Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

  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.

  25

  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 corner 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: EL VIS 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 do
nation,” 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.

  26

  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 tête-à-têtes 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?”