Страница:
think I talked him out of it."
"Nice scene. But you're right. A bazooka doesn't do the same thing as a
dumpster."
Hiro pauses long enough to get this down, then keeps walking. He
mumbles "Bigboard" again, recalls the magic map, pinpoints his own location,
and then reads off the name of this nearby screenwriter. Later on, he can do
a search of industry publications to find out what script this guy is
working on, hence the name of this mystery director with a fetish for
bazookas. Since this whole conversation has come to him via his computer,
he's just taken an audio tape of the whole thing. Later, he can process it
to disguise the voices, then upload it to the Library, cross-referenced
under the director's name. A hundred struggling screenwriters will call this
conversation up, listen to it over and over until they've got it memorized,
paying Hiro for the privilege, and within a few weeks, bazooka scripts will
flood the director's office. Whoom!
The Rock Star Quadrant is almost too bright to look at. Rock star
avatars have the hairdos that rock stars can only wear in their dreams. Hiro
scans it briefly to see if any of his friends are in there, but it's mostly
parasites and has-beens. Most of the people Hiro knows are will-bes or
wannabes.
The Movie Star Quadrant is easier to look at. Actors love to come here
because in The Black Sun, they always look as good as they do in the movies.
And unlike a bar or club in Reality, they can get into this place without
physically having to leave their mansion, hotel suite, ski lodge, private
airline cabin, or whatever. They can strut their stuff and visit with their
friends without any exposure to kidnappers, paparazzi, script-flingers,
assassins, ex-spouses, autograph brokers, process servers, psycho fans,
marriage proposals, or gossip columnists.
He gets up off the bar stool and resumes his slow orbit, scanning the
Nipponese Quadrant. It's a lot of guys in suits, as usual. Some of them are
talking to gringos from the Industry. And a large part of the quadrant, in
the back corner, has been screened off by a temporary partition.
Bigboard again. Hiro figures out which tables are behind the partition,
starts reading off the names. The only one he recognizes immediately is an
American: L. Bob Rife, the cable-television monopolist. A very big name to
the Industry, though he's rarely seen. He seems to be meeting with a whole
raft of big Nipponese honchos. Hiro has his computer memorize their names so
that, later, he can check them against the CIC database and find out who
they are. It has the look of a big and important meeting.
"Secret Agent Hiro! How are you doing?"
Hiro turns around. Juanita is right behind him, standing out in her
black-and-white avatar, looking good anyway. "How are you?" she asks.
"Fine. How are you?"
"Great. I hope you don't mind talking to me in this ugly fax-of-life
avatar."
"Juanita, I would rather look at a fax of you than most other women in
the flesh."
"Thanks, you sly bastard. It's been a long time since we've talked!"
she observes, as though there's something remarkable about this.
Something's going on.
"I hope you're not going to mess around with Snow Crash," she says.
"Da5id won't listen to me."
"What am I, a model of self-restraint? I'm exactly the kind of guy who
would mess around with it."
"I know you better than that. You're impulsive. But you're very clever.
You have those sword-fighting reflexes."
"What does that have to do with drug abuse?"
"It means you can see bad things coming and deflect them. It's an
instinct, not a learned thing. As soon as you turned around and saw me, that
look came over your face, like, what's going on? What the hell is Juanita up
to?"
"I didn't think you talked to people in the Metaverse."
"I do if I want to get through to someone in a hurry," she says. "And
I'll always talk to you."
"Why me?"
"You know. Because of us. Remember? Because of our relationship - when
I was writing this thing - you and I are the only two people who can ever
have an honest conversation in the Metaverse."
"You're just the same mystical crank you always were," he says, smiling
so as to make this a charming statement.
"You can't imagine how mystical and cranky I am now, Hiro."
"How mystical and cranky are you?"
She eyes him warily. Exactly the same way she did when he came into her
office years ago.
It comes into his mind to wonder why she is always so alert in his
presence. In college, he used to think that she was afraid of his intellect,
but he's known for years that this is the last of her worries. At Black Sun
Systems, he figured that it was just typical female guardedness - Juanita
was afraid he was trying to get her into the sack. But this, too, is pretty
much out of the question.
At this late date in his romantic career, he is just canny enough to
come up with a new theory: She's being careful because she likes him. She
likes him in spite of herself. He is exactly the kind of tempting but
utterly wrong romantic choice that a smart girl like Juanita must learn to
avoid.
That's definitely it. There's something to be said for getting older.
By way of answering his question, she says, "I have an associate I'd
like you to meet. A gentleman and a scholar named Lagos. He's a fascinating
guy to talk to."
"Is he your boyfriend?"
She thinks this one over rather than lashing out instantaneously. "My
behavior at The Black Sun to the contrary, I don't fuck every male I work
with. And even if I did, Lagos is out of the question."
"Not your type?"
"Not by a long shot."
"What is your type, anyway?"
"Old, rich, unimaginative blonds with steady careers."
This one almost slips by him. Then he catches it. "Well, I could dye my
hair. And I'll get old eventually."
She actually laughs. It's a tension-releasing kind of outburst.
"Believe me, Hiro, I'm the last person you want to be involved with at this
point."
"Is this part of your church thing?" he asks. Juanita has been using
her excess money to start her own branch of the Catholic church - she
considers herself a missionary to the intelligent atheists of the world.
"Don't be condescending," she says. "That's exactly the attitude I'm
fighting. Religion is not for simpletons."
"Sorry. This is unfair, you know - you can read every expression on my
face, and I'm looking at you through a fucking blizzard."
"It's definitely related to religion," she says. "But this is so
complex, and your background in that area is so deficient, I don't know
where to begin."
"Hey, I went to church every week in high school. I sang in the choir."
"I know. That's exactly the problem. Ninety-nine percent of everything
that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with
the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and
they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why
atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds."
"So none of that stuff I learned in church has anything to do with what
you're talking about?"
Juanita thinks for a while, eyeing him. Then she pulls a hypercard out
of her pocket. "Here. Take this."
As Hiro pulls it from her hand, the hypercard changes from a jittery
two-dimensional figment into a realistic, cream-colored, finely textured
piece of stationery. Printed across its face in glossy black ink is a pair
of words
(I n f o c a l y p s e)
The world freezes and grows dim for a second. The Black Sun loses its
smooth animation and begins to move in fuzzy stop-action. Clearly, his
computer has just taken a major hit; all of its circuits are busy processing
a huge bolus of data - the contents of the hypercard - and don't have time
to redraw the image of The Black Sun in its full, breathtaking fidelity.
"Holy shit!" he says, when The Black Sun pops back into full animation
again. "What the hell is in this card? You must have half of the Library in
here!"
"And a librarian to boot," Juanita says, "to help you sort through it.
And lots of videotapes of L. Bob Rife - which accounts for most of the
bytes."
"Well, I'll try to have a look at it," he says dubiously.
"Do. Unlike Da5id, you're just smart enough to benefit from this. And
in the meantime, stay away from Raven. And stay away from Snow Crash. Okay?"
"Who's Raven?" he asks. But Juanita is already on her way out the door.
The fancy avatars all turn around to watch her as she goes past them; the
movie stars give her drop-dead looks, and the hackers purse their lips and
stare reverently.
Hiro orbits back around to the Hacker Quadrant. Da5id's shuffling
hypercards around on his table - business stats on The Black Sun, film and
video clips, hunks of software, scrawled telephone numbers.
"There's a little blip in the operating system that hits me right in
the gut every time you come in the door," Da5id says. "I always have this
premonition that The Black Sun is headed for a crash."
"Must be Bigboard," Hiro says. "It has one routine that patches some of
the traps in low memory, for a moment."
"Ah, that's it. Please, please throw that thing away," Da5id says.
"What, Bigboard?"
"Yeah. It was totally rad at one point, but now it's like trying to
work on a fusion reactor with a stone ax."
"Thanks."
"I'll give you all the headers you need if you want to update it to
something a little less dangerous," Da5id says. "I wasn't impugning your
abilities. I'm just saying you need to keep up with the times."
"It's fucking hard," Hiro says. "There's no place for a freelance
hacker anymore. You have to have a big corporation behind you."
"I'm aware of that. And I'm aware that you can't stand to work for a
big corporation. That's why I'm saying, I'll give you the stuff you need.
You're always a part of The Black Sun to me, Hiro, even since we parted
ways."
It is classic Da5id. He's talking with his heart again, bypassing his
head. If Da5id weren't a hacker, Hiro would despair of his ever having
enough brains to do anything.
"Let's talk about something else," Hiro says. "Was I just
hallucinating, or are you and Juanita on speaking terms again?"
Da5id gives him an indulgent smile. He has been very kind to Hiro ever
since The Conversation, several years back. It was a conversation that
started out as a friendly chat over beer and oysters between a couple of
longtime comrades-in-arms. It was not until three-quarters of the way
through The Conversation that it dawned on Hiro that he was, in fact, being
fired, at this very moment. Since The Conversation, Da5id has been known to
feed Hiro useful bits of intel and gossip from time to time.
"Fishing for something useful?" Da5id asks knowingly. Like many
bitheads, Da5id is utterly guileless, but at times like this, he thinks he's
the reincarnation of Machiavelli.
"I got news for you, man," Hiro says. "Most of the stuff you give me, I
never put into the Library."
"Why not? Hell, I give you all my best gossip. I thought you were
making money off that stuff."
"I just can't stand it," Hiro says, "taking parts of my private
conversations and whoring them out. Why do you think I'm broke?"
There's another thing he doesn't mention, which is that he's always
considered himself to be Da5id's equal, and he can't stand the idea of
feeding off Da5id's little crumbs and tidbits, like a dog curled up under
his table.
"I was glad to see Juanita come in here - even as a black-and-white,"
Da5id says. "For her not to use The Black Sun - it's like Alexander Graham
Bell refusing to use the telephone."
"Why did she come in tonight?"
"Something's bugging her," Da5id says. "She wanted to know if I'd seen
certain people on the Street."
"Anyone in particular?"
"She's worried about a really large guy with long black hair," Da5id
says. "Peddling something called - get this - Snow Crash."
"Has she tried the Library?"
"Yeah. I assume so, anyway."
"Have you seen this guy?"
"Oh, yeah. It's not hard to find him," Da5id says. "He's right outside
the door. I got this from him."
Da5id scans the table, picks up one of the hypercards, and shows it to
Hiro.
tear this card in half to
release your free sample
"Da5id," Hiro says, "I can't believe you took a hypercard from a
black-and-white person."
Da5id laughs. "This is not the old days, my friend. I've got so much
antiviral medicine in my system that nothing could get through. I get so
much contaminated shit from all the hackers who come through here, it's like
working in a plague ward. So I'm not afraid of whatever's in this
hypercard."
"Well, in that case, I'm curious," Hiro says.
"Yeah. Me, too." Da5id laughs.
"It's probably something very disappointing."
"Probably an animercial," Da5id agrees. "Think I should do it?"
"Yeah. Go for it. It's not every day you get to try out a new drug,"
Hiro says.
"Well, you can try one every day if you want to," Da5id says, "but it's
not every day you find one that can't hurt you." He picks up the hypercard
and tears it in half.
For a second, nothing happens. "I'm waiting," Da5id says.
An avatar materializes on the table in front of Da5id, starting out
ghostly and transparent, gradually becoming solid and three-dimensional.
It's a really trite effect; Hiro and Da5id are already laughing.
The avatar is a stark naked Brandy. It doesn't even look like the
standard Brandy; this looks like one of the cheap Taiwanese Brandy
knockoffs. Clearly, it's just a daemon. She is holding a pair of tubes in
her hands, about the size of paper-towel rolls.
Da5id is leaning back in his chair, enjoying this. There is something
hilariously tawdry about the entire scene.
The Brandy leans forward, beckoning Da5id toward her. Da5id leans into
her face, grinning broadly. She puts her crude, ruby-red lips up by his ear
and mumbles something that Hiro can't hear.
When she leans back away from Da5id, his face has changed. He looks
dazed and expressionless. Maybe Da5id really looks that way; maybe Snow
Crash has messed up his avatar somehow so that it's no longer tracking
Da5id's true facial expressions. But he's staring straight ahead, eyes
frozen in their sockets.
The Brandy holds the pair of tubes up in front of Da5id's immobilized
face and spreads them apart. It's actually a scroll. She's unrolling it
right in front of Da5id's face, spreading it apart like a flat
two-dimensional screen in front of his eyes. Da5id's paralyzed face has
taken on a bluish tinge as it reflects light coming out of the scroll.
Hiro walks around the table to look. He gets a brief glimpse of the
scroll before the Brandy snaps it shut again. It is a living wall of light,
like a flexible, flatscreened television set, and it's not showing anything
at all. just static. White noise. Snow.
Then she's gone, leaving no trace behind. Desultory, sarcastic applause
sounds from a few tables in the Hacker Quadrant.
Da5id's back to normal, wearing a grin that's part snide and part
embarrassed.
"What was it?" Hiro says. "I just glimpsed some snow at the very end."
"You saw the whole thing," Da5id says. "A fixed pattern of
black-and-white pixels, fairly high-resolution. Just a few hundred thousand
ones and zeroes for me to look at."
"So in other words, someone just exposed your optic nerve to, what,
maybe a hundred thousand bytes of information," Hiro says.
"Noise, is more like it."
"Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code," Hiro
says.
"Why would anyone show me information in binary code? I'm not a
computer. I can't read a bitmap."
"Relax, Da5id, I'm just shitting you," Hiro says.
"You know what it was? You know how hackers are always trying to show
me samples of their work?"
"Yeah."
"Some hacker came up with this scheme to show me his stuff. And
everything worked fine until the moment the Brandy opened the scroll - but
his code was buggy, and it snow-crashed at the wrong moment, so instead of
seeing his output, all I saw was snow."
"Then why did he call the thing Snow Crash?"
"Gallows humor. He knew it was buggy."
"What did the Brandy whisper in your ear?"
"Some language I didn't recognize," Da5id says. "Just a bunch of
babble."
Babble. Babel.
"Afterward, you looked sort of stunned."
Da5id looks resentful. "I wasn't stunned. I just found the whole
experience so weird, I guess I just was taken aback for a second."
Hiro is giving him an extremely dubious look. Da5id notices it and
stands up. "Want to go see what your competitors in Nippon are up to?"
"What competitors?"
"You used to design avatars for rock stars, right?"
"Still do."
"Well, Sushi K is here tonight."
"Oh, yeah. The hairdo the size of a galaxy."
"You can see the rays from here," Da5id says, waving toward the next
quadrant, "but I want to see the whole getup."
It does look as though the sun is rising somewhere in the middle of the
Rock Star Quadrant. Above the heads of the milling avatars, Hiro can see a
fan of orange beams radiating outward from some point in the middle of the
crowd. It keeps moving, turning around, shaking from side to side, and the
whole universe seems to move with it. On the Street, the full radiance of
Sushi K's Rising Sun hairdo is suppressed by the height and width
regulations. But Da5id allows free expression inside The Black Sun, so the
orange rays extend all the way to the property lines.
"I wonder if anyone's told him yet that Americans won't buy rap music
from a Japanese person," Hiro says as they stroll over there.
"Maybe you should tell him," Da5id suggests, "charge him for the
service. He's in L.A. right now, you know."
"Probably staying in a hotel full of bootlickers telling him what a big
star he's going to be. He needs to be exposed to some actual biomass."
They inject themselves into a stream of traffic, winding a narrow
channel through a rift in the crowd.
"Biomass?" Da5id says.
"A body of living stuff. It's an ecology term. If you take an acre of
rain forest or a cubic mile of ocean or a square block of Compton and strain
out all the unliving stuff - dirt and water - you get the biomass."
Da5id, ever the bithead, says, "I do not understand." His voice sounds
funny; there's a lot of white noise creeping into his audio.
"Industry expression," Hiro says. "The Industry feeds off the human
biomass of America. Like a whale straining krill from the sea."
Hiro wedges himself between a couple of Nipponese businessmen. One is
wearing a uniform blue, but the other is a neo-traditional, wearing a dark
kimono. And, like Hiro, he's wearing two swords - the long katana on his
left hip and the one-handed wakizashi stuck diagonally in his waistband. He
and Hiro glance cursorily at each other's armaments. Then Hiro looks away
and pretends not to notice, while the neo-traditional is freezing solid,
except for the corners of his mouth which are curling downward. Hiro has
seen this kind of thing before. He knows he's about to get into a fight.
People are moving out of the way; something big and inexorable is
plunging through the crowd, shoving avatars this way and that. Only one
thing has the ability to shove people around like that inside The Black Sun,
and that's a bouncer daemon.
As they get closer, Hiro sees that it's a whole flying wedge of them,
gorillas in tuxedos. Real gorillas. And they seem to be headed toward Hiro.
He tries to back away, but he quickly runs into something. Looks like
Bigboard finally got him in trouble; he's on his way out of the bar.
"Da5id," Hiro says. "Call them off, man, I'll stop using it."
All of the people in his vicinity are staring over Hiro's shoulder,
their faces illuminated by a stew of brilliant colored lights.
Hiro turns around to look at Da5id. But Da5id's not there anymore.
Instead of Da5id, there is just a jittering cloud of bad digital karma.
It's so bright and fast and meaningless that it hurts to look at. It flashes
back and forth from color to black and white, and when it's in color, it
rolls wildly around the color wheel as though being strafed with highpowered
disco lights. And it's not staying within it's own body space; hair-thin
pixel lines keep shooting off to one side, passing all the way across The
Black Sun and out through the wall. It is not so much an organized body as
it is a centrifugal cloud of lines and polygons whose center cannot hold,
throwing bright bits of body shrapnel all over the room, interfering with
people's avatars, flickering and disappearing.
The gorillas don't mind. They shove their long furry fingers into the
midst of the disintegrating cloud and latch onto it somehow and carry it
past Hiro, toward the exit. Hiro looks down as it goes past him and sees
what looks very much like Da5id's face as viewed through a pile of shattered
glass. It's just a momentary glimpse. Then the avatar is gone, expertly
drop-kicked out the front door, soaring out over the Street in a long flat
arc that takes it over the horizon. Hiro looks up the aisle to see Da5id's
table, empty, surrounded by stunned hackers. Some of them are shocked, some
are trying to stifle grins.
Da5id Meier, supreme hacker overload, founding father of the Metaverse
protocol, creator and proprietor of the world-famous Black Sun, has just
suffered a system crash. He's been thrown out of his own bar by his own
daemons.
About the second or third thing they learned how to do when studying to
become Kouriers was how to shiv open a pair of handcuffs. Handcuffs are not
intended as longterm restraint devices, millions of Clink franchisees to the
contrary. And the longtime status of skateboarders as an oppressed ethnic
group means that by now all of them are escape artists of some degree.
First things first. Y.T. has many a thing hanging off her uniform. The
uniform has a hundred pockets, big flat pockets for deliveries and eensy
narrow pockets for gear, pockets sewn into sleeves, thighs, shins. The
equipment stuck into these multifarious pockets tends to be small, tricky,
lightweight: pens, markers, penlights, penknives, lock picks, bar-code
scanners, flares, screwdrivers, Liquid Knuckles, bundy stunners, and
lightsticks. A calculator is stuck upside-down to her right thigh, doubling
as a taxi meter and a stopwatch.
On the other thigh is a personal phone. As the manager is locking the
door upstairs, it begins to ring. Y.T. unhooks it with her free hand. It is
her mother.
"Hi, Mom. Fine, how are you? I'm at Tracy's house. Yeah, we went to the
Metaverse. We were just fooling around at this arcade on the Street. Pretty
bumpin'. Yes, I used a nice avatar. Nah, Tracy's mom said she'd give me a
ride home later. But we might stop off at the joyride on Victory for a
while, okay? Okay, well, sleep tight, Mom. I will. I love you, too. See you
later."
She punches the flash button, killing the chat with Mom and giving her
a fresh dial tone in the space of about half a second. "Roadkill," she says.
The telephone remembers and dials Roadkill's number.
Roaring sounds. This is the sound of air peeling over the microphone of
Roadkill's personal phone at some terrifying velocity. Also the competing
whooshes of many vehicles' tires on pavement, broken by chuckhole
percussion; sounds like the crumbling Ventura.
"Yo, Y.T.," Roadkill says, "'sup?"
"'Sup with you?"
"Surfing the Turf. 'Sup with you?"
"Maxing The Clink."
"Whoa! Who popped you?"
"MetaCops. Affixed me to the gate of White Columns with a loogie gun."
"Whoa, how very! When you leaving?"
"Soon. Can you swing by and give me a hand?."
"What do you mean?"
Men. "You know, give me a hand. You're my boyfriend," she says,
speaking very simply and plainly. "If I get popped, you're supposed to come
around and help bust me out." Isn't everyone supposed to know this stuff?
Don't parents teach their kids anything anymore?
"Well, uh, where are you?"
"Buy 'n' Fly number 501,762."
"I'm on my way to Bernie with a super-ultra."
As in San Bernardino. As in super-ultra-high-priority delivery. As in,
you're out of luck.
"Okay, thanks for nothing."
"Sorry."
"Surfing safety," Y.T. says, in the traditional sarcastic sign off.
"Keep breathing," Roadkill says. The roaring noise snaps off.
What a jerk. Next date, he's really going to have to grovel. But in the
meantime, there's one other person who owes her one. The only problem is
that he might be a spaz. But it's worth a try.
"Hello?" he says into his personal phone. He's breathing hard and a
couple of sirens are dueling in the background.
"Hiro Protagonist?"
"Yeah, who's this?"
"Y.T. Where are you?"
"In the parking lot of a Safeway on Oahu," he says. And he's telling
the truth; in the background she can hear the shopping carts performing
their clashy, anal copulations.
"I'm kind of busy now, Whitey - but what can I do for you?"
"It's Y.T.," she says, "and you can help bust me out of The Clink." She
gives him the details.
"How long ago did he put you there?"
"Ten minutes."
"Okay, the three-ring binder for Clink franchises states that the
manager is supposed to check on the detainee half an hour after admission."
"How do you know this stuff?" she says accusingly.
"Use your imagination. As soon as the manager pulls his half-hour
check, wait for another five minutes, and then make your move. I'll try to
give you a hand. Okay?"
"Got it."
At half an hour on the dot, she hears the back door being unlocked. The
lights come on. Her Knight Visions save her from wracking eyeball pains. The
manager thunks down a couple of steps, glares at her, glares at her for
rather a long time. The manager, clearly, is tempted. That momentary glimpse
of flesh has been ricocheting around in his brain for half an hour. He is
wracking his mind with vast cosmological dilemmas. Y.T. hopes that he does
not try anything, because the dentata's effects can be unpredictable.
"Make up your fucking mind," she says.
It works. This fresh burst of culture shock rattles the jeek out of his
ethical conundrum. He gives Y.T. a disapproving glower - she, after all,
forced him to be attracted to her, forced him to get horny, made his head
swim - she didn't have to get arrested, did she? - and so on top of
everything else he's angry with her. As if he has a right to be.
This is the gender that invented the polio vaccine?
He turns, goes back up the steps, kills the light, locks the door.
She notes the time, sets her alarm watch for five minutes from now -
the only North American who actually knows how to set the alarm on her
digital wristwatch - pulls her shiv kit from one of the narrow pockets on
her sleeve. She also hauls out a lightstick and snaps it so she can see
'sup. She finds one piece of narrow, flat spring steel, slides it up into
the manacle's innards, depresses the spring-loaded pawl. The cuff, formerly
a one-way ratchet that could only get tighter, springs loose from the
cold-water pipe.
She could take it off her wrist, but she has decided she likes the look
of it. She cuffs the loose manacle onto her wrist, right next to the other
one, forming a double bracelet. The kind of thing her mom used to do, back
when she was a punk.
The steel door is locked, but Buy 'n' Fly safety regs mandate an
emergency exit from the basement in case of fire. Here, it's a basement
window with mondo bars and a big red multilingual fire alarm bolted onto it.
The red looks black in the green glow of the lightstick. She reads the
instructions that are in English, runs through it once or twice in her mind,
then waits for the alarm to go off. She whiles away the time by reading the
instructions in all the other languages, wondering which is which. It all
looks like Taxilinga to Y.T.
The window is almost too grungy to see through, but she sees something
black walking past it. Hiro.
About ten seconds later, her wristwatch goes off. She punches the
emergency exit. The bell rings. The bars are trickier than she thought -
good thing it's not a real fire - but eventually she gets them open. She
throws her plank outside onto the parking lot, drags her body through just
as she hears the rear door being unlocked. By the time the three-ringer has
found that all-important light switch, she is banking a sharp turn into the
front lot - which has turned into a jeek festival!
Every jeek in Southern Cal is here, it seems, driving their giant,
wrecked taxicabs with alien livestock in the back seat, reeking of incense
and sloshing neon-hued Airwicks! They have set up a giant eight-tubed hookah
on the trunk of one of the cabs and are slurping up great mountain-man
lungfuls of choking smoke.
And they're all staring at Hiro Protagonist, who is just staring back
at them. Everyone in the parking lot looks completely astounded.
He must have made his approach from the rear - didn't realize that the
front lot was full of jeeks. Whatever he was planning isn't going to work.
The plan is screwed.
The manager comes running around from the back of the Buy 'n' Fly,
sounding a bloodcurdling Taxilinga tocsin. He's got missile lock on Y.T.'s
ass.
But the jeeks around the hookah don't care about Y.T. They've got
missile lock on Hiro. They carefully hang the ornate silver nozzles on a
rack built into the neck of the mega-bong. Then they start moving toward
him, reaching into the folds of their robes, the inner pockets of their
windbreakers.
Y.T. is distracted by a sharp hissing noise. Her eyes glance back at
Hiro, and she sees that he has withdrawn a three-foot, curved sword from a
scabbard, which she did not notice before. He has dropped into a squat. The
blade of the sword glitters painfully under the killer security lights of
the Buy 'n' Fly.
How sweet!
It would be an understatement to say that the hookah boys are taken
aback. But they are not scared so much as they are confused. Almost
undoubtedly, most of them have guns. So why is this guy trying to bother
them with a sword?
She remembers that one of the multiple professions on Hiro's business
card is Greatest sword fighter in the world. Can he really take out a whole
clan of armed jeeks?
The manager's hand clenches her upper arm - like this is really going
to stop her. She reaches across her body with the other hand and lets him
have it with a brief squirt of Liquid Knuckles. He makes a muffled, distant
grunt, his head snaps back, he lets go of her arm and staggers back wildly
until he sprawls against another taxi, jamming the heels of both hands into
his eye sockets.
Wait a sec. There's nobody in that particular taxi. But she can see a
two-foot-long macrame keychain dangling from the ignition.
She tosses her plank through the window of the taxi, dives in after it
(she's small, opening the door is optional), climbs in behind the driver's
seat, sinking into a deep nest of wooden beads and air fresheners, grinds
the motor, and takes off. Backward. Headed for the rear parking lot. The car
was pointed outward, in taxicab style, ready for a quick getaway, which
would be fine if she were by herself - but there is Hiro to think of. The
radio is screaming, alive with hollered bursts of Taxilinga. She backs all
the way around behind the Buy 'n' Fly. The back lot is strangely quiet and
empty.
She shifts into drive and blasts back the way she came. The jeeks
haven't quite had time to react, were expecting her to come out the other
way. She screams it to a halt right next to Hiro, who has already had the
presence of mind to put his sword back in its scabbard. He dives in the
passenger-side window. Then she stops paying attention to him.. She's got
other stuff to look at, such as whether she's going to get broadsided as she
pulls out onto the road.
She doesn't get broadsided, though a car has to squeal around her. She
guns it out onto the highway. It responds as only an ancient taxicab will.
The only problem being that half a dozen other ancient taxicabs are now
following them.
Something is pressing against Y.T.'s left thigh. She looks down. It is
a remarkably huge revolver in a net bag hanging on the door panel.
She has to find someplace to pull into. If she could find a Nova
Sicilia franchulate, that would do it - the Mafia owes her one. Or a New
South Africa, which she hates. But the New South Africans hate jeeks even
more.
Scratch that; Hiro is black, or at least part black. Can't take him
into New South Africa. And because Y.T. is a Cauc, they can't go to
Metazania.
"Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong," Hiro says. "Half mile ahead on the
right."
"Nice thinking - but they won't let you in with your swords, will
they?"
"Yes," he says, "because I'm a citizen."
Then she sees it. The sign stands out because it is a rare one. Don't
see many of these. It is a green-and-blue sign, soothing and calm in a
glare-torn franchise ghetto. It says:
MR. LEE'S GREATER HONG KONG
Explosive noise from in back. Her head smacks into the whiplash
arrestor. Another taxi rear-ended them.
And she screams into the parking lot of Mr. Lee's doing seventy-five.
The security system doesn't even have time to rez her visa and drop the STD,
so it's Severe Tire Damage all the way, those bald radials are left behind
on the spikes. Sparking along on four naked rims, she shrieks to a stop on
the lawngrid, which doubles as carbon dioxide-eating turf and impervious
parking lot.
She and Hiro climb out of the car.
Hiro is grinning wildly, pinioned in the crossfire of a dozen red laser
beams scanning him from every direction at once. The Hong Kong robot
security system is checking him out. Her, too; she looks down to see the
lasers scribbling across her chest.
"Welcome to Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, Mr. Protagonist," the security
system says through a P.A. speaker. "And welcome to your guest, Ms. Y.T."
The other taxis have stopped in formation along the curb. Several of
them overshot the Hong Kong franchise and had to back up a block or so. A
barrage of doors thunking shut. Some of them don't bother, just leave the
engines running and the doors wide open. Three jeeks linger on the sidewalk,
eyeing the tire shreds impaled on spikes: long streaks of neoprene sprouting
steel and fiberglass hairs, like ruined toupees. One of them has a revolver
in his hand, pointed straight down at the sidewalk.
Four more jeeks run up to join them. Y.T. counts two more revolvers and
a pump shotgun. Any more of these guys and they'll be able to form a
government.
They step carefully over the spikes and onto the lush Hong Kong
lawngrid. As they do, the lasers appear once more. The jeeks turn all red
and grainy for a second.
Then something different happens. Lights come on. The security system
wants better illumination on these people.
Hong Kong franchulates are famous for their lawngrids - whoever heard
of a lawn you could park on? - and for their antennas. They all look like
NASA research facilities with their antennas. Some of them are satellite
uplinks, pointed at the sky. But some of them, tiny little antennas, are
pointed at the ground, at the lawngrid.
Y.T. does not really get this, but these small antennas are
millimeter-wave radar transceivers. Like any other radar, they are good at
picking up metallic objects. Unlike the radar in an air traffic control
center, they can rez fine details. The rez of a system is only as fine as
its wavelength; since the wavelength of this radar is about a millimeter, it
can see the fillings in your teeth, the grommets in your Converse high-tops,
the rivets in your Levi's. It can calculate the value of your pocket change.
Seeing guns is not a problem. This thing can even tell if the guns are
loaded, and with what sort of ammunition. That is an important function,
because guns are illegal in Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong.
It doesn't seem polite to hang around and gawk over the fact that
Da5id's computer crashed. A lot of the younger hackers are doing just that,
as a way of showing all the other hackers how knowledgeable they are. Hiro
shrugs it off and turns back in the direction of the Rock Star Quadrant. He
still wants to see Sushi K's hairdo.
But his path is being blocked by the Nipponese man - the
neo-traditional. The guy with the swords. He's facing off against Hiro,
about two sword-lengths apart, and it doesn't look like he intends to move.
Hiro does the polite thing. He bows at the waist, straightens up.
The businessman does the much less polite thing. He looks Hiro rather
carefully up and down, then returns the bow. Sort of.
"These - " the businessman says. "Very nice."
"Thank you, sir. Please feel free to converse in Nipponese if you
prefer."
"This is what your avatar wears. You do not carry such weapons in
Reality," the businessman says. In English.
"I'm sorry to be difficult, but in fact, I do carry such weapons in
Reality," Hiro says.
"Exactly like these?"
"Exactly."
"These are ancient weapons, then," the businessman says.
"Yes, I believe they are."
"How did you come to be in possession of such important family
heirlooms from Nippon?" the businessman says.
Hiro knows the subtext here: What do you use those swords for, boy,
slicing watermelon?
"They are now my family heirlooms," Hiro says. "My father won them."
"Won them? Gambling?"
"Single combat. It was a struggle between my father and a Nipponese
officer. The story is quite complicated."
"Please excuse me if I have misinterpreted your story," the businessman
says, "but I was under the impression that men of your race were not allowed
to fight during that war."
"Your impression is correct," Hiro says. "My father was a truck
driver."
"Then how did he come to be in hand-to-hand combat with a Nipponese
officer?"
"The incident took place outside a prisoner-of-war camp," Hiro says.
"My father and another prisoner tried to escape. They were pursued by a
number of Nipponese soldiers and the officer who owned these swords."
"Your story is very difficult to believe," the businessman says,
"because your father could not have survived such an escape long enough to
pass the swords on to his son. Nippon is an island nation. There is nowhere
he could have escaped to."
"This happened very late in the war," Hiro says, "and this camp was
just outside of Nagasaki."
The businessman chokes, reddens, nearly loses it. His left hand reaches
up to grip the scabbard of his sword. Hiro looks around; suddenly they are
in the center of an open circle of people some ten yards across.
"Do you think that the manner in which you came to possess these swords
was honorable?" the businessman says.
"If I did not, I would long since have returned them," Hiro says.
"Then you will not object to losing them in the same fashion," the
businessman says.
"Nor will you object to losing yours," Hiro says.
The businessman reaches across his body with his right hand, grips the
handle of his sword just below the guard, draws it out, snaps it forward so
it's pointing at Hiro, then places his left hand on the grip just below the
right.
Hiro does the same.
Both of them bend their knees, dropping into a low squat while keeping
the torso bolt upright, then stand up again and shuffle their feet into the
proper stance - feet parallel, both pointed straight ahead, right foot in
front of the left foot.
The businessman turns out to have a lot of zanshin. Translating this
concept into English is like translating "fuckface" into Nipponese, but it
might translate into "emotional intensity" in football lingo. He charges
directly at Hiro, hollering at the top of his lungs. The movement actually
consists of a very rapid shuffling motion of the feet, so that he stays
balanced at all times. At the last moment, he draws the sword up over his
head and snaps it down toward Hiro. Hiro brings his own sword up, rotating
it around sideways so that the handle is up high, above and to the left of
his face, and the blade slopes down and to the right, providing a roof above
him. The businessman's blow bounces off this roof like rain, and then Hiro
sidesteps to let him go by and snaps the sword down toward his unprotected
shoulder. But the businessman is moving too fast, and Hiro's timing is off.
The blade cuts behind and to the side of the businessman.
Both men wheel to face each other, back up, get back into the stance.
"Emotional intensity" doesn't convey the half of it, of course. It is
the kind of coarse and disappointing translation that makes the dismembered
bodies of samurai warriors spin in their graves. The word "zanshin" is
larded down with a lot of other folderol that you have to be Nipponese to
understand.
And Hiro thinks, frankly, that most of it is pseudomystical crap, on
the same level as his old high school football coach exhorting his men to
play at 110 percent.
The businessman makes another attack. This one is pretty
straightforward: a quick shuffling approach and then a snapping cut in the
direction of Hiro's ribcage. Hiro parries it.
Now Hiro knows something about this businessman, namely, that like most
Nipponese sword fighters, all he knows is kendo.
Kendo is to real samurai sword fighting what fencing is to real
swashbuckling: an attempt to take a highly disorganized, chaotic, violent,
and brutal conflict and turn it into a cute game. As in fencing, you're only
supposed to attack certain parts of the body - the parts that are protected
by armor. As in fencing, you're not allowed to kick your opponent in the
kneecaps or break a chair over his head. And the judging is totally
subjective. In kendo, you can get a good solid hit on your opponent and
still not get credit for it, because the judges feel you didn't possess the
right amount of zanshin.
Hiro doesn't have any zanshin at all. He just wants this over with. The
next time the businessman sets up his ear-splitting screech and shuffles
toward Hiro, cutting and snapping his blade, Hiro parries the attack, turns
around, and cuts both of his legs off just above the knees.
The businessman collapses to the floor.
It takes a lot of practice to make your avatar move through the
Metaverse like a real person. When your avatar has just lost its legs, all
that skill goes out the window.
"Well, land sakes!" Hiro says. "Lookee here!" He whips his blade
sideways, cutting off both of the businessman's forearms, causing the sword
to clatter onto the floor.
"Better fire up the ol' barbecue, Jemima!" Hiro continues, whipping the
sword around sideways, cutting the businessman's body in half just above the
navel. Then he leans down so he's looking right into the businessman's face.
"Didn't anyone tell you," he says, losing the dialect, "that I was a
hacker?"
Then he hacks the guy's head off. It falls to the floor, does a
half-roll, and comes to rest staring straight up at the ceiling. So Hiro
steps back a couple of paces and mumbles, "Safe."
A largish safe, about a meter on a side, materializes just below the
ceiling, plummets, and lands directly on the businessman's head. The impact
drives both the safe and the head straight down through the floor of The
Black Sun, leaving a square hole in the floor, exposing the tunnel system
underneath. The rest of the dismembered body is still strewn around the
floor.
At this moment, a Nipponese businessman somewhere, in a nice hotel in
London or an office in Tokyo or even in the first-class lounge of the LATH,
the Los Angeles/Tokyo Hypersonic, is sitting in front of his computer,
red-faced and sweating, looking at The Black Sun Hall of Fame. He has been
cut off from contact with The Black Sun itself, disconnected as it were from
"Nice scene. But you're right. A bazooka doesn't do the same thing as a
dumpster."
Hiro pauses long enough to get this down, then keeps walking. He
mumbles "Bigboard" again, recalls the magic map, pinpoints his own location,
and then reads off the name of this nearby screenwriter. Later on, he can do
a search of industry publications to find out what script this guy is
working on, hence the name of this mystery director with a fetish for
bazookas. Since this whole conversation has come to him via his computer,
he's just taken an audio tape of the whole thing. Later, he can process it
to disguise the voices, then upload it to the Library, cross-referenced
under the director's name. A hundred struggling screenwriters will call this
conversation up, listen to it over and over until they've got it memorized,
paying Hiro for the privilege, and within a few weeks, bazooka scripts will
flood the director's office. Whoom!
The Rock Star Quadrant is almost too bright to look at. Rock star
avatars have the hairdos that rock stars can only wear in their dreams. Hiro
scans it briefly to see if any of his friends are in there, but it's mostly
parasites and has-beens. Most of the people Hiro knows are will-bes or
wannabes.
The Movie Star Quadrant is easier to look at. Actors love to come here
because in The Black Sun, they always look as good as they do in the movies.
And unlike a bar or club in Reality, they can get into this place without
physically having to leave their mansion, hotel suite, ski lodge, private
airline cabin, or whatever. They can strut their stuff and visit with their
friends without any exposure to kidnappers, paparazzi, script-flingers,
assassins, ex-spouses, autograph brokers, process servers, psycho fans,
marriage proposals, or gossip columnists.
He gets up off the bar stool and resumes his slow orbit, scanning the
Nipponese Quadrant. It's a lot of guys in suits, as usual. Some of them are
talking to gringos from the Industry. And a large part of the quadrant, in
the back corner, has been screened off by a temporary partition.
Bigboard again. Hiro figures out which tables are behind the partition,
starts reading off the names. The only one he recognizes immediately is an
American: L. Bob Rife, the cable-television monopolist. A very big name to
the Industry, though he's rarely seen. He seems to be meeting with a whole
raft of big Nipponese honchos. Hiro has his computer memorize their names so
that, later, he can check them against the CIC database and find out who
they are. It has the look of a big and important meeting.
"Secret Agent Hiro! How are you doing?"
Hiro turns around. Juanita is right behind him, standing out in her
black-and-white avatar, looking good anyway. "How are you?" she asks.
"Fine. How are you?"
"Great. I hope you don't mind talking to me in this ugly fax-of-life
avatar."
"Juanita, I would rather look at a fax of you than most other women in
the flesh."
"Thanks, you sly bastard. It's been a long time since we've talked!"
she observes, as though there's something remarkable about this.
Something's going on.
"I hope you're not going to mess around with Snow Crash," she says.
"Da5id won't listen to me."
"What am I, a model of self-restraint? I'm exactly the kind of guy who
would mess around with it."
"I know you better than that. You're impulsive. But you're very clever.
You have those sword-fighting reflexes."
"What does that have to do with drug abuse?"
"It means you can see bad things coming and deflect them. It's an
instinct, not a learned thing. As soon as you turned around and saw me, that
look came over your face, like, what's going on? What the hell is Juanita up
to?"
"I didn't think you talked to people in the Metaverse."
"I do if I want to get through to someone in a hurry," she says. "And
I'll always talk to you."
"Why me?"
"You know. Because of us. Remember? Because of our relationship - when
I was writing this thing - you and I are the only two people who can ever
have an honest conversation in the Metaverse."
"You're just the same mystical crank you always were," he says, smiling
so as to make this a charming statement.
"You can't imagine how mystical and cranky I am now, Hiro."
"How mystical and cranky are you?"
She eyes him warily. Exactly the same way she did when he came into her
office years ago.
It comes into his mind to wonder why she is always so alert in his
presence. In college, he used to think that she was afraid of his intellect,
but he's known for years that this is the last of her worries. At Black Sun
Systems, he figured that it was just typical female guardedness - Juanita
was afraid he was trying to get her into the sack. But this, too, is pretty
much out of the question.
At this late date in his romantic career, he is just canny enough to
come up with a new theory: She's being careful because she likes him. She
likes him in spite of herself. He is exactly the kind of tempting but
utterly wrong romantic choice that a smart girl like Juanita must learn to
avoid.
That's definitely it. There's something to be said for getting older.
By way of answering his question, she says, "I have an associate I'd
like you to meet. A gentleman and a scholar named Lagos. He's a fascinating
guy to talk to."
"Is he your boyfriend?"
She thinks this one over rather than lashing out instantaneously. "My
behavior at The Black Sun to the contrary, I don't fuck every male I work
with. And even if I did, Lagos is out of the question."
"Not your type?"
"Not by a long shot."
"What is your type, anyway?"
"Old, rich, unimaginative blonds with steady careers."
This one almost slips by him. Then he catches it. "Well, I could dye my
hair. And I'll get old eventually."
She actually laughs. It's a tension-releasing kind of outburst.
"Believe me, Hiro, I'm the last person you want to be involved with at this
point."
"Is this part of your church thing?" he asks. Juanita has been using
her excess money to start her own branch of the Catholic church - she
considers herself a missionary to the intelligent atheists of the world.
"Don't be condescending," she says. "That's exactly the attitude I'm
fighting. Religion is not for simpletons."
"Sorry. This is unfair, you know - you can read every expression on my
face, and I'm looking at you through a fucking blizzard."
"It's definitely related to religion," she says. "But this is so
complex, and your background in that area is so deficient, I don't know
where to begin."
"Hey, I went to church every week in high school. I sang in the choir."
"I know. That's exactly the problem. Ninety-nine percent of everything
that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with
the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and
they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why
atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds."
"So none of that stuff I learned in church has anything to do with what
you're talking about?"
Juanita thinks for a while, eyeing him. Then she pulls a hypercard out
of her pocket. "Here. Take this."
As Hiro pulls it from her hand, the hypercard changes from a jittery
two-dimensional figment into a realistic, cream-colored, finely textured
piece of stationery. Printed across its face in glossy black ink is a pair
of words
(I n f o c a l y p s e)
The world freezes and grows dim for a second. The Black Sun loses its
smooth animation and begins to move in fuzzy stop-action. Clearly, his
computer has just taken a major hit; all of its circuits are busy processing
a huge bolus of data - the contents of the hypercard - and don't have time
to redraw the image of The Black Sun in its full, breathtaking fidelity.
"Holy shit!" he says, when The Black Sun pops back into full animation
again. "What the hell is in this card? You must have half of the Library in
here!"
"And a librarian to boot," Juanita says, "to help you sort through it.
And lots of videotapes of L. Bob Rife - which accounts for most of the
bytes."
"Well, I'll try to have a look at it," he says dubiously.
"Do. Unlike Da5id, you're just smart enough to benefit from this. And
in the meantime, stay away from Raven. And stay away from Snow Crash. Okay?"
"Who's Raven?" he asks. But Juanita is already on her way out the door.
The fancy avatars all turn around to watch her as she goes past them; the
movie stars give her drop-dead looks, and the hackers purse their lips and
stare reverently.
Hiro orbits back around to the Hacker Quadrant. Da5id's shuffling
hypercards around on his table - business stats on The Black Sun, film and
video clips, hunks of software, scrawled telephone numbers.
"There's a little blip in the operating system that hits me right in
the gut every time you come in the door," Da5id says. "I always have this
premonition that The Black Sun is headed for a crash."
"Must be Bigboard," Hiro says. "It has one routine that patches some of
the traps in low memory, for a moment."
"Ah, that's it. Please, please throw that thing away," Da5id says.
"What, Bigboard?"
"Yeah. It was totally rad at one point, but now it's like trying to
work on a fusion reactor with a stone ax."
"Thanks."
"I'll give you all the headers you need if you want to update it to
something a little less dangerous," Da5id says. "I wasn't impugning your
abilities. I'm just saying you need to keep up with the times."
"It's fucking hard," Hiro says. "There's no place for a freelance
hacker anymore. You have to have a big corporation behind you."
"I'm aware of that. And I'm aware that you can't stand to work for a
big corporation. That's why I'm saying, I'll give you the stuff you need.
You're always a part of The Black Sun to me, Hiro, even since we parted
ways."
It is classic Da5id. He's talking with his heart again, bypassing his
head. If Da5id weren't a hacker, Hiro would despair of his ever having
enough brains to do anything.
"Let's talk about something else," Hiro says. "Was I just
hallucinating, or are you and Juanita on speaking terms again?"
Da5id gives him an indulgent smile. He has been very kind to Hiro ever
since The Conversation, several years back. It was a conversation that
started out as a friendly chat over beer and oysters between a couple of
longtime comrades-in-arms. It was not until three-quarters of the way
through The Conversation that it dawned on Hiro that he was, in fact, being
fired, at this very moment. Since The Conversation, Da5id has been known to
feed Hiro useful bits of intel and gossip from time to time.
"Fishing for something useful?" Da5id asks knowingly. Like many
bitheads, Da5id is utterly guileless, but at times like this, he thinks he's
the reincarnation of Machiavelli.
"I got news for you, man," Hiro says. "Most of the stuff you give me, I
never put into the Library."
"Why not? Hell, I give you all my best gossip. I thought you were
making money off that stuff."
"I just can't stand it," Hiro says, "taking parts of my private
conversations and whoring them out. Why do you think I'm broke?"
There's another thing he doesn't mention, which is that he's always
considered himself to be Da5id's equal, and he can't stand the idea of
feeding off Da5id's little crumbs and tidbits, like a dog curled up under
his table.
"I was glad to see Juanita come in here - even as a black-and-white,"
Da5id says. "For her not to use The Black Sun - it's like Alexander Graham
Bell refusing to use the telephone."
"Why did she come in tonight?"
"Something's bugging her," Da5id says. "She wanted to know if I'd seen
certain people on the Street."
"Anyone in particular?"
"She's worried about a really large guy with long black hair," Da5id
says. "Peddling something called - get this - Snow Crash."
"Has she tried the Library?"
"Yeah. I assume so, anyway."
"Have you seen this guy?"
"Oh, yeah. It's not hard to find him," Da5id says. "He's right outside
the door. I got this from him."
Da5id scans the table, picks up one of the hypercards, and shows it to
Hiro.
tear this card in half to
release your free sample
"Da5id," Hiro says, "I can't believe you took a hypercard from a
black-and-white person."
Da5id laughs. "This is not the old days, my friend. I've got so much
antiviral medicine in my system that nothing could get through. I get so
much contaminated shit from all the hackers who come through here, it's like
working in a plague ward. So I'm not afraid of whatever's in this
hypercard."
"Well, in that case, I'm curious," Hiro says.
"Yeah. Me, too." Da5id laughs.
"It's probably something very disappointing."
"Probably an animercial," Da5id agrees. "Think I should do it?"
"Yeah. Go for it. It's not every day you get to try out a new drug,"
Hiro says.
"Well, you can try one every day if you want to," Da5id says, "but it's
not every day you find one that can't hurt you." He picks up the hypercard
and tears it in half.
For a second, nothing happens. "I'm waiting," Da5id says.
An avatar materializes on the table in front of Da5id, starting out
ghostly and transparent, gradually becoming solid and three-dimensional.
It's a really trite effect; Hiro and Da5id are already laughing.
The avatar is a stark naked Brandy. It doesn't even look like the
standard Brandy; this looks like one of the cheap Taiwanese Brandy
knockoffs. Clearly, it's just a daemon. She is holding a pair of tubes in
her hands, about the size of paper-towel rolls.
Da5id is leaning back in his chair, enjoying this. There is something
hilariously tawdry about the entire scene.
The Brandy leans forward, beckoning Da5id toward her. Da5id leans into
her face, grinning broadly. She puts her crude, ruby-red lips up by his ear
and mumbles something that Hiro can't hear.
When she leans back away from Da5id, his face has changed. He looks
dazed and expressionless. Maybe Da5id really looks that way; maybe Snow
Crash has messed up his avatar somehow so that it's no longer tracking
Da5id's true facial expressions. But he's staring straight ahead, eyes
frozen in their sockets.
The Brandy holds the pair of tubes up in front of Da5id's immobilized
face and spreads them apart. It's actually a scroll. She's unrolling it
right in front of Da5id's face, spreading it apart like a flat
two-dimensional screen in front of his eyes. Da5id's paralyzed face has
taken on a bluish tinge as it reflects light coming out of the scroll.
Hiro walks around the table to look. He gets a brief glimpse of the
scroll before the Brandy snaps it shut again. It is a living wall of light,
like a flexible, flatscreened television set, and it's not showing anything
at all. just static. White noise. Snow.
Then she's gone, leaving no trace behind. Desultory, sarcastic applause
sounds from a few tables in the Hacker Quadrant.
Da5id's back to normal, wearing a grin that's part snide and part
embarrassed.
"What was it?" Hiro says. "I just glimpsed some snow at the very end."
"You saw the whole thing," Da5id says. "A fixed pattern of
black-and-white pixels, fairly high-resolution. Just a few hundred thousand
ones and zeroes for me to look at."
"So in other words, someone just exposed your optic nerve to, what,
maybe a hundred thousand bytes of information," Hiro says.
"Noise, is more like it."
"Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code," Hiro
says.
"Why would anyone show me information in binary code? I'm not a
computer. I can't read a bitmap."
"Relax, Da5id, I'm just shitting you," Hiro says.
"You know what it was? You know how hackers are always trying to show
me samples of their work?"
"Yeah."
"Some hacker came up with this scheme to show me his stuff. And
everything worked fine until the moment the Brandy opened the scroll - but
his code was buggy, and it snow-crashed at the wrong moment, so instead of
seeing his output, all I saw was snow."
"Then why did he call the thing Snow Crash?"
"Gallows humor. He knew it was buggy."
"What did the Brandy whisper in your ear?"
"Some language I didn't recognize," Da5id says. "Just a bunch of
babble."
Babble. Babel.
"Afterward, you looked sort of stunned."
Da5id looks resentful. "I wasn't stunned. I just found the whole
experience so weird, I guess I just was taken aback for a second."
Hiro is giving him an extremely dubious look. Da5id notices it and
stands up. "Want to go see what your competitors in Nippon are up to?"
"What competitors?"
"You used to design avatars for rock stars, right?"
"Still do."
"Well, Sushi K is here tonight."
"Oh, yeah. The hairdo the size of a galaxy."
"You can see the rays from here," Da5id says, waving toward the next
quadrant, "but I want to see the whole getup."
It does look as though the sun is rising somewhere in the middle of the
Rock Star Quadrant. Above the heads of the milling avatars, Hiro can see a
fan of orange beams radiating outward from some point in the middle of the
crowd. It keeps moving, turning around, shaking from side to side, and the
whole universe seems to move with it. On the Street, the full radiance of
Sushi K's Rising Sun hairdo is suppressed by the height and width
regulations. But Da5id allows free expression inside The Black Sun, so the
orange rays extend all the way to the property lines.
"I wonder if anyone's told him yet that Americans won't buy rap music
from a Japanese person," Hiro says as they stroll over there.
"Maybe you should tell him," Da5id suggests, "charge him for the
service. He's in L.A. right now, you know."
"Probably staying in a hotel full of bootlickers telling him what a big
star he's going to be. He needs to be exposed to some actual biomass."
They inject themselves into a stream of traffic, winding a narrow
channel through a rift in the crowd.
"Biomass?" Da5id says.
"A body of living stuff. It's an ecology term. If you take an acre of
rain forest or a cubic mile of ocean or a square block of Compton and strain
out all the unliving stuff - dirt and water - you get the biomass."
Da5id, ever the bithead, says, "I do not understand." His voice sounds
funny; there's a lot of white noise creeping into his audio.
"Industry expression," Hiro says. "The Industry feeds off the human
biomass of America. Like a whale straining krill from the sea."
Hiro wedges himself between a couple of Nipponese businessmen. One is
wearing a uniform blue, but the other is a neo-traditional, wearing a dark
kimono. And, like Hiro, he's wearing two swords - the long katana on his
left hip and the one-handed wakizashi stuck diagonally in his waistband. He
and Hiro glance cursorily at each other's armaments. Then Hiro looks away
and pretends not to notice, while the neo-traditional is freezing solid,
except for the corners of his mouth which are curling downward. Hiro has
seen this kind of thing before. He knows he's about to get into a fight.
People are moving out of the way; something big and inexorable is
plunging through the crowd, shoving avatars this way and that. Only one
thing has the ability to shove people around like that inside The Black Sun,
and that's a bouncer daemon.
As they get closer, Hiro sees that it's a whole flying wedge of them,
gorillas in tuxedos. Real gorillas. And they seem to be headed toward Hiro.
He tries to back away, but he quickly runs into something. Looks like
Bigboard finally got him in trouble; he's on his way out of the bar.
"Da5id," Hiro says. "Call them off, man, I'll stop using it."
All of the people in his vicinity are staring over Hiro's shoulder,
their faces illuminated by a stew of brilliant colored lights.
Hiro turns around to look at Da5id. But Da5id's not there anymore.
Instead of Da5id, there is just a jittering cloud of bad digital karma.
It's so bright and fast and meaningless that it hurts to look at. It flashes
back and forth from color to black and white, and when it's in color, it
rolls wildly around the color wheel as though being strafed with highpowered
disco lights. And it's not staying within it's own body space; hair-thin
pixel lines keep shooting off to one side, passing all the way across The
Black Sun and out through the wall. It is not so much an organized body as
it is a centrifugal cloud of lines and polygons whose center cannot hold,
throwing bright bits of body shrapnel all over the room, interfering with
people's avatars, flickering and disappearing.
The gorillas don't mind. They shove their long furry fingers into the
midst of the disintegrating cloud and latch onto it somehow and carry it
past Hiro, toward the exit. Hiro looks down as it goes past him and sees
what looks very much like Da5id's face as viewed through a pile of shattered
glass. It's just a momentary glimpse. Then the avatar is gone, expertly
drop-kicked out the front door, soaring out over the Street in a long flat
arc that takes it over the horizon. Hiro looks up the aisle to see Da5id's
table, empty, surrounded by stunned hackers. Some of them are shocked, some
are trying to stifle grins.
Da5id Meier, supreme hacker overload, founding father of the Metaverse
protocol, creator and proprietor of the world-famous Black Sun, has just
suffered a system crash. He's been thrown out of his own bar by his own
daemons.
About the second or third thing they learned how to do when studying to
become Kouriers was how to shiv open a pair of handcuffs. Handcuffs are not
intended as longterm restraint devices, millions of Clink franchisees to the
contrary. And the longtime status of skateboarders as an oppressed ethnic
group means that by now all of them are escape artists of some degree.
First things first. Y.T. has many a thing hanging off her uniform. The
uniform has a hundred pockets, big flat pockets for deliveries and eensy
narrow pockets for gear, pockets sewn into sleeves, thighs, shins. The
equipment stuck into these multifarious pockets tends to be small, tricky,
lightweight: pens, markers, penlights, penknives, lock picks, bar-code
scanners, flares, screwdrivers, Liquid Knuckles, bundy stunners, and
lightsticks. A calculator is stuck upside-down to her right thigh, doubling
as a taxi meter and a stopwatch.
On the other thigh is a personal phone. As the manager is locking the
door upstairs, it begins to ring. Y.T. unhooks it with her free hand. It is
her mother.
"Hi, Mom. Fine, how are you? I'm at Tracy's house. Yeah, we went to the
Metaverse. We were just fooling around at this arcade on the Street. Pretty
bumpin'. Yes, I used a nice avatar. Nah, Tracy's mom said she'd give me a
ride home later. But we might stop off at the joyride on Victory for a
while, okay? Okay, well, sleep tight, Mom. I will. I love you, too. See you
later."
She punches the flash button, killing the chat with Mom and giving her
a fresh dial tone in the space of about half a second. "Roadkill," she says.
The telephone remembers and dials Roadkill's number.
Roaring sounds. This is the sound of air peeling over the microphone of
Roadkill's personal phone at some terrifying velocity. Also the competing
whooshes of many vehicles' tires on pavement, broken by chuckhole
percussion; sounds like the crumbling Ventura.
"Yo, Y.T.," Roadkill says, "'sup?"
"'Sup with you?"
"Surfing the Turf. 'Sup with you?"
"Maxing The Clink."
"Whoa! Who popped you?"
"MetaCops. Affixed me to the gate of White Columns with a loogie gun."
"Whoa, how very! When you leaving?"
"Soon. Can you swing by and give me a hand?."
"What do you mean?"
Men. "You know, give me a hand. You're my boyfriend," she says,
speaking very simply and plainly. "If I get popped, you're supposed to come
around and help bust me out." Isn't everyone supposed to know this stuff?
Don't parents teach their kids anything anymore?
"Well, uh, where are you?"
"Buy 'n' Fly number 501,762."
"I'm on my way to Bernie with a super-ultra."
As in San Bernardino. As in super-ultra-high-priority delivery. As in,
you're out of luck.
"Okay, thanks for nothing."
"Sorry."
"Surfing safety," Y.T. says, in the traditional sarcastic sign off.
"Keep breathing," Roadkill says. The roaring noise snaps off.
What a jerk. Next date, he's really going to have to grovel. But in the
meantime, there's one other person who owes her one. The only problem is
that he might be a spaz. But it's worth a try.
"Hello?" he says into his personal phone. He's breathing hard and a
couple of sirens are dueling in the background.
"Hiro Protagonist?"
"Yeah, who's this?"
"Y.T. Where are you?"
"In the parking lot of a Safeway on Oahu," he says. And he's telling
the truth; in the background she can hear the shopping carts performing
their clashy, anal copulations.
"I'm kind of busy now, Whitey - but what can I do for you?"
"It's Y.T.," she says, "and you can help bust me out of The Clink." She
gives him the details.
"How long ago did he put you there?"
"Ten minutes."
"Okay, the three-ring binder for Clink franchises states that the
manager is supposed to check on the detainee half an hour after admission."
"How do you know this stuff?" she says accusingly.
"Use your imagination. As soon as the manager pulls his half-hour
check, wait for another five minutes, and then make your move. I'll try to
give you a hand. Okay?"
"Got it."
At half an hour on the dot, she hears the back door being unlocked. The
lights come on. Her Knight Visions save her from wracking eyeball pains. The
manager thunks down a couple of steps, glares at her, glares at her for
rather a long time. The manager, clearly, is tempted. That momentary glimpse
of flesh has been ricocheting around in his brain for half an hour. He is
wracking his mind with vast cosmological dilemmas. Y.T. hopes that he does
not try anything, because the dentata's effects can be unpredictable.
"Make up your fucking mind," she says.
It works. This fresh burst of culture shock rattles the jeek out of his
ethical conundrum. He gives Y.T. a disapproving glower - she, after all,
forced him to be attracted to her, forced him to get horny, made his head
swim - she didn't have to get arrested, did she? - and so on top of
everything else he's angry with her. As if he has a right to be.
This is the gender that invented the polio vaccine?
He turns, goes back up the steps, kills the light, locks the door.
She notes the time, sets her alarm watch for five minutes from now -
the only North American who actually knows how to set the alarm on her
digital wristwatch - pulls her shiv kit from one of the narrow pockets on
her sleeve. She also hauls out a lightstick and snaps it so she can see
'sup. She finds one piece of narrow, flat spring steel, slides it up into
the manacle's innards, depresses the spring-loaded pawl. The cuff, formerly
a one-way ratchet that could only get tighter, springs loose from the
cold-water pipe.
She could take it off her wrist, but she has decided she likes the look
of it. She cuffs the loose manacle onto her wrist, right next to the other
one, forming a double bracelet. The kind of thing her mom used to do, back
when she was a punk.
The steel door is locked, but Buy 'n' Fly safety regs mandate an
emergency exit from the basement in case of fire. Here, it's a basement
window with mondo bars and a big red multilingual fire alarm bolted onto it.
The red looks black in the green glow of the lightstick. She reads the
instructions that are in English, runs through it once or twice in her mind,
then waits for the alarm to go off. She whiles away the time by reading the
instructions in all the other languages, wondering which is which. It all
looks like Taxilinga to Y.T.
The window is almost too grungy to see through, but she sees something
black walking past it. Hiro.
About ten seconds later, her wristwatch goes off. She punches the
emergency exit. The bell rings. The bars are trickier than she thought -
good thing it's not a real fire - but eventually she gets them open. She
throws her plank outside onto the parking lot, drags her body through just
as she hears the rear door being unlocked. By the time the three-ringer has
found that all-important light switch, she is banking a sharp turn into the
front lot - which has turned into a jeek festival!
Every jeek in Southern Cal is here, it seems, driving their giant,
wrecked taxicabs with alien livestock in the back seat, reeking of incense
and sloshing neon-hued Airwicks! They have set up a giant eight-tubed hookah
on the trunk of one of the cabs and are slurping up great mountain-man
lungfuls of choking smoke.
And they're all staring at Hiro Protagonist, who is just staring back
at them. Everyone in the parking lot looks completely astounded.
He must have made his approach from the rear - didn't realize that the
front lot was full of jeeks. Whatever he was planning isn't going to work.
The plan is screwed.
The manager comes running around from the back of the Buy 'n' Fly,
sounding a bloodcurdling Taxilinga tocsin. He's got missile lock on Y.T.'s
ass.
But the jeeks around the hookah don't care about Y.T. They've got
missile lock on Hiro. They carefully hang the ornate silver nozzles on a
rack built into the neck of the mega-bong. Then they start moving toward
him, reaching into the folds of their robes, the inner pockets of their
windbreakers.
Y.T. is distracted by a sharp hissing noise. Her eyes glance back at
Hiro, and she sees that he has withdrawn a three-foot, curved sword from a
scabbard, which she did not notice before. He has dropped into a squat. The
blade of the sword glitters painfully under the killer security lights of
the Buy 'n' Fly.
How sweet!
It would be an understatement to say that the hookah boys are taken
aback. But they are not scared so much as they are confused. Almost
undoubtedly, most of them have guns. So why is this guy trying to bother
them with a sword?
She remembers that one of the multiple professions on Hiro's business
card is Greatest sword fighter in the world. Can he really take out a whole
clan of armed jeeks?
The manager's hand clenches her upper arm - like this is really going
to stop her. She reaches across her body with the other hand and lets him
have it with a brief squirt of Liquid Knuckles. He makes a muffled, distant
grunt, his head snaps back, he lets go of her arm and staggers back wildly
until he sprawls against another taxi, jamming the heels of both hands into
his eye sockets.
Wait a sec. There's nobody in that particular taxi. But she can see a
two-foot-long macrame keychain dangling from the ignition.
She tosses her plank through the window of the taxi, dives in after it
(she's small, opening the door is optional), climbs in behind the driver's
seat, sinking into a deep nest of wooden beads and air fresheners, grinds
the motor, and takes off. Backward. Headed for the rear parking lot. The car
was pointed outward, in taxicab style, ready for a quick getaway, which
would be fine if she were by herself - but there is Hiro to think of. The
radio is screaming, alive with hollered bursts of Taxilinga. She backs all
the way around behind the Buy 'n' Fly. The back lot is strangely quiet and
empty.
She shifts into drive and blasts back the way she came. The jeeks
haven't quite had time to react, were expecting her to come out the other
way. She screams it to a halt right next to Hiro, who has already had the
presence of mind to put his sword back in its scabbard. He dives in the
passenger-side window. Then she stops paying attention to him.. She's got
other stuff to look at, such as whether she's going to get broadsided as she
pulls out onto the road.
She doesn't get broadsided, though a car has to squeal around her. She
guns it out onto the highway. It responds as only an ancient taxicab will.
The only problem being that half a dozen other ancient taxicabs are now
following them.
Something is pressing against Y.T.'s left thigh. She looks down. It is
a remarkably huge revolver in a net bag hanging on the door panel.
She has to find someplace to pull into. If she could find a Nova
Sicilia franchulate, that would do it - the Mafia owes her one. Or a New
South Africa, which she hates. But the New South Africans hate jeeks even
more.
Scratch that; Hiro is black, or at least part black. Can't take him
into New South Africa. And because Y.T. is a Cauc, they can't go to
Metazania.
"Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong," Hiro says. "Half mile ahead on the
right."
"Nice thinking - but they won't let you in with your swords, will
they?"
"Yes," he says, "because I'm a citizen."
Then she sees it. The sign stands out because it is a rare one. Don't
see many of these. It is a green-and-blue sign, soothing and calm in a
glare-torn franchise ghetto. It says:
MR. LEE'S GREATER HONG KONG
Explosive noise from in back. Her head smacks into the whiplash
arrestor. Another taxi rear-ended them.
And she screams into the parking lot of Mr. Lee's doing seventy-five.
The security system doesn't even have time to rez her visa and drop the STD,
so it's Severe Tire Damage all the way, those bald radials are left behind
on the spikes. Sparking along on four naked rims, she shrieks to a stop on
the lawngrid, which doubles as carbon dioxide-eating turf and impervious
parking lot.
She and Hiro climb out of the car.
Hiro is grinning wildly, pinioned in the crossfire of a dozen red laser
beams scanning him from every direction at once. The Hong Kong robot
security system is checking him out. Her, too; she looks down to see the
lasers scribbling across her chest.
"Welcome to Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, Mr. Protagonist," the security
system says through a P.A. speaker. "And welcome to your guest, Ms. Y.T."
The other taxis have stopped in formation along the curb. Several of
them overshot the Hong Kong franchise and had to back up a block or so. A
barrage of doors thunking shut. Some of them don't bother, just leave the
engines running and the doors wide open. Three jeeks linger on the sidewalk,
eyeing the tire shreds impaled on spikes: long streaks of neoprene sprouting
steel and fiberglass hairs, like ruined toupees. One of them has a revolver
in his hand, pointed straight down at the sidewalk.
Four more jeeks run up to join them. Y.T. counts two more revolvers and
a pump shotgun. Any more of these guys and they'll be able to form a
government.
They step carefully over the spikes and onto the lush Hong Kong
lawngrid. As they do, the lasers appear once more. The jeeks turn all red
and grainy for a second.
Then something different happens. Lights come on. The security system
wants better illumination on these people.
Hong Kong franchulates are famous for their lawngrids - whoever heard
of a lawn you could park on? - and for their antennas. They all look like
NASA research facilities with their antennas. Some of them are satellite
uplinks, pointed at the sky. But some of them, tiny little antennas, are
pointed at the ground, at the lawngrid.
Y.T. does not really get this, but these small antennas are
millimeter-wave radar transceivers. Like any other radar, they are good at
picking up metallic objects. Unlike the radar in an air traffic control
center, they can rez fine details. The rez of a system is only as fine as
its wavelength; since the wavelength of this radar is about a millimeter, it
can see the fillings in your teeth, the grommets in your Converse high-tops,
the rivets in your Levi's. It can calculate the value of your pocket change.
Seeing guns is not a problem. This thing can even tell if the guns are
loaded, and with what sort of ammunition. That is an important function,
because guns are illegal in Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong.
It doesn't seem polite to hang around and gawk over the fact that
Da5id's computer crashed. A lot of the younger hackers are doing just that,
as a way of showing all the other hackers how knowledgeable they are. Hiro
shrugs it off and turns back in the direction of the Rock Star Quadrant. He
still wants to see Sushi K's hairdo.
But his path is being blocked by the Nipponese man - the
neo-traditional. The guy with the swords. He's facing off against Hiro,
about two sword-lengths apart, and it doesn't look like he intends to move.
Hiro does the polite thing. He bows at the waist, straightens up.
The businessman does the much less polite thing. He looks Hiro rather
carefully up and down, then returns the bow. Sort of.
"These - " the businessman says. "Very nice."
"Thank you, sir. Please feel free to converse in Nipponese if you
prefer."
"This is what your avatar wears. You do not carry such weapons in
Reality," the businessman says. In English.
"I'm sorry to be difficult, but in fact, I do carry such weapons in
Reality," Hiro says.
"Exactly like these?"
"Exactly."
"These are ancient weapons, then," the businessman says.
"Yes, I believe they are."
"How did you come to be in possession of such important family
heirlooms from Nippon?" the businessman says.
Hiro knows the subtext here: What do you use those swords for, boy,
slicing watermelon?
"They are now my family heirlooms," Hiro says. "My father won them."
"Won them? Gambling?"
"Single combat. It was a struggle between my father and a Nipponese
officer. The story is quite complicated."
"Please excuse me if I have misinterpreted your story," the businessman
says, "but I was under the impression that men of your race were not allowed
to fight during that war."
"Your impression is correct," Hiro says. "My father was a truck
driver."
"Then how did he come to be in hand-to-hand combat with a Nipponese
officer?"
"The incident took place outside a prisoner-of-war camp," Hiro says.
"My father and another prisoner tried to escape. They were pursued by a
number of Nipponese soldiers and the officer who owned these swords."
"Your story is very difficult to believe," the businessman says,
"because your father could not have survived such an escape long enough to
pass the swords on to his son. Nippon is an island nation. There is nowhere
he could have escaped to."
"This happened very late in the war," Hiro says, "and this camp was
just outside of Nagasaki."
The businessman chokes, reddens, nearly loses it. His left hand reaches
up to grip the scabbard of his sword. Hiro looks around; suddenly they are
in the center of an open circle of people some ten yards across.
"Do you think that the manner in which you came to possess these swords
was honorable?" the businessman says.
"If I did not, I would long since have returned them," Hiro says.
"Then you will not object to losing them in the same fashion," the
businessman says.
"Nor will you object to losing yours," Hiro says.
The businessman reaches across his body with his right hand, grips the
handle of his sword just below the guard, draws it out, snaps it forward so
it's pointing at Hiro, then places his left hand on the grip just below the
right.
Hiro does the same.
Both of them bend their knees, dropping into a low squat while keeping
the torso bolt upright, then stand up again and shuffle their feet into the
proper stance - feet parallel, both pointed straight ahead, right foot in
front of the left foot.
The businessman turns out to have a lot of zanshin. Translating this
concept into English is like translating "fuckface" into Nipponese, but it
might translate into "emotional intensity" in football lingo. He charges
directly at Hiro, hollering at the top of his lungs. The movement actually
consists of a very rapid shuffling motion of the feet, so that he stays
balanced at all times. At the last moment, he draws the sword up over his
head and snaps it down toward Hiro. Hiro brings his own sword up, rotating
it around sideways so that the handle is up high, above and to the left of
his face, and the blade slopes down and to the right, providing a roof above
him. The businessman's blow bounces off this roof like rain, and then Hiro
sidesteps to let him go by and snaps the sword down toward his unprotected
shoulder. But the businessman is moving too fast, and Hiro's timing is off.
The blade cuts behind and to the side of the businessman.
Both men wheel to face each other, back up, get back into the stance.
"Emotional intensity" doesn't convey the half of it, of course. It is
the kind of coarse and disappointing translation that makes the dismembered
bodies of samurai warriors spin in their graves. The word "zanshin" is
larded down with a lot of other folderol that you have to be Nipponese to
understand.
And Hiro thinks, frankly, that most of it is pseudomystical crap, on
the same level as his old high school football coach exhorting his men to
play at 110 percent.
The businessman makes another attack. This one is pretty
straightforward: a quick shuffling approach and then a snapping cut in the
direction of Hiro's ribcage. Hiro parries it.
Now Hiro knows something about this businessman, namely, that like most
Nipponese sword fighters, all he knows is kendo.
Kendo is to real samurai sword fighting what fencing is to real
swashbuckling: an attempt to take a highly disorganized, chaotic, violent,
and brutal conflict and turn it into a cute game. As in fencing, you're only
supposed to attack certain parts of the body - the parts that are protected
by armor. As in fencing, you're not allowed to kick your opponent in the
kneecaps or break a chair over his head. And the judging is totally
subjective. In kendo, you can get a good solid hit on your opponent and
still not get credit for it, because the judges feel you didn't possess the
right amount of zanshin.
Hiro doesn't have any zanshin at all. He just wants this over with. The
next time the businessman sets up his ear-splitting screech and shuffles
toward Hiro, cutting and snapping his blade, Hiro parries the attack, turns
around, and cuts both of his legs off just above the knees.
The businessman collapses to the floor.
It takes a lot of practice to make your avatar move through the
Metaverse like a real person. When your avatar has just lost its legs, all
that skill goes out the window.
"Well, land sakes!" Hiro says. "Lookee here!" He whips his blade
sideways, cutting off both of the businessman's forearms, causing the sword
to clatter onto the floor.
"Better fire up the ol' barbecue, Jemima!" Hiro continues, whipping the
sword around sideways, cutting the businessman's body in half just above the
navel. Then he leans down so he's looking right into the businessman's face.
"Didn't anyone tell you," he says, losing the dialect, "that I was a
hacker?"
Then he hacks the guy's head off. It falls to the floor, does a
half-roll, and comes to rest staring straight up at the ceiling. So Hiro
steps back a couple of paces and mumbles, "Safe."
A largish safe, about a meter on a side, materializes just below the
ceiling, plummets, and lands directly on the businessman's head. The impact
drives both the safe and the head straight down through the floor of The
Black Sun, leaving a square hole in the floor, exposing the tunnel system
underneath. The rest of the dismembered body is still strewn around the
floor.
At this moment, a Nipponese businessman somewhere, in a nice hotel in
London or an office in Tokyo or even in the first-class lounge of the LATH,
the Los Angeles/Tokyo Hypersonic, is sitting in front of his computer,
red-faced and sweating, looking at The Black Sun Hall of Fame. He has been
cut off from contact with The Black Sun itself, disconnected as it were from