Snow Crash

  The snotty, fibrous drop of stuff has wrapped all the way around her hand and forearm and lashed them onto the bar of the gate. Excess goo has sagged and run down the bar a short ways, but is setting now, turning into rubber. A few loose strands have also whipped forward and gained footholds on her shoulder, chest, and lower face. She backs away and the adhesive separates from the fibers, stretching out into long, infinitely thin strands, like hot mozzarella. These set instantly, become solid, and then break, curling away like smoke. It is not quite so grotendous, now that the loogie is off her face, but her hand is still perfectly immobilized.

  “You are hereby warned that any movement on your part not explicitly endorsed by verbal authorization on my part may pose a direct physical risk to you, as well as consequential psychological and possibly, depending on your personal belief system, spiritual risks ensuing from your personal reaction to said physical risk. Any movement on your part constitutes an implicit and irrevocable acceptance of such risk,” the first MetaCop says. There is a little speaker on his belt, simultaneously translating all of this into Spanish and Japanese.

  “Or as we used to say,” the other MetaCop says, “freeze, sucker!”

  The untranslatable word resonates from the little speaker, pronounced “esucker” and “saka” respectively.

  “We are authorized Deputies of MetaCops Unlimited. Under Section 24.5.2 of the White Columns Code, we are authorized to carry out the actions of a police force on this territory.”

  “Such as hassling innocent thrashers,” Y.T. says.

  The MetaCop turns off the translator. “By speaking English you implicitly and irrevocably agree for all our future conversation to take place in the English language,” he says.

  “You can't even rez what Y.T. says,” Y.T. says.

  “You have been identified as an Investigatory Focus of a Registered Criminal Event that is alleged to have taken place on another territory, namely, The Mews at Windsor Heights.”

  “That's another country, man. This is White Columns!”

  “Under provisions of The Mews at Windsor Heights Code, we are authorized to enforce law, national security concerns, and societal harmony on said territory also. A treaty between The Mews at Windsor Heights and White Columns authorizes us to place you in temporary custody until your status as an Investigatory Focus has been resolved.”

  “Your ass is busted,” the second MetaCop says.

  “As your demeanor has been nonaggressive and you carry no visible weapons, we are not authorized to employ heroic measures to ensure your cooperation,” the first MetaCop says.

  “You stay cool and we'll stay cool,” the second MetaCop says.

  “However, we are equipped with devices, including but not limited to projectile weapons, which, if used, may pose an extreme and immediate threat to your health and well-being.”

  “Make one funny move and we'll blow your head off,” the second MetaCop says.

  “Just unglom my fuckin' hand,” Y.T. says. She has heard all this a million times before.

  White Columns, like most Burbclaves, has no jail, no police station. So unsightly. Property values. Think of the liability exposure. MetaCops has a franchise just down the road that serves as headquarters. As for a jail, some place to habeas the occasional stray corpus, any half-decent franchise strip has one.

  They are cruising in the Mobile Unit. Y.T.'s hands are cuffed together in front of her. One hand is still half-encased in rubbery goo, smelling so intensely of vinyl fumes that both MetaCops have rolled down their windows. Six feet of loose fibers trail into her lap, across the floor of the Unit, out the door, and drag on the pavement. The MetaCops are taking it easy, cruising down the middle lane, not above issuing a speeding ticket here and there as long as they're in their jurisdiction. Motorists around them drive slowly and sanely, appalled by the thought of having to pull over and listen to half an hour of disclaimers, advisements, and tangled justifications from the likes of these. The occasional CosaNostra delivery boy whips past them in the left lane, orange lights aflame, and they pretend not to notice.

  “What's it gonna be, the Hoosegow or The Clink?” the first MetaCop says. From the way he is talking, he must be talking to the other MetaCop.

  “The Hoosegow, please,” Y.T. says.

  “The Clink!” the other MetaCop says, turning around, sneering at her through the antiballistic glass, wallowing in power.

  The whole interior of the car lights up as they drive past a Buy 'n' Fly. Loiter in the parking lot of a Buy 'n' Fly and you'd get a suntan. Then WorldBeat Security would come and arrest you. All that security-inducing light makes the Visa and MasterCard stickers on the driver's-side window glow for a moment.

  “Y.T. is card-carrying,” Y.T. says. “What does it cost to get off?”

  “How come you keep calling yourself Whitey?” the second MetaCop says. Like many people of color, he has misconstrued her name.

  “Not whitey. Y.T.,” the first MetaCop says.

  “That's what Y.T. is called,” Y.T. says.

  “That's what I said,” the second MetaCop says. “Whitey.”

  “Y.T.,” the first one says, accenting the T so brutally that he throws a glittering burst of saliva against the windshield. “Let me guess—Yolanda Truman?”

  “No.”

  “Yvonne Thomas?”

  “No.”

  “Whatsit stand for?”

  “Nothing.”

  Actually, it stands for Yours Truly, but if they can't figure that out, fuck 'em.

  “You can't afford it,” the first MetaCop says. “You're going up against TMAWH here.”

  “I don't have to officially get off. I could just escape.”

  “This is a class Unit. We don't support escapes,” the first MetaCop says.

  “Tell you what,” the second one says. “You pay us a trillion bucks and we'll take you to a Hoosegow. Then you can bargain with them.”

  “Half a trillion,” Y.T. says.

  “Seven hundred and fifty billion,” the MetaCop says. “Final. Shit, you're wearing cuffs, you can't be bargaining with us.”

  Y.T. unzips a pocket on the thigh of her coverall, pulls out the card with her clean hand, runs it through a slot on the back of the front seat, puts it back in her pocket.

  The Hoosegow looks like a nice new one. Y.T. has seen hotels that were worse places to sleep. Its logo sign, a saguaro cactus with a black cowboy hat resting on top of it at a jaunty angle, is brand-new and clean.

  THE HOOSEGOW

  Premium incarceration and restraint services

  We welcome busloads!

  There are a couple of other MetaCop cars in the lot, and an Enforcer paddybus parked across the back, taking up ten consecutive spaces. This draws much attention from the MetaCops. The Enforcers are to the MetaCops what the Delta Force is to the Peace Corps.

  “One to check in,” says the second MetaCop. They are standing in the reception area. The walls are lined with illuminated signs, each one bearing the image of some Old West desperado. Annie Oakley stares down blankly at Y.T., providing a role model. The check-in counter is faux rustic; the employees all wear cowboy hats and five-pointed stars with their names embossed on them. In back is a door made of hokey, old-fashioned iron bars. Once you got through there, it would look like an operating room. A whole line of little cells, curvy and white like prefab shower stalls—in fact, they double as shower stalls, you bathe in the middle of the room. Bright lights that turn themselves off at eleven o'clock. Coin-operated TV. Private phone line. Y.T. can hardly wait.

  The cowboy behind the desk aims a scanner at Y.T., zaps her bar code. Hundreds of pages about Y.T.'s personal life zoom up on a graphics screen.

  “Huh,” he says. “Female.”

  The two MetaCops look at each other like, what a genius—this guy could never be a MetaCop.

  “Sorry, boys, we're full up. No space for females tonight.”

  “Aw, c'mon.”

  “See that bus in back? There wa
s a riot at Snooze 'n' Cruise. Some Narcolombians were selling a bad batch of Vertigo. Place went nuts. Enforcers sent in a half dozen squads, brought in about thirty. So we're full up. Try The Clink, down the street.”

  Y.T. does not like the looks of this.

  They put her back in the car, turn on the noise cancellation in the back seat, so she can't hear anything except squirts and gurgles coming from her own empty tummy, and the glistening crackle whenever she moves her glommed-up hand. She was really looking forward to a Hoosegow meal—Campfire Chili or Bandit Burgers.

  In the front seat, the two MetaCops are talking to each other. They pull out into traffic. Up in front of them is a square illuminated logo, a giant Universal Product Code in black-on-white with BUY 'N' FLY underneath it.

  Stuck onto the same signpost, beneath the Buy 'n' Fly sign, is a smaller one, a narrow strip in generic lettering: THE CLINK.

  They are taking her to The Clink. The bastards. She pounds on the glass with cuffed-together hands, leaving sticky handprints. Let these bastards try to wash the stuff off. They turn around and look right through her, the guilty scum, like they heard something but they can't imagine what.

  They enter the Buy 'n' Fly's nimbus of radioactive blue security light. Second MetaCop goes in, talks to the guy behind the counter. There's a fat white boy purchasing a monster trucks magazine, wearing a New South Africa baseball cap with a Confederate flag, and overhearing them he peers out the window, wanting to lay his eyes on a real perp. A second man comes out from back, same ethnicity as the guy behind the counter, another dark man with burning eyes and a bony neck. This one is carrying a three-ring binder with the Buy 'n' Fly logo. To find the manager of a franchise, don't strain to read his title off the name tag, just look for the one with the binder.

  The manager talks to the MetaCop, nods his head, pulls a keychain out of a drawer.

  Second MetaCop comes out, saunters to the car, suddenly whips open the back door.

  “Shut up,” he says, “or next time I fire the loogie gun into your mouth.”

  “Good thing you like The Clink,” Y.T. says, “cause that is where you will be tomorrow night, loogie-man.”

  “'Zat right?”

  “Yeah. For credit card fraud.”

  “Me cop, you thrasher. How you gonna make a case at Judge Bob's Judicial System?”

  “I work for RadiKS. We protect our own.”

  “Not tonight you don't. Tonight you took a pizza from the scene of a car wreck. Left the scene of an accident. RadiKS tell you to deliver that pizza?”

  Y.T. does not return fire. The MetaCop is right; RadiKS did not tell her to deliver that pizza. She was doing it on a whim.

  “So RadiKS ain't gonna help you. So shut up.”

  He jerks her arm, and the rest of her follows. The three-ringer gives her a quick look, just long enough to make sure she is really a person, not a sack of flour or an engine block or a tree stump. He leads them around to the fetid rump of the Buy 'n' Fly, dark realm of wretched refuse in teeming dumpsters. He unlocks the back door, a boring steel number with jimmy marks around the edges like steel-clawed beasts have been trying to get in.

  Y.T. is taken downstairs into the basement. First MetaCop follows, carrying her plank, banging it heedlessly against doorways and stained polycarbonate bottle racks.

  “Better take her uniform—all that gear,” the second MetaCop suggests, not unlewdly.

  The manager looks at Y.T., trying not to let his gaze travel sinfully up and down her body. For thousands of years his people have survived on alertness: waiting for Mongols to come galloping over the horizon, waiting for repeat offenders to swing sawed-off shotguns across their check-out counters. His alertness right now is palpable and painful; he's like a goblet of hot nitroglycerin. The added question of sexual misconduct makes it even worse. To him it's no joke.

  Y.T. shrugs, trying to think of something unnerving and wacky. At this point, she is supposed to squeal and shrink, wriggle and whine, swoon and beg. They are threatening to take her clothes. How awful. But she does not get upset because she knows that they are expecting her to.

  A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box.

  Y.T. is not fond of boxes. Y.T. establishes her space on the pavement by zagging mightily from lane to lane, establishing a precedent of scary randomness. Keeps people on their toes, makes them react to her, instead of the other way round. Now these men are trying to put her in a box, make her follow rules.

  She unzips her coverall all the way down below her navel. Underneath is naught but billowing pale flesh.

  The MetaCops raise their eyebrows.

  The manager jumps back, raises both hands up to form a visual shield, protecting himself from the damaging input. “No, no, no!” he says.

  Y.T. shrugs, zips herself back up.

  She's not afraid; she's wearing a dentata.

  The manager handcuffs her to a cold-water pipe. Second MetaCop removes his newer, more cybernetic brand of handcuffs, snaps them back onto his harness. First MetaCop leans her plank against the wall, just out of her reach. Manager kicks a rusty coffee can across the floor, caroming it expertly off her skin, so she can go to the bathroom.

  “Where you from?” Y.T. asks.

  “Tadzhikistan,” he says.

  A jeek. She should have known.

  “Well, shitcan soccer must be your national pastime.”

  The manager doesn't get it. The MetaCops emit rote, shallow laughter.

  Papers are signed. Everyone else goes upstairs. On his way out the door, the manager turns off the lights; in Tadzhikistan, electricity is quite the big deal.

  Y.T. is in The Clink.

  7

  The Black Sun is as big as a couple of football fields laid side by side. The decor consists of black, square tabletops hovering in the air (it would be pointless to draw in legs), evenly spaced across the floor in a grid. Like pixels. The only exception is in the middle, where the bar's four quadrants come together (4 = 22). This part is occupied by a circular bar sixteen meters across. Everything is matte black, which makes it a lot easier for the computer system to draw things in on top of it—no worries about filling in a complicated background. And that way all attention can be focused on the avatars, which is the way people like it.

  It doesn't pay to have a nice avatar on the Street, where it's so crowded and all the avatars merge and flow into one another. But The Black Sun is a much classier piece of software. In The Black Sun, avatars are not allowed to collide. Only so many people can be here at once, and they can't walk through each other. Everything is solid and opaque and realistic. And the clientele has a lot more class—no talking penises in here. The avatars look like real people. For the most part, so do the daemons.

  “Daemon” is an old piece of jargon from the UNIX operating system, where it referred to a piece of low-level utility software, a fundamental part of the operating system. In The Black Sun, a daemon is like an avatar, but it does not represent a human being. It's a robot that lives in the Metaverse. A piece of software, a kind of spirit that inhabits the machine, usually with some particular role to carry out. The Black Sun has a number of daemons that serve imaginary drinks to the patrons and run little errands for people.

  It even has bouncer daemons that get rid of undesirables—grab their avatars and throw them out the door, applying certain basic principles of avatar physics. Da5id has even enhanced the physics of The Black Sun to make it a little cartoonish, so that particularly obnoxious people can be hit over the head with giant mallets or crushed under plummeting safes before they are ejected. This happens to people who are being disruptive, to anyone who is pestering or taping a celebrity, and to anyone who seems contagious. That is, if your personal computer is infected with viruses, and attempts to spread them via The Black Sun, you had better keep one eye on the
ceiling.

  Hiro mumbles the word “Bigboard.” This is the name of a piece of software he wrote, a power tool for a CIC stringer. It digs into The Black Sun's operating system, rifles it for information, and then throws up a flat square map in front of his face, giving him a quick overview of who's here and whom they're talking to. It's all unauthorized data that Hiro is not supposed to have. But Hiro is not some bimbo actor coming here to network. He is a hacker. If he wants some information, he steals it right out of the guts of the system—gossip ex machina.

  Bigboard shows him that Da5id is ensconced in his usual place, a table in the Hacker Quadrant near the bar. The Movie Star Quadrant has the usual scattering of Sovereigns and wannabes. The Rock Star Quadrant is very busy tonight; Hiro can see that a Nipponese rap star named Sushi K has stopped in for a visit. And there are a lot of record-industry types hanging around in the Nipponese Quadrant—which looks like the other quadrants except that it's quieter, the tables are closer to the floor, and it's full of bowing and fluttering geisha daemons. Many of these people probably belong to Sushi K's retinue of managers, flacks, and lawyers.

  Hiro cuts across the Hacker Quadrant, headed for Da5id's table. He recognizes many of the people in here, but as usual, he's surprised and disturbed by the number he doesn't recognize—all those sharp, perceptive twenty-one-year-old faces. Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.

  Looking up the aisle toward Da5id's table, he sees Da5id talking to a black-and-white person. Despite her lack of color and shitty resolution, Hiro recognizes her by the way she folds her arms when she's talking, the way she tosses her hair when she's listening to Da5id. Hiro's avatar stops moving and stares at her, adopting just the same facial expression with which he used to stare at this woman years ago. In Reality, he reaches out with one hand, picks up his beer, takes a pull on the bottle, and lets it roll around in his mouth, a bundle of waves clashing inside a small space.

  Her name is Juanita Marquez. Hiro has known her ever since they were freshmen together at Berkeley, and they were in the same lab section in a freshman physics class. The first time he saw her, he formed an impression that did not change for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who dressed like she was interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral parlor. At the same time, she had a flamethrower tongue that she would turn on people at the oddest times, usually in some grandiose, earth-scorching retaliation for a slight or breach of etiquette that none of the other freshmen had even perceived.