Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

  The L.A. River was a natural site. And there were plenty of nice overpasses. All they had to do was follow skateboarders to the secret places they had long since discovered. Thrashers and nuclear fuzz-grunge collectives thrive in the same environment. That's where Vitaly and Hiro are going right now.

  Vitaly has a really old VW Vanagon, the kind with a pop-top that turns it into a makeshift camper. He used to live in it, staying on the street or in various Snooze 'n' Cruise franchises, until he met up with Hiro Protagonist. Now, the ownership of the Vanagon is subject to dispute, because Vitaly owes Hiro more money than it is technically worth. So they share it.

  They drive the Vanagon around to the other side of the U-Stor-It, honking the horn and flashing the lights in order to shoo a hundred little kids away from the loading dock. It's not a playground, kids.

  They pick their way down a broad corridor, excusing themselves every inch of the way as they step over little Mayan encampments and Buddhist shrines and white trash stoned on Vertigo, Apple Pie, Fuzzy Buzzy, Narthex, Mustard, and the like. The floor needs sweeping: used syringes, crack vials, charred spoons, pipe stems. There are also many little tubes, about thumb sized, transparent plastic with a red cap on one end. They might be crack vials, but the caps are still on them, and pipeheads wouldn't be so fastidious as to replace the lid on an empty vial. It must be something new Hiro hasn't heard of before, the McDonald's styrofoam burger box of drug containers.

  They push through a fire door into another section of the U-Stor-It, which looks the same as the last one (everything looks the same in America, there are no transitions now). Vitaly owns the third locker on the right, a puny 5-by-10 that he is actually using for its intended purpose: storage.

  Vitaly steps up to the door and commences trying to remember the combination to the padlock, which involves a certain amount of random guessing. Finally, the lock snaps and pops open. Vitaly shoots the bolt and swings the door open, sweeping a clean half-circle through the drug paraphernalia. Most of the 5-by-10 is occupied by a couple of large four-wheeled flatbed handcarts piled high with speakers and amps.

  Hiro and Vitaly wheel the carts down to the loading dock, put the stuff into the Vanagon, and then return the empty carts to the 5-by-10. Technically, the carts are community property, but no one believes that.

  The drive to the scene of the concert is long, made longer by the fact that Vitaly, rejecting the technocentric L.A. view of the universe in which Speed is God, likes to stay on the surface and drive at about thirty-five miles per hour. Traffic is not great, either. So Hiro jacks his computer into the cigarette lighter and goggles into the Metaverse.

  He is no longer connected to the network by a fiberoptic cable, and so all his communication with the outside world has to take place via radio waves, which are much slower and less reliable. Going into The Black Sun would not be practical—it would look and sound terrible, and the other patrons would look at him as if he were some kind of black-and-white person. But there's no problem with going into his office, because that's generated within the guts of his computer, which is sitting on his lap; he doesn't need any communication with the outside world for that.

  He materializes in his office, in his nice little house in the old hacker neighborhood just off the Street. It is all quite Nipponese: tatami mats cover the floor. His desk is a great, ruddy slab of rough-sawn mahogany. Silvery cloud-light filters through ricepaper walls. A panel in front of him slides open to reveal a garden, complete with babbling brook and steelhead trout jumping out from time to time to grab flies. Technically speaking, the pond should be full of carp, but Hiro is American enough to think of carp as inedible dinosaurs that sit on the bottom and eat sewage.

  There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it. It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns—all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.

  Hiro has been thinking that in a few years, if he does really well in the intel biz, maybe he will make enough money to subscribe to Earth and get this thing in his office. Now it is suddenly here, free of charge. The only explanation he can come up with is that Juanita must have given it to him.

  But first things first. The Babel/Infocalypse card is still in his avatar's pocket. He takes it out.

  One of the rice-paper panels that make up the walls of his office slides open. On the other side of it, Hiro can see a large, dimly lit room that wasn't there before; apparently Juanita came in and made a major addition to his house as well. A man walks into the office.

  The Librarian daemon looks like a pleasant, fiftyish, silver-haired, bearded man with bright blue eyes, wearing a V-neck sweater over a work shirt, with a coarsely woven, tweedy-looking wool tie. The tie is loosened, the sleeves pushed up. Even though he's just a piece of software, he has reason to be cheerful; he can move through the nearly infinite stacks of information in the Library with the agility of a spider dancing across a vast web of cross-references. The Librarian is the only piece of CIC software that costs even more than Earth; the only thing he can't do is think.

  “Yes, sir,” the Librarian says. He is eager without being obnoxiously chipper; he clasps his hands behind his back, rocks forward slightly on the balls of his feet, raises his eyebrows expectantly over his half-glasses.

  “Babel's a city in Babylon, right?”

  “It was a legendary city,” the Librarian says. “Babel is a Biblical term for Babylon. The word is Semitic; Bab means gate and El means God, so Babel means ‘Gate of God.' But it is probably also somewhat onomatopoeic, imitating someone who speaks in an incomprehensible tongue. The Bible is full of puns.”

  “They built a tower to Heaven and God knocked it down.”

  “This is an anthology of common misconceptions. God did not do anything to the Tower itself. ‘And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.” So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth.' Genesis 11:6–9, Revised Standard Version.”

  “So the tower wasn't knocked down. It just went on hiatus.”

  “Correct. It was not knocked down.”

  “But that's bogus.”

  “Bogus?”

  “Provably false. Juanita believes that nothing is provably true or provably false in the Bible. Because of it's provably false, then the Bible is a lie, and if it's provably true, then the existence of God is proven and there's no room for faith. The Babel story is provably false, because if they built a tower to Heaven and God didn't knock it down, then it would still be around somewhere, or at least a visible remnant of it.”

  “In assuming that it was very tall, you are relying on an obsolete reading. The tower is described, literally, as ‘its top with the heavens.' For many centuries, this was interpreted to mean that its top was so high that it was in the heavens. But in the last century or so, as actual Babylonian ziggurats have been excavated, astrological diagrams—pictures of the heavens—have been found inscribed into their tops.”

  “Oh. Okay, so the real story is that a tower was built with heavenly diagrams carved into its top. Which is far more plausible than a tower that reaches to the heavens.”

  “More than plausible,” the Librarian reminds him. “Such structures have actually been found.”

  “Anyway, you're saying that when God got angry and came down on them, the tower itself wasn't affected. But they had to stop building the tower because of an informational dis
aster—they couldn't talk to each other.”

  “‘Disaster' is an astrological term meaning ‘bad star,' ” the Librarian points out. “Sorry—but due to my internal structure, I'm a sucker for non sequiturs.”

  “That's okay, really,” Hiro says. “You're a pretty decent piece of ware. Who wrote you, anyway?”

  “For the most part I write myself,” the Librarian says. “That is, I have the innate ability to learn from experience. But this ability was originally coded into me by my creator.”

  “Who wrote you? Maybe I know him,” Hiro says. “I know a lot of hackers.”

  “I was not coded by a professional hacker, per se, but by a researcher at the Library of Congress who taught himself how to code,” the Librarian says. “He devoted himself to the common problem of sifting through vast amounts of irrelevant detail in order to find significant gems of information. His name was Dr. Emanuel Lagos.”

  “I've heard the name,” Hiro says. “So he was kind of a meta-librarian. That's funny, I guessed he was one of those old CIA spooks who hangs around in the CIC.”

  “He never worked with the CIA.”

  “Okay. Let's get some work done. Look up every piece of free information in the Library that contains L. Bob Rife and arrange it in chronological order. The emphasis here is on free.”

  “Television and newspapers, yes, sir. One moment, sir,” the Librarian says. He turns around and exits on crepe soles. Hiro turns his attention to Earth.

  The level of detail is fantastic. The resolution, the clarity, just the look of it, tells Hiro, or anyone else who knows computers, that this piece of software is some heavy shit.

  It's not just continents and oceans. It looks exactly like the earth would look from a point in geosynchronous orbit directly above L.A., complete with weather systems—vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering just above the surface of the globe, casting gray shadows on the oceans—and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea. Half of the globe is illuminated by sunlight, and half is dark. The terminator—the line between night and day—has just swept across L.A. and is now creeping across the Pacific, off to the west.

  Everything is going in slow motion. Hiro can see the clouds change shape if he watches them long enough. Looks like a clear night on the East Coast.

  Something catches his attention, moving rapidly over the surface of the globe. He thinks it must be a gnat. But there are no gnats in the Metaverse. He tries to focus on it. The computer, bouncing low-powered lasers off his cornea, senses this change in emphasis, and then Hiro gasps as he seems to plunge downward toward the globe, like a space-walking astronaut who has just fallen out of his orbital groove. When he finally gets it under control, he's just a few hundred miles above the earth, looking down at a solid bank of clouds, and he can see the gnat gliding along below him. It's a low-flying CIC satellite, swinging north to south in a polar orbit.

  “Your information, sir,” the Librarian says.

  Hiro startles and glances up. Earth swings down and out of his field of view and there is the Librarian, standing in front of the desk, holding out a hypercard. Like any librarian in Reality, this daemon can move around without audible footfalls.

  “Can you make a little more noise when you walk? I'm easily startled,” Hiro says.

  “It is done, sir. My apologies.”

  Hiro reaches out for the hypercard. The Librarian takes half a step forward and leans toward him. This time, his foot makes a soft noise on the tatami mat, and Hiro can hear the white noise of his trousers sliding over his leg.

  Hiro takes the hypercard and looks at it. The front is labeled

  He flips the card over. The back is divided into several dozen fingernail-sized icons. Some of them are little snapshots of the front pages of newspapers. Many of them are colorful, glowing rectangles: miniature television screens showing live video.

  “That's impossible,” Hiro says. “I'm sitting in a VW van, okay? I'm jacked in over a cellular link. You couldn't have moved that much video into my system that fast.”

  “It was not necessary to move anything,” the Librarian says. “All existing video on L. Bob Rife was collected by Dr. Lagos and placed in the Babel/Infocalypse stack, which you have in your system.”

  “Oh.”

  14

  Hiro stares at the miniature TV in the upper left corner of the card. It zooms toward him until it's about the size of a twelve-inch low-def television set at arms' length. Then the video image begins to play. It's very poor eight-millimeter film footage of a high school football game in the sixties. No soundtrack.

  “What is this game?”

  The Librarian says, “Odessa, Texas, 1965. L. Bob Rife is a fullback, number eight in the dark uniform.”

  “This is more detail than I need. Can you summarize some of these things?”

  “No. But I can list the contents briefly. The stack contains eleven high school football games. Rife was on the second-string Texas all-state team in his senior year. Then he proceeded to Rice on an academic scholarship and walked onto the football team, so there are also fourteen tapes of college games. Rife majored in communications.”

  “Logically enough, considering what he became.”

  “He became a television sports reporter in the Houston market, so there are fifty hours of footage from this period—mostly outtakes, of course. After two years in this line of work, Rife went into business with his great-uncle, a financier with roots in the oil business. The stack contains a few newspaper stories to that effect, which, as I note from reading them, are all textually related—implying that they came from the same source.”

  “A press release.”

  “Then there are no stories for five years.”

  “He was up to something.”

  “Then we begin to see more stories, mostly from the Religion sections of Houston newspapers, detailing Rife's contributions to various organizations.”

  “That sounded like summary to me. I thought you couldn't summarize.”

  “I can't really. I was quoting a summary that Dr. Lagos made to Juanita Marquez recently, in my presence, when they were reviewing the same data.”

  “Go on.”

  “Rife contributed $500 to the Highlands Church of the Baptism by Fire, Reverend Wayne Bedford, head minister; $2,500 to the Pentecostal Youth League of Bayside, Reverend Wayne Bedford, president: $150,000 to the Pentecostal Church of the New Trinity, Reverend Wayne Bedford, founder and patriarch; $2.3 million to Rife Bible College, Reverend Wayne Bedford, President and chairman of the theology department; $20 million to the archaeology department of Rife Bible College, plus $45 million to the astronomy department and $100 million to the computer science department.”

  “Did these donations take place before hyperinflation?”

  “Yes, sir. They were, as the expression goes, real money.”

  “That Wayne Bedford guy—is this the same Reverend Wayne who runs the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates?”

  “The same.”

  “Are you telling me that Rife owns the Reverend Wayne?”

  “He owns a majority share in Pearigate Associates, which is the multinational that runs the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates chain.”

  “Okay, let's keep sifting through this,” Hiro says.

  Hiro peeps out over his goggles to confirm that Vitaly is still nowhere near the concert. Then he dives back in and continues to go over the video and the news stories that Lagos has compiled.

  During the same years that Rife makes his contributions to the Reverend Wayne, he's showing up with increasing frequency in the business section, first in the local papers and later in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. There is a big flurry of publicity—obvious PR plants—after the Nipponese tried to use their old-boy network to shut him out of the telecommunications market there, and he took it to the American public, spending $10 million of his own money on a campaign to convince Americans that the Nipponese were duplicitous schemers. A triumphal cover on The Econom
ist after the Nipponese finally knuckled under and let him corner the fiber-optics market in that country and, by extension, most of East Asia.

  Finally, then, the lifestyle pieces start coming in. L. Bob Rife has let his publicist know that he wants to show a more human side. There is a personality journalism program that does a puff piece on Rife after he buys a new yacht, surplus, from the U.S. Government.

  L. Bob Rife, last of the nineteenth-century monopolists, is shown consulting with his decorator in the captain's quarters. It looks nice as it is, considering that Rife bought this ship from the Navy, but it's not Texan enough for him. He wants it gutted and rebuilt. Then, shots of Rife maneuvering his steerlike body through the narrow passages and steep staircase of the ship's interior—typical boring gray steel Navy scape, which, he assures the interviewer, he is going to have spruced up considerably.

  “Y'know, there's a story that when Rockefeller bought himself a yacht, he bought a pretty small one, like a seventy-footer or something. Small by the standards of the day. And when someone asked him why he went and bought himself such a dinky little yacht, he just looked at the guy and said, ‘What do you think I am, a Vanderbilt?' Haw! Well, anyway, welcome aboard my yacht.”

  L. Bob Rife says this while standing on a huge openair platform elevator along with the interviewer and the whole camera crew. The elevator is going up. In the background is the Pacific Ocean. As Rife is speaking the last part of the line, suddenly the elevator rises up to the top and the camera turns around, and we are looking out across the deck of the aircraft carrier Enterprise, formerly of the U.S. Navy, now the personal yacht of L. Bob Rife, who beat out both General Jim's Defense System and Admiral Bob's Global Security in a furious bidding war. L. Bob Rife proceeds to admire the vast, flat open spaces of the carrier's flight deck, likening it to certain parts of Texas. He suggests that it would be amusing to cover part of it with dirt and raise cattle there.

  Another profile, this one shot for a business network, apparently made somewhat later: Back on the Enterprise, where the captain's office has been massively reworked. L. Bob Rife, Lord of Bandwidth, is sitting behind his desk, having his mustache waxed. Not in the sense that women have their legs waxed. He's having the curl smoothed out and restored. The waxer is a very short Asian woman who does it so delicately that it doesn't even interfere with his talking, mostly about his efforts to extend his cable TV network throughout Korea and into China and link it up with his big fiber-optic trunk line that runs across Siberia and over the Urals.