e. Behind him, the interior of the semi is brightly lit up. Halogen light glares off the man's slick hairdo. Even with this backlighting, she can tell it is the man with the glass eye. "What do you want?" she says. "What I want," he says, looking her up and down, and what I need are different things. Right now I'm working, see, which means that what I want is not important. What I need is for you to get into this truck along with your skateboard and that suitcase." Then he adds, "Am I getting through to you?" He asks the question almost rhetorically, like he presumes the answer is no. "He's for real," Jason says, as though Y.T. must be hanging on his opinion. "Well, there you have it," the man with the glass eye says. Y.T. is supposed to be on her way to a Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates franchise. If she screws up this delivery, that means she's double-crossing God, who may or may not exist, and in any case who is capable of forgiveness. The Mafia definitely exists and hews to a higher standard of obedience. She hands her stuff - the plank and the aluminum case - up to the man with the glass eye, then vaults up into the back of the semi, ignoring his proffered hand. He recoils, holds up his hand, looks at it to see if there's something wrong with it. By the time her feet leave the ground, the truck is already moving. By the time the door is pulled shut behind her, they have already pulled onto the boulevard. "Just gotta run a few tests on this delivery of yours," the man with the glass eye says. "Ever think of introducing yourself?" Y.T. says. "Nah," he says, "people always forget names. You can just think of me as that one guy, y'know?" Y.T. is not really listening. She is checking out the inside of the truck. The trailer of this rig consists of a single long skinny room. Y.T. has just come in through its only entrance. At this end of the room, a couple of Mafia guys are lounging around, the way they always do. Most of the room is taken up by electronics. Big electronics. "Going to just do some computer stuff, y'know," he says, handing the briefcase over to a computer guy. Y.T. knows he's a computer guy because he has long hair in a ponytail and he's wearing jeans and he seems gentle. "Hey, if anything happens to that, my ass is grass," Y.T. says. She's trying to sound tough and brave, but it's a hollow act in these circumstances. The man with the glass eye is, like, shocked. "What do you think I am, some kind of incredibly stupid dickhead?" he says. "Shit, that's just what I need, trying to explain to Uncle Enzo how I managed to get his little bunny rabbit shot in the kneecaps." "It's a noninvasive procedure," the computer guy says in a placid, liquid voice. The computer guy rotates the case around in his hand a few times, just to get a feel for it. Then he slides it into a large open-ended cylinder that is resting on the top of a table. The walls of the cylinder are a couple of inches thick. Frost appears to be growing on this thing. Mystery gases continuously slide off of it, like teaspoons of milk dropped into turbulent water. The gases plunge out across the table and drop to the floor, where they make a little carpet of fog that flows and blooms around their shoes. When the computer guy has it in place, he yanks his hand back from the cold . Then he puts on a pair of computer goggles. That's all there is to it. He just sits there for a few minutes. Y.T. is not a computer person, but she knows that somewhere behind the cabinets and doors in the back of this truck there is a big computer doing a lot of things right now. "It's like a CAT scanner," the man with the glass eye says, using the same hushed tone of voice as a sportscaster in a golfing tournament. "But it reads everything, you know," he says, rotating his hands impatiently in all-encompassing circles. "How much does it cost?" "I don't know." "What's it called?" "Doesn't really have a name yet." "Well, who makes it?" "We made the goddamn thing," the man with the glass eye says. "Just, like in the last couple weeks." "What for?" "You're asking too many questions. Look. You're a cute kid. I mean, you're a hell of a chick. You're a knockout. But don't go thinking you're too important at this stage." At this stage. Hmm. 24 Hiro is in his 20-by-30 at the U-Stor-It. He is spending a little time in Reality, as per the suggestion of his partner. The door is open so that ocean breezes and jet exhaust can blow through. All the furniture - the futons, the cargo pallet, the experimental cinderblock furniture - has been pushed up against the walls. He is holding a one-meter-long piece of heavy rebar with tape wrapped around one end to make a handle. The rebar approximates a katana, but it is very much heavier. He calls it redneck katana. He is in the kendo stance, barefoot. He should be wearing voluminous ankle-length culottes and a heavy indigo tunic, which is the traditional uniform, but instead he is wearing jockey shorts. Sweat is running down his smoothly muscled cappuccino back and exploring his cleavage. Blisters the size of green grapes are forming on the ball of his left foot. Hiro's heart and lungs are well developed, and he has been blessed with unusually quick reflexes, but he is not intrinsically strong, the way his father was. Even if he were intrinsically strong, working with the redneck katana would be very difficult. He is full of adrenaline, his nerves are shot, and his mind is cluttered up with free-floating anxiety - floating around on an ocean of generalized terror. He is shuffling back and forth down the thirty-foot axis of the room. From time to time he will accelerate, raise the redneck katana up over his head until it is pointed backward, then bring it swiftly down, snapping his wrists at the last moment so that it comes to a stop in midair. Then he says, "Next"' Theoretically. In fact, the redneck katana is difficult to stop once it gets moving. But it's good exercise. His forearms look like bundles of steel cables. Almost. Well, they will soon, anyway. The Nipponese don't go in for this nonsense about follow-through. If you strike a man on the top of his head with a katana and do not make any effort to stop the blade, it will divide his skull and probably get hung up in his collarbone or his pelvis, and then you will be out there in the middle of the medieval battlefield with a foot on your late opponent's face, trying to work the blade loose as his best friend comes running up to you with a certain vengeful gleam in his eye. So the plan is to snap the blade to a full stop just after the impact, maybe crease his brainpan an inch or two, then whip it out and look for another samurai, hence: "Next!" He has been thinking about what happened earlier tonight with Raven, which pretty much rules out sleep, and this is why he is practicing with the redneck katana at three in the morning. He knows he was totally unprepared. The spear just came at him. He slapped at it with the blade. He happened to slap it at the right time, and it missed him. But he did this almost absentmindedly. Maybe that's how great warriors do it. Carelessly, not wracking their minds with the consequences. Maybe he's flattering himself. The sound of a helicopter has been getting louder for some minutes now. Even though Hiro lives right next to the airport, this is unusual. They're not supposed to fly right near LAX, it raises evident safety questions. It doesn't stop getting louder until it is very loud, and at that point, the helicopter is hovering a few feet above the parking lot, right out in front of Hiro and Vitaly's 20-by-30. It's a nice one, a corporate jet chopper, dark green, with subdued markings. Hiro suspects that in brighter light, he would be able to make out the logo of a defense contractor, most likely General Jim's Defense System. A pale-faced white man with a very high forehead-cum-bald spot jumps out of the chopper, looking a lot more athletic than his face and general demeanor would lead you to expect, and jogs across the parking lot directly toward Hiro. This is the kind of guy Hiro remembers from when his dad was in the Army - not the gristly veterans of legends and movies, just sort of regular thirty-five-year-old guys rattling around in bulky uniforms. He's a major. His name, sewn onto his BDUs, is Clem. "Hiro Protagonist?" "The same." "Juanita sent me to pick you up. She said you'd recognize the name." "I recognize the name. But I don't really work for Juanita." "She says you do now." "Well, that's nice," Hiro says. "So I guess it's kind of urgent?" "I think that would be a fair assumption," Major Clem says. "Can I spare a few minutes? Because I've been working out, and I need to run next door." Major Clem looks next door. The next logo down the strip is THE REST STOP. "The situation is fairly static. You could spare five minutes," Major Clem says. Hiro has an account with The Rest Stop. To live at the U-Stor-It, you sort of have to have an account. So he gets to bypass the front office where the attendant waits by the cash register. He shoves his membership card into a slot, and a computer screen lights up with three choices: M F NURSERY (UNISEX) Hiro slaps the "M" button. Then the screen changes to a menu of four choices: OUR SPECIAL LIMITED FACILITIES - THRIFTY BUT SANITARY STANDARD FACILITIES - JUST LIKE HOME - MAYBE JUST A LITTLE BETTER PRIME FACILITIES - A GRACIOUS PLACE FOR THE DISCRIMINATING PATRON THE LAVATORY GRANDE ROYALE He has to override a well-worn reflex to stop himself from automatically punching SPECIAL LIMITED FACILITIES, which is what he and all the other U-Stor-It residents always use. Almost impossible to go in there and not come in contact with someone else's bodily fluids. Not a pretty sight. Not at all gracious. Instead - what the fuck, Juanita's going to hire him, right? - he slams the button for LAVATORY GRANDE ROYALE. Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega-jackpot. It's got everything that a dimwitted pathological gambler would identify with luxury: gold-plated fixtures, lots of injection-molded pseudomarble, velvet drapes, and a butler. None of the U-Stor-It residents ever use The Lavatory Grande Royale. The only reason it's here is that this place happens to be across the street from LAX. Singaporean CEOs who want to have a shower and take a nice, leisurely crap, with all the sound effects, without having to hear and smell other travelers doing the same, can come here and put it all on their corporate travel card. The butler is a thirty-year-old Centroamerican whose eyes look a little funny, like they've been closed for the last several hours. He is just throwing some improbably thick towels over his arm as Hiro bursts in. "Gotta get in and out in five minutes," Hiro says. "You want shave?" the butler says. He paws at his own checks suggestively, unable to peg Hiro's ethnic group. "Love to. No time." He peels off his jockey shorts, tosses his swords onto the crushed-velvet sofa, and steps into the marbleized amphitheatre of the shower stall. Hot water hits him from all directions at once. There's a knob on the wall so you can choose your favorite temperature. Afterward, he'd like to take a dump, read some of those glossy phone book-sized magazines next to the high-tech shitter, but he's got to get going. He dries himself off with a fresh towel the size of a circus tent, yanks on some loose drawstring slacks and a T-shirt, throws some Kongbucks at the butler, and runs out, girding himself with the swords. It's a short flight, mostly because the military pilot is happy to eschew comfort in favor of speed. The chopper takes off at a shallow angle, keeping low so it won't get sucked into any jumbo jets, and as soon as the pilot gets room to maneuver, he whips the tail around, drops the nose, and lets the rotor yank them onward and upward across the basin, toward the sparsely lit mass of the Hollywood Hills. But they stop short of the Hills, and end up on the roof of a hospital. Part of the Mercy chain, which technically makes this Vatican airspace. So far, this has Juanita written all over it. "Neurology ward," Major Clem says, delivering this string of nouns like an order. "Fifth floor, east wing, room 564." The man in the hospital bed is Da5id. Extremely thick, wide leather straps have been stretched across the head and foot of the bed. Leather cuffs, lined with fluffy sheepskin, are attached to the straps. These cuffs have been fastened around Da5id's wrists and ankles. He's wearing a hospital gown that has mostly fallen off. The worst thing is that his eyes don't always point in the same direction. He's hooked up to an EKG that's charting his heartbeat, and even though Hiro's not a doctor, he can see it's not a regular pattern. It beats too fast, then it doesn't beat at all, then an alarm sounds, then it starts beating again. He has gone completely blank. His eyes are not seeing anything. At first, Hiro thinks that his body is limp and relaxed. Getting closer, he sees that Da5id is taut and shivering, slick with perspiration. "We put in a temporary pacemaker," a woman says. Hiro turns. It's a nun who also appears to be a surgeon. "How long has he been in convulsions?" "His ex-wife called us in, said she was worried." "Juanita." "Yes. When the paramedics arrived, he had fallen out of his chair at home and was convulsing on the floor. You can see a bruise, here, where we think his computer fell off the table and hit him in the ribs. So to protect him from further damage, we put him in four-points. But for the last half hour he's been like this - like his whole body is in fibrillation. If he stays this way, we'll take the restraints off." "Was he wearing goggles?" "I don't know. I can check for you." "But you think this happened while he was goggled into his computer?" "I really don't know, sir. All I know is, he's got such bad cardiac arrhythmia that we had to implant a temporary pacemaker right there on his office floor. We gave him some seizure medication, which didn't work. Put him on some downers to calm him, which worked slightly. Put his head into various pieces of imaging machinery to find out what the problem was. The jury is still out on that." "Well, I'm going to go look at his house," Hiro says. The doctor shrugs. "Let me know when he comes out of it," Hiro says. The doctor doesn't say anything to this. For the first time, Hiro realizes that Da5id's condition may not be temporary. As Hiro is stepping out into the hallway, Da5id speaks, "e ne em ma ni a gi a gi ni mu ma ma dam e ne em am an ki ga a gi a gi..." Hiro turns around and looks. Da5id has gone limp in the restraints, seems relaxed, half asleep. He is looking at Hiro through half-closed eyes. "e ne em dam gal nun na a gi agi e ne em u mu un abzu ka a gi a agi..." Da5id's voice is deep and placid, with no trace of stress. The syllables roll off his tongue like drool. As Hiro walks down the hallway he can hear Da5id talking all the way. "i ge en i ge en nu ge en nu ge en us sa tur ra lu ra ze em men..." Hiro gets back into the chopper. They cruise up the middle of Beachwood Canyon, headed straight for the Hollywood sign. Da5id's house has been transfigured by light. It's at the end of its own little road, at the summit of a hill. The road has been blocked off by a squat froglike jeep-thing from General Jim's, saturated red and blue light sweeping and pulsing out of it. Another helicopter is above the house, supported on a swirling column of radiance. Soldiers creep up and down the property, carrying hand-held searchlights. "We took the precaution of securing the area," Major Clem says. At the fringes of all this light, Hiro can see the dead organic colors of the hillside. The soldiers are trying to push it back with their searchlights, trying to burn it away. He is about to bury himself in it, become a single muddy pixel in some airline passenger's window. Plunging into the biomass. Da5id's laptop is on the floor next to the table where he liked to work. It is surrounded by medical debris. In the middle of this, Hiro finds Da5id's goggles, which either fell off when he hit the floor, or were stripped off by the paramedics. Hiro picks up the goggles. As he brings them up toward his eyes, he sees the image: a wall of black-and-white static. Da5id's computer has snow-crashed. He closes his eyes and drops the goggles. You can't get hurt by looking at a bitmap. Or can you? The house is sort of a modernist castle with a high turret on one end. Da5id and Hiro and the rest of the hackers used to go up there with a case of beer and a hibachi and just spend a whole night, eating jumbo shrimp and crab legs and oysters and washing them down with beer. Now it's deserted, of course, just the hibachi, which is rusted and almost buried in gray ash, like an archaeological relic. Hiro has pinched one of Da5id's beers from the fridge, and he sits up here for a while, in what used to be his favorite place, drinking his beer slowly, like he used to, reading stories in the lights. The old central neighborhoods are packed in tight below an eternal, organic haze. In other cities, you breathe industrial contaminants, but in L.A., you breathe amino acids. The hazy sprawl is ringed and netted with glowing lines, like hot wires in a toaster. At the outlet of the canyon, it comes close enough that the light sharpens and breaks up into stars, arches, glowing letters. Streams of red and white corpuscles throb down highways to the fuzzy logic of intelligent traffic lights. Farther away, spreading across the basin, a million sprightly logos smear into solid arcs, like geometric points merging into curves. To either side of the franchise ghettos, the loglo dwindles across a few shallow layers of development and into a surrounding dimness that is burst here and there by the blaze of a security spotlight in someone's backyard. The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder - its DNA - xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines. In olden times, you'd wander down to Mom's Cafe for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn't recognize. If you did enough traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere. But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald's and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald's is Home, condensed into a three-ring binder and xeroxed. "No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture. The only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris; immigrants, thrown out like shrapnel from the destruction of the Asian powers; young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. Young smart people like Da5id and Hiro, who take the risk of living in the city because they like stimulation and they know they can handle it. 25 Y.T. can't really tell where they are. It's clear that they're stuck in traffic. It's not like this is predictable or anything. "Y.T. must get under way now," she announces. No reaction for a sec. Then the hacker guy sits back in his chair, stares out through his goggles, ignoring the 3-D compu-display, taking in a nice view of the wall. "Okay," he says. Quick as a mongoose, the man with the glass eye darts in, yanks the aluminum case out of the cryogenic cylinder, tosses it to Y.T. Meantime, one of the lounging-around Mafia guys is opening the back door of the truck, giving them all a nice view of a traffic jam on the boulevard. "One other thing," the man with the glass eye says, and shoves an envelope into one of Y.T.'s multitudinous pockets. "What's that?" Y.T. says. He holds up his hands self-protectively. "Don't worry, it's just a little something. Now get going." He motions at the guy who's holding her plank. The guy turns out to be fairly hip, because he just throws the plank. It lands at an odd angle on the floor between them. But the spokes have long ago seen the floor coming, calculated all the angles, extended and flexed themselves like the legs and feet of a basketball player coming back to earth from a monster dunk. The plank lands on its feet, banks this way, then that, as it regains its balance, then steers itself right up to Y.T. and stops beside her. She stands on it, kicks a few times, flies out the back door of the semi, and onto the hood of a Pontiac that was following them much too closely. Its windshield makes a nice surface to bank off of, and she gets her direction neatly reversed by the time she hits the pavement. The owner of the Pontiac is honking self-righteously, but there's no way he can chase her down because traffic is totally stopped, Y.T. is the only thing for miles around that is actually capable of movement. Which is the whole point of Kouriers in the first place. The Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates #1106 is a pretty big one. Its low serial number implies great age. It was built long ago, when land was cheap and lots were big. The parking lot is half full. Usually, all you see at a Reverend Wayne's are old beaters with wacky Spanish expressions nail-polished on the rear bumpers - the rides of Centro-American evangelicals who have come up north to get decent jobs and escape the relentlessly Catholic style of their homelands. This lot also has a lot of just plain old regular bimbo boxes with license plates from all the Burbclaves. Traffic is moving a little better on this stretch of the boulevard, and so Y.T. comes into the lot at a pretty good clip, takes one or two orbits around the franchise to work off her speed. A smooth parking lot is hard to resist when you are going fast, and to look at it from a slightly less juvenile point of view, it's a good idea to scope things out, to be familiar with your environment. Y.T. learns that this parking lot is linked with that of a Chop Shop franchise next door ("We turn any vehicle into CASH in minutes!"), which in turn flows into the lot of a neighboring strip mall. A dedicated thrasher could probably navigate from L.A. to New York by coasting from one parking lot into the next. This parking lot makes popping and skittering noises in some areas. Looking down, she sees that behind the franchise, near the dumpster, the asphalt is strewn with small glass vials, like the one that Squeaky was looking at last night. They are scattered about like cigarette butts behind a bar. When the footpads of her wheels pass over these vials, they tiddlywink out from underneath and skitter across the pavement. People are lined up out the door, waiting to get in. Y.T. jumps the line and goes inside. The front room of the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates is, of course, like all the others. A row of padded vinyl chairs where worshippers can wait for their number to be called, with a potted plant at each end and a table strewn with primeval magazines. A toy comer where kids can kill time, reenacting imaginary, cosmic battles in injection-molded plastic. A counter done up in fake wood so it looks like something from an old church. Behind the counter, a pudgy high school babe, dishwater blond hair that has been worked over pretty good with a curling iron, blue metal-flake eyeshadow, an even coat of red makeup covering her broad, gelatinous cheeks, a flimsy sort of choir robe thrown over her T-shirt. When Y.T. comes in, she is right in the middle of a transaction. She sees Y.T. right away, but no three-ring binder anywhere in the world allows you to flag or fail in the middle of a transaction. Stymied, Y.T. sighs and crosses her arms to convey impatience. In any other business establishment, she'd already be raising hell and marching around behind the counter as if she owned the place. But this is a church, damn it. There's a little rack along the front of the counter bearing religious tracts, free for the taking, donation requested. Several slots on the rack are occupied by the Reverend Wayne's famous bestseller. How America Was Saved from Communism: ELVIS SHOT JFK. She pulls out the envelope that the man with the glass eye stuck into her pocket. It is not thick and soft enough to contain a lot of cash, unfortunately. It contains half a dozen snapshots. All of them feature Uncle Enzo. He is on the broad, flat horseshoe driveway of a large house, larger than any house Y.T. has ever seen with her own two eyes. He is standing on a skateboard. Or falling off of a skateboard. Or coasting, slowly, arms splayed wildly out to the sides, chased by nervous security personnel. A piece of paper is wrapped around the pictures. It says: "Y.T. Thanks for your help. As you can see from these pictures, I tried to train for this assignment, but it's going to take some practice. Your friend, Uncle Enzo." Y.T. wraps the pictures up just the way they were, puts them back in her pocket, stifles a smile, returns to business matters. The girl in the robe is still performing her transaction behind the counter. The transactee is a stocky Spanish-speaking woman in an orange dress. The girl types some stuff into the computer. The customer snaps her Visa card down on the fake wood altar top; it sounds like a rifle shot. The girl pries the card up using her inch-long fingernails, a dicey and complicated operation that makes Y.T. think of insects climbing out of their egg sacs. Then she performs the sacrament, swiping the card through its electromagnetic slot with a carefully modulated sweep of the arm, as though tearing back a veil, handing over the slip, mumbling that she needs a signature and daytime phone number. She might as well have been speaking Latin, but that's okay, since this customer is familiar with the liturgy and signs and numbers it before the words are fully spoken. Then it just remains for the Word from On High. But computers and communications are awfully good these days, and it usually doesn't take longer than a couple of seconds to perform a charge-card verification. The little machine beeps out its approval code, heavenly tunes sing out from tinny speakers, and a wide pair of pearlescent doors in the back of the room swing majestically open. "Thank you for your donation," the girl says, slurring the words together into a single syllable. The customer stomps toward the double doors, drawn in by hypnotic organ strains. The interior of the chapel is weirdly colored, illuminated partly by fluorescent fixtures wedged into the ceiling and partly by large colored light boxes that simulate stained-glass windows. The largest of these, shaped like a fattened Gothic arch, is bolted to the back wall, above the altar, and features a blazing trinity: Jesus, Elvis, and the Reverend Wayne. Jesus gets top billing. The worshipper is not half a dozen steps into the place before she thuds down on her knees in the middle of the aisle and begins to speak in tongues: "ar ia ari ar isa ve na a mir ia i sa, ve na a mir ia a sar ia..." The doors swing shut again. "Just a sec," the girl says, looking at Y.T. a little nervously. She goes around the corner and stands in the middle of the toy area, inadvertently getting the hem of her robe caught up in a Ninja Raft Warriors battle module, and knocks on the door to the potty. "Busy!" says a man's voice from the other side of the door. "The Kourier's here," the girl says. "I'll be right out," the man says, more quietly. And he really is right out. Y.T. does not perceive any waiting time, no zipping up of the fly or washing of the hands. He is wearing a black suit with a clerical collar, pulling a lightweight black robe on over that as he emerges into the toy area, crushing little action figures and fighter aircraft beneath his black shoes. His hair is black and well greased, with individual strands of gray, and he wears wire-rimmed bifocals with a subtle brownish tint. He has very large pores. And by the time he gets close enough that Y.T. can see all of these details, she can also smell him. She smells Old Spice, plus a strong whiff of vomit on his breath. But it's not boozy vomit. "Gimme that," he says, and yanks the aluminum briefcase from her hand. Y.T. never lets people do that. "You have to sign for it, " she says. But she knows it's too late. If you don't get them to sign first, you're screwed. You have no power, no leverage. You're just a brat on a skateboard. Which is why Y.T. never lets people yank deliveries out of her hand. But this guy is a minister, for God's sake. She just didn't reckon on it. He yanked it out of her hand - and now he runs with it back to his office. "I can sign for it," the girl says. She looks scared. More than that, she looks sick. "It has to be him personally," Y.T. says. "Reverend Dale T. Thorpe." Now she's done being shocked and starting to be pissed. So she just follows him right into his office. "You can't go in there," the girl says, but she says it dreamily, sadly, like this whole thing is already half forgotten. Y.T. opens the door. The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe sits at his desk. The aluminum briefcase is open in front of him. It is filled with the same complicated bit of business that she saw the other night, after the Raven thing. The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe seems to be leashed by the neck to this device. No, actually he is wearing something on a string around his neck. He was keeping it under his clothes, the way Y.T. keeps Uncle Enzo's dog tags. He has pulled it out now and shoved it into a slot inside the aluminum case. It appears to be a laminated ID card with a bar code on it. Now he pulls the card out and lets it dangle down his front. Y.T. cannot tell whether he has noticed her. He is typing on the keyboard, punching away with two fingers, missing letters, doing it again. Then motors and servos inside the aluminum case whir and shudder. The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe has unsnapped one of the little vials from its place in the lid and inserted it into a socket next to the keyboard. It is slowly drawn down inside the machine. The vial pops back out again. The red plastic cap is emitting grainy red light. It has little LEDs built into it, and they are spelling out numbers, counting down seconds: 5,4,3,2,1... The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe holds the vial up to his left nostril. When the LED counter gets down to zero, it hisses, like air coming out of a tire valve. At the same time, he inhales deeply, sucking it all into his lungs. Then he shoots the vial expertly into his wastebasket. "Reverend?" the girl says. Y.T. spins around to see her drifting toward the office. "Would you do mine now, please?" The Reverend Dale T. Thorpe does not answer. He has slumped back in his leather swivel chair and is staring at a neon-framed blowup of Elvis, in his Army days, holding a rifle. 26 When he wakes up, it's the middle of the day and he is all dried out from the sun, and birds are circling overhead, trying to decide whether he's dead or alive. Hiro climbs down from the roof of the turret and, throwing caution to the wind, drinks three glasses of L.A. tap water. He gets some bacon out of Da5id's fridge and throws it in the microwave. Most of General Jim's people have left, and there is only a token guard of soldiers down on the road. Hiro locks all the doors that look out on the hillside, because he can't stop thinking about Raven. Then he sits at the kitchen table and goggles in. The Black Sun is mostly full of Asians, including a lot of people from the Bombay film industry, glaring at each other, stroking their black mustaches, trying to figure out what kind of hyperviolent action film will play in Persepolis next year. It is nighttime there. Hiro is one of the few Americans in the joint. Along the back wall of the bar is a row of private rooms, ranging from little tete-a-tetes to big conference rooms where a bunch of avatars can gather and have a meeting. Juanita is waiting for Hiro in one of the smaller ones. Her avatar just looks like Juanita. It is an honest representation, with no effort made to hide the early suggestions of crow's-feet at the corners of her big black eyes. Her glossy hair is so well resolved that Hiro can see individual strands refracting the light into tiny rainbows. "I'm at Da5id's house. Where are you?" Hiro says. "In an airplane - so I may break up," Juanita says. "You on your way here?" "To Oregon, actually." "Portland?" "Astoria." "Why on earth would you go to Astoria, Oregon, at a time like this?" Juanita takes a deep breath, lets it out shakily. "If I told you, we'd get into an argument." "What's the latest word on Da5id?" Hiro says. "The same." "Any diagnosis?" Juanita sighs, looks tired. "There won't be any diagnosis," she says. "It's a software, not a hardware, problem." "Huh?" "They're rounding up the usual suspects. CAT scans, NMR scans, PET scans, EEGs. Everything's fine. There's nothing wrong with his brain - his hardware." "It just happens to be running the wrong program?" "His software got poisoned. Da5id had a snow crash last night, inside his head." "Are you trying to say it's a psychological problem?" "It kind of goes beyond those established categories," Juanita says, "because it's a new phenomenon. A very old one, actually." "Does this thing just happen spontaneously, or what?" "You tell me," she says. "You were there last night. Did anything happen after I left?" "He had a Snow Crash hypercard that he got from Raven outside The Black Sun." "Shit. That bastard." "Who's the bastard? Raven or Da5id?" "Da5id. I tried to warn him." "He used it." Hiro goes on to explain the Brandy with the magic scroll. "Then later he had computer trouble and got bounced." "I heard about that part," she says. "That's why I called the paramedics." "I don't see the connection between Da5id's computer having a crash, and you calling an ambulance." "The Brandy's scroll wasn't just showing random static. It was flashing up a large amount of digital information, in binary form. That digital information was going straight into Da5id's optic nerve. Which is part of the brain, incidentally - if you stare into a person's pupil, you can see the terminal of the brain." "Da5id's not a computer. He can't read binary code." "He's a hacker. He messes with binary code for a living. That ability is firm-wired into the deep structures of his brain. So he's susceptible to that form of information. And so are you, home-boy." "What kind of information are we talking about?" "Bad news. A metavirus," Juanita says. "It's the atomic bomb of informational warfare - a virus that causes any system to infect itself with new viruses." "And that's what made Da5id sick?" "Yes." "Why didn't I get sick?" "Too far away. Your eyes couldn't resolve the bitmap. It has to be right up in your face." "I'll think about that one," Hiro says. "But I have another question. Raven also distributes another drug - in Reality - called, among other things, Snow Crash. What is it?" "It's not a drug," Juanita says. "They make it look like a drug and feel like a drug so that people will want to take it. It's laced with cocaine and some other stuff." "If it's not a drug, what is it?" "It's chemically processed blood serum taken from people who are infected with the metavirus," Juanita says. "That is, it's just another way of spreading the infection." "Who's spreading it?" "L. Bob Rife's private church. All of those people are infected." Hiro puts his head in his hands. He's not exactly thinking about this; he's letting it ricochet around in his skull, waiting for it to come to rest. "Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing - is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?" That Juanita is talking this way does not make it any easier for Hiro to get back on his feet in this conversation. "How can you say that? You're a religious person yourself." "Don't lump all religion together." "Sorry." "All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral - a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next. That's the way it used to be, and unfortunately, that's the way it's headed right now. But there have been several efforts to deliver us from the hands of primitive, irrational religion. The first was made by someone named Enki about four thousand years ago. The second was made by Hebrew scholars in the eighth century B.C., driven out of their homeland by the invasion of Sargon II, but eventually it just devolved into empty legalism. Another attempt was made by Jesus - that one was hijacked by viral influences within fifty days of his death. The virus was suppressed by the Catholic Church, but we're in the middle of a big epidemic that started in Kansas in 1900 and has been gathering momentum ever since." "Do you believe in God or not?" Hiro says. First things first. "Definitely."