Hiro ducks out of Tranny's celebratory dinner rather early, drags Reason off the zodiac and onto the front porch of the houseboat, opens it up, and jacks his personal computer into its bios.
Reason reboots with no problems. That's to be expected. It's also to be expected that later, probably when he most needs Reason to work, it will crash again, the way it did for Fisheye. He could keep turning it off and on every time it does this, but this is awkward in the heat of battle, and not the type of solution that hackers admire. It would be much more sensible just to debug it.
Which he could do by hand, if he had time. But there may be a better way of going about it. It's possible that, by now, Ng Security Industries has fixed the bug -- come out with a new version of the software. If so, he should be able to get a copy of it on the Street.
Hiro materializes in his office. The Librarian pokes his head out of the next room, just in case Hiro has any questions for him.
"What does ultima ratio regum mean?"
"'The Last Argument of Kings,'" the Librarian says. "King Louis XIV had it stamped onto the barrels of all of the cannons that were forged during his reign."
Hiro stands up and walks out into his garden. His motorcycle is waiting for him on the gravel path that leads to the gate. Looking up over the fence, Hiro can see the lights of Downtown rising in the distance again. His computer has succeeded in jacking into L. Bob Rife's global network; he has access to the Street. This is as Hiro had expected. Rife must have a whole suite of satellite uplinks there on the Enterprise, patched into a cellular network covering the Raft. Otherwise, he wouldn't be able to reach the Metaverse from his very own watery fortress, which would never do for a man like Rife.
Hiro climbs on his bike, eases it through the neighborhood and onto the Street, and then gooses it up to a few hundred miles an hour, slaloming between the stanchions of the monorail, practicing. He runs into a few of them and stops, but that's to be expected.
Ng Security Industries has a whole floor of a mile-high neon skyscraper near Port One, right in the middle of Downtown. Like everything else in the Metaverse, it's open twenty-four hours, because it's always business hours somewhere in the world. Hiro leaves his bike on the Street, takes the elevator up to the 397th floor, and comes face to face with a receptionist daemon. For a moment, he can't peg her racial background; then he realizes that this daemon is half-black, half-Asian -- just like him. If a white man had stepped off the elevator, she probably would have been a blonde. A Nipponese businessman would have come face to face with a perky Nipponese office girl.
"Yes, sir," she says. "Is this in regard to sales or customer service?"
"Customer service."
"Whom are you with?"
"You name it, I'm with them."
"I'm sorry?" Like human receptionists, the daemon is especially bad at handling irony.
"At the moment, I think I'm working for the Central Intelligence Corporation, the Mafia, and Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong."
"I see," says the receptionist, making a note. Also like a human receptionist, it is not possible to impress her. "And what product is this in regards to?"
"Reason."
"Sir! Welcome to Ng Security Industries," says another voice.
It is another daemon, an attractive black/Asian woman in highly professional dress, who has materialized from the depths of the office suite.
She ushers Hiro down a long, nicely paneled hallway, down another long paneled hallway, and then down a long paneled hallway. Every few steps, he passes by a reception area where avatars from all over the world sit in chairs, passing the time. But Hiro doesn't have to wait. She ushers him straight into a nice big paneled office where an Asian man sits behind a desk littered with models of helicopters. It is Mr.Ng himself. He stands up; they swap bows; the usher lady checks out.
"You working with Fisheye?" Ng says, lighting up a cig. The smoke swirls in the air ostentatiously. It takes as much computing power realistically to model the smoke coming out of Ng's mouth as it does to model the weather system of the entire planet.
"He's dead," Hiro says. "Reason crashed at a critical juncture, and he ate a harpoon."
Ng doesn't react. Instead, he just sits there motionless for a few seconds, absorbing this data, as if his customers get harpooned all the time. He's probably got a mental database of everyone who has ever used one of his toys and what happened to them.
"I told him it was a beta version," Ng says. "And he should have known not to use it for infighting. A two-dollar switchblade would have served him better."
"Agreed. But he was quite taken with it."
Ng blows out more smoke, thinking. "As we learned in Vietnam, high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to psychoactive drugs. Like LSD, which can convince people they can fly -- causing them to jump out of windows -- weapons can make people overconfident. Skewing their tactical judgment. As in the case of Fisheye."
"I'll be sure and remember that," Hiro says.
"What kind of combat environment do you want to use Reason in?" Ng says.
"I need to take over an aircraft carrier tomorrow morning."
"The Enterprise?"
"Yes."
"You know," Ng says, apparently in a conversational mood, "there's a guy who actually took over a nuclear-missile submarine armed with nothing more than a piece of glass -- "
"Yeah, that's the guy who killed Fisheye. I might have to tangle with him, too."
Ng laughs. "What is your ultimate objective? As you know, we are all in this together, so you may share your thoughts with me."
"I'd prefer a little more discretion in this case ... "
"Too late for that, Hiro," says another voice. Hiro turns around; it is Uncle Enzo, being ushered through the door by the receptionist -- a striking Italian woman. Just a few paces behind him is a small Asian businessman and an Asian receptionist.
"I took the liberty of calling them in when you arrived," Ng says, "so that we could have a powwow."
"Pleasure," Uncle Enzo says, bowing slightly to Hiro. Hiro bows back.
"I'm really sorry about the car, sir."
"It's forgotten," Uncle Enzo says.
The small Asian man has now come into the room. Hiro finally recognizes him. It is the photo that is on the wall of every Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong in the world.
Introductions and bows all around. Suddenly, a number of extra chairs have materialized in the office, so everyone pulls one up. Ng comes out from behind his desk, and they sit in a circle.
"Let us cut to the chase, since I assume that your situation, Hiro, may be more precarious than ours," Uncle Enzo says.
"You got that right, sir."
"We would all like to know what the hell is going on," Mr. Lee says. His English is almost devoid of a Chinese accent; clearly his cute, daffy public image is just a front.
"How much of this have you guys figured out so far?"
"Bits and pieces," Uncle Enzo says. "How much have you figured out?"
"Almost all of it," Hiro says. "Once I talk to Juanita, I'll have the rest."
"In that case, you are in possession of some very valuable intel," Uncle Enzo says. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hypercard and hands it toward Hiro. It says
TWENTY-FIVE MILLION HONG KONG DOLLARS
Hiro reaches out and takes the card.
Somewhere on earth, two computers swap bursts of electronic noise and the money gets transferred from the Mafia's account to Hiro's.
"You'll take care of the split with Y.T.," Uncle Enzo says.
Hiro nods. You bet I will.
"I'm here on the Raft looking for a piece of software -- a piece of medicine to be specific -- that was written five thousand years ago by a Sumerian personage named Enki, a neurolinguistic hacker."
"What does that mean?" Mr. Lee says.
"It means a person who was capable of programming other people's minds with verbal streams of data, known as nam-shubs."
Ng is totally expressionless. He takes another drag on his cigarette, spouts the smoke up above his head in a geyser, watches it spread out against the ceiling. "What is the mechanism?"
"We've got two kinds of language in our heads. The kind we're using now is acquired. It patterns our brains as we're learning it. But there's also a tongue that's based in the deep structures of the brain, that everyone shares. These structures consist of basic neural circuits that have to exist in order to allow our brains to acquire higher languages."
"Linguistic infrastructure," Uncle Enzo says.
"Yeah. I guess 'deep structure' and 'infrastructure' mean the same thing. Anyway, we can access those parts of the brain under the right conditions. Glossolalia -- speaking in tongues -- is the output side of it, where the deep linguistic structures hook into our tongues and speak, bypassing all the higher, acquired languages. Everyone's known that for some time."
"You're saying there's an input side, too?" Ng says.
"Exactly. It works in reverse. Under the right conditions, your ears -- or eyes -- can tie into the deep structures, bypassing the higher language functions. Which is to say, someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visual symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstem. Like a cracker who breaks into a computer system, bypasses all the security precautions, and plugs himself into the core, enabling him to exert absolute control over the machine."
"In that situation, the people who own the computer are helpless," Ng says.
"Right. Because they access the machine at a higher level, which has now been overridden. In the same sense, once a neurolinguistic hacker plugs into the deep structures of our brain, we can't get him out -- because we can't even control our own brain at such a basic level."
"What does this have to do with a clay tablet on the Enterprise?" Mr. Lee says.
"Bear with me. This language -- the mother tongue -- is a vestige of an earlier phase of human social development. Primitive societies were controlled by verbal rules called me. The me were like little programs for humans. They were a necessary part of the transition from caveman society to an organized, agricultural society. For example, there was a program for plowing a furrow in the ground and planting grain. There was a program for baking bread and another one for making a house. There were also me for higher-level functions such as war, diplomacy, and religious ritual. All the skills required to operate a self-sustaining culture were contained in these me, which were written down on tablets or passed around in an oral tradition. In any case, the repository for the me was the local temple, which was a database of me, controlled by a priest/king called an en. When someone needed bread, they would go to the en or one of his underlings and download the bread-making me from the temple. Then they would carry out the instructions -- run the program -- and when they were finished, they'd have a loaf of bread.
"A central database was necessary, among other reasons, because some of the me had to be properly timed. If people carried out the plowing-and-planting me at the wrong time of year, the harvest would fail and everyone would starve. The only way to make sure that the me were properly timed was to build astronomical observatories to watch the skies for the changes of season. So the Sumerians built towers 'with their tops with the heavens' -- topped with astronomical diagrams. The en would watch the skies and dispense the agricultural me at the proper times of year to keep the economy running."
"I think you have a chicken-and-egg problem," Uncle Enzo says. "How did such a society first come to be organized?"
"There is an informational entity known as the metavirus, which causes information systems to infect themselves with customized viruses. This may be just a basic principle of nature, like Darwinian selection, or it may be an actual piece of information that floats around the universe on comets and radio waves -- I'm not sure. In any case, what it comes down to is this: Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses -- viruses generated from within itself.
"At some point in the distant past, the metavirus infected the human race and has been with us ever since. The first thing it did was to spawn a whole Pandora's box of DNA viruses -- smallpox, influenza, and so on. Health and longevity became a thing of the past. A distant memory of this event is preserved in legends of the Fall from Paradise, in which mankind was ejected from a life of ease into a world infested with disease and pain.
"That plague eventually reached some kind of a plateau. We still see new DNA viruses from time to time, but it seems that our bodies have developed a resistance to DNA viruses in general."
"Perhaps," Ng says, "there are only so many viruses that will work in the human DNA, and the metavirus has created all of them."
"Could be. Anyway, Sumerian culture -- the society based on me -- was another manifestation of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in a linguistic form rather than DNA."
"Excuse me," Mr. Lee says. "You are saying that civilization started out as an infection?"
"Civilization in its primitive form, yes. Each me was a sort of virus, kicked out by the metavirus principle. Take the example of the bread-baking me. Once that me got into society, it was a self-sustaining piece of information. It's a simple question of natural selection: people who know how to bake bread will live better and be more apt to reproduce than people who don't know how. Naturally, they will spread the me, acting as hosts for this self-replicating piece of information. That makes it a virus. Sumerian culture -- with its temples full of me -- was just a collection of successful viruses that had accumulated over the millennia. It was a franchise operation, except it had ziggurats instead of golden arches, and clay tablets instead of three-ring binders.
"The Sumerian word for 'mind,' or 'wisdom,' is identical to the word for 'ear.' That's all those people were: ears with bodies attached. Passive receivers of information. But Enki was different. Enki was an en who just happened to be especially good at his job. He had the unusual ability to write new me -- he was a hacker. He was, actually, the first modern man, a fully conscious human being, just like us.
"At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People were carrying out the same old me all the time, not coming up with new ones, not thinking for themselves. I suspect that he was lonely, being one of the few -- perhaps the only -- conscious human being in the world. He realized that in order for the human race to advance, they had to be delivered from the grip of this viral civilization.
"So he created the nam-shub of Enki, a countervirus that spread along the same routes as the me and the metavirus. It went into the deep structures of the brain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could understand the Sumerian language, or any other deep structure-based language. Cut off from our common deep structures, we began to develop new languages that had nothing in common with each other. The me no longer worked and it was not possible to write new me. Further transmission of the metavirus was blocked."
"Why didn't everyone starve from lack of bread, having lost the bread-making me?" Uncle Enzo says.
"Some probably did. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and figure it out. So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings of human consciousness -- when we first had to think for ourselves. It was the beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to think about abstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That's where the name Babel comes from. Literally it means 'Gate of God.' It was the gate that allowed God to reach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a gateway that was opened by the nam-shub of Enki that broke us free from the metavirus and gave us the ability to think -- moved us from a materialistic world to a dualistic world -- a binary world -- with both a physical and a spiritual component.
"There was probably chaos and upheaval. Enki, or his son Marduk, tried to reimpose order on society by supplanting the old system of me with a code of laws -- The Code of Hammurabi. It was partially successful. Asherah worship continued in many places, though. It was an incredibly tenacious cult, a throwback to Sumer, that spread itself both verbally and through the exchange of bodily fluids -- they had cult prostitutes, and they also adopted orphans and spread the virus to them via breast milk."
"Wait a minute," Ng says. "Now you are talking about a biological virus again."
"Exactly. That's the whole point of Asherah. It's both. As an example, look at herpes simplex. Herpes heads straight for the nervous system when it enters the body. Some strains stay in the peripheral nervous system, but other strains head like a bullet for the central nervous system and take up permanent residence in the cells of the brain -- coiling around the brainstem like a serpent around a tree. The Asherah virus, which may be related to herpes, or they may be one and the same, passes through the cell walls and goes to the nucleus and messes with the cell's DNA in the same way that steroids do. But Asherah is a lot more complicated than a steroid."
"And when it alters that DNA, what is the result?"
"No one has studied it, except maybe for L. Bob Rife. I think it definitely brings the mother tongue closer to the surface, makes people more apt to speak in tongues and more susceptible to me. I would guess that it also tends to encourage irrational behavior, maybe lowers the victim's defenses to viral ideas, makes them sexually promiscuous, perhaps all of the above."
"Does every viral idea have a biological virus counterpart?" Uncle Enzo says.
"No. Only Asherah does, as far as I know. That is why, of all the me and all the gods and religious practices that predominated in Sumer, only Asherah is still going strong today. A viral idea can be stamped out -- as happened with Nazism, bell bottoms, and Bart Simpson T-shirts -- but Asherah, because it has a biological aspect, can remain latent in the human body. After Babel, Asherah was still resident in the human brain, being passed on from mother to child and from lover to lover.
"We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. But being physically infected with a virulent strain of the Asherah virus makes you a whole lot more susceptible. The only thing that keeps these things from taking over the world is the Babel factor -- the walls of mutual incomprehension that compartmentalize the human race and stop the spread of viruses.
"Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed -- Hebrew -- that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history -- a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance.
"They may have gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the Kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name.
"In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the subsequent monotheistic religions -- known by Muslims, appropriately, as religions of the Book -- incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example, the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy, of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the territory where the viral cult had once thrived -- from India to Spain -- was under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism.
"But because of its latency -- coiled about the brainstem of those it infects, passed from one generation to the next -- it always finds ways to resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as stifling.
"The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition -- sort of an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new nam-shub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough; We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.
"People who were used to the rigid theocracy of the Pharisees couldn't handle the idea of a popular, nonhierarchical church. They wanted popes and bishops and priests. And so the myth of the Resurrection was added onto the gospels. The message was changed to a form of idolatry. In this new version of the gospels, Jesus came back to earth and organized a church, which later became the Church of the Eastern and Western Roman Empire -- another rigid, brutal, and irrational theocracy.
"At the same time, the Pentecostal church was being founded. The early Christians spoke in tongues. The Bible says, 'And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?"' Well, I think I may be able to answer that question. It was a viral outbreak. Asherah had been present, lurking in the population, ever since the triumph of the deuteronomists. The informational hygiene measures practiced by the Jews kept it suppressed. But in the early days of Christianity, there must have been a lot of chaos, a lot of radicals and free thinkers running around, flouting tradition. Throwbacks to the days of prerational religion. Throwbacks to Sumer. And sure enough, they all started talking to each other in the tongue of Eden.
"The mainline Christian church refused to accept glossolalia. They frowned on it for a few centuries and officially purged it at the Council of Constantinople in 381. The glossolalic cult remained on the fringes of the Christian world. The Church was willing to accept a little bit of xenoglossia if it helped convert heathens, as in the case of St. Louis Bertrand who converted thousands of Indians in the sixteenth century, spreading glossolalia across the continent faster than smallpox. But as soon as they were converted, those Indians were supposed to shut up and speak Latin like everyone else.
"The Reformation opened the door a little wider. But Pentecostalism didn't really take off until the year 1900, when a small group of Bible-college students in Kansas began to speak in tongues. They spread the practice to Texas. There it became known as the revival movement. It spread like wildfire, all across the United States, and then the world, reaching China and India in 1906. The twentieth century's mass media, high literacy rates, and high-speed transportation all served as superb vectors for the infection. In a packed revival hall or a Third World refugee encampment, glossolalia spread from one person to the next as fast as panic. By the eighties, the number of Pentecostals worldwide numbered in the tens of millions.
"And then came television, and the Reverend Wayne, backed up by the vast media power of L. Bob Rife. The behavior that the Reverend Wayne promulgates through his television shows, pamphlets, and franchises can be traced in an unbroken line back to the Pentecostal cults of early Christianity, and from there back to pagan glossolalia cults. The cult of Asherah lives. The Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates is the cult of Asherah.
"Lagos figured all of this out. He was originally a researcher at the Library of Congress, later became part of CIC when it absorbed the Library. He made a living by discovering interesting things in the Library, facts no one else had bothered to dig up. He would organize these facts and sell them to people. Once he figured out all of this Enki/Asherah stuff, he went looking for someone who would pay for it and settled on L. Bob Rife, Lord of Bandwidth, owner of the fiber-optics monopoly, who at that time employed more programmers than anyone else on earth.
"Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought too small. He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers. Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad idea.
"Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be much more powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off. Then he started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a small church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a small-time preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important than the Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began converting people by the hundreds of thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand. L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the creation of Islam. They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many self-described Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that they use his name. It's a postrational religion.
"He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or enhancer of the cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that through the use of cult prostitution because it is flagrantly anti-Christian. But one of the major functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and vaccinate people -- and there was more than just vaccine in those needles.
"Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.
"In the meantime, he got the Raft going as a way of transporting hundreds of thousands of his cultists from the wretched parts of Asia into the United States. The media image of the Raft is that it is a place of utter chaos, where thousands of different languages are spoken and there is no central authority. But it's not like that at all. It's highly organized and tightly controlled. These people are all talking to each other in tongues. L. Bob Rife has taken xenoglossia and perfected it, turned it into a science.
"He can control these people by grafting radio receivers into their skulls, broadcasting instructions -- me -- directly into their brainstems. If one person in a hundred has a receiver, he can act as the local en and distribute the me of L. Bob Rife to all the others. They will act out L. Bob Rife's instructions as though they have been programmed to. And right now, he has about a million of these people poised off the California coast.
"He also has a digital metavirus, in binary code, that can infect computers, or hackers, via the optic nerve."
"How did he translate it into binary form?" Ng says.
"I don't think he did. I think he found it in space. Rife owns the biggest radio astronomy network in the world. He doesn't do real astronomy with it -- he just listens for signals from other planets. It stood to reason that sooner or later, one of his dishes would pick up the metavirus."
"How does that stand to reason?"
"The metavirus is everywhere. Anywhere life exists, the metavirus is there, too, propagating through it. Originally, it was spread around on comets. That's probably how life first came to the Earth, and that's probably how the metavirus came here also. But comets are slow, whereas radio waves are fast. In binary form, a virus can bounce around the universe at the speed of light. It infects a civilized planet, gets into its computers, reproduces, and inevitably gets broadcast on television or radio or whatever. Those transmissions don't stop at the edge of the atmosphere -- they radiate out into space, forever. And if they hit a planet with another civilized culture, where people are listening to the stars the way Rife was doing, then that planet gets infected, too. I think that was Rife's plan, and I think it worked. Except that Rife was smart -- he caught it in a controlled manner. He put it in a bottle. An informational warfare agent for him to use at his discretion. When it is placed into a computer, it snow-crashes the computer by causing it to infect itself with new viruses. But it is much more devastating when it goes into the mind of a hacker, a person who has an understanding of binary code built into the deep structures of his brain. The binary metavirus will destroy the mind of a hacker."
"So Rife can control two kinds of people," Ng says. "He can control Pentecostals by using me written in the mother tongue. And he can control hackers in a much more violent fashion by damaging their brains with binary viruses."
"Exactly."
"What do you think Rife wants?" Ng says.
"He wants to be Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look, it's simple: Once he converts you to his religion, he can control you with me. And he can convert millions of people to his religion because it spreads like a fucking virus -- people have no resistance to it because no one is used to thinking about religion, people aren't rational enough to argue about this kind of thing. Basically, anyone who reads the National Enquirer or watches pro wrestling on TV is easy to convert. And with Snow Crash as a promoter, it's even easier to get converts.
"Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or aliterate and relies on TV -- which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite -- the people who go into the Metaverse, basically -- who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.
"That makes us a big stumbling block to Rife's plan. People like L. Bob Rife can't do anything without us hackers. And even if he could convert us, he wouldn't be able to use us, because what we do is creative in nature and can't be duplicated by people running me. But he can threaten us with the blunt instrument of Snow Crash. That, I think, is what happened to Da5id. It may have been an experiment, just to see if Snow Crash worked on a real hacker, and it may have been a warning shot intended to demonstrate Rife's power to the hacker community. The message: If Asherah gets broadcast into the technological priesthood -- "
"Napalm on wildflowers," Ng says.
"As far as I know, there's no way to stop the binary virus. But there's an antidote to Rife's bogus religion. The nam-shub of Enki still exists. He gave a copy to his son Marduk, who passed it on to Hammurabi. Now, Marduk may or may not have been a real person. The point is that Enki went out of his way to leave the impression that he had passed on his nam-shub in some form. In other words, he was planting a message that later generations of hackers were supposed to decode, if Asherah should rise again.
"I am fairly certain that the information we need is contained within a clay envelope that was excavated from the ancient Sumerian city of Eridu in southern Iraq ten years ago. Eridu was the seat of Enki; in other words, Enki was the local en of Eridu, and the temple of Eridu contained his me, including the nam-shub that we are looking for."
"Who excavated this clay envelope?"
"The Eridu dig was sponsored entirely by a religious university in Bayview, Texas."
"L. Bob Rife's?"
"You got it. He created an archaeology department whose sole function was to dig up the city of Eridu, locate the temple where Enki stored all of his me, and take it all home. L. Bob Rife wanted to reverse-engineer the skills that Enki possessed; by analyzing Enki's me, he wanted to create his very own neurolinguistic hackers, who could write new me that would become the ground rules, the program, for the new society that Rife wants to create."
"But among these me is a copy of the nam-shub of Enki," Ng says, "which is dangerous to Rife's plan."
"Right. He wanted that tablet, too -- not to analyze but to keep to himself, so no one could use it against him."
"If you can obtain a copy of this nam-shub," Ng says, "what effect would it have?"
"If we could transmit the nam-shub of Enki to all of the en on the Raft, they would relay it to all of the Raft people. It would jam their mother-tongue neurons and prevent Rife from programming them with new me," Hiro says. "But we really need to get this done before the Raft breaks up -- before the Refus all come ashore. Rife talks to his en through a central transmitter on the Enterprise, which I take to be a fairly short-range, line-of-sight type of thing. Pretty soon he'll use this system to distribute a big me that will cause all the Refus to come ashore as a unified army with coordinated marching orders. In other words, the Raft will break up, and after that it won't be possible to reach all of these people anymore with a single transmission. So we have to do it as soon as possible."
"Mr.Rife will be most unhappy," Ng predicts. "He will try to retaliate by unleashing Snow Crash against the technological priesthood."
"I know that," Hiro says, "but I can only worry about one thing at a time. I could use a little help here."
"Easier said than done," Ng says. "To reach the Core, one must fly over the Raft or drive a small boat through its midst. Rife has a million people there with rifles and missile launchers. Even high-tech weapons systems cannot defeat organized small-arms fire on a massive scale."
"Get some choppers out to this vicinity, then," Hiro says. "Something. Anything. If I can get my hands on the nam-shub of Enki and infect everyone on the Raft with it, then you can approach safely."
"We'll see what we can come up with," Uncle Enzo says.
"Fine," Hiro says. "Now, what about Reason?"
Ng mumbles something and a card appears in his hand. "Here's a new version of the system software," he says. "It should be a little less buggy."
"A little less?"
"No piece of software is ever bug free," Ng says.
Uncle Enzo says, "I guess there's a little bit of Asherah in all of us."
Hiro finds his own way out and takes the elevator all the way back down to the Street. When he exits the neon skyscraper, a black-and-white girl is sitting on his motorcycle, messing with the controls.
"Where are you?" she says.
"I'm on the Raft, too. Hey, we just made twenty-five million dollars."
He is sure that just this one time, Y.T. is going to be impressed by something that he says. But she's not.
"That'll buy me a really happening funeral when they mail me home in a piece of Tupperware," she says.
"Why would that happen?"
"I'm in trouble," she admits -- for the first time in her life. "I think my boyfriend is going to kill me."
"Who's your boyfriend?"
"Raven."
If avatars could turn pale and woozy and have to sit down on the sidewalk, Hiro's would. "Now I know why he has POOR IMPULSE CONTROL tattooed across his forehead."
"This is great. I was hoping to get a little cooperation or at least maybe some advice," she says.
"If you think he's going to kill you, you're wrong, because if you were right, you'd be dead," Hiro says.
"Depends on your assumptions," she says. She goes on to tell him a highly entertaining story about a dentata.
"I'm going to try to help you," Hiro says, "but I'm not necessarily the safest guy on the Raft to hang out with, either."
"Did you hook up with your girlfriend yet?"
"No. But I have high hopes for that. Assuming I can stay alive."
"High hopes for what?"
"Our relationship."
"Why?" she asks. "What's changed between then and now?"
This is one of these utterly simple and obvious questions that is irritating because Hiro's not sure of the answer. "Well, I think I figured out what she was doing -- why she came here."
Another simple and obvious question. "So, I feel like I understand her now."
"You do?"
"Yeah, well, sort of."
"And is that supposed to be a good thing?"
"Well, sure."
"Hiro, you are such a geek. She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after."
"Well, what is she after, do you suppose -- keeping in mind that you've never actually met the woman, and that you're going out with Raven?"
"She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable."
"You figure?"
"Yeah. Definitely."
"What makes you think I don't understand myself?"
"It's just obvious. You're a really smart hacker and the greatest sword fighter in the world -- and you're delivering pizzas and promoting concerts that you don't make any money off of. How do you expect her to -- "
The rest is drowned out by sound breaking in through his earphones, coming in from Reality: a screeching, tearing noise riding in high and sharp above the rumbling noise of heavy impact. Then there is just the screaming of terrified neighborhood children, the cries of men in Tagalog, and the groaning and popping sound of a steel fishing trawler collapsing under the pressure of the sea.
"What was that?" Y.T. says.
"Meteorite," Hiro says.
"Huh?"
"Stay tuned," Hiro says, "I think I just got into a Gatling gun duel."
"Are you going to sign off?"
"Just shut up for a second."
This neighborhood is U-shaped, built around a sort of cove in the Raft where half a dozen rusty old fishing boats are tied up. A floating pier, pieced together from mismatched pontoons, runs around the edge.
The empty trawler, the one they've been cutting up for scrap, has been hit by a burst from the big gun on the deck of the Enterprise. It looks as though a big wave picked it up and tried to wrap it around a pillar: one whole side is collapsed in, the bow and the stern are actually bent toward each other. Its back is broken. Its empty holds are ingurgitating a vast, continuous rush of murky brown seawater, sucking in that variegated sewage like a drowning man sucks air. It's heading for the bottom fast.
Hiro shoves Reason back into the zodiac, jumps in, and starts the motor. He doesn't have time to untie the boat from the pontoon, so he snaps through the line with his wakizashi and takes off.
The pontoons are already sagging inward and down, pulled together by the ruined ship's mooring lines. The trawler is falling off the surface of the water, trying top~ in the entire neighborhood like a black hole.
A couple of Filipino men are already out with short knives, hacking at the stuff that webs the neighborhood together, trying to cut loose the parts that can't be salvaged. Hiro buzzes over to a pontoon that is already knee-deep under the water, finds the ropes that connect it to the next pontoon, which is even more deeply submerged, and probes them with his katana. The remaining ropes pop like rifle shots, and then the pontoon breaks loose, shooting up to the surface so fast that it almost capsizes the zodiac.
A whole section of the pontoon pier, along the side of the trawler, can't be salvaged. Men with fishing knives and women with kitchen cleavers are down on their knees, the water already rising up under their chins, cutting their neighborhood free. It breaks loose one rope at a time, haphazardly, tossing the Filipinos up into the air. A boy with a machete cuts the one remaining line, which pops up and lashes him across the face. Finally, the raft is free and flexible once again, bobbing and waving back toward equilibrium, and where the trawler was, there's nothing but a bubbling whirlpool that occasionally vomits up a loose piece of floating debris.
Some others have already clambered up onto the fishing boat that was tied up next to the trawler. It has suffered some damage, too: several men cluster around and lean over the rail to examine a couple of large impact craters on the side. Each hole is surrounded by a shiny dinner plate-sized patch that has been blown free of all paint and rust. In the middle is a hole the size of a golf ball.
Hiro decides it's time to leave.
But before he does, he reaches into his coverall, pulls out a money clip, and counts out a few thousand Kongbucks. He puts them on the deck and weighs them down under the corner of a red steel gasoline tank. Then he hits the road. He has no trouble finding the canal that leads to the next neighborhood. His paranoia level is way up, and so he glances back and forth as he pilots his way out of there, looking up all the little alleys. In one of those niches, he sees a wirehead, mumbling something.
The next neighborhood is Malaysian. Several dozen of them are gathered near the bridge, attracted by the noise. As Hiro is entering their neighborhood, he sees men running down the undulating pontoon bridge that serves as the main street, carrying guns and knives. The local constabulary. More men of the same description emerge from the byways and skiffs and sam-pans, joining them. A tremendous whacking and splintering and tearing noise sounds tight beside him, as though a lumber truck has just crashed into a brick wall. Water splashes his body, and an exhalation of steam passes over his face. Then it's quiet again. He turns around, slowly and reluctantly. The nearest pontoon isn't there anymore, just a bloody, turbulent soup of splinters and chaff.
He turns around and looks behind him. The wirehead he saw a few seconds ago is out in the open now, standing all by himself at the edge of a raft. Everyone else has cleared out of there. He can see the bastard's lips moving. Hiro whips the boat around and returns to him, drawing his wakizashi with his free hand, and cuts him down on the spot.
But there will be more. Hiro knows they're all out looking for him now. The gunners up there on the Enterprise don't care how many of these Refus they have to kill in order to nail Hiro.
From the Malaysian neighborhood, he passes into a Chinese neighborhood. This one's a lot more built up, it contains a number of steel ships and barges. It extends off into the distance, away from the Core, for as far as Hiro can see from his worthless sea-level vantage point.
He's being watched by a man high up in the superstructure of one of those Chinese ships, another wirehead. Hiro can see the guy's jaw flapping as he sends updates to Raft Central.
The big Gatling gun on the deck of the Enterprise opens up again and fires another meteorite of depleted uranium slugs into the side of an unoccupied barge about twenty feet from Hiro. The entire side of the barge chases itself inward, like the steel has become liquid and is running down a drain, and the metal turns bright as shock waves simply turn that thick layer of rust into an aerosol, blast it free from the steel borne on a wave of sound so powerful that it hurts Hiro down inside his chest and makes him feel sick.
The gun is radar controlled. It's very accurate when it's shooting at a piece of metal. It's a lot less accurate when it's trying to hit flesh and blood.
"Hiro? What the fuck's going on?" Y.T. is shouting into his earphones.
"Can't talk. Get me to my office," Hiro says. "Pull me onto the back of the motorcycle and then drive it there."
"I don't know how to drive a motorcycle," she says.
"It's only got one control. Twist the throttle and it goes."
And then he points his boat out toward the open water and drills it. Dimly superimposed on Reality, he can see the black-and-white figure of Y.T. sitting in front of him on the motorcycle; she reaches out for the throttle and both of them jerk forward and slam into the wall of a skyscraper at Mach 1.
He turns off his view of the Metaverse entirely, making the goggles totally transparent. Then he switches his system into full gargoyle mode: enhanced visible light with false-color infrared, plus millimeter-wave radar. His view of the world goes into grainy black and white, much brighter than it was before. Here and there, certain objects glow fuzzily in pink or red. This comes from the infrared, and it means that these things are warm or hot; people are pink, engines and fires are red.
The millimeter-wave radar stuff is superimposed much more cleanly and crisply in neon green. Anything made of metal shows up. Hiro is now navigating down a grainy, charcoal-gray avenue of water lined with grainy, light gray pontoon bridges tied up to crisp neon-green barges and ships that glow reddishly from place to place, wherever they are generating heat, It's not pretty. In fact, it's so ugly that it probably explains why gargoyles are, in general, so socially retarded. But it's a lot more useful than the charcoal-on-ebony view he had before.
And it saves his life. As he's buzzing down a curving, narrow canal, a narrow green parabola appears hanging across the water in front of him, suddenly rising out of the water and snapping into a perfectly straight line at neck level. It's a piece of piano wire. Hiro ducks under it, waves to the young Chinese men who set the booby trap, and keeps going.
The radar picks out three fuzzy pink individuals holding Chinese AK47s standing by the side of the channel. Hiro cuts into a side channel and avoids them. But it's a narrower channel, and he's not sure where it goes.
"Y.T.," he says, "where the hell are we?"
"Driving down the street toward your house. We overshot it about six times."
Up ahead, the channel dead-ends. Hiro does a one-eighty. With the big heat exchanger dragging behind it, the boat is not nearly as maneuverable or as fast as Hiro wants it to be. He passes back underneath the booby-trap wire and starts exploring another narrow channel that he passed earlier.
"Okay, we're home. You're sitting at your desk," Y.T. says.
"Okay," Hiro says, "this is going to be tricky."
He coasts down to a dead stop in the middle of the channel, makes a scan for militia men and wireheads, and finds none. There is a five-foot-tall Chinese woman in the boat next to him holding a square cleaver, chopping something. Hiro figures it's a risk he can handle, so he turns off Reality and returns to the Metaverse.
He's sitting at his desk. Y.T. is standing next to him, arms crossed, radiating Attitude.
"Librarian?"
"Yes, sir," the Librarian says, padding in.
"I need blueprints of the aircraft carrier Enterprise. Fast. If you can get me something in 3-D, that'd be great."
"Yes, sir," the Librarian says.
Hiro reaches out and grabs Earth.
"YOU ARE HERE," he says.
Earth spins around until he's staring straight down at the Raft. Then it plunges toward him at a terrifying rate. It takes all of three seconds for him to get there.
If he were in some normal, stable part of the world like lower Manhattan, this would actually work in 3-D. Instead, he's got to put up with two-dimensional satellite imagery. He is looking at a red dot superimposed on a black-and-white photograph of the Raft. The red dot is in the middle of a narrow black channel of water: YOU ARE HERE.
It's still an incredible maze. But it's a lot easier to solve a maze when you're looking down on it. Within about sixty seconds, he's out in the open Pacific. It's a foggy gray dawn. The plume of steam coming out of Reason's heat exchanger just thickens it a little.
"Where the hell are you?" Y.T. says.
"Leaving the Raft."
"Gee, thanks for all your help."
"I'll be back in a minute. I just need a second to get myself organized."
"There's a lot of scary guys around here," Y.T. says. "They're watching me."
"It's okay," Hiro says. "I'm sure they'll listen to Reason."
He flips open the big suitcase. The screen is still on, showing him a flat desktop display with a menu bar at the top. He uses a trackball to pull down a menu
HELP Getting ready Firing Reason Tactical tips Maintenance Resupply Troubleshooting Miscellaneous
Under the "Getting ready" heading is more information than he could possibly want on that subject, including half an hour of badly overexposed video starring a stocky, scar-faced Asian guy whose face seems paralyzed into a permanent look of disdain. He puts on his clothes. He limbers up with special stretching exercises. He opens up Reason. He checks the barrels for damage or dirt. Hiro fast-forwards through all of this.
Finally the stocky Asian man puts on the gun.
Fisheye wasn't really using Reason the right way; it comes with its own mount that straps to your body so that you can soak up the recoil with your pelvis, taking the force right in your body's center of gravity. The mount has shock absorbers and miniature hydraulic goodies to compensate for the weight and the recoil. If you put all this stuff on the right way, the gun's a lot easier to use accurately. And if you're goggled into a computer, it'll superimpose a handy cross hairs over whatever the gun's aimed at.
"Your information, sir," the Librarian says.
"Are you smart enough to tie that information into YOU ARE HERE?" Hiro says.
"I'll see what I can do, sir. The formats appear to be reconcilable. Sir?"
"Yes?"
"These blueprints are several years old. Since they were made, the Enterprise has been purchased by a private owner -- "
"Who may have made some changes. Gotcha."
Hiro's back in Reality.
He finds an open boulevard of water that leads inward to the Core. It has a sort of pedestrian catwalk running along one side of it, pieced together haphazardly, a seemingly endless procession of gangplanks, pontoons, logs, abandoned skiffs, aluminum canoes, oil drums. Anywhere else in the world, it would be an obstacle course; here in the Fifth World, it's a superhighway.
Hiro takes the boat straight down the middle, not very fast. If he runs into something, the boat might flip. Reason will sink. And Hiro's strapped onto Reason.
Flipping into gargoyle mode, he can clearly make out a sparse picket line of hemispherical domes running along the edge of the Enterprise's flight deck. The radar gear thoughtfully identifies these, onscreen, as the radar antennas of Phalanx antimissile guns. Underneath each dome, a multibarreled gun protrudes.
He slows to a near stop and waves the barrel of Reason back and forth for a while until a cross hairs whips across his field of vision. That's the aiming point. He gets it settled down in the middle, right on one of those Phalanx guns, and perks the trigger for half a second.
The big dome turns into a fountain of jagged, flaky debris. Underneath it, the gun barrels are still visible, speckled with a few red marks; Hiro lowers the cross hairs a tad and fires another fifty-round burst that cuts the gun loose from its mount. Then its ammunition belt starts to burst sporadically, and Hiro has to look away.
He looks at the next Phalanx gun and finds himself staring straight down its barrels. That's so scary he jerks the trigger involuntarily and fires a long burst that appears to do nothing at all. Then his view is obscured by something close up; the recoil has pushed him back behind a decrepit yacht tied up along the side of the channel.
He knows what's going to happen next -- the steam makes him easy to find -- so he whips out of there. A second later, the yacht gets simply forced under the water by a burst from the big gun.
Hiro runs for a few seconds, finds a pontoon where he can steady himself and opens up again with a long burst; when he's finished, the edge of the Enterprise has a jagged semicircular bite taken out of it where the Phalanx gun used to be.
He takes to the main channel again and follows it inward until it terminates beneath one of the Core ships, a containership converted into a high-rise apartment complex. A cargo net serves as a ramp from one to the other. It probably serves as a drawbridge also, when undesirables try to clamber up out of the ghetto. Hiro is about as undesirable as anyone can be on the Raft, but they leave the cargo net there for him.
That's quite all right. He's staying on the little boat for now. He buzzes down the side of the containership, makes a U-turn around its prow.
The next vessel is a big oil tanker, mostly empty and riding high in the water. Looking up the sheer steel canyon separating the two ships, he sees no handy cargo nets stretched between them. They don't want thieves or terrorists to come up onto the tanker and drill for oil.
The next ship is the Enterprise.
The two giant vessels, the tanker and the aircraft carrier, ride parallel, anywhere from ten to fifty feet apart, joined by a number of gigantic cables and held apart by huge airbags, like they squished a few blimps between them to keep them from rubbing. The heavy cables aren't just lashed from one ship to another, they've done something clever with weights and pulleys, he suspects, to allow for some slack when rough seas pull the ships opposite ways.
Hiro rides his own little airbag in between them. This gray steel tunnel is quiet and isolated compared to the Raft; except for him, no one has any reason to be here. For a minute, he just wants to sit there and relax.
Which is not too likely, when you think about it. "YOU ARE HERE," he says. His view of the Enterprise's hull -- a gently curved expanse of gray steel -- turns into a three-dimensional wire frame drawing, showing him all the guts of the ship on the other side.
Down here along the waterline, the Enterprise has a belt of thick antitorpedo armor. It's not too promising. Farther up, the armor is thinner, and there's good stuff on the other side of it, actual rooms instead of fuel tanks or ammunition holds.
Hiro chooses a room marked WARDROOM and opens fire. The hull of the Enterprise is surprisingly tough. Reason doesn't just blow a crater straight through; it takes a few moments for the burst to penetrate. And then all it does is make a hole about six inches across. The recoil pushes Hiro back against the rusted hull of the oil tanker.
He can't take the gun with him anyway. He holds the trigger down and just tries to keep it aimed in a consistent direction until all the ammunition is gone. Then he unstraps it from his body and dumps the whole thing overboard. It'll go to the bottom and mark its position with a column of steam; later, Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong can dispatch one of its environmental direct-action posses to pick it up. Then they can haul Hiro before the Tribunal of Environmental Crimes, if they want to. Right now he doesn't care.
It takes half a dozen tries to secure the grappling hook in the jagged hole, twenty feet above the waterline.
As he's wriggling through the hole, his coverall makes popping and hissing noises as the hot, sharp metal melts and tears through the synthetic material. He ends up leaving scraps of it behind, welded to the hull. He's got a few first- and second-degree burns on the parts of his skin that are now exposed, but they don't really hurt yet. That's how wound up he is. Later, they'll hurt. The soles of his shoes melt and sizzle as he treads on glowing hunks of shrapnel. The room is rather smoky, but aircraft carriers are nothing if not fire conscious, and not too much in this place is flammable. Hiro just walks through the smoke to the door, which has been carved into a steel doily by Reason. He kicks it out of its frame and enters a place that, in the blueprints, is simply marked PASSAGEWAY. Then, because this seems as good a time as any, he draws his katana.