Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

  She asked him again later, as they were wandering around looking for their room, and he told her: These guys all work for L. Bob Rife. Programmers and engineers and communications people. Rife's an important man. Got a monopoly to run.

  “Rife's here?” she asked him. Putting on an act, of course; she had it figured out by that point.

  “Ssh,” he said.

  It's a nice piece of intel. Hiro should like it, if she can just get it to him. And even that's going to be easy. She never thought there'd be Metaverse terminals here on the Raft, but on this ship there's a whole row of them, so that visiting suits can call back to civilization. All she has to do is get to one without waking up Raven. Which could be tricky. It's too bad she couldn't drug him with something, like in the Raft movies.

  That's when the realization comes. It swims up out of her subconscious in the same way that a nightmare does. Or when you leave the house and remember half an hour later that you left a teakettle going on the stove. It's a cold clammy reality that she can't do a damn thing about.

  She has finally remembered what that nagging thing was that bothered her for a moment, right before the actual moment of fucking.

  It was not birth control. It was not a hygiene thing.

  It was her dentata. The last line of personal self-defense. Along with Uncle Enzo's dog tags, the one piece of stuff that the Orthos didn't take. They didn't take it because they don't believe in cavity searches.

  Which means that at the moment Raven entered her, a very small hypodermic needle slipped imperceptibly into the engorged frontal vein of his penis, automatically shooting a cocktail of powerful narcotics and depressants into his bloodstream.

  Raven's been harpooned in the place where he least expected it. Now he's going to sleep for at least four hours.

  And then, boy, is he ever going to be pissed.

  53

  Hiro remembers Eliot's warning: Don't go onto the Raft itself without a local guide. This kid must be a Refu that Bruce Lee recruited from some Filipino neighborhood on the Raft.

  The kid's name is Transubstanciacion. Tranny for short. He climbs into the zodiac before Hiro tells him to.

  “Wait a sec,” Hiro says. “We have to do some packing first.”

  Hiro risks turning on a small flashlight, uses it to-rummage around the yacht, picking up valuable stuff: a few bottles of (presumably) drinkable water, some food, extra ammunition for his nine. He takes one of the grappling hooks, too, coiling its rope neatly. Seems like the kind of thing that might be useful on the Raft.

  He has one other chore to take care of, not something he's looking forward to.

  Hiro has lived in a lot of places where mice and even rats were a problem. He used to get rid of them using traps. But then he had a run of bad luck with the things. He would hear a trap snap shut in the middle of the night, and then instead of silence he would hear pitiable squeaking and thrashing, whacking noises as the stricken rodent tried to drag itself back to safety with a trap snapped over some part of its anatomy, usually its head. When you have gotten up at three in the morning to find a live mouse on your kitchen counter leaving a contrail of brain tissue across the formica, it is hard to get back to sleep, and so he prefers to set out poison now.

  Somewhat in the same vein, a severely wounded man—the last man Hiro shot—is thrashing around on the deck of the yacht, up near the bow, babbling.

  More than anything he has ever wanted to do, Hiro wants to get into the zodiac and get away from this person. He knows that in order to go up and help him, or put him out of his misery, he's going to have to shine the flashlight on him, and when he does that he's going to see something he'll never be able to forget.

  But he has to do it. He swallows a couple of times because he's already gagging and follows his flashlight beam up to the bow.

  It's much worse than he had expected.

  This man apparently took a bullet somewhere around the bridge of his nose, aimed upward. Everything above that point has been pretty much blown off. Hiro's looking into a cross-section of his lower brain.

  Something is sticking up out of his head. Hiro figures it must be fragments of skull or something. But it's too smooth and regular for that.

  Now that he's gotten over his initial nausea, he's finding this easier to look at. It helps to know that the guy is out of his misery. More than half of his brain is gone. He's still talking—his voice sounds whistly and gaseous, like a pipe organ gone bad, because of the changes in his skull—but it's just a brainstem function, just a twitch in the vocal cords.

  The thing sticking up out of his head is a whip antenna about a foot long. It is encased in black rubber, like the antennas on cop walkie-talkies, and it is strapped onto his head, above the left ear. This is one of the antenna-heads that Eliot warned them about.

  Hiro grabs the antenna and pulls. He might as well take the headset with him—it must have something to do with the way L. Bob Rife controls the Raft.

  It doesn't come off. When Hiro pulls, what's left of the guy's head twists around, but the antenna doesn't come loose. And that's how Hiro figures out that this isn't a headset at all. The antenna has been permanently grafted onto the base of the man's skull.

  Hiro switches his goggles into millimeter-wave radar and stares into the man's ruined head.

  The antenna is attached to the skull by means of short screws that go into the bone, but do not pierce all the way through. The base of the antenna contains a few microchips, whose purpose Hiro cannot divine by looking at them. But nowadays you can put a supercomputer on a single chip, so anytime you see more than one chip together in one place, you're looking at significant ware.

  A single hair-thin wire emerges from the base of the antenna and penetrates the skull. It passes straight through to the brainstem and then branches and re-branches into a network of invisibly tiny wires embedded in the brain tissue. Coiled around the base of the tree.

  Which explains why this guy continues to pump out a steady stream of Raft babble even when his brain is missing: It looks like L. Bob Rife has figured out a way to make electrical contact with the part of the brain where Asherah lives. These words aren't originating here. It's a pentecostal radio broadcast coming through on his antenna.

  Reason is still up top, its monitor screen radiating blue static toward heaven. Hiro finds the hard power switch and turns it off. Computers this powerful are supposed to shut themselves down, after you've asked them to. Turning one off with the hard switch is like lulling someone to sleep by severing their spinal column. But when the system has snow-crashed, it loses even the ability to turn itself off, and primitive methods are required. Hiro packs the Gatling gun assembly back into the case and latches it shut.

  Maybe it's not as heavy as he thought, or maybe he's on adrenaline overdrive. Then he realizes why it seems so much lighter: most of its weight was ammunition, and Fisheye used up quite a bit. He half-carries, half-drags it back to the stern, making sure the heat exchanger stays in the water, and somersaults it into the zodiac.

  Hiro climbs in after it, joining Tranny, and starts attending to the motor.

  “No motor,” Tranny says. “It snag bad.”

  Right. The spiderweb would get wrapped around the propeller. Tranny shows Hiro how to snap the zodiac's oars into the oarlocks.

  Hiro rows for a while and finds himself in a long clear zone that zigzags its way through the Raft, like a lead of clear water between ice floes in the Arctic.

  “Motor okay,” Tranny says.

  He drops the motor into the water. Tranny pumps up the fuel line and starts it up. It starts on the first pull; Bruce Lee ran a tight ship.

  As Hiro begins to motor down the open space, he is afraid that it is just a little cove in the ghetto. But this is just a trick of the lights. He rounds a corner and finds it stretching out for some distance. It is a sort of beltway that runs all the way around the Raft. Small streets and even smaller alleys lead from this beltway into the various ghettos. Through the scope
, Hiro can see that their entrances are guarded. Anyone's free to cruise around the beltway, but people are more protective of their neighborhoods.

  The worst thing that can happen on the Raft is for your neighborhood to get cut loose. That's why the Raft is such a tangled mess. Each neighborhood is afraid that the neighboring 'hoods are going to gang up on them, cut them loose, leave them to starve in the middle of the Pacific. So they are constantly finding new ways to tie themselves into each other, running cables over, under, and around their neighbors, tying into more far-flung 'hoods, or preferably into one of the Core ships.

  The neighborhood guards are armed, needless to say. Looks like the weapon of choice is a small Chinese knock-off of the AK-47. Its metal frame jumps out pretty clearly on radar. The Chinese government must have stamped out an unimaginable number of these things, back in the days when they spent a lot of time thinking about the possibility of fighting a land war with the Soviets.

  Most of them just look like indolent Third World militia the world over. But at the entrance to one neighborhood, Hiro sees that the guard in charge has a whip antenna sticking straight up in the air, sprouting from his head.

  A few minutes later, they get to a point where the beltway is intersected by a broad street that runs straight into the middle of the Raft, where the big ships are—the Core. The closest one is a Nipponese containership—a low, flat-decked number with a high bridge, stacked with steel shipping containers. It's webbed over with rope ladders and makeshift stairways that enable people to climb up into this container or that. Many of the containers have lights burning in them.

  “Apartment building,” Tranny jokes, noting Hiro's interest. Then he shakes his head and rolls his eyes and rubs his thumb against his fingertips. Apparently, this is quite the swell neighborhood.

  The nice part of the cruise comes to an end when they notice several fast skiffs emerging from a dark and smoky neighborhood.

  “Vietnam gang,” Tranny says. He puts his hand on Hiro's and gently but firmly removes it from the outboard motor's throttle. Hiro checks them out on radar. A couple of these guys have the little AK-47s, but most of them are armed with knives and pistols, obviously looking forward to some close-up, face-to-face contact. These guys in the boats are, of course, the peons. More important-looking gents stand along the edge of the neighborhood, smoking and watching. A couple of them are wireheads.

  Tranny revs it up, turns into a sparse neighborhood of loosely connected Arabian dhows, and maneuvers through the darkness for a while, occasionally putting his hand on Hiro's head and gently pressing it down so he doesn't catch a rope with his neck.

  When they emerge from the fleet of dhows, the Vietnamese gang is no longer in evidence. If this happened in daylight, the gangsters could track them by following Reason's steam. Tranny steers them across a medium-sized street and into a cluster of fishing boats. In the middle of this area an old trawler sits, being cut up for scrap, cutting torches illuminating the black surface of the water all around. But most of the work is being done with hammers and cold chisels, which radiate appalling noise across the flat echoing water.

  “Home,” Tranny says, smiling, and points to a couple of houseboats lashed together. Lights are still burning here, a couple of guys are out on the deck smoking fat, makeshift cigars, through the windows they can see a couple of women working in the kitchen.

  As they approach, the guys on the deck sit up, take notice, draw revolvers out of their waistbands. But then Tranny speaks up in a happy stream of Tagalog. And everything changes.

  Tranny gets the full Prodigal Son welcome: crying, hysterical fat ladies, a swarm of little kids piling out of their hammocks, sucking their thumbs and jumping up and down. Older men beaming, showing great gaps and black splotches in their smiles, watching and nodding and diving in to give him the occasional hug.

  And on the edge of the mob, way back in the darkness, is another wirehead.

  “You come in, too,” says one of the women, a lady in her forties named Eunice.

  “That's okay,” Hiro says. “I won't intrude.”

  This statement is translated and moves like a wave through the some eight hundred and ninety-six Filipinos who have now converged on the area. It is greeted with the utmost shock. Intrude? Unthinkable! Nonsense! How dare you so insult us?

  One of the gap-toothed guys, a miniature old man and probable World War II veteran, jumps onto the rocking zodiac, sticks to the floor like a gecko, wraps his arm around Hiro's shoulders, and pokes a spliff into his mouth.

  He looks like a solid guy. Hiro leans into him. “Compadre, who is the guy with the antenna? A friend of yours?”

  “Nah,” the guy whispers, “he's an asshole.” Then he puts his index finger dramatically to his lips and shushes.

  54

  It's all in the eyes. Along with picking handcuffs, vaulting Jersey barriers, and fending off perverts, it is one of the quintessential Kourier skills: walking around in a place where you don't belong without attracting suspicion. And you do it by not looking at anyone. Keep those eyes straight ahead no matter what, don't open them too wide, don't look tense. That, and the fact that she just came in here with a guy that everyone is scared of, gets her back through the containership to the reception area.

  “I need to use a Street terminal,” she says to the reception guy. “Can you charge it to my room?”

  “Yes, ma'am,” the reception guy says. He doesn't have to ask which room she's in. He's all smiles, all respect. Not the kind of thing you get very often when you're a Kourier.

  She could really get to like this relationship with Raven, if it weren't for the fact that he's a homicidal mutant.

  55

  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.”