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the Metaverse, and is just seeing a two-dimensional display. The top ten
swordsmen of all time are shown along with their photographs. Beneath is a
scrolling list of numbers and names, starting with #11. He can scroll down
the list if he wants to find his own ranking. The screen helpfully informs
him that he is currently ranked number 863 out of 890 people who have ever
participated in a sword fight in The Black Sun.
Number One, the name and the photograph on the top of the list, belongs
to Hiroaki Protagonist.
Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a
pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees,
dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly
through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them.
He has a little yard all to himself. It has a fence around it. He knows
he can't jump over the fence. He's never actually tried to jump it, because
he knows be can't. He doesn't go into the yard unless he has to. It's hot
out there.
He has an important job: Protect the yard. Sometimes people come in and
out of the yard. Most of the time, they are good people, and he doesn't
bother them. He doesn't know why they are good people. He just knows it.
Sometimes they are bad people, and he has to do bad things to them to make
them go away. This is fitting and proper.
Out in the world beyond his yard, there are other yards with other
doggies just like him. These aren't nasty dogs. They are all his friends.
The closest neighbor doggie is far away, farther than he can see. But
he can hear this doggie bark sometimes, when a bad person approaches his
yard. He can hear other neighbor doggies, too, a whole pack of them
stretching off into the distance, in all directions. He belongs to a big
pack of nice doggies.
He and the other nice doggies bark whenever a stranger comes into their
yard, or even near it. The stranger doesn't hear him, but all the other
doggies in the pack do. If they live nearby, they get excited. They wake up
and get ready to do bad things to that stranger if he should try to come
into their yard.
When a neighbor doggie barks at a stranger, pictures and sounds and
smells come into his mind along with the bark. He suddenly knows what that
stranger looks like. What he smells like. How he sounds. Then, if that
stranger should come anywhere near his yard, he will recognize him. He will
help spread the bark along to other nice doggies so that the entire pack can
all be prepared to fight the stranger.
Tonight, Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 is barking. He is not just
passing some other doggie's bark to the pack. He is barking because he feels
very excited about things that are happening in his yard.
First, two people come in. This made him excited because they came in
very fast. Their hearts are beating quickly and they are sweating and they
smell scared. He looked at these two people to see if they were carrying bad
things.
The little one is carrying things that are a little naughty, but not
really bad. The big one is carrying some pretty bad things. But he knows,
somehow, that the big one is okay. He belongs in this yard. He is not a
stranger; he lives here. And the little one is his guest.
Still, he senses there is something exciting happening. He starts to
bark. The people in the yard don't hear him barking. But all the other nice
doggies in the pack, far away, hear him, and when they do, they see these
two scared, nice people, smell them, and hear them.
Then more people come into his yard. They are also excited; he can hear
their hearts beating. Saliva floods his mouth as he smells the hot salty
blood pumping through their arteries. These people are excited and angry and
just a little bit scared. They don't live here; they are strangers. He
doesn't like strangers very much.
He looks at them and sees that they are carrying three revolvers, a .38
and two .357 magnums; that the .38 is loaded with hollow-points, one of the
.357s is loaded with Teflon bullets and has also been cocked; and that the
pump shotgun is loaded with buckshot and already has a shell chambered, plus
four more shells in its magazine.
The things that the strangers are carrying are bad. Scary things. He
gets excited. He gets angry. He gets a little bit scared, but he likes being
scared, to him it is the same thing as being excited. Really, he has only
two emotions: sleeping and adrenaline overdrive.
The bad stranger with the shotgun is raising his weapon!
It is an utterly terrible thing. A lot of bad, excited strangers are
invading his yard with evil things, come to hurt the nice visitors.
He barely has time to bark out a warning to the other nice doggies
before he launches himself from his doghouse, propelled on a white-hot jet
of pure, feral emotion.
In Y.T.'s peripheral vision she sees a brief flash, hears a clunking
noise. She looks over in that direction to see that the source of the light
is a sort of doggie door built into the side of the Hong Kong franchise. The
doggie door has in the very recent past been slammed open by something
coming from the inside, headed for the lawngrid with the speed and
determination of a howitzer shell.
As all of this registers on Y.T.'s mind, she begins to hear the
shouting of the jeeks. This shouting is not angry and not scared either. No
one has had time to get scared yet. It is the shouting of someone who has
just had a bucket of ice water dumped over his head.
This shouting is still getting underway, she is still turning her head
to look at the jeeks, when the doggie door emits another burst of light. Her
eyes flick that-a-way; she thinks that she saw something, a long round
shadow cross-sectioned in the light for a blurry instant as the door was
being slammed inward. But when her eyes focus on it, she sees nothing except
the oscillating door, same as before. These are the only impressions left on
her mind, except for one more detail: a train of sparks that danced across
the lawngrid from the doggie door to the jeeks and back again during this
one-second event, like a skyrocket glancing across the lot.
People say that the Rat Thing runs on four legs. Perhaps the claws on
its robot legs made those sparks as they were digging into the lawngrid for
traction.
The jeeks are all in motion. Some of them have just been body-slammed
into the lawngrid and are still bouncing and rolling. Others are still in
mid-collapse. They are unarmed. They are reaching to grip their gun hands
with the opposite hands, still hollering, though now their voices are tinged
with a certain amount of fear. One of them has had his trousers torn from
the waistband all the way down to the ankle, and a strip of fabric is
trailing out across the lot, as though he had his pocket picked by something
that was in too much of a hurry to let go of the actual pocket before it
left. Maybe this guy had a knife in his pocket.
There is no blood anywhere. The Rat Thing is precise. Still they hold
their hands and holler. Maybe it's true what they say, that the Rat Thing
gives you an electrical shock when it wants you to let go of something.
"Look out," she hears herself saying, "they got guns."
Hiro turns and grins at her. His teeth are very white and straight; he
has a sharp grin, a carnivore's grin. "No, they don't. Guns are illegal in
Hong Kong, remember?"
"They had guns just a second ago," Y.T. says, bulging her eyes and
shaking her head.
"The Rat Thing has them now," Hiro says.
The jeeks all decide they better leave. They run out and get into their
taxis and take off, tires asqueal.
Y.T. backs the taxi on its rims out over the STD and into the street,
where she grindingly parallel parks it. She goes back into the Hong Kong
franchise, a nebula of aromatic freshness trailing behind her like the tail
of a comet. She is thinking, oddly enough, about what it would be like to
climb into the back of the car with Hiro Protagonist for a while. Pretty
nice, probably. But she'd have to take out the dentata, and this isn't the
place. Besides, anyone decent enough to come help her escape from The Clink
probably has some kind of scruples about boffing fifteen-year-old girls.
"That was nice of you," he says, nodding at the parked taxi. "Are you
going to pay for his tires, too?"
"No. Are you?"
"I'm having some cash flow problems."
She stands there in the middle of the Hong Kong lawngrid. They look
each other up and down, carefully.
"I called my boyfriend. But he flaked out on me," she says.
"Another thrasher?"
"The same."
"You made the same mistake I made once," he says.
"What's that?"
"Mixing business with pleasure. Going out with a colleague. It gets
very confusing."
"Yeah. I see what you mean." She's not exactly sure what a colleague
is.
"I was thinking that we should be partners," she says.
She's expecting him to laugh at her. But instead he grins and nods his
head slightly. "The same thing occurred to me. But I'd have to think about
how it would work."
She is astounded that he would actually be thinking this. Then she gets
the sap factor under control and realizes: He's waffling. Which means he's
probably lying. This is probably going to end with him trying to get her
into bed.
"I gotta go," she says. "Gotta get home."
Now we'll see how fast he loses interest in the partnership concept.
She turns her back on him.
Suddenly, they are impaled on Hong Kong robot spotlights one more time.
Y.T. feels a sharp bruising pain in her ribs, as though someone punched
her. But it wasn't Hiro. He is an unpredictable freak who carries swords,
but she can smell chick-punchers a mile off.
"Ow!" she says, twisting away from the impact. She looks down to see a
small heavy object bouncing on the ground at their feet. Out in the street,
an ancient taxi squeals its tires, getting the hell out of there. A jeek is
hanging out the rear window, shaking his fist at them. He must have thrown a
rock at her.
Except it's not a rock. The heavy thing at her feet, the thing that
just bounced off of Y.T.'s ribcage, is a hand grenade. She stares for a
second, recognizing it, a well-known cartoon icon made real.
Then her feet get knocked out from under her, too fast really to hurt.
And just when she's getting reoriented to that, there is a painfully loud
bang from another part of the parking lot.
And then everything finally stops long enough to be seen and
understood.
The Rat Thing has stopped. Which they never do. It's part of their
mystery that you never get to see them, they move so fast. No one knows what
they look like.
No one except for Y.T. and Hiro, now.
It's bigger than she imagined. The body is Rottweiler-sized, segmented
into overlapping hard plates like those of a rhinoceros. The legs are long,
curled way up to deliver power, like a cheetah's. It must be the tail that
makes people refer to it as a Rat Thing, because that's the only ratlike
part-incredibly long and flexible. But it looks like a rat's tail with the
flesh eaten away by acid, because it just consists of segments, hundreds of
them neatly plugged together, like vertebrae.
"Jesus H. Christ!" Hiro says. And she knows, from that, that he's never
seen one either.
Right now, the tail is coiled and piled around on top of the Rat
Thing's body like a rope that has fallen out of a tree. Parts of it are
trying to move, other parts of it look dead and inert. The legs are moving
one by one, spasmodically, not acting in concert. The whole thing just looks
terribly wrong, like footage of an airplane that has had its tail blown off,
trying to maneuver for a landing. Even someone who is not an engineer can
see that it has gone all perverse and twisted.
The tail writhes and lashes like a snake, uncoils itself, rises up off
the Rat Thing's body, gets out of the way of its legs. But still the legs
have problems; it can't get itself up
"Y.T.," Hiro is saying, "don't."
She does. One footstep at a time, she approaches the Rat Thing.
"It's dangerous, in case you hadn't noticed," Hiro says, following her
a few paces behind. "They say it has biological components."
"Biological components?"
"Animal parts. So it might be unpredictable."
She likes animals. She keeps walking.
She's seeing it better now. It's not all armor and muscle. A lot of it
actually looks kind of flimsy. It has short stubby winglike things
projecting from its body: A big one from each shoulder and a row of smaller
ones down the length of its spine, like on a stegosaurus. Her Knight Visions
tell her that these things are hot enough to bake pizzas on. As she
approaches, they seem to unfold and grow.
They are blooming like flowers in an educational film, spreading and
unfolding to reveal a fine complicated internal structure that has been all
collapsed together inside. Each stubby wing splits off into little miniature
copies of itself, and each of those in turn splits off into more smaller
copies and so on forever. The smallest ones are just tiny bits of foil, so
small that, from a distance, the edges look fuzzy.
It is continuing to get hotter. The little wings are almost red hot
now. Y.T. slides her goggles up onto her forehead and cups her hands around
her face to block out the surrounding lights, and sure enough she can see
them beginning to make a dull brownish glow, like an electric stove element
that has just been turned on. The grass underneath the Rat Thing is
beginning to smoke.
"Careful. Supposedly they have really nasty isotopes inside," Hiro says
behind her. He has come up a little closer now, but he's still hanging way
back.
"What's an isotope?"
"A radioactive substance that makes heat. That's its energy source."
"How do you turn it off?"
"You don't. It keeps making heat until it melts."
Y.T. is only a few feet away from the Rat Thing now, and she can feel
the heat on her checks. The wings have unfolded as far as they can go. At
their roots they are a bright yellow-orange, fading out through red and
brown to their delicate edges, which are still dark. The acrid smoke of the
burning grass obscures some of the details.
She thinks: The edges of the wings look like something I've seen
before. They look like the thin metal vanes that run up the outside of a
window air conditioner, the ones that you can write your name in by mashing
them down with your finger.
Or like the radiator on a car. The fan blows air over the radiator to
cool off the engine.
"It's got radiators," she says. "The Rat Thing has got radiators to
cool off." She's gathering intel right at this very moment.
But it's not cooling off. It's just getting hotter.
Y.T. surfs through traffic jams for a living. That's her economic
niche: beating the traffic. And she knows that a car doesn't boil over when
it is speeding down an open freeway. It boils over when it is stopped in
traffic. Because when it sits still, not enough air is being blown over the
radiator.
That's what's happening to the Rat Thing right now. It has to keep
moving, keep forcing air over its radiators, or else it overheats and melts
down.
"Cool," she says. "I wonder if it's going to blow up or what."
The body converges to a sharp nose. In the front it bends down sharply,
and there is a black glass canopy, raked sharply like the windshield of a
fighter plane. If the Rat Thing has eyes, this is where it looks out.
Under that, where the jaw should be are the remains of some kind of
mechanical stuff that has been mostly blown off by the explosion of the
grenade.
The black glass windshield - or facemask, or whatever you call it - has
a hole blown through it. Big enough that Y.T. could put her hand through. On
the other side of that hole, it's dark and she can't see much, especially so
close to the bright orange glare coming from the radiators. But she can see
that red stuff is coming out from inside. And it ain't no Dexron II. The Rat
Thing is hurt and it's bleeding.
"This thing is real," she says. "It's got blood in its veins." She's
thinking: This is intel. This is intel. I can make money off this with my
pardner - my pod - Hiro.
Then she thinks: The poor thing is burning itself alive.
"Don't do it. Don't touch it, Y.T.," Hiro says.
She steps right up to it, flips her goggles down to protect her face
from the heat. The Rat Thing's legs stop their spasmodic movements, as
though waiting for her.
She bends down and grabs its front legs. They react, tightening their
pushrod muscles against the pull of her hands. It's exactly like grabbing a
dog by the front legs and asking it to dance. This thing is alive. It reacts
to her. She knows.
She looks up at Hiro, just to make sure he's taking this all in. He is.
"Jerk!" she says. "I stick my neck out and say I want to be your
partner, and you say you want to think about it? What's your problem, I'm
not good enough to work with you?"
She leans back and begins dragging the Rat Thing backward across the
lawngrid. It's incredibly light. No wonder it can run so fast. She could
pick it up, if she felt like burning herself alive.
As she drags it backward toward the doggie door, it brands a blackened,
smoking trail into the lawngrid. She can see steam rising up out of her
coverall, old sweat and stuff boiling out of the fabric. She's small enough
to fit through the doggie door - another thing she can do and Hiro can't .
Usually these things are locked, she's tried to mess with them. But this one
is opened.
Inside, the franchise is bright, white, robot-polished floors. A few
feet from the doggie door is what looks like a black washing machine. This
is the Rat Thing's hutch, where it lurks in darkness and privacy, waiting
for a job to do. It is wired into the franchise by a thick cable coming out
of the wall. Right now, the hutch's door is hanging open, which is another
thing she's never seen before. And steam is rolling out from inside of it.
Not steam. Cold stuff. Like when you open your freezer door on a humid
day.
She pushes the Rat Thing into its hutch. Some kind of cold liquid
sprays out of all the walls and bursts into steam before it even reaches the
Rat Thing's body, and the steam comes blasting out the front of the hutch so
powerfully that it knocks her on her ass.
The long tail is strung out the front of the hutch, across the floor,
and out through the doggie door. She picks up part of it, the sharp
machine-tooled edges of its vertebrae pinching her gloves.
Suddenly it tenses, comes alive, vibrates for a second. She jerks her
hands back. The tail shoots back inside the hutch like a rubber band
snapping. She can't even see it move. Then the hutch door slams shut. A
janitor robot, a Hoover with a brain, hums out of another doorway to clean
the long streaks of blood off the floor.
Above her, hanging on the foyer wall facing the main entrance, is a
framed poster with a garland of well-browned jasmine blossoms hung around
it. It consists of a photo of the wildly grinning Mr. Lee, with the usual
statement underneath:
It is my pleasure to welcome all quality folks to visiting of Hong
Kong. Whether seriously in business or on a fun-loving hijink, make yourself
totally homely in this meager environment. If any aspect is not utterly
harmonious, gratefully bring it to my notice and I shall strive to earn your
satisfaction.
We of Greater Hong Kong take many prides in our tiny nation's
extravagant growth. The ones who saw our isle as a morsel of Red China's
pleasure have struck their faces in keen astonishment to see many great
so-called powers of the olden guard reel in dismay before our leaping
strides and charged-up hustling, freewheeling idiom of high-tech personal
accomplishment and betterment of all peoples. The potentials of all ethnic
races and anthropologies to merge under a banner of the Three Principles to
follow
1. Information, information, information!
2. Totally fair marketeering!
3. Strict ecology!
have been peerless in the history of economic strife.
Who would disdain to subscribe under this flowing banner? If you have
not attained your Hong Kong citizenship, apply for a passport now! In this
month, the usual fee of HK$100 will be kindly neglected. Fill out a coupon
(below) now. If coupons are lacking, dial 1-800-HONG KONG instantly to apply
from the help of our wizened operators.
Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong is a private, wholly extraterritorial,
sovereign, quasi-national entity not recognized by any other nationalities
and in no way affiliated with the former Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which is
part of the People's Republic of China. The People's Republic of China
admits or accepts no responsibility for Mr. Lee, the Government of Greater
Hong Kong, or any of the citizens thereof, or for any violations of local
law, personal injury, or property damage occurring in territories,
buildings, municipalities, institutions, or real estate owned, occupied, or
claimed by Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong.
Join us instantly!
Your enterprising partner,
Mr. Lee
Back in his cool little house, Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 is
howling. Outside in the yard, it was very hot and he felt bad. Whenever he
is out in the yard, he gets hot unless he keeps running. When he got hurt
and had to lie down for a long time, he felt hotter than he had ever been
before.
Now he doesn't feel hot anymore. But he is still hurt. He is howling
his injured howl. He is telling all the neighbor doggies that he needs help.
They feel sad and upset and repeat his howl and pass it along to all the
rest of the doggies.
Soon he hears the vet's car approaching. The nice vet will come and
make him feel better.
He starts barking again. He is telling all the other doggies about how
the bad strangers came and hurt him. And how hot it was out in the yard when
he had to lie down. And how the nice girl helped him and took him back to
his cool house.
Right in front of the Hong Kong franchise, Y.T. notices a black Town
Car that has been sitting there for a while. She doesn't have to see the
plates to know it's Mafia. Only the Mafia drives cars like that. The windows
are blackened, but she knows someone's in there keeping an eye on her. How
do they do it? You see these Town Cars everywhere, but you never see them
move, never see them get anyplace. She's not even sure they have engines in
them.
"Okay. Sorry," Hiro says. "I keep my own thing going, but we have a
partnership for any intel you can dig up. Fifty-fifty split."
"Deal," she says, climbing onto her plank.
"Call me anytime. You have my card."
"Hey, that reminds me. Your card said you're into the three Ms of
software."
"Yeah. Music, movies, and microcode."
"You heard of Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns?"
"No. Is that a band?"
"Yeah. It's the greatest band. You should check it out, homeboy, it's
going to be the next big thing."
She coasts out onto the road and poons an Audi with Blooming Greens
license plates. It ought to take her home. Mom's probably in bed, pretending
to sleep, being worried.
Half a block from the entrance to Blooming Greens, she unpoons the Audi
and coasts into a McDonald's. She goes into the ladies'. It has a hung
ceiling. She stands on the seat of the third toilet, pushes up one of the
ceiling tiles, moves it aside. A cotton sleeve tumbles out, bearing a
delicate floral print. She pulls on it and hauls down the whole ensemble,
the blouse, the pleated skirt, underwear from Vicky's, the leather shoes,
the necklace and earrings, even a fucking purse. She takes off her RadiKS
coverall, wads it up, sticks it into the ceiling, replaces the loose tile.
Then she puts on the ensemble.
Now she looks just like she did when she had breakfast with Mom this
morning.
She carries her plank down the street to Blooming Greens, where it's
legal to carry them but not to put them on the 'crete. She flashes her
passport at the border post, walks a quarter of a mile down crisp new
sidewalks, and up to the house where the porch light is on.
Mom's sitting in the den, in front of her computer, as usual. Mom works
for the Feds. Feds don't make much money, but they have to work hard, to
show their loyalty.
Y.T. goes in and looks at her mother, who has slumped down in her
chair, put her hands around her face almost like she's vogueing, put bare
stockinged feet up. She wears these awful cheap Fed stockings that are like
scouring cloth, and when she walks, her thighs rub together underneath her
skirt and make a rasping noise. There is a heavy-duty Ziploc bag on the
table, full of water that used to be ice a couple of hours ago. Y.T. looks
at Mom's left arm. She has rolled up her sleeve to expose the fresh bruise,
just above her elbow, where they put the blood-pressure cuff. Weekly Fed
polygraph test.
"Is that you?" Mom shouts, not realizing that Y.T.'s in the room.
Y.T. retreats into the kitchen so she won't surprise her mother. "Yeah,
Mom," she shouts back. "How was your day?"
"I'm tired," Mom says. It's what she always says.
Y.T. pinches a beer from the fridge and starts running a hot bath. It
makes a roaring sound that relaxes her, like the white-noise generator on
Morn's nightstand.
The Nipponese businessman lies cut in segments on The Black Sun's
floor. Surprisingly (he looks so real when he's in one piece), no flesh,
blood, or organs are visible through the new crossections that Hiro's sword
made through his body. He is nothing more than a thin shell of epidermis, an
incredibly complex inflatable doll. But the air does not rush out of him, he
fails to collapse, and you can look into the aperture of a sword cut and
see, instead of bones and meat, the back of the skin on the other side.
It breaks the metaphor. The avatar is not acting like a real body. It
reminds all The Black Sun's patrons that they are living in a fantasy world.
People hate to be reminded of this.
When Hiro wrote The Black Sun's sword-fighting algorithms - code that
was later picked up and adopted by the entire Metaverse - he discovered that
there was no good way to handle the aftermath. Avatars are not supposed to
die. Not supposed to fall apart. The creators of the Metaverse had not been
morbid enough to foresee a demand for this kind of thing. But the whole
point of a sword fight is to cut someone up and kill them. So Hiro had to
kludge something together, in order that the Metaverse would not, over time,
become littered with inert, dismembered avatars that never decayed.
So the first thing that happens, when someone loses a sword fight, is
that his computer gets disconnected from the global network that is the
Metaverse. He gets chucked right out of the system. It is the closest
simulation of death that the Metaverse can offer, but all it really does is
cause the user a lot of annoyance.
Furthermore, the user finds that he can't get back into the Metaverse
for a few minutes. He can't log back on. This is because his avatar,
dismembered, is still in the Metaverse, and it's a rule that your avatar
can't exist in two places at once. So the user can't get back in until his
avatar has been disposed of.
Disposal of hacked-up avatars is taken care of by Graveyard Daemons, a
new Metaverse feature that Hiro had to invent. They are small lithe persons
swathed in black, like ninjas, not even their eyes showing. They are quiet
and efficient. Even as Hiro is stepping back from the hacked-up body of his
former opponent, they are emerging from invisible trapdoors in The Black
Sun's floor, climbing up out of the netherworld, converging on the fallen
businessman. Within seconds, they have stashed the body parts into black
bags. Then they climb back down through their secret trapdoors and vanish
into hidden tunnels beneath The Black Sun's floor. A couple of curious
patrons try to follow them, try to pry open the trapdoors, but their
avatars' fingers find nothing but smooth matte black. The tunnel system is
accessible only to the Graveyard Daemons.
And, incidentally, to Hiro. But he rarely uses it.
The Graveyard Daemons will take the avatar to the Pyre, an eternal,
underground bonfire beneath the center of The Black Sun, and burn it. As
soon as the flames consume the avatar, it will vanish from the Metaverse,
and then its owner will be able to sign on as usual, creating a new avatar
to run around in. But, hopefully, he will be more cautious and polite the
next time around.
Hiro looks up into the circle of applauding, whistling, and cheering
avatars and notes that they are fading out. The entire Black Sun now looks
like it is being projected on gauze. On the other side of that gauze, bright
lights shine through, overwhelming the image. Then it disappears entirely.
He peels off his goggles. and finds himself standing in the parking lot
of the U-Stor-It, holding a naked katana.
The sun has just gone down. A couple of dozen people are standing
around him at a great distance, shielding themselves behind parked cars,
awaiting his next move. Most of them are pretty scared, but a few of them
are just plain excited.
Vitaly Chernobyl is standing in the open door of their 20-by-30. His
hairdo is backlighted. It has been petrified by means of egg whites and
other proteins. These substances refract the light and throw off tiny little
spectral fragments, a cluster-bombed rainbow. Right now, a miniature image
of The Black Sun is being projected onto Vitaly's ass by Hiro's computer. He
is rocking unsteadily from foot to foot, as though standing on both of them
at the same time is too complicated to deal with this early in the day, and
he hasn't decided which one to use.
"You're blocking me," Hiro says.
"It's time to go," Vitaly says.
"You're telling me it's time to go? I've been waiting for you to wake
up for an hour."
As Hiro approaches, Vitaly watches his sword uncertainly. Vitaly's eyes
are dry and red, and on his lower lip he is sporting a chancre the size of a
tangerine.
"Did you win your sword fight?"
"Of course I won the fucking sword fight," Hiro says. "I'm the greatest
sword fighter in the world."
"And you wrote the software."
"Yeah. That, too," Hiro says.
After Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns arrived in Long Beach on one
of those hijacked ex-Soviet refugee freighters, they fanned out across
southern California looking for expanses of reinforced concrete that were as
vast and barren as the ones they had left behind in Kiev. They weren't
homesick. They needed such environments in order to practice their art.
The L.A. River was a natural site. And there were plenty of nice
overpasses. All they had to do was follow skateboarders to the secret places
they had long since discovered. Thrashers and nuclear fuzz-grunge
collectives thrive in the same environment. That's where Vitaly and Hiro are
going right now.
Vitaly has a really old VW Vanagon, the kind with a pop-top that turns
it into a makeshift camper. He used to live in it, staying on the street or
in various Snooze 'n' Cruise franchises, until he met up with Hiro
Protagonist. Now, the ownership of the Vanagon is subject to dispute,
because Vitaly owes Hiro more money than it is technically worth. So they
share it.
They drive the Vanagon around to the other side of the U-Stor-It,
honking the horn and flashing the lights in order to shoo a hundred little
kids away from the loading dock. It's not a playground, kids.
They pick their way down a broad corridor, excusing themselves every
inch of the way as they step over little Mayan encampments and Buddhist
shrines and white trash stoned on Vertigo, Apple Pie, Fuzzy Buzzy, Narthex,
Mustard, and the like. The floor needs sweeping: used syringes, crack vials,
charred spoons, pipe stems. There are also many little tubes, about thumb
sized, transparent plastic with a red cap on one end. They might be crack
vials, but the caps are still on them, and pipeheads wouldn't be so
fastidious as to replace the lid on an empty vial. It must be something new
Hiro hasn't heard of before, the McDonald's styrofoam burger box of drug
containers.
They push through a fire door into another section of the U-Stor-It,
which looks the same as the last one (everything looks the same in America,
there are no transitions now). Vitaly owns the third locker on the right, a
puny 5-by-10 that he is actually using for its intended purpose: storage.
Vitaly steps up to the door and commences trying to remember the
combination to the padlock, which involves a certain amount of random
guessing. Finally, the lock snaps and pops open. Vitaly shoots the bolt and
swings the door open, sweeping a clean half-circle through the drug
paraphernalia. Most of the 5-by-10 is occupied by a couple of large
four-wheeled flatbed handcarts piled high with speakers and amps.
Hiro and Vitaly wheel the carts down to the loading dock, put the stuff
into the Vanagon, and then return the empty carts to the 5-by-10.
Technically, the carts are community property, but no one believes that.
The drive to the scene of the concert is long, made longer by the fact
that Vitaly, rejecting the technocentric L.A. view of the universe in which
Speed is God, likes to stay on the surface and drive at about thirty-five
miles per hour. Traffic is not great, either. So Hiro jacks his computer
into the cigarette lighter and goggles into the Metaverse.
He is no longer connected to the network by a fiberoptic cable, and so
all his communication with the outside world has to take place via radio
waves, which are much slower and less reliable. Going into The Black Sun
would not be practical - it would look and sound terrible, and the other
patrons would look at him as if he were some kind of black-and-white person.
But there's no problem with going into his office, because that's generated
within the guts of his computer, which is sitting on his lap; he doesn't
need any communication with the outside world for that.
He materializes in his office, in his nice little house in the old
hacker neighborhood just off the Street. It is all quite Nipponese: tatami
mats cover the floor. His desk is a great, ruddy slab of rough-sawn
mahogany. Silvery cloud-light filters through ricepaper walls. A panel in
front of him slides open to reveal a garden, complete with babbling brook
and steelhead trout jumping out from time to time to grab flies. Technically
speaking, the pond should be full of carp, but Hiro is American enough to
think of carp as inedible dinosaurs that sit on the bottom and eat sewage.
There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a
perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's
length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it. It
is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface
that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns
- all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite
surveillance stuff.
Hiro has been thinking that in a few years, if he does really well in
the intel biz, maybe he will make enough money to subscribe to Earth and get
this thing in his office. Now it is suddenly here, free of charge. The only
explanation he can come up with is that Juanita must have given it to him.
But first things first. The Babel/Infocalypse card is still in his
avatar's pocket. He takes it out.
One of the rice-paper panels that make up the walls of his office
slides open. On the other side of it, Hiro can see a large, dimly lit room
that wasn't there before; apparently Juanita came in and made a major
addition to his house as well. A man walks into the office.
The Librarian daemon looks like a pleasant, fiftyish, silver-haired,
bearded man with bright blue eyes, wearing a V-neck sweater over a work
shirt, with a coarsely woven, tweedy-looking wool tie. The tie is loosened,
the sleeves pushed up. Even though he's just a piece of software, he has
reason to be cheerful; he can move through the nearly infinite stacks of
information in the Library with the agility of a spider dancing across a
vast web of crossreferences. The Librarian is the only piece of CIC software
that costs even more than Earth; the only thing he can't do is think.
"Yes, sir," the Librarian says. He is eager without being obnoxiously
chipper; he clasps his hands behind his back, rocks forward slightly on the
balls of his feet, raises his eyebrows expectantly over his half-glasses.
"Babel's a city in Babylon, right?"
"It was a legendary city," the Librarian says. "Babel is a Biblical
term for Babylon. The word is Semitic; Bab means gate and El means God, so
Babel means 'Gate of God.' But it is probably also somewhat onomatopoeic,
imitating someone who speaks in an incomprehensible tongue. The Bible is
full of puns."
"They built a tower to Heaven and God knocked it down."
"This is an anthology of common misconceptions. God did not do anything
to the Tower itself. 'And the LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and
they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will
do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not
understand one another's speech." So the LORD scattered them abroad from
there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.
Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the
language of all the earth.' Genesis 11:6-9, Revised Standard Version."
"So the tower wasn't knocked down. It just went on hiatus."
"Correct. It was not knocked down."
"But that's bogus."
"Bogus?"
"Provably false. Juanita believes that nothing is provably true or
provably false in the Bible. Because of it's provably false, then the Bible
is a lie, and if it's provably true, then the existence of God is proven and
there's no room for faith. The Babel story is provably false, because if
they built a tower to Heaven and God didn't knock it down, then it would
still be around somewhere, or at least a visible remnant of it."
"In assuming that it was very tall, you are relying on an obsolete
reading. The tower is described, literally, as 'its top with the heavens.'
For many centuries, this was interpreted to mean that its top was so high
that it was in the heavens. But in the last century or so, as actual
Babylonian ziggurats have been excavated, astrological diagrams - pictures
of the heavens - have been found inscribed into their tops."
"Oh. Okay, so the real story is that a tower was built with heavenly
diagrams carved into its top. Which is far more plausible than a tower that
reaches to the heavens."
"More than plausible," the Librarian reminds him. "Such structures have
actually been found."
"Anyway, you're saying that when God got angry and came down on them,
the tower itself wasn't affected. But they had to stop building the tower
because of an informational disaster - they couldn't talk to each other."
"'Disaster' is an astrological term meaning 'bad star,"' the Librarian
points out. "Sorry - but due to my internal structure, I'm a sucker for non
sequiturs."
"That's okay, really," Hiro says. "You're a pretty decent piece of
ware. Who wrote you, anyway?"
"For the most part I write myself," the Librarian says. "That is, I
have the innate ability to learn from experience. But this ability was
originally coded into me by my creator."
"Who wrote you? Maybe I know him," Hiro says. "I know a lot of
hackers."
"I was not coded by a professional hacker, per se, but by a researcher
at the Library of Congress who taught himself how to code," the Librarian
says. "He devoted himself to the common problem of sifting through vast
amounts of irrelevant detail in order to find significant gems of
information. His name was Dr. Emanuel Lagos."
"I've heard the name," Hiro says. "So he was kind of a meta-librarian.
That's funny, I guessed he was one of those old CIA spooks who hangs around
in the CIC."
"He never worked with the CIA."
"Okay. Let's get some work done. Look up every piece of free
information in the Library that contains L. Bob Rife and arrange it in
chronological order. The emphasis here is on free.''
"Television and newspapers, yes, sir. One moment, sir," the Librarian
says. He turns around and exits on crepe soles. Hiro turns his attention to
Earth.
The level of detail is fantastic. The resolution, the clarity, just the
look of it, tells Hiro, or anyone else who knows computers, that this piece
of software is some heavy shit.
It's not just continents and oceans. It looks exactly like the earth
would look from a point in geosynchronous orbit directly above L.A.,
complete with weather systems - vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering
just above the surface of the globe, casting gray shadows on the oceans -
and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea. Half of the globe
is illuminated by sunlight, and half is dark. The terminator - the line
between night and day - has just swept across L.A. and is now creeping
across the Pacific, off to the west.
Everything is going in slow motion. Hiro can see the clouds change
shape if he watches them long enough. Looks like a clear night on the East
Coast.
Something catches his attention, moving rapidly over the surface of the
globe. He thinks it must be a gnat. But there are no gnats in the Metaverse.
He tries to focus on it. The computer, bouncing low-powered lasers off his
cornea, senses this change in emphasis, and then Hiro gasps as he seems to
plunge downward toward the globe, like a space-walking astronaut who has
just fallen out of his orbital groove. When he finally gets it under
control, he's just a few hundred miles above the earth, looking down at a
solid bank of clouds, and he can see the gnat gliding along below him. It's
a low-flying CIC satellite, swinging north to south in a polar orbit.
"Your information, sir," the Librarian says.
Hiro startles and glances up. Earth swings down and out of his field of
view and there is the Librarian, standing in front of the desk, holding out
a hypercard. Like any librarian in Reality, this daemon can move around
without audible footfalls.
"Can you make a little more noise when you walk? I'm easily startled,"
Hiro says.
"It is done, sir. My apologies."
Hiro reaches out for the hypercard. The Librarian takes half a step
forward and leans toward him. This time, his foot makes a soft noise on the
tatami mat, and Hiro can hear the white noise of his trousers sliding over
his leg.
Hiro takes the hypercard and looks at it. The front is labeled
Results of Library search on:
Rife, Lawrence Robert, 1948
He flips the card over. The back is divided into several dozen
fingemail-sized icons. Some of them are little snapshots of the front pages
of newspapers. Many of them are colorful, glowing rectangles: miniature
television screens showing live video.
"That's impossible," Hiro says. "I'm sitting in a VW van, okay? I'm
jacked in over a cellular link. You couldn't have moved that much video into
my system that fast."
"It was not necessary to move anything," the Librarian says. "All
existing video on L. Bob Rife was collected by Dr. Lagos and placed in the
Babel/Infocalypse stack, which you have in your system."
"Oh."
Hiro stares at the miniature TV in the upper left comer of the card. It
zooms toward him until it's about the size of a twelve-inch low-def
television set at arms' length. Then the video image begins to play. It's
very poor eight-millimeter film footage of a high school football game in
the sixties. No soundtrack.
"What is this game?"
The Librarian says, "Odessa, Texas, 1965. L. Bob Rife is a fullback,
number eight in the dark uniform."
"This is more detail than I need. Can you summarize some of these
swordsmen of all time are shown along with their photographs. Beneath is a
scrolling list of numbers and names, starting with #11. He can scroll down
the list if he wants to find his own ranking. The screen helpfully informs
him that he is currently ranked number 863 out of 890 people who have ever
participated in a sword fight in The Black Sun.
Number One, the name and the photograph on the top of the list, belongs
to Hiroaki Protagonist.
Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a
pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees,
dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly
through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them.
He has a little yard all to himself. It has a fence around it. He knows
he can't jump over the fence. He's never actually tried to jump it, because
he knows be can't. He doesn't go into the yard unless he has to. It's hot
out there.
He has an important job: Protect the yard. Sometimes people come in and
out of the yard. Most of the time, they are good people, and he doesn't
bother them. He doesn't know why they are good people. He just knows it.
Sometimes they are bad people, and he has to do bad things to them to make
them go away. This is fitting and proper.
Out in the world beyond his yard, there are other yards with other
doggies just like him. These aren't nasty dogs. They are all his friends.
The closest neighbor doggie is far away, farther than he can see. But
he can hear this doggie bark sometimes, when a bad person approaches his
yard. He can hear other neighbor doggies, too, a whole pack of them
stretching off into the distance, in all directions. He belongs to a big
pack of nice doggies.
He and the other nice doggies bark whenever a stranger comes into their
yard, or even near it. The stranger doesn't hear him, but all the other
doggies in the pack do. If they live nearby, they get excited. They wake up
and get ready to do bad things to that stranger if he should try to come
into their yard.
When a neighbor doggie barks at a stranger, pictures and sounds and
smells come into his mind along with the bark. He suddenly knows what that
stranger looks like. What he smells like. How he sounds. Then, if that
stranger should come anywhere near his yard, he will recognize him. He will
help spread the bark along to other nice doggies so that the entire pack can
all be prepared to fight the stranger.
Tonight, Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 is barking. He is not just
passing some other doggie's bark to the pack. He is barking because he feels
very excited about things that are happening in his yard.
First, two people come in. This made him excited because they came in
very fast. Their hearts are beating quickly and they are sweating and they
smell scared. He looked at these two people to see if they were carrying bad
things.
The little one is carrying things that are a little naughty, but not
really bad. The big one is carrying some pretty bad things. But he knows,
somehow, that the big one is okay. He belongs in this yard. He is not a
stranger; he lives here. And the little one is his guest.
Still, he senses there is something exciting happening. He starts to
bark. The people in the yard don't hear him barking. But all the other nice
doggies in the pack, far away, hear him, and when they do, they see these
two scared, nice people, smell them, and hear them.
Then more people come into his yard. They are also excited; he can hear
their hearts beating. Saliva floods his mouth as he smells the hot salty
blood pumping through their arteries. These people are excited and angry and
just a little bit scared. They don't live here; they are strangers. He
doesn't like strangers very much.
He looks at them and sees that they are carrying three revolvers, a .38
and two .357 magnums; that the .38 is loaded with hollow-points, one of the
.357s is loaded with Teflon bullets and has also been cocked; and that the
pump shotgun is loaded with buckshot and already has a shell chambered, plus
four more shells in its magazine.
The things that the strangers are carrying are bad. Scary things. He
gets excited. He gets angry. He gets a little bit scared, but he likes being
scared, to him it is the same thing as being excited. Really, he has only
two emotions: sleeping and adrenaline overdrive.
The bad stranger with the shotgun is raising his weapon!
It is an utterly terrible thing. A lot of bad, excited strangers are
invading his yard with evil things, come to hurt the nice visitors.
He barely has time to bark out a warning to the other nice doggies
before he launches himself from his doghouse, propelled on a white-hot jet
of pure, feral emotion.
In Y.T.'s peripheral vision she sees a brief flash, hears a clunking
noise. She looks over in that direction to see that the source of the light
is a sort of doggie door built into the side of the Hong Kong franchise. The
doggie door has in the very recent past been slammed open by something
coming from the inside, headed for the lawngrid with the speed and
determination of a howitzer shell.
As all of this registers on Y.T.'s mind, she begins to hear the
shouting of the jeeks. This shouting is not angry and not scared either. No
one has had time to get scared yet. It is the shouting of someone who has
just had a bucket of ice water dumped over his head.
This shouting is still getting underway, she is still turning her head
to look at the jeeks, when the doggie door emits another burst of light. Her
eyes flick that-a-way; she thinks that she saw something, a long round
shadow cross-sectioned in the light for a blurry instant as the door was
being slammed inward. But when her eyes focus on it, she sees nothing except
the oscillating door, same as before. These are the only impressions left on
her mind, except for one more detail: a train of sparks that danced across
the lawngrid from the doggie door to the jeeks and back again during this
one-second event, like a skyrocket glancing across the lot.
People say that the Rat Thing runs on four legs. Perhaps the claws on
its robot legs made those sparks as they were digging into the lawngrid for
traction.
The jeeks are all in motion. Some of them have just been body-slammed
into the lawngrid and are still bouncing and rolling. Others are still in
mid-collapse. They are unarmed. They are reaching to grip their gun hands
with the opposite hands, still hollering, though now their voices are tinged
with a certain amount of fear. One of them has had his trousers torn from
the waistband all the way down to the ankle, and a strip of fabric is
trailing out across the lot, as though he had his pocket picked by something
that was in too much of a hurry to let go of the actual pocket before it
left. Maybe this guy had a knife in his pocket.
There is no blood anywhere. The Rat Thing is precise. Still they hold
their hands and holler. Maybe it's true what they say, that the Rat Thing
gives you an electrical shock when it wants you to let go of something.
"Look out," she hears herself saying, "they got guns."
Hiro turns and grins at her. His teeth are very white and straight; he
has a sharp grin, a carnivore's grin. "No, they don't. Guns are illegal in
Hong Kong, remember?"
"They had guns just a second ago," Y.T. says, bulging her eyes and
shaking her head.
"The Rat Thing has them now," Hiro says.
The jeeks all decide they better leave. They run out and get into their
taxis and take off, tires asqueal.
Y.T. backs the taxi on its rims out over the STD and into the street,
where she grindingly parallel parks it. She goes back into the Hong Kong
franchise, a nebula of aromatic freshness trailing behind her like the tail
of a comet. She is thinking, oddly enough, about what it would be like to
climb into the back of the car with Hiro Protagonist for a while. Pretty
nice, probably. But she'd have to take out the dentata, and this isn't the
place. Besides, anyone decent enough to come help her escape from The Clink
probably has some kind of scruples about boffing fifteen-year-old girls.
"That was nice of you," he says, nodding at the parked taxi. "Are you
going to pay for his tires, too?"
"No. Are you?"
"I'm having some cash flow problems."
She stands there in the middle of the Hong Kong lawngrid. They look
each other up and down, carefully.
"I called my boyfriend. But he flaked out on me," she says.
"Another thrasher?"
"The same."
"You made the same mistake I made once," he says.
"What's that?"
"Mixing business with pleasure. Going out with a colleague. It gets
very confusing."
"Yeah. I see what you mean." She's not exactly sure what a colleague
is.
"I was thinking that we should be partners," she says.
She's expecting him to laugh at her. But instead he grins and nods his
head slightly. "The same thing occurred to me. But I'd have to think about
how it would work."
She is astounded that he would actually be thinking this. Then she gets
the sap factor under control and realizes: He's waffling. Which means he's
probably lying. This is probably going to end with him trying to get her
into bed.
"I gotta go," she says. "Gotta get home."
Now we'll see how fast he loses interest in the partnership concept.
She turns her back on him.
Suddenly, they are impaled on Hong Kong robot spotlights one more time.
Y.T. feels a sharp bruising pain in her ribs, as though someone punched
her. But it wasn't Hiro. He is an unpredictable freak who carries swords,
but she can smell chick-punchers a mile off.
"Ow!" she says, twisting away from the impact. She looks down to see a
small heavy object bouncing on the ground at their feet. Out in the street,
an ancient taxi squeals its tires, getting the hell out of there. A jeek is
hanging out the rear window, shaking his fist at them. He must have thrown a
rock at her.
Except it's not a rock. The heavy thing at her feet, the thing that
just bounced off of Y.T.'s ribcage, is a hand grenade. She stares for a
second, recognizing it, a well-known cartoon icon made real.
Then her feet get knocked out from under her, too fast really to hurt.
And just when she's getting reoriented to that, there is a painfully loud
bang from another part of the parking lot.
And then everything finally stops long enough to be seen and
understood.
The Rat Thing has stopped. Which they never do. It's part of their
mystery that you never get to see them, they move so fast. No one knows what
they look like.
No one except for Y.T. and Hiro, now.
It's bigger than she imagined. The body is Rottweiler-sized, segmented
into overlapping hard plates like those of a rhinoceros. The legs are long,
curled way up to deliver power, like a cheetah's. It must be the tail that
makes people refer to it as a Rat Thing, because that's the only ratlike
part-incredibly long and flexible. But it looks like a rat's tail with the
flesh eaten away by acid, because it just consists of segments, hundreds of
them neatly plugged together, like vertebrae.
"Jesus H. Christ!" Hiro says. And she knows, from that, that he's never
seen one either.
Right now, the tail is coiled and piled around on top of the Rat
Thing's body like a rope that has fallen out of a tree. Parts of it are
trying to move, other parts of it look dead and inert. The legs are moving
one by one, spasmodically, not acting in concert. The whole thing just looks
terribly wrong, like footage of an airplane that has had its tail blown off,
trying to maneuver for a landing. Even someone who is not an engineer can
see that it has gone all perverse and twisted.
The tail writhes and lashes like a snake, uncoils itself, rises up off
the Rat Thing's body, gets out of the way of its legs. But still the legs
have problems; it can't get itself up
"Y.T.," Hiro is saying, "don't."
She does. One footstep at a time, she approaches the Rat Thing.
"It's dangerous, in case you hadn't noticed," Hiro says, following her
a few paces behind. "They say it has biological components."
"Biological components?"
"Animal parts. So it might be unpredictable."
She likes animals. She keeps walking.
She's seeing it better now. It's not all armor and muscle. A lot of it
actually looks kind of flimsy. It has short stubby winglike things
projecting from its body: A big one from each shoulder and a row of smaller
ones down the length of its spine, like on a stegosaurus. Her Knight Visions
tell her that these things are hot enough to bake pizzas on. As she
approaches, they seem to unfold and grow.
They are blooming like flowers in an educational film, spreading and
unfolding to reveal a fine complicated internal structure that has been all
collapsed together inside. Each stubby wing splits off into little miniature
copies of itself, and each of those in turn splits off into more smaller
copies and so on forever. The smallest ones are just tiny bits of foil, so
small that, from a distance, the edges look fuzzy.
It is continuing to get hotter. The little wings are almost red hot
now. Y.T. slides her goggles up onto her forehead and cups her hands around
her face to block out the surrounding lights, and sure enough she can see
them beginning to make a dull brownish glow, like an electric stove element
that has just been turned on. The grass underneath the Rat Thing is
beginning to smoke.
"Careful. Supposedly they have really nasty isotopes inside," Hiro says
behind her. He has come up a little closer now, but he's still hanging way
back.
"What's an isotope?"
"A radioactive substance that makes heat. That's its energy source."
"How do you turn it off?"
"You don't. It keeps making heat until it melts."
Y.T. is only a few feet away from the Rat Thing now, and she can feel
the heat on her checks. The wings have unfolded as far as they can go. At
their roots they are a bright yellow-orange, fading out through red and
brown to their delicate edges, which are still dark. The acrid smoke of the
burning grass obscures some of the details.
She thinks: The edges of the wings look like something I've seen
before. They look like the thin metal vanes that run up the outside of a
window air conditioner, the ones that you can write your name in by mashing
them down with your finger.
Or like the radiator on a car. The fan blows air over the radiator to
cool off the engine.
"It's got radiators," she says. "The Rat Thing has got radiators to
cool off." She's gathering intel right at this very moment.
But it's not cooling off. It's just getting hotter.
Y.T. surfs through traffic jams for a living. That's her economic
niche: beating the traffic. And she knows that a car doesn't boil over when
it is speeding down an open freeway. It boils over when it is stopped in
traffic. Because when it sits still, not enough air is being blown over the
radiator.
That's what's happening to the Rat Thing right now. It has to keep
moving, keep forcing air over its radiators, or else it overheats and melts
down.
"Cool," she says. "I wonder if it's going to blow up or what."
The body converges to a sharp nose. In the front it bends down sharply,
and there is a black glass canopy, raked sharply like the windshield of a
fighter plane. If the Rat Thing has eyes, this is where it looks out.
Under that, where the jaw should be are the remains of some kind of
mechanical stuff that has been mostly blown off by the explosion of the
grenade.
The black glass windshield - or facemask, or whatever you call it - has
a hole blown through it. Big enough that Y.T. could put her hand through. On
the other side of that hole, it's dark and she can't see much, especially so
close to the bright orange glare coming from the radiators. But she can see
that red stuff is coming out from inside. And it ain't no Dexron II. The Rat
Thing is hurt and it's bleeding.
"This thing is real," she says. "It's got blood in its veins." She's
thinking: This is intel. This is intel. I can make money off this with my
pardner - my pod - Hiro.
Then she thinks: The poor thing is burning itself alive.
"Don't do it. Don't touch it, Y.T.," Hiro says.
She steps right up to it, flips her goggles down to protect her face
from the heat. The Rat Thing's legs stop their spasmodic movements, as
though waiting for her.
She bends down and grabs its front legs. They react, tightening their
pushrod muscles against the pull of her hands. It's exactly like grabbing a
dog by the front legs and asking it to dance. This thing is alive. It reacts
to her. She knows.
She looks up at Hiro, just to make sure he's taking this all in. He is.
"Jerk!" she says. "I stick my neck out and say I want to be your
partner, and you say you want to think about it? What's your problem, I'm
not good enough to work with you?"
She leans back and begins dragging the Rat Thing backward across the
lawngrid. It's incredibly light. No wonder it can run so fast. She could
pick it up, if she felt like burning herself alive.
As she drags it backward toward the doggie door, it brands a blackened,
smoking trail into the lawngrid. She can see steam rising up out of her
coverall, old sweat and stuff boiling out of the fabric. She's small enough
to fit through the doggie door - another thing she can do and Hiro can't .
Usually these things are locked, she's tried to mess with them. But this one
is opened.
Inside, the franchise is bright, white, robot-polished floors. A few
feet from the doggie door is what looks like a black washing machine. This
is the Rat Thing's hutch, where it lurks in darkness and privacy, waiting
for a job to do. It is wired into the franchise by a thick cable coming out
of the wall. Right now, the hutch's door is hanging open, which is another
thing she's never seen before. And steam is rolling out from inside of it.
Not steam. Cold stuff. Like when you open your freezer door on a humid
day.
She pushes the Rat Thing into its hutch. Some kind of cold liquid
sprays out of all the walls and bursts into steam before it even reaches the
Rat Thing's body, and the steam comes blasting out the front of the hutch so
powerfully that it knocks her on her ass.
The long tail is strung out the front of the hutch, across the floor,
and out through the doggie door. She picks up part of it, the sharp
machine-tooled edges of its vertebrae pinching her gloves.
Suddenly it tenses, comes alive, vibrates for a second. She jerks her
hands back. The tail shoots back inside the hutch like a rubber band
snapping. She can't even see it move. Then the hutch door slams shut. A
janitor robot, a Hoover with a brain, hums out of another doorway to clean
the long streaks of blood off the floor.
Above her, hanging on the foyer wall facing the main entrance, is a
framed poster with a garland of well-browned jasmine blossoms hung around
it. It consists of a photo of the wildly grinning Mr. Lee, with the usual
statement underneath:
It is my pleasure to welcome all quality folks to visiting of Hong
Kong. Whether seriously in business or on a fun-loving hijink, make yourself
totally homely in this meager environment. If any aspect is not utterly
harmonious, gratefully bring it to my notice and I shall strive to earn your
satisfaction.
We of Greater Hong Kong take many prides in our tiny nation's
extravagant growth. The ones who saw our isle as a morsel of Red China's
pleasure have struck their faces in keen astonishment to see many great
so-called powers of the olden guard reel in dismay before our leaping
strides and charged-up hustling, freewheeling idiom of high-tech personal
accomplishment and betterment of all peoples. The potentials of all ethnic
races and anthropologies to merge under a banner of the Three Principles to
follow
1. Information, information, information!
2. Totally fair marketeering!
3. Strict ecology!
have been peerless in the history of economic strife.
Who would disdain to subscribe under this flowing banner? If you have
not attained your Hong Kong citizenship, apply for a passport now! In this
month, the usual fee of HK$100 will be kindly neglected. Fill out a coupon
(below) now. If coupons are lacking, dial 1-800-HONG KONG instantly to apply
from the help of our wizened operators.
Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong is a private, wholly extraterritorial,
sovereign, quasi-national entity not recognized by any other nationalities
and in no way affiliated with the former Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which is
part of the People's Republic of China. The People's Republic of China
admits or accepts no responsibility for Mr. Lee, the Government of Greater
Hong Kong, or any of the citizens thereof, or for any violations of local
law, personal injury, or property damage occurring in territories,
buildings, municipalities, institutions, or real estate owned, occupied, or
claimed by Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong.
Join us instantly!
Your enterprising partner,
Mr. Lee
Back in his cool little house, Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 is
howling. Outside in the yard, it was very hot and he felt bad. Whenever he
is out in the yard, he gets hot unless he keeps running. When he got hurt
and had to lie down for a long time, he felt hotter than he had ever been
before.
Now he doesn't feel hot anymore. But he is still hurt. He is howling
his injured howl. He is telling all the neighbor doggies that he needs help.
They feel sad and upset and repeat his howl and pass it along to all the
rest of the doggies.
Soon he hears the vet's car approaching. The nice vet will come and
make him feel better.
He starts barking again. He is telling all the other doggies about how
the bad strangers came and hurt him. And how hot it was out in the yard when
he had to lie down. And how the nice girl helped him and took him back to
his cool house.
Right in front of the Hong Kong franchise, Y.T. notices a black Town
Car that has been sitting there for a while. She doesn't have to see the
plates to know it's Mafia. Only the Mafia drives cars like that. The windows
are blackened, but she knows someone's in there keeping an eye on her. How
do they do it? You see these Town Cars everywhere, but you never see them
move, never see them get anyplace. She's not even sure they have engines in
them.
"Okay. Sorry," Hiro says. "I keep my own thing going, but we have a
partnership for any intel you can dig up. Fifty-fifty split."
"Deal," she says, climbing onto her plank.
"Call me anytime. You have my card."
"Hey, that reminds me. Your card said you're into the three Ms of
software."
"Yeah. Music, movies, and microcode."
"You heard of Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns?"
"No. Is that a band?"
"Yeah. It's the greatest band. You should check it out, homeboy, it's
going to be the next big thing."
She coasts out onto the road and poons an Audi with Blooming Greens
license plates. It ought to take her home. Mom's probably in bed, pretending
to sleep, being worried.
Half a block from the entrance to Blooming Greens, she unpoons the Audi
and coasts into a McDonald's. She goes into the ladies'. It has a hung
ceiling. She stands on the seat of the third toilet, pushes up one of the
ceiling tiles, moves it aside. A cotton sleeve tumbles out, bearing a
delicate floral print. She pulls on it and hauls down the whole ensemble,
the blouse, the pleated skirt, underwear from Vicky's, the leather shoes,
the necklace and earrings, even a fucking purse. She takes off her RadiKS
coverall, wads it up, sticks it into the ceiling, replaces the loose tile.
Then she puts on the ensemble.
Now she looks just like she did when she had breakfast with Mom this
morning.
She carries her plank down the street to Blooming Greens, where it's
legal to carry them but not to put them on the 'crete. She flashes her
passport at the border post, walks a quarter of a mile down crisp new
sidewalks, and up to the house where the porch light is on.
Mom's sitting in the den, in front of her computer, as usual. Mom works
for the Feds. Feds don't make much money, but they have to work hard, to
show their loyalty.
Y.T. goes in and looks at her mother, who has slumped down in her
chair, put her hands around her face almost like she's vogueing, put bare
stockinged feet up. She wears these awful cheap Fed stockings that are like
scouring cloth, and when she walks, her thighs rub together underneath her
skirt and make a rasping noise. There is a heavy-duty Ziploc bag on the
table, full of water that used to be ice a couple of hours ago. Y.T. looks
at Mom's left arm. She has rolled up her sleeve to expose the fresh bruise,
just above her elbow, where they put the blood-pressure cuff. Weekly Fed
polygraph test.
"Is that you?" Mom shouts, not realizing that Y.T.'s in the room.
Y.T. retreats into the kitchen so she won't surprise her mother. "Yeah,
Mom," she shouts back. "How was your day?"
"I'm tired," Mom says. It's what she always says.
Y.T. pinches a beer from the fridge and starts running a hot bath. It
makes a roaring sound that relaxes her, like the white-noise generator on
Morn's nightstand.
The Nipponese businessman lies cut in segments on The Black Sun's
floor. Surprisingly (he looks so real when he's in one piece), no flesh,
blood, or organs are visible through the new crossections that Hiro's sword
made through his body. He is nothing more than a thin shell of epidermis, an
incredibly complex inflatable doll. But the air does not rush out of him, he
fails to collapse, and you can look into the aperture of a sword cut and
see, instead of bones and meat, the back of the skin on the other side.
It breaks the metaphor. The avatar is not acting like a real body. It
reminds all The Black Sun's patrons that they are living in a fantasy world.
People hate to be reminded of this.
When Hiro wrote The Black Sun's sword-fighting algorithms - code that
was later picked up and adopted by the entire Metaverse - he discovered that
there was no good way to handle the aftermath. Avatars are not supposed to
die. Not supposed to fall apart. The creators of the Metaverse had not been
morbid enough to foresee a demand for this kind of thing. But the whole
point of a sword fight is to cut someone up and kill them. So Hiro had to
kludge something together, in order that the Metaverse would not, over time,
become littered with inert, dismembered avatars that never decayed.
So the first thing that happens, when someone loses a sword fight, is
that his computer gets disconnected from the global network that is the
Metaverse. He gets chucked right out of the system. It is the closest
simulation of death that the Metaverse can offer, but all it really does is
cause the user a lot of annoyance.
Furthermore, the user finds that he can't get back into the Metaverse
for a few minutes. He can't log back on. This is because his avatar,
dismembered, is still in the Metaverse, and it's a rule that your avatar
can't exist in two places at once. So the user can't get back in until his
avatar has been disposed of.
Disposal of hacked-up avatars is taken care of by Graveyard Daemons, a
new Metaverse feature that Hiro had to invent. They are small lithe persons
swathed in black, like ninjas, not even their eyes showing. They are quiet
and efficient. Even as Hiro is stepping back from the hacked-up body of his
former opponent, they are emerging from invisible trapdoors in The Black
Sun's floor, climbing up out of the netherworld, converging on the fallen
businessman. Within seconds, they have stashed the body parts into black
bags. Then they climb back down through their secret trapdoors and vanish
into hidden tunnels beneath The Black Sun's floor. A couple of curious
patrons try to follow them, try to pry open the trapdoors, but their
avatars' fingers find nothing but smooth matte black. The tunnel system is
accessible only to the Graveyard Daemons.
And, incidentally, to Hiro. But he rarely uses it.
The Graveyard Daemons will take the avatar to the Pyre, an eternal,
underground bonfire beneath the center of The Black Sun, and burn it. As
soon as the flames consume the avatar, it will vanish from the Metaverse,
and then its owner will be able to sign on as usual, creating a new avatar
to run around in. But, hopefully, he will be more cautious and polite the
next time around.
Hiro looks up into the circle of applauding, whistling, and cheering
avatars and notes that they are fading out. The entire Black Sun now looks
like it is being projected on gauze. On the other side of that gauze, bright
lights shine through, overwhelming the image. Then it disappears entirely.
He peels off his goggles. and finds himself standing in the parking lot
of the U-Stor-It, holding a naked katana.
The sun has just gone down. A couple of dozen people are standing
around him at a great distance, shielding themselves behind parked cars,
awaiting his next move. Most of them are pretty scared, but a few of them
are just plain excited.
Vitaly Chernobyl is standing in the open door of their 20-by-30. His
hairdo is backlighted. It has been petrified by means of egg whites and
other proteins. These substances refract the light and throw off tiny little
spectral fragments, a cluster-bombed rainbow. Right now, a miniature image
of The Black Sun is being projected onto Vitaly's ass by Hiro's computer. He
is rocking unsteadily from foot to foot, as though standing on both of them
at the same time is too complicated to deal with this early in the day, and
he hasn't decided which one to use.
"You're blocking me," Hiro says.
"It's time to go," Vitaly says.
"You're telling me it's time to go? I've been waiting for you to wake
up for an hour."
As Hiro approaches, Vitaly watches his sword uncertainly. Vitaly's eyes
are dry and red, and on his lower lip he is sporting a chancre the size of a
tangerine.
"Did you win your sword fight?"
"Of course I won the fucking sword fight," Hiro says. "I'm the greatest
sword fighter in the world."
"And you wrote the software."
"Yeah. That, too," Hiro says.
After Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns arrived in Long Beach on one
of those hijacked ex-Soviet refugee freighters, they fanned out across
southern California looking for expanses of reinforced concrete that were as
vast and barren as the ones they had left behind in Kiev. They weren't
homesick. They needed such environments in order to practice their art.
The L.A. River was a natural site. And there were plenty of nice
overpasses. All they had to do was follow skateboarders to the secret places
they had long since discovered. Thrashers and nuclear fuzz-grunge
collectives thrive in the same environment. That's where Vitaly and Hiro are
going right now.
Vitaly has a really old VW Vanagon, the kind with a pop-top that turns
it into a makeshift camper. He used to live in it, staying on the street or
in various Snooze 'n' Cruise franchises, until he met up with Hiro
Protagonist. Now, the ownership of the Vanagon is subject to dispute,
because Vitaly owes Hiro more money than it is technically worth. So they
share it.
They drive the Vanagon around to the other side of the U-Stor-It,
honking the horn and flashing the lights in order to shoo a hundred little
kids away from the loading dock. It's not a playground, kids.
They pick their way down a broad corridor, excusing themselves every
inch of the way as they step over little Mayan encampments and Buddhist
shrines and white trash stoned on Vertigo, Apple Pie, Fuzzy Buzzy, Narthex,
Mustard, and the like. The floor needs sweeping: used syringes, crack vials,
charred spoons, pipe stems. There are also many little tubes, about thumb
sized, transparent plastic with a red cap on one end. They might be crack
vials, but the caps are still on them, and pipeheads wouldn't be so
fastidious as to replace the lid on an empty vial. It must be something new
Hiro hasn't heard of before, the McDonald's styrofoam burger box of drug
containers.
They push through a fire door into another section of the U-Stor-It,
which looks the same as the last one (everything looks the same in America,
there are no transitions now). Vitaly owns the third locker on the right, a
puny 5-by-10 that he is actually using for its intended purpose: storage.
Vitaly steps up to the door and commences trying to remember the
combination to the padlock, which involves a certain amount of random
guessing. Finally, the lock snaps and pops open. Vitaly shoots the bolt and
swings the door open, sweeping a clean half-circle through the drug
paraphernalia. Most of the 5-by-10 is occupied by a couple of large
four-wheeled flatbed handcarts piled high with speakers and amps.
Hiro and Vitaly wheel the carts down to the loading dock, put the stuff
into the Vanagon, and then return the empty carts to the 5-by-10.
Technically, the carts are community property, but no one believes that.
The drive to the scene of the concert is long, made longer by the fact
that Vitaly, rejecting the technocentric L.A. view of the universe in which
Speed is God, likes to stay on the surface and drive at about thirty-five
miles per hour. Traffic is not great, either. So Hiro jacks his computer
into the cigarette lighter and goggles into the Metaverse.
He is no longer connected to the network by a fiberoptic cable, and so
all his communication with the outside world has to take place via radio
waves, which are much slower and less reliable. Going into The Black Sun
would not be practical - it would look and sound terrible, and the other
patrons would look at him as if he were some kind of black-and-white person.
But there's no problem with going into his office, because that's generated
within the guts of his computer, which is sitting on his lap; he doesn't
need any communication with the outside world for that.
He materializes in his office, in his nice little house in the old
hacker neighborhood just off the Street. It is all quite Nipponese: tatami
mats cover the floor. His desk is a great, ruddy slab of rough-sawn
mahogany. Silvery cloud-light filters through ricepaper walls. A panel in
front of him slides open to reveal a garden, complete with babbling brook
and steelhead trout jumping out from time to time to grab flies. Technically
speaking, the pond should be full of carp, but Hiro is American enough to
think of carp as inedible dinosaurs that sit on the bottom and eat sewage.
There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a
perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's
length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it. It
is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface
that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns
- all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite
surveillance stuff.
Hiro has been thinking that in a few years, if he does really well in
the intel biz, maybe he will make enough money to subscribe to Earth and get
this thing in his office. Now it is suddenly here, free of charge. The only
explanation he can come up with is that Juanita must have given it to him.
But first things first. The Babel/Infocalypse card is still in his
avatar's pocket. He takes it out.
One of the rice-paper panels that make up the walls of his office
slides open. On the other side of it, Hiro can see a large, dimly lit room
that wasn't there before; apparently Juanita came in and made a major
addition to his house as well. A man walks into the office.
The Librarian daemon looks like a pleasant, fiftyish, silver-haired,
bearded man with bright blue eyes, wearing a V-neck sweater over a work
shirt, with a coarsely woven, tweedy-looking wool tie. The tie is loosened,
the sleeves pushed up. Even though he's just a piece of software, he has
reason to be cheerful; he can move through the nearly infinite stacks of
information in the Library with the agility of a spider dancing across a
vast web of crossreferences. The Librarian is the only piece of CIC software
that costs even more than Earth; the only thing he can't do is think.
"Yes, sir," the Librarian says. He is eager without being obnoxiously
chipper; he clasps his hands behind his back, rocks forward slightly on the
balls of his feet, raises his eyebrows expectantly over his half-glasses.
"Babel's a city in Babylon, right?"
"It was a legendary city," the Librarian says. "Babel is a Biblical
term for Babylon. The word is Semitic; Bab means gate and El means God, so
Babel means 'Gate of God.' But it is probably also somewhat onomatopoeic,
imitating someone who speaks in an incomprehensible tongue. The Bible is
full of puns."
"They built a tower to Heaven and God knocked it down."
"This is an anthology of common misconceptions. God did not do anything
to the Tower itself. 'And the LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and
they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will
do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not
understand one another's speech." So the LORD scattered them abroad from
there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.
Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the
language of all the earth.' Genesis 11:6-9, Revised Standard Version."
"So the tower wasn't knocked down. It just went on hiatus."
"Correct. It was not knocked down."
"But that's bogus."
"Bogus?"
"Provably false. Juanita believes that nothing is provably true or
provably false in the Bible. Because of it's provably false, then the Bible
is a lie, and if it's provably true, then the existence of God is proven and
there's no room for faith. The Babel story is provably false, because if
they built a tower to Heaven and God didn't knock it down, then it would
still be around somewhere, or at least a visible remnant of it."
"In assuming that it was very tall, you are relying on an obsolete
reading. The tower is described, literally, as 'its top with the heavens.'
For many centuries, this was interpreted to mean that its top was so high
that it was in the heavens. But in the last century or so, as actual
Babylonian ziggurats have been excavated, astrological diagrams - pictures
of the heavens - have been found inscribed into their tops."
"Oh. Okay, so the real story is that a tower was built with heavenly
diagrams carved into its top. Which is far more plausible than a tower that
reaches to the heavens."
"More than plausible," the Librarian reminds him. "Such structures have
actually been found."
"Anyway, you're saying that when God got angry and came down on them,
the tower itself wasn't affected. But they had to stop building the tower
because of an informational disaster - they couldn't talk to each other."
"'Disaster' is an astrological term meaning 'bad star,"' the Librarian
points out. "Sorry - but due to my internal structure, I'm a sucker for non
sequiturs."
"That's okay, really," Hiro says. "You're a pretty decent piece of
ware. Who wrote you, anyway?"
"For the most part I write myself," the Librarian says. "That is, I
have the innate ability to learn from experience. But this ability was
originally coded into me by my creator."
"Who wrote you? Maybe I know him," Hiro says. "I know a lot of
hackers."
"I was not coded by a professional hacker, per se, but by a researcher
at the Library of Congress who taught himself how to code," the Librarian
says. "He devoted himself to the common problem of sifting through vast
amounts of irrelevant detail in order to find significant gems of
information. His name was Dr. Emanuel Lagos."
"I've heard the name," Hiro says. "So he was kind of a meta-librarian.
That's funny, I guessed he was one of those old CIA spooks who hangs around
in the CIC."
"He never worked with the CIA."
"Okay. Let's get some work done. Look up every piece of free
information in the Library that contains L. Bob Rife and arrange it in
chronological order. The emphasis here is on free.''
"Television and newspapers, yes, sir. One moment, sir," the Librarian
says. He turns around and exits on crepe soles. Hiro turns his attention to
Earth.
The level of detail is fantastic. The resolution, the clarity, just the
look of it, tells Hiro, or anyone else who knows computers, that this piece
of software is some heavy shit.
It's not just continents and oceans. It looks exactly like the earth
would look from a point in geosynchronous orbit directly above L.A.,
complete with weather systems - vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering
just above the surface of the globe, casting gray shadows on the oceans -
and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea. Half of the globe
is illuminated by sunlight, and half is dark. The terminator - the line
between night and day - has just swept across L.A. and is now creeping
across the Pacific, off to the west.
Everything is going in slow motion. Hiro can see the clouds change
shape if he watches them long enough. Looks like a clear night on the East
Coast.
Something catches his attention, moving rapidly over the surface of the
globe. He thinks it must be a gnat. But there are no gnats in the Metaverse.
He tries to focus on it. The computer, bouncing low-powered lasers off his
cornea, senses this change in emphasis, and then Hiro gasps as he seems to
plunge downward toward the globe, like a space-walking astronaut who has
just fallen out of his orbital groove. When he finally gets it under
control, he's just a few hundred miles above the earth, looking down at a
solid bank of clouds, and he can see the gnat gliding along below him. It's
a low-flying CIC satellite, swinging north to south in a polar orbit.
"Your information, sir," the Librarian says.
Hiro startles and glances up. Earth swings down and out of his field of
view and there is the Librarian, standing in front of the desk, holding out
a hypercard. Like any librarian in Reality, this daemon can move around
without audible footfalls.
"Can you make a little more noise when you walk? I'm easily startled,"
Hiro says.
"It is done, sir. My apologies."
Hiro reaches out for the hypercard. The Librarian takes half a step
forward and leans toward him. This time, his foot makes a soft noise on the
tatami mat, and Hiro can hear the white noise of his trousers sliding over
his leg.
Hiro takes the hypercard and looks at it. The front is labeled
Results of Library search on:
Rife, Lawrence Robert, 1948
He flips the card over. The back is divided into several dozen
fingemail-sized icons. Some of them are little snapshots of the front pages
of newspapers. Many of them are colorful, glowing rectangles: miniature
television screens showing live video.
"That's impossible," Hiro says. "I'm sitting in a VW van, okay? I'm
jacked in over a cellular link. You couldn't have moved that much video into
my system that fast."
"It was not necessary to move anything," the Librarian says. "All
existing video on L. Bob Rife was collected by Dr. Lagos and placed in the
Babel/Infocalypse stack, which you have in your system."
"Oh."
Hiro stares at the miniature TV in the upper left comer of the card. It
zooms toward him until it's about the size of a twelve-inch low-def
television set at arms' length. Then the video image begins to play. It's
very poor eight-millimeter film footage of a high school football game in
the sixties. No soundtrack.
"What is this game?"
The Librarian says, "Odessa, Texas, 1965. L. Bob Rife is a fullback,
number eight in the dark uniform."
"This is more detail than I need. Can you summarize some of these