Snow Crash (27 page)

“Kind of like the Torah.”

“Yes, but they have a kind of mystical or magical force. And they often deal with banal subjects—not just religion.”

“Examples?”

“In one myth, the goddess Inanna goes to Eridu and tricks Enki into giving her ninety-four
me
and brings them back to her home town of Uruk, where they are greeted with much commotion and rejoicing.”

“Inanna is the person that Juanita's obsessed with.”

“Yes, sir. She is hailed as a savior because ‘she brought the perfect execution of the
me
.' ”

“Execution? Like executing a computer program?”

“Yes. Apparently, they are like algorithms for carrying out certain activities essential to the society. Some of them have to do with the workings of priesthood and kingship. Some explain how to carry out religious ceremonies. Some relate to the arts of war and diplomacy. Many of them are about the arts and crafts: music, carpentry, smithing, tanning, building, farming, even such simple tasks as lighting fires.”

“The operating system of society.”

“I'm sorry?”

“When you first turn on a computer, it is an inert collection of circuits that can't really do anything. To start up the machine, you have to infuse those circuits with a collection of rules that tell it how to function. How to be a computer. It sounds as though these
me
served as the operating system of the society, organizing an inert collection of people into a functioning system.”

“As you wish. In any case, Enki was the guardian of the
me
.”

“So he was a good guy, really.”

“He was the most beloved of the gods.”

“He sounds like kind of a hacker. Which makes his nam-shub very difficult to understand. If he was such a nice guy, why did he do the Babel thing?”

“This is considered to be one of the mysteries of Enki. As you have noticed, his behavior was not always consistent with modern norms.”

“I don't buy that. I don't think he actually fucked his sister, daughter, and so on. That story has to be a metaphor for something else. I think it is a metaphor for some kind of recursive informational process. This whole myth stinks of it. To these people, water equals semen. Makes sense, because they probably had no concept of pure water—it was all brown and muddy and full of viruses anyway. But from a modern standpoint, semen is just a carrier of information—both benevolent sperm and malevolent viruses. Enki's water—his semen, his data, his
me
—flow throughout the country of Sumer and cause it to flourish.”

“As you may be aware, Sumer existed on the flood-plain between two major rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. This is where all the clay came from—they took it directly from the riverbeds.”

“So Enki even provided them with their medium for conveying information—clay. They wrote on wet clay and then they dried it out—got rid of the water. If water got to it later, the information was destroyed. But if they baked it and drove out all the water, sterilized Enki's semen with heat, then the tablet lasted forever, immutable, like the words of the Torah. Do I sound like a maniac?”

“I don't know,” the Librarian says, “but you do sound a little like Lagos.”

“I'm thrilled. Next thing you know, I'll turn myself into a gargoyle.”

34

Any ped can get into Griffith Park without being noticed. And Y.T. figures that despite the barriers across the road, the Falabala camp isn't too well protected, if you've got off-road capability. For a skate ninja on a brand-new plank in a brand-new pair of Knight Visions (hey, you have to spend money to make money) there will be no problem. Just find a high embankment that ramps down into the canyon, skirt the edge until you see those campfires down below. And then lean down that hill. Trust gravity.

She realizes halfway down that her blue-and-orange coverall, fly as it may be, is going to be a real attention getter in the middle of the night in the Falabala zone, so she reaches up to her collar, feels a hard disk sewn into the fabric, presses it between thumb and finger until it clicks. Her coverall darkens, the colors shimmer through the electropigment like an oil slick, and then it's black.

On her first visit she didn't check this place out all that carefully because she hoped she'd never come back. So the embankment turns out to be taller and steeper than Y.T. remembered. Maybe a little more of a cliff, drop-off, or abyss than she thought. Only thing that makes her think so is that she seems to be doing a lot of free-fall work here. Major plummeting. Big time ballistic styling. That's cool, it's all part of the job, she tells herself. The smartwheels are good for it. The tree trunks are bluish black, standing out not so well against a blackish blue background. The only other thing she can see is the red laser light of the digital speedometer down on the front of her plank, which is not showing any real information. The numbers have vibrated themselves into a cloud of gritty red light as the radar speed sensor tries to lock onto something.

She turns the speedometer off. Running totally black now. Precipitating her way toward the sweet 'crete of the creek bottom like a black angel who has just had the shroud lines of her celestial parachute severed by the Almighty. And when the wheels finally meet the pavement, it just about drives her knees up through her jawbone. She finishes the whole gravitational transaction with not much altitude and a nasty head of dark velocity.

Mental note: Next time just jump off a fucking bridge. That way there's no question of getting an invisible cholla shoved up your nose.

She whips around a corner, heeled over so far she could lick the yellow line, and her Knight Visions reveal all in a blaze of multispectral radiation. On infrared, the Falabala encampment is a turbulating aurora of pink fog punctuated by the white-hot bursts of campfires. All of it rests on dim bluish pavement, which means, in the false-color scheme of things, that it's cold. Behind everything is the jagged horizon line of that funky improvised barrier technology that the Falabalas are so good at. A barrier that has been completely spurned, snubbed, and confounded by Y.T., who dropped out of the sky into the middle of the camp like a Stealth fighter with an inferiority complex.

Once you're into the actual encampment, people don't really notice or care who you are. A couple people see her, watch her slide on by, don't get all hairy about it. They probably get a lot of Kouriers coming through here. A lot of dippy, gullible, Kool-Aid-drinking couriers. And these people aren't hip enough to tell Y.T. apart from that breed. But that's okay, she'll pass for now, as long as they don't check out the detailing on her new plank.

The campfires provide enough plain old regular visible light to show this sorry affair for what it is: a bunch of demented Boy Scouts, a jamboree without merit badges or hygiene. With the IR supered on top of the visible, she can also see vague, spectral red faces out in the shadows where her unassisted eyes would only see darkness. These new Knight Visions cost her a big wad of her Mob drug-running money. Just the kind of thing Mom had in mind when she insisted Y.T. get a part-time job.

Some of the people who were here last time are gone now, and there's a few new ones she doesn't recognize. There's a couple of people actually wearing duct-tape straitjackets. That's a fashion statement reserved for the ones who are totally out of control, rolling and thrashing around on the ground. And there's a few more who are spazzing out, but not as bad, and one or two who are just plain messed up, like plain old derelicts that you might see at the Snooze 'n' Cruise.

“Hey, look!” someone says. “It's our friend the Kourier! Welcome, friend!”

She's got her Liquid Knuckles uncapped, available, and shaken well before use. She's got high-voltage, high-fashion metallic cuffs around her wrists in case someone tries to grab her by same. And a bundy stunner up her sleeve. Only the most tubular throwbacks carry guns. Guns take a long time to work (you have to wait for the victim to bleed to death), but paradoxically they end up killing people pretty often. But nobody hassles you after you've hit them with a bundy stunner. At least that's what the ads say.

So it's not like she exactly feels vulnerable or anything. But still, she'd like to pick her target. So she maintains escape velocity until she's found the woman who seemed friendly—the bald chick in the torn-up Chanel knockoff—and then zeroes in on her.

“Let's get off into the woods, man,” Y.T. says, “I want to talk to you about what's going on with what's left of your brain.”

The woman smiles, struggles to her feet with the good-natured awkwardness of a retarded person in a good mood. “I like to talk about that,” she says. “Because I believe in it.”

Y.T. doesn't stop to do a lot of talking, just grabs the woman by the hand, starts leading her uphill, into the scrubby little trees, away from the road. She doesn't see any pink faces lurking up here in the infrared, it ought to be safe. But there are a couple behind her, just ambling along pleasantly, not looking directly at her, like they just decided it was time to go for a stroll in the woods in the middle of the night. One of them is the High Priest.

The woman's probably in her mid-twenties, she's a tall gangly type, nice- but not good-looking, probably was a spunky but low-scoring forward on her high school basketball team. Y.T. sits her down on a rock out in the darkness.

“Do you have any idea where you are?” Y.T. says.

“In the park,” the woman says, “with my friends. We're helping to spread the Word.”

“How'd you get here?”

“From the
Enterprise
. That's where we go to learn things.”

“You mean, like, the Raft? The
Enterprise
Raft? Is that where you guys all came from?”

“I don't know where we came from,” the woman says. “Sometimes it's hard to remember stuff. But that's not important.”

“Where were you before? You didn't grow up on the Raft, did you?”

“I was a systems programmer for 3verse Systems in Mountain View, California,” the woman says, suddenly whipping off a string of perfect, normal-sounding English.

“Then how did you get to be on the Raft?”

“I don't know. My old life stopped. My new life started. Now I'm here.” Back to baby talk.

“What's the last thing you remember before your old life stopped?”

“I was working late. My computer was having problems.”

“That's it? That's the last normal thing that happened to you?”

“My system crashed,” she said. “I saw static. And then I became very sick. I went to the hospital. And there in the hospital, I met a man who explained everything to me. He explained that I had been washed in the blood. That I belonged to the Word now. And suddenly it all made sense. And then I decided to go to the Raft.”

“You decided, or someone decided for you?”

“I just wanted to. That's where we go.”

“Who else was on the Raft with you?”

“More people like me.”

“Like you how?”

“All programmers. Like me. Who had seen the Word.”

“Seen it on their computers?”

“Yes. Or sometimes on TV.”

“What did you do on the Raft?”

The woman pushes up one sleeve of her raggedy sweatshirt to expose a needle-pocked arm.

“You took drugs?”

“No. We gave blood.”

“
They sucked your blood out?
”

“Yes. Sometimes we would do a little coding. But only some of us.”

“How long have you been here?”

“I don't know. They move us here when our veins don't work anymore. We just do things to help spread the Word—drag stuff around, make barricades. But we don't really spend much time working. Most of the time we sing songs, pray, and tell other people about the Word.”

“You want to leave? I can get you out of here.”

“No,” the woman says, “I've never been so happy.”

“How can you say that? You were a big-time hacker. Now you're kind of a dip, if I may speak frankly.”

“That's okay, it doesn't hurt my feelings. I wasn't really happy when I was a hacker. I never thought about the important things. God. Heaven. The things of the spirit. It's hard to think about those things in America. You just put them aside. But those are really the important things—not programming computers or making money. Now, that's all I think about.”

Y.T. has been keeping an eye on the High Priest and his buddy. They keep moving closer, one step at a time. Now they're close enough that Y.T. can smell their dinner. The woman puts her hand on Y.T.'s shoulder pad.

“I want you to stay here with me. Won't you come down and have some refreshments? You must be thirsty.”

“Gotta run,” Y.T. says, standing up.

“I really have to object to that,” the High Priest says, stepping forward. He doesn't say it angrily. Now he's trying to be like Y.T.'s dad. “That's not really the right decision for you.”

“What are you, a role model?”

“That's okay. You don't have to agree. But let's go down and sit by the campfire and talk about it.”

“Let's just get the fuck away from Y.T. before she goes into a self-defense mode,” Y.T. says.

All three Falabalas step back away from her. Very cooperative. The High Priest is holding up his hands, placating her. “I'm sorry if we made you feel threatened,” he says.

“You guys just come on a little weird,” Y.T. says, flipping her goggles back onto infrared.

In the infrared, she can see that the third Falabala, the one who came up here with the High Priest, is holding a small thing in one hand that is unusually warm.

She nails him with her penlight, spotlighting his upper body in a narrow yellow beam. Most of him is dirty and dun colored and reflects little light. But there is a brilliant glossy red thing, a shaft of ruby.

It's a hypodermic needle. It's full of red fluid. Under infrared, it shows up warm. It's fresh blood.

And she doesn't exactly get it—why these guys would be walking around with a syringe full of fresh blood. But she's seen enough.

The Liquid Knuckles shoots out of the can in a long narrow neon-green stream, and when it nails the needle man in the face, he jerks his head back like he's just been axed across the bridge of the nose and falls back without making a sound. Then she gives the High Priest a shot of it for good measure. The woman just stands there, totally, like, appalled.

Y.T. pumps herself up out of the canyon so fast that when she flies out into traffic, she's going about as fast as it is. As soon as she gets a solid poon on a nocturnal lettuce tanker, she gets on the phone to Mom.

“Mom, listen. No, Mom, never mind the roaring noise. Yes, I am riding my skateboard in traffic. But listen to me for a second, Mom—”

She has to hang up on the old bitch. It's impossible to talk to her. Then she tries to make a voice linkup with Hiro. That takes a couple of minutes to go through.

“Hello! Hello! Hello!” she's shouting. Then she hears the honk of a car horn. Coming out of the telephone.

“Hello?”

“It's Y.T.”

“How are you doing?” This guy always seems a little too laid back in his personal dealings. She doesn't really want to talk about how she's doing. She hears another honking horn in the background, behind Hiro's voice.

“Where the hell are you, Hiro?”

“Walking down a street in L.A.”

“How can you be goggled in if you're walking down a street?” Then the terrible reality sinks in: “Oh, my God, you didn't turn into a gargoyle, did you?”

“Well,” Hiro says. He is hesitant, embarrassed, like it hadn't occurred to him yet that this was what he was doing. “It's not exactly like being a gargoyle. Remember when you gave me shit about spending all my money on computer stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“I decided I wasn't spending enough. So I got a belt-pack machine. Smallest ever made. I'm walking down the street with this thing strapped to my belly. It's really cool.”

“You're a gargoyle.”

“Yeah, but it's not like having all this clunky shit strapped all over your body—”

“You're a gargoyle. Listen, I talked to one of these wholesalers.”

“Yeah?”

“She says she used to be a hacker. She saw something strange on her computer. Then she got sick for a while and joined this cult and ended up on the Raft.”

“The Raft. Do tell.”

“On the
Enterprise
. They take their blood, Hiro. Suck it out of their bodies. They infect people by injecting them with the blood of sick hackers. And when their veins get all tracked out like a junkie's, they cut them loose and put them to work on the mainland running the wholesale operation.”

“That's good,” he says. “That's good stuff.”

“She says she saw some static on her computer screen and it made her sick. You know anything about that?”

“Yeah. It's true.”

“It's true?”

“Yeah. But you don't have to worry about it. It only affects hackers.”

For a minute she can't even speak, she's so pissed. “My mother is a programmer for the Feds. You asshole. Why didn't you warn me?”

Half an hour later, she's there. Doesn't bother to change back into her WASP disguise this time, just bursts into the house in basic, bad black. Drops her plank on the floor on the way in. Grabs one of Mom's curios off the shelf—it's a heavy crystal award—clear plastic, actually—that she got a couple years ago for sucking up to her Fed boss and passing all her polygraph tests—and goes into the den.