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nothing's parked in the lot but an eighteen-wheeler, motor running, SALDUCCI
BROS. MOVING & STORAGE painted on the sides.
"Come on," Jason says, getting out of his Oldsmobile. "You don't want
to waste any time."
"Screw you, asshole," she says, reeling in her poon, looking back
toward the boulevard for some promising westbound traffic. Whatever this guy
has in mind, it is probably unprofessional.
"Young lady," says another voice, an older and more arresting sort of
voice, "it's fine if you don't like Jason. But your pal, Uncle Enzo, needs
your help."
A door on the back of the semi has opened up. A man in a black suit is
standing there. Behind him, the interior of the semi is brightly lit up.
Halogen light glares off the man's slick hairdo. Even with this
backlighting, she can tell it is the man with the glass eye.
"What do you want?" she says.
"What I want," he says, looking her up and down, and what I need are
different things. Right now I'm working, see, which means that what I want
is not important. What I need is for you to get into this truck along with
your skateboard and that suitcase."
Then he adds, "Am I getting through to you?" He asks the question
almost rhetorically, like he presumes the answer is no.
"He's for real," Jason says, as though Y.T. must be hanging on his
opinion.
"Well, there you have it," the man with the glass eye says.
Y.T. is supposed to be on her way to a Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates
franchise. If she screws up this delivery, that means she's double-crossing
God, who may or may not exist, and in any case who is capable of
forgiveness. The Mafia definitely exists and hews to a higher standard of
obedience.
She hands her stuff - the plank and the aluminum case - up to the man
with the glass eye, then vaults up into the back of the semi, ignoring his
proffered hand. He recoils, holds up his hand, looks at it to see if there's
something wrong with it. By the time her feet leave the ground, the truck is
already moving. By the time the door is pulled shut behind her, they have
already pulled onto the boulevard.
"Just gotta run a few tests on this delivery of yours," the man with
the glass eye says.
"Ever think of introducing yourself?" Y.T. says.
"Nah," he says, "people always forget names. You can just think of me
as that one guy, y'know?"
Y.T. is not really listening. She is checking out the inside of the
truck.
The trailer of this rig consists of a single long skinny room. Y.T. has
just come in through its only entrance. At this end of the room, a couple of
Mafia guys are lounging around, the way they always do.
Most of the room is taken up by electronics. Big electronics.
"Going to just do some computer stuff, y'know," he says, handing the
briefcase over to a computer guy. Y.T. knows he's a computer guy because he
has long hair in a ponytail and he's wearing jeans and he seems gentle.
"Hey, if anything happens to that, my ass is grass," Y.T. says. She's
trying to sound tough and brave, but it's a hollow act in these
circumstances.
The man with the glass eye is, like, shocked. "What do you think I am,
some kind of incredibly stupid dickhead?" he says. "Shit, that's just what I
need, trying to explain to Uncle Enzo how I managed to get his little bunny
rabbit shot in the kneecaps."
"It's a noninvasive procedure," the computer guy says in a placid,
liquid voice.
The computer guy rotates the case around in his hand a few times, just
to get a feel for it. Then he slides it into a large open-ended cylinder
that is resting on the top of a table. The walls of the cylinder are a
couple of inches thick. Frost appears to be growing on this thing. Mystery
gases continuously slide off of it, like teaspoons of milk dropped into
turbulent water. The gases plunge out across the table and drop to the
floor, where they make a little carpet of fog that flows and blooms around
their shoes. When the computer guy has it in place, he yanks his hand back
from the cold .
Then he puts on a pair of computer goggles.
That's all there is to it. He just sits there for a few minutes. Y.T.
is not a computer person, but she knows that somewhere behind the cabinets
and doors in the back of this truck there is a big computer doing a lot of
things right now.
"It's like a CAT scanner," the man with the glass eye says, using the
same hushed tone of voice as a sportscaster in a golfing tournament. "But it
reads everything, you know," he says, rotating his hands impatiently in
all-encompassing circles.
"How much does it cost?"
"I don't know."
"What's it called?"
"Doesn't really have a name yet."
"Well, who makes it?"
"We made the goddamn thing," the man with the glass eye says. "Just,
like in the last couple weeks."
"What for?"
"You're asking too many questions. Look. You're a cute kid. I mean,
you're a hell of a chick. You're a knockout. But don't go thinking you're
too important at this stage."
At this stage. Hmm.
Hiro is in his 20-by-30 at the U-Stor-It. He is spending a little time
in Reality, as per the suggestion of his partner. The door is open so that
ocean breezes and jet exhaust can blow through. All the furniture - the
futons, the cargo pallet, the experimental cinderblock furniture - has been
pushed up against the walls. He is holding a one-meter-long piece of heavy
rebar with tape wrapped around one end to make a handle. The rebar
approximates a katana, but it is very much heavier. He calls it redneck
katana.
He is in the kendo stance, barefoot. He should be wearing voluminous
ankle-length culottes and a heavy indigo tunic, which is the traditional
uniform, but instead he is wearing jockey shorts. Sweat is running down his
smoothly muscled cappuccino back and exploring his cleavage. Blisters the
size of green grapes are forming on the ball of his left foot. Hiro's heart
and lungs are well developed, and he has been blessed with unusually quick
reflexes, but he is not intrinsically strong, the way his father was. Even
if he were intrinsically strong, working with the redneck katana would be
very difficult.
He is full of adrenaline, his nerves are shot, and his mind is
cluttered up with free-floating anxiety - floating around on an ocean of
generalized terror.
He is shuffling back and forth down the thirty-foot axis of the room.
From time to time he will accelerate, raise the redneck katana up over his
head until it is pointed backward, then bring it swiftly down, snapping his
wrists at the last moment so that it comes to a stop in midair. Then he
says, "Next"'
Theoretically. In fact, the redneck katana is difficult to stop once it
gets moving. But it's good exercise. His forearms look like bundles of steel
cables. Almost. Well, they will soon, anyway.
The Nipponese don't go in for this nonsense about follow-through. If
you strike a man on the top of his head with a katana and do not make any
effort to stop the blade, it will divide his skull and probably get hung up
in his collarbone or his pelvis, and then you will be out there in the
middle of the medieval battlefield with a foot on your late opponent's face,
trying to work the blade loose as his best friend comes running up to you
with a certain vengeful gleam in his eye. So the plan is to snap the blade
to a full stop just after the impact, maybe crease his brainpan an inch or
two, then whip it out and look for another samurai, hence: "Next!"
He has been thinking about what happened earlier tonight with Raven,
which pretty much rules out sleep, and this is why he is practicing with the
redneck katana at three in the morning.
He knows he was totally unprepared. The spear just came at him. He
slapped at it with the blade. He happened to slap it at the right time, and
it missed him. But he did this almost absentmindedly.
Maybe that's how great warriors do it. Carelessly, not wracking their
minds with the consequences.
Maybe he's flattering himself.
The sound of a helicopter has been getting louder for some minutes now.
Even though Hiro lives right next to the airport, this is unusual. They're
not supposed to fly right near LAX, it raises evident safety questions.
It doesn't stop getting louder until it is very loud, and at that
point, the helicopter is hovering a few feet above the parking lot, right
out in front of Hiro and Vitaly's 20-by-30. It's a nice one, a corporate jet
chopper, dark green, with subdued markings. Hiro suspects that in brighter
light, he would be able to make out the logo of a defense contractor, most
likely General Jim's Defense System.
A pale-faced white man with a very high forehead-cum-bald spot jumps
out of the chopper, looking a lot more athletic than his face and general
demeanor would lead you to expect, and jogs across the parking lot directly
toward Hiro. This is the kind of guy Hiro remembers from when his dad was in
the Army - not the gristly veterans of legends and movies, just sort of
regular thirty-five-year-old guys rattling around in bulky uniforms. He's a
major. His name, sewn onto his BDUs, is Clem.
"Hiro Protagonist?"
"The same."
"Juanita sent me to pick you up. She said you'd recognize the name."
"I recognize the name. But I don't really work for Juanita."
"She says you do now."
"Well, that's nice," Hiro says. "So I guess it's kind of urgent?"
"I think that would be a fair assumption," Major Clem says.
"Can I spare a few minutes? Because I've been working out, and I need
to run next door."
Major Clem looks next door. The next logo down the strip is THE REST
STOP.
"The situation is fairly static. You could spare five minutes," Major
Clem says.
Hiro has an account with The Rest Stop. To live at the U-Stor-It, you
sort of have to have an account. So he gets to bypass the front office where
the attendant waits by the cash register. He shoves his membership card into
a slot, and a computer screen lights up with three choices:
F
NURSERY (UNISEX)
Hiro slaps the "M" button. Then the screen changes to a menu of four
choices:
STANDARD FACILITIES - JUST LIKE HOME - MAYBE JUST A LITTLE BETTER
PRIME FACILITIES - A GRACIOUS PLACE FOR THE DISCRIMINATING PATRON
THE LAVATORY GRANDE ROYALE
He has to override a well-worn reflex to stop himself from
automatically punching SPECIAL LIMITED FACILITIES, which is what he and all
the other U-Stor-It residents always use. Almost impossible to go in there
and not come in contact with someone else's bodily fluids. Not a pretty
sight. Not at all gracious. Instead - what the fuck, Juanita's going to hire
him, right? - he slams the button for LAVATORY GRANDE ROYALE.
Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a
luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded
adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega-jackpot. It's
got everything that a dimwitted pathological gambler would identify with
luxury: gold-plated fixtures, lots of injection-molded pseudomarble, velvet
drapes, and a butler.
None of the U-Stor-It residents ever use The Lavatory Grande Royale.
The only reason it's here is that this place happens to be across the street
from LAX. Singaporean CEOs who want to have a shower and take a nice,
leisurely crap, with all the sound effects, without having to hear and smell
other travelers doing the same, can come here and put it all on their
corporate travel card.
The butler is a thirty-year-old Centroamerican whose eyes look a little
funny, like they've been closed for the last several hours. He is just
throwing some improbably thick towels over his arm as Hiro bursts in.
"Gotta get in and out in five minutes," Hiro says.
"You want shave?" the butler says. He paws at his own checks
suggestively, unable to peg Hiro's ethnic group.
"Love to. No time."
He peels off his jockey shorts, tosses his swords onto the
crushed-velvet sofa, and steps into the marbleized amphitheatre of the
shower stall. Hot water hits him from all directions at once. There's a knob
on the wall so you can choose your favorite temperature.
Afterward, he'd like to take a dump, read some of those glossy phone
book-sized magazines next to the high-tech shitter, but he's got to get
going. He dries himself off with a fresh towel the size of a circus tent,
yanks on some loose drawstring slacks and a T-shirt, throws some Kongbucks
at the butler, and runs out, girding himself with the swords.
It's a short flight, mostly because the military pilot is happy to
eschew comfort in favor of speed. The chopper takes off at a shallow angle,
keeping low so it won't get sucked into any jumbo jets, and as soon as the
pilot gets room to maneuver, he whips the tail around, drops the nose, and
lets the rotor yank them onward and upward across the basin, toward the
sparsely lit mass of the Hollywood Hills.
But they stop short of the Hills, and end up on the roof of a hospital.
Part of the Mercy chain, which technically makes this Vatican airspace. So
far, this has Juanita written all over it.
"Neurology ward," Major Clem says, delivering this string of nouns like
an order. "Fifth floor, east wing, room 564."
The man in the hospital bed is Da5id.
Extremely thick, wide leather straps have been stretched across the
head and foot of the bed. Leather cuffs, lined with fluffy sheepskin, are
attached to the straps. These cuffs have been fastened around Da5id's wrists
and ankles. He's wearing a hospital gown that has mostly fallen off.
The worst thing is that his eyes don't always point in the same
direction. He's hooked up to an EKG that's charting his heartbeat, and even
though Hiro's not a doctor, he can see it's not a regular pattern. It beats
too fast, then it doesn't beat at all, then an alarm sounds, then it starts
beating again.
He has gone completely blank. His eyes are not seeing anything. At
first, Hiro thinks that his body is limp and relaxed. Getting closer, he
sees that Da5id is taut and shivering, slick with perspiration.
"We put in a temporary pacemaker," a woman says.
Hiro turns. It's a nun who also appears to be a surgeon.
"How long has he been in convulsions?"
"His ex-wife called us in, said she was worried."
"Juanita."
"Yes. When the paramedics arrived, he had fallen out of his chair at
home and was convulsing on the floor. You can see a bruise, here, where we
think his computer fell off the table and hit him in the ribs. So to protect
him from further damage, we put him in four-points. But for the last half
hour he's been like this - like his whole body is in fibrillation. If he
stays this way, we'll take the restraints off."
"Was he wearing goggles?"
"I don't know. I can check for you."
"But you think this happened while he was goggled into his computer?"
"I really don't know, sir. All I know is, he's got such bad cardiac
arrhythmia that we had to implant a temporary pacemaker right there on his
office floor. We gave him some seizure medication, which didn't work. Put
him on some downers to calm him, which worked slightly. Put his head into
various pieces of imaging machinery to find out what the problem was. The
jury is still out on that."
"Well, I'm going to go look at his house," Hiro says. The doctor
shrugs.
"Let me know when he comes out of it," Hiro says.
The doctor doesn't say anything to this. For the first time, Hiro
realizes that Da5id's condition may not be temporary.
As Hiro is stepping out into the hallway, Da5id speaks, "e ne em ma ni
a gi a gi ni mu ma ma dam e ne em am an ki ga a gi a gi..."
Hiro turns around and looks. Da5id has gone limp in the restraints,
seems relaxed, half asleep. He is looking at Hiro through half-closed eyes.
"e ne em dam gal nun na a gi agi e ne em u mu un abzu ka a gi a agi..."
Da5id's voice is deep and placid, with no trace of stress. The
syllables roll off his tongue like drool. As Hiro walks down the hallway he
can hear Da5id talking all the way.
"i ge en i ge en nu ge en nu ge en us sa tur ra lu ra ze em men..."
Hiro gets back into the chopper. They cruise up the middle of Beachwood
Canyon, headed straight for the Hollywood sign.
Da5id's house has been transfigured by light. It's at the end of its
own little road, at the summit of a hill. The road has been blocked off by a
squat froglike jeep-thing from General Jim's, saturated red and blue light
sweeping and pulsing out of it. Another helicopter is above the house,
supported on a swirling column of radiance. Soldiers creep up and down the
property, carrying hand-held searchlights.
"We took the precaution of securing the area," Major Clem says.
At the fringes of all this light, Hiro can see the dead organic colors
of the hillside. The soldiers are trying to push it back with their
searchlights, trying to burn it away. He is about to bury himself in it,
become a single muddy pixel in some airline passenger's window. Plunging
into the biomass.
Da5id's laptop is on the floor next to the table where he liked to
work. It is surrounded by medical debris. In the middle of this, Hiro finds
Da5id's goggles, which either fell off when he hit the floor, or were
stripped off by the paramedics.
Hiro picks up the goggles. As he brings them up toward his eyes, he
sees the image: a wall of black-and-white static. Da5id's computer has
snow-crashed.
He closes his eyes and drops the goggles. You can't get hurt by looking
at a bitmap. Or can you?
The house is sort of a modernist castle with a high turret on one end.
Da5id and Hiro and the rest of the hackers used to go up there with a case
of beer and a hibachi and just spend a whole night, eating jumbo shrimp and
crab legs and oysters and washing them down with beer. Now it's deserted, of
course, just the hibachi, which is rusted and almost buried in gray ash,
like an archaeological relic. Hiro has pinched one of Da5id's beers from the
fridge, and he sits up here for a while, in what used to be his favorite
place, drinking his beer slowly, like he used to, reading stories in the
lights.
The old central neighborhoods are packed in tight below an eternal,
organic haze. In other cities, you breathe industrial contaminants, but in
L.A., you breathe amino acids. The hazy sprawl is ringed and netted with
glowing lines, like hot wires in a toaster. At the outlet of the canyon, it
comes close enough that the light sharpens and breaks up into stars, arches,
glowing letters. Streams of red and white corpuscles throb down highways to
the fuzzy logic of intelligent traffic lights. Farther away, spreading
across the basin, a million sprightly logos smear into solid arcs, like
geometric points merging into curves. To either side of the franchise
ghettos, the loglo dwindles across a few shallow layers of development and
into a surrounding dimness that is burst here and there by the blaze of a
security spotlight in someone's backyard.
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in
one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently
virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder - its DNA -
xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway,
preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it
runs up against its property lines.
In olden times, you'd wander down to Mom's Cafe for a bite to eat and a
cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you
never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone
would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate
Special would be something you didn't recognize. If you did enough
traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere.
But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can
walk into a McDonald's and no one will stare at him. He can order without
having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same.
McDonald's is Home, condensed into a three-ring binder and xeroxed. "No
surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal,
subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and
grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and
terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to
where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find
the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America
of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake
handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise
missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping.
They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed
Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock
shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast
house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium
culture.
The only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris;
immigrants, thrown out like shrapnel from the destruction of the Asian
powers; young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood of Mr. Lee's Greater
Hong Kong. Young smart people like Da5id and Hiro, who take the risk of
living in the city because they like stimulation and they know they can
handle it.
Y.T. can't really tell where they are. It's clear that they're stuck in
traffic. It's not like this is predictable or anything.
"Y.T. must get under way now," she announces.
No reaction for a sec. Then the hacker guy sits back in his chair,
stares out through his goggles, ignoring the 3-D compu-display, taking in a
nice view of the wall. "Okay," he says.
Quick as a mongoose, the man with the glass eye darts in, yanks the
aluminum case out of the cryogenic cylinder, tosses it to Y.T. Meantime, one
of the lounging-around Mafia guys is opening the back door of the truck,
giving them all a nice view of a traffic jam on the boulevard.
"One other thing," the man with the glass eye says, and shoves an
envelope into one of Y.T.'s multitudinous pockets.
"What's that?" Y.T. says.
He holds up his hands self-protectively. "Don't worry, it's just a
little something. Now get going."
He motions at the guy who's holding her plank. The guy turns out to be
fairly hip, because he just throws the plank. It lands at an odd angle on
the floor between them. But the spokes have long ago seen the floor coming,
calculated all the angles, extended and flexed themselves like the legs and
feet of a basketball player coming back to earth from a monster dunk. The
plank lands on its feet, banks this way, then that, as it regains its
balance, then steers itself right up to Y.T. and stops beside her.
She stands on it, kicks a few times, flies out the back door of the
semi, and onto the hood of a Pontiac that was following them much too
closely. Its windshield makes a nice surface to bank off of, and she gets
her direction neatly reversed by the time she hits the pavement. The owner
of the Pontiac is honking self-righteously, but there's no way he can chase
her down because traffic is totally stopped, Y.T. is the only thing for
miles around that is actually capable of movement. Which is the whole point
of Kouriers in the first place.
The Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates #1106 is a pretty big one. Its low
serial number implies great age. It was built long ago, when land was cheap
and lots were big. The parking lot is half full. Usually, all you see at a
Reverend Wayne's are old beaters with wacky Spanish expressions
nail-polished on the rear bumpers - the rides of Centro-American
evangelicals who have come up north to get decent jobs and escape the
relentlessly Catholic style of their homelands. This lot also has a lot of
just plain old regular bimbo boxes with license plates from all the
Burbclaves.
Traffic is moving a little better on this stretch of the boulevard, and
so Y.T. comes into the lot at a pretty good clip, takes one or two orbits
around the franchise to work off her speed. A smooth parking lot is hard to
resist when you are going fast, and to look at it from a slightly less
juvenile point of view, it's a good idea to scope things out, to be familiar
with your environment. Y.T. learns that this parking lot is linked with that
of a Chop Shop franchise next door ("We turn any vehicle into CASH in
minutes!"), which in turn flows into the lot of a neighboring strip mall. A
dedicated thrasher could probably navigate from L.A. to New York by coasting
from one parking lot into the next.
This parking lot makes popping and skittering noises in some areas.
Looking down, she sees that behind the franchise, near the dumpster, the
asphalt is strewn with small glass vials, like the one that Squeaky was
looking at last night. They are scattered about like cigarette butts behind
a bar. When the footpads of her wheels pass over these vials, they
tiddlywink out from underneath and skitter across the pavement.
People are lined up out the door, waiting to get in. Y.T. jumps the
line and goes inside.
The front room of the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates is, of course, like
all the others. A row of padded vinyl chairs where worshippers can wait for
their number to be called, with a potted plant at each end and a table
strewn with primeval magazines. A toy comer where kids can kill time,
reenacting imaginary, cosmic battles in injection-molded plastic. A counter
done up in fake wood so it looks like something from an old church. Behind
the counter, a pudgy high school babe, dishwater blond hair that has been
worked over pretty good with a curling iron, blue metal-flake eyeshadow, an
even coat of red makeup covering her broad, gelatinous cheeks, a flimsy sort
of choir robe thrown over her T-shirt.
When Y.T. comes in, she is right in the middle of a transaction. She
sees Y.T. right away, but no three-ring binder anywhere in the world allows
you to flag or fail in the middle of a transaction.
Stymied, Y.T. sighs and crosses her arms to convey impatience. In any
other business establishment, she'd already be raising hell and marching
around behind the counter as if she owned the place. But this is a church,
damn it.
There's a little rack along the front of the counter bearing religious
tracts, free for the taking, donation requested. Several slots on the rack
are occupied by the Reverend Wayne's famous bestseller. How America Was
Saved from Communism: ELVIS SHOT JFK.
She pulls out the envelope that the man with the glass eye stuck into
her pocket. It is not thick and soft enough to contain a lot of cash,
unfortunately.
It contains half a dozen snapshots. All of them feature Uncle Enzo. He
is on the broad, flat horseshoe driveway of a large house, larger than any
house Y.T. has ever seen with her own two eyes. He is standing on a
skateboard. Or falling off of a skateboard. Or coasting, slowly, arms
splayed wildly out to the sides, chased by nervous security personnel.
A piece of paper is wrapped around the pictures. It says: "Y.T. Thanks
for your help. As you can see from these pictures, I tried to train for this
assignment, but it's going to take some practice. Your friend, Uncle Enzo."
Y.T. wraps the pictures up just the way they were, puts them back in
her pocket, stifles a smile, returns to business matters.
The girl in the robe is still performing her transaction behind the
counter. The transactee is a stocky Spanish-speaking woman in an orange
dress.
The girl types some stuff into the computer. The customer snaps her
Visa card down on the fake wood altar top; it sounds like a rifle shot. The
girl pries the card up using her inch-long fingernails, a dicey and
complicated operation that makes Y.T. think of insects climbing out of their
egg sacs. Then she performs the sacrament, swiping the card through its
electromagnetic slot with a carefully modulated sweep of the arm, as though
tearing back a veil, handing over the slip, mumbling that she needs a
signature and daytime phone number. She might as well have been speaking
Latin, but that's okay, since this customer is familiar with the liturgy and
signs and numbers it before the words are fully spoken.
Then it just remains for the Word from On High. But computers and
communications are awfully good these days, and it usually doesn't take
longer than a couple of seconds to perform a charge-card verification. The
little machine beeps out its approval code, heavenly tunes sing out from
tinny speakers, and a wide pair of pearlescent doors in the back of the room
swing majestically open.
"Thank you for your donation," the girl says, slurring the words
together into a single syllable.
The customer stomps toward the double doors, drawn in by hypnotic organ
strains. The interior of the chapel is weirdly colored, illuminated partly
by fluorescent fixtures wedged into the ceiling and partly by large colored
light boxes that simulate stained-glass windows. The largest of these,
shaped like a fattened Gothic arch, is bolted to the back wall, above the
altar, and features a blazing trinity: Jesus, Elvis, and the Reverend Wayne.
Jesus gets top billing. The worshipper is not half a dozen steps into the
place before she thuds down on her knees in the middle of the aisle and
begins to speak in tongues: "ar ia ari ar isa ve na a mir ia i sa, ve na a
mir ia a sar ia..."
The doors swing shut again.
"Just a sec," the girl says, looking at Y.T. a little nervously. She
goes around the corner and stands in the middle of the toy area,
inadvertently getting the hem of her robe caught up in a Ninja Raft Warriors
battle module, and knocks on the door to the potty.
"Busy!" says a man's voice from the other side of the door.
"The Kourier's here," the girl says.
"I'll be right out," the man says, more quietly.
And he really is right out. Y.T. does not perceive any waiting time, no
zipping up of the fly or washing of the hands. He is wearing a black suit
with a clerical collar, pulling a lightweight black robe on over that as he
emerges into the toy area, crushing little action figures and fighter
aircraft beneath his black shoes. His hair is black and well greased, with
individual strands of gray, and he wears wire-rimmed bifocals with a subtle
brownish tint. He has very large pores.
And by the time he gets close enough that Y.T. can see all of these
details, she can also smell him. She smells Old Spice, plus a strong whiff
of vomit on his breath. But it's not boozy vomit.
"Gimme that," he says, and yanks the aluminum briefcase from her hand.
Y.T. never lets people do that.
"You have to sign for it, " she says. But she knows it's too late. If
you don't get them to sign first, you're screwed. You have no power, no
leverage. You're just a brat on a skateboard.
Which is why Y.T. never lets people yank deliveries out of her hand.
But this guy is a minister, for God's sake. She just didn't reckon on it. He
yanked it out of her hand - and now he runs with it back to his office.
"I can sign for it," the girl says. She looks scared. More than that,
she looks sick.
"It has to be him personally," Y.T. says. "Reverend Dale T. Thorpe."
Now she's done being shocked and starting to be pissed. So she just
follows him right into his office.
"You can't go in there," the girl says, but she says it dreamily,
sadly, like this whole thing is already half forgotten. Y.T. opens the door.
The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe sits at his desk. The aluminum briefcase is
open in front of him. It is filled with the same complicated bit of business
that she saw the other night, after the Raven thing. The Reverend Dale T.
Thorpe seems to be leashed by the neck to this device.
No, actually he is wearing something on a string around his neck. He
was keeping it under his clothes, the way Y.T. keeps Uncle Enzo's dog tags.
He has pulled it out now and shoved it into a slot inside the aluminum case.
It appears to be a laminated ID card with a bar code on it.
Now he pulls the card out and lets it dangle down his front. Y.T.
cannot tell whether he has noticed her. He is typing on the keyboard,
punching away with two fingers, missing letters, doing it again.
Then motors and servos inside the aluminum case whir and shudder. The
Reverend Dale T. Thorpe has unsnapped one of the little vials from its place
in the lid and inserted it into a socket next to the keyboard. It is slowly
drawn down inside the machine.
The vial pops back out again. The red plastic cap is emitting grainy
red light. It has little LEDs built into it, and they are spelling out
numbers, counting down seconds: 5,4,3,2,1...
The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe holds the vial up to his left nostril. When
the LED counter gets down to zero, it hisses, like air coming out of a tire
valve. At the same time, he inhales deeply, sucking it all into his lungs.
Then he shoots the vial expertly into his wastebasket.
"Reverend?" the girl says. Y.T. spins around to see her drifting toward
the office. "Would you do mine now, please?"
The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe does not answer. He has slumped back in his
leather swivel chair and is staring at a neon-framed blowup of Elvis, in his
Army days, holding a rifle.
When he wakes up, it's the middle of the day and he is all dried out
from the sun, and birds are circling overhead, trying to decide whether he's
dead or alive. Hiro climbs down from the roof of the turret and, throwing
caution to the wind, drinks three glasses of L.A. tap water. He gets some
bacon out of Da5id's fridge and throws it in the microwave. Most of General
Jim's people have left, and there is only a token guard of soldiers down on
the road. Hiro locks all the doors that look out on the hillside, because he
can't stop thinking about Raven. Then he sits at the kitchen table and
goggles in.
The Black Sun is mostly full of Asians, including a lot of people from
the Bombay film industry, glaring at each other, stroking their black
mustaches, trying to figure out what kind of hyperviolent action film will
play in Persepolis next year. It is nighttime there. Hiro is one of the few
Americans in the joint.
Along the back wall of the bar is a row of private rooms, ranging from
little tete-a-tetes to big conference rooms where a bunch of avatars can
gather and have a meeting. Juanita is waiting for Hiro in one of the smaller
ones. Her avatar just looks like Juanita. It is an honest representation,
with no effort made to hide the early suggestions of crow's-feet at the
corners of her big black eyes. Her glossy hair is so well resolved that Hiro
can see individual strands refracting the light into tiny rainbows.
"I'm at Da5id's house. Where are you?" Hiro says.
"In an airplane - so I may break up," Juanita says.
"You on your way here?"
"To Oregon, actually."
"Portland?"
"Astoria."
"Why on earth would you go to Astoria, Oregon, at a time like this?"
Juanita takes a deep breath, lets it out shakily. "If I told you, we'd
get into an argument."
"What's the latest word on Da5id?" Hiro says.
"The same."
"Any diagnosis?"
Juanita sighs, looks tired. "There won't be any diagnosis," she says.
"It's a software, not a hardware, problem."
"Huh?"
"They're rounding up the usual suspects. CAT scans, NMR scans, PET
scans, EEGs. Everything's fine. There's nothing wrong with his brain - his
hardware."
"It just happens to be running the wrong program?"
"His software got poisoned. Da5id had a snow crash last night, inside
his head."
"Are you trying to say it's a psychological problem?"
"It kind of goes beyond those established categories," Juanita says,
"because it's a new phenomenon. A very old one, actually."
"Does this thing just happen spontaneously, or what?"
"You tell me," she says. "You were there last night. Did anything
happen after I left?"
"He had a Snow Crash hypercard that he got from Raven outside The Black
Sun."
"Shit. That bastard."
"Who's the bastard? Raven or Da5id?"
"Da5id. I tried to warn him."
"He used it." Hiro goes on to explain the Brandy with the magic scroll.
"Then later he had computer trouble and got bounced."
"I heard about that part," she says. "That's why I called the
paramedics."
"I don't see the connection between Da5id's computer having a crash,
and you calling an ambulance."
"The Brandy's scroll wasn't just showing random static. It was flashing
up a large amount of digital information, in binary form. That digital
information was going straight into Da5id's optic nerve. Which is part of
the brain, incidentally - if you stare into a person's pupil, you can see
the terminal of the brain."
"Da5id's not a computer. He can't read binary code."
"He's a hacker. He messes with binary code for a living. That ability
is firm-wired into the deep structures of his brain. So he's susceptible to
that form of information. And so are you, home-boy."
"What kind of information are we talking about?"
"Bad news. A metavirus," Juanita says. "It's the atomic bomb of
informational warfare - a virus that causes any system to infect itself with
new viruses."
"And that's what made Da5id sick?"
"Yes."
"Why didn't I get sick?"
"Too far away. Your eyes couldn't resolve the bitmap. It has to be
right up in your face."
"I'll think about that one," Hiro says. "But I have another question.
Raven also distributes another drug - in Reality - called, among other
things, Snow Crash. What is it?"
"It's not a drug," Juanita says. "They make it look like a drug and
feel like a drug so that people will want to take it. It's laced with
cocaine and some other stuff."
"If it's not a drug, what is it?"
"It's chemically processed blood serum taken from people who are
infected with the metavirus," Juanita says. "That is, it's just another way
of spreading the infection."
"Who's spreading it?"
"L. Bob Rife's private church. All of those people are infected."
Hiro puts his head in his hands. He's not exactly thinking about this;
he's letting it ricochet around in his skull, waiting for it to come to
rest. "Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing - is
it a virus, a drug, or a religion?"
Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?"
That Juanita is talking this way does not make it any easier for Hiro
to get back on his feet in this conversation.
"How can you say that? You're a religious person yourself."
"Don't lump all religion together."
"Sorry."
"All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built
into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll
fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral - a piece
of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one
person to the next. That's the way it used to be, and unfortunately, that's
the way it's headed right now. But there have been several efforts to
deliver us from the hands of primitive, irrational religion. The first was
made by someone named Enki about four thousand years ago. The second was
made by Hebrew scholars in the eighth century B.C., driven out of their
homeland by the invasion of Sargon II, but eventually it just devolved into
empty legalism. Another attempt was made by Jesus - that one was hijacked by
viral influences within fifty days of his death. The virus was suppressed by
the Catholic Church, but we're in the middle of a big epidemic that started
in Kansas in 1900 and has been gathering momentum ever since."
"Do you believe in God or not?" Hiro says. First things first.
"Definitely."
"Do you believe in Jesus?"
"Yes. But not in the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus."
"How can you be a Christian without believing in that?"
"I would say," Juanita says, "how can you be a Christian with it?
Anyone who takes the trouble to study the gospels can see that the bodily
resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto the real story several years
after the real histories were written. It's so National Enquirer-esque,
don't you think?"
Beyond that, Juanita doesn't have much to say. She doesn't want to get
into it now, she says. She doesn't want to prejudice Hiro's thinking "at
this point."
"Does that imply that there's going to be some other point? Is this a
continuing relationship?" Hiro says.
"Do you want to find the people who infected Da5id?"
"Yes. Hell, Juanita, even if it weren't for the fact that he is my
friend, I'd want to find them before they infect me."
"Look at the Babel stack, Hiro, and then visit me if I get back from
Astoria."
"If you get back? What are you doing there?"
"Research."
She's been putting on a businesslike front through this whole talk,
spitting out information, telling Hiro the way it is. But she's tired and
anxious, and Hiro gets the idea that she's deeply afraid.
"Good luck," he says. He was all ready to do some flirting with her
during this meeting, picking up where they left off last night. But
something has changed in Juanita's mind between then and now. Flirting is
the last thing on her mind.
Juanita's going to do something dangerous in Oregon. She doesn't want
Hiro to know about it so that he won't worry.
"There's some good stuff in the Babel stack about someone named
Inanna," she says.
"Who's Inanna?"
"A Sumerian goddess. I'm sort of in love with her. Anyway, you can't
understand what I'm about to do until you understand Inanna."
"Well, good luck," Hiro says. "Say hi to Inanna for me."
"Thanks."
"When you get back, I want to spend some time with you."
"The feeling is mutual," she says. "But we have to get out of this
first."
"Oh. I didn't realize I was in something."
"Don't be a sap. We're all in it."
Hiro leaves, exiting into The Black Sun.
There is one guy wandering around the Hacker Quadrant who really stands
out. His avatar doesn't look so hot. And he's having trouble controlling it.
He looks like a guy who's just goggled into the Metaverse for the first time
and doesn't know how to move around. He keeps bumping into tables, and when
he wants to turn around, he spins around several times, not knowing how to
stop himself.
Hiro walks toward him, because his face seems a little familiar. When
the guy finally stops moving long enough for Hiro to resolve him clearly, he
recognizes the avatar. It's a Clint. Most often seen in the company of a
Brandy.
The Clint recognizes Hiro, and his surprised face comes on for a
second, is then replaced by his usual stern, stiff-lipped, craggy
appearance. He holds up his hands together in front of him, and Hiro sees
that he is holding a scroll, just like Brandy's.
Hiro reaches for his katana, but the scroll is already up in his face,
spreading open to reveal the blue glare of the bitmap inside. He sidesteps,
gets over to one side of the Clint, raising the katana overhead, snaps the
katana straight down and cuts the Clint's arms off.
As the scroll falls, it spreads open even wider. Hiro doesn't dare look
at it now. The Clint has turned around and is awkwardly trying to escape
from The Black Sun, bouncing from table to table like a pinball.
If Hiro could kill the guy - cut his head off - then his avatar would
stay in The Black Sun, be carried away by the Graveyard Daemons. Hiro could
do some hacking and maybe figure out who he is, where he's coming in from.
But a few dozen hackers are lounging around the bar, watching all of
this, and if they come over and look at the scroll, they'll all end up like
Da5id.
Hiro squats down, looking away from the scroll, and pulls up one of the
hidden trapdoors that lead down into the tunnel system. He's the one who
BROS. MOVING & STORAGE painted on the sides.
"Come on," Jason says, getting out of his Oldsmobile. "You don't want
to waste any time."
"Screw you, asshole," she says, reeling in her poon, looking back
toward the boulevard for some promising westbound traffic. Whatever this guy
has in mind, it is probably unprofessional.
"Young lady," says another voice, an older and more arresting sort of
voice, "it's fine if you don't like Jason. But your pal, Uncle Enzo, needs
your help."
A door on the back of the semi has opened up. A man in a black suit is
standing there. Behind him, the interior of the semi is brightly lit up.
Halogen light glares off the man's slick hairdo. Even with this
backlighting, she can tell it is the man with the glass eye.
"What do you want?" she says.
"What I want," he says, looking her up and down, and what I need are
different things. Right now I'm working, see, which means that what I want
is not important. What I need is for you to get into this truck along with
your skateboard and that suitcase."
Then he adds, "Am I getting through to you?" He asks the question
almost rhetorically, like he presumes the answer is no.
"He's for real," Jason says, as though Y.T. must be hanging on his
opinion.
"Well, there you have it," the man with the glass eye says.
Y.T. is supposed to be on her way to a Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates
franchise. If she screws up this delivery, that means she's double-crossing
God, who may or may not exist, and in any case who is capable of
forgiveness. The Mafia definitely exists and hews to a higher standard of
obedience.
She hands her stuff - the plank and the aluminum case - up to the man
with the glass eye, then vaults up into the back of the semi, ignoring his
proffered hand. He recoils, holds up his hand, looks at it to see if there's
something wrong with it. By the time her feet leave the ground, the truck is
already moving. By the time the door is pulled shut behind her, they have
already pulled onto the boulevard.
"Just gotta run a few tests on this delivery of yours," the man with
the glass eye says.
"Ever think of introducing yourself?" Y.T. says.
"Nah," he says, "people always forget names. You can just think of me
as that one guy, y'know?"
Y.T. is not really listening. She is checking out the inside of the
truck.
The trailer of this rig consists of a single long skinny room. Y.T. has
just come in through its only entrance. At this end of the room, a couple of
Mafia guys are lounging around, the way they always do.
Most of the room is taken up by electronics. Big electronics.
"Going to just do some computer stuff, y'know," he says, handing the
briefcase over to a computer guy. Y.T. knows he's a computer guy because he
has long hair in a ponytail and he's wearing jeans and he seems gentle.
"Hey, if anything happens to that, my ass is grass," Y.T. says. She's
trying to sound tough and brave, but it's a hollow act in these
circumstances.
The man with the glass eye is, like, shocked. "What do you think I am,
some kind of incredibly stupid dickhead?" he says. "Shit, that's just what I
need, trying to explain to Uncle Enzo how I managed to get his little bunny
rabbit shot in the kneecaps."
"It's a noninvasive procedure," the computer guy says in a placid,
liquid voice.
The computer guy rotates the case around in his hand a few times, just
to get a feel for it. Then he slides it into a large open-ended cylinder
that is resting on the top of a table. The walls of the cylinder are a
couple of inches thick. Frost appears to be growing on this thing. Mystery
gases continuously slide off of it, like teaspoons of milk dropped into
turbulent water. The gases plunge out across the table and drop to the
floor, where they make a little carpet of fog that flows and blooms around
their shoes. When the computer guy has it in place, he yanks his hand back
from the cold .
Then he puts on a pair of computer goggles.
That's all there is to it. He just sits there for a few minutes. Y.T.
is not a computer person, but she knows that somewhere behind the cabinets
and doors in the back of this truck there is a big computer doing a lot of
things right now.
"It's like a CAT scanner," the man with the glass eye says, using the
same hushed tone of voice as a sportscaster in a golfing tournament. "But it
reads everything, you know," he says, rotating his hands impatiently in
all-encompassing circles.
"How much does it cost?"
"I don't know."
"What's it called?"
"Doesn't really have a name yet."
"Well, who makes it?"
"We made the goddamn thing," the man with the glass eye says. "Just,
like in the last couple weeks."
"What for?"
"You're asking too many questions. Look. You're a cute kid. I mean,
you're a hell of a chick. You're a knockout. But don't go thinking you're
too important at this stage."
At this stage. Hmm.
Hiro is in his 20-by-30 at the U-Stor-It. He is spending a little time
in Reality, as per the suggestion of his partner. The door is open so that
ocean breezes and jet exhaust can blow through. All the furniture - the
futons, the cargo pallet, the experimental cinderblock furniture - has been
pushed up against the walls. He is holding a one-meter-long piece of heavy
rebar with tape wrapped around one end to make a handle. The rebar
approximates a katana, but it is very much heavier. He calls it redneck
katana.
He is in the kendo stance, barefoot. He should be wearing voluminous
ankle-length culottes and a heavy indigo tunic, which is the traditional
uniform, but instead he is wearing jockey shorts. Sweat is running down his
smoothly muscled cappuccino back and exploring his cleavage. Blisters the
size of green grapes are forming on the ball of his left foot. Hiro's heart
and lungs are well developed, and he has been blessed with unusually quick
reflexes, but he is not intrinsically strong, the way his father was. Even
if he were intrinsically strong, working with the redneck katana would be
very difficult.
He is full of adrenaline, his nerves are shot, and his mind is
cluttered up with free-floating anxiety - floating around on an ocean of
generalized terror.
He is shuffling back and forth down the thirty-foot axis of the room.
From time to time he will accelerate, raise the redneck katana up over his
head until it is pointed backward, then bring it swiftly down, snapping his
wrists at the last moment so that it comes to a stop in midair. Then he
says, "Next"'
Theoretically. In fact, the redneck katana is difficult to stop once it
gets moving. But it's good exercise. His forearms look like bundles of steel
cables. Almost. Well, they will soon, anyway.
The Nipponese don't go in for this nonsense about follow-through. If
you strike a man on the top of his head with a katana and do not make any
effort to stop the blade, it will divide his skull and probably get hung up
in his collarbone or his pelvis, and then you will be out there in the
middle of the medieval battlefield with a foot on your late opponent's face,
trying to work the blade loose as his best friend comes running up to you
with a certain vengeful gleam in his eye. So the plan is to snap the blade
to a full stop just after the impact, maybe crease his brainpan an inch or
two, then whip it out and look for another samurai, hence: "Next!"
He has been thinking about what happened earlier tonight with Raven,
which pretty much rules out sleep, and this is why he is practicing with the
redneck katana at three in the morning.
He knows he was totally unprepared. The spear just came at him. He
slapped at it with the blade. He happened to slap it at the right time, and
it missed him. But he did this almost absentmindedly.
Maybe that's how great warriors do it. Carelessly, not wracking their
minds with the consequences.
Maybe he's flattering himself.
The sound of a helicopter has been getting louder for some minutes now.
Even though Hiro lives right next to the airport, this is unusual. They're
not supposed to fly right near LAX, it raises evident safety questions.
It doesn't stop getting louder until it is very loud, and at that
point, the helicopter is hovering a few feet above the parking lot, right
out in front of Hiro and Vitaly's 20-by-30. It's a nice one, a corporate jet
chopper, dark green, with subdued markings. Hiro suspects that in brighter
light, he would be able to make out the logo of a defense contractor, most
likely General Jim's Defense System.
A pale-faced white man with a very high forehead-cum-bald spot jumps
out of the chopper, looking a lot more athletic than his face and general
demeanor would lead you to expect, and jogs across the parking lot directly
toward Hiro. This is the kind of guy Hiro remembers from when his dad was in
the Army - not the gristly veterans of legends and movies, just sort of
regular thirty-five-year-old guys rattling around in bulky uniforms. He's a
major. His name, sewn onto his BDUs, is Clem.
"Hiro Protagonist?"
"The same."
"Juanita sent me to pick you up. She said you'd recognize the name."
"I recognize the name. But I don't really work for Juanita."
"She says you do now."
"Well, that's nice," Hiro says. "So I guess it's kind of urgent?"
"I think that would be a fair assumption," Major Clem says.
"Can I spare a few minutes? Because I've been working out, and I need
to run next door."
Major Clem looks next door. The next logo down the strip is THE REST
STOP.
"The situation is fairly static. You could spare five minutes," Major
Clem says.
Hiro has an account with The Rest Stop. To live at the U-Stor-It, you
sort of have to have an account. So he gets to bypass the front office where
the attendant waits by the cash register. He shoves his membership card into
a slot, and a computer screen lights up with three choices:
F
NURSERY (UNISEX)
Hiro slaps the "M" button. Then the screen changes to a menu of four
choices:
STANDARD FACILITIES - JUST LIKE HOME - MAYBE JUST A LITTLE BETTER
PRIME FACILITIES - A GRACIOUS PLACE FOR THE DISCRIMINATING PATRON
THE LAVATORY GRANDE ROYALE
He has to override a well-worn reflex to stop himself from
automatically punching SPECIAL LIMITED FACILITIES, which is what he and all
the other U-Stor-It residents always use. Almost impossible to go in there
and not come in contact with someone else's bodily fluids. Not a pretty
sight. Not at all gracious. Instead - what the fuck, Juanita's going to hire
him, right? - he slams the button for LAVATORY GRANDE ROYALE.
Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a
luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded
adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega-jackpot. It's
got everything that a dimwitted pathological gambler would identify with
luxury: gold-plated fixtures, lots of injection-molded pseudomarble, velvet
drapes, and a butler.
None of the U-Stor-It residents ever use The Lavatory Grande Royale.
The only reason it's here is that this place happens to be across the street
from LAX. Singaporean CEOs who want to have a shower and take a nice,
leisurely crap, with all the sound effects, without having to hear and smell
other travelers doing the same, can come here and put it all on their
corporate travel card.
The butler is a thirty-year-old Centroamerican whose eyes look a little
funny, like they've been closed for the last several hours. He is just
throwing some improbably thick towels over his arm as Hiro bursts in.
"Gotta get in and out in five minutes," Hiro says.
"You want shave?" the butler says. He paws at his own checks
suggestively, unable to peg Hiro's ethnic group.
"Love to. No time."
He peels off his jockey shorts, tosses his swords onto the
crushed-velvet sofa, and steps into the marbleized amphitheatre of the
shower stall. Hot water hits him from all directions at once. There's a knob
on the wall so you can choose your favorite temperature.
Afterward, he'd like to take a dump, read some of those glossy phone
book-sized magazines next to the high-tech shitter, but he's got to get
going. He dries himself off with a fresh towel the size of a circus tent,
yanks on some loose drawstring slacks and a T-shirt, throws some Kongbucks
at the butler, and runs out, girding himself with the swords.
It's a short flight, mostly because the military pilot is happy to
eschew comfort in favor of speed. The chopper takes off at a shallow angle,
keeping low so it won't get sucked into any jumbo jets, and as soon as the
pilot gets room to maneuver, he whips the tail around, drops the nose, and
lets the rotor yank them onward and upward across the basin, toward the
sparsely lit mass of the Hollywood Hills.
But they stop short of the Hills, and end up on the roof of a hospital.
Part of the Mercy chain, which technically makes this Vatican airspace. So
far, this has Juanita written all over it.
"Neurology ward," Major Clem says, delivering this string of nouns like
an order. "Fifth floor, east wing, room 564."
The man in the hospital bed is Da5id.
Extremely thick, wide leather straps have been stretched across the
head and foot of the bed. Leather cuffs, lined with fluffy sheepskin, are
attached to the straps. These cuffs have been fastened around Da5id's wrists
and ankles. He's wearing a hospital gown that has mostly fallen off.
The worst thing is that his eyes don't always point in the same
direction. He's hooked up to an EKG that's charting his heartbeat, and even
though Hiro's not a doctor, he can see it's not a regular pattern. It beats
too fast, then it doesn't beat at all, then an alarm sounds, then it starts
beating again.
He has gone completely blank. His eyes are not seeing anything. At
first, Hiro thinks that his body is limp and relaxed. Getting closer, he
sees that Da5id is taut and shivering, slick with perspiration.
"We put in a temporary pacemaker," a woman says.
Hiro turns. It's a nun who also appears to be a surgeon.
"How long has he been in convulsions?"
"His ex-wife called us in, said she was worried."
"Juanita."
"Yes. When the paramedics arrived, he had fallen out of his chair at
home and was convulsing on the floor. You can see a bruise, here, where we
think his computer fell off the table and hit him in the ribs. So to protect
him from further damage, we put him in four-points. But for the last half
hour he's been like this - like his whole body is in fibrillation. If he
stays this way, we'll take the restraints off."
"Was he wearing goggles?"
"I don't know. I can check for you."
"But you think this happened while he was goggled into his computer?"
"I really don't know, sir. All I know is, he's got such bad cardiac
arrhythmia that we had to implant a temporary pacemaker right there on his
office floor. We gave him some seizure medication, which didn't work. Put
him on some downers to calm him, which worked slightly. Put his head into
various pieces of imaging machinery to find out what the problem was. The
jury is still out on that."
"Well, I'm going to go look at his house," Hiro says. The doctor
shrugs.
"Let me know when he comes out of it," Hiro says.
The doctor doesn't say anything to this. For the first time, Hiro
realizes that Da5id's condition may not be temporary.
As Hiro is stepping out into the hallway, Da5id speaks, "e ne em ma ni
a gi a gi ni mu ma ma dam e ne em am an ki ga a gi a gi..."
Hiro turns around and looks. Da5id has gone limp in the restraints,
seems relaxed, half asleep. He is looking at Hiro through half-closed eyes.
"e ne em dam gal nun na a gi agi e ne em u mu un abzu ka a gi a agi..."
Da5id's voice is deep and placid, with no trace of stress. The
syllables roll off his tongue like drool. As Hiro walks down the hallway he
can hear Da5id talking all the way.
"i ge en i ge en nu ge en nu ge en us sa tur ra lu ra ze em men..."
Hiro gets back into the chopper. They cruise up the middle of Beachwood
Canyon, headed straight for the Hollywood sign.
Da5id's house has been transfigured by light. It's at the end of its
own little road, at the summit of a hill. The road has been blocked off by a
squat froglike jeep-thing from General Jim's, saturated red and blue light
sweeping and pulsing out of it. Another helicopter is above the house,
supported on a swirling column of radiance. Soldiers creep up and down the
property, carrying hand-held searchlights.
"We took the precaution of securing the area," Major Clem says.
At the fringes of all this light, Hiro can see the dead organic colors
of the hillside. The soldiers are trying to push it back with their
searchlights, trying to burn it away. He is about to bury himself in it,
become a single muddy pixel in some airline passenger's window. Plunging
into the biomass.
Da5id's laptop is on the floor next to the table where he liked to
work. It is surrounded by medical debris. In the middle of this, Hiro finds
Da5id's goggles, which either fell off when he hit the floor, or were
stripped off by the paramedics.
Hiro picks up the goggles. As he brings them up toward his eyes, he
sees the image: a wall of black-and-white static. Da5id's computer has
snow-crashed.
He closes his eyes and drops the goggles. You can't get hurt by looking
at a bitmap. Or can you?
The house is sort of a modernist castle with a high turret on one end.
Da5id and Hiro and the rest of the hackers used to go up there with a case
of beer and a hibachi and just spend a whole night, eating jumbo shrimp and
crab legs and oysters and washing them down with beer. Now it's deserted, of
course, just the hibachi, which is rusted and almost buried in gray ash,
like an archaeological relic. Hiro has pinched one of Da5id's beers from the
fridge, and he sits up here for a while, in what used to be his favorite
place, drinking his beer slowly, like he used to, reading stories in the
lights.
The old central neighborhoods are packed in tight below an eternal,
organic haze. In other cities, you breathe industrial contaminants, but in
L.A., you breathe amino acids. The hazy sprawl is ringed and netted with
glowing lines, like hot wires in a toaster. At the outlet of the canyon, it
comes close enough that the light sharpens and breaks up into stars, arches,
glowing letters. Streams of red and white corpuscles throb down highways to
the fuzzy logic of intelligent traffic lights. Farther away, spreading
across the basin, a million sprightly logos smear into solid arcs, like
geometric points merging into curves. To either side of the franchise
ghettos, the loglo dwindles across a few shallow layers of development and
into a surrounding dimness that is burst here and there by the blaze of a
security spotlight in someone's backyard.
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in
one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently
virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder - its DNA -
xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway,
preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it
runs up against its property lines.
In olden times, you'd wander down to Mom's Cafe for a bite to eat and a
cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you
never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone
would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate
Special would be something you didn't recognize. If you did enough
traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere.
But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can
walk into a McDonald's and no one will stare at him. He can order without
having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same.
McDonald's is Home, condensed into a three-ring binder and xeroxed. "No
surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal,
subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and
grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and
terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to
where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find
the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America
of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake
handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise
missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping.
They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed
Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock
shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast
house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium
culture.
The only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris;
immigrants, thrown out like shrapnel from the destruction of the Asian
powers; young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood of Mr. Lee's Greater
Hong Kong. Young smart people like Da5id and Hiro, who take the risk of
living in the city because they like stimulation and they know they can
handle it.
Y.T. can't really tell where they are. It's clear that they're stuck in
traffic. It's not like this is predictable or anything.
"Y.T. must get under way now," she announces.
No reaction for a sec. Then the hacker guy sits back in his chair,
stares out through his goggles, ignoring the 3-D compu-display, taking in a
nice view of the wall. "Okay," he says.
Quick as a mongoose, the man with the glass eye darts in, yanks the
aluminum case out of the cryogenic cylinder, tosses it to Y.T. Meantime, one
of the lounging-around Mafia guys is opening the back door of the truck,
giving them all a nice view of a traffic jam on the boulevard.
"One other thing," the man with the glass eye says, and shoves an
envelope into one of Y.T.'s multitudinous pockets.
"What's that?" Y.T. says.
He holds up his hands self-protectively. "Don't worry, it's just a
little something. Now get going."
He motions at the guy who's holding her plank. The guy turns out to be
fairly hip, because he just throws the plank. It lands at an odd angle on
the floor between them. But the spokes have long ago seen the floor coming,
calculated all the angles, extended and flexed themselves like the legs and
feet of a basketball player coming back to earth from a monster dunk. The
plank lands on its feet, banks this way, then that, as it regains its
balance, then steers itself right up to Y.T. and stops beside her.
She stands on it, kicks a few times, flies out the back door of the
semi, and onto the hood of a Pontiac that was following them much too
closely. Its windshield makes a nice surface to bank off of, and she gets
her direction neatly reversed by the time she hits the pavement. The owner
of the Pontiac is honking self-righteously, but there's no way he can chase
her down because traffic is totally stopped, Y.T. is the only thing for
miles around that is actually capable of movement. Which is the whole point
of Kouriers in the first place.
The Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates #1106 is a pretty big one. Its low
serial number implies great age. It was built long ago, when land was cheap
and lots were big. The parking lot is half full. Usually, all you see at a
Reverend Wayne's are old beaters with wacky Spanish expressions
nail-polished on the rear bumpers - the rides of Centro-American
evangelicals who have come up north to get decent jobs and escape the
relentlessly Catholic style of their homelands. This lot also has a lot of
just plain old regular bimbo boxes with license plates from all the
Burbclaves.
Traffic is moving a little better on this stretch of the boulevard, and
so Y.T. comes into the lot at a pretty good clip, takes one or two orbits
around the franchise to work off her speed. A smooth parking lot is hard to
resist when you are going fast, and to look at it from a slightly less
juvenile point of view, it's a good idea to scope things out, to be familiar
with your environment. Y.T. learns that this parking lot is linked with that
of a Chop Shop franchise next door ("We turn any vehicle into CASH in
minutes!"), which in turn flows into the lot of a neighboring strip mall. A
dedicated thrasher could probably navigate from L.A. to New York by coasting
from one parking lot into the next.
This parking lot makes popping and skittering noises in some areas.
Looking down, she sees that behind the franchise, near the dumpster, the
asphalt is strewn with small glass vials, like the one that Squeaky was
looking at last night. They are scattered about like cigarette butts behind
a bar. When the footpads of her wheels pass over these vials, they
tiddlywink out from underneath and skitter across the pavement.
People are lined up out the door, waiting to get in. Y.T. jumps the
line and goes inside.
The front room of the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates is, of course, like
all the others. A row of padded vinyl chairs where worshippers can wait for
their number to be called, with a potted plant at each end and a table
strewn with primeval magazines. A toy comer where kids can kill time,
reenacting imaginary, cosmic battles in injection-molded plastic. A counter
done up in fake wood so it looks like something from an old church. Behind
the counter, a pudgy high school babe, dishwater blond hair that has been
worked over pretty good with a curling iron, blue metal-flake eyeshadow, an
even coat of red makeup covering her broad, gelatinous cheeks, a flimsy sort
of choir robe thrown over her T-shirt.
When Y.T. comes in, she is right in the middle of a transaction. She
sees Y.T. right away, but no three-ring binder anywhere in the world allows
you to flag or fail in the middle of a transaction.
Stymied, Y.T. sighs and crosses her arms to convey impatience. In any
other business establishment, she'd already be raising hell and marching
around behind the counter as if she owned the place. But this is a church,
damn it.
There's a little rack along the front of the counter bearing religious
tracts, free for the taking, donation requested. Several slots on the rack
are occupied by the Reverend Wayne's famous bestseller. How America Was
Saved from Communism: ELVIS SHOT JFK.
She pulls out the envelope that the man with the glass eye stuck into
her pocket. It is not thick and soft enough to contain a lot of cash,
unfortunately.
It contains half a dozen snapshots. All of them feature Uncle Enzo. He
is on the broad, flat horseshoe driveway of a large house, larger than any
house Y.T. has ever seen with her own two eyes. He is standing on a
skateboard. Or falling off of a skateboard. Or coasting, slowly, arms
splayed wildly out to the sides, chased by nervous security personnel.
A piece of paper is wrapped around the pictures. It says: "Y.T. Thanks
for your help. As you can see from these pictures, I tried to train for this
assignment, but it's going to take some practice. Your friend, Uncle Enzo."
Y.T. wraps the pictures up just the way they were, puts them back in
her pocket, stifles a smile, returns to business matters.
The girl in the robe is still performing her transaction behind the
counter. The transactee is a stocky Spanish-speaking woman in an orange
dress.
The girl types some stuff into the computer. The customer snaps her
Visa card down on the fake wood altar top; it sounds like a rifle shot. The
girl pries the card up using her inch-long fingernails, a dicey and
complicated operation that makes Y.T. think of insects climbing out of their
egg sacs. Then she performs the sacrament, swiping the card through its
electromagnetic slot with a carefully modulated sweep of the arm, as though
tearing back a veil, handing over the slip, mumbling that she needs a
signature and daytime phone number. She might as well have been speaking
Latin, but that's okay, since this customer is familiar with the liturgy and
signs and numbers it before the words are fully spoken.
Then it just remains for the Word from On High. But computers and
communications are awfully good these days, and it usually doesn't take
longer than a couple of seconds to perform a charge-card verification. The
little machine beeps out its approval code, heavenly tunes sing out from
tinny speakers, and a wide pair of pearlescent doors in the back of the room
swing majestically open.
"Thank you for your donation," the girl says, slurring the words
together into a single syllable.
The customer stomps toward the double doors, drawn in by hypnotic organ
strains. The interior of the chapel is weirdly colored, illuminated partly
by fluorescent fixtures wedged into the ceiling and partly by large colored
light boxes that simulate stained-glass windows. The largest of these,
shaped like a fattened Gothic arch, is bolted to the back wall, above the
altar, and features a blazing trinity: Jesus, Elvis, and the Reverend Wayne.
Jesus gets top billing. The worshipper is not half a dozen steps into the
place before she thuds down on her knees in the middle of the aisle and
begins to speak in tongues: "ar ia ari ar isa ve na a mir ia i sa, ve na a
mir ia a sar ia..."
The doors swing shut again.
"Just a sec," the girl says, looking at Y.T. a little nervously. She
goes around the corner and stands in the middle of the toy area,
inadvertently getting the hem of her robe caught up in a Ninja Raft Warriors
battle module, and knocks on the door to the potty.
"Busy!" says a man's voice from the other side of the door.
"The Kourier's here," the girl says.
"I'll be right out," the man says, more quietly.
And he really is right out. Y.T. does not perceive any waiting time, no
zipping up of the fly or washing of the hands. He is wearing a black suit
with a clerical collar, pulling a lightweight black robe on over that as he
emerges into the toy area, crushing little action figures and fighter
aircraft beneath his black shoes. His hair is black and well greased, with
individual strands of gray, and he wears wire-rimmed bifocals with a subtle
brownish tint. He has very large pores.
And by the time he gets close enough that Y.T. can see all of these
details, she can also smell him. She smells Old Spice, plus a strong whiff
of vomit on his breath. But it's not boozy vomit.
"Gimme that," he says, and yanks the aluminum briefcase from her hand.
Y.T. never lets people do that.
"You have to sign for it, " she says. But she knows it's too late. If
you don't get them to sign first, you're screwed. You have no power, no
leverage. You're just a brat on a skateboard.
Which is why Y.T. never lets people yank deliveries out of her hand.
But this guy is a minister, for God's sake. She just didn't reckon on it. He
yanked it out of her hand - and now he runs with it back to his office.
"I can sign for it," the girl says. She looks scared. More than that,
she looks sick.
"It has to be him personally," Y.T. says. "Reverend Dale T. Thorpe."
Now she's done being shocked and starting to be pissed. So she just
follows him right into his office.
"You can't go in there," the girl says, but she says it dreamily,
sadly, like this whole thing is already half forgotten. Y.T. opens the door.
The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe sits at his desk. The aluminum briefcase is
open in front of him. It is filled with the same complicated bit of business
that she saw the other night, after the Raven thing. The Reverend Dale T.
Thorpe seems to be leashed by the neck to this device.
No, actually he is wearing something on a string around his neck. He
was keeping it under his clothes, the way Y.T. keeps Uncle Enzo's dog tags.
He has pulled it out now and shoved it into a slot inside the aluminum case.
It appears to be a laminated ID card with a bar code on it.
Now he pulls the card out and lets it dangle down his front. Y.T.
cannot tell whether he has noticed her. He is typing on the keyboard,
punching away with two fingers, missing letters, doing it again.
Then motors and servos inside the aluminum case whir and shudder. The
Reverend Dale T. Thorpe has unsnapped one of the little vials from its place
in the lid and inserted it into a socket next to the keyboard. It is slowly
drawn down inside the machine.
The vial pops back out again. The red plastic cap is emitting grainy
red light. It has little LEDs built into it, and they are spelling out
numbers, counting down seconds: 5,4,3,2,1...
The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe holds the vial up to his left nostril. When
the LED counter gets down to zero, it hisses, like air coming out of a tire
valve. At the same time, he inhales deeply, sucking it all into his lungs.
Then he shoots the vial expertly into his wastebasket.
"Reverend?" the girl says. Y.T. spins around to see her drifting toward
the office. "Would you do mine now, please?"
The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe does not answer. He has slumped back in his
leather swivel chair and is staring at a neon-framed blowup of Elvis, in his
Army days, holding a rifle.
When he wakes up, it's the middle of the day and he is all dried out
from the sun, and birds are circling overhead, trying to decide whether he's
dead or alive. Hiro climbs down from the roof of the turret and, throwing
caution to the wind, drinks three glasses of L.A. tap water. He gets some
bacon out of Da5id's fridge and throws it in the microwave. Most of General
Jim's people have left, and there is only a token guard of soldiers down on
the road. Hiro locks all the doors that look out on the hillside, because he
can't stop thinking about Raven. Then he sits at the kitchen table and
goggles in.
The Black Sun is mostly full of Asians, including a lot of people from
the Bombay film industry, glaring at each other, stroking their black
mustaches, trying to figure out what kind of hyperviolent action film will
play in Persepolis next year. It is nighttime there. Hiro is one of the few
Americans in the joint.
Along the back wall of the bar is a row of private rooms, ranging from
little tete-a-tetes to big conference rooms where a bunch of avatars can
gather and have a meeting. Juanita is waiting for Hiro in one of the smaller
ones. Her avatar just looks like Juanita. It is an honest representation,
with no effort made to hide the early suggestions of crow's-feet at the
corners of her big black eyes. Her glossy hair is so well resolved that Hiro
can see individual strands refracting the light into tiny rainbows.
"I'm at Da5id's house. Where are you?" Hiro says.
"In an airplane - so I may break up," Juanita says.
"You on your way here?"
"To Oregon, actually."
"Portland?"
"Astoria."
"Why on earth would you go to Astoria, Oregon, at a time like this?"
Juanita takes a deep breath, lets it out shakily. "If I told you, we'd
get into an argument."
"What's the latest word on Da5id?" Hiro says.
"The same."
"Any diagnosis?"
Juanita sighs, looks tired. "There won't be any diagnosis," she says.
"It's a software, not a hardware, problem."
"Huh?"
"They're rounding up the usual suspects. CAT scans, NMR scans, PET
scans, EEGs. Everything's fine. There's nothing wrong with his brain - his
hardware."
"It just happens to be running the wrong program?"
"His software got poisoned. Da5id had a snow crash last night, inside
his head."
"Are you trying to say it's a psychological problem?"
"It kind of goes beyond those established categories," Juanita says,
"because it's a new phenomenon. A very old one, actually."
"Does this thing just happen spontaneously, or what?"
"You tell me," she says. "You were there last night. Did anything
happen after I left?"
"He had a Snow Crash hypercard that he got from Raven outside The Black
Sun."
"Shit. That bastard."
"Who's the bastard? Raven or Da5id?"
"Da5id. I tried to warn him."
"He used it." Hiro goes on to explain the Brandy with the magic scroll.
"Then later he had computer trouble and got bounced."
"I heard about that part," she says. "That's why I called the
paramedics."
"I don't see the connection between Da5id's computer having a crash,
and you calling an ambulance."
"The Brandy's scroll wasn't just showing random static. It was flashing
up a large amount of digital information, in binary form. That digital
information was going straight into Da5id's optic nerve. Which is part of
the brain, incidentally - if you stare into a person's pupil, you can see
the terminal of the brain."
"Da5id's not a computer. He can't read binary code."
"He's a hacker. He messes with binary code for a living. That ability
is firm-wired into the deep structures of his brain. So he's susceptible to
that form of information. And so are you, home-boy."
"What kind of information are we talking about?"
"Bad news. A metavirus," Juanita says. "It's the atomic bomb of
informational warfare - a virus that causes any system to infect itself with
new viruses."
"And that's what made Da5id sick?"
"Yes."
"Why didn't I get sick?"
"Too far away. Your eyes couldn't resolve the bitmap. It has to be
right up in your face."
"I'll think about that one," Hiro says. "But I have another question.
Raven also distributes another drug - in Reality - called, among other
things, Snow Crash. What is it?"
"It's not a drug," Juanita says. "They make it look like a drug and
feel like a drug so that people will want to take it. It's laced with
cocaine and some other stuff."
"If it's not a drug, what is it?"
"It's chemically processed blood serum taken from people who are
infected with the metavirus," Juanita says. "That is, it's just another way
of spreading the infection."
"Who's spreading it?"
"L. Bob Rife's private church. All of those people are infected."
Hiro puts his head in his hands. He's not exactly thinking about this;
he's letting it ricochet around in his skull, waiting for it to come to
rest. "Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing - is
it a virus, a drug, or a religion?"
Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?"
That Juanita is talking this way does not make it any easier for Hiro
to get back on his feet in this conversation.
"How can you say that? You're a religious person yourself."
"Don't lump all religion together."
"Sorry."
"All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built
into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll
fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral - a piece
of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one
person to the next. That's the way it used to be, and unfortunately, that's
the way it's headed right now. But there have been several efforts to
deliver us from the hands of primitive, irrational religion. The first was
made by someone named Enki about four thousand years ago. The second was
made by Hebrew scholars in the eighth century B.C., driven out of their
homeland by the invasion of Sargon II, but eventually it just devolved into
empty legalism. Another attempt was made by Jesus - that one was hijacked by
viral influences within fifty days of his death. The virus was suppressed by
the Catholic Church, but we're in the middle of a big epidemic that started
in Kansas in 1900 and has been gathering momentum ever since."
"Do you believe in God or not?" Hiro says. First things first.
"Definitely."
"Do you believe in Jesus?"
"Yes. But not in the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus."
"How can you be a Christian without believing in that?"
"I would say," Juanita says, "how can you be a Christian with it?
Anyone who takes the trouble to study the gospels can see that the bodily
resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto the real story several years
after the real histories were written. It's so National Enquirer-esque,
don't you think?"
Beyond that, Juanita doesn't have much to say. She doesn't want to get
into it now, she says. She doesn't want to prejudice Hiro's thinking "at
this point."
"Does that imply that there's going to be some other point? Is this a
continuing relationship?" Hiro says.
"Do you want to find the people who infected Da5id?"
"Yes. Hell, Juanita, even if it weren't for the fact that he is my
friend, I'd want to find them before they infect me."
"Look at the Babel stack, Hiro, and then visit me if I get back from
Astoria."
"If you get back? What are you doing there?"
"Research."
She's been putting on a businesslike front through this whole talk,
spitting out information, telling Hiro the way it is. But she's tired and
anxious, and Hiro gets the idea that she's deeply afraid.
"Good luck," he says. He was all ready to do some flirting with her
during this meeting, picking up where they left off last night. But
something has changed in Juanita's mind between then and now. Flirting is
the last thing on her mind.
Juanita's going to do something dangerous in Oregon. She doesn't want
Hiro to know about it so that he won't worry.
"There's some good stuff in the Babel stack about someone named
Inanna," she says.
"Who's Inanna?"
"A Sumerian goddess. I'm sort of in love with her. Anyway, you can't
understand what I'm about to do until you understand Inanna."
"Well, good luck," Hiro says. "Say hi to Inanna for me."
"Thanks."
"When you get back, I want to spend some time with you."
"The feeling is mutual," she says. "But we have to get out of this
first."
"Oh. I didn't realize I was in something."
"Don't be a sap. We're all in it."
Hiro leaves, exiting into The Black Sun.
There is one guy wandering around the Hacker Quadrant who really stands
out. His avatar doesn't look so hot. And he's having trouble controlling it.
He looks like a guy who's just goggled into the Metaverse for the first time
and doesn't know how to move around. He keeps bumping into tables, and when
he wants to turn around, he spins around several times, not knowing how to
stop himself.
Hiro walks toward him, because his face seems a little familiar. When
the guy finally stops moving long enough for Hiro to resolve him clearly, he
recognizes the avatar. It's a Clint. Most often seen in the company of a
Brandy.
The Clint recognizes Hiro, and his surprised face comes on for a
second, is then replaced by his usual stern, stiff-lipped, craggy
appearance. He holds up his hands together in front of him, and Hiro sees
that he is holding a scroll, just like Brandy's.
Hiro reaches for his katana, but the scroll is already up in his face,
spreading open to reveal the blue glare of the bitmap inside. He sidesteps,
gets over to one side of the Clint, raising the katana overhead, snaps the
katana straight down and cuts the Clint's arms off.
As the scroll falls, it spreads open even wider. Hiro doesn't dare look
at it now. The Clint has turned around and is awkwardly trying to escape
from The Black Sun, bouncing from table to table like a pinball.
If Hiro could kill the guy - cut his head off - then his avatar would
stay in The Black Sun, be carried away by the Graveyard Daemons. Hiro could
do some hacking and maybe figure out who he is, where he's coming in from.
But a few dozen hackers are lounging around the bar, watching all of
this, and if they come over and look at the scroll, they'll all end up like
Da5id.
Hiro squats down, looking away from the scroll, and pulls up one of the
hidden trapdoors that lead down into the tunnel system. He's the one who