s  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 halfdecent 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 was 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  = 2^2).  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, rifes 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.
     It  wasn't  until a number of  years  later,  when they both  wound  up
working  at  Black  Sun Systems, Inc.,  that he put the  other  half  of the
equation together. At the time, both of them were working on avatars. He was
working on  bodies, she was working  on faces. She was the face  department,
because nobody  thought that faces  were all that important - they were just
flesh-toned  busts  on top  of  the avatars. She was just in the process  of
proving them all desperately wrong. But at this phase, the all-male  society
of bitheads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems  said that
the face problem was  trivial and  superficial.  It was, of  course, nothing
more  than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who
sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.
     That first impression, back at the  age of seventeen, was  nothing more
than that - the gut  reaction of a postadolescent Army brat who had been  on
his own for about three weeks. His mind was good, but he only understood one
or two things in the whole world - samurai movies and the Macintosh - and he
understood them  far,  far too  well.  It  was a  worldview with no room for
someone like Juanita.
     There is a certain kind of small town that grows like a boil on the ass
of  every  Army base  in  the world. In a long series  of  such places, Hiro
Protagonist was speedraised  like a mutant hothouse orchid flourishing under
the glow  of a thousand Buy 'n' Fly  security spotlights. Hiro's  father had
joined the  army in 1944, at the  age of  sixteen,  and  spent a year in the
Pacific, most of it as a prisoner of war. Hiro was  born when his father was
in his late middle age. By  that time,  Dad could  long  since have quit and
taken  his  pension,  but he  wouldn't have known  what  to do  with himself
outside of  the service, and  so he stayed  in until they finally kicked him
out in the late  eighties.  By the time Hiro made it out to Berkeley, he had
lived in Wrightstown, New  Jersey;  Tacoma,  Washington; Fayetteville, North
Carolina; Hinesville,  Georgia; Killeen, Texas; Grafenwehr, Germany;  Seoul,
Korea;  Ogden, Kansas; and Watertown,  New  York. All  of these  places were
basically the same, with the same franchise  ghettos, the same strip joints,
and  even the  same people  -  he kept  running into school chums he'd known
years before, other Army brats who happened  to wind  up at the same base at
the same time.
     Their skins were  different colors  but they all  belonged  to the same
ethnic group: Military.  Black kids didn't talk  like black kids. Asian kids
didn't bust their asses to excel in school. White kids, by and large, didn't
have any problem getting along with the black and Asian kids. And girls knew
their place.  They all had the same moms  with the same generous buttocks in
stretchy slacks and  the  same frosted-and-curling-ironed  hairdos, and they
were all basically sweet and  endearing and conforming and, if they happened
to be smart, they went out of their way to hide it.
     So the  first time  Hiro saw Juanita, or  any other girl like  her, his
perspectives were bent  all out of  shape. She had  long, glossy black  hair
that  had never been  subjected to any  chemical process other than  regular
shampooing.  She didn't  wear blue  stuff on  her  eyelids. Her clothing was
dark, tailored, restrained. And she  didn't take  shit from anyone, not even
her professors, which seemed shrewish and threatening to him at the time.
     When he saw her again after an absence of several years -a period spent
mostly in Japan, working among real grown-ups  from a  higher  social  class
than he was used to, people of substance  who wore real clothes and did real
things with their lives  - he  was  startled to  realize that Juanita was an
elegant, stylish  knockout. He thought at first  that she had undergone some
kind of radical changes since their first year in college.
     But  then  he went  back to visit his father in one of those Army towns
and  ran into the high  school prom queen. She had grown up  shockingly fast
into an  overweight dame with loud hair  and loud clothes  who speedread the
tabloids at the check-out line in the commissary because she didn't have the
spare money to buy them, who popped her gum and had two kids that she didn't
have the energy or the foresight to discipline.
     Seeing this woman at the commissary, he finally went through a belated,
dim-witted  epiphany,  not a brilliant light shining down from  heaven, more
like the  brown  glimmer  of  a half-dead  flashlight  from  the  top  of  a
stepladder: Juanita hadn't really changed much at all since those days, just
grown into herself. It was he who had changed. Radically.
     He came into her office once, strictly on a business matter. Until this
point, they had seen each other around  the office a lot but acted like they
had never met before.  But  when he came  into her office that day, she told
him to close  the door  behind him, and she  blacked  out  the screen on her
computer and started twiddling a pencil between her hands  and eyed him like
a plate of day-old sushi. Behind  her on the wall was an amateurish painting
of an old lady,  set in an ornate antique frame. It was the  only decoration
in Juanita's  office. All  the  other  hackers had color photographs  of the
space shuttle lifting off, or posters of the starship Enterprise.
     "It's my late grandmother, may God have mercy on  her  soul," she said,
watching him look at the painting. "My role model."
     "Why? Was she a programmer?"
     She  just looked at him over the rotating  pencil  like, how slow can a
mammal be and still have respiratory  functions? But instead of lowering the
boom on  him, she just gave  a simple answer:  "No."  Then  she gave a  more
complicated answer.  "When  I  was fifteen years old,  I missed a period. My
boyfriend and I were  using a  diaphragm, but I  knew it was fallible. I was
good at math, I had the failure  rate memorized, burnt into my subconscious.
Or maybe it was my conscious, I can never keep them straight. Anyway,  I was
terrified. Our family dog started treating me differently - supposedly, they
can smell a pregnant woman. Or a pregnant bitch, for that matter."
     By this point, Hiro's face was  frozen in a wary,  astonished  position
that Juanita later  made extensive use of in  her work. Because, as she  was
talking  to him, she was watching,  his  face, analyzing  the way the little
muscles in his forehead pulled his brows up and made his eyes change shape.
     "My  mother was  clueless. My  boyfriend was  worse than clueless -  in
fact,  I ditched him on  the spot, because  it made me realize what an alien
the guy was - like many members of your species." By this, she was referring
to males.
     "Anyway, my grandmother  came to visit," she continued,  glancing  back
over her shoulder at the painting.  "I avoided her until we all sat down for
dinner. And then she figured out the whole situation in, maybe, ten minutes,
just by watching my face across the dinner table. I didn't say more than ten
words  -  'Pass  the tortillas.' I don't  know  how  my  face  conveyed that
information,  or  what  kind of  internal  wiring  in  my grandmother's mind
enabled her  to accomplish this incredible  feat. To condense  fact from the
vapor of nuance."
     Condense  fact from the vapor of nuance. Hiro has  never  forgotten the
sound of her  speaking those  words, the feeling  that came  over  him as he
realized for the first time how smart Juanita was.
     She continued. "I didn't even really appreciate all of this until about
ten years later, as.  a grad student, trying to build a user  interface that
would  convey  a lot  of data  very  quickly, for  one of these  baby-killer
grants." This was her term for  anything related to the Defense  Department.
"I was coming up with all kinds of elaborate technical fixes like  trying to
implant electrodes directly into the brain. Then I remembered my grandmother
and realized, my  God, the  human mind can  absorb and process an incredible
amount  of  information  -  if it comes  in  the  right  format.  The  right
interface. If you put the right face on it. Want some coffee?"
     Then he had an alarming thought: What had he been like back in college?
How  much  of an  asshole had  he  been? Had he  left  Juanita  with  a  bad
impression?
     Another young man would  have worried about it in silence, but Hiro has
never been restrained by thinking about things too hard, and so he asked her
out for dinner and, after having a couple of drinks (she drank club  sodas),
just popped the question: Do you think I'm an asshole?
     She  laughed.  He smiled, believing  that he had  come up  with a good,
endearing, flirtatious bit of patter.
     He did not realize until  a  couple of  years later  that this question
was, in effect,  the cornerstone of  their  relationship. Did  Juanita think
that Hiro was an asshole? He always had some reason to think that the answer
was yes, but nine times out of  ten she insisted the answer was no. It  made
for some great arguments and some great sex, some dramatic failings out  and
some passionate reconciliations, but in  the  end  the wildness was just too
much for them - they were exhausted by work - and they backed away from each
other. He was emotionally worn out from wondering what she really thought of
him, and confused by the fact that he cared so deeply about her opinion. And
she,  maybe, was beginning to think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own
mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't.
     Hiro would have chalked it all up to class differences, except that her
parents  lived in a house in Mexicali with a dirt floor, and his father made
more money than  many college professors. But the class idea still held sway
in  his mind, because class is more than income - it has to do with  knowing
where you stand in a web of social relationships. Juanita and her folks knew
where they stood  with  a certitude  that bordered  on dementia.  Hiro never
knew. His father was a  sergeant  major, his mother was a Korean woman whose
people had been mine slaves in  Nippon, and  Hiro didn't know whether he was
black or Asian or just plain Army, whether  he was rich or poor, educated or
ignorant,  talented or lucky.  He didn't even have a  part of the country to
call home until he moved to California, which is about as specific as saying
that you live in  the Northern Hemisphere. In the end,  it was  probably his
general disorientation that did them in.
     After the  breakup, Hiro went out with a long succession of essentially
bimbos who (unlike Juanita) were  impressed that he worked  for  a high-tech
Silicon Valley firm. More recently, he has had to go searching for women who
are even easier to impress.
     Juanita went celibate for a while and then started going out with Da5id
and eventually got married to him. Da5id had no  doubts whatsoever about his
standing  in the world. His  folks were  Russian Jews from Brooklyn  and had
lived in the same brownstone for seventy  years  after coming from a village
in Latvia where they had  lived for five hundred years; with a  Torah on his
lap, he could trace his bloodlines all the way back to Adam and  Eve. He was
an only child who had always been first in his class in everything, and when
he  got his  master's in  computer science from  Stanford,  he went  out and
started his  own  company  with about  as  much  fuss as Hiro's dad used  to
exhibit in renting out a new P.O. box when they moved. Then he got rich, and
now he runs The Black Sun. Da5id has always been certain of everything.
     Even when he's totally wrong.  Which is why Hiro quit his job at  Black
Sun Systems, despite  the promise of future riches, and why Juanita divorced
Da5id two years after she married him.
     Hiro did  not attend Juanita and Da5id's wedding; he was languishing in
jail, into which he had been thrown a few hours before the rehearsal. He had
been  found  in  Golden Gate  Park,  lovesick, wearing nothing  but a thong,
taking  long pulls from a  jumbo bottle of  Courvoisier and practicing kendo
attacks  with  a  genuine  samurai  sword,  floating  across  the  grass  on
powerfully muscled  thighs to slice other picnickers'  hurtling Frisbees and
baseballs  in  twain. Catching a long fly ball with the  edge of your blade,
neatly  halving it like a grapefruit, is not an insignificant feat. The only
drawback is that the owners of the baseball may misinterpret your intentions
and summon the police.
     He  got  out of it by paying for  all the  baseballs and  Frisbees, but
since that episode, he has never even bothered to ask Juanita whether or not
she thinks he's an asshole. Even Hiro knows the answer now.
     Since then, they've gone very different ways. In the early years of The
Black Sun  project, the only way  the hackers  ever got paid was  by issuing
stock to themselves. Hiro tended to sell his off almost as quickly as he got
it. Juanita  didn't. Now she's rich, and  he isn't. It would be  easy to say
that Hiro is a stupid investor and Juanita a smart one, but  the facts are a
little  more complicated  than  that: Juanita put her  eggs in  one  basket,
keeping all her money in Black Sun stock; as it turns out, she made a lot of
money that  way, but she could have gone broke, too. And Hiro  didn't have a
lot of choice in some ways.  When his father got sick, the Army and the V.A.
took care  of most of his medical bills, but they ran into a lot of expenses
anyway, and Hiro's mother - who could barely speak English - wasn't equipped
to make or handle  money on  her own. When Hiro's  father died, he cashed in
all of his Black  Sun stock  to  put Mom in a nice  community  in Korea. She
loves it there. Goes  golfing every day. He could have kept his money in The
Black  Sun and made  ten  million  dollars about a year  later when it  went
public, but his mother would have been a street person.  So when his  mother
visits him in the Metaverse, looking tan and happy in her golfing duds, Hiro
views that as his personal fortune. It won't pay the rent, but that's okay -
when you  live  in  a shithole,  there's always the  Metaverse,  and  in the
Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince.

        8

     His tongue is  stinging;  he realizes that, back  in  Reality,  he  has
forgotten to swallow his beer.
     It's  ironic  that  Juanita has come  into  this place  in  a low-tech,
black-and-white  avatar.  She  was  the one who figured  out  a  way to make
avatars show something close to real emotion. That  is a fact Hiro has never
forgotten,  because  she did most of her work when  they  were together, and
whenever an avatar looks surprised or angry or passionate in the  Metaverse,
he sees an  echo of himself or Juanita - the Adam and Eve  of the Metaverse.
Makes it hard to forget.
     Shortly after Juanita and Da5id got divorced, The Black Sun really took
off. And once they got done  counting their money,  marketing the  spinoffs,
soaking up the adulation of others in the hacker community, they all came to
the  realization   that  what  made  this  place  a   success  was  not  the
collision-avoidance algorithms or the  bouncer daemons or  any of that other
stuff. It was Juanita's faces.
     Just ask the businessmen  in the  Nipponese Quadrant. They come here to
talk turkey with  suits from around  the world, and they consider it just as
good as a face-to-face. They  more or  less ignore  what is  being saida lot
gets  lost in  translation,  after all.  They  pay  attention to  the facial
expressions and body language of the  people they are talking to. And that's
how they know  what's going  on inside a person's head  - by condensing fact
from the vapor of nuance.
     Juanita refused to analyze this process, insisted that it was something
ineffable,   something  you   couldn't  explain  with   words.   A  radical,
rosary-toting Catholic,  she has no problem with that kind of thing. But the
bitheads didn't like it. Said  it  was irrational mysticism. So she quit and
took  a job  with some Nipponese  company. They don't have  any problem with
irrational mysticism as long as it makes money.
     But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore.  Partly, she's pissed
at Da5id  and  the other hackers who never appreciated her work. But she has
also decided that the whole thing is  bogus. That no matter  how good it is,
the Metaverse is distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants
no such distortion in her relationships.
     Da5id notices Hiro, indicates with a flick of his eyes that this is not
a good time. Normally, such subtle gestures are lost  in the system's noise,
but  Da5id has a very good personal computer,  and Juanita helped design his
avatar - so the message comes through like a shot fired into the ceiling.
     Hiro turns away, saunters around  the big circular bar in a slow orbit.
Most  of  the sixty-four bar  stools are  filled  with lower-level  Industry
people, getting together in twos and threes, doing what they do best: gossip
and intrigue.
     "So I get together with the director  for a story  conference. He's got
this beach house - "
     "Incredible?"
     "Don't get me started."
     "I heard. Debi was there for a party when Frank and Mitzi owned it."
     "Anyway, there's  this scene,  early, where the main character wakes up
in a dumpster. The idea is to show how, you know, despondent he is - "
     "That crazy energy - "
     "Exactly."
     "Fabulous."
     "I like it. Well, he wants to replace it with a scene where the guy  is
out  in  the  desert with  a bazooka,  blowing up old cars in  an  abandoned
junkyard."
     "You're kidding!"
     "So we're sitting there on  his fucking patio over  the beach  and he's
going, like, whoom! whoom! imitating  this goddamn bazooka. He's thrilled by
the idea. I mean, this is a man who wants to put a bazooka  in a movie. So I
think I talked him out of it."
     "Nice scene. But you're right. A bazooka doesn't do the same thing as a
dumpster."
     Hiro  pauses  long  enough to  get this down, then  keeps  walking.  He
mumbles "Bigboard" again, recalls the magic map, pinpoints his own location,
and then reads off the name of this nearby screenwriter. Later on, he can do
a search  of industry  publications to find  out  what  script  this guy  is
working on, hence  the name  of  this  mystery director  with  a fetish  for
bazookas. Since this whole conversation has come to him  via  his  computer,
he's just taken an  audio  tape of the whole thing. Later, he can process it
to  disguise the voices,  then upload it to  the  Library,  cross-referenced
under the director's name. A hundred struggling screenwriters will call this
conversation up, listen to it over and over until they've got  it memorized,
paying Hiro for  the privilege, and within a few weeks, bazooka scripts will
flood the director's office. Whoom!
     The Rock Star Quadrant  is  almost too  bright to  look  at. Rock  star
avatars have the hairdos that rock stars can only wear in their dreams. Hiro
scans it briefly to see if any of his friends are in there, but it's  mostly
parasites  and  has-beens. Most  of the  people Hiro  knows are will-bes  or
wannabes.
     The Movie Star Quadrant is easier to look at.  Actors love to come here
because in The Black Sun, they always look as good as they do in the movies.
And  unlike a  bar or club in  Reality, they can get into this place without
physically having to leave their mansion,  hotel suite,  ski lodge,  private
airline cabin, or whatever. They can strut their stuff and  visit with their
friends without  any  exposure to  kidnappers,  paparazzi,  script-flingers,
assassins,  ex-spouses,  autograph  brokers,  process  servers, psycho fans,
marriage proposals, or gossip columnists.
     He gets up off the bar  stool and  resumes his slow orbit, scanning the
Nipponese Quadrant. It's a lot of guys in suits, as  usual. Some of them are
talking to gringos from  the Industry.  And a large part of the quadrant, in
the back corner, has been screened off by a temporary partition.
     Bigboard again. Hiro figures out which tables are behind the partition,
starts  reading off the names.  The only one he recognizes immediately is an
American: L. Bob Rife, the  cable-television monopolist. A  very big name to
the Industry, though he's rarely  seen. He seems to be  meeting with a whole
raft of big Nipponese honchos. Hiro has his computer memorize their names so
that, later, he can check them against  the CIC database  and  find  out who
they are. It has the look of a big and important meeting.
     "Secret Agent Hiro! How are you doing?"
     Hiro turns  around. Juanita  is right behind  him, standing  out in her
black-and-white avatar, looking good anyway. "How are you?" she asks.
     "Fine. How are you?"
     "Great.  I hope  you don't mind talking to me in this  ugly fax-of-life
avatar."
     "Juanita, I would rather look at a fax of  you than most other women in
the flesh."
     "Thanks,  you  sly bastard. It's been  a long time since we've talked!"
she observes, as though there's something remarkable about this.
     Something's going on.
     "I hope you're not going to mess around with  Snow  Crash,"  she  says.
"Da5id won't listen to me."
     "What am I,  a model of self-restraint? I'm exactly the kind of guy who
would mess around with it."
     "I know you better than that. You're impulsive. But you're very clever.
You have those sword-fighting reflexes."
     "What does that have to do with drug abuse?"
     "It  means  you can see bad things  coming  and  deflect them.  It's an
instinct, not a learned thing. As soon as you turned around and saw me, that
look came over your face, like, what's going on? What the hell is Juanita up
to?"
     "I didn't think you talked to people in the Metaverse."
     "I do if I want to  get through to someone in a hurry," she  says. "And
I'll always talk to you."
     "Why me?"
     "You know. Because of us.  Remember? Because of our relationship - when
I  was writing  this thing - you and I are the only two people  who can ever
have an honest conversation in the Metaverse."
     "You're just the same mystical crank you always were," he says, smiling
so as to make this a charming statement.
     "You can't imagine how mystical and cranky I am now, Hiro."
     "How mystical and cranky are you?"
     She eyes him warily. Exactly the same way she did when he came into her
office years ago.
     It comes  into his mind  to wonder  why she  is always so alert  in his
presence. In college, he used to think that she was afraid of his intellect,
but he's known for years that this is the last of her worries. At Black  Sun
Systems,  he figured  that  it was just typical female guardedness - Juanita
was afraid he was trying to get her into the sack.  But this, too, is pretty
much out of the question.
     At this late date in his romantic career,  he  is just canny enough  to
come  up with a new  theory: She's being careful because she likes  him. She
likes  him in spite of  herself.  He  is exactly  the  kind  of tempting but
utterly wrong romantic choice that a smart girl  like  Juanita must learn to
avoid.
     That's definitely it. There's something to be said for getting older.
     By way of answering his  question, she says,  "I have an associate  I'd
like you to meet. A  gentleman and a scholar named Lagos. He's a fascinating
guy to talk to."
     "Is he your boyfriend?"
     She thinks this one over rather than  lashing out instantaneously.  "My
behavior at The  Black Sun to the contrary, I don't fuck every male  I  work
with. And even if I did, Lagos is out of the question."
     "Not your type?"
     "Not by a long shot."
     "What is your type, anyway?"
     "Old, rich, unimaginative blonds with steady careers."
     This one almost slips by him. Then he catches it. "Well, I could dye my
hair. And I'll get old eventually."
     She  actually  laughs.  It's  a  tension-releasing  kind  of  outburst.
"Believe me, Hiro, I'm the last person you  want to be involved with at this
point."
     "Is this part  of your church  thing?" he asks. Juanita has  been using
her  excess money to  start her  own  branch  of the Catholic church  -  she
considers herself a missionary to the intelligent atheists of the world.
     "Don't be  condescending," she says. "That's exactly the  attitude  I'm
fighting. Religion is not for simpletons."
     "Sorry. This  is unfair, you know - you can read every expression on my
face, and I'm looking at you through a fucking blizzard."
     "It's  definitely related  to  religion,"  she says. "But  this  is  so
complex, and  your  background in  that area is  so deficient,  I don't know
where to begin."
     "Hey, I went to church every week in high school. I sang in the choir."
     "I know. That's exactly the problem. Ninety-nine percent  of everything
that goes on in  most Christian  churches has  nothing whatsoever to do with
the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and
they conclude that the entire  one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why
atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds."
     "So none of that stuff I learned in church has anything to do with what
you're talking about?"
     Juanita thinks for  a while, eyeing him. Then she pulls a hypercard out
of her pocket. "Here. Take this."
     As Hiro pulls  it from  her hand,  the hypercard changes from a jittery
two-dimensional figment  into  a realistic,  cream-colored, finely  textured
piece of stationery. Printed  across its face in glossy black  ink is a pair
of words
        B A B E L
     (I n f o c a l y p s e)

        9

     The world freezes and  grows dim for a second. The  Black Sun loses its
smooth animation  and begins  to move  in  fuzzy  stop-action.  Clearly, his
computer has just taken a major hit; all of its circuits are busy processing
a huge bolus of  data - the contents of the hypercard - and don't  have time
to redraw the image of The Black Sun in its full, breathtaking fidelity.
     "Holy shit!" he says,  when The Black Sun pops back into full animation
again.  "What the hell is in this card? You must have half of the Library in
here!"
     "And a librarian to boot," Juanita says, "to  help you sort through it.
And  lots of videotapes  of L. Bob Rife  -  which accounts for most  of  the
bytes."
     "Well, I'll try to have a look at it," he says dubiously.
     "Do. Unlike Da5id, you're just smart enough  to benefit  from this. And
in the meantime, stay away from Raven. And stay away from Snow Crash. Okay?"
     "Who's Raven?" he asks. But Juanita is already on her way out the door.
The fancy  avatars all  turn around to watch her as she goes past  them; the
movie  stars give her drop-dead looks, and the hackers purse  their lips and
stare reverently.

     Hiro  orbits  back  around  to the Hacker Quadrant.  Da5id's  shuffling
hypercards around on his table - business stats on  The Black Sun, film  and
video clips, hunks of software, scrawled telephone numbers.
     "There's  a little blip in the operating system that hits me  right  in
the gut every time you come in the  door," Da5id  says.  "I always have this
premonition that The Black Sun is headed for a crash."
     "Must be Bigboard," Hiro says. "It has one routine that patches some of
the traps in low memory, for a moment."
     "Ah, that's it. Please, please throw that thing away," Da5id says.
     "What, Bigboard?"
     "Yeah. It was  totally rad at one point,  but now it's  like trying  to
work on a fusion reactor with a stone ax."
     "Thanks."
     "I'll give you all the  headers  you need if you  want to  update it to
something a  little  less  dangerous," Da5id says. "I  wasn't impugning your
abilities. I'm just saying you need to keep up with the times."
     "It's  fucking hard,"  Hiro says. "There's  no  place  for a  freelance
hacker anymore. You have to have a big corporation behind you."
     "I'm aware  of that. And I'm aware that you  can't stand to  work for a
big corporation. That's why I'm saying,  I'll  give  you the stuff you need.
You're always  a part  of The Black Sun  to  me, Hiro,  even since we parted
ways."
     It is classic Da5id. He's talking with  his heart again, bypassing  his
head. If Da5id  weren't  a hacker,  Hiro  would  despair of his  ever having
enough brains to do anything.
     "Let's  talk   about   something   else,"   Hiro   says.  "Was  I  just
hallucinating, or are you and Juanita on speaking terms again?"
     Da5id gives him an indulgent smile. He has been very kind to  Hiro ever
since  The  Conversation,  several years back.  It  was a  conversation that
started out  as  a friendly chat over beer  and oysters between a  couple of
longtime comrades-in-arms.  It was  not  until  three-quarters  of  the  way
through The Conversation that it dawned on  Hiro that he was, in fact, being
fired, at  this very moment. Since The Conversation, Da5id has been known to
feed Hiro useful bits of intel and gossip from time to time.
     "Fishing  for  something  useful?"  Da5id  asks  knowingly.  Like  many
bitheads, Da5id is utterly guileless, but at times like this, he thinks he's
the reincarnation of Machiavelli.
     "I got news for you, man," Hiro says. "Most of the stuff you give me, I
never put into the Library."
     "Why  not? Hell,  I give  you all  my best gossip.  I  thought you were
making money off that stuff."
     "I  just  can't  stand  it," Hiro  says,  "taking parts of  my  private
conversations and whoring them out. Why do you think I'm broke?"
     There's  another thing  he  doesn't mention, which  is that he's always
considered  himself  to  be Da5id's  equal, and he can't  stand the  idea of
feeding off Da5id's little crumbs and  tidbits, like a dog  curled up  under
his table.
     "I was glad to see Juanita come in here  - even as  a black-and-white,"
Da5id says. "For her not  to  use The Black Sun - it's like Alexander Graham
Bell refusing to use the telephone."
     "Why did she come in tonight?"
     "Something's bugging her,"  Da5id says. "She wanted to know if I'd seen
certain people on the Street."
     "Anyone in particular?"
     "She's worried about a really  large guy with  long black hair,"  Da5id
says. "Peddling something called - get this - Snow Crash."
     "Has she tried the Library?"
     "Yeah. I assume so, anyway."
     "Have you seen this guy?"
     "Oh, yeah. It's not hard to find him," Da5id says.  "He's right outside
the door. I got this from him."
     Da5id scans the table, picks up one  of the hypercards, and shows it to
Hiro.
        SNOW CRASH
     tear this card in half to
     release your free sample
     "Da5id," Hiro  says, "I  can't believe  you took  a  hypercard  from  a
black-and-white person."
     Da5id laughs.  "This  is not the old days,  my friend. I've got so much
antiviral  medicine in my  system  that nothing could  get through. I get so
much contaminated shit from all the hackers who come through here, it's like
working  in a  plague  ward.  So  I'm  not  afraid  of  whatever's  in  this
hypercard."
     "Well, in that case, I'm curious," Hiro says.
     "Yeah. Me, too." Da5id laughs.
     "It's probably something very disappointing."
     "Probably an animercial," Da5id agrees. "Think I should do it?"
     "Yeah.  Go  for it. It's not every day  you get to try out a new drug,"
Hiro says.
     "Well, you can try one every day if you want to," Da5id says, "but it's
not every day you find  one  that can't hurt you." He picks up the hypercard
and tears it in half.
     For a second, nothing happens. "I'm waiting," Da5id says.
     An avatar  materializes  on  the  table in front of Da5id, starting out
ghostly  and  transparent, gradually becoming  solid  and three-dimensional.
It's a really trite effect; Hiro and Da5id are already laughing.
     The  avatar  is  a  stark  naked Brandy. It doesn't even  look like the
standard  Brandy;  this  looks  like  one  of  the  cheap  Taiwanese  Brandy
knockoffs. Clearly,  it's just a daemon.  She is holding a pair of  tubes in
her hands, about the size of paper-towel rolls.
     Da5id is leaning back in  his chair, enjoying  this. There is something
hilariously tawdry about the entire scene.
     The Brandy leans forward, beckoning Da5id toward  her. Da5id leans into
her face, grinning broadly. She puts her crude, ruby-red lips  up by his ear
and mumbles something that Hiro can't hear.
     When  she  leans  back away  from Da5id, his face has changed. He looks
dazed and expressionless. Maybe  Da5id really  looks  that  way;  maybe Snow
Crash has  messed up his  avatar  somehow  so  that  it's no longer tracking
Da5id's  true facial  expressions.  But he's  staring  straight ahead,  eyes
frozen in their sockets.
     The Brandy holds  the pair  of tubes up in front of Da5id's immobilized
face  and spreads them  apart. It's  actually a scroll. She's  unrolling  it
right  in  front  of   Da5id's  face,  spreading  it  apart   like  a   flat
two-dimensional screen in front  of  his  eyes. Da5id's  paralyzed face  has
taken on a bluish tinge as it reflects light coming out of the scroll.
     Hiro walks  around  the  table to look. He  gets a brief glimpse of the
scroll before the Brandy  snaps it shut again. It is a living wall of light,
like  a flexible, flatscreened television set, and it's not showing anything
at all. just static. White noise. Snow.
     Then she's gone, leaving no trace behind. Desultory, sarcastic applause
sounds from a few tables in the Hacker Quadrant.
     Da5id's back  to  normal,  wearing a grin that's  part  snide  and part
embarrassed.
     "What was it?" Hiro says. "I just glimpsed some snow at the very end."
     "You  saw  the  whole  thing,"  Da5id   says.  "A   fixed   pattern  of
black-and-white pixels, fairly  high-resolution. Just a few hundred thousand
ones and zeroes for me to look at."
     "So in other words, someone just  exposed your  optic  nerve to,  what,
maybe a hundred thousand bytes of information," Hiro says.
     "Noise, is more like it."
     "Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code," Hiro
says.
     "Why  would  anyone show  me  information  in  binary code?  I'm not  a
computer. I can't read a bitmap."
     "Relax, Da5id, I'm just shitting you," Hiro says.
     "You know what it was? You know how hackers are  always  trying to show
me samples of their work?"
     "Yeah."
     "Some  hacker  came  up  with this scheme to  show  me  his stuff.  And
everything worked fine until  the  moment the Brandy opened the scroll - but
his code was buggy,  and it  snow-crashed at the wrong moment, so instead of
seeing his output, all I saw was snow."
     "Then why did he call the thing Snow Crash?"
     "Gallows humor. He knew it was buggy."
     "What did the Brandy whisper in your ear?"
     "Some  language  I didn't  recognize,"  Da5id  says. "Just a  bunch  of
babble."
     Babble. Babel.
     "Afterward, you looked sort of stunned."
     Da5id  looks  resentful.  "I  wasn't  stunned.  I just found  the whole
experience so weird, I guess I just was taken aback for a second."
     Hiro is giving  him an  extremely  dubious  look.  Da5id notices it and
stands up. "Want to go see what your competitors in Nippon are up to?"
     "What competitors?"
     "You used to design avatars for rock stars, right?"
     "Still do."
     "Well, Sushi K is here tonight."
     "Oh, yeah. The hairdo the size of a galaxy."
     "You can see the  rays from here," Da5id  says,  waving toward the next
quadrant, "but I want to see the whole getup."
     It does look as though the sun is rising somewhere in the middle of the
Rock Star Quadrant. Above  the heads of the milling avatars, Hiro  can see a
fan of orange beams radiating outward from some  point in the middle of  the
crowd. It keeps moving, turning around,  shaking from side to side,  and the
whole universe seems  to move with it. On the  Street, the  full radiance of
Sushi  K's  Rising  Sun  hairdo  is  suppressed  by  the  height  and  width
regulations. But  Da5id allows free expression inside The Black Sun,  so the
orange rays extend all the way to the property lines.
     "I wonder  if  anyone's told him yet that Americans won't buy rap music
from a Japanese person," Hiro says as they stroll over there.
     "Maybe you  should  tell  him,"  Da5id suggests,  "charge him  for  the
service. He's in L.A. right now, you know."
     "Probably staying in a hotel full of bootlickers telling him what a big
star he's going to be. He needs to be exposed to some actual biomass."
     They  inject themselves  into  a stream  of  traffic, winding  a narrow
channel through a rift in the crowd.
     "Biomass?" Da5id says.
     "A body of living stuff.  It's an ecology term. If you take an  acre of
rain forest or a cubic mile of ocean or a square block of Compton and strain
out all the unliving stuff - dirt and water - you get the biomass."
     Da5id, ever the bithead, says, "I do not understand." His  voice sounds
funny; there's a lot of white noise creeping into his audio.
     "Industry  expression,"  Hiro  says. "The Industry  feeds off the human
biomass of America. Like a whale straining krill from the sea."
     Hiro  wedges himself  between a couple of Nipponese businessmen. One is
wearing a uniform blue, but  the other is a neo-traditional, wearing  a dark
kimono.  And, like Hiro,  he's wearing two swords  - the long  katana on his
left hip and the one-handed wakizashi stuck diagonally  in his waistband. He
and Hiro glance cursorily at each  other's armaments. Then  Hiro  looks away
and  pretends  not to  notice, while the neo-traditional is freezing  solid,
except  for the  corners  of his mouth which  are curling downward. Hiro has
seen this kind of thing before. He knows he's about to get into a fight.
     People  are  moving out of the way;  something  big and  inexorable  is
plunging through  the crowd, shoving avatars  this  way and  that.  Only one
thing has the ability to shove people around like that inside The Black Sun,
and that's a bouncer daemon.
     As they  get closer, Hiro sees that  it's a whole flying wedge of them,
gorillas in tuxedos. Real gorillas. And they seem to be headed toward Hiro.
     He tries to back away, but  he quickly runs  into something. Looks like
Bigboard finally got him in trouble; he's on his way out of the bar.
     "Da5id," Hiro says. "Call them off, man, I'll stop using it."
     All of the people  in his vicinity  are  staring over  Hiro's shoulder,
their faces illuminated by a stew of brilliant colored lights.
     Hiro turns around to look at Da5id. But Da5id's not there anymore.
     Instead of Da5id, there is just a jittering cloud of bad digital karma.
It's so bright and fast and meaningless that it hurts to look at. It flashes
back  and forth from color  to black  and  white, and when it's in color, it
rolls wildly around the color wheel as though being strafed with highpowered
disco  lights.  And it's  not staying within  it's own body space; hair-thin
pixel  lines  keep shooting off to one side, passing all the way  across The
Black Sun and out through  the wall. It is  not so much an organized body as
it is a centrifugal cloud of lines and polygons whose  center  cannot  hold,
throwing bright bits of  body  shrapnel all over  the room, interfering with
people's avatars, flickering and disappearing.
     The  gorillas  don't mind. They shove their long furry fingers into the
midst of the  disintegrating  cloud and latch  onto it somehow  and carry it
past Hiro, toward  the exit. Hiro  looks down  as it goes  past him and sees
what looks very much like Da5id's face as viewed through a pile of shattered
glass. It's  just a momentary glimpse. Then  the  avatar is  gone,  expertly
drop-kicked  out the front door, soaring out over the Street  in a long flat
arc that takes it  over the horizon. Hiro looks  up the aisle to see Da5id's
table, empty, surrounded by stunned hackers. Some  of them are shocked, some
are trying to stifle grins.
     Da5id Meier, supreme hacker  overload, founding father of the Metaverse
protocol,  creator and proprietor  of the world-famous  Black Sun,  has just
suffered  a  system  crash.  He's been thrown out of his own bar  by his own
daemons.

        10

     About the second or third thing they learned how to do when studying to
become Kouriers was how to shiv open a pair  of handcuffs. Handcuffs are not
intended as longterm restraint devices, millions of Clink franchisees to the
contrary. And the  longtime  status of skateboarders as an  oppressed ethnic
group means that by now all of them are escape artists of some degree.
     First things first. Y.T. has many a thing hanging  off her uniform. The
uniform has  a  hundred pockets,  big flat pockets for deliveries and  eensy
narrow  pockets for  gear, pockets  sewn  into sleeves,  thighs, shins.  The
equipment  stuck  into these multifarious pockets tends to be small, tricky,
lightweight:  pens,  markers,  penlights,  penknives,  lock picks,  bar-code
scanners,  flares,  screwdrivers,   Liquid  Knuckles,  bundy  stunners,  and
lightsticks. A  calculator is stuck upside-down to her right thigh, doubling
as a taxi meter and a stopwatch.
     On the other thigh is  a personal phone. As the manager is  locking the
door upstairs, it begins to ring. Y.T. unhooks it with  her free hand. It is
her mother.
     "Hi, Mom. Fine, how are you? I'm at Tracy's house. Yeah, we went to the
Metaverse. We were just fooling around at this arcade  on the Street. Pretty
bumpin'. Yes, I used a nice avatar. Nah, Tracy's  mom  said she'd give me  a
ride home later.  But  we  might  stop  off at the  joyride on Victory for a
while, okay? Okay,  well, sleep tight, Mom. I will. I love you, too. See you
later."
     She punches the flash button, killing the chat with Mom  and giving her
a fresh dial tone in the space of about half a second. "Roadkill," she says.
     The telephone remembers and dials Roadkill's number.
     Roaring sounds. This is the sound of air peeling over the microphone of
Roadkill's  personal phone at  some terrifying velocity.  Also the competing
whooshes  of  many   vehicles'  tires   on  pavement,  broken  by  chuckhole
percussion; sounds like the crumbling Ventura.
     "Yo, Y.T.," Roadkill says, "'sup?"
     "'Sup with you?"
     "Surfing the Turf. 'Sup with you?"
     "Maxing The Clink."
     "Whoa! Who popped you?"
     "MetaCops. Affixed me to the gate of White Columns with a loogie gun."
     "Whoa, how very! When you leaving?"
     "Soon. Can you swing by and give me a hand?."
     "What do you mean?"
     Men.  "You  know,  give me  a  hand.  You're  my boyfriend," she  says,
speaking very  simply and plainly. "If I get popped, you're supposed to come
around and help bust me  out."  Isn't everyone supposed to know this  stuff?
Don't parents teach their kids anything anymore?
     "Well, uh, where are you?"
     "Buy 'n' Fly number 501,762."
     "I'm on my way to Bernie with a super-ultra."
     As in San Bernardino. As in  super-ultra-high-priority delivery. As in,
you're out of luck.
     "Okay, thanks for nothing."
     "Sorry."
     "Surfing safety," Y.T. says, in the traditional sarcastic sign off.
     "Keep breathing," Roadkill says. The roaring noise snaps off.
     What a jerk. Next date, he's really going to have to grovel. But in the
meantime,  there's  one other person who  owes her one.  The only problem is
that he might be a spaz. But it's worth a try.
     "Hello?" he says into his  personal phone.  He's  breathing  hard and a
couple of sirens are dueling in the background.
     "Hiro Protagonist?"
     "Yeah, who's this?"
     "Y.T. Where are you?"
     "In the  parking lot of a Safeway on  Oahu," he says.  And he's telling
the truth;  in the  background she can  hear the  shopping carts  performing
their clashy, anal copulations.
     "I'm kind of busy now, Whitey - but what can I do for you?"
     "It's Y.T.," she says, "and you can help bust me out of The Clink." She
gives him the details.
     "How long ago did he put you there?"
     "Ten minutes."
     "Okay,  the  three-ring  binder for  Clink franchises  states  that the
manager is supposed to check on the detainee half an hour after admission."
     "How do you know this stuff?" she says accusingly.
     "Use your  imagination.  As  soon as the manager  pulls  his  half-hour
check, wait for another five minutes, and then make  your move. I'll  try to
give you a hand. Okay?"
     "Got it."

     At half an hour on the dot, she hears the back door being unlocked. The
lights come on. Her Knight Visions save her from wracking eyeball pains. The
manager thunks down  a  couple of  steps,  glares at her, glares at her  for
rather a long time. The manager, clearly, is tempted. That momentary glimpse
of flesh has been ricocheting  around in his brain for half  an hour.  He is
wracking his mind with vast cosmological  dilemmas. Y.T.  hopes that he does
not try anything, because the dentata's effects can be unpredictable.
     "Make up your fucking mind," she says.
     It works. This fresh burst of culture shock rattles the jeek out of his
ethical  conundrum. He gives Y.T.  a disapproving  glower - she, after  all,
forced him to be  at-tracted to her, forced him to get horny, made his  head
swim  - she  didn't have  to  get arrested,  did she?  -  and  so on  top of
everything else he's angry with her. As if he has a right to be.
     This is the gender that invented the polio vaccine?
     He turns, goes back up the steps, kills the light, locks the door.
     She  notes the time, sets her alarm watch for  five minutes from now  -
the  only  North American  who actually knows  how to set  the  alarm on her
digital wristwatch  - pulls her  shiv kit from  one of the narrow pockets on
her  sleeve.  She  also hauls out a lightstick and  snaps it so  she can see
'sup. She finds one piece of  narrow, flat spring  steel,  slides it up into
the manacle's innards, depresses the spring-loaded pawl.  The cuff, formerly
a  one-way ratchet that  could only  get tighter,  springs  loose  from  the
cold-water pipe.
     She could take it off her wrist, but she has decided she likes the look
of it.  She cuffs the loose manacle onto her wrist,  right next to the other
one, forming a double bracelet. The  kind of thing her mom used  to do, back
when she was a punk.
     The  steel  door is locked, but  Buy  'n'  Fly  safety  regs mandate an
emergency  exit from the  basement  in  case of fire. Here, it's  a basement
window with mondo bars and a big red multilingual fire alarm bolted onto it.
The red  looks black in the green glow  of  the  lightstick.  She reads  the
instructions that are in English, runs through it once or twice in her mind,
then waits for the  alarm to go off. She whiles away the time by reading the
instructions in all the  other languages,  wondering which is  which. It all
looks like Taxilinga to Y.T.
     The window is almost too grungy to see  through, but she sees something
black walking past it. Hiro.
     About  ten  seconds later, her wristwatch  goes  off.  She punches  the
emergency exit. The  bell rings. The  bars  are  trickier than she thought -
good thing  it's not a real fire -  but eventually  she gets them  open. She
throws  her  plank outside onto the parking lot, drags her body through just
as she hears the rear door  being unlocked. By the time the three-ringer has
found that all-important light switch, she  is banking a sharp turn into the
front lot - which has turned into a jeek festival!
     Every jeek  in  Southern  Cal is here, it seems,  driving their  giant,
wrecked taxicabs with alien livestock  in the back seat, reeking  of incense
and sloshing neon-hued Airwicks! They have set up a giant eight-tubed hookah
on  the trunk of one  of  the  cabs and  are slurping  up great mountain-man
lungfuls of choking smoke.
     And they're  all  staring at Hiro Protagonist, who is just staring back
at them. Everyone in the parking lot looks completely astounded.
     He must have  made his approach from the rear - didn't realize that the
front lot was full of jeeks. Whatever he  was  planning isn't going to work.
The plan is screwed.
     The  manager comes running around from the back  of  the  Buy  'n' Fly,
sounding a bloodcurdling Taxilinga  tocsin. He's got missile lock on  Y.T.'s
ass.
     But  the jeeks  around  the  hookah don't  care about Y.T. They've  got
missile lock on  Hiro. They carefully hang  the ornate  silver nozzles on  a
rack built into the neck  of the mega-bong.  Then they  start moving  toward
him,  reaching into  the  folds  of their  robes, the inner pockets of their
windbreakers.
     Y.T. is  distracted by a sharp hissing  noise. Her eyes  glance back at
Hiro, and she sees that he has withdrawn a  three-foot,  curved sword from a
scabbard,  which she did not notice before. He has dropped into a squat. The
blade of the sword  glitters painfully under  the killer security  lights of
the Buy 'n' Fly.
     How sweet!
     It would  be an understatement to  say  that the hookah boys  are taken
aback. But  they  are  not scared  so  much  as they  are  confused.  Almost
undoubtedly,  most of them have  guns. So  why is this  guy trying to bother
them with a sword?
     She remembers that one of the multiple  professions on Hiro's  business
card is Greatest sword fighter in  the world. Can he really take out a whole
clan of armed jeeks?
     The manager's hand clenches  her  upper arm - like this is really going
to stop her. She  reaches  across her body with  the other hand and lets him
have it with a brief squirt of  Liquid Knuckles. He makes a muffled, distant
grunt, his head snaps back, he lets  go of her arm and  staggers back wildly
until he sprawls against another taxi, jamming the heels  of both hands into
his eye sockets.
     Wait a sec. There's nobody in that particular taxi. But she  can see  a
two-foot-long macrame keychain dangling from the ignition.
     She tosses her plank through the window of the taxi, dives in after  it
(she's small, opening the door is optional),  climbs in  behind the driver's
seat, sinking into a deep nest  of  wooden beads and  air fresheners, grinds
the motor, and takes off. Backward. Headed for the rear parking lot. The car
was  pointed  outward, in  taxicab  style, ready  for a quick getaway, which
would be fine if she were by herself -  but there  is Hiro to think  of. The
radio is  screaming, alive with hollered bursts of Taxilinga. She  backs all
the way around behind the Buy 'n' Fly.  The back lot is  strangely quiet and
empty.
     She shifts  into drive  and blasts  back the  way  she came.  The jeeks
haven't quite had time to react, were  expecting  her to come out  the other
way. She screams it to a halt right next to Hiro,  who has  already had  the
presence of mind to  put his  sword  back in its  scabbard.  He dives in the
passenger-side  window. Then she stops paying  attention  to him.. She's got
other stuff to look at, such as whether she's going to get broadsided as she
pulls out onto the road.
     She doesn't get broadsided, though a car has to squeal  around her. She
guns it out onto the highway. It responds as only an ancient taxicab will.
     The only problem being that half a dozen other ancient taxicabs are now
following them.
     Something is pressing against Y.T.'s left thigh. She looks down. It  is
a remarkably huge revolver in a net bag hanging on the door panel.
     She has  to  find someplace  to  pull into. If  she  could  find a Nova
Sicilia  franchulate,  that would do it -  the Mafia owes  her one. Or a New
South  Africa, which she hates. But the  New South Africans hate  jeeks even
more.
     Scratch that;  Hiro is black, or  at least part black. Can't  take  him
into  New  South  Africa.  And  because  Y.T. is a  Cauc,  they can't  go to
Metazania.
     "Mr. Lee's  Greater Hong Kong," Hiro says.  "Half  mile  ahead  on  the
right."
     "Nice  thinking - but  they won't let  you  in with  your swords,  will
they?"
     "Yes," he says, "because I'm a citizen."
     Then she sees it. The  sign stands out because  it is a rare one. Don't
see  many of these. It is  a green-and-blue sign,  soothing and  calm  in  a
glare-torn franchise ghetto. It says:
     MR. LEE'S GREATER HONG KONG
     Explosive  noise  from  in  back. Her  head  smacks into  the  whiplash
arrestor. Another taxi rear-ended them.
     And she screams into the parking lot of Mr.  Lee's  doing seventy-five.
The security system doesn't even have time to rez her visa and drop the STD,
so it's Severe Tire Damage all the way,  those bald radials are left  behind
on  the spikes. Sparking along on four  naked rims, she shrieks to a stop on
the  lawngrid,  which  doubles  as carbon dioxide-eating turf and impervious
parking lot.
     She and Hiro climb out of the car.
     Hiro is grinning wildly, pinioned in the crossfire of a dozen red laser
beams  scanning  him from  every  direction  at  once.  The Hong  Kong robot
security  system is checking him out. Her, too;  she looks down  to see  the
lasers scribbling across her chest.
     "Welcome to Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong, Mr. Protagonist," the security
system says through a P.A. speaker. "And welcome to your guest, Ms. Y.T."
     The  other taxis have stopped  in formation along the curb.  Several of
them overshot  the Hong Kong franchise and had to back up a block  or  so. A
barrage of  doors thunking shut. Some of  them don't  bother, just leave the
engines running and the doors wide open. Three jeeks linger on the sidewalk,
eyeing the tire shreds impaled on spikes: long streaks of neoprene sprouting
steel  and fiberglass hairs, like ruined toupees. One of them has a revolver
in his hand, pointed straight down at the sidewalk.
     Four more jeeks run up to join them. Y.T. counts two more revolvers and
a pump  shotgun. Any  more  of these  guys  and  they'll be  able  to form a
government.
     They  step  carefully  over the spikes  and  onto  the  lush Hong  Kong
lawngrid. As  they do,  the lasers appear once  more. The jeeks turn all red
and grainy for a second.
     Then  something different happens. Lights  come on. The security system
wants better illumination on these people.
     Hong Kong franchulates are famous for their lawngrids -  whoever  heard
of a lawn you  could park  on? - and for their antennas. They all look  like
NASA  research facilities with their  antennas. Some  of them are  satellite
uplinks,  pointed at the sky. But some  of  them,  tiny little antennas, are
pointed at the ground, at the lawngrid.
     Y.T.  does  not   really   get  this,  but  these  small  antennas  are
millimeter-wave radar transceivers.  Like any other radar,  they are good at
picking up  metallic objects. Unlike  the  radar  in an air traffic  control
center, they can rez  fine details. The  rez of  a system is only as fine as
its wavelength; since the wavelength of this radar is about a millimeter, it
can see the fillings in your teeth, the grommets in your Converse high-tops,
the rivets in your Levi's. It can calculate the value of your pocket change.
     Seeing guns is not a problem. This thing can even tell  if the guns are
loaded, and with what sort of  ammunition.  That is  an important  function,
because guns are illegal in Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong.

        11

     It  doesn't  seem polite to hang around  and gawk  over  the fact  that
Da5id's computer crashed. A lot of the younger hackers  are doing just that,
as a way of showing all the other  hackers how  knowledgeable they are. Hiro
shrugs it off and turns back in the direction of the Rock  Star Quadrant. He
still wants to see Sushi K's hairdo.
     But  his   path  is   being  blocked  by  the   Nipponese  man   -  the
neo-traditional.  The guy with the  swords. He's facing  off  against  Hiro,
about two sword-lengths apart, and it doesn't look like he intends to move.
     Hiro does the polite thing. He bows at the waist, straightens up.
     The businessman  does the much less polite thing. He  looks Hiro rather
carefully up and down, then returns the bow. Sort of.
     "These - " the businessman says. "Very nice."
     "Thank  you, sir. Please  feel  free to  converse  in Nipponese if  you
prefer."
     "This is what  your  avatar  wears. You  do  not carry  such weapons in
Reality," the businessman says. In English.
     "I'm  sorry to be  difficult, but in  fact, I do carry  such weapons in
Reality," Hiro says.
     "Exactly like these?"
     "Exactly."
     "These are ancient weapons, then," the businessman says.
     "Yes, I believe they are."
     "How did  you come  to  be  in  possession  of  such  important  family
heirlooms from Nippon?" the businessman says.
     Hiro knows  the subtext  here: What do you use those swords  for,  boy,
slicing watermelon?
     "They are now my family heirlooms," Hiro says. "My father won them."
     "Won them? Gambling?"
     "Single combat.  It  was  a struggle between my  father and a Nipponese
officer. The story is quite complicated."
     "Please excuse me if I have misinterpreted your story," the businessman
says, "but I was under the impression that men of your race were not allowed
to fight during that war."
     "Your  impression  is  correct,"  Hiro says. "My  father  was  a  truck
driver."
     "Then how  did he come  to be  in hand-to-hand  combat with a Nipponese
officer?"
     "The incident  took  place outside a prisoner-of-war  camp," Hiro says.
"My father  and  another  prisoner tried  to  escape. They were pursued by a
number of Nipponese soldiers and the officer who owned these swords."
     "Your  story is  very  difficult to  believe,"  the  businessman  says,
"because your  father could not have survived such  an escape long enough to
pass the swords on to his son. Nippon is an island  nation. There is nowhere
he could have escaped to."
     "This happened very late in  the war,"  Hiro  says,  "and this camp was
just outside of Nagasaki."
     The businessman chokes, reddens, nearly loses it. His left hand reaches
up to grip the scabbard of  his sword. Hiro looks around; suddenly they  are
in the center of an open circle of people some ten yards across.
     "Do you think that the manner in which you came to possess these swords
was honorable?" the businessman says.
     "If I did not, I would long since have returned them," Hiro says.
     "Then you will not  object to  losing them in  the  same  fashion," the
businessman says.
     "Nor will you object to losing yours," Hiro says.
     The businessman reaches across his body with his right hand,  grips the
handle  of his sword just below the guard, draws it out, snaps it forward so
it's pointing  at Hiro, then places his left hand on the grip just below the
right.
     Hiro does the same.
     Both of them bend their knees, dropping into  a low squat while keeping
the torso  bolt upright, then stand up again and shuffle their feet into the
proper stance - feet parallel, both pointed  straight  ahead,  right foot in
front of the left foot.
     The businessman turns  out to have  a  lot of zanshin. Translating this
concept into English is  like translating "fuckface" into  Nipponese, but it
might  translate  into "emotional  intensity" in football lingo. He  charges
directly at  Hiro, hollering at the top of his lungs.  The movement actually
consists of a very  rapid  shuffling motion  of  the feet, so that  he stays
balanced at  all times. At the last moment, he draws the  sword up  over his
head  and snaps it down toward Hiro. Hiro  brings his own sword up, rotating
it around sideways so that the handle is  up high, above and to  the left of
his face, and the blade slopes down and to the right, providing a roof above
him. The businessman's blow bounces off  this roof like  rain, and then Hiro
sidesteps to let  him  go by and snaps the sword down toward his unprotected
shoulder. But the businessman is moving too fast, and Hiro's timing  is off.
The blade cuts behind and to the side of the businessman.
     Both men wheel to face each other, back up, get back into the stance.
     "Emotional intensity" doesn't convey  the half of it, of course.  It is
the kind  of coarse and disappointing translation that makes the dismembered
bodies  of samurai warriors spin  in  their  graves. The  word  "zanshin" is
larded down with a lot  of other folderol that you have to be  Nipponese  to
understand.
     And Hiro thinks, frankly, that most  of  it is pseudomystical  crap, on
the same  level  as his old high school  football coach exhorting his men to
play at 110 percent.
     The   businessman   makes   another   attack.   This  one   is   pretty
straightforward: a  quick shuffling  approach and then a snapping cut in the
direction of Hiro's ribcage. Hiro parries it.
     Now Hiro knows something about this businessman, namely, that like most
Nipponese sword fighters, all he knows is kendo.
     Kendo  is  to  real samurai sword  fighting  what fencing  is  to  real
swashbuckling:  an attempt to take a highly disorganized,  chaotic, violent,
and brutal conflict and turn it into a cute game. As in fencing, you're only
supposed to attack certain parts of the body - the parts that  are protected
by armor. As in  fencing,  you're not allowed to kick your  opponent in  the
kneecaps  or  break  a  chair  over  his head.  And  the  judging is totally
subjective.  In  kendo, you can  get a good  solid hit on  your opponent and
still not  get credit for it, because the judges feel you didn't possess the
right amount of zanshin.
     Hiro doesn't have any zanshin at all. He just wants this over with. The
next time  the  businessman  sets up his ear-splitting  screech and shuffles
toward Hiro, cutting and snapping his blade, Hiro  parries the attack, turns
around, and cuts both of his legs off just above the knees.
     The businessman collapses to the floor.
     It  takes a  lot  of  practice  to make  your avatar  move through  the
Metaverse  like a real person. When your avatar has just lost its legs,  all
that skill goes out the window.
     "Well,  land  sakes!"  Hiro says. "Lookee  here!"  He  whips his  blade
sideways, cutting off both of the businessman's forearms, causing  the sword
to clatter onto the floor.
     "Better fire up the ol' barbecue, Jemima!" Hiro continues, whipping the
sword around sideways, cutting the businessman's body in half just above the
navel. Then he leans down so he's looking right into the businessman's face.
"Didn't anyone  tell  you," he  says,  losing  the  dialect,  "that I was  a
hacker?"
     Then he  hacks  the  guy's  head off.  It falls  to the  floor, does  a
half-roll,  and comes to rest  staring straight  up  at the ceiling. So Hiro
steps back a couple of paces and mumbles, "Safe."
     A largish  safe, about a meter on  a side, materializes  just below the
ceiling, plummets, and lands directly on the businessman's head. The  impact
drives both  the safe and the  head straight  down through the  floor of The
Black Sun, leaving a square  hole in the floor,  exposing  the tunnel system
underneath.  The rest of the  dismembered body  is  still strewn  around the
floor.
     At this moment, a  Nipponese businessman somewhere, in a nice  hotel in
London or an office in Tokyo or even in the first-class lounge of the  LATH,
the Los Angeles/Tokyo  Hypersonic,  is  sitting in  front of  his  computer,
red-faced and sweating, looking at The Black Sun Hall  of Fame. He has  been
cut off from contact with The Black Sun itself, disconnected as it were from
the Metaverse, and  is  just seeing a two-dimensional display.  The top  ten
swordsmen of all  time are shown along  with their photographs. Beneath is a
scrolling list of numbers and names,  starting with #11. He can scroll  down
the list if he wants  to find his own ranking. The screen  helpfully informs
him that  he is currently ranked number  863 out of 890 people who have ever
participated in a sword fight in The Black Sun.
     Number One, the name and the photograph on the top of the list, belongs
to Hiroaki Protagonist.

        12

     Ng  Security Industries Semi-Autonomous  Guard Unit #A-367  lives in  a
pleasant black-and-white  Metaverse  where porterhouse steaks grow on trees,
dangling  at head level from  low  branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly
through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them.
     He has a little yard all to himself. It has a fence around it. He knows
he can't jump over the fence. He's  never actually tried to jump it, because
he  knows be can't.  He doesn't go into the yard unless he has  to. It's hot
out there.
     He has an important job: Protect the yard. Sometimes people come in and
out of the yard.  Most  of the time, they  are good people,  and he  doesn't
bother them. He  doesn't know why  they  are good people.  He just knows it.
Sometimes  they are bad  people, and he has to do bad things to them to make
them go away. This is fitting and proper.
     Out  in  the  world beyond his yard,  there are other yards  with other
doggies just like him. These aren't nasty dogs. They are all his friends.
     The closest  neighbor doggie is far away, farther  than he can see. But
he  can hear this  doggie bark  sometimes, when  a bad person approaches his
yard. He  can  hear  other  neighbor  doggies,  too, a  whole pack  of  them
stretching  off  into the distance, in  all directions.  He belongs to a big
pack of nice doggies.
     He and the other nice doggies bark whenever a stranger comes into their
yard,  or even near it. The  stranger  doesn't hear  him, but all  the other
doggies  in the pack do. If they live nearby, they get excited. They wake up
and get ready to  do bad things  to that stranger if he should  try  to come
into their yard.
     When  a neighbor  doggie barks  at a stranger,  pictures and sounds and
smells come into his mind along with the bark. He  suddenly  knows what that
stranger looks  like.  What  he smells  like.  How  he sounds. Then, if that
stranger should come anywhere near his  yard, he will recognize him. He will
help spread the bark along to other nice doggies so that the entire pack can
all be prepared to fight the stranger.
     Tonight, Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit  #A-367 is barking. He is  not just
passing some other doggie's bark to the pack. He is barking because he feels
very excited about things that are happening in his yard.
     First,  two people come in. This made  him excited because they came in
very fast. Their hearts are  beating quickly and they are sweating  and they
smell scared. He looked at these two people to see if they were carrying bad
things.
     The little  one is carrying things that are a  little  naughty, but not
really  bad. The big one is carrying some  pretty  bad things. But he knows,
somehow, that the big one is okay. He belongs  in  this  yard. He  is not  a
stranger; he lives here. And the little one is his guest.
     Still,  he senses there is  something  exciting happening. He starts to
bark.  The people in the yard don't hear him barking. But all the other nice
doggies  in the pack, far away, hear him,  and when they do, they see  these
two scared, nice people, smell them, and hear them.
     Then more people come into his yard. They are also excited; he can hear
their  hearts beating. Saliva floods  his mouth as he  smells the  hot salty
blood pumping through their arteries. These people are excited and angry and
just  a little  bit scared.  They don't live here;  they  are  strangers. He
doesn't like strangers very much.
     He looks at them and sees that they are carrying three revolvers, a .38
and two .357 magnums; that the  .38 is loaded with hollow-points, one of the
.357s is loaded with Teflon bullets and has also  been cocked; and that  the
pump shotgun is loaded with buckshot and already has a shell chambered, plus
four more shells in its magazine.
     The  things that the strangers are carrying  are bad.  Scary things. He
gets excited. He gets angry. He gets a little bit scared, but he likes being
scared,  to him it is the  same  thing as being excited. Really, he has only
two emotions: sleeping and adrenaline overdrive.
     The bad stranger with the shotgun is raising his weapon!
     It is an  utterly terrible thing. A  lot of  bad, excited strangers are
invading his yard with evil things, come to hurt the nice visitors.
     He barely  has  time  to bark  out a warning to the other nice  doggies
before he launches  himself  from his doghouse, propelled on a white-hot jet
of pure, feral emotion.

     In Y.T.'s  peripheral vision she sees a brief  flash, hears a  clunking
noise. She looks over in that  direction to see that the source of the light
is a sort of doggie door built into the side of the Hong Kong franchise. The
doggie door has  in the  very recent  past  been  slammed  open by something
coming  from  the  inside,  headed  for  the  lawngrid  with  the speed  and
determination of a howitzer shell.
     As all  of  this  registers on Y.T.'s  mind,  she  begins  to  hear the
shouting of the jeeks. This shouting is not angry and not  scared either. No
one has had  time to get scared  yet.  It is the shouting of someone who has
just had a bucket of ice water dumped over his head.
     This shouting is still getting underway, she is still turning  her head
to look at the jeeks, when the doggie door emits another burst of light. Her
eyes  flick that-a-way; she  thinks that she  saw  something, a  long  round
shadow cross-sectioned  in  the  light for a blurry instant as the door  was
being slammed inward. But when her eyes focus on it, she sees nothing except
the oscillating door, same as before. These are the only impressions left on
her mind, except for one more detail:  a train of  sparks that danced across
the lawngrid from the  doggie door to the jeeks and  back again  during this
one-second event, like a skyrocket glancing across the lot.
     People say that the Rat Thing runs  on four legs. Perhaps the  claws on
its robot legs made those sparks as they were digging into the  lawngrid for
traction.
     The jeeks are all  in motion. Some of them have  just been body-slammed
into the lawngrid and are still bouncing and rolling.  Others  are  still in
mid-collapse.  They are unarmed.  They are  reaching to grip their gun hands
with the opposite hands, still hollering, though now their voices are tinged
with a certain amount  of  fear.  One of them has had his trousers torn from
the waistband all the way  down  to  the ankle,  and a strip  of  fabric  is
trailing out across the lot, as though he had his pocket picked by something
that was in too  much of  a hurry to  let  go of the actual pocket before it
left. Maybe this guy had a knife in his pocket.
     There is no blood anywhere. The Rat Thing  is precise.  Still they hold
their hands and holler. Maybe it's true what  they say, that  the Rat  Thing
gives you an electrical shock when it wants you to let go of something.
     "Look out," she hears herself saying, "they got guns."
     Hiro turns and grins at her. His teeth are  very white and straight; he
has a  sharp grin, a carnivore's grin. "No, they don't. Guns are illegal  in
Hong Kong, remember?"
     "They  had guns just a second  ago,"  Y.T. says,  bulging her eyes  and
shaking her head.
     "The Rat Thing has them now," Hiro says.
     The jeeks all decide they better leave. They run out and get into their
taxis and take off, tires asqueal.
     Y.T. backs the taxi on its  rims out over the STD  and into the street,
where she  grindingly parallel parks it.  She goes  back into the  Hong Kong
franchise, a nebula of  aromatic freshness trailing behind her like the tail
of a  comet. She is thinking, oddly enough, about  what it  would be like to
climb into the  back  of the car with  Hiro  Protagonist for a while. Pretty
nice, probably. But she'd  have to take  out the dentata, and this isn't the
place. Besides, anyone  decent enough to come help her escape from The Clink
probably has some kind of scruples about boffing fifteen-year-old girls.
     "That was nice  of you," he  says, nodding at the parked taxi. "Are you
going to pay for his tires, too?"
     "No. Are you?"
     "I'm having some cash flow problems."
     She stands  there in the middle  of the  Hong Kong lawngrid.  They look
each other up and down, carefully.
     "I called my boyfriend. But he flaked out on me," she says.
     "Another thrasher?"
     "The same."
     "You made the same mistake I made once," he says.
     "What's that?"
     "Mixing  business with pleasure. Going out with  a colleague.  It  gets
very confusing."
     "Yeah.  I see what you mean." She's  not exactly sure what  a colleague
is.
     "I was thinking that we should be partners," she says.
     She's expecting him to laugh at her.  But instead he grins and nods his
head slightly.  "The same thing occurred to me. But  I'd have to think about
how it would work."
     She is astounded that he would actually be thinking this. Then she gets
the sap factor under  control and realizes:  He's waffling. Which means he's
probably lying. This is probably  going  to end with him  trying to get  her
into bed.
     "I gotta go," she says. "Gotta get home."
     Now  we'll see how fast  he loses  interest in the partnership concept.
She turns her back on him.
     Suddenly, they are impaled on Hong Kong robot spotlights one more time.
     Y.T. feels a sharp bruising pain in her ribs, as though someone punched
her. But it  wasn't Hiro. He is an  unpredictable  freak who carries swords,
but she can smell chick-punchers a mile off.
     "Ow!" she says, twisting away from the impact. She looks down  to see a
small heavy object bouncing on  the ground at their feet. Out in the street,
an ancient taxi squeals its tires,  getting the hell out of there. A jeek is
hanging out the rear window, shaking his fist at them. He must have thrown a
rock at her.
     Except it's not  a  rock. The heavy  thing  at her feet, the thing that
just bounced off of Y.T.'s  ribcage, is  a  hand  grenade. She stares for  a
second, recognizing it, a well-known cartoon icon made real.
     Then her feet get knocked out from under her, too fast  really to hurt.
And  just when  she's getting  reoriented to that, there is a painfully loud
bang from another part of the parking lot.
     And  then  everything   finally  stops  long  enough  to  be  seen  and
understood.
     The Rat  Thing  has stopped. Which  they  never  do. It's part of their
mystery that you never get to see them, they move so fast. No one knows what
they look like.
     No one except for Y.T. and Hiro, now.
     It's bigger than she imagined. The body is Rottweiler-sized,  segmented
into overlapping  hard plates like those of a rhinoceros. The legs are long,
curled way  up to deliver power, like a cheetah's.  It must be the tail that
makes  people refer  to it  as a Rat Thing, because  that's the only ratlike
part-incredibly long and flexible. But it looks  like  a rat's tail with the
flesh eaten away by acid, because it just consists of  segments, hundreds of
them neatly plugged together, like vertebrae.
     "Jesus H. Christ!" Hiro says. And she knows, from that, that he's never
seen one either.
     Right  now,  the  tail  is coiled and  piled  around on top of  the Rat
Thing's  body like a rope that  has  fallen out  of a tree. Parts of  it are
trying  to move, other parts of it look  dead and inert. The legs are moving
one by one, spasmodically, not acting in concert. The whole thing just looks
terribly wrong, like footage of an airplane that has had its tail blown off,
trying to maneuver  for a landing. Even  someone who  is not an engineer can
see that it has gone all perverse and twisted.
     The  tail writhes and lashes like a snake, uncoils itself, rises up off
the Rat Thing's body, gets out of  the way of its legs. But  still the  legs
have problems; it can't get itself up
     "Y.T.," Hiro is saying, "don't."
     She does. One footstep at a time, she approaches the Rat Thing.
     "It's dangerous, in case you hadn't noticed,"  Hiro says, following her
a few paces behind. "They say it has biological components."
     "Biological components?"
     "Animal parts. So it might be unpredictable."
     She likes animals. She keeps walking.
     She's seeing it better now. It's not all armor and muscle. A lot of  it
actually  looks  kind  of  flimsy.  It  has  short  stubby  winglike  things
projecting from its body: A big one from each shoulder  and a row of smaller
ones down the length of its spine, like on a stegosaurus. Her Knight Visions
tell her  that  these  things  are hot enough  to  bake pizzas  on.  As  she
approaches, they seem to unfold and grow.
     They are blooming like flowers in  an educational  film,  spreading and
unfolding to reveal  a fine complicated internal structure that has been all
collapsed together inside. Each stubby wing splits off into little miniature
copies of itself,  and each of  those in turn  splits  off into more smaller
copies  and so on forever. The smallest  ones are just tiny bits of foil, so
small that, from a distance, the edges look fuzzy.
     It  is continuing  to get hotter. The  little wings are almost red  hot
now. Y.T. slides her goggles up onto her forehead and cups her hands  around
her  face to block out the surrounding lights,  and sure enough she can  see
them beginning to make a dull brownish glow,  like an electric stove element
that  has  just  been turned  on.  The  grass underneath  the  Rat  Thing is
beginning to smoke.
     "Careful. Supposedly they have really nasty isotopes inside," Hiro says
behind her. He has come up  a  little closer now, but he's still hanging way
back.
     "What's an isotope?"
     "A radioactive substance that makes heat. That's its energy source."
     "How do you turn it off?"
     "You don't. It keeps making heat until it melts."
     Y.T. is only a  few feet away from the Rat  Thing now, and she can feel
the  heat on her checks.  The wings have unfolded as far as  they can go. At
their  roots  they are a bright  yellow-orange, fading  out through red  and
brown to  their delicate edges, which are still dark. The acrid smoke of the
burning grass obscures some of the details.
     She  thinks:  The edges  of  the  wings look like something  I've  seen
before. They  look like  the thin metal vanes that run up the  outside  of a
window  air conditioner, the ones that you can write your name in by mashing
them down with your finger.
     Or like the radiator on a car. The fan blows air  over  the radiator to
cool off the engine.
     "It's got  radiators," she says. "The  Rat Thing has  got  radiators to
cool off." She's gathering intel right at this very moment.
     But it's not cooling off. It's just getting hotter.
     Y.T. surfs  through  traffic jams for  a  living.  That's  her economic
niche: beating the traffic.  And she knows that a car doesn't boil over when
it is speeding down an open freeway.  It boils over  when  it is stopped  in
traffic. Because when it sits still, not enough air is being blown over  the
radiator.
     That's  what's  happening  to the Rat  Thing right now. It has to  keep
moving, keep forcing air  over its radiators, or else it overheats and melts
down.
     "Cool," she says. "I wonder if it's going to blow up or what."
     The body converges to a sharp nose. In the front it bends down sharply,
and there is a black  glass canopy,  raked sharply like the windshield  of a
fighter plane. If the Rat Thing has eyes, this is where it looks out.
     Under that,  where the jaw should be are the remains  of  some  kind of
mechanical  stuff that has  been mostly  blown  off by the explosion of  the
grenade.
     The black glass windshield - or facemask, or whatever you call it - has
a hole blown through it. Big enough that Y.T. could put her hand through. On
the other side of that hole, it's dark and she can't see much, especially so
close to the  bright orange glare coming from the radiators. But she can see
that red stuff is coming out from inside. And it ain't no Dexron II. The Rat
Thing is hurt and it's bleeding.
     "This thing is real,"  she says.  "It's got  blood in its veins." She's
thinking: This is intel.  This is  intel. I can make money off this  with my
pardner - my pod - Hiro.
     Then she thinks: The poor thing is burning itself alive.
     "Don't do it. Don't touch it, Y.T.," Hiro says.
     She steps right up  to it, flips her goggles  down to protect her  face
from  the  heat.  The Rat  Thing's legs stop their spasmodic  movements,  as
though waiting for her.
     She bends down  and grabs its front legs. They react, tightening  their
pushrod muscles against  the pull of her hands. It's exactly like grabbing a
dog by the front legs and asking it to dance. This thing is alive. It reacts
to her. She knows.
     She looks up at Hiro, just to make sure he's taking this all in. He is.
     "Jerk!"  she  says. "I stick my  neck  out  and say  I want to  be your
partner,  and you say  you want  to think about it? What's your problem, I'm
not good enough to work with you?"
     She leans back and  begins dragging the Rat Thing  backward  across the
lawngrid. It's  incredibly light. No wonder it can run  so fast.  She  could
pick it up, if she felt like burning herself alive.
     As she drags it backward toward the doggie door, it brands a blackened,
smoking trail  into the  lawngrid.  She can  see steam rising  up out of her
coverall, old sweat  and stuff boiling out of the fabric. She's small enough
to fit through the doggie  door - another  thing she can do and Hiro can't .
Usually these things are locked, she's tried to mess with them. But this one
is opened.
     Inside, the  franchise is  bright,  white, robot-polished floors. A few
feet from the doggie door is what  looks like a black washing machine.  This
is  the  Rat  Thing's hutch, where it lurks in darkness and privacy, waiting
for a job to do. It is wired into the franchise by a  thick cable coming out
of the wall. Right now,  the hutch's door is  hanging open, which is another
thing she's never seen before. And steam is rolling out from inside of it.
     Not steam. Cold stuff. Like when you open your freezer door on a  humid
day.
     She pushes  the Rat  Thing  into its  hutch.  Some kind  of cold liquid
sprays out of all the walls and bursts into steam before it even reaches the
Rat Thing's body, and the steam comes blasting out the front of the hutch so
powerfully that it knocks her on her ass.
     The  long tail  is strung out the front of the hutch, across the floor,
and  out  through the doggie door.  She picks  up  part  of  it,  the  sharp
machine-tooled edges of its vertebrae pinching her gloves.
     Suddenly it tenses, comes alive, vibrates  for a second. She jerks  her
hands back. The  tail shoots  back  inside  the  hutch  like a  rubber  band
snapping. She  can't even see it move.  Then the hutch  door slams  shut.  A
janitor  robot, a  Hoover with a brain, hums out of another doorway to clean
the long streaks of blood off the floor.
     Above her, hanging on the  foyer  wall facing the main entrance,  is  a
framed poster with a garland of  well-browned  jasmine blossoms  hung around
it. It consists of a photo of  the wildly  grinning Mr.  Lee, with the usual
statement underneath:

        WELCOME!
     It is my  pleasure  to welcome all quality  folks to  visiting  of Hong
Kong. Whether seriously in business or on a fun-loving hijink, make yourself
totally  homely  in this meager  environment. If any  aspect is not  utterly
harmonious, gratefully bring it to my notice and I shall strive to earn your
satisfaction.
     We  of  Greater  Hong  Kong  take  many  prides  in our  tiny  nation's
extravagant  growth. The  ones who saw our  isle  as a morsel of Red China's
pleasure  have  struck  their faces in  keen astonishment to see many  great
so-called  powers of  the  olden  guard  reel in  dismay  before our leaping
strides and  charged-up  hustling, freewheeling idiom of high-tech  personal
accomplishment and betterment  of all peoples.  The potentials of all ethnic
races and anthropologies to merge  under a banner of the Three Principles to
follow
     1. Information, information, i