Snow Crash (14 page)

“I've heard the expression, yes.”

“That's my expression. I made it up. An expression like that is just like a virus, you know—it's a piece of information—data—that spreads from one person to the next. Well, the function of the Raft is to bring more biomass. To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. Leaves behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel. Ever read the story about the labyrinth and the minotaur?”

“Sure. That was on Crete, right?” The journalist only answers out of sarcasm; he can't believe he's here listening to this, he wants to fly back to L.A. yesterday.

“Yeah. Every year, the Greeks had to pony up a few virgins and send them to Crete as tribute. Then the king put them into the labyrinth, and the minotaur ate them up. I used to read that story when I was a kid and wonder who the hell these guys were, on Crete, that everyone else was so scared of them that they would just meekly give up their children to be eaten, every year. They must have been some mean sons of bitches.

“Now I have a different perspective on it. America must look, to those poor little buggers down there, about the same as Crete looked to those poor Greek suckers. Except that there's no coercion involved. Those people down there give up their children willingly. Send them into the labyrinth by the millions to be eaten up. The Industry feeds on them and spits back images, sends out movies and TV programs, over my networks, images of wealth and exotic things beyond their wildest dreams, back to those people, and it gives them something to dream about, something to aspire to. And that is the function of the Raft. It's just a big old krill carrier.”

Finally the journalist gives up on being a journalist, just starts to slag L. Bob Rife openly. He's had it with this guy. “That's disgusting. I can't believe you can think about people that way.”

“Shit, boy, get down off your high horse. Nobody really gets eaten. It's just a figure of speech. They come here, they get decent jobs, find Christ, buy a Weber grill, and live happily ever after. What's wrong with that?”

Rife is pissed. He's yelling. Behind him, the Bangladeshis are picking up on his emotional vibes and becoming upset themselves. Suddenly, one of them, an incredibly gaunt man with a long drooping mustache, runs in front of the camera and begins to shout: “a ma la ge zen ba dam gal nun ka aria su su na an da . . .” The sounds spread from him to his neighbors, spreading across the flight deck like a wave.

“Cut,” the journalist says, turning into the camera. “Just cut. The Babble Brigade has started up again.”

The soundtrack now consists of a thousand people speaking in tongues under the high-pitched, shit-eating chuckles of L. Bob Rife.

“This is the miracle of tongues,” Rife shouts above the tumult. “I can understand every word these people are saying. Can you, brother?”

“Yo! Snap out of it, pod!”

Hiro looks up from the card. No one is in his office except for the Librarian.

The image loses focus and veers upward and out of his field of view. Hiro is looking out the windshield of the Vanagon. Someone has just yanked his goggles off his face—not Vitaly.

“I'm out here, gogglehead!”

Hiro looks out the window. It's Y.T., hanging onto the side of the van with one hand, holding his goggles in the other.

“You spend too much time goggled in,” she says. “Try a little Reality, man.”

“Where we are going,” Hiro says, “we're going to get more Reality than I can handle.”

As Hiro and Vitaly approach the vast freeway overpass where tonight's concert is to take place, the solid ferrous quality of the Vanagon attracts MagnaPoons like a Twinkie draws cockroaches. If they knew that Vitaly Chernobyl himself was in the van, they'd go crazy, they'd stall the van's engine. But right now, they'll poon anything that might be headed toward the concert.

When they get closer to the overpass, it becomes a lost cause trying to drive at all, the thrashers are so thick and numerous. It's like putting on crampons and trying to walk through a room full of puppies. They have to nose their way along, tapping the horn, flashing the lights.

Finally, they get to the flatbed semi that constitutes the stage for tonight's concert. Next to it is another semi, full of amps and other sound gear. The drivers of the trucks, an oppressed minority of two, have retreated into the cab of the sound truck to smoke cigarettes and glare balefully at the swarm of thrashers, their sworn enemies in the food chain of the highways. They will not voluntarily come out until five in the morning, when the way has been made plain.

A couple of the other Meltdowns are standing around smoking cigarettes, holding them between two fingers in the Slavic style, like darts. They stomp the cigarettes out on the concrete with their cheap vinyl shoes, run up to the Vanagon, and begin to haul out the sound equipment. Vitaly puts on goggles, hooks himself into a computer on the sound truck, and begins tuning the system. There's a 3-D model of the overpass already in memory. He has to figure out how to sync the delays on all the different speaker clusters to maximize the number of nasty, clashing echoes.

15

The warm-up band, Blunt Force Trauma, gets rolling at about 9:00
P
.
M
. On the first power chord, a whole stack of cheap preowned speakers shorts out; its wires throw sparks into the air, sending an arc of chaos through the massed skateboarders. The sound truck's electronics isolate the bad circuit and shut it off before anything or anyone gets hurt. Blunt Force Trauma play a kind of speed reggae heavily influenced by the antitechnological ideas of the Meltdowns.

These guys will probably play for an hour, then there will be a couple of hours of Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns to look forward to. And if Sushi K shows up, he's welcome to make a guest appearance at the mike.

Just in case that actually happens, Hiro pulls back from the delirious center of the crowd and begins to orbit back and forth along its fringes. Y.T.'s in there somewhere, but no point in trying to track her down. She would be embarrassed, anyway, to be seen with an oldster like Hiro.

Now that the concert is up and running, it will take care of itself. There's not much more for Hiro to do. Besides, interesting things happen along borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same. There may be something happening along the border of the crowd, back where the lights fade into the shade of the overpass.

The fringe crowd looks pretty typical for the wrong side of an L.A. overpass in the middle of the night. There's a good-sized shantytown of hardcore Third World unemployables, plus a scattering of schizophrenic first worlders who have long ago burned their brains to ash in the radiant heat of their own imaginings. A lot of them have emerged from their overturned dumpsters and refrigerator boxes to stand on tiptoe at the edge of the crowd and peer into the noise and light. Some of them look sleepy and awed, and some—stocky Latino men—look amused by the whole thing, passing cigarettes back and forth and shaking their heads in disbelief.

This is Crips turf. The Crips wanted to provide security, but Hiro, a student of Altamont, decided to take the risk of snubbing them. He hired The Enforcers to do it instead.

So every few dozen feet there's a large man with erect posture wearing an acid green windbreaker with ENFORCER spelled out across the back. Very conspicuous, which is how they like it. But it's all done with electropigment, so if there's trouble, these guys can turn themselves black by flipping a lapel switch. And they can make themselves bulletproof just by zipping the windbreakers up the front. Right now, it's a warm night, and most of them are leaving their uniforms open to the cool breezes. Some of them are just coasting, but most of them are attentive, keeping their eyes on the crowd, not the band.

Seeing all of those soldiers, Hiro looks for the general and soon finds him: a small, stout black guy, a pint-sized weightlifter type. He's wearing the same windbreaker as the others, but there's an additional layer of bulletproof vest underneath, and clipped onto that he's got a nice assortment of communications gear and small, clever devices for hurting people. He's doing a lot of jogging back and forth, swiveling his head from side to side, mumbling quick bursts into his headset like a football coach on the sidelines.

Hiro notices a tall man in his late thirties, distinguished goatee, wearing a very nice charcoal gray suit. Hiro can see the diamonds in his tie pin flashing from a hundred feet away. He knows that if he gets up closer he will be able to see the word “Crips” spelled out in blue sapphires, nestled among those diamonds. He's got his own security detail of half a dozen other guys in suits. Even though they aren't doing security, they couldn't help sending along a token delegation to show the colors.

This is a non sequitur that has been nibbling on the edges of Hiro's mind for the last ten minutes: Laser light has a particular kind of gritty intensity, a molecular purity reflecting its origins. Your eye notices this, somehow knows that it's unnatural. It stands out anywhere, but especially under a dirty overpass in the middle of the night. Hiro keeps getting flashes of it in his peripheral vision, keeps glancing over to track down it's source. It's obvious to him, but no one else seems to notice.

Someone in this overpass, somewhere, is bouncing a laser beam off Hiro's face.

It's annoying. Without being too obvious about it, he changes his course slightly, wanders over to a point downwind of a trash fire that's burning in a steel drum. Now he's standing in the middle of a plume of diluted smoke that he can smell but can't quite see.

But the next time the laser darts into his face, it scatters off a million tiny, ashy particulates and reveals itself as a pure geometric line in space, pointing straight back to its source.

It's a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case he's not already conspicuous enough, he's wearing a suit. Hiro starts walking toward him.

Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.

The CIC brass can't stand these guys because they upload staggering quantities of useless information to the database, on the off chance that some of it will eventually be useful. It's like writing down the license number of every car you see on your way to work each morning, just in case one of them will be involved in a hit-and-run accident. Even the CIC database can only hold so much garbage. So, usually, these habitual gargoyles get kicked out of the CIC before too long.

This guy hasn't been kicked out yet. And to judge from the quality of his equipment—which is very expensive—he's been at it for a while. So he must be pretty good.

If so, what's he doing hanging around this place?

“Hiro Protagonist,” the gargoyle says as Hiro finally tracks him down in the darkness beside a shanty. “CIC stringer for eleven months. Specializing in the Industry. Former hacker, security guard, pizza deliverer, concert promoter.” He sort of mumbles it, not wanting Hiro to waste his time reciting a bunch of known facts.

The laser that kept jabbing Hiro in the eye was shot out of this guy's computer, from a peripheral device that sits above his goggles in the middle of his forehead. A long-range retinal scanner. If you turn toward him with your eyes open, the laser shoots out, penetrates your iris, tenderest of sphincters, and scans your retina. The results are shot back to CIC, which has a database of several tens of millions of scanned retinas. Within a few seconds, if you're in the database already, the owner finds out who you are. If you're not already in the database, well, you are now.

Of course, the user has to have access privileges. And once he gets your identity, he has to have more access privileges to find out personal information about you. This guy, apparently, has a lot of access privileges. A lot more than Hiro.

“Name's Lagos,” the gargoyle says.

So this is the guy. Hiro considers asking him what the hell he's doing here. He'd love to take him out for a drink, talk to him about how the Librarian was coded. But he's pissed off. Lagos is being rude to him (gargoyles are rude by definition).

“You here on the Raven thing? Or just that fuzzgrunge tip you've been working on for the last, uh, thirty-six days approximately?” Lagos says.

Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter-wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they're talking to you, but they're actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro's cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.

“You're the guy who's working with Juanita, right?” Hiro says.

“Or she's working with me. Or something like that.”

“She said she wanted me to meet you.”

For several seconds Lagos is frozen. He's ransacking more data. Hiro wants to throw a bucket of water on him.

“Makes sense,” he says. “You're as familiar with the Metaverse as anyone. Freelance hacker—that's exactly right.”

“Exactly right for what? No one wants freelance hackers anymore.”

“The corporate assembly-line hackers are suckers for infection. They're going to go down by the thousands, just like Sennacherib's army before the walls of Jerusalem,” Lagos says.

“Infection? Sennacherib?”

“And you can defend yourself in Reality, too—that'll be good if you ever go up against Raven. Remember, his knives are as sharp as a molecule. They'll go through a bulletproof jacket like lingerie.”

“Raven?”

“You'll probably see him tonight. Don't mess with him.”

“Okay,” Hiro says. “I'll look out for him.”

“That's not what I said,” Lagos says. “I said, don't mess with him.”

“Why not?”

“It's a dangerous world,” Lagos says. “Getting more dangerous all the time. So we don't want to upset the balance of terror. Just think about the Cold War.”

“Yup.” All Hiro wants to do now is walk away and never see this guy again, but he won't wind up the conversation.

“You're a hacker. That means you have deep structures to worry about, too.”

“Deep structures?”

“Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?”

“Sure.”

“You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them—the axons split and push their way between the dividing glial cells—your bioware self-modifies—the software becomes part of the hardware. So now you're vulnerable—all hackers are vulnerable—to a
nam-shub
. We have to look out for each other.”

“What's a nam-shub? Why am I vulnerable to it?”

“Just don't stare into any bitmaps. Anyone try to show you a raw bitmap lately? Like, in the Metaverse?”

Interesting. “Not to me personally, but now that you mention it, this Brandy came up to my friend—”

“A cult prostitute of Asherah. Trying to spread the disease. Which is synonymous with evil. Sound melodramatic? Not really. You know, to the Mesopotamians, there was no independent concept of evil. Just disease and ill health. Evil was a synonym for disease. So what does that tell you?”

Hiro walks away, the same way he walks away from psychotic street people who follow him down the street.

“It tells you that evil is a virus!” Lagos calls after him. “Don't let the nam-shub into your operating system!”

Juanita's working with this alien?

Blunt Force Trauma play for a solid hour, segueing from one song into the next with no chink or crevice in the wall of noise. All a part of the aesthetic. When the music stops, their set is over. For the first time, Hiro can hear the exaltation of the crowd. It's a blast of high-pitched noise that he feels in his head, ringing his ears.

But there's a low thudding sound, too, like someone pummeling a bass drum, and for a minute he thinks maybe it's a truck rolling by on the overpass above them. But it's too steady for that, it doesn't die away.

It's behind him. Other people have noticed it, turned to look toward the sound, are scurrying out of the way. Hiro sidesteps, turning to see what it is.

Big and black, to begin with. It does not seem as though such a large man could perch on a motorcycle, even a big chortling Harley like this one.

Correction. It's a Harley with some kind of a sidecar added, a sleek black projectile hanging off to the right, supported on its own wheel. But no one is sitting in the sidecar.

It does not seem as though a man could be this bulky without being fat. But he's not fat at all, he's wearing tight stretchy clothes—like leather, but not quite—that show bones and muscles, but nothing else.

He is riding the Harley so slowly that he would certainly fall over if not for the sidecar. Occasionally he gooses it forward with a flick of the fingers on his clutch hand.

Maybe one reason he looks so big—other than the fact that he really is big—is the fact that he appears totally neckless. His head starts out wide and just keeps getting wider until it merges with his shoulders. At first Hiro thinks it must be some kind of avant-garde helmet. But when the man rolls past him, this great shroud moves and flutters and Hiro sees that it is just his hair, a thick mane of black hair tossed back over his shoulders, trailing down his back almost to his waist.

As he is marveling at this, he realizes that the man has turned his head to look back at him. Or to look in his general direction, anyway. It's impossible to tell exactly what he's looking at because of his goggles, a smooth convex shell over the eyes, interrupted by a narrow horizontal slit.

He is looking at Hiro. He gives him the same fuck-you smile that he sported earlier tonight, when Hiro was standing in the entryway to The Black Sun, and he was in a public terminal somewhere.

This is the guy. Raven. This is the guy that Juanita is looking for. The guy Lagos told him not to mess with. And Hiro has seen him before, outside the entrance to The Black Sun. This is the guy who gave the Snow Crash card to Da5id.

The tattoo on his forehead consists of three words, written in block letters: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL.

Hiro startles and actually jumps into the air as Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns launch into their opening number, “Radiation Burn.” It is a tornado of mostly high-pitched noise and distortion, like being flung bodily through a wall of fishhooks.