tches. "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 fuzz-grunge 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, trading 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. These days, most states are franchulates or Burbclaves, much too small to have anything like a jail, or even a judicial system. So when someone does something bad, they try to find quick and dirty punishments, like flogging, confiscation of property, public humiliation, or, in the case of people who have a high potential of going on to hurt others, a warning tattoo on a prominent body part. POOR IMPULSE CONTROL. Apparently, this guy went to such a place and lost his temper real bad. For an instant, a glowing red gridwork is plotted against the side of Raven's face. It rapidly shrinks, all sides converging inward toward the right pupil. Raven shakes his head, turns to look for the source of the laser light, but it's already gone. Lagos has already got his retinal scan. That's why Lagos is here. He's not interested in Hiro or Vitaly Chernobyl. He's interested in Raven. And somehow, Lagos knew that he was going to be here. And Lagos is somewhere nearby, right now, videotaping the guy, probing the contents of his pockets with radar, recording his pulse and respiration. Hiro picks up his personal phone. "Y.T.," he says, and it dials Y.T.'s number. It rings for a long time before she picks it up. It's almost impossible to hear anything over the sound of the concert. "What the fuck do you want?" "Y.T., I'm sorry about this. But something's going on. Something big time. I'm keeping one eye on a big biker named Raven." "The problem with you hackers is you never stop working." "That's what a hacker is," Hiro says. "I'll keep an eye on this Raven guy, too," she says, "sometime when I am working." Then she hangs up. 16 Raven makes a couple of broad, lazy sweeps along the perimeter of the crowd, going very slowly, looking in all directions. He is annoyingly calm and unhurried. Then he cuts farther out into the darkness, away from the crowd. He does a little more looking around, checking out the perimeter of the shantytown. And finally, he swings the big Harley around in a trajectory that brings him back to the big important Crip. The guy with the sapphire tie clip and the personal security detail. Hiro begins weaving through the crowd in that direction, trying not to be too obvious about it. This looks like it's going to be interesting. As Raven approaches, the bodyguards converge on the head Crip, form a loose protective ring around him. As he comes nearer, all of them back away a step or two, as though the man is surrounded by an invisible force field. He finally comes to a stop, deigns to put his feet on the ground. He flicks a few switches on the handlebars before he steps away from his Harley. Then, anticipating what's next, he stands with his feet apart and his arms up. One Crip approaches from each side. They don't look real happy about this particular duty, they keep casting sidelong glances at the motorcycle. The head Crip keeps goading them forward with his voice, shooing them toward Raven with his hands. Each one of them has a hand-held metal-detecting wand. They swirl the wands around his body and find nothing at all, not even the tiniest speck of metal, not even coins in his pocket. The man is 100 percent organic. So if nothing else, Lagos's warning about Raven's knife has turned out to be bullshit. These two Crips walk rapidly back to the main group. Raven begins to follow them. But the head Crip takes a step back, holds both of his hands up in a "stop" motion. Raven stops, stands there, the grin returning to his face. The head Crip turns away and gestures back toward his black BMW. The rear door of the BMW opens up and a man gets out, a younger, smaller black man in round wire-rims, wearing jeans and big white athletic shoes and typical studentish gear. The student walks slowly toward Raven, pulling something from his pocket. It's a hand-held device, but much too bulky to be a calculator. It's got a keypad on the top and a sort of window on one end, which the student keeps aiming toward Raven. There's an LED readout above the keypad and a red flashing light underneath that. The student is wearing a pair of headphones that are jacked into a socket on the butt of the device. For starters, the student aims the window at the ground, then at the sky, then at Raven, keeping his eye on the flashing red light and the LED readout. It has the feel of some kind of religious rite, accepting digital input from the sky spirit and then the ground spirit and then from the black biker angel. Then he begins to walk slowly toward Raven, one step at a time. Hiro can see the red light flashing intermittently, not following any particular pattern or rhythm. The student gets to within a yard of Raven and then orbits him a couple of times, always keeping the device aimed inward. When he's finished, he steps back briskly, turns, and aims it toward the motorcycle. When the device is aimed at the motorcycle, the red light flashes much more quickly. The student walks up to the head Crip, pulling off his headphones, and has a short conversation with him. The Crip listens to the student but keeps his eyes fixed on Raven, nods his head a few times, finally pats the student on his shoulder and sends him back to the BMW. It was a Geiger counter. Raven strolls up to the big Crip. They shake hands, a standard plain old Euro-shake, no fancy variations. It's not a real friendly get-together. The Crip has his eyes a little too wide open, Hiro can see the furrows in his brow, everything about his posture and his face screaming out: Get me away from this Martian. Raven goes back to his radioactive hog, releases a few bungee cords, and picks up a metal briefcase. He hands it to the head Crip, and they shake hands again. Then he turns away, walks slowly and calmly back to the motorcycle, gets on, and putt-putts away. Hiro would love to stick around and watch some more, but he has the feeling that Lagos has this particular event covered. And besides, he has other business. Two limousines are fighting their way through the crowd, headed for the stage. The limousines stop, and Nipponese people start to climb out. Dark-clad, unfunky, they stand around awkwardly in the middle of the party/riot, like a handful of broken nails suspended in a colorful jello mold. Finally, Hiro makes bold enough to go up and look into one of the windows to find out if this is who he thinks it is. Can't see through the smoked glass. He bends down, puts his face right near the window, trying to make it real obvious. Still no response. Finally, he knocks on the window. Silence. He looks up at the entourage. They are all watching him. But when he looks up they glance away, suddenly remember to drag on their cigarettes or rub their eyebrows. There is only one source of light inside the limousine that's bright enough to be visible through the smoked glass, and that is the distinctive inflated rectangle of a television screen. What the hell. This is America, Hiro is half American, and there's no reason to take this politeness thing to an unhealthy extreme. He hauls the door open and looks into the back of the limousine. Sushi K is sitting there wedged in between a couple of other young Nipponese men, programmers on his imageering team. His hairdo is turned off, so it just looks like an orange Afro. He is wearing a partly assembled stage costume, apparently expecting to be performing tonight. Looks like he's taking Hiro up on his offer. He's watching a well-known television program called Eye Spy. It is produced by CIC and syndicated through one of the major studios. It is reality television: CIC picks out one of their agents who is involved in a wet operation - doing some actual cloak-and-dagger work - and has him put on a gargoyle rig so that everything he sees and hears is transmitted back to the home base in Langley. This material is then edited into a weekly hour-long program. Hiro never watches it. Now that he works for CIC, he finds it kind of annoying. But he hears a lot of gossip about the show, and he knows that tonight they are showing the second-to-last episode in a five-part arc. CIC has smuggled a guy onto the Raft, where he is trying to infiltrate one of its many colorful and sadistic pirate bands: the Bruce Lee organization. Hiro enters the limousine and gets a look at the TV just in time to see Bruce Lee himself, as seen from the point of view of the hapless gargoyle spy, approaching down some dank corridor on a Raft ghost ship. Condensation is dripping from the blade of Bruce Lee's samurai sword. "Bruce Lee's men have trapped the spy in an old Korean factory ship in the Core," one of Sushi K's henchmen says, a rapid hissing explanation. "They are looking for him now." Suddenly, Bruce Lee is pinioned under a brilliant spotlight that makes his trademark diamond grin flash like the arm of a galaxy. In the middle of the screen, a pair of cross hairs swing into place, centered on Bruce Lee's forehead. Apparently, the spy has decided he must fight his way out of this mess and is bringing some powerful CIC weapons system to bear on Bruce Lee's skull. But then a blur comes in from the side, a mysterious dark shape blocking our view of Bruce Lee. The cross hairs are now centered on - what, exactly? We'll have to wait until next week to find out. Hiro sits down across from Sushi K and the programmers, next to the television set, so that he can get a TV's-eye view of the man. "I'm Hiro Protagonist. You got my message, I take it." "Fabu!" Sushi K cries, using the Nipponese abbreviation of the all-purpose Hollywood adjective "fabulous." He continues, "Hiro-san, I am deeply indebted to you for this once-in-a-lifetime chance to perform my small works before such an audience." He says the whole thing in Nipponese except for "once-in-a-lifetime chance." "I must humbly apologize for arranging the whole thing so hastily and haphazardly," Hiro says. "It pains me deeply that you should feel the need to apologize when you have given me an opportunity that any Nipponese rapper would give anything for - to perform my humble works before actual homeboys from the ghettos of L.A." "I am profoundly embarrassed to reveal that these fans are not exactly ghetto homeboys, as I must have carelessly led you to believe. They are thrashers. Skateboarders who like both rap music and heavy metal." "Ah. This is fine, then," Sushi K says. But his tone of voice suggests that it's not really fine at all. "But there are representatives of the Crips here," Hiro says, thinking very, very fast even by his standards, "and if your performance is well received, as I'm quite certain it will be, they will spread the word throughout their community." Sushi K rolls down the window. The decibel level quintuples in an instant. He stares at the crowd, five thousand potential market shares, young people with funkiness on their minds. They've never heard any music before that wasn't perfect. It's either studio-perfect digital sound from their CD players or performance-perfect fuzz-grunge from the best people in the business, the groups that have come to L.A. to make a name for themselves and have actually survived the gladiatorial combat environment of the clubs. Sushi K's face lights up with a combination of joy and terror. Now he actually has to go up there and do it. In front of the seething biomass. Hiro goes out and paves the way for him. That's easy enough. Then he bails. He's done his bit. No point in wasting time on this puny Sushi K thing when Raven is out there, representing a much larger source of income. So he wanders back out toward the periphery. "Yo! Dude with the swords," someone says. Hiro turns around, sees a green-jacketed Enforcer motioning to him. It's the short, powerful guy with the headset, the guy in charge of the security detail. "Squeaky," he says, extending his hand. "Hiro," Hiro says, shaking it, and handing over his business card. No particular reason to be coy with these guys. "What can I do for you, Squeaky?" Squeaky reads the card. He has a kind of exaggerated politeness that is kind of like a military man. He's calm, mature, role-modelesque, like a high school football coach. "You in charge of this thing?" "To the extent anyone is." "Mr. Protagonist, we got a call a few minutes ago from a friend of yours named Y.T." "What's wrong? Is she okay?" "Oh, yes, sir, she's just fine. But you know that bug you were talking to earlier?" Hiro's never heard the term "bug" used this way, but he reckons that Squeaky is referring to the gargoyle, Lagos. "Yeah." "Well, there's a situation involving that gentleman that Y.T. sort of tipped us off to. We thought you might want to have a look." "What's going on?" "Uh. why don't you come with me. You know, some things are easier to show than to explain verbally." As Squeaky turns, Sushi K's first rap song begins. His voice sounds tight and tense. I'm Sushi K and I'm here to say I like to rap in a different way Look out Number One in every city Sushi K rap has all most pretty My special talking of remarkable words Is not the stereotyped bucktooth nerd My hair is big as a galaxy Cause I attain greater technology Hiro follows Squeaky away from the crowd, into the dimly lit area on the edge of the shantytown. Up above them on the overpass embankment, he can dimly make out phosphorescent shapes - green-jacketed Enforcers orbiting some strange attractor. "Watch your step," Squeaky says as they begin to climb up the embankment. "It's slippery in places." I like to rap about sweetened romance My fond ambition is of your pants So here is of special remarkable way Of this fellow raps named Sushi K The Nipponese talking phenomenon Like samurai sword his sharpened tongue Who raps the East Asia and the Pacific Prosperity Sphere, to be specific It's a typical loose slope of dirt and stones that looks like it would wash away in the first rainfall. Sage and cactus and tumbleweeds here and there, all looking scraggly and half-dead from air pollution. It's hard to see anything clearly, because Sushi K is jumping around down below them on the stage, the brilliant orange rays of his sunburst hairdo are sweeping back and forth across the embankment at a speed that seems to be supersonic, washing grainy, gritty light over the weeds and the rocks and throwing everything into weird, discolored, high-contrast freeze frames. Sarariman on subway listen For Sushi K like nuclear fission Fire-breathing lizard Gojiro He my always big-time hero His mutant rap burn down whole block Start investing now Sushi K stock It on Nikkei stock exchange Waxes; other rappers wane Best investment, make my day Corporation Sushi K Squeaky is walking straight uphill, paralleling a fresh motorcycle track that has cut deeply into the loose yellow soil. It consists of a deep, wide track with a narrower one that runs parallel, a couple of feet to the right. The track gets deeper the farther up they go. Deeper and darker. It looks less and less like a motorcycle rut in loose dirt and more like a drainage ditch for some sinister black effluent. Coming to America now Rappers trying to start a row Say "Stay in Japan, please, listen! We can't handle competition!" U.S. rappers booing and hissin' Ask for rap protectionism They afraid of Sushi K Cause their audience go away He got chill financial backin' Give those U.S. rappers a smackin' Sushi K concert machine Fast efficient super clean Run like clockwork in a watch Kick old rappers in the crotch One of The Enforcers up the hill is carrying a flashlight. As he moves, it sweeps across the ground at a flat angle, briefly illuminating the ground like a searchlight. For an instant, the light shines into the motorcycle rut, and Hiro perceives that it has become a river of bright red, oxygenated blood. He learn English total immersion English/Japanese be mergin' Into super combination So can have fans in every nation Hong Kong they speak English, too Yearn of rappers just like you Anglophones who live down under Sooner later start to wonder When they get they own rap star Tired of rappers from afar Lagos is lying on the ground, sprawled across the tire track. He has been slit open like a salmon, with a single smooth-edged cut that begins at his anus and runs up his belly, through the middle of his sternum, all the way up to the point of his jaw. It's not just a superficial slash. It appears to go all the way to his spine in some places. The black nylon straps that hold his computer system to his body have been neatly cut where they cross the midline, and half of the stuff has fallen off into the dust. So I will get big radio traffic When you look at demographic Sushi K research statistic Make big future look ballistic Speed of Sushi K growth stock Put U.S. rappers into shock 17 Jason Breckinridge wears a terracotta blazer. It is the color of Sicily. Jason Breckinridge has never been to Sicily. He may get to go there someday, as a premium. In order to get the free cruise to Sicily, Jason has to accumulate 10,000 Goombata. Points. He begins this quest in a favorable position. By opening up his own Nova Sicilia franchise, he started out with an automatic 3,333 points in the Goombata Point bank. Add to that a one-time-only Citizenship Bonus of 500 points and the balance is starting to look pretty good. The number is stored in the big computer in Brooklyn. Jason grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago, one of the most highly franchised regions in the country. He attended the University of Illinois business school, racking up a GPA of 2.9567, and did a senior thesis called "The Interaction of the Ethnographic, Financial, and Paramilitary Dimensions of Competition in Certain Markets." This was a case study of turf struggle between Nova Sicilia and Narcolombia franchises in his old neighborhood in Aurora. Enrique Cortazar ran the failing Narcolombia franchise upon which Jason had hinged his argument. Jason interviewed him several times over the phone, briefly, but never saw Mr. Cortazar face to face. Mr. Cortazar celebrated Jason's graduation by firebombing the Breckinridges' Omni Horizon van in a parking lot and then firing eleven clips of automatic rifle ammunition through the front wall of their house. Fortunately, Mr. Caruso, who ran the local string of Nova Sicilia franchulates that was in the process of beating the pants off of Enrique Cortazar, got wind of these attacks before they happened, probably by intercepting signal intelligence from Mr. Cortazar's fleet of poorly secured cellular phones and CB radios. He was able to warn Jason's family in time, so that when all of those bullets flew through their house in the middle of the night, they were enjoying complimentary champagne in an Old Sicilia Inn five miles down Highway 96. Naturally, when the B-school held its end-of-the-year job fair, Jason made a point of swinging by the Nova Sicilia booth to thank Mr. Caruso for saving everyone in his family from certain death. "Hey, y'know, it was just, like a neighbor kinda thing, y'know, Jasie boy?" Mr. Caruso said, whacking Jason across the shoulder blades and squeezing his deltoids, which were the size of cantaloupes. Jason did not hit the steroids as hard as he had when he was fifteen, but he was still in great shape. Mr. Caruso was from New York. He had one of the most popular booths at the job fair. It was being held in a big exhibition space in the Union. The hall had been done up with an imaginary street pattern. Two "highways" divided it up into quadrants, and all the franchise companies and nationalities had their booths along the highways. Burbclaves and other companies had booths hidden among the suburban "streets" within the quadrants. Mr. Caruso's Nova Sicilia booth was right at the intersection of the two highways. Dozens of scrubby B-school grads were lined up there waiting to interview, but Mr. Caruso noticed Jason standing in line and went right up and plucked him out of line and grabbed his deltoids. All the other B-school grads stared at Jason enviously. That made Jason feel good, really special. That was the feeling he got about Nova Sicilia: personal