By the time he's got the plastic wrapper cut away, Juanita is waving to him from the windows on top of the control tower.
He takes all the pieces that look to be part of the envelope and puts them into a separate pile. Then he assembles the remains of the tablet itself into a coherent group. It's not obvious, yet, how to piece them together, and he doesn't have time for jigsaw puzzles. So he goggles into his office, uses the computer to take an electronic snapshot of the fragments, and calls the Librarian.
“Yes, sir?”
“This hypercard contains a picture of a shattered clay tablet. Do you know of some software that would be good at piecing it back together?”
“One moment, sir,” the Librarian says. Then a hypercard appears in his hand. He gives it to Hiro. It contains a picture of an assembled tablet. “That's how it looks, sir.”
“Can you read Sumerian?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you read this tablet out loud?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get ready to do it. And hold on a second.”
Hiro walks over to the base of the control tower. There's a door there that gives him access to a stairwell. He climbs up to the control room, a strange mixture of Iron Age and high-tech. Juanita's waiting there, surrounded by peacefully slumbering wireheads. She taps a microphone that is projecting from a communications panel at the end of a flexible gooseneck—the same mike that the en was speaking into.
“Live to the Raft,” she says. “Go for it.”
Hiro puts his computer into speakerphone mode and stands up next to the microphone. “Librarian, read it back,” he says. And a string of syllables pours out of the speaker.
In the middle of it, Hiro glances up at Juanita. She's standing in the far corner of the room with her fingers stuck in her ears.
Down at the base of the stairs, a wirehead begins to talk. Deep down inside the Enterprise, there's more talking going on. And none of it makes any sense. It's just a lot of babbling.
There's an external catwalk on the control tower. Hiro goes out there and listens to the Raft. From all around them comes a dim roar, not of waves or wind, but of a million unchained human voices speaking in a confusion of tongues.
Juanita comes out to listen, too. Hiro sees a trickle of red under her ear.
“You're bleeding,” he says.
“I know. A little bit of primitive surgery,” she says. Her voice is strained and uncomfortable. “I've been carrying around a scalpel blade for cases like this.”
“What did you do?”
“Slid it up under the base of the antenna and cut the wire that goes into my skull,” she says.
“When did you do that?”
“While you were down on the flight deck.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?” she says. “So I wouldn't be exposed to the nam-shub of Enki. I'm a neurolinguistic hacker now, Hiro. I went through hell to obtain this knowledge. It's a part of me. Don't expect me to submit to a lobotomy.”
“If we get out of this, will you be my girl?”
“Naturally,” she says. “Now let's get out of it.”
62
“I was just doing my job, man,” she says. “This Enki dude wanted to get a message to Hiro, and I delivered it.”
“Shut up,” Rife says. He doesn't say it like he's pissed. He just wants her to be quiet. Because what she did doesn't make any difference now that all those wireheads have piled on top of Hiro.
Y.T. looks out the window. They are buzzing across the Pacific, keeping pretty low down so that the water skims quickly beneath them. She doesn't know how fast they're going, but it looks to be pretty damn fast. She always thought the ocean was supposed to be blue, but in fact it's the most boring gray color she's ever seen. And there's miles and miles of it.
After a few minutes, another chopper catches up with them and begins flying alongside, pretty close, in formation. It's the RARE chopper, the one full of medics.
Through its cabin window, she can see Raven sitting in one of the seats. At first she thinks he's still unconscious because he's kind of hunched over, not moving.
Then he lifts his head and she sees that he's goggled in to the Metaverse. He reaches up with one hand and pulls the goggles up onto his forehead for a moment, squints out the window, and sees her watching him. Their eyes meet and her heart starts flopping around weakly, like a bunny in a Ziploc bag. He grins and waves.
Y. T. sits back in her seat and pulls the shade down over the window.
63
From Hiro's front yard to L. Bob Rife's black cube at Port 127 is halfway around the Metaverse, a distance of 32,768 kilometers. The only hard part, really, is getting out of Downtown. He can ride his bike straight through the avatars as usual, but the Street is also cluttered with vehicles, animercials, commercial displays, public plazas, and other bits of solid-looking software that get in his way.
Not to mention a few distractions. Off to his right, about a kilometer away from The Black Sun, is a deep hole in the hyper-Manhattan skyline. It is an open plaza about a mile wide, a park of sorts where avatars can gather for concerts and conventions and festivals. Most of it is occupied by a deep-dish amphitheater that is capable of seating close to a million avatars at once. Down at the bottom is a huge circular stage.
Normally, the stage is occupied by major rock groups. Tonight, it is occupied by the grandest and most brilliant computer hallucinations that the human mind can invent. A three-dimensional marquee hangs above it, announcing tonight's event: a benefit graphics concert staged on behalf of Da5id Meier, who is still hospitalized with an inexplicable disease. The amphitheater is half filled with hackers.
Once he gets out of Downtown, Hiro twists his throttle up to the max and covers the remaining thirty-two thousand and some kilometers in the space of about ten minutes. Over his head, the express trains are whooshing down the track at a metaphorical speed of ten thousand miles per hour; he passes them like they're standing still. This only works because he's riding in an absolutely straight line. He's got a routine coded into his motorcycle software that makes it follow the monorail track automatically so that he doesn't even have to worry about steering it.
Meanwhile, Juanita's standing next to him in Reality. She's got another pair of goggles; she can see all the same things that Hiro sees.
“Rife's got a mobile uplink on his corporate chopper, just like the one on commercial airliners, so he can patch into the Metaverse when he's in the air. As long as he's airborne, that's his only link to the Metaverse. We may be able to hack our way into that one link and block it or something. . . .”
“That low-level communications stuff is too full of medicine for us to mess with it in this decade,” Hiro says, braking his motorcycle to a stop. “Holy shit. It's just like Y.T. described it.”
He's in front of Port 127. Rife's black cube is there, just as Y.T. described it. There's no door.
Hiro starts walking away from the Street, toward the cube. It reflects no light at all, so he can't tell whether it's ten feet or ten miles away from him until the security daemons begin to materialize. There are half a dozen of them, all big sturdy avatars in blue coveralls, sort of quasimilitary looking, but without rank. They don't need rank because they're all running the same program. They materialize around him in a neat semicircle with a radius of about ten feet, blocking Hiro's way to the cube.
Hiro mumbles a word under his breath and vanishes—he slips into his invisible avatar. It would be very interesting to hang around and see how these security daemons deal with it, but right now he has to get moving before they get a chance to adjust.
They don't, at least not very well. Hiro runs between two of the security daemons and heads for the wall of the cube. He finally gets there, slamming into it, coming to a dead stop. The security daemons have all turned around and are chasing him. They can figure out where he is—the computer tells them that much—but they can't do much to him. Like the bouncer daemons in The Black
Sun, which Hiro helped write, they shove people around by applying basic rules of avatar physics. When Hiro is invisible, there is very little for them to shove. But if they are well written, they may have more subtle ways of messing him up, so he's not wasting any time. He pokes his katana through the side of the cube and follows it through the wall and out the other side.
This is a hack. It is really based on a very old hack, a loophole that he found years ago when he was trying to graft the sword-fighting rules onto the existing Metaverse software. His blade doesn't have the power to cut a hole in the wall—this would mean permanently changing the shape of someone else's building—but it does have the power to penetrate things. Avatars do not have that power. That is the whole purpose of a wall in the Metaverse; it is a structure that does not allow avatars to penetrate it. But like anything else in the Metaverse, this rule is nothing but a protocol, a convention that different computers agree to follow. In theory, it cannot be ignored. But in practice, it depends upon the ability of different computers to swap information very precisely, at high speed, and at just the right times. And when you are connected to the system over a satellite uplink, as Hiro is, out here on the Raft, there is a delay as the signals bounce up to the satellite and back down. That delay can be taken advantage of, if you move quickly and don't look back. Hiro passes right through the wall on the tail end of his all-penetrating katana.
Rifeland is a vast, brightly lit space occupied by elementary shapes done up in primary colors. It is like being inside an educational toy designed to teach solid geometry to three-year-olds: cubes, spheres, tetrahedrons, polyhedrons, connected with a web of cylinders and lines and helices. But in this case, it has gone way, way out of control, as if every Tinkertoy set and Lego block ever made had been slapped together according to some long-forgotten scheme.
Hiro's been around the Metaverse long enough to know that despite the bright cheery appearance of this thing, it is, in fact, as simple and utilitarian as an Army camp. This is a model of a system. A big complicated system. The shapes probably represent computers, or central nodes in Rife's worldwide network, or Pearly Gates franchises, or any other kind of local and regional offices that Rife has going around the world. By clambering over this structure and going into those bright shapes, Hiro could probably uncover some of the code that makes Rife's network operate. He could, perhaps, try to hack it up, as Juanita suggested.
But there is no point in messing with something he doesn't understand. He might waste hours fooling around with some piece of code only to find out that it was the software to control the automatic toilet flushers at Rife Bible College. So Hiro keeps moving, keeps looking up at the tangle of shapes, trying to find a pattern. He knows, now, that he has found his way into the boiler room of the entire Metaverse. But he has no idea what he's looking for.
This system, he realizes, really consists of several separate networks all tangled together in the same space. There's an extremely complicated tangle of fine red lines, millions of them, running back and forth between thousands of small red balls. Just as a wild guess, Hiro figures that this may represent Rife's fiber-optics network, with its innumerable local offices and nodes spread all over the world. There are a number of less complicated networks in other colors, which might represent coaxial lines, such as they used to use for cable television, or even voice phone lines.
And there is a crude, heavily built, blocky network all done up in blue. It consists of a small number—fewer than a dozen—of big blue cubes. They are connected to each other, but to nothing else, by massive blue tubes; the tubes are transparent, and inside of them, Hiro can see bundles of smaller connections in various colors. It has taken Hiro a while to see all of this, because the blue cubes are nearly obscured; they are all surrounded by little red balls and other small nodes, like trees being over-whelmed with kudzu. It appears to be an older, preexisting network of some kind, with its own internal channels, mostly primitive ones like voice phone. Rife has patched into it, heavily, with his own, higher-tech systems.
Hiro maneuvers until he can get a closer look at one of the blue cubes, peering through the clutter of lines that has grown around it. The blue cube has a big white star on each of its six faces.
“It's the Government of the United States,” Juanita says.
“Where hackers go to die,” Hiro says. The largest, and yet the least efficient, producer of computer software in the world.
Hiro and Y.T. have eaten a lot of junk food together in different joints all over L.A.—doughnuts, burritos, pizza, sushi, you name it—and all Y.T. ever talks about is her mother and the terrible job that she has with the Feds. The regimentation. The lie-detector tests. The fact that for all the work she does, she really has no idea what it is that the government is really working on.
It's always been a mystery to Hiro, too, but then, that's how the government is. It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn't bother with, which means that there's probably no reason for it; you never know what they're doing or why. Hackers have traditionally looked upon the government's coding sweatshops with horror and just tried to forget that all of that shit ever existed.
But they have thousands of programmers. The programmers work twelve hours a day out of some twisted sense of personal loyalty. Their software-engineering techniques, while cruel and ugly, are very sophisticated. They must have been up to something.
“Juanita?”
“Yeah?”
“Don't ask me why I think this. But I think that the government has been undertaking a big software development project for L. Bob Rife.”
“Makes sense,” she says. “He has such a love-hate relationship with his programmers—he needs them, but he won't trust them. The government's the only organization he would trust to write something important. I wonder what it is?”
“Hold on,” Hiro says. “Hold on.”
He is now a stone's throw away from a big blue cube sitting at ground level. All the other blue cubes sort of feed into it. There is a motorcycle parked next to the cube, rendered in color, but just one notch above black and white: big jaggedy pixels and a limited color palette. It has a sidecar. Raven's standing next to it.
He is carrying something in his arms. It is another simple geometric construction, a long smooth blue ellipsoid a couple of feet in length. From the way he's moving, Hiro thinks that Raven has just removed it from the blue cube; he carries it over to the motorcycle and nestles it into the sidecar.
“The Big One,” Hiro says.
“It's exactly what we were afraid of,” Juanita says. “Rife's revenge.”
“Headed for the amphitheater. Where all the hackers are gathered in one place. Rife's going to infect all of them at once. He's going to burn their minds.”
64
Raven's already on the motorcycle. If Hiro chases him on foot, he might catch him before he reaches the Street.
But he might not. In that case, Raven would be on his way to Downtown at tens of thousands of miles per hour while Hiro was still trying to get back to his own motorcycle. At those speeds, once Hiro has lost sight of Raven, he's lost him forever.
Raven starts his bike, begins maneuvering carefully through the tangle, headed for the exit. Hiro takes off as fast as his invisible legs can carry him, headed straight for the wall.
He punches through a couple of seconds later, runs back to the Street. His tiny little invisible avatar can't operate the motorcycle, so he returns to his normal look, hops on his bike, and gets it turned around. Looking back, he sees Raven riding out toward the Street, the logic bomb glowing a soft blue, like heavy water in a reactor. He doesn't even see Hiro yet.
Now's his chance. He draws his katana, aims his bike at Raven, pumps it up to sixty or so miles an hour. No point in coming in too fast; the only way to kill Raven's avatar is to take its head off. Running it over with the motorcycle won't have any effect.
A security daemon is running toward Raven, waving his arms. Raven looks up, sees Hiro bearing do
wn on him, and bursts forward. The sword cuts air behind Raven's head.
It's too late. Raven must be gone now—but turning himself around, Hiro can see him in the middle of the Street. He slammed into one of the stanchions that holds up the monorail track—a perennial irritation to high-speed motorcyclists.
“Shit!” both of them say simultaneously.
Raven gets turned toward Downtown and twists his throttle just as Hiro is pulling in behind him on the Street, doing the same. Within a couple of seconds, they're both headed for Downtown at something like fifty thousand miles an hour. Hiro's half a mile behind Raven but can see him clearly: the streetlights have merged into a smooth twin streak of yellow, and Raven blazes in the middle, a storm of cheap color and big pixels.
“If I can take his head off, they're finished,” Hiro says.
“Gotcha,” Juanita says. “Because if you kill Raven, he gets kicked out of the system. And he can't sign back on until the Graveyard Daemons dispose of his avatar.”
“And I control the Graveyard Daemons. So all I have to do is kill the bastard once.”
“Once they get their choppers back to land, they'll have better access to the net—they can have someone else go into the Metaverse and take over for him,” Juanita warns.
“Wrong. Because Uncle Enzo and Mr. Lee are waiting for them on land. They have to do it during the next hour, or never.”
65
Y.T. suddenly wakes up. She hadn't realized that she was asleep. Something about the thwop of the rotor blades must have lulled her. She must be tired as shit, is what it really is.
“What the fuck is going on with my com net?” L. Bob Rife is squalling.
“No one answers,” the Russian pilot says. “Not Raft, not L.A., not Khyooston.”
“Get me LAX on the phone, then,” Rife says. “I want to take the jet to Houston. We'll get our butts over to the campus and find out what's going on.”