postadolescent Army brat who had been on
his own for about three weeks. His mind was good, but he only understood one
or two things in the whole world - samurai movies and the Macintosh - and he
understood them far, far too well. It was a worldview with no room for
someone like Juanita.
There is a certain kind of small town that grows like a boil on the ass
of every Army base in the world. In a long series of such places, Hiro
Protagonist was speedraised like a mutant hothouse orchid flourishing under
the glow of a thousand Buy 'n' Fly security spotlights. Hiro's father had
joined the army in 1944, at the age of sixteen, and spent a year in the
Pacific, most of it as a prisoner of war. Hiro was born when his father was
in his late middle age. By that time, Dad could long since have quit and
taken his pension, but he wouldn't have known what to do with himself
outside of the service, and so he stayed in until they finally kicked him
out in the late eighties. By the time Hiro made it out to Berkeley, he had
lived in Wrightstown, New Jersey; Tacoma, Washington; Fayetteville, North
Carolina; Hinesville, Georgia; Killeen, Texas; Grafenwehr, Germany; Seoul,
Korea; Ogden, Kansas; and Watertown, New York. All of these places were
basically the same, with the same franchise ghettos, the same strip joints,
and even the same people - he kept running into school chums he'd known
years before, other Army brats who happened to wind up at the same base at
the same time.
Their skins were different colors but they all belonged to the same
ethnic group: Military. Black kids didn't talk like black kids. Asian kids
didn't bust their asses to excel in school. White kids, by and large, didn't
have any problem getting along with the black and Asian kids. And girls knew
their place. They all had the same moms with the same generous buttocks in
stretchy slacks and the same frosted-and-curling-ironed hairdos, and they
were all basically sweet and endearing and conforming and, if they happened
to be smart, they went out of their way to hide it.
So the first time Hiro saw Juanita, or any other girl like her, his
perspectives were bent all out of shape. She had long, glossy black hair
that had never been subjected to any chemical process other than regular
shampooing. She didn't wear blue stuff on her eyelids. Her clothing was
dark, tailored, restrained. And she didn't take shit from anyone, not even
her professors, which seemed shrewish and threatening to him at the time.
When he saw her again after an absence of several years -a period spent
mostly in Japan, working among real grown-ups from a higher social class
than he was used to, people of substance who wore real clothes and did real
things with their lives - he was startled to realize that Juanita was an
elegant, stylish knockout. He thought at first that she had undergone some
kind of radical changes since their first year in college.
But then he went back to visit his father in one of those Army towns
and ran into the high school prom queen. She had grown up shockingly fast
into an overweight dame with loud hair and loud clothes who speedread the
tabloids at the check-out line in the commissary because she didn't have the
spare money to buy them, who popped her gum and had two kids that she didn't
have the energy or the foresight to discipline.
Seeing this woman at the commissary, he finally went through a belated,
dim-witted epiphany, not a brilliant light shining down from heaven, more
like the brown glimmer of a half-dead flashlight from the top of a
stepladder: Juanita hadn't really changed much at all since those days, just
grown into herself. It was he who had changed. Radically.
He came into her office once, strictly on a business matter. Until this
point, they had seen each other around the office a lot but acted like they
had never met before. But when he came into her office that day, she told
him to close the door behind him, and she blacked out the screen on her
computer and started twiddling a pencil between her hands and eyed him like
a plate of day-old sushi. Behind her on the wall was an amateurish painting
of an old lady, set in an ornate antique frame. It was the only decoration
in Juanita's office. All the other hackers had color photographs of the
space shuttle lifting off, or posters of the starship Enterprise.
"It's my late grandmother, may God have mercy on her soul," she said,
watching him look at the painting. "My role model."
"Why? Was she a programmer?"
She just looked at him over the rotating pencil like, how slow can a
mammal be and still have respiratory functions? But instead of lowering the
boom on him, she just gave a simple answer: "No." Then she gave a more
complicated answer. "When I was fifteen years old, I missed a period. My
boyfriend and I were using a diaphragm, but I knew it was fallible. I was
good at math, I had the failure rate memorized, burnt into my subconscious.
Or maybe it was my conscious, I can never keep them straight. Anyway, I was
terrified. Our family dog started treating me differently - supposedly, they
can smell a pregnant woman. Or a pregnant bitch, for that matter."
By this point, Hiro's face was frozen in a wary, astonished position
that Juanita later made extensive use of in her work. Because, as she was
talking to him, she was watching, his face, analyzing the way the little
muscles in his forehead pulled his brows up and made his eyes change shape.
"My mother was clueless. My boyfriend was worse than clueless - in
fact, I ditched him on the spot, because it made me realize what an alien
the guy was - like many members of your species." By this, she was referring
to males.
"Anyway, my grandmother came to visit," she continued, glancing back
over her shoulder at the painting. "I avoided her until we all sat down for
dinner. And then she figured out the whole situation in, maybe, ten minutes,
just by watching my face across the dinner table. I didn't say more than ten
words - 'Pass the tortillas.' I don't know how my face conveyed that
information, or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind
enabled her to accomplish this incredible feat. To condense fact from the
vapor of nuance."
Condense fact from the vapor of nuance. Hiro has never forgotten the
sound of her speaking those words, the feeling that came over him as he
realized for the first time how smart Juanita was.
She continued. "I didn't even really appreciate all of this until about
ten years later, as. a grad student, trying to build a user interface that
would convey a lot of data very quickly, for one of these baby-killer
grants." This was her term for anything related to the Defense Department.
"I was coming up with all kinds of elaborate technical fixes like trying to
implant electrodes directly into the brain. Then I remembered my grandmother
and realized, my God, the human mind can absorb and process an incredible
amount of information - if it comes in the right format. The right
interface. If you put the right face on it. Want some coffee?"
Then he had an alarming thought: What had he been like back in college?
How much of an asshole had he been? Had he left Juanita with a bad
impression?
Another young man would have worried about it in silence, but Hiro has
never been restrained by thinking about things too hard, and so he asked her
out for dinner and, after having a couple of drinks (she drank club sodas),
just popped the question: Do you think I'm an asshole?
She laughed. He smiled, believing that he had come up with a good,
endearing, flirtatious bit of patter.
He did not realize until a couple of years later that this question
was, in effect, the cornerstone of their relationship. Did Juanita think
that Hiro was an asshole? He always had some reason to think that the answer
was yes, but nine times out of ten she insisted the answer was no. It made
for some great arguments and some great sex, some dramatic failings out and
some passionate reconciliations, but in the end the wildness was just too
much for them - they were exhausted by work - and they backed away from each
other. He was emotionally worn out from wondering what she really thought of
him, and confused by the fact that he cared so deeply about her opinion. And
she, maybe, was beginning to think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own
mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't.
Hiro would have chalked it all up to class differences, except that her
parents lived in a house in Mexicali with a dirt floor, and his father made
more money than many college professors. But the class idea still held sway
in his mind, because class is more than income - it has to do with knowing
where you stand in a web of social relationships. Juanita and her folks knew
where they stood with a certitude that bordered on dementia. Hiro never
knew. His father was a sergeant major, his mother was a Korean woman whose
people had been mine slaves in Nippon, and Hiro didn't know whether he was
black or Asian or just plain Army, whether he was rich or poor, educated or
ignorant, talented or lucky. He didn't even have a part of the country to
call home until he moved to California, which is about as specific as saying
that you live in the Northern Hemisphere. In the end, it was probably his
general disorientation that did them in.
After the breakup, Hiro went out with a long succession of essentially
bimbos who (unlike Juanita) were impressed that he worked for a high-tech
Silicon Valley firm. More recently, he has had to go searching for women who
are even easier to impress.
Juanita went celibate for a while and then started going out with Da5id
and eventually got married to him. Da5id had no doubts whatsoever about his
standing in the world. His folks were Russian Jews from Brooklyn and had
lived in the same brownstone for seventy years after coming from a village
in Latvia where they had lived for five hundred years; with a Torah on his
lap, he could trace his bloodlines all the way back to Adam and Eve. He was
an only child who had always been first in his class in everything, and when
he got his master's in computer science from Stanford, he went out and
started his own company with about as much fuss as Hiro's dad used to
exhibit in renting out a new P.O. box when they moved. Then he got rich, and
now he runs The Black Sun. Da5id has always been certain of everything.
Even when he's totally wrong. Which is why Hiro quit his job at Black
Sun Systems, despite the promise of future riches, and why Juanita divorced
Da5id two years after she married him.
Hiro did not attend Juanita and Da5id's wedding; he was languishing in
jail, into which he had been thrown a few hours before the rehearsal. He had
been found in Golden Gate Park, lovesick, wearing nothing but a thong,
taking long pulls from a jumbo bottle of Courvoisier and practicing kendo
attacks with a genuine samurai sword, floating across the grass on
powerfully muscled thighs to slice other picnickers' hurtling Frisbees and
baseballs in twain. Catching a long fly ball with the edge of your blade,
neatly halving it like a grapefruit, is not an insignificant feat. The only
drawback is that the owners of the baseball may misinterpret your intentions
and summon the police.
He got out of it by paying for all the baseballs and Frisbees, but
since that episode, he has never even bothered to ask Juanita whether or not
she thinks he's an asshole. Even Hiro knows the answer now.
Since then, they've gone very different ways. In the early years of The
Black Sun project, the only way the hackers ever got paid was by issuing
stock to themselves. Hiro tended to sell his off almost as quickly as he got
it. Juanita didn't. Now she's rich, and he isn't. It would be easy to say
that Hiro is a stupid investor and Juanita a smart one, but the facts are a
little more complicated than that: Juanita put her eggs in one basket,
keeping all her money in Black Sun stock; as it turns out, she made a lot of
money that way, but she could have gone broke, too. And Hiro didn't have a
lot of choice in some ways. When his father got sick, the Army and the V.A.
took care of most of his medical bills, but they ran into a lot of expenses
anyway, and Hiro's mother - who could barely speak English - wasn't equipped
to make or handle money on her own. When Hiro's father died, he cashed in
all of his Black Sun stock to put Mom in a nice community in Korea. She
loves it there. Goes golfing every day. He could have kept his money in The
Black Sun and made ten million dollars about a year later when it went
public, but his mother would have been a street person. So when his mother
visits him in the Metaverse, looking tan and happy in her golfing duds, Hiro
views that as his personal fortune. It won't pay the rent, but that's okay -
when you live in a shithole, there's always the Metaverse, and in the
Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince.
His tongue is stinging; he realizes that, back in Reality, he has
forgotten to swallow his beer.
It's ironic that Juanita has come into this place in a low-tech,
black-and-white avatar. She was the one who figured out a way to make
avatars show something close to real emotion. That is a fact Hiro has never
forgotten, because she did most of her work when they were together, and
whenever an avatar looks surprised or angry or passionate in the Metaverse,
he sees an echo of himself or Juanita - the Adam and Eve of the Metaverse.
Makes it hard to forget.
Shortly after Juanita and Da5id got divorced, The Black Sun really took
off. And once they got done counting their money, marketing the spinoffs,
soaking up the adulation of others in the hacker community, they all came to
the realization that what made this place a success was not the
collision-avoidance algorithms or the bouncer daemons or any of that other
stuff. It was Juanita's faces.
Just ask the businessmen in the Nipponese Quadrant. They come here to
talk turkey with suits from around the world, and they consider it just as
good as a face-to-face. They more or less ignore what is being saida lot
gets lost in translation, after all. They pay attention to the facial
expressions and body language of the people they are talking to. And that's
how they know what's going on inside a person's head - by condensing fact
from the vapor of nuance.
Juanita refused to analyze this process, insisted that it was something
ineffable, something you couldn't explain with words. A radical,
rosary-toting Catholic, she has no problem with that kind of thing. But the
bitheads didn't like it. Said it was irrational mysticism. So she quit and
took a job with some Nipponese company. They don't have any problem with
irrational mysticism as long as it makes money.
But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore. Partly, she's pissed
at Da5id and the other hackers who never appreciated her work. But she has
also decided that the whole thing is bogus. That no matter how good it is,
the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants
no such distortion in her relationships.
Da5id notices Hiro, indicates with a flick of his eyes that this is not
a good time. Normally, such subtle gestures are lost in the system's noise,
but Da5id has a very good personal computer, and Juanita helped design his
avatar - so the message comes through like a shot fired into the ceiling.
Hiro turns away, saunters around the big circular bar in a slow orbit.
Most of the sixty-four bar stools are filled with lower-level Industry
people, getting together in twos and threes, doing what they do best: gossip
and intrigue.
"So I get together with the director for a story conference. He's got
this beach house - "
"Incredible?"
"Don't get me started."
"I heard. Debi was there for a party when Frank and Mitzi owned it."
"Anyway, there's this scene, early, where the main character wakes up
in a dumpster. The idea is to show how, you know, despondent he is - "
"That crazy energy - "
"Exactly."
"Fabulous."
"I like it. Well, he wants to replace it with a scene where the guy is
out in the desert with a bazooka, blowing up old cars in an abandoned
junkyard."
"You're kidding!"
"So we're sitting there on his fucking patio over the beach and he's
going, like, whoom! whoom! imitating this goddamn bazooka. He's thrilled by
the idea. I mean, this is a man who wants to put a bazooka in a movie. So I
He has a crisp accent that Hiro can't quite place. His audio is as bad
as his video. Hiro can hear cars going past the guy in the background. He
must be goggled in from a public terminal alongside some freeway.
"I don't get this," Hiro says. "What is Snow Crash?"
"It's a drug, asshole," the guy says. "What do you think?"
"Wait a minute. This is a new one on me," Hiro says. "You honestly
think I'm going to give you some money here? And then what do I do, wait for
you to mail me the stuff?"
"I said try, not buy," the guy says. "You don't have to give me any
money. Free sample. And you don't have to wait for no mail. You can have it
now."
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hypercard.
It looks like a business card. The hypercard is an avatar of sorts. It
is used in the Metaverse to represent a chunk of data. It might be text,
audio, video, a still image, or any other information that can be
represented digitally.
Think of a baseball card, which carries a picture, some text, and some
numerical data. A baseball hypercard could contain a highlight film of the
player in action, shown in perfect high-def television; a complete
biography, read by the player himself, in stereo digital sound; and a
complete statistical database along with specialized software to help you
look up the numbers you want.
A hypercard can carry a virtually infinite amount of information. For
all Hiro knows, this hypercard might contain all the books in the Library of
Congress, or every episode of Hawaii Five-O that was ever filmed, or the
complete recordings of Jimi Hendrix, or the 1950 Census.
Or - more likely - a wide variety of nasty computer viruses. If Hiro
reaches out and takes the hypercard, then the data it represents will be
transferred from this guy's system into Hiro's computer. Hiro, naturally,
wouldn't touch it under any circumstances, any more than you would take a
free syringe from a stranger in Times Square and jab it into your neck.
And it doesn't make sense anyway. "That's a hypercard. I thought you
said Snow Crash was a drug," Hiro says, now totally nonplussed.
"It is," the guy says. "Try it."
"Does it fuck up your brain?" Hiro says. "Or your computer?"
"Both. Neither. What's the difference?"
Hiro finally realizes that he has just wasted sixty seconds of his life
having a meaningless conversation with a paranoid schizophrenic. He turns
around and goes into The Black Sun.
At the exit of White Columns sits a black car, curled up like a
panther, a burnished steel lens reflecting the loglo of Oahu Road. It is a
Unit. It is a Mobile Unit of MetaCops Unlimited. A silvery badge is embossed
on its door, a chrome-plated cop badge the size of a dinner plate, bearing
the name of said private peace organization and emblazoned
All Major Credit Cards
MetaCops Unlimited is the official peacekeeping force of White Columns,
and also of The Mews at Windsor Heights, The Heights at Bear Run, Cinnamon
Grove, and The Farms of Cloverdelle. They also enforce traffic regulations
on all highways and byways operated by Fairlanes, Inc. A few different
FOQNEs also use them: Caymans Plus and The Alps, for example. But franchise
nations prefer to have their own security force. You can bet that Metazania
and New South Africa handle their own security; that's the only reason
people become citizens, so they can get drafted. Obviously, Nova Sicilia has
its own security, too. Narcolombia doesn't need security because people are
scared just to drive past the franchise at less than a hundred miles an hour
(Y.T. always snags a nifty power boost in neighborhoods thick with
Narcolombia consulates), and Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, the grandaddy of
all FOQNEs, handles it in a typically Hong Kong way, with robots.
MetaCops' main competitor, WorldBeat Security, handles all roads
belonging to Cruiseways, plus has worldwide contracts with Dixie
Traditionals, Pickett's Plantation, Rainbow Heights (check it out - two
apartheid Burbclaves and one for black suits), Meadowvale on the [insert
name of river] and Brickyard Station. WorldBeat is smaller than MetaCops,
handles more upscale contracts, supposedly has a bigger espionage arm -
though if that's what people want, they just talk to an account rep at the
Central Intelligence Corporation.
And then there's The Enforcers - but they cost a lot and don't take
well to supervision. It is rumored that, under their uniforms, they wear
T-shirts bearing the unofficial Enforcer coat of arms: a fist holding a
nightstick, emblazoned with the words SUE ME.
So Y.T. is coasting down a gradual slope toward the heavy iron gate of
White Columns, waiting for it to roll aside, waiting, waiting - but the gate
does not seem to be opening. No laser pulse has shot out of the guard shack
to find out who Y.T. is. The system has been overridden. If Y.T. was a
stupid ped she would go up to the MetaCop and ask him why. The MetaCop would
say, "The security of the city-state," and nothing more. These Burbclaves!
These city-states! So small, so insecure, that just about everything, like
not mowing your lawn, or playing your stereo too loud, becomes a national
security issue.
No way to skate around the fence; White Columns has eight-foot iron,
robo-wrought, all the way around. She rolls up to the gate, grabs the bars,
rattles it, but it's too big and solid to rattle.
MetaCops aren't allowed to lean against their Unit - makes them look
lazy and weak. They can almost lean, look like they're leaning, they can
even brandish a big leaning-against-the-car 'tude like this particular
individual, but they can't lean. Besides, with the complete, glinting
majesty of their Personal Portable Equipment Suite hanging on their Personal
Modular Equipment Harness, they would scratch the finish of the Unit.
"Jack this barrier to commerce, man, I got deliveries to make," Y.T.
announces to the MetaCop.
A wet, smacking burst, not loud enough to be an explosion, sounds from
the back of the Mobile Unit. It is the soft thup of a thick wrestler's
loogie being propelled through a rolled-up tongue. It is the distant,
muffled splurt of a baby having a big one. Y.T.'s hand, still gripping the
bars of the gate, stings for a moment, then feels cold and hot at the same
time. She can barely move it. She smells vinyl.
The MetaCop's partner climbs out of the back seat of the Mobile Unit.
The window of the back door is open, but everything on the Mobile Unit is so
black and shiny you can't tell that until the door moves. Both MetaCops,
under their glossy black helmets and night-vision goggles, are grinning. The
one getting out of the Mobile Unit is carrying a Short-Range Chemical
Restraint Projector - a loogie gun. Their little plan has worked. Y.T.
didn't think to aim her Knight Visions into the back seat to check for a
goo-firing sniper.
The loogie, when expanded into the air like this, is about the size of
a football. Miles and miles of eensy but strong fibers, like spaghetti. The
sauce on the spaghetti is sticky, goopy stuff that stays fluid for an
instant, when the loogie gun is fired, then sets quickly.
MetaCops have to tote this kind of gear because when each franchulate
is so small, you can't be chasing people around. The perp - almost always an
innocent thrasher - is always a three-second skateboard ride away from
asylum in the neighboring franchulate. Also, the incredible bulk of the
Personal Modular Equipment Harness - the chandelier o' gear - and all that
is clipped onto it slows them down so bad that whenever they try to run,
people just start laughing at them. So instead of losing some pounds, they
just clip more stuff onto their harnesses, like the loogie gun.
The snotty, fibrous drop of stuff has wrapped all the way around her
hand and forearm and lashed them onto the bar of the gate. Excess goo has
sagged and run down the bar a short ways, but is setting now, turning into
rubber. A few loose strands have also whipped forward and gained footholds
on her shoulder, chest, and lower face. She backs away and the adhesive
separates from the fibers, stretching out into long, infinitely thin
strands, like hot mozzarella. These set instantly, become solid, and then
break, curling away like smoke. It is not quite so grotendous, now that the
loogie is off her face, but her hand is still perfectly immobilized.
"You are hereby warned that any movement on your part not explicitly
endorsed by verbal authorization on my part may pose a direct physical risk
to you, as well as consequential psychological and possibly, depending on
your personal belief system, spiritual risks ensuing from your personal
reaction to said physical risk. Any movement on your part constitutes an
implicit and irrevocable acceptance of such risk," the first MetaCop says.
There is a little speaker on his belt, simultaneously translating all of
this into Spanish and Japanese.
"Or as we used to say," the other MetaCop says, "freeze, sucker!"
The untranslatable word resonates from the little speaker, pronounced
"esucker" and "saka" respectively.
"We are authorized Deputies of MetaCops Unlimited. Under Section 24.5.2
of the White Columns Code, we are authorized to carry out the actions of a
police force on this territory."
"Such as hassling innocent thrashers," Y.T. says.
The MetaCop turns off the translator. "By speaking English you
implicitly and irrevocably agree for all our future conversation to take
place in the English language," he says.
"You can't even rez what Y.T. says," Y.T. says.
"You have been identified as an Investigatory Focus of a Registered
Criminal Event that is alleged to have taken place on another territory,
namely, The Mews at Windsor Heights."
"That's another country, man. This is White Columns!"
"Under provisions of The Mews at Windsor Heights Code, we are
authorized to enforce law, national security concerns, and societal harmony
on said territory also. A treaty between The Mews at Windsor Heights and
White Columns authorizes us to place you in temporary custody until your
status as an Investigatory Focus has been resolved."
"Your ass is busted," the second MetaCop says.
"As your demeanor has been nonaggressive and you carry no visible
weapons, we are not authorized to employ heroic measures to ensure your
cooperation," the first MetaCop says.
"You stay cool and we'll stay cool," the second MetaCop says.
"However, we are equipped with devices, including but not limited to
projectile weapons, which, if used, may pose an extreme and immediate threat
to your health and well-being."
"Make one funny move and we'll blow your head off," the second MetaCop
says.
"Just unglom my fuckin' hand," Y.T. says. She has heard all this a
million times before.
White Columns, like most Burbclaves, has no jail, no police station. So
unsightly. Property values. Think of the liability exposure. MetaCops has a
franchise just down the road that serves as headquarters. As for a jail,
some place to habeas the occasional stray corpus, any halfdecent franchise
strip has one.
They are cruising in the Mobile Unit. Y.T.'s hands are cuffed together
in front of her. One hand is still half-encased in rubbery goo, smelling so
intensely of vinyl fumes that both MetaCops have rolled down their windows.
Six feet of loose fibers trail into her lap, across the floor of the Unit,
out the door, and drag on the pavement. The MetaCops are taking it easy,
cruising down the middle lane, not above issuing a speeding ticket here and
there as long as they're in their jurisdiction. Motorists around them drive
slowly and sanely, appalled by the thought of having to pull over and listen
to half an hour of disclaimers, advisements, and tangled justifications from
the likes of these. The occasional CosaNostra delivery boy whips past them
in the left lane, orange lights aflame, and they pretend not to notice.
"What's it gonna be, the Hoosegow or The Clink?" the first MetaCop
says. From the way he is talking, he must be talking to the other MetaCop.
"The Hoosegow, please," Y.T. says.
"The Clink!" the other MetaCop says, turning around, sneering at her
through the antiballistic glass, wallowing in power.
The whole interior of the car lights up as they drive past a Buy 'n'
Fly. Loiter in the parking lot of a Buy 'n' Fly and you'd get a suntan. Then
WorldBeat Security would come and arrest you. All that security-inducing
light makes the Visa and MasterCard stickers on the driver's-side window
glow for a moment.
"Y.T. is card-carrying," Y.T. says. "What does it cost to get off?"
"How come you keep calling yourself Whitey?" the second MetaCop says.
Like many people of color, he has misconstrued her name.
"Not whitey. Y.T.," the first MetaCop says.
"That's what Y.T. is called," Y.T. says.
"That's what I said," the second MetaCop says. "Whitey."
"Y.T.," the first one says, accenting the T so brutally that he throws
a glittering burst of saliva against the windshield. "Let me guess - Yolanda
Truman?"
"No."
"Yvonne Thomas?"
"No."
"Whatsit stand for?"
"Nothing."
Actually, it stands for Yours Truly, but if they can't figure that out,
fuck 'em.
"You can't afford it," the first MetaCop says. "You're going up against
TMAWH here."
"I don't have to officially get off. I could just escape."
"This is a class Unit. We don't support escapes," the first MetaCop
says.
"Tell you what," the second one says. "You pay us a trillion bucks and
we'll take you to a Hoosegow. Then you can bargain with them."
"Half a trillion," Y.T. says.
"Seven hundred and fifty billion," the MetaCop says. "Final. Shit,
you're wearing cuffs, you can't be bargaining with us."
Y.T. unzips a pocket on the thigh of her coverall, pulls out the card
with her clean hand, runs it through a slot on the back of the front seat,
puts it back in her pocket.
The Hoosegow looks like a nice new one. Y.T. has seen hotels that were
worse places to sleep. Its logo sign, a saguaro cactus with a black cowboy
hat resting on top of it at a jaunty angle, is brand-new and clean.
Premium incarceration and restraint services
We welcome busloads!
There are a couple of other MetaCop cars in the lot, and an Enforcer
paddybus parked across the back, taking up ten consecutive spaces. This
draws much attention from the MetaCops. The Enforcers are to the MetaCops
what the Delta Force is to the Peace Corps.
"One to check in," says the second MetaCop. They are standing in the
reception area. The walls are lined with illuminated signs, each one bearing
the image of some Old West desperado. Annie Oakley stares down blankly at
Y.T., providing a role model. The check-in counter is faux rustic; the
employees all wear cowboy hats and five-pointed stars with their names
embossed on them. In back is a door made of hokey, old-fashioned iron bars.
Once you got through there, it would look like an operating room. A whole
line of little cells, curvy and white like prefab shower stalls - in fact,
they double as shower stalls, you bathe in the middle of the room. Bright
lights that turn themselves off at eleven o'clock. Coin-operated TV. Private
phone line. Y.T. can hardly wait.
The cowboy behind the desk aims a scanner at Y.T., zaps her bar code.
Hundreds of pages about Y.T.'s personal life zoom up on a graphics screen.
"Huh," he says. "Female."
The two MetaCops look at each other like, what a genius - this guy
could never be a MetaCop.
"Sorry, boys, we're full up. No space for females tonight."
"Aw, c'mon."
"See that bus in back? There was a riot at Snooze 'n' Cruise. Some
Narcolombians were selling a bad batch of Vertigo. Place went nuts.
Enforcers sent in a half dozen squads, brought in about thirty. So we're
full up. Try The Clink, down the street."
Y.T. does not like the looks of this.
They put her back in the car, turn on the noise cancellation in the
back seat, so she can't hear anything except squirts and gurgles coming from
her own empty tummy, and the glistening crackle whenever she moves her
glommed-up hand. She was really looking forward to a Hoosegow meal -
Campfire Chili or Bandit Burgers.
In the front seat, the two MetaCops are talking to each other. They
pull out into traffic. Up in front of them is a square illuminated logo, a
giant Universal Product Code in black-on-white with BUY 'N' FLY underneath
it.
Stuck onto the same signpost, beneath the Buy 'n' Fly sign, is a
smaller one, a narrow strip in generic lettering: THE CLINK.
They are taking her to The Clink. The bastards. She pounds on the glass
with cuffed-together hands, leaving sticky handprints. Let these bastards
try to wash the stuff off. They turn around and look right through her, the
guilty scum, like they heard something but they can't imagine what.
They enter the Buy 'n' Fly's nimbus of radioactive blue security light.
Second MetaCop goes in, talks to the guy behind the counter. There's a fat
white boy purchasing a monster trucks magazine, wearing a New South Africa
baseball cap with a Confederate flag, and overhearing them he peers out the
window, wanting to lay his eyes on a real perp. A second man comes out from
back, same ethnicity as the guy behind the counter, another dark man with
burning eyes and a bony neck. This one is carrying a three-ring binder with
the Buy 'n' Fly logo. To find the manager of a franchise, don't strain to
read his title off the name tag, just look for the one with the binder.
The manager talks to the MetaCop, nods his head, pulls a keychain out
of a drawer.
Second MetaCop comes out, saunters to the car, suddenly whips open the
back door.
"Shut up," he says, "or next time I fire the loogie gun into your
mouth."
"Good thing you like The Clink," Y.T. says, "cause that is where you
will be tomorrow night, loogie-man."
"'Zat right?"
"Yeah. For credit card fraud."
"Me cop, you thrasher. How you gonna make a case at judge Bob's
judicial System?"
"I work for RadiKS. We protect our own."
"Not tonight you don't. Tonight you took a pizza from the scene of a
car wreck. Left the scene of an accident. RadiKS tell you to deliver that
pizza?"
Y.T. does not return fire. The MetaCop is right; RadiKS did not tell
her to deliver that pizza. She was doing it on a whim.
"So RadiKS ain't gonna help you. So shut up."
He jerks her arm, and the rest of her follows. The three-ringer gives
her a quick look, just long enough to make sure she is really a person, not
a sack of flour or an engine block or a tree stump. He leads them around to
the fetid rump of the Buy 'n' Fly, dark realm of wretched refuse in teeming
dumpsters. He unlocks the back door, a boring steel number with jimmy marks
around the edges like steel-clawed beasts have been trying to get in.
Y.T. is taken downstairs into the basement. First MetaCop follows,
carrying her plank, banging it heedlessly against doorways and stained
polycarbonate bottle racks.
"Better take her uniform - all that gear," the second MetaCop suggests,
not unlewdly.
The manager looks at Y.T., trying not to let his gaze travel sinfully
up and down her body. For thousands of years his people have survived on
alertness: waiting for Mongols to come galloping over the horizon, waiting
for repeat offenders to swing sawed-off shotguns across their check-out
counters. His alertness right now is palpable and painful; he's like a
goblet of hot nitroglycerin. The added question of sexual misconduct makes
it even worse. To him it's no joke.
Y.T. shrugs, trying to think of something unnerving and wacky. At this
point, she is supposed to squeal and shrink, wriggle and whine, swoon and
beg. They are threatening to take her clothes. How awful. But she does not
get upset because she knows that they are expecting her to.
A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable
law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box
in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that
little box.
Y.T. is not fond of boxes. Y.T. establishes her space on the pavement
by zagging mightily from lane to lane, establishing a precedent of scary
randomness. Keeps people on their toes, makes them react to her, instead of
the other way round. Now these men are trying to put her in a box, make her
follow rules.
She unzips her coverall all the way down below her navel. Underneath is
naught but billowing pale flesh.
The MetaCops raise their eyebrows.
The manager jumps back, raises both hands up to form a visual shield,
protecting himself from the damaging input. "No, no, no!" he says.
Y.T. shrugs, zips herself back up.
She's not afraid; she's wearing a dentata.
The manager handcuffs her to a cold-water pipe. Second MetaCop removes
his newer, more cybernetic brand of handcuffs, snaps them back onto his
harness. First MetaCop leans her plank against the wall, just out of her
reach. Manager kicks a rusty coffee can across the floor, caroming it
expertly off her skin, so she can go to the bathroom.
"Where you from?" Y.T. asks.
"Tadzhikistan," he says.
A jeek. She should have known.
"Well, shitcan soccer must be your national pastime."
The manager doesn't get it. The MetaCops emit rote, shallow laughter.
Papers are signed. Everyone else goes upstairs. On his way out the
door, the manager turns off the lights; in Tadzhikistan, electricity is
quite the big deal.
Y.T. is in The Clink.
The Black Sun is as big as a couple of football fields laid side by
side. The decor consists of black, square tabletops hovering in the air (it
would be pointless to draw in legs), evenly spaced across the floor in a
grid. Like pixels. The only exception is in the middle, where the bar's four
quadrants come together (4 = 2^2). This part is occupied by a circular bar
sixteen meters across. Everything is matte black, which makes it a lot
easier for the computer system to draw things in on top of it - no worries
about filling in a complicated background. And that way all attention can be
focused on the avatars, which is the way people like it.
It doesn't pay to have a nice avatar on the Street, where it's so
crowded and all the avatars merge and flow into one another. But The Black
Sun is a much classier piece of software. In The Black Sun, avatars are not
allowed to collide. Only so many people can be here at once, and they can't
walk through each other. Everything is solid and opaque and realistic. And
the clientele has a lot more class - no talking penises in here. The avatars
look like real people. For the most part, so do the daemons.
"Daemon" is an old piece of jargon from the UNIX operating system,
where it referred to a piece of low-level utility software, a fundamental
part of the operating system. In The Black Sun, a daemon is like an avatar,
but it does not represent a human being. It's a robot that lives in the
Metaverse. A piece of software, a kind of spirit that inhabits the machine,
usually with some particular role to carry out. The Black Sun has a number
of daemons that serve imaginary drinks to the patrons and run little errands
for people.
It even has bouncer daemons that get rid of undesirables - grab their
avatars and throw them out the door, applying certain basic principles of
avatar physics. Da5id has even enhanced the physics of The Black Sun to make
it a little cartoonish, so that particularly obnoxious people can be hit
over the head with giant mallets or crushed under plummeting safes before
they are ejected. This happens to people who are being disruptive, to anyone
who is pestering or taping a celebrity, and to anyone who seems contagious.
That is, if your personal computer is infected with viruses, and attempts to
spread them via The Black Sun, you had better keep one eye on the ceiling.
Hiro mumbles the word "Bigboard." This is the name of a piece of
software he wrote, a power tool for a CIC stringer. It digs into The Black
Sun's operating system, rifes it for information, and then throws up a flat
square map in front of his face, giving him a quick overview of who's here
and whom they're talking to. It's all unauthorized data that Hiro is not
supposed to have. But Hiro is not some bimbo actor coming here to network.
He is a hacker. If he wants some information, he steals it right out of the
guts of the system - gossip ex machina.
Bigboard shows him that Da5id is ensconced in his usual place, a table
in the Hacker Quadrant near the bar. The Movie Star Quadrant has the usual
scattering of Sovereigns and wannabes. The Rock Star Quadrant is very busy
tonight; Hiro can see that a Nipponese rap star named Sushi K has stopped in
for a visit. And there are a lot of record-industry types hanging around in
the Nipponese Quadrant - which looks like the other quadrants except that
it's quieter, the tables are closer to the floor, and it's full of bowing
and fluttering geisha daemons. Many of these people probably belong to Sushi
K's retinue of managers, flacks, and lawyers.
Hiro cuts across the Hacker Quadrant, headed for Da5id's table. He
recognizes many of the people in here, but as usual, he's surprised and
disturbed by the number he doesn't recognize - all those sharp, perceptive
twenty-one-year-old faces. Software development, like professional sports,
has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.
Looking up the aisle toward Da5id's table, he sees Da5id talking to a
black-and-white person. Despite her lack of color and shitty resolution,
Hiro recognizes her by the way she folds her arms when she's talking, the
way she tosses her hair when she's listening to Da5id. Hiro's avatar stops
moving and stares at her, adopting just the same facial expression with
which he used to stare at this woman years ago. In Reality, he reaches out
with one hand, picks up his beer, takes a pull on the bottle, and lets it
roll around in his mouth, a bundle of waves clashing inside a small space.
Her name is Juanita Marquez. Hiro has known her ever since they were
freshmen together at Berkeley, and they were in the same lab section in a
freshman physics class. The first time he saw her, he formed an impression
that did not change for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who
dressed like she was interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral
parlor. At the same time, she had a flamethrower tongue that she would turn
on people at the oddest times, usually in some grandiose, earth-scorching
retaliation for a slight or breach of etiquette that none of the other
freshmen had even perceived.
It wasn't until a number of years later, when they both wound up
working at Black Sun Systems, Inc., that he put the other half of the
equation together. At the time, both of them were working on avatars. He was
working on bodies, she was working on faces. She was the face department,
because nobody thought that faces were all that important - they were just
flesh-toned busts on top of the avatars. She was just in the process of
proving them all desperately wrong. But at this phase, the all-male society
of bitheads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems said that
the face problem was trivial and superficial. It was, of course, nothing
more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who
sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.
That first impression, back at the age of seventeen, was nothing more
than that - the gut reaction of a postadolescent Army brat who had been on
his own for about three weeks. His mind was good, but he only understood one
or two things in the whole world - samurai movies and the Macintosh - and he
understood them far, far too well. It was a worldview with no room for
someone like Juanita.
There is a certain kind of small town that grows like a boil on the ass
of every Army base in the world. In a long series of such places, Hiro
Protagonist was speedraised like a mutant hothouse orchid flourishing under
the glow of a thousand Buy 'n' Fly security spotlights. Hiro's father had
joined the army in 1944, at the age of sixteen, and spent a year in the
Pacific, most of it as a prisoner of war. Hiro was born when his father was
in his late middle age. By that time, Dad could long since have quit and
taken his pension, but he wouldn't have known what to do with himself
outside of the service, and so he stayed in until they finally kicked him
out in the late eighties. By the time Hiro made it out to Berkeley, he had
lived in Wrightstown, New Jersey; Tacoma, Washington; Fayetteville, North
Carolina; Hinesville, Georgia; Killeen, Texas; Grafenwehr, Germany; Seoul,
Korea; Ogden, Kansas; and Watertown, New York. All of these places were
basically the same, with the same franchise ghettos, the same strip joints,
and even the same people - he kept running into school chums he'd known
years before, other Army brats who happened to wind up at the same base at
the same time.
Their skins were different colors but they all belonged to the same
ethnic group: Military. Black kids didn't talk like black kids. Asian kids
didn't bust their asses to excel in school. White kids, by and large, didn't
have any problem getting along with the black and Asian kids. And girls knew
their place. They all had the same moms with the same generous buttocks in
stretchy slacks and the same frosted-and-curling-ironed hairdos, and they
were all basically sweet and endearing and conforming and, if they happened
to be smart, they went out of their way to hide it.
So the first time Hiro saw Juanita, or any other girl like her, his
perspectives were bent all out of shape. She had long, glossy black hair
that had never been subjected to any chemical process other than regular
shampooing. She didn't wear blue stuff on her eyelids. Her clothing was
dark, tailored, restrained. And she didn't take shit from anyone, not even
her professors, which seemed shrewish and threatening to him at the time.
When he saw her again after an absence of several years -a period spent
mostly in Japan, working among real grown-ups from a higher social class
than he was used to, people of substance who wore real clothes and did real
things with their lives - he was startled to realize that Juanita was an
elegant, stylish knockout. He thought at first that she had undergone some
kind of radical changes since their first year in college.
But then he went back to visit his father in one of those Army towns
and ran into the high school prom queen. She had grown up shockingly fast
into an overweight dame with loud hair and loud clothes who speedread the
tabloids at the check-out line in the commissary because she didn't have the
spare money to buy them, who popped her gum and had two kids that she didn't
have the energy or the foresight to discipline.
Seeing this woman at the commissary, he finally went through a belated,
dim-witted epiphany, not a brilliant light shining down from heaven, more
like the brown glimmer of a half-dead flashlight from the top of a
stepladder: Juanita hadn't really changed much at all since those days, just
grown into herself. It was he who had changed. Radically.
He came into her office once, strictly on a business matter. Until this
point, they had seen each other around the office a lot but acted like they
had never met before. But when he came into her office that day, she told
him to close the door behind him, and she blacked out the screen on her
computer and started twiddling a pencil between her hands and eyed him like
a plate of day-old sushi. Behind her on the wall was an amateurish painting
of an old lady, set in an ornate antique frame. It was the only decoration
in Juanita's office. All the other hackers had color photographs of the
space shuttle lifting off, or posters of the starship Enterprise.
"It's my late grandmother, may God have mercy on her soul," she said,
watching him look at the painting. "My role model."
"Why? Was she a programmer?"
She just looked at him over the rotating pencil like, how slow can a
mammal be and still have respiratory functions? But instead of lowering the
boom on him, she just gave a simple answer: "No." Then she gave a more
complicated answer. "When I was fifteen years old, I missed a period. My
boyfriend and I were using a diaphragm, but I knew it was fallible. I was
good at math, I had the failure rate memorized, burnt into my subconscious.
Or maybe it was my conscious, I can never keep them straight. Anyway, I was
terrified. Our family dog started treating me differently - supposedly, they
can smell a pregnant woman. Or a pregnant bitch, for that matter."
By this point, Hiro's face was frozen in a wary, astonished position
that Juanita later made extensive use of in her work. Because, as she was
talking to him, she was watching, his face, analyzing the way the little
muscles in his forehead pulled his brows up and made his eyes change shape.
"My mother was clueless. My boyfriend was worse than clueless - in
fact, I ditched him on the spot, because it made me realize what an alien
the guy was - like many members of your species." By this, she was referring
to males.
"Anyway, my grandmother came to visit," she continued, glancing back
over her shoulder at the painting. "I avoided her until we all sat down for
dinner. And then she figured out the whole situation in, maybe, ten minutes,
just by watching my face across the dinner table. I didn't say more than ten
words - 'Pass the tortillas.' I don't know how my face conveyed that
information, or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind
enabled her to accomplish this incredible feat. To condense fact from the
vapor of nuance."
Condense fact from the vapor of nuance. Hiro has never forgotten the
sound of her speaking those words, the feeling that came over him as he
realized for the first time how smart Juanita was.
She continued. "I didn't even really appreciate all of this until about
ten years later, as. a grad student, trying to build a user interface that
would convey a lot of data very quickly, for one of these baby-killer
grants." This was her term for anything related to the Defense Department.
"I was coming up with all kinds of elaborate technical fixes like trying to
implant electrodes directly into the brain. Then I remembered my grandmother
and realized, my God, the human mind can absorb and process an incredible
amount of information - if it comes in the right format. The right
interface. If you put the right face on it. Want some coffee?"
Then he had an alarming thought: What had he been like back in college?
How much of an asshole had he been? Had he left Juanita with a bad
impression?
Another young man would have worried about it in silence, but Hiro has
never been restrained by thinking about things too hard, and so he asked her
out for dinner and, after having a couple of drinks (she drank club sodas),
just popped the question: Do you think I'm an asshole?
She laughed. He smiled, believing that he had come up with a good,
endearing, flirtatious bit of patter.
He did not realize until a couple of years later that this question
was, in effect, the cornerstone of their relationship. Did Juanita think
that Hiro was an asshole? He always had some reason to think that the answer
was yes, but nine times out of ten she insisted the answer was no. It made
for some great arguments and some great sex, some dramatic failings out and
some passionate reconciliations, but in the end the wildness was just too
much for them - they were exhausted by work - and they backed away from each
other. He was emotionally worn out from wondering what she really thought of
him, and confused by the fact that he cared so deeply about her opinion. And
she, maybe, was beginning to think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own
mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't.
Hiro would have chalked it all up to class differences, except that her
parents lived in a house in Mexicali with a dirt floor, and his father made
more money than many college professors. But the class idea still held sway
in his mind, because class is more than income - it has to do with knowing
where you stand in a web of social relationships. Juanita and her folks knew
where they stood with a certitude that bordered on dementia. Hiro never
knew. His father was a sergeant major, his mother was a Korean woman whose
people had been mine slaves in Nippon, and Hiro didn't know whether he was
black or Asian or just plain Army, whether he was rich or poor, educated or
ignorant, talented or lucky. He didn't even have a part of the country to
call home until he moved to California, which is about as specific as saying
that you live in the Northern Hemisphere. In the end, it was probably his
general disorientation that did them in.
After the breakup, Hiro went out with a long succession of essentially
bimbos who (unlike Juanita) were impressed that he worked for a high-tech
Silicon Valley firm. More recently, he has had to go searching for women who
are even easier to impress.
Juanita went celibate for a while and then started going out with Da5id
and eventually got married to him. Da5id had no doubts whatsoever about his
standing in the world. His folks were Russian Jews from Brooklyn and had
lived in the same brownstone for seventy years after coming from a village
in Latvia where they had lived for five hundred years; with a Torah on his
lap, he could trace his bloodlines all the way back to Adam and Eve. He was
an only child who had always been first in his class in everything, and when
he got his master's in computer science from Stanford, he went out and
started his own company with about as much fuss as Hiro's dad used to
exhibit in renting out a new P.O. box when they moved. Then he got rich, and
now he runs The Black Sun. Da5id has always been certain of everything.
Even when he's totally wrong. Which is why Hiro quit his job at Black
Sun Systems, despite the promise of future riches, and why Juanita divorced
Da5id two years after she married him.
Hiro did not attend Juanita and Da5id's wedding; he was languishing in
jail, into which he had been thrown a few hours before the rehearsal. He had
been found in Golden Gate Park, lovesick, wearing nothing but a thong,
taking long pulls from a jumbo bottle of Courvoisier and practicing kendo
attacks with a genuine samurai sword, floating across the grass on
powerfully muscled thighs to slice other picnickers' hurtling Frisbees and
baseballs in twain. Catching a long fly ball with the edge of your blade,
neatly halving it like a grapefruit, is not an insignificant feat. The only
drawback is that the owners of the baseball may misinterpret your intentions
and summon the police.
He got out of it by paying for all the baseballs and Frisbees, but
since that episode, he has never even bothered to ask Juanita whether or not
she thinks he's an asshole. Even Hiro knows the answer now.
Since then, they've gone very different ways. In the early years of The
Black Sun project, the only way the hackers ever got paid was by issuing
stock to themselves. Hiro tended to sell his off almost as quickly as he got
it. Juanita didn't. Now she's rich, and he isn't. It would be easy to say
that Hiro is a stupid investor and Juanita a smart one, but the facts are a
little more complicated than that: Juanita put her eggs in one basket,
keeping all her money in Black Sun stock; as it turns out, she made a lot of
money that way, but she could have gone broke, too. And Hiro didn't have a
lot of choice in some ways. When his father got sick, the Army and the V.A.
took care of most of his medical bills, but they ran into a lot of expenses
anyway, and Hiro's mother - who could barely speak English - wasn't equipped
to make or handle money on her own. When Hiro's father died, he cashed in
all of his Black Sun stock to put Mom in a nice community in Korea. She
loves it there. Goes golfing every day. He could have kept his money in The
Black Sun and made ten million dollars about a year later when it went
public, but his mother would have been a street person. So when his mother
visits him in the Metaverse, looking tan and happy in her golfing duds, Hiro
views that as his personal fortune. It won't pay the rent, but that's okay -
when you live in a shithole, there's always the Metaverse, and in the
Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince.
His tongue is stinging; he realizes that, back in Reality, he has
forgotten to swallow his beer.
It's ironic that Juanita has come into this place in a low-tech,
black-and-white avatar. She was the one who figured out a way to make
avatars show something close to real emotion. That is a fact Hiro has never
forgotten, because she did most of her work when they were together, and
whenever an avatar looks surprised or angry or passionate in the Metaverse,
he sees an echo of himself or Juanita - the Adam and Eve of the Metaverse.
Makes it hard to forget.
Shortly after Juanita and Da5id got divorced, The Black Sun really took
off. And once they got done counting their money, marketing the spinoffs,
soaking up the adulation of others in the hacker community, they all came to
the realization that what made this place a success was not the
collision-avoidance algorithms or the bouncer daemons or any of that other
stuff. It was Juanita's faces.
Just ask the businessmen in the Nipponese Quadrant. They come here to
talk turkey with suits from around the world, and they consider it just as
good as a face-to-face. They more or less ignore what is being saida lot
gets lost in translation, after all. They pay attention to the facial
expressions and body language of the people they are talking to. And that's
how they know what's going on inside a person's head - by condensing fact
from the vapor of nuance.
Juanita refused to analyze this process, insisted that it was something
ineffable, something you couldn't explain with words. A radical,
rosary-toting Catholic, she has no problem with that kind of thing. But the
bitheads didn't like it. Said it was irrational mysticism. So she quit and
took a job with some Nipponese company. They don't have any problem with
irrational mysticism as long as it makes money.
But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore. Partly, she's pissed
at Da5id and the other hackers who never appreciated her work. But she has
also decided that the whole thing is bogus. That no matter how good it is,
the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants
no such distortion in her relationships.
Da5id notices Hiro, indicates with a flick of his eyes that this is not
a good time. Normally, such subtle gestures are lost in the system's noise,
but Da5id has a very good personal computer, and Juanita helped design his
avatar - so the message comes through like a shot fired into the ceiling.
Hiro turns away, saunters around the big circular bar in a slow orbit.
Most of the sixty-four bar stools are filled with lower-level Industry
people, getting together in twos and threes, doing what they do best: gossip
and intrigue.
"So I get together with the director for a story conference. He's got
this beach house - "
"Incredible?"
"Don't get me started."
"I heard. Debi was there for a party when Frank and Mitzi owned it."
"Anyway, there's this scene, early, where the main character wakes up
in a dumpster. The idea is to show how, you know, despondent he is - "
"That crazy energy - "
"Exactly."
"Fabulous."
"I like it. Well, he wants to replace it with a scene where the guy is
out in the desert with a bazooka, blowing up old cars in an abandoned
junkyard."
"You're kidding!"
"So we're sitting there on his fucking patio over the beach and he's
going, like, whoom! whoom! imitating this goddamn bazooka. He's thrilled by
the idea. I mean, this is a man who wants to put a bazooka in a movie. So I