Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

  Hiro had a pretty good motorcycle. He probably could have had the best one on the Street, simply because his reflexes are unearthly. But he was more preoccupied with sword fighting than motorcycle riding.

  He opens up the most recent version of his motorcycle software, gets familiar with the controls again. He ascends from Flatland into the three-dimensional Metaverse and practices riding his bike around his yard for a while. Beyond the boundaries of his yard is nothing but blackness, because he's not jacked into the net. It is a lost, desolate sensation, kind of like floating on a life raft in the Pacific Ocean.

  49

  Sometimes they see boats in the distance. A couple of these even swing close by to check them out, but none of them seems to be in that rescuing mood. There are few altruists in the vicinity of the Raft, and it must be evident that they don't have much to steal.

  From time to time, they see an old deep-water fishing boat, fifty to a hundred feet long, with half a dozen or so small fast boats clustered around it.

  When Eliot informs them that these are pirate vessels, Vic and Fisheye prick up their ears. Vic unwraps his rifle from the collection of Hefty bags that he uses to protect it from the salt spray, and detaches the bulky sight so that they can use it as a spyglass. Hiro can't see any reason to pull the sight off the rifle in order to do this, other than the fact that if you don't, it looks like you're drawing a bead on whatever you're looking at.

  Whenever a pirate vessel comes into view, they all take turns looking at it through the sight, playing with all the different sensor modes: visible, infrared, and so on. Eliot has spent enough time knocking around the Rim that he has become familiar with the colors of the different pirate groups, so by examining them through the sight he can tell who they are: Clint Eastwood and his band parallel them for a few minutes one day, checking them out, and the Magnificent Seven send out one of their small boats to zoom by them and look for potential booty. Hiro's almost hoping they get taken prisoner by the Seven, because they have the nicest-looking pirate ship: a former luxury yacht with Exocet launch tubes kludged to the foredeck. But this reconnaissance leads nowhere. The pirates, unschooled in thermodynamics, do not grasp the implications of the eternal plume of steam coming from beneath the life raft.

  One morning, a big old trawler materializes very close to them, congealing out of nothing as the fog lifts. Hiro has been hearing its engines for a while, but didn't realize how close it was.

  “Who are they?” Fisheye says, choking on a cup of the freeze-dried coffee he despises so much. He's wrapped up in a space blanket and partly snuggled underneath the boat's waterproof canopy, just his face and hands visible.

  Eliot scopes them out with the sight. He is not a real demonstrative guy, but it's clear that he is not very happy with what he sees. “That is Bruce Lee,” he says.

  “How is that significant?” Fisheye says.

  “Well, check out the colors,” Eliot says.

  The ship is close enough that everyone can see the flag pretty clearly. It's a red banner with a silver fist in the middle, a pair of nunchuks crossed beneath it, the initials B and L on either side.

  “What about 'em?” Fisheye says.

  “Well, the guy who calls himself Bruce Lee, who's like the leader? He got a vest with those colors on the back.”

  “So?”

  “So, it's not just embroidered or painted, it's actually done in scalps. Patchwork, like.”

  “Say what?” Hiro says.

  “There's a rumor, just a rumor, man, that he went through the Refu ships looking for people with red or silver hair so he could collect the scalps he needed.”

  Hiro is still absorbing that when Fisheye makes an unexpected decision. “I want to talk to this Bruce Lee character,” he says. “He interests me.”

  “Why the hell do you want to talk to this fucking psycho?” Eliot says.

  “Yeah,” Hiro says. “Didn't you see that series on Eye Spy? He's a maniac.”

  Fisheye throws up his hands as if to say the answer is, like Catholic theology, beyond mortal comprehension. “This is my decision,” he says.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Eliot says.

  “President of the fucking boat,” Fisheye says. “I hereby nominate myself. Is there a second?”

  “Yup,” Vic says, the first time he has spoken in forty-eight hours.

  “All in favor say aye,” Fisheye says.

  “Aye,” Vic says, bursting into florid eloquence.

  “I win,” Fisheye says. “So how do we get these Bruce Lee guys to come over here and talk to us?”

  “Why should they want to?” Eliot says. “We got nothing they want except for poontang.”

  “Are you saying these guys are homos?” Fisheye says, his face shriveling up.

  “Shit, man,” Eliot says, “you didn't even blink when I told you about the scalps.”

  “I knew I didn't like any of this boat shit,” Fisheye says.

  “If this makes any difference to you, they're not gay in the sense that we usually think of it,” Eliot explains. “They're het, but they're pirates. They'll go after anything that's warm and concave.”

  Fisheye makes a snap decision. “Okay, you two guys, Hiro and Eliot, you're Chinese. Take off your clothes.”

  “What?”

  “Do it. I'm the president, remember? You want Vic to do it for you?”

  Eliot and Hiro can't help looking over at Vic, who is just sitting there like a lump. There is something about his extremely blasé attitude that inspires fear.

  “Do it or I'll fucking kill you,” Fisheye says, finally driving the point home.

  Eliot and Hiro, bobbing awkwardly on the unsteady floor of the raft, peel off their survival suits and step out of them. Then they pull off the rest of their clothes, exposing smooth bare skin to the air for the first time in a few days.

  The trawler comes right alongside of them, no more than twenty feet away, and cuts its engines. They are nicely equipped: half a dozen Zodiacs with new outboards, an Exocet-type missile, two radars, and a fifty-caliber machine gun at each end of the boat, currently unmanned. A couple of speedboats are being towed behind the trawler like dinghys and each of these also has a heavy machine gun. And there is also a thirty-six-foot motor yacht, following them under its own power.

  There are a couple of dozen guys in Bruce Lee's pirate band, and they are now lined up along the trawler's railing, grinning, whistling, howling like wolves, and waving unrolled trojans in the air.

  “Don't worry, man, I'm not going to let 'em fuck you,” Fisheye says, grinning.

  “What you gonna do,” Eliot says, “hand them a papal encyclical?”

  “I'm sure they'll listen to reason,” Fisheye says.

  “These guys aren't scared of the Mafia, if that's what you have in mind,” Eliot says.

  “That's just because they don't know us very well.”

  Finally, the leader comes out, Bruce Lee himself, a fortyish guy in a Kevlar vest, an ammo vest stretched over that, a diagonal bandolier, samurai sword—Hiro would love to take him on—nunchuks, and his colors, the patchwork of human scalps.

  He flashes them a nice grin, has a look at Hiro and Eliot, gives them a highly suggestive, thrusting thumbs-up gesture, and then struts up and down the length of the boat one time, swapping high fives with his merry men. Every so often, he picks out one of the pirates at random and gestures at the man's trojan. The pirate puts his condom to his lips and inflates it into a slippery ribbed balloon. Then Bruce Lee inspects it, making sure there are no leaks. Obviously, the man runs a tight ship.

  Hiro can't help staring at the scalps on Bruce Lee's back. The pirates note his interest and mug for him, pointing to the scalps, nodding, looking back at him with wide, mocking eyes. The colors look much too uniform—no change in the red from one to the next. Hiro concludes that Bruce Lee, contrary to his reputation, must have just gone out and gotten scalps of any old color, bleached them, and dyed them. What a wimp.

  Finally,
Bruce Lee works his way back to midship and flashes them another big grin. He has a great, dazzling grin and he knows it; maybe it's those one-karat diamonds Krazy Glued to his front teeth.

  “Jammin' boat,” he says. “Maybe you, me swap, huh? Hahaha.”

  Everyone on the life raft, except for Vic, just smiles a brittle smile.

  “Where you goin'? Key West? Hahaha.”

  Bruce Lee examines Hiro and Eliot for a while, rotates his index finger to indicate that they should spin around and display their business ends. They do.

  “Quanto?” Bruce Lee says, and all the pirates get uproarious, most of all Bruce Lee. Hiro can feel his anal sphincter contracting to the size of a pore.

  “He's asking how much we cost,” Eliot says. “It's a joke, see, because they know they can come over and have our asses for free.”

  “Oh, hilarious!” Fisheye says. While Hiro and Eliot literally freeze their asses, he's still snuggled up under the canopy, that bastard.

  “Poonmissile, like?” Bruce Lee says, pointing to one of the antiship missiles on the deck. “Bugs? Motorolas?”

  “Poonmissile is a Harpoon antiship missile, real expensive,” Eliot says. “A bug is a microchip. Motorola would be one brand, like Ford or Chevy. Bruce Lee deals in a lot of electronics—you know, typical Asian pirate dude.”

  “He'd give us a Harpoon missile for you guys?” Fisheye says.

  “No! He's being sarcastic, shithead!” Eliot says.

  “Tell him we want a boat with an outboard motor,” Fisheye says.

  “Want one zode, one kicker, fillerup,” Eliot says.

  Suddenly Bruce Lee gets real serious and actually considers it. “Scope clause, chomsayen? Gauge and gag.”

  “He'll consider it if they can come and check out the merchandise first,” Eliot says. “They want to check out how tight we are, and whether we are capable of suppressing our gag reflex. These are all terms from the Raft brothel industry.”

  “Ombwas scope like twelves to me, hahaha.”

  “Us homeboys look like we have twelve-gauge assholes,” Eliot says, “i.e., that we are all stretched out and worthless.”

  Fisheye speaks up on his own. “No, no, four-tens, totally!”

  The entire deck of the pirate ship titters with excitement.

  “No way,” Bruce Lee says.

  “These ombwas,” Fisheye says, “still got cherries up in there!”

  The whole deck erupts in rude, screaming laughter. One of the pirates scrambles up to balance on the railing, gyrates one fist in the air, and hollers: “ba ka na zu ma lay ga no ma la aria ma na po no a ab zu . . .” By that point all the other pirates have stopped laughing, gotten serious looks on their faces, and joined in, bellowing their own private streams of babble, rattling the air with a profound hoarse ululation.

  Hiro's feet go out from under him as the raft moves suddenly; he can see Eliot falling down next to him.

  He looks up at Bruce Lee's ship and flinches involuntarily as he sees what looks like a dark wave cresting over the rail, washing over the row of standing pirates, starting at the stern of the trawler and working its way forward. But this is just some kind of optical illusion. It is not really a wave at all. Suddenly, they are fifty feet away from the trawler, not twenty feet. As the laughter on the railing dies away, Hiro hears a new sound: a low whirring noise from the direction of Fisheye, and from the atmosphere around them, a tearing, hissing noise, like the sound just before a thunderbolt strikes, like the sound of sheets being ripped in half.

  Looking back at Bruce Lee's trawler, he sees that the dark wavelike phenomenon was a wave of blood, as though someone hosed down the deck with a giant severed aorta. But it didn't come from outside. It erupted from the pirates' bodies, one at a time, moving from the stern to the bow. The deck of Bruce Lee's ship is now utterly quiet and motionless except for blood and gelatinized internal organs sliding down the rusted steel and plopping softly into the water.

  Fisheye is up on his knees now and has torn away the canopy and space blanket that have covered him until this point. In one hand he is holding a long device a couple of inches in diameter, which is the source of the whirring noise. It is a circular bundle of parallel tubes about pencil-sized and a couple of feet long, like a miniaturized Gatling gun. It whirs around so quickly that the individual tubes are difficult to make out; when it is operating, it is in fact ghostly and transparent because of this rapid motion, a glittering, translucent cloud jutting out of Fisheye's arm. The device is attached to a wrist-thick bundle of black tubes and cables that snake down into the large suitcase, which lies open on the bottom of the raft. The suitcase has a built-in color monitor screen with graphics giving information about the status of this weapons system: how much ammo is left, the status of various subsystems. Hiro just gets a quick glimpse at it before all of the ammunition on board Bruce Lee's ship begins to explode.

  “See, I told you they'd listen to Reason,” Fisheye says, shutting down the whirling gun.

  Now Hiro sees a nameplate tacked onto the control panel.

  “Fucking recoil pushed us halfway to China,” Fisheye says appreciatively.

  “Did you do that? What just happened?” Eliot says.

  “I did it. With Reason. See, it fires these teeny little metal splinters. They go real fast—more energy than a rifle bullet. Depleted uranium.”

  The spinning barrels have now slowed almost to a stop. It looks like there are about two dozen of them.

  “I thought you hated machine guns,” Hiro says.

  “I hate this fucking raft even more. Let's go get ourselves something that goes, you know. Something with a motor on it.”

  Because of the fires and small explosions going off on Bruce Lee's pirate ship, it takes them a minute to realize that several people are still alive there, still shooting at them. When Fisheye becomes aware of this, he pulls the trigger again, the barrels whirl themselves up into a transparent cylinder, and the tearing, hissing noise begins again. As he waves the gun back and forth, hosing the target down with a hypersonic shower of depleted uranium, Bruce Lee's entire ship seems to sparkle and glitter, as though Tinkerbell was flying back and forth from stem to stem, sprinkling nuclear fairy dust over it.

  Bruce Lee's smaller yacht makes the mistake of coming around to see what's going on. Fisheye turns toward it for a moment and its high, protruding bridge slides off into the water.

  Major structural elements of the trawler are losing their integrity. Enormous popping and wrenching noises are coming from inside as big pieces of Swiss-cheesed metal give way, and the superstructure is slowly collapsing down into the hull like a botched soufflé. When Fisheye notes this, he ceases fire.

  “Cut it out, boss,” Vic says.

  “I'm melting!” Fisheye crows.

  “We could have used that trawler, asshole,” Eliot says, vindictively yanking his pants back on.

  “I didn't mean to blow it all up. I guess the little bullets just go through everything.”

  “Sharp thinking, Fisheye,” Hiro says.

  “Well, I'm sorry I took a little action to save our asses. Come on, let's go get one of them little boats before they all burn.”

  They paddle in the direction of the decapitated yacht. By the time they reach it, Bruce Lee's trawler is just a listing, empty steel hull with flames and smoke pouring out of it, spiced by the occasional explosion.

  The remaining portion of the yacht has many, many tiny little holes in it, and glitters with exploded fragments of fiberglass: a million tiny little glass fibers about a millimeter long. The skipper and a crew member, or rather the stew that they turned into when the bridge was hit by Reason, slid off into the water along with the rest of the debris, leaving behind no evidence of their having been there except for a pair of long parallel streaks trailing off into the water. But there is a Filipino boy down in the galley, the galley so low, unhurt and only dimly aware of what happened.

  A number of electrical cables have been sawn in half. Eliot di
gs up a toolbox from belowdecks and spends the next twelve hours patching things together to the point where the engine can be started and the yacht can be steered. Hiro, who has a rudimentary knowledge of electrical stuff, acts as gofer and limp-dicked adviser.

  “Did you hear the way the pirates were talking, before Fisheye opened up on them?” Hiro asks Eliot while they are working.

  “You mean in pidgin?”

  “No. At the very end. The babbling.”

  “Yeah. That's a Raft thing.”

  “It is?”

  “Yeah. One guy will start in and the rest will follow. I think it's just a fad.”

  “But it's common on the Raft?”

  “Yeah. They all speak different languages, you know, all those different ethnic groups. It's like the fucking Tower of Babel. I think when they make that sound—when they babble at each other—they're just imitating what all the other groups sound like.”

  The Filipino kid starts making them some food. Vic and Fisheye sit down in the main cabin belowdecks, eating, going through Chinese magazines, looking at pictures of Asian chicks, and occasionally looking at nautical charts. When Eliot gets the electrical system back up and running, Hiro plugs his personal computer in, to recharge its batteries.

  By the time the yacht is up and running again, it's dark. To the southwest, a fluctuating column of light is playing back and forth against the low overhanging cloud layer.

  “Is that the Raft over there?” Fisheye says, pointing to the light, as all hands converge on Eliot's makeshift control center.

  “It is,” Eliot says. “They light it up at night so that the fishing boats can find their way back to it.”