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things?"
"No. But I can list the contents briefly. The stack contains eleven
high school football games. Rife was on the second-string Texas all-state
team in his senior year. Then he proceeded to Rice on an academic
scholarship and walked onto the football team, so there are also fourteen
tapes of college games. Rife majored in communications."
"Logically enough, considering what he became."
"He became a television sports reporter in the Houston market, so there
are fifty hours of footage from this period - mostly outtakes, of course.
After two years in this line of work, Rife went into business with his
great-uncle, a financier with roots in the oil business. The stack contains
a few newspaper stories to that effect, which, as I note from reading them,
are all textually related - implying that they came from the same source."
"A press release."
"Then there are no stories for five years."
"He was up to something."
"Then we begin to see more stories, mostly from the Religion sections
of Houston newspapers, detailing Rife's contributions to various
organizations."
"That sounded like summary to me. I thought you couldn't summarize."
"I can't really. I was quoting a summary that Dr. Lagos made to Juanita
Marquez recently, in my presence, when they were reviewing the same data."
"Go on."
"Rife contributed $500 to the Highlands Church of the Baptism by Fire,
Reverend Wayne Bedford, head minister; $2,500 to the Pentecostal Youth
League of Bayside, Reverend Wayne Bedford, president; $150,000 to the
Pentecostal Church of the New Trinity, Reverend Wayne Bedford, founder and
patriarch; $2.3 million to Rife Bible College, Reverend Wayne Bedford,
President and chairman of the theology department; $20 million to the
archaeology department of Rife Bible College, plus $45 million to the
astronomy department and $100 million to the computer science department."
"Did these donations take place before hyperinflation?"
"Yes, sir. They were, as the expression goes, real money."
"That Wayne Bedford guy - is this the same Reverend Wayne who runs the
Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates?"
"The same."
"Are you telling me that Rife owns the Reverend Wayne?"
"He owns a majority share in Pearlgate Associates, which is the
multinational that runs the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates chain."
"Okay, let's keep sifting through this," Hiro says.
Hiro Peeps out over his goggles to confirm that Vitaly is still nowhere
near the concert. Then he dives back in and continues to go over the video
and the news stories that Lagos has compiled.
During the same years that Rife makes his contributions to the Reverend
Wayne, he's showing up with increasing frequency in the business section,
first in the local papers and later in The Wall Street Journal and The New
York Times. There is a big flurry of publicity - obvious PR plants - after
the Nipponese tried to use their old-boy network to shut him out of the
telecommunications market there, and he took it to the American public,
spending $10 million of his own money on a campaign to convince Americans
that the Nipponese were duplicitous schemers. A triumphal cover on The
Economist after the Nipponese finally knuckled under and let him corner the
fiber-optics market in that country and, by extension, most of East Asia.
Finally, then, the lifestyle pieces start coming in. L. Bob Rife has
let his publicist know that he wants to show a more human side. There is a
personality journalism program that does a puff piece on Rife after he buys
a new yacht, surplus, from the U.S. Government.
L. Bob Rife, last of the nineteenth-century monopolists, is shown
consulting with his decorator in the captain's quarters. It looks nice as it
is, considering that Rife bought this ship from the Navy, but it's not Texan
enough for him. He wants it gutted and rebuilt. Then, shots of Rife
maneuvering his steerlike body through the narrow passages and steep
staircase of the ship's interior - typical boring gray steel Navy scape,
which, he assures the interviewer, he is going to have spruced up
considerably.
"Y'know, there's a story that when Rockefeller bought himself a yacht,
he bought a pretty small one, like a seventy-footer or something. Small by
the standards of the day. And when someone asked him why he went and bought
himself such a dinky little yacht, he just looked at the guy and said, 'What
do you think I am, a Vanderbilt?' Haw! Well, anyway, welcome aboard my
yacht."
L. Bob Rife says this while standing on a huge open-air platform
elevator along with the interviewer and the whole camera crew. The elevator
is going up. In the background is the Pacific Ocean. As Rife is speaking the
last part of the line, suddenly the elevator rises up to the top and the
camera turns around, and we are looking out across the deck of the aircraft
carrier Enterprise, formerly of the U.S. Navy, now the personal yacht of L.
Bob Rife, who beat out both General Jim's Defense System and Admiral Bob's
Global Security in a furious bidding war. L. Bob Rife proceeds to admire the
vast, flat open spaces of the carrier's flight deck, likening it to certain
parts of Texas. He suggests that it would be amusing to cover part of it
with dirt and raise cattle there.
Another profile, this one shot for a business network, apparently made
somewhat later: Back on the Enterprise, where the captain's office has been
massively reworked. L. Bob Rife, Lord of Bandwidth, is sitting behind his
desk, having his mustache waxed. Not in the sense that women have their legs
waxed. He's having the curl smoothed out and restored. The waxer is a very
short Asian woman who does it so delicately that it doesn't even interfere
with his talking, mostly about his efforts to extend his cable TV network
throughout Korea and into China and link it up with his big fiber-optic
trunk line that runs across Siberia and over the Urals.
"Yeah, you know, a monopolist's work is never done. No such thing as a
perfect monopoly. Seems like you can never get that last one-tenth of one
percent."
"Isn't the government still strong in Korea? You must have more trouble
with regulations there."
L. Bob Rife laughs. "Y'know, watching government regulators trying to
keep up with the world is my favorite sport. Remember when they busted up Ma
Bell?"
"Just barely." The reporter is a woman in her twenties.
"You know what it was, right?"
"Voice communications monopoly."
"Right. They were in the same business as me. The information business.
Moving phone conversations around on little tiny copper wires, one at a
time. Government busted them up - at the same time when I was starting cable
TV franchises in thirty states. Haw! Can you believe that? It's like if they
figured out a way to regulate horses at the same time the Model T and the
airplane were being introduced."
"But a cable TV system isn't the same as a phone system."
"At that stage it wasn't, cause it was just a local system. But once
you get local systems all over the world, all you got to do is hook 'em
together and it's a global network. Just as big as the phone system. Except
this one carries information ten thousand times faster. It carries images,
sound, data, you name it."
A naked PR plant, a half-hour television commercial with no purpose
whatsoever other than to let L. Bob Rife tell his side of a particular
issue. It seems that a number of Rife's programmers, the people who made his
systems run, got together and formed a union - unheard of, for hackers - and
filed a suit against Rife, claiming that he had placed audio and video bugs
in their homes, in fact placed all of them under twenty-four-hour
surveillance, and harassed and threatened some programmers who were making
what he called "unacceptable lifestyle choices." For example, when one of
his programmers and her husband engaged in oral sex in their own bedroom one
night, the next morning she was called into Rife's office, where he called
her a slut and a sodomite and told her to clean out her desk. The bad
publicity from this so annoyed Rife that he felt the need to blow a few
million on some more PR.
"I deal in information," he says to the smarmy, toadying
pseudojournalist who "interviews" him. He's sitting in his office in
Houston, looking slicker than normal. "All television going out to consumers
throughout the world goes through me. Most of the information transmitted to
and from the CIC database passes through my networks. The Metaverse - the
entire Street - exists by virtue of a network that I own and control.
"But that means, if you'll just follow my reasoning for a bit, that
when I have a programmer working under me who is working with that
information, he is wielding enormous power. Information is going into his
brain. And it's staying there. It travels with him when he goes home at
night. It gets all tangled up into his dreams, for Christ's sake. He talks
to his wife about it. And, goddamn it, he doesn't have any right to that
information. If I was running a car factory, I wouldn't let workers drive
the cars home or borrow tools. But that's what I do at five o'clock each
day, all over the world, when my hackers go home from work.
"When they used to hang rustlers in the old days, the last thing they
would do is piss their pants. That was the ultimate sign, you see, that they
had lost control over their own bodies, that they were about to die. See,
it's the first function of any organization to control its own sphincters.
We're not even doing that. So we're working on refining our management
techniques so that we can control that information no matter where it is -
on our hard disks or even inside the programmers' heads. Now, I can't say
more because I got competition to worry about. But it is my fervent hope
that in five or ten years, this kind of thing won't even be an issue."
A half-hour episode of a science news program, this one on the
controversial new subject of infoastronomy, the search for radio signals
coming from other solar systems. L. Bob Rife has taken a personal interest
in the subject; as various national governments auction off their
possessions, he has purchased a string of radio observatories and hooked
them together, using his fabled fiber-optic net, to turn them into a single
giant antenna as big as the whole earth. He is scanning the skies
twenty-four hours a day, looking for radio waves that mean something - radio
waves carrying information from other civilizations. And why, asks the
interviewer - a celebrity professor from MIT - why would a simple oilman be
interested in such a high-flown, abstract pursuit?
"I just about got this planet all sewn up."
Rife delivers this line with an incredibly sardonic and contemptuous
twang, the exaggerated accent of a cowboy who suspects that some Yankee
pencilneck is looking down his nose at him.
Another news piece, this one apparently done a few years later. Again
we are on the Enterprise, but this time the atmosphere is different again.
The top deck has been turned into an open-air refugee camp. It is swarming
with Bangladeshis that L. Bob Rife plucked out of the Bay of Bengal after
their country washed into the ocean in a series of massive floods, caused by
deforestation farther upstream in India - hydrological warfare. The camera
pans to look out over the edge of the flight deck, and down below, we see
the first beginnings of the Raft: a relatively small collection of a few
hundred boats that have glommed onto the Enterprise, hoping for a free ride
across to America.
Rife's walking among the people, handing out Bible comics and kisses to
little kids. They cluster around with broad smiles, pressing their palms
together and bowing. Rife bows back, very awkwardly, but there's no gaiety
on his face. He's deadly serious.
"Mr. Rife, what's your opinion of the people who say you're just doing
this as a self-aggrandizing publicity stunt?" This interviewer is trying to
be more of a Bad Cop.
"Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I
wouldn't get any work done," L. Bob Rife says. "You should ask these people
what they think."
"You're telling me that this refugee assistance program has nothing to
do with your public image?"
"Nope. L-"
There's an edit and they cut away to the journalist, pontificating into
the camera. Rife was on the verge of delivering a sermon, Hiro senses, but
they cut him off.
But one of the true glories of the Library is that it has so many
outtakes. Just because a piece of videotape never got edited into a
broadcast program doesn't mean it's devoid of intel value. CIC long ago
stuck its fingers into the networks' videotape libraries. All of those
outtakes - millions of hours of footage - have not actually been uploaded to
the Library in digital form yet. But you can send in a request, and CIC will
go and pull that videotape off the shelf for you and play it back.
Lagos has already done it. The tape is right there.
"Nope. Look. The Raft is a media event. But in a much more profound,
general sense than you can possibly imagine."
"Oh."
"It's created by the media in that without the media, people wouldn't
know it was here, Refus wouldn't come out and glom onto it the way they do.
And it sustains the media. It creates a lot of information flow - movies,
news reports - you know."
"So you're creating your own news event to make money off the
information flow that it creates?" says the journalist, desperately trying
to follow. His tone of voice says that this is all a waste of videotape. His
weary attitude suggests that this is not the first time Rife has flown off
on a bizarre tangent.
"Partly. But that's only a very crude explanation. It really goes a lot
deeper than that. You've probably heard the expression that the Industry
feeds off of biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean."
"I've heard the expression, yes."
"That's my expression. I made it up. An expression like that is just
like a virus, you know - it's a piece of information - data that spreads
from one person to the next. Well, the function of the Raft is to bring more
biomass. To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is
keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking, smoking
machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating
everything in sight. Leaves behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always
needs more fuel. Ever read the story about the labyrinth and the minotaur?"
"Sure. That was on Crete, right?" The journalist only answers out of
sarcasm; he can't believe he's here listening to this, he wants to fly back
to L.A. yesterday.
"Yeah. Every year, the Greeks had to pony up a few virgins and send
them to Crete as tribute. Then the king put them into the labyrinth, and the
minotaur ate them up. I used to read that story when I was a kid and wonder
who the hell these guys were, on Crete, that everyone else was so scared of
them that they would just meekly give up their children to be eaten, every
year. They must have been some mean sons of bitches.
"Now I have a different perspective on it. America must look, to those
poor little buggers down there, about the same as Crete looked to those poor
Greek suckers. Except that there's no coercion involved. Those people down
there give up their children willingly. Send them into the labyrinth by the
millions to be eaten up. The Industry feeds on them and spits back images,
sends out movies and TV programs, over my networks, images of wealth and
exotic things beyond their wildest dreams, back to those people, and it
gives them something to dream about, something to aspire to. And that is the
function of the Raft. It's just a big old krill carrier."
Finally the journalist gives up on being a journalist, just starts to
slag L. Bob Rife openly. He's had it with this guy. "That's disgusting. I
can't believe you can think about people that way."
"Shit, boy, get down off your high horse. Nobody really gets eaten.
It's just a figure of speech. They come here, they get decent jobs, find
Christ, buy a Weber grill, and live happily ever after. What's wrong with
that?"
Rife is pissed. He's yelling. Behind him, the Bangladeshis are picking
up on his emotional vibes and becoming upset themselves. Suddenly, one of
them, an incredibly gaunt man with a long drooping mustache, runs in front
of the camera and begins to shout: "a ma la ge zen ba dam gal nun ka aria su
su na an da..." The sounds spread from him to his neighbors, spreading
across the flight deck like a wave.
"Cut," the journalist says, turning into the camera. "Just cut. The
Babble Brigade has started up again."
The soundtrack now consists of a thousand people speaking in tongues
under the high-pitched, shit-eating chuckles of L. Bob Rife.
"This is the miracle of tongues," Rife shouts above the tumult. "I can
understand every word these people are saying. Can you, brother?"
"Yo! Snap out of it, pod!"
Hiro looks up from the card. No one is in his office except for the
Librarian.
The image loses focus and veers upward and out of his field of view.
Hiro is looking out the windshield of the Vanagon. Someone has just yanked
his goggles off his face-not Vitaly.
"I'm out here, gogglehead!"
Hiro looks out the window. It's Y.T., hanging onto the side of the van
with one hand, holding his goggles in the other.
"You spend too much time goggled in," she says. "Try a little Reality,
man."
"Where we are going," Hiro says, "we're going to get more Reality than
I can handle."
As Hiro and Vitaly approach the vast freeway overpass where tonight's
concert is to take place, the solid ferrous quality of the Vanagon attracts
MagnaPoons like a Twinkie draws cockroaches. If they knew that Vitaly
Chernobyl himself was in the van, they'd go crazy, they'd stall the van's
engine. But right now, they'll poon anything that might be headed toward the
concert.
When they get closer to the overpass, it becomes a lost cause trying to
drive at all, the thrashers are so thick and numerous. It's like putting on
crampons and trying to walk through a room full of puppies. They have to
nose their way along, tapping the horn, flashing the lights.
Finally, they get to the flatbed semi that constitutes the stage for
tonight's concert. Next to it is another semi, full of amps and other sound
gear. The drivers of the trucks, an oppressed minority of two, have
retreated into the cab of the sound truck to smoke cigarettes and glare
balefully at the swarm of thrashers, their sworn enemies in the food chain
of the highways. They will not voluntarily come out until five in the
morning, when the way has been made plain.
A couple of the other Meltdowns are standing around smoking cigarettes,
holding them between two fingers in the Slavic style, like darts. They stomp
the cigarettes out on the concrete with their cheap vinyl shoes, run up to
the Vanagon, and begin to haul out the sound equipment. Vitaly puts on
goggles, hooks himself into a computer on the sound truck, and begins tuning
the system. There's a 3-D model of the overpass already in memory. He has to
figure out how to sync the delays on all the different speaker clusters to
maximize the number of nasty, clashing echoes.
The warm-up band, Blunt Force Trauma, gets rolling at about 9:00 P.M.
On the first power chord, a whole stack of cheap preowned speakers shorts
out; its wires throw sparks into the air, sending an arc of chaos through
the massed skateboarders. The sound truck's electronics isolate the bad
circuit and shut it off before anything or anyone gets hurt. Blunt Force
Trauma play a kind of speed reggae heavily influenced by the
antitechnological ideas of the Meltdowns.
These guys will probably play for an hour, then there will be a couple
of hours of Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns to look forward to. And if
Sushi K shows up, he's welcome to make a guest appearance at the mike.
Just in case that actually happens, Hiro pulls back from the delirious
center of the crowd and begins to orbit back and forth along its fringes.
Y.T.'s in there somewhere, but no point in trying to track her down. She
would be embarrassed, anyway, to be seen with an oldster like Hiro.
Now that the concert is up and running, it will take care of itself.
There's not much more for Hiro to do. Besides, interesting things happen
along borders - transitions - not in the middle where everything is the
same. There may be something happening along the border of the crowd, back
where the lights fade into the shade of the overpass.
The fringe crowd looks pretty typical for the wrong side of an L.A.
overpass in the middle of the night. There's a good-sized shantytown of
hardcore Third World unemployables, plus a scattering of schizophrenic first
worlders who have long ago burned their brains to ash in the radiant heat of
their own imaginings. A lot of them have emerged from their overturned
dumpsters and refrigerator boxes to stand on tiptoe at the edge of the crowd
and peer into the noise and light. Some of them look sleepy and awed, and
some - stocky Latino men - look amused by the whole thing, passing
cigarettes back and forth and shaking their heads in disbelief.
This is Crips turf. The Crips wanted to provide security, but Hiro, a
student of Altamont, decided to take the risk of snubbing them. He hired The
Enforcers to do it instead.
So every few dozen feet there's a large man with erect posture wearing
an acid green windbreaker with ENFORCER spelled out across the back. Very
conspicuous, which is how they like it. But it's all done with
electropigment, so if there's trouble, these guys can turn themselves black
by flipping a lapel switch. And they can make themselves bulletproof just by
zipping the windbreakers up the front. Right now, it's a warm night, and
most of them are leaving their uniforms open to the cool breezes. Some of
them are just coasting, but most of them are attentive, keeping their eyes
on the crowd, not the band.
Seeing all of those soldiers, Hiro looks for the general and soon finds
him: a small, stout black guy, a pint-sized weightlifter type. He's wearing
the same windbreaker as the others, but there's an additional layer of
bulletproof vest underneath, and clipped onto that he's got a nice
assortment of communications gear and small, clever devices for hurting
people. He's doing a lot of jogging back and forth, swiveling his head from
side to side, mumbling quick bursts into his headset like a football coach
on the sidelines.
Hiro notices a tall man in his late thirties, distinguished goatee,
wearing a very nice charcoal gray suit. Hiro can see the diamonds in his tie
pin flashing from a hundred feet away. He knows that if he gets up closer he
will be able to see the word "Crips" spelled out in blue sapphires, nestled
among those diamonds. He's got his own security detail of half a dozen other
guys in suits. Even though they aren't doing security, they couldn't help
sending along a token delegation to show the colors.
This is a non sequitur that has been nibbling on the edges of Hiro's
mind for the last ten minutes: Laser light has a particular kind of gritty
intensity, a molecular purity reflecting its origins. Your eye notices this,
somehow knows that it's unnatural. It stands out anywhere, but especially
under a dirty overpass in the middle of the night. Hiro keeps getting
flashes of it in his peripheral vision, keeps glancing over to track down
it's source. It's obvious to him, but no one else seems to notice.
Someone in this overpass, somewhere, is bouncing a laser beam off
Hiro's face.
It's annoying. Without being too obvious about it, he changes his
course slightly, wanders over to a point downwind of a trash fire that's
burning in a steel drum. Now he's standing in the middle of a plume of
diluted smoke that he can smell but can't quite see.
But the next time the laser darts into his face, it scatters off a
million tiny, ashy particulates and reveals itself as a pure geometric line
in space, pointing straight back to its source.
It's a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case
he's not already conspicuous enough, he's wearing a suit. Hiro starts
walking toward him.
Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence
Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their
bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back,
on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording
everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups
are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator
pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once
above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they
embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the
attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in
the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.
The CIC brass can't stand these guys because they upload staggering
quantities of useless information to the database, on the off chance that
some of it will eventually be useful. It's like writing down the license
number of every car you see on your way to work each morning, just in case
one of them will be involved in a hit-and-run accident. Even the CIC
database can only hold so much garbage. So, usually, these habitual
gargoyles get kicked out of the CIC before too long.
This guy hasn't been kicked out yet. And to judge from the quality of
his equipment - which is very expensive - he's been at it for a while. So he
must be pretty good.
If so, what's he doing hanging around this place?
"Hiro Protagonist," the gargoyle says as Hiro finally tracks him down
in the darkness beside a shanty. "CIC stringer for eleven months.
Specializing in the Industry. Former hacker, security guard, pizza
deliverer, concert promoter." He sort of mumbles it, not wanting Hiro to
waste his time reciting a bunch of known facts.
The laser that kept jabbing Hiro in the eye was shot out of this guy's
computer, from a peripheral device that sits above his goggles in the middle
of his forehead. A long-range retinal scanner. If you turn toward him with
your eyes open, the laser shoots out, penetrates your iris, tenderest of
sphincters, and scans your retina. The results are shot back to CIC, which
has a database of several tens of millions of scanned retinas. Within a few
seconds, if you're in the database already, the owner finds out who you are.
If you're not already in the database, well, you are now.
Of course, the user has to have access privileges. And once he gets
your identity, he has to have more access privileges to find out personal
information about you. This guy, apparently, has a lot of access privileges.
A lot more than Hiro.
"Name's Lagos," the gargoyle says.
So this is the guy. Hiro considers asking him what the hell he's doing
here. He'd love to take him out for a drink, talk to him about how the
Librarian was coded. But he's pissed off. Lagos is being rude to him
(gargoyles are rude by definition).
"You here on the Raven thing? Or just that fuzz-grunge tip you've been
working on for the last, uh, thirty-six days approximately?" Lagos says.
Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are
adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing
background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in
visual light, infrared, millimeter-wave radar, and ultrasound all at once.
You think they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the
credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying
the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is
standing there measuring the length of Hiro's cock through his trousers
while they pretend to make conversation.
"You're the guy who's working with Juanita, right?" Hiro says.
"Or she's working with me. Or something like that."
"She said she wanted me to meet you."
For several seconds Lagos is frozen. He's ransacking more data. Hiro
wants to throw a bucket of water on him.
"Makes sense," he says. "You're as familiar with the Metaverse as
anyone. Freelance hacker - that's exactly right."
"Exactly right for what? No one wants freelance hackers anymore."
"The corporate assembly-line hackers are suckers for infection. They're
going to go down by the thousands, just like Sennacherib's army before the
walls of Jerusalem," Lagos says.
"Infection? Sennacherib?"
"And you can defend yourself in Reality, too - that'll be good if you
ever go up against Raven. Remember, his knives are as sharp as a molecule.
They'll go through a bulletproof jacket like lingerie."
"Raven?"
"You'll probably see him tonight. Don't mess with him."
"Okay," Hiro says. "I'll look out for him."
"That's not what I said," Lagos says. "I said, don't mess with him."
"Why not?"
"It's a dangerous world," Lagos says. "Getting more dangerous all the
time. So we don't want to upset the balance of terror. Just think about the
Cold War."
"Yup." All Hiro wants to do now is walk away and never see this guy
again, but he won't wind up the conversation.
"You're a hacker. That means you have deep structures to worry about,
too."
"Deep structures?"
"Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you
learned binary code?"
"Sure."
"You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves
grow new connections as you use them - the axons split and push their way
between the dividing glial cells - your bioware self-modifies - the software
becomes part of the hardware. So now you're vulnerable - all hackers are
vulnerable - to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other."
"What's a nam-shub? Why am I vulnerable to it?"
"Just don't stare into any bitmaps. Anyone try to show you a raw bitmap
lately? Like, in the Metaverse?"
Interesting. "Not to me personally, but now that you mention it, this
Brandy came up to my friend - "
"A cult prostitute of Asherah. Trying to spread the disease. Which is
synonymous with evil. Sound melodramatic? Not really. You know, to the
Mesopotamians, there was no independent concept of evil. Just disease and
ill health. Evil was a synonym for disease. So what does that tell you?"
Hiro walks away, the same way he walks away from psychotic street
people who follow him down the street.
"It tells you that evil is a virus!" Lagos calls after him. "Don't let
the nam-shub into your operating system!"
Juanita's working with this alien?
Blunt Force Trauma play for a solid hour, segueing from one song into
the next with no chink or crevice in the wall of noise. All a part of the
aesthetic. When the music stops, their set is over. For the first time, Hiro
can hear the exaltation of the crowd. It's a blast of high-pitched noise
that he feels in his head, ringing his ears.
But there's a low thudding sound, too, like someone pummeling a bass
drum, and for a minute he thinks maybe it's a truck rolling by on the
overpass above them. But it's too steady for that, it doesn't die away.
It's behind him. Other people have noticed it, turned to look toward
the sound, are scurrying out of the way. Hiro sidesteps, turning to see what
it is.
Big and black, to begin with. It does not seem as though such a large
man could perch on a motorcycle, even a big chortling Harley like this one.
Correction. It's a Harley with some kind of a sidecar added, a sleek
black projectile hanging off to the right, supported on its own wheel. But
no one is sitting in the sidecar.
It does not seem as though a man could be this bulky without being fat.
But he's not fat at all, he's wearing tight stretchy clothes - like leather,
but not quite - that show bones and muscles, but nothing else.
He is riding the Harley so slowly that he would certainly fall over if
not for the sidecar. Occasionally he gooses it forward with a flick of the
fingers on his clutch hand.
Maybe one reason he looks so big - other than the fact that he really
is big - is the fact that he appears totally neckless. His head starts out
wide and just keeps getting wider until it merges with his shoulders. At
first Hiro thinks it must be some kind of avant-garde helmet. But when the
man rolls past him, this great shroud moves and flutters and Hiro sees that
it is just his hair, a thick mane of black hair tossed back over his
shoulders, trading down his back almost to his waist.
As he is marveling at this, he realizes that the man has turned his
head to look back at him. Or to look in his general direction, anyway. It's
impossible to tell exactly what he's looking at because of his goggles, a
smooth convex shell over the eyes, interrupted by a narrow horizontal slit.
He is looking at Hiro. He gives him the same fuck-you smile that he
sported earlier tonight, when Hiro was standing in the entryway to The Black
Sun, and he was in a public terminal somewhere.
This is the guy. Raven. This is the guy that Juanita is looking for.
The guy Lagos told him not to mess with. And Hiro has seen him before,
outside the entrance to The Black Sun. This is the guy who gave the Snow
Crash card to Da5id.
The tattoo on his forehead consists of three words, written in block
letters: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL.
Hiro startles and actually jumps into the air as Vitaly Chernobyl and
the Meltdowns launch into their opening number, "Radiation Burn." It is a
tornado of mostly high-pitched noise and distortion, like being flung bodily
through a wall of fishhooks.
These days, most states are franchulates or Burbclaves, much too small
to have anything like a jail, or even a judicial system. So when someone
does something bad, they try to find quick and dirty punishments, like
flogging, confiscation of property, public humiliation, or, in the case of
people who have a high potential of going on to hurt others, a warning
tattoo on a prominent body part. POOR IMPULSE CONTROL. Apparently, this guy
went to such a place and lost his temper real bad.
For an instant, a glowing red gridwork is plotted against the side of
Raven's face. It rapidly shrinks, all sides converging inward toward the
right pupil. Raven shakes his head, turns to look for the source of the
laser light, but it's already gone. Lagos has already got his retinal scan.
That's why Lagos is here. He's not interested in Hiro or Vitaly
Chernobyl. He's interested in Raven. And somehow, Lagos knew that he was
going to be here. And Lagos is somewhere nearby, right now, videotaping the
guy, probing the contents of his pockets with radar, recording his pulse and
respiration.
Hiro picks up his personal phone. "Y.T.," he says, and it dials Y.T.'s
number.
It rings for a long time before she picks it up. It's almost impossible
to hear anything over the sound of the concert.
"What the fuck do you want?"
"Y.T., I'm sorry about this. But something's going on. Something big
time. I'm keeping one eye on a big biker named Raven."
"The problem with you hackers is you never stop working."
"That's what a hacker is," Hiro says.
"I'll keep an eye on this Raven guy, too," she says, "sometime when I
am working." Then she hangs up.
Raven makes a couple of broad, lazy sweeps along the perimeter of the
crowd, going very slowly, looking in all directions. He is annoyingly calm
and unhurried.
Then he cuts farther out into the darkness, away from the crowd. He
does a little more looking around, checking out the perimeter of the
shantytown. And finally, he swings the big Harley around in a trajectory
that brings him back to the big important Crip. The guy with the sapphire
tie clip and the personal security detail.
Hiro begins weaving through the crowd in that direction, trying not to
be too obvious about it. This looks like it's going to be interesting.
As Raven approaches, the bodyguards converge on the head Crip, form a
loose protective ring around him. As he comes nearer, all of them back away
a step or two, as though the man is surrounded by an invisible force field.
He finally comes to a stop, deigns to put his feet on the ground. He flicks
a few switches on the handlebars before he steps away from his Harley. Then,
anticipating what's next, he stands with his feet apart and his arms up.
One Crip approaches from each side. They don't look real happy about
this particular duty, they keep casting sidelong glances at the motorcycle.
The head Crip keeps goading them forward with his voice, shooing them toward
Raven with his hands. Each one of them has a hand-held metal-detecting wand.
They swirl the wands around his body and find nothing at all, not even the
tiniest speck of metal, not even coins in his pocket. The man is 100 percent
organic. So if nothing else, Lagos's warning about Raven's knife has turned
out to be bullshit.
These two Crips walk rapidly back to the main group. Raven begins to
follow them. But the head Crip takes a step back, holds both of his hands up
in a "stop" motion. Raven stops, stands there, the grin returning to his
face.
The head Crip turns away and gestures back toward his black BMW. The
rear door of the BMW opens up and a man gets out, a younger, smaller black
man in round wire-rims, wearing jeans and big white athletic shoes and
typical studentish gear.
The student walks slowly toward Raven, pulling something from his
pocket. It's a hand-held device, but much too bulky to be a calculator. It's
got a keypad on the top and a sort of window on one end, which the student
keeps aiming toward Raven. There's an LED readout above the keypad and a red
flashing light underneath that. The student is wearing a pair of headphones
that are jacked into a socket on the butt of the device.
For starters, the student aims the window at the ground, then at the
sky, then at Raven, keeping his eye on the flashing red light and the LED
readout. It has the feel of some kind of religious rite, accepting digital
input from the sky spirit and then the ground spirit and then from the black
biker angel.
Then he begins to walk slowly toward Raven, one step at a time. Hiro
can see the red light flashing intermittently, not following any particular
pattern or rhythm.
The student gets to within a yard of Raven and then orbits him a couple
of times, always keeping the device aimed inward. When he's finished, he
steps back briskly, turns, and aims it toward the motorcycle. When the
device is aimed at the motorcycle, the red light flashes much more quickly.
The student walks up to the head Crip, pulling off his headphones, and
has a short conversation with him. The Crip listens to the student but keeps
his eyes fixed on Raven, nods his head a few times, finally pats the student
on his shoulder and sends him back to the BMW.
It was a Geiger counter.
Raven strolls up to the big Crip. They shake hands, a standard plain
old Euro-shake, no fancy variations. It's not a real friendly get-together.
The Crip has his eyes a little too wide open, Hiro can see the furrows in
his brow, everything about his posture and his face screaming out: Get me
away from this Martian.
Raven goes back to his radioactive hog, releases a few bungee cords,
and picks up a metal briefcase. He hands it to the head Crip, and they shake
hands again. Then he turns away, walks slowly and calmly back to the
motorcycle, gets on, and putt-putts away.
Hiro would love to stick around and watch some more, but he has the
feeling that Lagos has this particular event covered. And besides, he has
other business. Two limousines are fighting their way through the crowd,
headed for the stage.
The limousines stop, and Nipponese people start to climb out.
Dark-clad, unfunky, they stand around awkwardly in the middle of the
party/riot, like a handful of broken nails suspended in a colorful jello
mold. Finally, Hiro makes bold enough to go up and look into one of the
windows to find out if this is who he thinks it is.
Can't see through the smoked glass. He bends down, puts his face right
near the window, trying to make it real obvious.
Still no response. Finally, he knocks on the window.
Silence. He looks up at the entourage. They are all watching him. But
when he looks up they glance away, suddenly remember to drag on their
cigarettes or rub their eyebrows.
There is only one source of light inside the limousine that's bright
enough to be visible through the smoked glass, and that is the distinctive
inflated rectangle of a television screen.
What the hell. This is America, Hiro is half American, and there's no
reason to take this politeness thing to an unhealthy extreme. He hauls the
door open and looks into the back of the limousine.
Sushi K is sitting there wedged in between a couple of other young
Nipponese men, programmers on his imageering team. His hairdo is turned off,
so it just looks like an orange Afro. He is wearing a partly assembled stage
costume, apparently expecting to be performing tonight. Looks like he's
taking Hiro up on his offer.
He's watching a well-known television program called Eye Spy. It is
produced by CIC and syndicated through one of the major studios. It is
reality television: CIC picks out one of their agents who is involved in a
wet operation - doing some actual cloak-and-dagger work - and has him put on
a gargoyle rig so that everything he sees and hears is transmitted back to
the home base in Langley. This material is then edited into a weekly
hour-long program.
Hiro never watches it. Now that he works for CIC, he finds it kind of
annoying. But he hears a lot of gossip about the show, and he knows that
tonight they are showing the second-to-last episode in a five-part arc. CIC
has smuggled a guy onto the Raft, where he is trying to infiltrate one of
its many colorful and sadistic pirate bands: the Bruce Lee organization.
Hiro enters the limousine and gets a look at the TV just in time to see
Bruce Lee himself, as seen from the point of view of the hapless gargoyle
spy, approaching down some dank corridor on a Raft ghost ship. Condensation
is dripping from the blade of Bruce Lee's samurai sword.
"Bruce Lee's men have trapped the spy in an old Korean factory ship in
the Core," one of Sushi K's henchmen says, a rapid hissing explanation.
"They are looking for him now."
Suddenly, Bruce Lee is pinioned under a brilliant spotlight that makes
his trademark diamond grin flash like the arm of a galaxy. In the middle of
the screen, a pair of cross hairs swing into place, centered on Bruce Lee's
forehead. Apparently, the spy has decided he must fight his way out of this
mess and is bringing some powerful CIC weapons system to bear on Bruce Lee's
skull. But then a blur comes in from the side, a mysterious dark shape
blocking our view of Bruce Lee. The cross hairs are now centered on - what,
exactly?
We'll have to wait until next week to find out.
Hiro sits down across from Sushi K and the programmers, next to the
television set, so that he can get a TV's-eye view of the man.
"I'm Hiro Protagonist. You got my message, I take it."
"Fabu!" Sushi K cries, using the Nipponese abbreviation of the
all-purpose Hollywood adjective "fabulous."
He continues, "Hiro-san, I am deeply indebted to you for this
once-in-a-lifetime chance to perform my small works before such an
audience." He says the whole thing in Nipponese except for
"once-in-a-lifetime chance."
"I must humbly apologize for arranging the whole thing so hastily and
haphazardly," Hiro says.
"It pains me deeply that you should feel the need to apologize when you
have given me an opportunity that any Nipponese rapper would give anything
for - to perform my humble works before actual homeboys from the ghettos of
"No. But I can list the contents briefly. The stack contains eleven
high school football games. Rife was on the second-string Texas all-state
team in his senior year. Then he proceeded to Rice on an academic
scholarship and walked onto the football team, so there are also fourteen
tapes of college games. Rife majored in communications."
"Logically enough, considering what he became."
"He became a television sports reporter in the Houston market, so there
are fifty hours of footage from this period - mostly outtakes, of course.
After two years in this line of work, Rife went into business with his
great-uncle, a financier with roots in the oil business. The stack contains
a few newspaper stories to that effect, which, as I note from reading them,
are all textually related - implying that they came from the same source."
"A press release."
"Then there are no stories for five years."
"He was up to something."
"Then we begin to see more stories, mostly from the Religion sections
of Houston newspapers, detailing Rife's contributions to various
organizations."
"That sounded like summary to me. I thought you couldn't summarize."
"I can't really. I was quoting a summary that Dr. Lagos made to Juanita
Marquez recently, in my presence, when they were reviewing the same data."
"Go on."
"Rife contributed $500 to the Highlands Church of the Baptism by Fire,
Reverend Wayne Bedford, head minister; $2,500 to the Pentecostal Youth
League of Bayside, Reverend Wayne Bedford, president; $150,000 to the
Pentecostal Church of the New Trinity, Reverend Wayne Bedford, founder and
patriarch; $2.3 million to Rife Bible College, Reverend Wayne Bedford,
President and chairman of the theology department; $20 million to the
archaeology department of Rife Bible College, plus $45 million to the
astronomy department and $100 million to the computer science department."
"Did these donations take place before hyperinflation?"
"Yes, sir. They were, as the expression goes, real money."
"That Wayne Bedford guy - is this the same Reverend Wayne who runs the
Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates?"
"The same."
"Are you telling me that Rife owns the Reverend Wayne?"
"He owns a majority share in Pearlgate Associates, which is the
multinational that runs the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates chain."
"Okay, let's keep sifting through this," Hiro says.
Hiro Peeps out over his goggles to confirm that Vitaly is still nowhere
near the concert. Then he dives back in and continues to go over the video
and the news stories that Lagos has compiled.
During the same years that Rife makes his contributions to the Reverend
Wayne, he's showing up with increasing frequency in the business section,
first in the local papers and later in The Wall Street Journal and The New
York Times. There is a big flurry of publicity - obvious PR plants - after
the Nipponese tried to use their old-boy network to shut him out of the
telecommunications market there, and he took it to the American public,
spending $10 million of his own money on a campaign to convince Americans
that the Nipponese were duplicitous schemers. A triumphal cover on The
Economist after the Nipponese finally knuckled under and let him corner the
fiber-optics market in that country and, by extension, most of East Asia.
Finally, then, the lifestyle pieces start coming in. L. Bob Rife has
let his publicist know that he wants to show a more human side. There is a
personality journalism program that does a puff piece on Rife after he buys
a new yacht, surplus, from the U.S. Government.
L. Bob Rife, last of the nineteenth-century monopolists, is shown
consulting with his decorator in the captain's quarters. It looks nice as it
is, considering that Rife bought this ship from the Navy, but it's not Texan
enough for him. He wants it gutted and rebuilt. Then, shots of Rife
maneuvering his steerlike body through the narrow passages and steep
staircase of the ship's interior - typical boring gray steel Navy scape,
which, he assures the interviewer, he is going to have spruced up
considerably.
"Y'know, there's a story that when Rockefeller bought himself a yacht,
he bought a pretty small one, like a seventy-footer or something. Small by
the standards of the day. And when someone asked him why he went and bought
himself such a dinky little yacht, he just looked at the guy and said, 'What
do you think I am, a Vanderbilt?' Haw! Well, anyway, welcome aboard my
yacht."
L. Bob Rife says this while standing on a huge open-air platform
elevator along with the interviewer and the whole camera crew. The elevator
is going up. In the background is the Pacific Ocean. As Rife is speaking the
last part of the line, suddenly the elevator rises up to the top and the
camera turns around, and we are looking out across the deck of the aircraft
carrier Enterprise, formerly of the U.S. Navy, now the personal yacht of L.
Bob Rife, who beat out both General Jim's Defense System and Admiral Bob's
Global Security in a furious bidding war. L. Bob Rife proceeds to admire the
vast, flat open spaces of the carrier's flight deck, likening it to certain
parts of Texas. He suggests that it would be amusing to cover part of it
with dirt and raise cattle there.
Another profile, this one shot for a business network, apparently made
somewhat later: Back on the Enterprise, where the captain's office has been
massively reworked. L. Bob Rife, Lord of Bandwidth, is sitting behind his
desk, having his mustache waxed. Not in the sense that women have their legs
waxed. He's having the curl smoothed out and restored. The waxer is a very
short Asian woman who does it so delicately that it doesn't even interfere
with his talking, mostly about his efforts to extend his cable TV network
throughout Korea and into China and link it up with his big fiber-optic
trunk line that runs across Siberia and over the Urals.
"Yeah, you know, a monopolist's work is never done. No such thing as a
perfect monopoly. Seems like you can never get that last one-tenth of one
percent."
"Isn't the government still strong in Korea? You must have more trouble
with regulations there."
L. Bob Rife laughs. "Y'know, watching government regulators trying to
keep up with the world is my favorite sport. Remember when they busted up Ma
Bell?"
"Just barely." The reporter is a woman in her twenties.
"You know what it was, right?"
"Voice communications monopoly."
"Right. They were in the same business as me. The information business.
Moving phone conversations around on little tiny copper wires, one at a
time. Government busted them up - at the same time when I was starting cable
TV franchises in thirty states. Haw! Can you believe that? It's like if they
figured out a way to regulate horses at the same time the Model T and the
airplane were being introduced."
"But a cable TV system isn't the same as a phone system."
"At that stage it wasn't, cause it was just a local system. But once
you get local systems all over the world, all you got to do is hook 'em
together and it's a global network. Just as big as the phone system. Except
this one carries information ten thousand times faster. It carries images,
sound, data, you name it."
A naked PR plant, a half-hour television commercial with no purpose
whatsoever other than to let L. Bob Rife tell his side of a particular
issue. It seems that a number of Rife's programmers, the people who made his
systems run, got together and formed a union - unheard of, for hackers - and
filed a suit against Rife, claiming that he had placed audio and video bugs
in their homes, in fact placed all of them under twenty-four-hour
surveillance, and harassed and threatened some programmers who were making
what he called "unacceptable lifestyle choices." For example, when one of
his programmers and her husband engaged in oral sex in their own bedroom one
night, the next morning she was called into Rife's office, where he called
her a slut and a sodomite and told her to clean out her desk. The bad
publicity from this so annoyed Rife that he felt the need to blow a few
million on some more PR.
"I deal in information," he says to the smarmy, toadying
pseudojournalist who "interviews" him. He's sitting in his office in
Houston, looking slicker than normal. "All television going out to consumers
throughout the world goes through me. Most of the information transmitted to
and from the CIC database passes through my networks. The Metaverse - the
entire Street - exists by virtue of a network that I own and control.
"But that means, if you'll just follow my reasoning for a bit, that
when I have a programmer working under me who is working with that
information, he is wielding enormous power. Information is going into his
brain. And it's staying there. It travels with him when he goes home at
night. It gets all tangled up into his dreams, for Christ's sake. He talks
to his wife about it. And, goddamn it, he doesn't have any right to that
information. If I was running a car factory, I wouldn't let workers drive
the cars home or borrow tools. But that's what I do at five o'clock each
day, all over the world, when my hackers go home from work.
"When they used to hang rustlers in the old days, the last thing they
would do is piss their pants. That was the ultimate sign, you see, that they
had lost control over their own bodies, that they were about to die. See,
it's the first function of any organization to control its own sphincters.
We're not even doing that. So we're working on refining our management
techniques so that we can control that information no matter where it is -
on our hard disks or even inside the programmers' heads. Now, I can't say
more because I got competition to worry about. But it is my fervent hope
that in five or ten years, this kind of thing won't even be an issue."
A half-hour episode of a science news program, this one on the
controversial new subject of infoastronomy, the search for radio signals
coming from other solar systems. L. Bob Rife has taken a personal interest
in the subject; as various national governments auction off their
possessions, he has purchased a string of radio observatories and hooked
them together, using his fabled fiber-optic net, to turn them into a single
giant antenna as big as the whole earth. He is scanning the skies
twenty-four hours a day, looking for radio waves that mean something - radio
waves carrying information from other civilizations. And why, asks the
interviewer - a celebrity professor from MIT - why would a simple oilman be
interested in such a high-flown, abstract pursuit?
"I just about got this planet all sewn up."
Rife delivers this line with an incredibly sardonic and contemptuous
twang, the exaggerated accent of a cowboy who suspects that some Yankee
pencilneck is looking down his nose at him.
Another news piece, this one apparently done a few years later. Again
we are on the Enterprise, but this time the atmosphere is different again.
The top deck has been turned into an open-air refugee camp. It is swarming
with Bangladeshis that L. Bob Rife plucked out of the Bay of Bengal after
their country washed into the ocean in a series of massive floods, caused by
deforestation farther upstream in India - hydrological warfare. The camera
pans to look out over the edge of the flight deck, and down below, we see
the first beginnings of the Raft: a relatively small collection of a few
hundred boats that have glommed onto the Enterprise, hoping for a free ride
across to America.
Rife's walking among the people, handing out Bible comics and kisses to
little kids. They cluster around with broad smiles, pressing their palms
together and bowing. Rife bows back, very awkwardly, but there's no gaiety
on his face. He's deadly serious.
"Mr. Rife, what's your opinion of the people who say you're just doing
this as a self-aggrandizing publicity stunt?" This interviewer is trying to
be more of a Bad Cop.
"Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I
wouldn't get any work done," L. Bob Rife says. "You should ask these people
what they think."
"You're telling me that this refugee assistance program has nothing to
do with your public image?"
"Nope. L-"
There's an edit and they cut away to the journalist, pontificating into
the camera. Rife was on the verge of delivering a sermon, Hiro senses, but
they cut him off.
But one of the true glories of the Library is that it has so many
outtakes. Just because a piece of videotape never got edited into a
broadcast program doesn't mean it's devoid of intel value. CIC long ago
stuck its fingers into the networks' videotape libraries. All of those
outtakes - millions of hours of footage - have not actually been uploaded to
the Library in digital form yet. But you can send in a request, and CIC will
go and pull that videotape off the shelf for you and play it back.
Lagos has already done it. The tape is right there.
"Nope. Look. The Raft is a media event. But in a much more profound,
general sense than you can possibly imagine."
"Oh."
"It's created by the media in that without the media, people wouldn't
know it was here, Refus wouldn't come out and glom onto it the way they do.
And it sustains the media. It creates a lot of information flow - movies,
news reports - you know."
"So you're creating your own news event to make money off the
information flow that it creates?" says the journalist, desperately trying
to follow. His tone of voice says that this is all a waste of videotape. His
weary attitude suggests that this is not the first time Rife has flown off
on a bizarre tangent.
"Partly. But that's only a very crude explanation. It really goes a lot
deeper than that. You've probably heard the expression that the Industry
feeds off of biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean."
"I've heard the expression, yes."
"That's my expression. I made it up. An expression like that is just
like a virus, you know - it's a piece of information - data that spreads
from one person to the next. Well, the function of the Raft is to bring more
biomass. To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is
keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking, smoking
machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating
everything in sight. Leaves behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always
needs more fuel. Ever read the story about the labyrinth and the minotaur?"
"Sure. That was on Crete, right?" The journalist only answers out of
sarcasm; he can't believe he's here listening to this, he wants to fly back
to L.A. yesterday.
"Yeah. Every year, the Greeks had to pony up a few virgins and send
them to Crete as tribute. Then the king put them into the labyrinth, and the
minotaur ate them up. I used to read that story when I was a kid and wonder
who the hell these guys were, on Crete, that everyone else was so scared of
them that they would just meekly give up their children to be eaten, every
year. They must have been some mean sons of bitches.
"Now I have a different perspective on it. America must look, to those
poor little buggers down there, about the same as Crete looked to those poor
Greek suckers. Except that there's no coercion involved. Those people down
there give up their children willingly. Send them into the labyrinth by the
millions to be eaten up. The Industry feeds on them and spits back images,
sends out movies and TV programs, over my networks, images of wealth and
exotic things beyond their wildest dreams, back to those people, and it
gives them something to dream about, something to aspire to. And that is the
function of the Raft. It's just a big old krill carrier."
Finally the journalist gives up on being a journalist, just starts to
slag L. Bob Rife openly. He's had it with this guy. "That's disgusting. I
can't believe you can think about people that way."
"Shit, boy, get down off your high horse. Nobody really gets eaten.
It's just a figure of speech. They come here, they get decent jobs, find
Christ, buy a Weber grill, and live happily ever after. What's wrong with
that?"
Rife is pissed. He's yelling. Behind him, the Bangladeshis are picking
up on his emotional vibes and becoming upset themselves. Suddenly, one of
them, an incredibly gaunt man with a long drooping mustache, runs in front
of the camera and begins to shout: "a ma la ge zen ba dam gal nun ka aria su
su na an da..." The sounds spread from him to his neighbors, spreading
across the flight deck like a wave.
"Cut," the journalist says, turning into the camera. "Just cut. The
Babble Brigade has started up again."
The soundtrack now consists of a thousand people speaking in tongues
under the high-pitched, shit-eating chuckles of L. Bob Rife.
"This is the miracle of tongues," Rife shouts above the tumult. "I can
understand every word these people are saying. Can you, brother?"
"Yo! Snap out of it, pod!"
Hiro looks up from the card. No one is in his office except for the
Librarian.
The image loses focus and veers upward and out of his field of view.
Hiro is looking out the windshield of the Vanagon. Someone has just yanked
his goggles off his face-not Vitaly.
"I'm out here, gogglehead!"
Hiro looks out the window. It's Y.T., hanging onto the side of the van
with one hand, holding his goggles in the other.
"You spend too much time goggled in," she says. "Try a little Reality,
man."
"Where we are going," Hiro says, "we're going to get more Reality than
I can handle."
As Hiro and Vitaly approach the vast freeway overpass where tonight's
concert is to take place, the solid ferrous quality of the Vanagon attracts
MagnaPoons like a Twinkie draws cockroaches. If they knew that Vitaly
Chernobyl himself was in the van, they'd go crazy, they'd stall the van's
engine. But right now, they'll poon anything that might be headed toward the
concert.
When they get closer to the overpass, it becomes a lost cause trying to
drive at all, the thrashers are so thick and numerous. It's like putting on
crampons and trying to walk through a room full of puppies. They have to
nose their way along, tapping the horn, flashing the lights.
Finally, they get to the flatbed semi that constitutes the stage for
tonight's concert. Next to it is another semi, full of amps and other sound
gear. The drivers of the trucks, an oppressed minority of two, have
retreated into the cab of the sound truck to smoke cigarettes and glare
balefully at the swarm of thrashers, their sworn enemies in the food chain
of the highways. They will not voluntarily come out until five in the
morning, when the way has been made plain.
A couple of the other Meltdowns are standing around smoking cigarettes,
holding them between two fingers in the Slavic style, like darts. They stomp
the cigarettes out on the concrete with their cheap vinyl shoes, run up to
the Vanagon, and begin to haul out the sound equipment. Vitaly puts on
goggles, hooks himself into a computer on the sound truck, and begins tuning
the system. There's a 3-D model of the overpass already in memory. He has to
figure out how to sync the delays on all the different speaker clusters to
maximize the number of nasty, clashing echoes.
The warm-up band, Blunt Force Trauma, gets rolling at about 9:00 P.M.
On the first power chord, a whole stack of cheap preowned speakers shorts
out; its wires throw sparks into the air, sending an arc of chaos through
the massed skateboarders. The sound truck's electronics isolate the bad
circuit and shut it off before anything or anyone gets hurt. Blunt Force
Trauma play a kind of speed reggae heavily influenced by the
antitechnological ideas of the Meltdowns.
These guys will probably play for an hour, then there will be a couple
of hours of Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns to look forward to. And if
Sushi K shows up, he's welcome to make a guest appearance at the mike.
Just in case that actually happens, Hiro pulls back from the delirious
center of the crowd and begins to orbit back and forth along its fringes.
Y.T.'s in there somewhere, but no point in trying to track her down. She
would be embarrassed, anyway, to be seen with an oldster like Hiro.
Now that the concert is up and running, it will take care of itself.
There's not much more for Hiro to do. Besides, interesting things happen
along borders - transitions - not in the middle where everything is the
same. There may be something happening along the border of the crowd, back
where the lights fade into the shade of the overpass.
The fringe crowd looks pretty typical for the wrong side of an L.A.
overpass in the middle of the night. There's a good-sized shantytown of
hardcore Third World unemployables, plus a scattering of schizophrenic first
worlders who have long ago burned their brains to ash in the radiant heat of
their own imaginings. A lot of them have emerged from their overturned
dumpsters and refrigerator boxes to stand on tiptoe at the edge of the crowd
and peer into the noise and light. Some of them look sleepy and awed, and
some - stocky Latino men - look amused by the whole thing, passing
cigarettes back and forth and shaking their heads in disbelief.
This is Crips turf. The Crips wanted to provide security, but Hiro, a
student of Altamont, decided to take the risk of snubbing them. He hired The
Enforcers to do it instead.
So every few dozen feet there's a large man with erect posture wearing
an acid green windbreaker with ENFORCER spelled out across the back. Very
conspicuous, which is how they like it. But it's all done with
electropigment, so if there's trouble, these guys can turn themselves black
by flipping a lapel switch. And they can make themselves bulletproof just by
zipping the windbreakers up the front. Right now, it's a warm night, and
most of them are leaving their uniforms open to the cool breezes. Some of
them are just coasting, but most of them are attentive, keeping their eyes
on the crowd, not the band.
Seeing all of those soldiers, Hiro looks for the general and soon finds
him: a small, stout black guy, a pint-sized weightlifter type. He's wearing
the same windbreaker as the others, but there's an additional layer of
bulletproof vest underneath, and clipped onto that he's got a nice
assortment of communications gear and small, clever devices for hurting
people. He's doing a lot of jogging back and forth, swiveling his head from
side to side, mumbling quick bursts into his headset like a football coach
on the sidelines.
Hiro notices a tall man in his late thirties, distinguished goatee,
wearing a very nice charcoal gray suit. Hiro can see the diamonds in his tie
pin flashing from a hundred feet away. He knows that if he gets up closer he
will be able to see the word "Crips" spelled out in blue sapphires, nestled
among those diamonds. He's got his own security detail of half a dozen other
guys in suits. Even though they aren't doing security, they couldn't help
sending along a token delegation to show the colors.
This is a non sequitur that has been nibbling on the edges of Hiro's
mind for the last ten minutes: Laser light has a particular kind of gritty
intensity, a molecular purity reflecting its origins. Your eye notices this,
somehow knows that it's unnatural. It stands out anywhere, but especially
under a dirty overpass in the middle of the night. Hiro keeps getting
flashes of it in his peripheral vision, keeps glancing over to track down
it's source. It's obvious to him, but no one else seems to notice.
Someone in this overpass, somewhere, is bouncing a laser beam off
Hiro's face.
It's annoying. Without being too obvious about it, he changes his
course slightly, wanders over to a point downwind of a trash fire that's
burning in a steel drum. Now he's standing in the middle of a plume of
diluted smoke that he can smell but can't quite see.
But the next time the laser darts into his face, it scatters off a
million tiny, ashy particulates and reveals itself as a pure geometric line
in space, pointing straight back to its source.
It's a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case
he's not already conspicuous enough, he's wearing a suit. Hiro starts
walking toward him.
Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence
Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their
bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back,
on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording
everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups
are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator
pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once
above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they
embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the
attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in
the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.
The CIC brass can't stand these guys because they upload staggering
quantities of useless information to the database, on the off chance that
some of it will eventually be useful. It's like writing down the license
number of every car you see on your way to work each morning, just in case
one of them will be involved in a hit-and-run accident. Even the CIC
database can only hold so much garbage. So, usually, these habitual
gargoyles get kicked out of the CIC before too long.
This guy hasn't been kicked out yet. And to judge from the quality of
his equipment - which is very expensive - he's been at it for a while. So he
must be pretty good.
If so, what's he doing hanging around this place?
"Hiro Protagonist," the gargoyle says as Hiro finally tracks him down
in the darkness beside a shanty. "CIC stringer for eleven months.
Specializing in the Industry. Former hacker, security guard, pizza
deliverer, concert promoter." He sort of mumbles it, not wanting Hiro to
waste his time reciting a bunch of known facts.
The laser that kept jabbing Hiro in the eye was shot out of this guy's
computer, from a peripheral device that sits above his goggles in the middle
of his forehead. A long-range retinal scanner. If you turn toward him with
your eyes open, the laser shoots out, penetrates your iris, tenderest of
sphincters, and scans your retina. The results are shot back to CIC, which
has a database of several tens of millions of scanned retinas. Within a few
seconds, if you're in the database already, the owner finds out who you are.
If you're not already in the database, well, you are now.
Of course, the user has to have access privileges. And once he gets
your identity, he has to have more access privileges to find out personal
information about you. This guy, apparently, has a lot of access privileges.
A lot more than Hiro.
"Name's Lagos," the gargoyle says.
So this is the guy. Hiro considers asking him what the hell he's doing
here. He'd love to take him out for a drink, talk to him about how the
Librarian was coded. But he's pissed off. Lagos is being rude to him
(gargoyles are rude by definition).
"You here on the Raven thing? Or just that fuzz-grunge tip you've been
working on for the last, uh, thirty-six days approximately?" Lagos says.
Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are
adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing
background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in
visual light, infrared, millimeter-wave radar, and ultrasound all at once.
You think they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the
credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying
the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is
standing there measuring the length of Hiro's cock through his trousers
while they pretend to make conversation.
"You're the guy who's working with Juanita, right?" Hiro says.
"Or she's working with me. Or something like that."
"She said she wanted me to meet you."
For several seconds Lagos is frozen. He's ransacking more data. Hiro
wants to throw a bucket of water on him.
"Makes sense," he says. "You're as familiar with the Metaverse as
anyone. Freelance hacker - that's exactly right."
"Exactly right for what? No one wants freelance hackers anymore."
"The corporate assembly-line hackers are suckers for infection. They're
going to go down by the thousands, just like Sennacherib's army before the
walls of Jerusalem," Lagos says.
"Infection? Sennacherib?"
"And you can defend yourself in Reality, too - that'll be good if you
ever go up against Raven. Remember, his knives are as sharp as a molecule.
They'll go through a bulletproof jacket like lingerie."
"Raven?"
"You'll probably see him tonight. Don't mess with him."
"Okay," Hiro says. "I'll look out for him."
"That's not what I said," Lagos says. "I said, don't mess with him."
"Why not?"
"It's a dangerous world," Lagos says. "Getting more dangerous all the
time. So we don't want to upset the balance of terror. Just think about the
Cold War."
"Yup." All Hiro wants to do now is walk away and never see this guy
again, but he won't wind up the conversation.
"You're a hacker. That means you have deep structures to worry about,
too."
"Deep structures?"
"Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you
learned binary code?"
"Sure."
"You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves
grow new connections as you use them - the axons split and push their way
between the dividing glial cells - your bioware self-modifies - the software
becomes part of the hardware. So now you're vulnerable - all hackers are
vulnerable - to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other."
"What's a nam-shub? Why am I vulnerable to it?"
"Just don't stare into any bitmaps. Anyone try to show you a raw bitmap
lately? Like, in the Metaverse?"
Interesting. "Not to me personally, but now that you mention it, this
Brandy came up to my friend - "
"A cult prostitute of Asherah. Trying to spread the disease. Which is
synonymous with evil. Sound melodramatic? Not really. You know, to the
Mesopotamians, there was no independent concept of evil. Just disease and
ill health. Evil was a synonym for disease. So what does that tell you?"
Hiro walks away, the same way he walks away from psychotic street
people who follow him down the street.
"It tells you that evil is a virus!" Lagos calls after him. "Don't let
the nam-shub into your operating system!"
Juanita's working with this alien?
Blunt Force Trauma play for a solid hour, segueing from one song into
the next with no chink or crevice in the wall of noise. All a part of the
aesthetic. When the music stops, their set is over. For the first time, Hiro
can hear the exaltation of the crowd. It's a blast of high-pitched noise
that he feels in his head, ringing his ears.
But there's a low thudding sound, too, like someone pummeling a bass
drum, and for a minute he thinks maybe it's a truck rolling by on the
overpass above them. But it's too steady for that, it doesn't die away.
It's behind him. Other people have noticed it, turned to look toward
the sound, are scurrying out of the way. Hiro sidesteps, turning to see what
it is.
Big and black, to begin with. It does not seem as though such a large
man could perch on a motorcycle, even a big chortling Harley like this one.
Correction. It's a Harley with some kind of a sidecar added, a sleek
black projectile hanging off to the right, supported on its own wheel. But
no one is sitting in the sidecar.
It does not seem as though a man could be this bulky without being fat.
But he's not fat at all, he's wearing tight stretchy clothes - like leather,
but not quite - that show bones and muscles, but nothing else.
He is riding the Harley so slowly that he would certainly fall over if
not for the sidecar. Occasionally he gooses it forward with a flick of the
fingers on his clutch hand.
Maybe one reason he looks so big - other than the fact that he really
is big - is the fact that he appears totally neckless. His head starts out
wide and just keeps getting wider until it merges with his shoulders. At
first Hiro thinks it must be some kind of avant-garde helmet. But when the
man rolls past him, this great shroud moves and flutters and Hiro sees that
it is just his hair, a thick mane of black hair tossed back over his
shoulders, trading down his back almost to his waist.
As he is marveling at this, he realizes that the man has turned his
head to look back at him. Or to look in his general direction, anyway. It's
impossible to tell exactly what he's looking at because of his goggles, a
smooth convex shell over the eyes, interrupted by a narrow horizontal slit.
He is looking at Hiro. He gives him the same fuck-you smile that he
sported earlier tonight, when Hiro was standing in the entryway to The Black
Sun, and he was in a public terminal somewhere.
This is the guy. Raven. This is the guy that Juanita is looking for.
The guy Lagos told him not to mess with. And Hiro has seen him before,
outside the entrance to The Black Sun. This is the guy who gave the Snow
Crash card to Da5id.
The tattoo on his forehead consists of three words, written in block
letters: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL.
Hiro startles and actually jumps into the air as Vitaly Chernobyl and
the Meltdowns launch into their opening number, "Radiation Burn." It is a
tornado of mostly high-pitched noise and distortion, like being flung bodily
through a wall of fishhooks.
These days, most states are franchulates or Burbclaves, much too small
to have anything like a jail, or even a judicial system. So when someone
does something bad, they try to find quick and dirty punishments, like
flogging, confiscation of property, public humiliation, or, in the case of
people who have a high potential of going on to hurt others, a warning
tattoo on a prominent body part. POOR IMPULSE CONTROL. Apparently, this guy
went to such a place and lost his temper real bad.
For an instant, a glowing red gridwork is plotted against the side of
Raven's face. It rapidly shrinks, all sides converging inward toward the
right pupil. Raven shakes his head, turns to look for the source of the
laser light, but it's already gone. Lagos has already got his retinal scan.
That's why Lagos is here. He's not interested in Hiro or Vitaly
Chernobyl. He's interested in Raven. And somehow, Lagos knew that he was
going to be here. And Lagos is somewhere nearby, right now, videotaping the
guy, probing the contents of his pockets with radar, recording his pulse and
respiration.
Hiro picks up his personal phone. "Y.T.," he says, and it dials Y.T.'s
number.
It rings for a long time before she picks it up. It's almost impossible
to hear anything over the sound of the concert.
"What the fuck do you want?"
"Y.T., I'm sorry about this. But something's going on. Something big
time. I'm keeping one eye on a big biker named Raven."
"The problem with you hackers is you never stop working."
"That's what a hacker is," Hiro says.
"I'll keep an eye on this Raven guy, too," she says, "sometime when I
am working." Then she hangs up.
Raven makes a couple of broad, lazy sweeps along the perimeter of the
crowd, going very slowly, looking in all directions. He is annoyingly calm
and unhurried.
Then he cuts farther out into the darkness, away from the crowd. He
does a little more looking around, checking out the perimeter of the
shantytown. And finally, he swings the big Harley around in a trajectory
that brings him back to the big important Crip. The guy with the sapphire
tie clip and the personal security detail.
Hiro begins weaving through the crowd in that direction, trying not to
be too obvious about it. This looks like it's going to be interesting.
As Raven approaches, the bodyguards converge on the head Crip, form a
loose protective ring around him. As he comes nearer, all of them back away
a step or two, as though the man is surrounded by an invisible force field.
He finally comes to a stop, deigns to put his feet on the ground. He flicks
a few switches on the handlebars before he steps away from his Harley. Then,
anticipating what's next, he stands with his feet apart and his arms up.
One Crip approaches from each side. They don't look real happy about
this particular duty, they keep casting sidelong glances at the motorcycle.
The head Crip keeps goading them forward with his voice, shooing them toward
Raven with his hands. Each one of them has a hand-held metal-detecting wand.
They swirl the wands around his body and find nothing at all, not even the
tiniest speck of metal, not even coins in his pocket. The man is 100 percent
organic. So if nothing else, Lagos's warning about Raven's knife has turned
out to be bullshit.
These two Crips walk rapidly back to the main group. Raven begins to
follow them. But the head Crip takes a step back, holds both of his hands up
in a "stop" motion. Raven stops, stands there, the grin returning to his
face.
The head Crip turns away and gestures back toward his black BMW. The
rear door of the BMW opens up and a man gets out, a younger, smaller black
man in round wire-rims, wearing jeans and big white athletic shoes and
typical studentish gear.
The student walks slowly toward Raven, pulling something from his
pocket. It's a hand-held device, but much too bulky to be a calculator. It's
got a keypad on the top and a sort of window on one end, which the student
keeps aiming toward Raven. There's an LED readout above the keypad and a red
flashing light underneath that. The student is wearing a pair of headphones
that are jacked into a socket on the butt of the device.
For starters, the student aims the window at the ground, then at the
sky, then at Raven, keeping his eye on the flashing red light and the LED
readout. It has the feel of some kind of religious rite, accepting digital
input from the sky spirit and then the ground spirit and then from the black
biker angel.
Then he begins to walk slowly toward Raven, one step at a time. Hiro
can see the red light flashing intermittently, not following any particular
pattern or rhythm.
The student gets to within a yard of Raven and then orbits him a couple
of times, always keeping the device aimed inward. When he's finished, he
steps back briskly, turns, and aims it toward the motorcycle. When the
device is aimed at the motorcycle, the red light flashes much more quickly.
The student walks up to the head Crip, pulling off his headphones, and
has a short conversation with him. The Crip listens to the student but keeps
his eyes fixed on Raven, nods his head a few times, finally pats the student
on his shoulder and sends him back to the BMW.
It was a Geiger counter.
Raven strolls up to the big Crip. They shake hands, a standard plain
old Euro-shake, no fancy variations. It's not a real friendly get-together.
The Crip has his eyes a little too wide open, Hiro can see the furrows in
his brow, everything about his posture and his face screaming out: Get me
away from this Martian.
Raven goes back to his radioactive hog, releases a few bungee cords,
and picks up a metal briefcase. He hands it to the head Crip, and they shake
hands again. Then he turns away, walks slowly and calmly back to the
motorcycle, gets on, and putt-putts away.
Hiro would love to stick around and watch some more, but he has the
feeling that Lagos has this particular event covered. And besides, he has
other business. Two limousines are fighting their way through the crowd,
headed for the stage.
The limousines stop, and Nipponese people start to climb out.
Dark-clad, unfunky, they stand around awkwardly in the middle of the
party/riot, like a handful of broken nails suspended in a colorful jello
mold. Finally, Hiro makes bold enough to go up and look into one of the
windows to find out if this is who he thinks it is.
Can't see through the smoked glass. He bends down, puts his face right
near the window, trying to make it real obvious.
Still no response. Finally, he knocks on the window.
Silence. He looks up at the entourage. They are all watching him. But
when he looks up they glance away, suddenly remember to drag on their
cigarettes or rub their eyebrows.
There is only one source of light inside the limousine that's bright
enough to be visible through the smoked glass, and that is the distinctive
inflated rectangle of a television screen.
What the hell. This is America, Hiro is half American, and there's no
reason to take this politeness thing to an unhealthy extreme. He hauls the
door open and looks into the back of the limousine.
Sushi K is sitting there wedged in between a couple of other young
Nipponese men, programmers on his imageering team. His hairdo is turned off,
so it just looks like an orange Afro. He is wearing a partly assembled stage
costume, apparently expecting to be performing tonight. Looks like he's
taking Hiro up on his offer.
He's watching a well-known television program called Eye Spy. It is
produced by CIC and syndicated through one of the major studios. It is
reality television: CIC picks out one of their agents who is involved in a
wet operation - doing some actual cloak-and-dagger work - and has him put on
a gargoyle rig so that everything he sees and hears is transmitted back to
the home base in Langley. This material is then edited into a weekly
hour-long program.
Hiro never watches it. Now that he works for CIC, he finds it kind of
annoying. But he hears a lot of gossip about the show, and he knows that
tonight they are showing the second-to-last episode in a five-part arc. CIC
has smuggled a guy onto the Raft, where he is trying to infiltrate one of
its many colorful and sadistic pirate bands: the Bruce Lee organization.
Hiro enters the limousine and gets a look at the TV just in time to see
Bruce Lee himself, as seen from the point of view of the hapless gargoyle
spy, approaching down some dank corridor on a Raft ghost ship. Condensation
is dripping from the blade of Bruce Lee's samurai sword.
"Bruce Lee's men have trapped the spy in an old Korean factory ship in
the Core," one of Sushi K's henchmen says, a rapid hissing explanation.
"They are looking for him now."
Suddenly, Bruce Lee is pinioned under a brilliant spotlight that makes
his trademark diamond grin flash like the arm of a galaxy. In the middle of
the screen, a pair of cross hairs swing into place, centered on Bruce Lee's
forehead. Apparently, the spy has decided he must fight his way out of this
mess and is bringing some powerful CIC weapons system to bear on Bruce Lee's
skull. But then a blur comes in from the side, a mysterious dark shape
blocking our view of Bruce Lee. The cross hairs are now centered on - what,
exactly?
We'll have to wait until next week to find out.
Hiro sits down across from Sushi K and the programmers, next to the
television set, so that he can get a TV's-eye view of the man.
"I'm Hiro Protagonist. You got my message, I take it."
"Fabu!" Sushi K cries, using the Nipponese abbreviation of the
all-purpose Hollywood adjective "fabulous."
He continues, "Hiro-san, I am deeply indebted to you for this
once-in-a-lifetime chance to perform my small works before such an
audience." He says the whole thing in Nipponese except for
"once-in-a-lifetime chance."
"I must humbly apologize for arranging the whole thing so hastily and
haphazardly," Hiro says.
"It pains me deeply that you should feel the need to apologize when you
have given me an opportunity that any Nipponese rapper would give anything
for - to perform my humble works before actual homeboys from the ghettos of