aring and conforming and, if they happened to be smart, they went out of their way to hide it. So the first time Hiro saw Juanita, or any other girl like her, his perspectives were bent all out of shape. She had long, glossy black hair that had never been subjected to any chemical process other than regular shampooing. She didn't wear blue stuff on her eyelids. Her clothing was dark, tailored, restrained. And she didn't take shit from anyone, not even her professors, which seemed shrewish and threatening to him at the time. When he saw her again after an absence of several years -a period spent mostly in Japan, working among real grown-ups from a higher social class than he was used to, people of substance who wore real clothes and did real things with their lives - he was startled to realize that Juanita was an elegant, stylish knockout. He thought at first that she had undergone some kind of radical changes since their first year in college. But then he went back to visit his father in one of those Army towns and ran into the high school prom queen. She had grown up shockingly fast into an overweight dame with loud hair and loud clothes who speedread the tabloids at the check-out line in the commissary because she didn't have the spare money to buy them, who popped her gum and had two kids that she didn't have the energy or the foresight to discipline. Seeing this woman at the commissary, he finally went through a belated, dim-witted epiphany, not a brilliant light shining down from heaven, more like the brown glimmer of a half-dead flashlight from the top of a stepladder: Juanita hadn't really changed much at all since those days, just grown into herself. It was he who had changed. Radically. He came into her office once, strictly on a business matter. Until this point, they had seen each other around the office a lot but acted like they had never met before. But when he came into her office that day, she told him to close the door behind him, and she blacked out the screen on her computer and started twiddling a pencil between her hands and eyed him like a plate of day-old sushi. Behind her on the wall was an amateurish painting of an old lady, set in an ornate antique frame. It was the only decoration in Juanita's office. All the other hackers had color photographs of the space shuttle lifting off, or posters of the starship Enterprise. "It's my late grandmother, may God have mercy on her soul," she said, watching him look at the painting. "My role model." "Why? Was she a programmer?" She just looked at him over the rotating pencil like, how slow can a mammal be and still have respiratory functions? But instead of lowering the boom on him, she just gave a simple answer: "No." Then she gave a more complicated answer. "When I was fifteen years old, I missed a period. My boyfriend and I were using a diaphragm, but I knew it was fallible. I was good at math, I had the failure rate memorized, burnt into my subconscious. Or maybe it was my conscious, I can never keep them straight. Anyway, I was terrified. Our family dog started treating me differently - supposedly, they can smell a pregnant woman. Or a pregnant bitch, for that matter." By this point, Hiro's face was frozen in a wary, astonished position that Juanita later made extensive use of in her work. Because, as she was talking to him, she was watching, his face, analyzing the way the little muscles in his forehead pulled his brows up and made his eyes change shape. "My mother was clueless. My boyfriend was worse than clueless - in fact, I ditched him on the spot, because it made me realize what an alien the guy was - like many members of your species." By this, she was referring to males. "Anyway, my grandmother came to visit," she continued, glancing back over her shoulder at the painting. "I avoided her until we all sat down for dinner. And then she figured out the whole situation in, maybe, ten minutes, just by watching my face across the dinner table. I didn't say more than ten words - 'Pass the tortillas.' I don't know how my face conveyed that information, or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind enabled her to accomplish this incredible feat. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance." Condense fact from the vapor of nuance. Hiro has never forgotten the sound of her speaking those words, the feeling that came over him as he realized for the first time how smart Juanita was. She continued. "I didn't even really appreciate all of this until about ten years later, as. a grad student, trying to build a user interface that would convey a lot of data very quickly, for one of these baby-killer grants." This was her term for anything related to the Defense Department. "I was coming up with all kinds of elaborate technical fixes like trying to implant electrodes directly into the brain. Then I remembered my grandmother and realized, my God, the human mind can absorb and process an incredible amount of information - if it comes in the right format. The right interface. If you put the right face on it. Want some coffee?" Then he had an alarming thought: What had he been like back in college? How much of an asshole had he been? Had he left Juanita with a bad impression? Another young man would have worried about it in silence, but Hiro has never been restrained by thinking about things too hard, and so he asked her out for dinner and, after having a couple of drinks (she drank club sodas), just popped the question: Do you think I'm an asshole? She laughed. He smiled, believing that he had come up with a good, endearing, flirtatious bit of patter. He did not realize until a couple of years later that this question was, in effect, the cornerstone of their relationship. Did Juanita think that Hiro was an asshole? He always had some reason to think that the answer was yes, but nine times out of ten she insisted the answer was no. It made for some great arguments and some great sex, some dramatic failings out and some passionate reconciliations, but in the end the wildness was just too much for them - they were exhausted by work - and they backed away from each other. He was emotionally worn out from wondering what she really thought of him, and confused by the fact that he cared so deeply about her opinion. And she, maybe, was beginning to think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't. Hiro would have chalked it all up to class differences, except that her parents lived in a house in Mexicali with a dirt floor, and his father made more money than many college professors. But the class idea still held sway in his mind, because class is more than income - it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships. Juanita and her folks knew where they stood with a certitude that bordered on dementia. Hiro never knew. His father was a sergeant major, his mother was a Korean woman whose people had been mine slaves in Nippon, and Hiro didn't know whether he was black or Asian or just plain Army, whether he was rich or poor, educated or ignorant, talented or lucky. He didn't even have a part of the country to call home until he moved to California, which is about as specific as saying that you live in the Northern Hemisphere. In the end, it was probably his general disorientation that did them in. After the breakup, Hiro went out with a long succession of essentially bimbos who (unlike Juanita) were impressed that he worked for a high-tech Silicon Valley firm. More recently, he has had to go searching for women who are even easier to impress. Juanita went celibate for a while and then started going out with Da5id and eventually got married to him. Da5id had no doubts whatsoever about his standing in the world. His folks were Russian Jews from Brooklyn and had lived in the same brownstone for seventy years after coming from a village in Latvia where they had lived for five hundred years; with a Torah on his lap, he could trace his bloodlines all the way back to Adam and Eve. He was an only child who had always been first in his class in everything, and when he got his master's in computer science from Stanford, he went out and started his own company with about as much fuss as Hiro's dad used to exhibit in renting out a new P.O. box when they moved. Then he got rich, and now he runs The Black Sun. Da5id has always been certain of everything. Even when he's totally wrong. Which is why Hiro quit his job at Black Sun Systems, despite the promise of future riches, and why Juanita divorced Da5id two years after she married him. Hiro did not attend Juanita and Da5id's wedding; he was languishing in jail, into which he had been thrown a few hours before the rehearsal. He had been found in Golden Gate Park, lovesick, wearing nothing but a thong, taking long pulls from a jumbo bottle of Courvoisier and practicing kendo attacks with a genuine samurai sword, floating across the grass on powerfully muscled thighs to slice other picnickers' hurtling Frisbees and baseballs in twain. Catching a long fly ball with the edge of your blade, neatly halving it like a grapefruit, is not an insignificant feat. The only drawback is that the owners of the baseball may misinterpret your intentions and summon the police. He got out of it by paying for all the baseballs and Frisbees, but since that episode, he has never even bothered to ask Juanita whether or not she thinks he's an asshole. Even Hiro knows the answer now. Since then, they've gone very different ways. In the early years of The Black Sun project, the only way the hackers ever got paid was by issuing stock to themselves. Hiro tended to sell his off almost as quickly as he got it. Juanita didn't. Now she's rich, and he isn't. It would be easy to say that Hiro is a stupid investor and Juanita a smart one, but the facts are a little more complicated than that: Juanita put her eggs in one basket, keeping all her money in Black Sun stock; as it turns out, she made a lot of money that way, but she could have gone broke, too. And Hiro didn't have a lot of choice in some ways. When his father got sick, the Army and the V.A. took care of most of his medical bills, but they ran into a lot of expenses anyway, and Hiro's mother - who could barely speak English - wasn't equipped to make or handle money on her own. When Hiro's father died, he cashed in all of his Black Sun stock to put Mom in a nice community in Korea. She loves it there. Goes golfing every day. He could have kept his money in The Black Sun and made ten million dollars about a year later when it went public, but his mother would have been a street person. So when his mother visits him in the Metaverse, looking tan and happy in her golfing duds, Hiro views that as his personal fortune. It won't pay the rent, but that's okay - when you live in a shithole, there's always the Metaverse, and in the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince. 8 His tongue is stinging; he realizes that, back in Reality, he has forgotten to swallow his beer. It's ironic that Juanita has come into this place in a low-tech, black-and-white avatar. She was the one who figured out a way to make avatars show something close to real emotion. That is a fact Hiro has never forgotten, because she did most of her work when they were together, and whenever an avatar looks surprised or angry or passionate in the Metaverse, he sees an echo of himself or Juanita - the Adam and Eve of the Metaverse. Makes it hard to forget. Shortly after Juanita and Da5id got divorced, The Black Sun really took off. And once they got done counting their money, marketing the spinoffs, soaking up the adulation of others in the hacker community, they all came to the realization that what made this place a success was not the collision-avoidance algorithms or the bouncer daemons or any of that other stuff. It was Juanita's faces. Just ask the businessmen in the Nipponese Quadrant. They come here to talk turkey with suits from around the world, and they consider it just as good as a face-to-face. They more or less ignore what is being saida lot gets lost in translation, after all. They pay attention to the facial expressions and body language of the people they are talking to. And that's how they know what's going on inside a person's head - by condensing fact from the vapor of nuance. Juanita refused to analyze this process, insisted that it was something ineffable, something you couldn't explain with words. A radical, rosary-toting Catholic, she has no problem with that kind of thing. But the bitheads didn't like it. Said it was irrational mysticism. So she quit and took a job with some Nipponese company. They don't have any problem with irrational mysticism as long as it makes money. But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore. Partly, she's pissed at Da5id and the other hackers who never appreciated her work. But she has also decided that the whole thing is bogus. That no matter how good it is, the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such distortion in her relationships. Da5id notices Hiro, indicates with a flick of his eyes that this is not a good time. Normally, such subtle gestures are lost in the system's noise, but Da5id has a very good personal computer, and Juanita helped design his avatar - so the message comes through like a shot fired into the ceiling. Hiro turns away, saunters around the big circular bar in a slow orbit. Most of the sixty-four bar stools are filled with lower-level Industry people, getting together in twos and threes, doing what they do best: gossip and intrigue. "So I get together with the director for a story conference. He's got this beach house - " "Incredible?" "Don't get me started." "I heard. Debi was there for a party when Frank and Mitzi owned it." "Anyway, there's this scene, early, where the main character wakes up in a dumpster. The idea is to show how, you know, despondent he is - " "That crazy energy - " "Exactly." "Fabulous." "I like it. Well, he wants to replace it with a scene where the guy is out in the desert with a bazooka, blowing up old cars in an abandoned junkyard." "You're kidding!" "So we're sitting there on his fucking patio over the beach and he's going, like, whoom! whoom! imitating this goddamn bazooka. He's thrilled by the idea. I mean, this is a man who wants to put a bazooka in a movie. So I think I talked him out of it." "Nice scene. But you're right. A bazooka doesn't do the same thing as a dumpster." Hiro pauses long enough to get this down, then keeps walking. He mumbles "Bigboard" again, recalls the magic map, pinpoints his own location, and then reads off the name of this nearby screenwriter. Later on, he can do a search of industry publications to find out what script this guy is working on, hence the name of this mystery director with a fetish for bazookas. Since this whole conversation has come to him via his computer, he's just taken an audio tape of the whole thing. Later, he can process it to disguise the voices, then upload it to the Library, cross-referenced under the director's name. A hundred struggling screenwriters will call this conversation up, listen to it over and over until they've got it memorized, paying Hiro for the privilege, and within a few weeks, bazooka scripts will flood the director's office. Whoom! The Rock Star Quadrant is almost too bright to look at. Rock star avatars have the hairdos that rock stars can only wear in their dreams. Hiro scans it briefly to see if any of his friends are in there, but it's mostly parasites and has-beens. Most of the people Hiro knows are will-bes or wannabes. The Movie Star Quadrant is easier to look at. Actors love to come here because in The Black Sun, they always look as good as they do in the movies. And unlike a bar or club in Reality, they can get into this place without physically having to leave their mansion, hotel suite, ski lodge, private airline cabin, or whatever. They can strut their stuff and visit with their friends without any exposure to kidnappers, paparazzi, script-flingers, assassins, ex-spouses, autograph brokers, process servers, psycho fans, marriage proposals, or gossip columnists. He gets up off the bar stool and resumes his slow orbit, scanning the Nipponese Quadrant. It's a lot of guys in suits, as usual. Some of them are talking to gringos from the Industry. And a large part of the quadrant, in the back corner, has been screened off by a temporary partition. Bigboard again. Hiro figures out which tables are behind the partition, starts reading off the names. The only one he recognizes immediately is an American: L. Bob Rife, the cable-television monopolist. A very big name to the Industry, though he's rarely seen. He seems to be meeting with a whole raft of big Nipponese honchos. Hiro has his computer memorize their names so that, later, he can check them against the CIC database and find out who they are. It has the look of a big and important meeting. "Secret Agent Hiro! How are you doing?" Hiro turns around. Juanita is right behind him, standing out in her black-and-white avatar, looking good anyway. "How are you?" she asks. "Fine. How are you?" "Great. I hope you don't mind talking to me in this ugly fax-of-life avatar." "Juanita, I would rather look at a fax of you than most other women in the flesh." "Thanks, you sly bastard. It's been a long time since we've talked!" she observes, as though there's something remarkable about this. Something's going on. "I hope you're not going to mess around with Snow Crash," she says. "Da5id won't listen to me." "What am I, a model of self-restraint? I'm exactly the kind of guy who would mess around with it." "I know you better than that. You're impulsive. But you're very clever. You have those sword-fighting reflexes." "What does that have to do with drug abuse?" "It means you can see bad things coming and deflect them. It's an instinct, not a learned thing. As soon as you turned around and saw me, that look came over your face, like, what's going on? What the hell is Juanita up to?" "I didn't think you talked to people in the Metaverse." "I do if I want to get through to someone in a hurry," she says. "And I'll always talk to you." "Why me?" "You know. Because of us. Remember? Because of our relationship - when I was writing this thing - you and I are the only two people who can ever have an honest conversation in the Metaverse." "You're just the same mystical crank you always were," he says, smiling so as to make this a charming statement. "You can't imagine how mystical and cranky I am now, Hiro." "How mystical and cranky are you?" She eyes him warily. Exactly the same way she did when he came into her office years ago. It comes into his mind to wonder why she is always so alert in his presence. In college, he used to think that she was afraid of his intellect, but he's known for years that this is the last of her worries. At Black Sun Systems, he figured that it was just typical female guardedness - Juanita was afraid he was trying to get her into the sack. But this, too, is pretty much out of the question. At this late date in his romantic career, he is just canny enough to come up with a new theory: She's being careful because she likes him. She likes him in spite of herself. He is exactly the kind of tempting but utterly wrong romantic choice that a smart girl like Juanita must learn to avoid. That's definitely it. There's something to be said for getting older. By way of answering his question, she says, "I have an associate I'd like you to meet. A gentleman and a scholar named Lagos. He's a fascinating guy to talk to." "Is he your boyfriend?" She thinks this one over rather than lashing out instantaneously. "My behavior at The Black Sun to the contrary, I don't fuck every male I work with. And even if I did, Lagos is out of the question." "Not your type?" "Not by a long shot." "What is your type, anyway?" "Old, rich, unimaginative blonds with steady careers." This one almost slips by him. Then he catches it. "Well, I could dye my hair. And I'll get old eventually." She actually laughs. It's a tension-releasing kind of outburst. "Believe me, Hiro, I'm the last person you want to be involved with at this point." "Is this part of your church thing?" he asks. Juanita has been using her excess money to start her own branch of the Catholic church - she considers herself a missionary to the intelligent atheists of the world. "Don't be condescending," she says. "That's exactly the attitude I'm fighting. Religion is not for simpletons." "Sorry. This is unfair, you know - you can read every expression on my face, and I'm looking at you through a fucking blizzard." "It's definitely related to religion," she says. "But this is so complex, and your background in that area is so deficient, I don't know where to begin." "Hey, I went to church every week in high school. I sang in the choir." "I know. That's exactly the problem. Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds." "So none of that stuff I learned in church has anything to do with what you're talking about?" Juanita thinks for a while, eyeing him. Then she pulls a hypercard out of her pocket. "Here. Take this." As Hiro pulls it from her hand, the hypercard changes from a jittery two-dimensional figment into a realistic, cream-colored, finely textured piece of stationery. Printed across its face in glossy black ink is a pair of words B A B E L (I n f o c a l y p s e) 9 The world freezes and grows dim for a second. The Black Sun loses its smooth animation and begins to move in fuzzy stop-action. Clearly, his computer has just taken a major hit; all of its circuits are busy processing a huge bolus of data - the contents of the hypercard - and don't have time to redraw the image of The Black Sun in its full, breathtaking fidelity. "Holy shit!" he says, when The Black Sun pops back into full animation again. "What the hell is in this card? You must have half of the Library in here!" "And a librarian to boot," Juanita says, "to help you sort through it. And lots of videotapes of L. Bob Rife - which accounts for most of the bytes." "Well, I'll try to have a look at it," he says dubiously. "Do. Unlike Da5id, you're just smart enough to benefit from this. And in the meantime, stay away from Raven. And stay away from Snow Crash. Okay?" "Who's Raven?" he asks. But Juanita is already on her way out the door. The fancy avatars all turn around to watch her as she goes past them; the movie stars give her drop-dead looks, and the hackers purse their lips and stare reverently. Hiro orbits back around to the Hacker Quadrant. Da5id's shuffling hypercards around on his table - business stats on The Black Sun, film and video clips, hunks of software, scrawled telephone numbers. "There's a little blip in the operating system that hits me right in the gut every time you come in the door," Da5id says. "I always have this premonition that The Black Sun is headed for a crash." "Must be Bigboard," Hiro says. "It has one routine that patches some of the traps in low memory, for a moment." "Ah, that's it. Please, please throw that thing away," Da5id says. "What, Bigboard?" "Yeah. It was totally rad at one point, but now it's like trying to work on a fusion reactor with a stone ax." "Thanks." "I'll give you all the headers you need if you want to update it to something a little less dangerous," Da5id says. "I wasn't impugning your abilities. I'm just saying you need to keep up with the times." "It's fucking hard," Hiro says. "There's no place for a freelance hacker anymore. You have to have a big corporation behind you." "I'm aware of that. And I'm aware that you can't stand to work for a big corporation. That's why I'm saying, I'll give you the stuff you need. You're always a part of The Black Sun to me, Hiro, even since we parted ways." It is classic Da5id. He's talking with his heart again, bypassing his head. If Da5id weren't a hacker, Hiro would despair of his ever having enough brains to do anything. "Let's talk about something else," Hiro says. "Was I just hallucinating, or are you and Juanita on speaking terms again?" Da5id gives him an indulgent smile. He has been very kind to Hiro ever since The Conversation, several years back. It was a conversation that started out as a friendly chat over beer and oysters between a couple of longtime comrades-in-arms. It was not until three-quarters of the way through The Conversation that it dawned on Hiro that he was, in fact, being fired, at this very moment. Since The Conversation, Da5id has been known to feed Hiro useful bits of intel and gossip from time to time. "Fishing for something useful?" Da5id asks knowingly. Like many bitheads, Da5id is utterly guileless, but at times like this, he thinks he's the reincarnation of Machiavelli. "I got news for you, man," Hiro says. "Most of the stuff you give me, I never put into the Library." "Why not? Hell, I give you all my best gossip. I thought you were making money off that stuff." "I just can't stand it," Hiro says, "taking parts of my private conversations and whoring them out. Why do you think I'm broke?" There's another thing he doesn't mention, which is that he's always considered himself to be Da5id's equal, and he can't stand the idea of feeding off Da5id's little crumbs and tidbits, like a dog curled up under his table. "I was glad to see Juanita come in here - even as a black-and-white," Da5id says. "For her not to use The Black Sun - it's like Alexander Graham Bell refusing to use the telephone." "Why did she come in tonight?" "Something's bugging her," Da5id says. "She wanted to know if I'd seen certain people on the Street." "Anyone in particular?" "She's worried about a really large guy with long black hair," Da5id says. "Peddling something called - get this - Snow Crash." "Has she tried the Library?" "Yeah. I assume so, anyway." "Have you seen this guy?" "Oh, yeah. It's not hard to find him," Da5id says. "He's right outside the door. I got this from him." Da5id scans the table, picks up one of the hypercards, and shows it to Hiro. SNOW CRASH tear this card in half to release your free sample "Da5id," Hiro says, "I can't believe you took a hypercard from a black-and-white person." Da5id laughs. "This is not the old days, my friend. I've got so much antiviral medicine in my system that nothing could get through. I get so much contaminated shit from all the hackers who come through here, it's like working in a plague ward. So I'm not afraid of whatever's in this hypercard." "Well, in that case, I'm curious," Hiro says. "Yeah. Me, too." Da5id laughs. "It's probably something very disappointing." "Probably an animercial," Da5id agrees. "Think I should do it?" "Yeah. Go for it. It's not every day you get to try out a new drug," Hiro says. "Well, you can try one every day if you want to," Da5id says, "but it's not every day you find one that can't hurt you." He picks up the hypercard and tears it in half. For a second, nothing happens. "I'm waiting," Da5id says. An avatar materializes on the table in front of Da5id, starting out ghostly and transparent, gradually becoming solid and three-dimensional. It's a really trite effect; Hiro and Da5id are already laughing. The avatar is a stark naked Brandy. It doesn't even look like the standard Brandy; this looks like one of the cheap Taiwanese Brandy knockoffs. Clearly, it's just a daemon. She is holding a pair of tubes in her hands, about the size of paper-towel rolls. Da5id is leaning back in his chair, enjoying this. There is something hilariously tawdry about the entire scene. The Brandy leans forward, beckoning Da5id toward her. Da5id leans into her face, grinning broadly. She puts her crude, ruby-red lips up by his ear and mumbles something that Hiro can't hear. When she leans back away from Da5id, his face has changed. He looks dazed and expressionless. Maybe Da5id really looks that way; maybe Snow Crash has messed up his avatar somehow so that it's no longer tracking Da5id's true facial expressions. But he's staring straight ahead, eyes frozen in their sockets. The Brandy holds the pair of tubes up in front of Da5id's immobilized face and spreads them apart. It's actually a scroll. She's unrolling it right in front of Da5id's face, spreading it apart like a flat two-dimensional screen in front of his eyes. Da5id's paralyzed face has taken on a bluish tinge as it reflects light coming out of the scroll. Hiro walks around the table to look. He gets a brief glimpse of the scroll before the Brandy snaps it shut again. It is a living wall of light, like a flexible, flatscreened television set, and it's not showing anything at all. just static. White noise. Snow. Then she's gone, leaving no trace behind. Desultory, sarcastic applause sounds from a few tables in the Hacker Quadrant. Da5id's back to normal, wearing a grin that's part snide and part embarrassed. "What was it?" Hiro says. "I just glimpsed some snow at the very end." "You saw the whole thing," Da5id says. "A fixed pattern of black-and-white pixels, fairly high-resolution. Just a few hundred thousand ones and zeroes for me to look at." "So in other words, someone just exposed your optic nerve to, what, maybe a hundred thousand bytes of information," Hiro says. "Noise, is more like it." "Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code," Hiro says. "Why would anyone show me information in binary code? I'm not a computer. I can't read a bitmap." "Relax, Da5id, I'm just shitting you," Hiro says. "You know what it was? You know how hackers are always trying to show me samples of their work?" "Yeah." "Some hacker came up with this scheme to show me his stuff. And everything worked fine until the moment the Brandy opened the scroll - but his code was buggy, and it snow-crashed at the wrong moment, so instead of seeing his output, all I saw was snow." "Then why did he call the thing Snow Crash?" "Gallows humor. He knew it was buggy." "What did the Brandy whisper in your ear?" "Some language I didn't recognize," Da5id says. "Just a bunch of babble." Babble. Babel. "Afterward, you looked sort of stunned." Da5id looks resentful. "I wasn't stunned. I just found the whole experience so weird, I guess I just was taken aback for a second." Hiro is giving him an extremely dubious look. Da5id notices it and stands up. "Want to go see what your competitors in Nippon are up to?" "What competitors?" "You used to design avatars for rock stars, right?" "Still do." "Well, Sushi K is here tonight." "Oh, yeah. The hairdo the size of a galaxy." "You can see the rays from here," Da5id says, waving toward the next quadrant, "but I want to see the whole getup." It does look as though the sun is rising somewhere in the middle of the Rock Star Quadrant. Above the heads of the milling avatars, Hiro can see a fan of orange beams radiating outward from some point in the middle of the crowd. It keeps moving, turning around, shaking from side to side, and the whole universe seems to move with it. On the Street, the full radiance of Sushi K's Rising Sun hairdo is suppressed by the height and width regulations. But Da5id allows free expression inside The Black Sun, so the orange rays extend all the way to the property lines. "I wonder if anyone's told him yet that Americans won't buy rap music from a Japanese person," Hiro says as they stroll over there. "Maybe you should tell him," Da5id suggests, "charge him for the service. He's in L.A. right now, you know." "Probably staying in a hotel full of bootlickers telling him what a big star he's going to be. He needs to be exposed to some actual biomass." They inject themselves into a stream of traffic, winding a narrow channel through a rift in the crowd. "Biomass?" Da5id says. "A body of living stuff. It's an ecology term. If you take an acre of rain forest or a cubic mile of ocean or a square block of Compton and strain out all the unliving stuff - dirt and water - you get the biomass." Da5id, ever the bithead, says, "I do not understand." His voice sounds funny; there's a lot of white noise creeping into his audio. "Industry expression," Hiro says. "The Industry feeds off the human biomass of America. Like a whale straining krill from the sea." Hiro wedges himself between a couple of Nipponese businessmen. One is wearing a uniform blue, but the other is a neo-traditional, wearing a dark kimono. And, like Hiro, he's wearing two swords - the long katana on his left hip and the one-handed wakizashi stuck diagonally in his waistband. He and Hiro glance cursorily at each other's armaments. Then Hiro looks away and pretends not to notice, while the neo-traditional is freezing solid, except for the corners of his mouth which are curling downward. Hiro has seen this kind of thing before. He knows he's about to get into a fight. People are moving out of the way; something big and inexorable is plunging through the crowd, shoving avatars this way and that. Only one thing has the ability to shove people around like that inside The Black Sun, and that's a bouncer daemon. As they get closer, Hiro sees that it's a whole flying wedge of them, gorillas in tuxedos. Real gorillas. And they seem to be headed toward Hiro. He tries to back away, but he quickly runs into something. Looks like Bigboard finally got him in trouble; he's on his way out of the bar. "Da5id," Hiro says. "Call them off, man, I'll stop using it." All of the people in his vicinity are staring over Hiro's shoulder, their faces illuminated by a stew of brilliant colored lights. Hiro turns around to look at Da5id. But Da5id's not there anymore. Instead of Da5id, there is just a jittering cloud of bad digital karma. It's so bright and fast and meaningless that it hurts to look at. It flashes back and forth from color to black and white, and when it's in color, it rolls wildly around the color wheel as though being strafed with highpowered disco lights. And it's not staying within it's own body space; hair-thin pixel lines keep shooting off to one side, passing all the way across The Black Sun and out through the wall. It is not so much an organized body as it is a centrifugal cloud of lines and polygons whose center cannot hold, throwing bright bits of body shrapnel all over the room, interfering with people's avatars, flickering and disappearing. The gorillas don't mind. They shove their long furry fingers into the midst of the disintegrating cloud and latch onto it somehow and carry it past Hiro, toward the exit. Hiro looks down as it goes past him and sees what looks very much like Da5id's face as viewed through a pile of shattered glass. It's just a momentary glimpse. Then the avatar is gone, expertly drop-kicked out the front door, soaring out over the Street in a long flat arc that takes it over the horizon. Hiro looks up the aisle to see Da5id's table, empty, surrounded by stunned hackers. Some of them are shocked, some are trying to stifle grins. Da5id Meier, supreme hacker overload, founding father of the Metaverse protocol, creator and proprietor of the world-famous Black Sun, has just suffered a system crash. He's been thrown out of his own bar by his own daemons. 10 About the second or third thing they learned how to do when studying to become Kouriers was how to shiv open a pair of handcuffs. Handcuffs are not intended as longterm restraint devices, millions of Clink franchisees to the contrary. And the longtime status of skateboarders as an oppressed ethnic group means that by now all of them are escape artists of some degree. First things first. Y.T. has many a thing hanging off her uniform. The uniform has a hundred pockets, big flat pockets for deliveries and eensy narrow pockets for gear, pockets sewn into sleeves, thighs, shins. The equipment stuck into these multifarious pockets tends to be small, tricky, lightweight: pens, markers, penlights, penknives, lock picks, bar-code scanners, flares, screwdrivers, Liquid Knuckles, bundy stunners, and lightsticks. A calculator is stuck upside-down to her right thigh, doubling as a taxi meter and a stopwatch. On the other thigh is a personal phone. As the manager is locking the door upstairs, it begins to ring. Y.T. unhooks it with her free hand. It is her mother. "Hi, Mom. Fine, how are you? I'm at Tracy's house. Yeah, we went to the Metaverse. We were just fooling around at this arcade on the Street. Pretty bumpin'. Yes, I used a nice avatar. Nah, Tracy's mom said she'd give me a ride home later. But we might stop off at the joyride on Victory for a while, okay? Okay, well, sleep tight, Mom. I will. I love you, too. See you later." She punches the flash button, killing the chat with Mom and giving her a fresh dial tone in the space of about half a second. "Roadkill," she says. The telephone remembers and dials Roadkill's number. Roaring sounds. This is the sound of air peeling over the microphone of Roadkill's personal phone at some terrifying velocity. Also the competing whooshes of many vehicles' tires on pavement, broken by chuckhole percussion; sounds like the crumbling Ventura. "Yo, Y.T.," Roadkill says, "'sup?" "'Sup with you?" "Surfing the Turf. 'Sup with you?" "Maxing The Clink." "Whoa! Who popped you?" "MetaCops. Affixed me to the gate of White Columns with a loogie gun." "Whoa, how very! When you leaving?" "Soon. Can you swing by and give me a hand?." "What do you mean?" Men. "You know, give me a hand. You're my boyfriend," she says, speaking very simply and plainly. "If I get popped, you're supposed to come around and help bust me out." Isn't everyone supposed to know this stuff? Don't parents teach their kids anything anymore? "Well, uh, where are you?" "Buy 'n' Fly number 501,762." "I'm on my way to Bernie with a super-ultra." As in San Bernardino. As in super-ultra-high-priority delivery. As in, you're out of luck. "Okay, thanks for nothing." "Sorry." "Surfing safety," Y.T. says, in the traditional sarcastic sign off. "Keep breathing," Roadkill says. The roaring noise snaps off. What a jerk. Next date, he's really going to have to grovel. But in the meantime, there's one other person who owes her one. The only problem is that he might be a spaz. But it's worth a try. "Hello?" he says into his personal phone. He's breathi