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     Back  in  his cool little house, Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit  #A-367  is
howling. Outside  in the yard, it was very hot and he felt  bad. Whenever he
is out in the yard, he gets  hot unless he  keeps running. When he  got hurt
and had to lie down for  a long time, he felt hotter than he  had  ever been
before.
     Now  he doesn't feel hot  anymore. But he is still hurt. He is  howling
his injured howl. He is telling all the neighbor doggies that he needs help.
They  feel sad and  upset and repeat  his howl and pass it along to  all the
rest of the doggies.
     Soon  he hears the vet's car approaching.  The  nice  vet will come and
make him feel better.
     He starts barking again. He is telling all the  other doggies about how
the bad strangers came and hurt him. And how hot it was out in the yard when
he had to lie down.  And how the nice  girl helped him and took him  back to
his cool house.

     Right in front of  the Hong Kong franchise, Y.T. notices a  black  Town
Car that  has  been sitting there for a while. She doesn't have to  see  the
plates to know it's Mafia. Only the Mafia drives cars like that. The windows
are blackened, but she  knows someone's in there keeping an eye  on her. How
do  they  do it? You see these Town Cars everywhere, but  you never see them
move, never see them get anyplace. She's not  even sure they have engines in
them.
     "Okay.  Sorry," Hiro  says. "I keep my  own  thing going, but we have a
partnership for any intel you can dig up. Fifty-fifty split."
     "Deal," she says, climbing onto her plank.
     "Call me anytime. You have my card."
     "Hey,  that  reminds  me. Your card said you're into  the  three  Ms of
software."
     "Yeah. Music, movies, and microcode."
     "You heard of Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns?"
     "No. Is that a band?"
     "Yeah.  It's the greatest band. You should check it  out, homeboy, it's
going to be the next big thing."
     She coasts  out onto  the road and poons an  Audi with  Blooming Greens
license plates. It ought to take her home. Mom's probably in bed, pretending
to sleep, being worried.
     Half a block from the entrance to Blooming Greens, she unpoons the Audi
and coasts  into a McDonald's. She  goes into  the  ladies'. It has  a  hung
ceiling. She  stands on the seat  of the third  toilet, pushes up one of the
ceiling tiles, moves  it aside.  A  cotton sleeve  tumbles  out,  bearing  a
delicate floral  print. She pulls on  it and  hauls down the whole ensemble,
the  blouse, the pleated skirt,  underwear from Vicky's, the leather  shoes,
the  necklace and earrings, even a  fucking purse. She takes off her  RadiKS
coverall, wads it up,  sticks it into the ceiling, replaces the  loose tile.
Then she puts on the ensemble.
     Now she looks just like she did  when she  had breakfast  with Mom this
morning.
     She  carries her plank down  the  street to Blooming Greens, where it's
legal to carry  them  but  not to put them  on  the  'crete. She flashes her
passport  at the border post,  walks  a quarter  of a  mile  down crisp  new
sidewalks, and up to the house where the porch light is on.
     Mom's sitting in the den, in front of her computer, as usual. Mom works
for the  Feds.  Feds don't make much  money, but they have to  work hard, to
show their loyalty.
     Y.T.  goes in and  looks at her  mother,  who  has slumped down in  her
chair, put her hands around  her  face almost like she's vogueing,  put bare
stockinged feet up. She wears these  awful cheap Fed stockings that are like
scouring cloth,  and  when she walks, her thighs rub together underneath her
skirt and make a  rasping noise. There  is a heavy-duty Ziploc  bag  on  the
table, full  of water that used to be ice a couple of  hours ago. Y.T. looks
at Mom's left arm. She  has rolled up her sleeve to expose the fresh bruise,
just  above her elbow,  where  they put the blood-pressure cuff. Weekly  Fed
polygraph test.
     "Is that you?" Mom shouts, not realizing that Y.T.'s in the room.
     Y.T. retreats into the kitchen so she won't surprise her mother. "Yeah,
Mom," she shouts back. "How was your day?"
     "I'm tired," Mom says. It's what she always says.
     Y.T. pinches a beer from  the fridge and  starts running a hot bath. It
makes  a roaring sound that  relaxes her,  like the white-noise generator on
Morn's nightstand.

        13

     The  Nipponese businessman lies  cut in segments  on  The  Black  Sun's
floor. Surprisingly (he looks so real when  he's in  one  piece),  no flesh,
blood, or organs are visible through  the new crossections that Hiro's sword
made through his body. He is nothing more than a thin shell of epidermis, an
incredibly complex inflatable doll. But the air does not rush out of him, he
fails to collapse,  and you can  look into the aperture  of a sword  cut and
see, instead of bones and meat, the back of the skin on the other side.
     It breaks the metaphor. The avatar is  not acting like  a real body. It
reminds all The Black Sun's patrons that they are living in a fantasy world.
People hate to be reminded of this.
     When Hiro wrote The  Black Sun's sword-fighting  algorithms - code that
was later picked up and adopted by the entire Metaverse - he discovered that
there was no  good way  to handle the aftermath. Avatars are not supposed to
die. Not  supposed to fall apart. The creators of the Metaverse had not been
morbid enough  to  foresee a demand for this  kind  of  thing. But the whole
point of a sword fight  is  to cut someone up and  kill them. So Hiro had to
kludge something together, in order that the Metaverse would not, over time,
become littered with inert, dismembered avatars that never decayed.
     So the first  thing that happens, when someone loses  a sword fight, is
that  his computer gets disconnected from  the global  network  that is  the
Metaverse.  He  gets chucked  right  out of  the system. It  is the  closest
simulation  of death that the Metaverse can offer, but all it really does is
cause the user a lot of annoyance.
     Furthermore,  the user finds that he can't get  back into the Metaverse
for a  few  minutes. He  can't  log  back  on. This is because  his  avatar,
dismembered, is  still in  the Metaverse, and it's  a  rule that your avatar
can't exist in two places  at once.  So the user can't get back in until his
avatar has been disposed of.
     Disposal of hacked-up avatars is taken care of by Graveyard Daemons,  a
new Metaverse feature that Hiro had  to invent. They are small lithe persons
swathed in  black, like ninjas, not even their eyes showing. They are  quiet
and efficient. Even as Hiro is  stepping back from the hacked-up body of his
former  opponent,  they are emerging from  invisible trapdoors in  The Black
Sun's floor, climbing up out of  the  netherworld, converging on  the fallen
businessman. Within  seconds, they  have stashed the  body  parts into black
bags. Then they climb back  down through their secret  trapdoors and  vanish
into  hidden tunnels beneath  The Black Sun's floor.  A  couple  of  curious
patrons  try to  follow  them, try  to  pry  open  the trapdoors, but  their
avatars'  fingers find nothing but smooth matte black. The tunnel  system is
accessible only to the Graveyard Daemons.
     And, incidentally, to Hiro. But he rarely uses it.
     The Graveyard  Daemons  will take the avatar to  the Pyre, an  eternal,
underground bonfire beneath  the  center  of The  Black Sun, and burn it. As
soon as the flames consume  the  avatar, it  will vanish from the Metaverse,
and then its owner will be able to sign on as  usual,  creating a new avatar
to run around in. But, hopefully, he  will  be  more cautious and polite the
next time around.

     Hiro looks  up  into  the circle of applauding, whistling, and cheering
avatars and  notes that they are fading out.  The entire Black Sun now looks
like it is being projected on gauze. On the other side of that gauze, bright
lights shine through, overwhelming the image. Then it disappears entirely.
     He peels off his goggles. and finds himself standing in the parking lot
of the U-Stor-It, holding a naked katana.
     The sun has  just gone  down. A  couple  of  dozen people are  standing
around  him at  a great distance, shielding themselves  behind parked  cars,
awaiting his next  move. Most of them are pretty scared,  but a few  of them
are just plain excited.
     Vitaly  Chernobyl is  standing in the open door  of their 20-by-30. His
hairdo  is backlighted. It has  been petrified  by means  of  egg whites and
other proteins. These substances refract the light and throw off tiny little
spectral  fragments, a cluster-bombed rainbow. Right  now, a miniature image
of The Black Sun is being projected onto Vitaly's ass by Hiro's computer. He
is rocking unsteadily from foot to foot, as though  standing on both of them
at the same time is too complicated to deal with this early in the day,  and
he hasn't decided which one to use.
     "You're blocking me," Hiro says.
     "It's time to go," Vitaly says.
     "You're telling me it's time to go? I've been  waiting for  you to wake
up for an hour."
     As Hiro approaches, Vitaly watches his sword uncertainly. Vitaly's eyes
are dry and red, and on his lower lip he is sporting a chancre the size of a
tangerine.
     "Did you win your sword fight?"
     "Of course I won the fucking sword fight," Hiro says. "I'm the greatest
sword fighter in the world."
     "And you wrote the software."
     "Yeah. That, too," Hiro says.

     After Vitaly Chernobyl and  the Meltdowns arrived  in Long Beach on one
of those  hijacked  ex-Soviet  refugee  freighters, they  fanned  out across
southern California looking for expanses of reinforced concrete that were as
vast and barren as  the  ones  they  had  left behind in  Kiev. They weren't
homesick. They needed such environments in order to practice their art.
     The  L.A.  River  was a  natural  site. And  there were plenty  of nice
overpasses. All they had to do was follow skateboarders to the secret places
they  had  long  since   discovered.   Thrashers  and   nuclear  fuzz-grunge
collectives thrive in the same environment. That's where Vitaly and Hiro are
going right now.
     Vitaly  has a really old VW Vanagon, the kind with a pop-top that turns
it into a makeshift camper. He used to live in it, staying on the street  or
in  various  Snooze  'n'  Cruise  franchises, until  he  met  up  with  Hiro
Protagonist.  Now,  the ownership of  the  Vanagon is  subject  to  dispute,
because  Vitaly owes Hiro more  money than  it is technically worth. So they
share it.
     They  drive  the Vanagon  around to the  other side  of  the U-Stor-It,
honking the horn and flashing  the lights  in order to shoo a hundred little
kids away from the loading dock. It's not a playground, kids.
     They  pick their way  down a broad  corridor, excusing themselves every
inch  of  the way as they step over  little  Mayan  encampments and Buddhist
shrines  and white trash stoned on Vertigo, Apple Pie, Fuzzy Buzzy, Narthex,
Mustard, and the like. The floor needs sweeping: used syringes, crack vials,
charred  spoons, pipe  stems.  There are also many little tubes, about thumb
sized,  transparent plastic with a red cap  on  one end. They might be crack
vials,  but the  caps  are  still  on  them,  and pipeheads  wouldn't  be so
fastidious as to replace the lid on an empty vial. It must  be something new
Hiro  hasn't  heard of before, the McDonald's styrofoam burger box  of  drug
containers.
     They  push through  a fire door into another section  of the U-Stor-It,
which looks the  same as the last one (everything looks the same in America,
there are no transitions  now). Vitaly owns the third locker on the right, a
puny 5-by-10 that he is actually using for its intended purpose: storage.
     Vitaly  steps  up to  the  door and commences  trying  to remember  the
combination  to  the  padlock, which  involves a  certain  amount of  random
guessing. Finally, the lock snaps and pops  open. Vitaly shoots the bolt and
swings  the  door  open,  sweeping a  clean  half-circle  through  the  drug
paraphernalia.  Most  of the  5-by-10  is  occupied  by  a  couple  of large
four-wheeled flatbed handcarts piled high with speakers and amps.
     Hiro and Vitaly wheel the carts down to the loading dock, put the stuff
into  the  Vanagon,  and  then  return  the  empty  carts  to  the  5-by-10.
Technically, the carts are community property, but no one believes that.
     The drive to the scene of the concert is long, made longer by  the fact
that Vitaly, rejecting  the technocentric L.A. view of the universe in which
Speed  is  God, likes to  stay on the surface and drive at about thirty-five
miles per hour. Traffic  is  not great,  either. So Hiro  jacks his computer
into the cigarette lighter and goggles into the Metaverse.
     He  is no longer connected to the network by a fiberoptic cable, and so
all his communication  with the  outside  world has  to take place via radio
waves,  which are  much slower  and less  reliable. Going into The Black Sun
would not be practical  - it  would look and sound terrible,  and  the other
patrons would look at him as if he were some kind of black-and-white person.
But there's no problem with going into his  office, because that's generated
within the guts of his  computer, which is sitting on  his  lap; he  doesn't
need any communication with the outside world for that.
     He  materializes  in his  office, in his nice  little house in  the old
hacker neighborhood  just off the Street. It  is all quite Nipponese: tatami
mats  cover  the floor.  His  desk is  a  great, ruddy  slab  of  rough-sawn
mahogany. Silvery  cloud-light filters through  ricepaper  walls. A panel in
front  of him  slides open to reveal a garden, complete with babbling  brook
and steelhead trout jumping out from time to time to grab flies. Technically
speaking,  the pond should  be  full of carp, but Hiro is American enough to
think of carp as inedible dinosaurs that sit on the bottom and eat sewage.
     There  is  something new: A globe about the  size  of a  grapefruit,  a
perfectly  detailed rendition  of  Planet Earth, hanging in  space at  arm's
length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it. It
is a piece of CIC software  called, simply, Earth. It is  the user interface
that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns
-  all   the  maps,   weather  data,  architectural  plans,   and  satellite
surveillance stuff.
     Hiro has been  thinking that in a few years,  if he does really well in
the intel biz, maybe he will make enough money to subscribe to Earth and get
this thing in his office. Now it is suddenly here, free of charge.  The only
explanation he can come up with is that Juanita must have given it to him.
     But  first things  first. The Babel/Infocalypse  card is still  in  his
avatar's pocket. He takes it out.
     One  of  the rice-paper panels  that make  up  the  walls of his office
slides open. On the other  side of it, Hiro can see a large, dimly  lit room
that  wasn't there  before;  apparently  Juanita  came  in and made a  major
addition to his house as well. A man walks into the office.
     The  Librarian daemon looks  like a pleasant,  fiftyish, silver-haired,
bearded man  with  bright  blue  eyes, wearing  a V-neck sweater over a work
shirt, with a coarsely woven, tweedy-looking wool tie. The  tie is loosened,
the  sleeves  pushed up. Even though he's just  a piece of software, he  has
reason to  be  cheerful; he can move  through  the nearly infinite stacks of
information  in  the Library  with the agility of a spider dancing across  a
vast web of crossreferences. The Librarian is the only piece of CIC software
that costs even more than Earth; the only thing he can't do is think.
     "Yes, sir," the Librarian says.  He is eager without  being obnoxiously
chipper; he clasps his hands behind his back, rocks forward slightly  on the
balls of his feet, raises his eyebrows expectantly over his half-glasses.
     "Babel's a city in Babylon, right?"
     "It was  a legendary city,"  the  Librarian  says. "Babel is a Biblical
term for Babylon. The word is Semitic; Bab means gate and  El  means God, so
Babel means  'Gate of God.' But  it  is probably also somewhat onomatopoeic,
imitating someone  who speaks  in  an incomprehensible tongue. The Bible  is
full of puns."
     "They built a tower to Heaven and God knocked it down."
     "This is an anthology of common misconceptions. God did not do anything
to  the Tower itself. 'And  the LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and
they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will
do; and nothing that they propose  to  do will now  be impossible  for them.
Come, let  us  go down, and there confuse their language, that they  may not
understand one  another's  speech." So the LORD  scattered them  abroad from
there  over the face of all the earth, and they left off  building the city.
Therefore  its name was called  Babel, because there  the LORD  confused the
language of all the earth.' Genesis 11:6-9, Revised Standard Version."
     "So the tower wasn't knocked down. It just went on hiatus."
     "Correct. It was not knocked down."
     "But that's bogus."
     "Bogus?"
     "Provably  false.  Juanita  believes that nothing  is  provably true or
provably false in the Bible. Because  of it's provably false, then the Bible
is a lie, and if it's provably true, then the existence of God is proven and
there's no  room for faith. The Babel  story  is provably  false, because if
they built  a tower to Heaven and  God didn't knock it  down,  then it would
still be around somewhere, or at least a visible remnant of it."
     "In assuming  that it  was very  tall,  you  are relying on an obsolete
reading. The tower is described, literally, as 'its top with  the  heavens.'
For  many  centuries,  this was interpreted to mean that its top was so high
that it was in the  heavens.  But in  the  last century  or  so,  as  actual
Babylonian ziggurats have  been excavated, astrological diagrams -  pictures
of the heavens - have been found inscribed into their tops."
     "Oh. Okay, so the real  story is that  a tower  was built with heavenly
diagrams carved into its  top. Which is far more plausible than a tower that
reaches to the heavens."
     "More than plausible," the Librarian reminds him. "Such structures have
actually been found."
     "Anyway, you're saying that when God got angry  and came down on  them,
the tower itself wasn't affected. But  they had  to stop building  the tower
because of an informational disaster - they couldn't talk to each other."
     "'Disaster' is an astrological term meaning 'bad star,"'  the Librarian
points out.  "Sorry - but due to my internal structure, I'm a sucker for non
sequiturs."
     "That's  okay, really,"  Hiro says.  "You're  a  pretty decent piece of
ware. Who wrote you, anyway?"
     "For  the most part I write myself," the  Librarian says. "That  is,  I
have the  innate  ability  to  learn from experience.  But this ability  was
originally coded into me by my creator."
     "Who  wrote you?  Maybe  I know  him,"  Hiro  says.  "I  know a  lot of
hackers."
     "I was not coded by a professional hacker, per se, but by  a researcher
at the Library of Congress who  taught himself  how to  code," the Librarian
says. "He devoted  himself  to the  common  problem of sifting  through vast
amounts  of  irrelevant   detail  in  order  to  find  significant  gems  of
information. His name was Dr. Emanuel Lagos."
     "I've heard the name," Hiro says. "So  he was kind of a meta-librarian.
That's funny, I guessed he was one  of those old CIA spooks who hangs around
in the CIC."
     "He never worked with the CIA."
     "Okay.  Let's  get  some  work  done.  Look  up  every  piece  of  free
information  in the Library  that  contains L. Bob Rife and  arrange  it  in
chronological order. The emphasis here is on free.''
     "Television and newspapers, yes, sir. One moment,  sir,"  the Librarian
says. He  turns around and exits on crepe soles. Hiro turns his attention to
Earth.
     The level of detail is fantastic. The resolution, the clarity, just the
look of it, tells Hiro, or  anyone else who knows computers, that this piece
of software is some heavy shit.
     It's  not  just  continents and oceans. It looks exactly like the earth
would look  from  a  point  in  geosynchronous  orbit directly  above  L.A.,
complete  with  weather systems - vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering
just  above  the surface of the globe, casting gray  shadows on the oceans -
and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting  into  the sea. Half of the globe
is  illuminated by  sunlight,  and  half  is dark. The terminator - the line
between  night  and  day - has just swept across  L.A. and  is now  creeping
across the Pacific, off to the west.
     Everything  is going  in  slow motion. Hiro  can  see the clouds change
shape if he  watches  them long enough. Looks like a clear night on the East
Coast.
     Something catches his attention, moving rapidly over the surface of the
globe. He thinks it must be a gnat. But there are no gnats in the Metaverse.
He  tries to focus on  it. The computer, bouncing low-powered lasers off his
cornea, senses this change in emphasis,  and then Hiro gasps as  he seems to
plunge downward  toward the  globe, like a space-walking  astronaut who  has
just  fallen  out  of his  orbital  groove. When  he  finally gets  it under
control, he's  just a few hundred  miles above  the earth, looking down at a
solid bank of clouds, and  he can see the gnat gliding along below him. It's
a low-flying CIC satellite, swinging north to south in a polar orbit.
     "Your information, sir," the Librarian says.
     Hiro startles and glances up. Earth swings down and out of his field of
view and there is the Librarian, standing in  front of the desk, holding out
a  hypercard. Like  any  librarian in Reality, this  daemon can move  around
without audible footfalls.
     "Can you make a little more noise when you  walk? I'm easily startled,"
Hiro says.
     "It is done, sir. My apologies."
     Hiro reaches out for the  hypercard.  The Librarian  takes  half a step
forward and leans toward  him. This time, his foot makes a soft noise on the
tatami mat, and Hiro can hear the white noise of  his trousers sliding  over
his leg.
     Hiro takes the hypercard and looks at it. The front is labeled
     Results of Library search on:
     Rife, Lawrence Robert, 1948-
     He flips  the  card  over.  The back  is  divided  into  several  dozen
fingemail-sized icons. Some of them are little snapshots of  the front pages
of  newspapers.  Many of  them  are  colorful, glowing rectangles: miniature
television screens showing live video.
     "That's impossible,"  Hiro says. "I'm sitting  in a  VW van,  okay? I'm
jacked in over a cellular link. You couldn't have moved that much video into
my system that fast."
     "It  was not  necessary  to move  anything,"  the  Librarian says. "All
existing video on L. Bob Rife was collected by Dr. Lagos  and placed  in the
Babel/Infocalypse stack, which you have in your system."
     "Oh."

        14

     Hiro stares at the miniature TV in the upper left comer of the card. It
zooms  toward  him  until  it's  about  the  size  of a twelve-inch  low-def
television set at  arms' length. Then the  video image begins to play.  It's
very  poor eight-millimeter film  footage of a high school football  game in
the sixties. No soundtrack.
     "What is this game?"
     The Librarian says, "Odessa, Texas,  1965.  L. Bob  Rife is a fullback,
number eight in the dark uniform."
     "This  is more  detail than  I need. Can you summarize  some  of  these
things?"
     "No. But  I can list the contents  briefly.  The stack  contains eleven
high school  football  games. Rife was on the second-string Texas  all-state
team  in  his  senior year.  Then  he  proceeded  to  Rice  on  an  academic
scholarship and walked onto the football  team,  so  there are also fourteen
tapes of college games. Rife majored in communications."
     "Logically enough, considering what he became."
     "He became a television sports reporter in the Houston market, so there
are  fifty hours of  footage  from this period - mostly outtakes, of course.
After  two  years  in  this line of  work, Rife went  into business with his
great-uncle, a financier with  roots in the oil business. The stack contains
a  few newspaper stories to that effect, which, as I note from reading them,
are all textually related - implying that they came from the same source."
     "A press release."
     "Then there are no stories for five years."
     "He was up to something."
     "Then we  begin to  see more stories, mostly from the Religion sections
of  Houston   newspapers,   detailing   Rife's   contributions  to   various
organizations."
     "That sounded like summary to me. I thought you couldn't summarize."
     "I can't really. I was quoting a summary that Dr. Lagos made to Juanita
Marquez recently, in my presence, when they were reviewing the same data."
     "Go on."
     "Rife contributed $500 to the Highlands Church of  the Baptism by Fire,
Reverend  Wayne Bedford, head  minister;  $2,500  to  the  Pentecostal Youth
League  of Bayside, Reverend  Wayne  Bedford,  president;  $150,000  to  the
Pentecostal Church of the  New Trinity, Reverend Wayne Bedford, founder  and
patriarch;  $2.3  million to  Rife Bible  College, Reverend  Wayne  Bedford,
President  and  chairman of  the theology  department;  $20  million to  the
archaeology  department  of Rife Bible  College,  plus  $45  million to  the
astronomy department and $100 million to the computer science department."
     "Did these donations take place before hyperinflation?"
     "Yes, sir. They were, as the expression goes, real money."
     "That Wayne Bedford guy - is this the same Reverend Wayne who  runs the
Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates?"
     "The same."
     "Are you telling me that Rife owns the Reverend Wayne?"
     "He owns  a  majority  share  in  Pearlgate Associates,  which  is  the
multinational that runs the Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates chain."
     "Okay, let's keep sifting through this," Hiro says.
     Hiro Peeps out over his goggles to confirm that Vitaly is still nowhere
near the concert. Then he dives back in and  continues to go over the  video
and the news stories that Lagos has compiled.
     During the same years that Rife makes his contributions to the Reverend
Wayne,  he's showing up  with increasing  frequency in the business section,
first in the local papers and later in The  Wall Street  Journal and The New
York Times. There is a big flurry of  publicity - obvious PR  plants - after
the  Nipponese tried  to  use their old-boy  network to shut him out of  the
telecommunications market  there, and he took  it to  the  American  public,
spending $10 million of  his own money on a campaign  to convince  Americans
that the  Nipponese  were  duplicitous schemers. A triumphal  cover  on  The
Economist after the  Nipponese finally knuckled under and let him corner the
fiber-optics market in that country and, by extension, most of East Asia.
     Finally,  then, the lifestyle  pieces start  coming in. L. Bob Rife has
let his publicist know that he wants to show a  more human side.  There is a
personality journalism program that  does a puff piece on Rife after he buys
a new yacht, surplus, from the U.S. Government.
     L. Bob  Rife,  last  of  the nineteenth-century  monopolists,  is shown
consulting with his decorator in the captain's quarters. It looks nice as it
is, considering that Rife bought this ship from the Navy, but it's not Texan
enough  for  him.  He  wants  it  gutted and  rebuilt.  Then, shots of  Rife
maneuvering  his  steerlike  body  through  the  narrow  passages  and steep
staircase of the  ship's interior - typical  boring gray  steel  Navy scape,
which,  he  assures  the  interviewer,  he  is  going  to  have  spruced  up
considerably.
     "Y'know, there's a  story that when Rockefeller bought himself a yacht,
he bought a pretty small one, like a  seventy-footer or  something. Small by
the standards of the day. And when someone asked him why he  went and bought
himself such a dinky little yacht, he just looked at the guy and said, 'What
do  you think I am, a  Vanderbilt?' Haw!  Well,  anyway, welcome  aboard  my
yacht."
     L. Bob  Rife  says  this while  standing on a  huge  open-air  platform
elevator along with  the interviewer and the whole camera crew. The elevator
is going up. In the background is the Pacific Ocean. As Rife is speaking the
last part  of the  line, suddenly  the elevator rises up to the top and  the
camera turns around, and we are looking out across the deck  of the aircraft
carrier Enterprise, formerly of  the U.S. Navy, now the personal yacht of L.
Bob Rife, who beat out both General Jim's Defense  System and Admiral  Bob's
Global Security in a furious bidding war. L. Bob Rife proceeds to admire the
vast, flat open spaces of the carrier's flight deck, likening  it to certain
parts of  Texas.  He suggests that it would be  amusing to  cover part of it
with dirt and raise cattle there.
     Another  profile, this one shot for a business network, apparently made
somewhat later: Back on the Enterprise, where  the captain's office has been
massively reworked. L. Bob Rife, Lord  of  Bandwidth, is sitting behind  his
desk, having his mustache waxed. Not in the sense that women have their legs
waxed. He's having the curl smoothed out  and restored. The waxer  is a very
short  Asian woman who does it so delicately  that it doesn't even interfere
with his talking, mostly  about his  efforts to extend  his cable TV network
throughout Korea and  into China and  link  it  up  with his big fiber-optic
trunk line that runs across Siberia and over the Urals.
     "Yeah, you know, a monopolist's work is never done. No  such thing as a
perfect  monopoly. Seems like you can never  get that last one-tenth of  one
percent."
     "Isn't the government still strong in Korea? You must have more trouble
with regulations there."
     L. Bob Rife  laughs. "Y'know, watching government regulators  trying to
keep up with the world is my favorite sport. Remember when they busted up Ma
Bell?"
     "Just barely." The reporter is a woman in her twenties.
     "You know what it was, right?"
     "Voice communications monopoly."
     "Right. They were in the same business as me. The information business.
Moving phone conversations  around  on little  tiny copper  wires, one at  a
time. Government busted them up - at the same time when I was starting cable
TV franchises in thirty states. Haw! Can you believe that? It's like if they
figured out a  way to regulate horses at the  same time the Model T and  the
airplane were being introduced."
     "But a cable TV system isn't the same as a phone system."
     "At  that stage it  wasn't, cause it was just a local system. But  once
you get  local systems  all over the world,  all you got to do  is  hook 'em
together and it's a global network. Just as big as the  phone system. Except
this one carries information ten  thousand times faster.  It carries images,
sound, data, you name it."
     A naked PR plant,  a  half-hour  television  commercial with no purpose
whatsoever  other  than to let  L.  Bob  Rife tell his  side of a particular
issue. It seems that a number of Rife's programmers, the people who made his
systems run, got together and formed a union - unheard of, for hackers - and
filed a suit against Rife, claiming that he had placed  audio and video bugs
in  their  homes,  in  fact  placed  all  of  them  under   twenty-four-hour
surveillance, and harassed  and threatened some programmers who were  making
what  he called "unacceptable lifestyle choices." For  example,  when one of
his programmers and her husband engaged in oral sex in their own bedroom one
night, the next  morning  she was called into Rife's office, where he called
her a slut and  a  sodomite  and  told  her  to clean out  her desk. The bad
publicity from  this so annoyed  Rife that he  felt  the need  to blow a few
million on some more PR.
     "I   deal  in   information,"   he   says  to   the  smarmy,   toadying
pseudojournalist  who  "interviews"  him.  He's sitting  in  his  office  in
Houston, looking slicker than normal. "All television going out to consumers
throughout the world goes through me. Most of the information transmitted to
and from the CIC database  passes through my networks.  The Metaverse  - the
entire Street - exists by virtue of a network that I own and control.
     "But that means,  if  you'll just follow  my reasoning for a  bit, that
when I  have  a  programmer  working  under  me  who is  working  with  that
information, he is wielding enormous  power. Information is going  into  his
brain. And it's staying there. It travels  with him  when he  goes  home  at
night. It  gets all  tangled up into his dreams, for Christ's sake. He talks
to his  wife  about  it.  And, goddamn it, he doesn't have any right to that
information. If I was running a  car factory, I wouldn't  let  workers drive
the cars home or  borrow tools. But that's what I do  at  five  o'clock each
day, all over the world, when my hackers go home from work.
     "When they used to hang rustlers in the old  days, the last thing  they
would do is piss their pants. That was the ultimate sign, you see, that they
had  lost control over their own bodies, that  they were about  to die. See,
it's  the first function of any organization to control  its own sphincters.
We're not even doing that.  So  we're  working on  refining  our  management
techniques so that we can control that information no matter  where it is  -
on  our hard disks or  even inside the programmers' heads.  Now, I can't say
more  because I got competition to worry  about. But  it is my fervent  hope
that in five or ten years, this kind of thing won't even be an issue."
     A  half-hour  episode  of  a science news  program,  this  one  on  the
controversial  new subject  of  infoastronomy, the  search for radio signals
coming from other  solar systems. L. Bob Rife has taken a  personal interest
in  the  subject;  as   various  national  governments  auction   off  their
possessions, he  has  purchased  a string of  radio observatories and hooked
them together, using his fabled fiber-optic net,  to turn them into a single
giant  antenna  as big  as  the  whole  earth.  He  is  scanning  the  skies
twenty-four hours a day, looking for radio waves that mean something - radio
waves  carrying information  from  other  civilizations.  And  why, asks the
interviewer  - a celebrity professor from MIT - why would a simple oilman be
interested in such a high-flown, abstract pursuit?
     "I just about got this planet all sewn up."
     Rife delivers this line  with an  incredibly sardonic  and contemptuous
twang, the  exaggerated  accent  of a cowboy who suspects  that  some Yankee
pencilneck is looking down his nose at him.
     Another  news piece, this one apparently done a few years later.  Again
we are on  the Enterprise, but this time the atmosphere is different  again.
The  top deck has been turned into an open-air  refugee camp. It is swarming
with  Bangladeshis that  L. Bob Rife plucked out of the  Bay of Bengal after
their country washed into the ocean in a series of massive floods, caused by
deforestation  farther upstream  in India - hydrological warfare. The camera
pans to  look out over the edge of the flight deck,  and down  below, we see
the first  beginnings of  the Raft:  a relatively small collection of a  few
hundred boats that have glommed onto  the Enterprise, hoping for a free ride
across to America.
     Rife's walking among the people, handing out Bible comics and kisses to
little kids. They cluster  around  with broad  smiles, pressing their  palms
together and bowing. Rife bows back, very  awkwardly,  but there's no gaiety
on his face. He's deadly serious.
     "Mr. Rife, what's your opinion of the people who say  you're just doing
this as a self-aggrandizing publicity stunt?"  This interviewer is trying to
be more of a Bad Cop.
     "Shit,  if  I  took  time  out to  have an  opinion about everything, I
wouldn't get  any work done," L. Bob Rife says. "You should ask these people
what they think."
     "You're telling  me that this refugee assistance program has nothing to
do with your public image?"
     "Nope. L-"
     There's an edit and they cut away to the journalist, pontificating into
the camera. Rife was  on the verge  of delivering a sermon, Hiro senses, but
they cut him off.
     But  one of the true glories  of the  Library  is  that it  has so many
outtakes.  Just  because  a  piece  of videotape  never  got edited  into  a
broadcast  program doesn't  mean it's  devoid of  intel  value. CIC long ago
stuck  its fingers  into  the  networks' videotape  libraries. All  of those
outtakes - millions of hours of footage - have not actually been uploaded to
the Library in digital form yet. But you can send in a request, and CIC will
go and pull that videotape off the shelf for you and play it back.
     Lagos has already done it. The tape is right there.
     "Nope.  Look. The Raft  is a media event. But in a much  more profound,
general sense than you can possibly imagine."
     "Oh."
     "It's created by  the media in that without  the media, people wouldn't
know it  was here, Refus wouldn't come out and glom onto it the way they do.
And it sustains the media. It  creates a lot  of  information flow - movies,
news reports - you know."
     "So  you're  creating  your  own  news  event  to  make  money  off the
information  flow that it creates?" says the journalist,  desperately trying
to follow. His tone of voice says that this is all a waste of videotape. His
weary attitude suggests that this is not the first  time  Rife has flown off
on a bizarre tangent.
     "Partly. But that's only a very crude explanation. It really goes a lot
deeper than  that. You've  probably  heard the expression that  the Industry
feeds off of biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean."
     "I've heard the expression, yes."
     "That's my expression. I made  it up. An  expression like  that is just
like  a virus, you know  -  it's a piece of  information - data that spreads
from one person to the next. Well, the function of the Raft is to bring more
biomass. To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is
keep having  babies.  But  America's  like  this big old  clanking,  smoking
machine  that  just lumbers  across  the  landscape scooping up  and  eating
everything  in sight. Leaves  behind a trail of  garbage a mile wide. Always
needs more fuel. Ever read the story about the labyrinth and the minotaur?"
     "Sure.  That was on  Crete, right?" The journalist only  answers out of
sarcasm; he can't believe he's here  listening to this, he wants to fly back
to L.A. yesterday.
     "Yeah.  Every year, the Greeks  had to  pony up  a few virgins and send
them to Crete as tribute. Then the king put them into the labyrinth, and the
minotaur ate them up. I used to read that story when I was a  kid and wonder
who the hell these guys were,  on Crete, that everyone else was so scared of
them that they would just  meekly give up their children to be eaten,  every
year. They must have been some mean sons of bitches.
     "Now I have  a different perspective on it. America must look, to those
poor little buggers down there, about the same as Crete looked to those poor
Greek suckers. Except that there's no coercion  involved.  Those people down
there give up their children willingly. Send  them into the labyrinth by the
millions to  be eaten up. The Industry feeds on  them and spits back images,
sends out movies and TV programs, over my  networks, images  of  wealth  and
exotic things beyond their  wildest dreams,  back  to  those people, and  it
gives them something to dream about, something to aspire to. And that is the
function of the Raft. It's just a big old krill carrier."
     Finally  the journalist gives  up on being a journalist, just starts to
slag L. Bob  Rife  openly. He's had it with  this guy. "That's disgusting. I
can't believe you can think about people that way."
     "Shit, boy,  get down off your  high horse.  Nobody really  gets eaten.
It's just  a figure of  speech. They come here, they  get decent  jobs, find
Christ, buy a  Weber  grill, and  live happily ever after. What's wrong with
that?"
     Rife is  pissed. He's yelling. Behind him, the Bangladeshis are picking
up on his emotional  vibes and  becoming upset themselves. Suddenly,  one of
them, an incredibly gaunt  man with a long  drooping mustache, runs in front
of the camera and begins to shout: "a ma la ge zen ba dam gal nun ka aria su
su na  an  da..." The sounds  spread  from him  to  his neighbors, spreading
across the flight deck like a wave.
     "Cut," the journalist says, turning  into  the  camera. "Just  cut. The
Babble Brigade has started up again."
     The soundtrack  now consists of a thousand  people  speaking in tongues
under the high-pitched, shit-eating chuckles of L. Bob Rife.
     "This is the miracle of tongues," Rife shouts above the tumult. "I  can
understand every word these people are saying. Can you, brother?"

     "Yo! Snap out of it, pod!"
     Hiro looks up  from  the  card. No one  is in his office except for the
Librarian.
     The  image loses focus and veers upward and out of his field  of  view.
Hiro is looking out  the windshield of the Vanagon. Someone  has just yanked
his goggles off his face-not Vitaly.
     "I'm out here, gogglehead!"
     Hiro looks out the window. It's Y.T., hanging onto  the side of the van
with one hand, holding his goggles in the other.
     "You spend too much  time goggled in," she says. "Try a little Reality,
man."
     "Where we are going,"  Hiro says, "we're going to get more Reality than
I can handle."

     As Hiro and  Vitaly approach the vast freeway overpass where  tonight's
concert is to take place, the solid ferrous quality of the  Vanagon attracts
MagnaPoons  like  a  Twinkie  draws  cockroaches.  If they knew that  Vitaly
Chernobyl  himself was in the van,  they'd go  crazy, they'd stall the van's
engine. But right now, they'll poon anything that might be headed toward the
concert.
     When they get closer to the overpass, it becomes a lost cause trying to
drive at all, the thrashers  are so thick and numerous. It's like putting on
crampons and trying to  walk  through a room full  of  puppies. They have to
nose their way along, tapping the horn, flashing the lights.
     Finally,  they get to the flatbed semi that  constitutes  the stage for
tonight's concert.  Next to it is another semi, full of amps and other sound
gear.  The drivers  of  the trucks,  an  oppressed  minority  of  two,  have
retreated  into  the cab of  the sound  truck  to smoke cigarettes and glare
balefully at  the swarm of thrashers, their sworn enemies in  the food chain
of  the highways.  They will not  voluntarily  come out  until five  in  the
morning, when the way has been made plain.
     A couple of the other Meltdowns are standing around smoking cigarettes,
holding them between two fingers in the Slavic style, like darts. They stomp
the cigarettes out on  the  concrete with their cheap vinyl shoes, run up to
the  Vanagon, and  begin to haul  out the  sound equipment.  Vitaly puts  on
goggles, hooks himself into a computer on the sound truck, and begins tuning
the system. There's a 3-D model of the overpass already in memory. He has to
figure out how to  sync the delays on all the different  speaker clusters to
maximize the number of nasty, clashing echoes.

        15

     The warm-up band, Blunt  Force Trauma,  gets rolling at about 9:00 P.M.
On the first power chord,  a whole stack  of  cheap preowned speakers shorts
out; its  wires throw sparks into the air,  sending an  arc of chaos through
the  massed skateboarders. The  sound truck's  electronics  isolate  the bad
circuit and shut it off before  anything or  anyone  gets hurt.  Blunt Force
Trauma   play  a   kind  of  speed  reggae   heavily   influenced   by   the
antitechnological ideas of the Meltdowns.
     These guys will probably play for an hour, then there  will be a couple
of  hours of  Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns to look  forward to. And if
Sushi K shows up, he's welcome to make a guest appearance at the mike.
     Just in case that actually happens, Hiro pulls back  from the delirious
center of  the crowd and begins to orbit back and forth along  its  fringes.
Y.T.'s  in  there somewhere,  but no point in trying to track her down.  She
would be embarrassed, anyway, to be seen with an oldster like Hiro.
     Now  that  the concert  is up and running, it will take care of itself.
There's  not much more for Hiro to  do.  Besides, interesting  things happen
along borders -  transitions  - not in the  middle  where  everything is the
same. There may be something happening along the border  of the crowd,  back
where the lights fade into the shade of the overpass.
     The  fringe crowd looks  pretty typical for the wrong side  of an  L.A.
overpass in the middle  of  the night.  There's a good-sized  shantytown  of
hardcore Third World unemployables, plus a scattering of schizophrenic first
worlders who have long ago burned their brains to ash in the radiant heat of
their  own  imaginings. A lot  of  them  have emerged from their  overturned
dumpsters and refrigerator boxes to stand on tiptoe at the edge of the crowd
and peer  into the  noise and light. Some  of them look sleepy and awed, and
some  -  stocky  Latino  men  -  look  amused by  the whole  thing,  passing
cigarettes back and forth and shaking their heads in disbelief.
     This is Crips  turf. The Crips wanted  to provide security, but Hiro, a
student of Altamont, decided to take the risk of snubbing them. He hired The
Enforcers to do it instead.
     So every  few dozen feet there's a large man with erect posture wearing
an  acid green windbreaker  with ENFORCER spelled out  across the back. Very
conspicuous,   which   is  how  they  like  it.  But  it's  all   done  with
electropigment, so if there's trouble, these  guys can turn themselves black
by flipping a lapel switch. And they can make themselves bulletproof just by
zipping the  windbreakers up  the front. Right now, it's a warm  night,  and
most of  them are leaving their  uniforms open  to the cool breezes. Some of
them  are just coasting, but most of them  are attentive, keeping their eyes
on the crowd, not the band.
     Seeing all of those soldiers, Hiro looks for the general and soon finds
him: a small, stout  black guy, a pint-sized weightlifter type. He's wearing
the  same windbreaker  as  the others, but there's  an  additional  layer of
bulletproof  vest  underneath,  and  clipped  onto  that  he's  got  a  nice
assortment  of  communications  gear and small,  clever devices  for hurting
people. He's doing a  lot of jogging back and forth, swiveling his head from
side to side, mumbling quick  bursts into his headset like a  football coach
on the sidelines.
     Hiro  notices a  tall  man in his  late thirties, distinguished goatee,
wearing a very nice charcoal gray suit. Hiro can see the diamonds in his tie
pin flashing from a hundred feet away. He knows that if he gets up closer he
will be able to see the word "Crips" spelled out in blue sapphires,  nestled
among those diamonds. He's got his own security detail of half a dozen other
guys in  suits. Even though  they aren't doing security,  they couldn't help
sending along a token delegation to show the colors.

     This is a  non sequitur that has  been  nibbling on the edges of Hiro's
mind for  the last ten minutes: Laser light has a particular kind of  gritty
intensity, a molecular purity reflecting its origins. Your eye notices this,
somehow knows that it's  unnatural. It stands  out anywhere,  but especially
under  a  dirty  overpass in  the  middle of the night.  Hiro  keeps getting
flashes  of it in his  peripheral vision, keeps glancing over to  track down
it's source. It's obvious to him, but no one else seems to notice.
     Someone  in this  overpass, somewhere,  is bouncing  a  laser  beam off
Hiro's face.
     It's annoying. Without being  too  obvious  about  it,  he  changes his
course slightly,  wanders  over to  a point downwind of a  trash fire that's
burning  in  a steel drum.  Now he's standing in  the middle of  a plume  of
diluted smoke that he can smell but can't quite see.
     But  the next  time the laser darts  into  his  face, it scatters off a
million tiny,  ashy particulates and reveals itself as a pure geometric line
in space, pointing straight back to its source.
     It's a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case
he's  not  already  conspicuous  enough, he's wearing  a suit.  Hiro  starts
walking toward him.
     Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side  of the  Central Intelligence
Corporation. Instead of  using laptops,  they wear  their computers on their
bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back,
on  the  headset.  They  serve  as  human  surveillance  devices,  recording
everything that happens  around  them. Nothing looks stupider;  these getups
are the modern-day equivalent of the  slide-rule scabbard or  the calculator
pouch  on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once
above  and far  below human  society.  They are a boon  to Hiro because they
embody  the  worst stereotype of the  CIC  stringer. They  draw all  of  the
attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is  that you can be in
the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.
     The CIC brass  can't stand these  guys  because  they upload staggering
quantities of useless information  to  the database, on the  off chance that
some of it will eventually  be useful.  It's like  writing  down the license
number of every car you see on your way  to work each morning,  just in case
one  of  them  will  be  involved in a  hit-and-run  accident.  Even the CIC
database  can  only  hold  so  much  garbage.  So,  usually, these  habitual
gargoyles get kicked out of the CIC before too long.
     This  guy hasn't been kicked out yet. And to judge from the quality  of
his equipment - which is very expensive - he's been at it for a while. So he
must be pretty good.
     If so, what's he doing hanging around this place?
     "Hiro  Protagonist," the gargoyle says as Hiro finally  tracks him down
in  the  darkness  beside  a  shanty.  "CIC   stringer  for  eleven  months.
Specializing  in  the  Industry.  Former   hacker,   security  guard,  pizza
deliverer,  concert  promoter." He sort  of mumbles it, not  wanting Hiro to
waste his time reciting a bunch of known facts.
     The laser that  kept jabbing Hiro in the eye was shot out of this guy's
computer, from a peripheral device that sits above his goggles in the middle
of  his forehead. A long-range retinal  scanner. If you turn toward him with
your eyes open,  the  laser shoots out,  penetrates your iris,  tenderest of
sphincters, and  scans your retina. The  results are shot back to CIC, which
has a database of  several tens of millions of scanned retinas. Within a few
seconds, if you're in the database already, the owner finds out who you are.
If you're not already in the database, well, you are now.
     Of  course,  the user has to have access  privileges.  And once he gets
your identity, he  has to  have more access privileges to find  out personal
information about you. This guy, apparently, has a lot of access privileges.
A lot more than Hiro.
     "Name's Lagos," the gargoyle says.
     So this is the guy. Hiro considers  asking him what the hell he's doing
here. He'd love  to  take him out  for  a  drink, talk to him  about how the
Librarian was  coded.  But  he's  pissed off. Lagos is  being  rude  to  him
(gargoyles are rude by definition).
     "You here on the Raven thing? Or  just that fuzz-grunge tip you've been
working on for the last, uh, thirty-six days approximately?" Lagos says.
     Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are
adrift in  a laser-drawn  world, scanning retinas  in  all directions, doing
background checks on everyone within  a thousand yards, seeing everything in
visual light, infrared, millimeter-wave  radar, and ultrasound  all at once.
You  think  they're talking  to  you,  but they're  actually poring over the
credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying
the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos  is
standing there measuring the  length of  Hiro's  cock  through  his trousers
while they pretend to make conversation.
     "You're the guy who's working with Juanita, right?" Hiro says.
     "Or she's working with me. Or something like that."
     "She said she wanted me to meet you."
     For several seconds Lagos  is  frozen. He's ransacking more data.  Hiro
wants to throw a bucket of water on him.
     "Makes  sense,"  he says.  "You're as familiar  with  the Metaverse  as
anyone. Freelance hacker - that's exactly right."
     "Exactly right for what? No one wants freelance hackers anymore."
     "The corporate assembly-line hackers are suckers for infection. They're
going to go down by the thousands,  just like Sennacherib's army before  the
walls of Jerusalem," Lagos says.
     "Infection? Sennacherib?"
     "And you can defend yourself in  Reality, too -  that'll be good if you
ever go up against Raven. Remember, his  knives are as sharp as  a molecule.
They'll go through a bulletproof jacket like lingerie."
     "Raven?"
     "You'll probably see him tonight. Don't mess with him."
     "Okay," Hiro says. "I'll look out for him."
     "That's not what I said," Lagos says. "I said, don't mess with him."
     "Why not?"
     "It's a dangerous world,"  Lagos says. "Getting more dangerous  all the
time. So we don't want to upset the balance of terror. Just think about  the
Cold War."
     "Yup."  All  Hiro wants to  do  now is walk away and never see this guy
again, but he won't wind up the conversation.
     "You're  a hacker. That means you have deep structures to worry  about,
too."
     "Deep structures?"
     "Neurolinguistic pathways in your  brain. Remember  the first  time you
learned binary code?"
     "Sure."
     "You were forming pathways in your brain.  Deep structures. Your nerves
grow new connections  as you  use them - the axons split and push  their way
between the dividing glial cells - your bioware self-modifies - the software
becomes part  of the  hardware.  So now you're  vulnerable - all hackers are
vulnerable - to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other."
     "What's a nam-shub? Why am I vulnerable to it?"
     "Just don't stare into any bitmaps. Anyone try to show you a raw bitmap
lately? Like, in the Metaverse?"
     Interesting. "Not to me personally, but  now that you mention  it, this
Brandy came up to my friend - "
     "A cult prostitute of Asherah.  Trying to spread the  disease. Which is
synonymous  with  evil.  Sound  melodramatic? Not really.  You know, to  the
Mesopotamians, there  was  no independent concept of evil. Just  disease and
ill health. Evil was a synonym for disease. So what does that tell you?"
     Hiro walks  away, the same  way  he walks  away  from  psychotic street
people who follow him down the street.
     "It tells you that evil is  a virus!" Lagos calls after him. "Don't let
the nam-shub into your operating system!"
     Juanita's working with this alien?

     Blunt  Force Trauma play  for a solid hour, segueing from one song into
the next with no chink or crevice in  the wall  of noise.  All a part of the
aesthetic. When the music stops, their set is over. For the first time, Hiro
can hear  the exaltation  of  the crowd. It's  a blast of high-pitched noise
that he feels in his head, ringing his ears.
     But there's a  low thudding sound,  too,  like someone pummeling a bass
drum, and for  a  minute  he  thinks maybe it's  a  truck rolling by  on the
overpass above them. But it's too steady for that, it doesn't die away.
     It's behind him. Other  people have noticed it,  turned to look  toward
the sound, are scurrying out of the way. Hiro sidesteps, turning to see what
it is.
     Big and black, to begin with. It  does not seem as though  such a large
man could perch on a motorcycle, even a big chortling Harley like this one.
     Correction.  It's a Harley with  some kind of a sidecar  added, a sleek
black projectile hanging off to the right, supported on  its own  wheel. But
no one is sitting in the sidecar.
     It does not seem as though a man could be this bulky without being fat.
But he's not fat at all, he's wearing tight stretchy clothes - like leather,
but not quite - that show bones and muscles, but nothing else.
     He is riding  the Harley so slowly that he would certainly fall over if
not for the sidecar. Occasionally he gooses it  forward with a  flick of the
fingers on his clutch hand.
     Maybe one reason he  looks so big - other than the  fact that he really
is  big - is the fact that he appears totally neckless. His head starts  out
wide and just keeps  getting wider until it  merges with  his  shoulders. At
first Hiro  thinks it must be some kind of avant-garde helmet. But when  the
man rolls past him, this great shroud moves and flutters and  Hiro sees that
it  is  just  his  hair, a thick  mane of black  hair  tossed  back over his
shoulders, trading down his back almost to his waist.
     As he is  marveling at  this, he  realizes that the man has  turned his
head to look back at him. Or to look in his general direction,  anyway. It's
impossible  to tell exactly  what  he's looking at because of his goggles, a
smooth convex shell over the eyes, interrupted by a narrow horizontal slit.
     He is looking  at  Hiro. He  gives him the same fuck-you  smile that he
sported earlier tonight, when Hiro was standing in the entryway to The Black
Sun, and he was in a public terminal somewhere.
     This is the guy. Raven.  This is the guy that Juanita is  looking  for.
The  guy Lagos told  him  not  to mess with. And Hiro  has  seen him before,
outside the  entrance  to The Black  Sun. This is  the guy who gave the Snow
Crash card to Da5id.
     The  tattoo  on his forehead consists of  three words, written in block
letters: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL.
     Hiro startles and actually jumps into the air  as Vitaly  Chernobyl and
the  Meltdowns launch into their opening number,  "Radiation Burn."  It is a
tornado of mostly high-pitched noise and distortion, like being flung bodily
through a wall of fishhooks.
     These days, most states are franchulates  or Burbclaves, much too small
to have anything like a jail, or even  a judicial system.  So  when  someone
does something bad,  they try to  find  quick  and  dirty  punishments, like
flogging, confiscation of property, public humiliation, or,  in  the case of
people  who  have  a high potential  of going  on to  hurt others, a warning
tattoo on a prominent body  part. POOR IMPULSE CONTROL. Apparently, this guy
went to such a place and lost his temper real bad.
     For an  instant, a glowing red gridwork is  plotted against the side of
Raven's  face.  It rapidly shrinks,  all sides converging inward  toward the
right  pupil. Raven shakes  his head, turns  to  look  for the source of the
laser light, but it's already gone. Lagos has already got his retinal scan.
     That's  why  Lagos  is here. He's not  interested  in  Hiro  or  Vitaly
Chernobyl. He's interested in  Raven. And somehow,  Lagos  knew  that he was
going to be here. And Lagos  is somewhere nearby, right now, videotaping the
guy, probing the contents of his pockets with radar, recording his pulse and
respiration.
     Hiro picks up his personal phone. "Y.T.,"  he says, and it dials Y.T.'s
number.
     It rings for a long time before she picks it up. It's almost impossible
to hear anything over the sound of the concert.
     "What the fuck do you want?"
     "Y.T.,  I'm  sorry about this. But something's going on. Something  big
time. I'm keeping one eye on a big biker named Raven."
     "The problem with you hackers is you never stop working."
     "That's what a hacker is," Hiro says.
     "I'll keep an eye  on this Raven guy, too,"  she says, "sometime when I
am working." Then she hangs up.

        16

     Raven makes a  couple of broad, lazy sweeps along  the perimeter of the
crowd, going very slowly, looking in all directions.  He  is annoyingly calm
and unhurried.
     Then  he  cuts farther out  into the darkness,  away from the crowd. He
does  a little  more  looking  around,  checking  out  the perimeter of  the
shantytown.  And finally,  he swings  the big Harley around in  a trajectory
that brings him back to  the big important Crip.  The guy  with the sapphire
tie clip and the personal security detail.
     Hiro begins weaving through the crowd in that direction,  trying not to
be too obvious about it. This looks like it's going to be interesting.
     As Raven approaches,  the bodyguards converge on  the head Crip, form a
loose protective ring around him. As he comes nearer, all of them back  away
a step or  two, as though the man is surrounded by an invisible force field.
He finally comes to a stop, deigns to put his feet on  the ground. He flicks
a few switches on the handlebars before he steps away from his Harley. Then,
anticipating what's next, he stands with his feet apart and his arms up.
     One Crip approaches from  each side.  They don't look real happy  about
this particular duty, they keep casting sidelong glances at  the motorcycle.
The head Crip keeps goading them forward with his voice, shooing them toward
Raven with his hands. Each one of them has a hand-held metal-detecting wand.
They swirl the wands around his body and  find nothing at all, not even  the
tiniest speck of metal, not even coins in his pocket. The man is 100 percent
organic.  So if nothing else, Lagos's warning about Raven's knife has turned
out to be bullshit.
     These  two Crips walk rapidly  back to the  main group. Raven begins to
follow them. But the head Crip takes a step back, holds both of his hands up
in  a "stop" motion. Raven stops,  stands  there,  the grin returning to his
face.
     The head  Crip turns away and  gestures back  toward his black BMW. The
rear door  of  the BMW opens up and a man gets out, a younger, smaller black
man  in  round  wire-rims, wearing jeans  and big  white athletic shoes  and
typical studentish gear.
     The  student walks  slowly  toward Raven,  pulling  something from  his
pocket. It's a hand-held device, but much too bulky to be a calculator. It's
got a keypad on  the top and a sort of  window on one end, which the student
keeps aiming toward Raven. There's an LED readout above the keypad and a red
flashing light underneath that. The student is wearing a  pair of headphones
that are jacked into a socket on the butt of the device.
     For starters, the student aims the window  at the ground,  then  at the
sky,  then  at Raven, keeping his eye  on the flashing red light and the LED
readout. It has the feel of some  kind  of religious rite, accepting digital
input from the sky spirit and then the ground spirit and then from the black
biker angel.
     Then he begins to walk  slowly toward  Raven,  one step at a time. Hiro
can see the red light flashing intermittently,  not following any particular
pattern or rhythm.
     The student gets to within a yard of Raven and then orbits him a couple
of times, always  keeping the device  aimed inward.  When  he's finished, he
steps back  briskly, turns,  and  aims it toward  the  motorcycle. When  the
device is aimed at the motorcycle, the red light flashes much more quickly.
     The student walks up to the head Crip, pulling off his  headphones, and
has a short conversation with him. The Crip listens to the student but keeps
his eyes fixed on Raven, nods his head a few times, finally pats the student
on his shoulder and sends him back to the BMW.
     It was a Geiger counter.

     Raven strolls  up  to the  big Crip. They shake hands, a standard plain
old Euro-shake, no fancy variations. It's  not a real friendly get-together.
The Crip  has his eyes a little too  wide open, Hiro can  see the furrows in
his  brow, everything about his posture and  his face screaming  out: Get me
away from this Martian.
     Raven goes  back  to  his radioactive hog, releases a few bungee cords,
and picks up a metal briefcase. He hands it to the head Crip, and they shake
hands again.  Then  he  turns  away,  walks  slowly  and calmly back to  the
motorcycle, gets on, and putt-putts away.
     Hiro  would love to  stick  around and watch  some more, but he has the
feeling  that Lagos has this particular  event covered. And besides, he  has
other  business.  Two limousines are fighting their  way through the  crowd,
headed for the stage.
     The  limousines  stop,  and  Nipponese  people  start  to   climb  out.
Dark-clad,  unfunky,  they  stand  around awkwardly  in the  middle  of  the
party/riot,  like a handful of  broken nails  suspended in  a colorful jello
mold.  Finally, Hiro makes bold enough to go up  and  look  into one of  the
windows to find out if this is who he thinks it is.
     Can't see through the smoked glass.  He bends down, puts his face right
near the window, trying to make it real obvious.
     Still no response. Finally, he knocks on the window.
     Silence. He looks  up  at the entourage. They are all watching him. But
when  he  looks  up they  glance  away, suddenly remember to drag  on  their
cigarettes or rub their eyebrows.
     There is  only one  source of light  inside the limousine that's bright
enough to  be visible through  the smoked glass, and that is the distinctive
inflated rectangle of a television screen.
     What the hell. This  is America, Hiro is half American, and there's  no
reason to take this politeness  thing  to an unhealthy extreme. He hauls the
door open and looks into the back of the limousine.
     Sushi K  is  sitting  there wedged in between a  couple  of other young
Nipponese men, programmers on his imageering team. His hairdo is turned off,
so it just looks like an orange Afro. He is wearing a partly assembled stage
costume,  apparently expecting  to be performing  tonight. Looks  like  he's
taking Hiro up on his offer.
     He's  watching a well-known television program called  Eye  Spy.  It is
produced by  CIC  and syndicated through one  of  the  major  studios. It is
reality television: CIC  picks  out one of their agents who is involved in a
wet operation - doing some actual cloak-and-dagger work - and has him put on
a gargoyle rig so that everything  he sees and  hears is transmitted back to
the  home  base  in  Langley.  This material is then  edited  into  a weekly
hour-long program.
     Hiro  never watches it. Now that he works for CIC, he  finds it kind of
annoying. But  he  hears  a lot of gossip about the show, and  he knows that
tonight they are showing  the second-to-last episode in a five-part arc. CIC
has smuggled  a guy onto the Raft, where he is trying to  infiltrate  one of
its many colorful and sadistic pirate bands: the Bruce Lee organization.
     Hiro enters the limousine and gets a look at the TV just in time to see
Bruce  Lee  himself, as seen  from the point of view of the hapless gargoyle
spy,  approaching down some dank corridor on a Raft ghost ship. Condensation
is dripping from the blade of Bruce Lee's samurai sword.
     "Bruce Lee's men have trapped the spy in an old Korean factory  ship in
the Core,"  one  of  Sushi  K's henchmen says, a  rapid hissing explanation.
"They are looking for him now."
     Suddenly, Bruce Lee is pinioned under a brilliant  spotlight that makes
his trademark diamond grin flash like the arm of a galaxy. In  the middle of
the screen, a pair of cross  hairs swing into place, centered on Bruce Lee's
forehead. Apparently, the  spy has decided he must fight his way out of this
mess and is bringing some powerful CIC weapons system to bear on Bruce Lee's
skull.  But  then a blur  comes in from  the side,  a mysterious dark  shape
blocking our view of Bruce Lee. The cross hairs are now centered  on - what,
exactly?
     We'll have to wait until next week to find out.
     Hiro sits down across  from Sushi  K and the programmers,  next to  the
television set, so that he can get a TV's-eye view of the man.
     "I'm Hiro Protagonist. You got my message, I take it."
     "Fabu!"  Sushi  K  cries,  using  the  Nipponese  abbreviation  of  the
all-purpose Hollywood adjective "fabulous."
     He  continues,  "Hiro-san,  I  am  deeply  indebted  to  you  for  this
once-in-a-lifetime  chance   to  perform  my  small  works  before  such  an
audience."   He   says   the   whole   thing   in   Nipponese   except   for
"once-in-a-lifetime chance."
     "I must  humbly apologize for  arranging the whole thing so hastily and
haphazardly," Hiro says.
     "It pains me deeply that you should feel the need to apologize when you
have  given me an opportunity  that any Nipponese rapper would give anything
for - to perform my humble works before actual homeboys  from the ghettos of
L.A."
     "I am profoundly embarrassed  to reveal that these fans are not exactly
ghetto  homeboys, as I must  have carelessly  led you to  believe. They  are
thrashers. Skateboarders who like both rap music and heavy metal."
     "Ah. This is fine, then," Sushi  K says. But his tone of voice suggests
that it's not really fine at all.
     "But there are representatives  of the Crips here," Hiro says, thinking
very,  very  fast even by his  standards, "and if your  performance  is well
received,  as I'm quite certain  it  will  be,  they  will  spread the  word
throughout their community."
     Sushi  K rolls  down  the window.  The decibel  level quintuples in  an
instant. He stares at the  crowd,  five  thousand potential  market  shares,
young people with  funkiness  on their  minds. They've never heard any music
before  that wasn't  perfect.  It's either studio-perfect digital sound from
their CD players or  performance-perfect fuzz-grunge from the best people in
the  business,  the  groups  that  have  come  to L.A. to  make a  name  for
themselves and have actually survived the gladiatorial combat environment of
the clubs. Sushi K's  face lights up  with a combination of  joy and terror.
Now he  actually  has to  go up there and  do  it. In front of  the seething
biomass.
     Hiro  goes out and  paves the way for  him. That's easy enough. Then he
bails. He's done  his  bit.  No  point in wasting time on this  puny Sushi K
thing when Raven is out there, representing a  much larger source of income.
So he wanders back out toward the periphery.
     "Yo! Dude with the swords," someone says.
     Hiro turns  around,  sees a green-jacketed  Enforcer motioning  to him.
It's  the short,  powerful guy  with the headset, the  guy in charge  of the
security detail.
     "Squeaky," he says, extending his hand.
     "Hiro," Hiro  says, shaking it, and handing  over his business card. No
particular reason  to  be  coy  with these guys.  "What  can  I  do for you,
Squeaky?"
     Squeaky reads the card. He has a kind of exaggerated politeness that is
kind of like a military man. He's calm, mature, role-modelesque, like a high
school football coach. "You in charge of this thing?"
     "To the extent anyone is."
     "Mr.  Protagonist, we  got a call  a few minutes ago from  a friend  of
yours named Y.T."
     "What's wrong? Is she okay?"
     "Oh, yes, sir, she's  just fine. But you know that bug you were talking
to earlier?"
     Hiro's never heard  the  term "bug"  used this way, but he reckons that
Squeaky is referring to the gargoyle, Lagos.
     "Yeah."
     "Well, there's a situation  involving that gentleman that Y.T.  sort of
tipped us off to. We thought you might want to have a look."
     "What's going on?"
     "Uh. why don't you  come with me. You know,  some things  are easier to
show than to explain verbally."
     As Squeaky  turns,  Sushi K's first rap  song begins. His  voice sounds
tight and tense.
     I'm Sushi K and I'm here to say
     I like to rap in a different way
     Look out Number One in every city
     Sushi K rap has all most pretty
     My special talking of remarkable words
     Is not the stereotyped bucktooth nerd
     My hair is big as a galaxy
     Cause I attain greater technology
     Hiro  follows Squeaky away  from the  crowd, into the dimly lit area on
the edge of the shantytown. Up above them on the overpass embankment, he can
dimly  make  out  phosphorescent  shapes - green-jacketed Enforcers orbiting
some strange attractor.
     "Watch your  step,"  Squeaky  says  as  they  begin  to  climb  up  the
embankment. "It's slippery in places."
     I like to rap about sweetened romance
     My fond ambition is of your pants
     So here is of special remarkable way
     Of this fellow raps named Sushi K
     The Nipponese talking phenomenon
     Like samurai sword his sharpened tongue
     Who raps the East Asia and the Pacific
     Prosperity Sphere, to be specific
     It's a typical loose slope of  dirt and stones that looks like it would
wash away in  the first rainfall. Sage and cactus  and tumbleweeds  here and
there, all looking scraggly and half-dead from air pollution.
     It's hard to see anything clearly, because  Sushi K is  jumping  around
down  below them  on the stage, the brilliant  orange  rays of  his sunburst
hairdo  are sweeping back and  forth across  the embankment  at a speed that
seems to be supersonic, washing grainy, gritty light  over the weeds and the
rocks and throwing everything into weird,  discolored, high-contrast  freeze
frames.
     Sarariman on subway listen
     For Sushi K like nuclear fission
     Fire-breathing lizard Gojiro
     He my always big-time hero
     His mutant rap burn down whole block
     Start investing now Sushi K stock
     It on Nikkei stock exchange
     Waxes; other rappers wane
     Best investment, make my day
     Corporation Sushi K
     Squeaky  is  walking straight  uphill, paralleling  a fresh  motorcycle
track that has cut deeply into the loose yellow soil. It consists of a deep,
wide track with a narrower one  that runs parallel, a couple of feet  to the
right.
     The track  gets  deeper the  farther up  they go. Deeper and darker. It
looks less and less  like  a motorcycle rut  in loose dirt and more  like  a
drainage ditch for some sinister black effluent.
     Coming to America now
     Rappers trying to start a row
     Say "Stay in Japan, please, listen!
     We can't handle competition!"
     U.S. rappers booing and hissin'
     Ask for rap protectionism
     They afraid of Sushi K
     Cause their audience go away
     He got chill financial backin'
     Give those U.S. rappers a smackin'
     Sushi K concert machine
     Fast efficient super clean
     Run like clockwork in a watch
     Kick old rappers in the crotch
     One of The Enforcers up the hill is carrying a flashlight. As he moves,
it sweeps across the ground at a flat angle, briefly illuminating the ground
like  a searchlight. For an instant, the light  shines  into  the motorcycle
rut, and Hiro perceives that it has become a river of bright red, oxygenated
blood.
     He learn English total immersion
     English/Japanese be mergin'
     Into super combination
     So can have fans in every nation
     Hong Kong they speak English, too
     Yearn of rappers just like you
     Anglophones who live down under
     Sooner later start to wonder
     When they get they own rap star
     Tired of rappers from afar
     Lagos  is lying on the  ground, sprawled  across the tire track. He has
been slit open like a  salmon, with a single smooth-edged cut that begins at
his anus and runs up his belly,  through  the middle of his sternum, all the
way up  to the  point  of  his jaw.  It's not  just a superficial slash.  It
appears  to go all the  way to his spine in  some  places.  The black  nylon
straps that hold his computer system  to his body have been neatly cut where
they cross the midline, and half of the stuff has fallen off into the dust.
     So I will get big radio traffic
     When you look at demographic
     Sushi K research statistic
     Make big future look ballistic
     Speed of Sushi K growth stock
     Put U.S. rappers into shock

        17

     Jason  Breckinridge  wears  a terracotta  blazer.  It  is  the color of
Sicily. Jason Breckinridge has never been to  Sicily. He may get to go there
someday, as a premium. In order to get the  free cruise to Sicily, Jason has
to accumulate 10,000 Goombata. Points.
     He begins this quest in  a favorable position. By opening  up  his  own
Nova Sicilia franchise, he started out with an automatic 3,333 points in the
Goombata  Point bank. Add  to that a one-time-only Citizenship Bonus of  500
points and the balance is starting to look pretty good. The number is stored
in the big computer in Brooklyn.
     Jason grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago, one of the most highly
franchised regions in the  country.  He attended the University of  Illinois
business school, racking  up a GPA of 2.9567, and did a senior thesis called
"The Interaction of the Ethnographic, Financial, and Paramilitary Dimensions
of Competition in Certain Markets." This was  a case study  of turf struggle
between Nova  Sicilia and Narcolombia franchises in  his old neighborhood in
Aurora.
     Enrique Cortazar ran the failing Narcolombia franchise upon which Jason
had hinged his argument. Jason interviewed him several times over the phone,
briefly, but never saw Mr. Cortazar face to face.
     Mr.   Cortazar   celebrated  Jason's  graduation  by   firebombing  the
Breckinridges'  Omni Horizon van in  a parking lot  and  then  firing eleven
clips of automatic rifle ammunition through the front wall of their house.
     Fortunately, Mr.  Caruso,  who ran  the local  string  of  Nova Sicilia
franchulates that  was  in  the process of beating the pants  off of Enrique
Cortazar,  got  wind of  these attacks  before they  happened,  probably  by
intercepting signal intelligence from Mr. Cortazar's fleet of poorly secured
cellular phones and CB  radios. He was able to warn Jason's family in  time,
so that when all of those  bullets flew through their house in the middle of
the night, they were enjoying complimentary champagne in an Old  Sicilia Inn
five miles down Highway 96.
     Naturally, when the B-school  held  its end-of-the-year job fair, Jason
made a  point of swinging by the Nova Sicilia  booth to thank Mr. Caruso for
saving everyone in his family from certain death.
     "Hey, y'know, it was  just, like a neighbor  kinda thing, y'know, Jasie
boy?"  Mr.  Caruso said,  whacking  Jason  across  the  shoulder  blades and
squeezing  his deltoids, which were  the size of  cantaloupes. Jason did not
hit the steroids as hard as he had when he was fifteen,  but he was still in
great shape.
     Mr. Caruso was from New York. He had one of the most popular  booths at
the job fair. It was being held in a big exhibition space  in the Union. The
hall  had been done up  with  an  imaginary  street pattern. Two  "highways"
divided  it  up   into  quadrants,  and  all  the  franchise  companies  and
nationalities  had their  booths along the highways.  Burbclaves  and  other
companies  had  booths  hidden  among  the  suburban  "streets"  within  the
quadrants. Mr. Caruso's Nova Sicilia booth  was right at the intersection of
the  two  highways. Dozens of  scrubby  B-school  grads were  lined up there
waiting to interview, but Mr. Caruso noticed Jason standing in line and went
right up and plucked him out of line and grabbed his deltoids. All the other
B-school grads stared at  Jason enviously. That made Jason feel good, really
special.  That  was the  feeling  he got about  Nova  Sicilia:  personalized
attention.
     "Well,  I was going  to interview  here, of course,  and  at  Mr. Lee's
Greater Hong Kong, because I'm real interested in high tech," Jason said, in
response to Mr. Caruso's fatherly questioning.
     Mr. Caruso gave him an  especially hard squeeze. His voice said that he
was painfully surprised, but  that  he didn't necessarily think any  less of
Jason for it, not yet anyway. "Hong Kong? What would  a smart white kid like
you want with a fuckin' Nip operation?"
     "Well,  technically they're not  Nips - which is short  for  Niponese,"
Jason said. "Hong Kong is a predominantly Catonese - "
     "They're  all Nips," Mr. Caruso said,  "and y'know why  I say that? Not
because  I'm a fuckin' racist, because I'm not.  Because to them  - to those
people, y'know, the Nips - we're  all  foreign devils. That's what they call
us. Foreign devils. How d'ya like that?"
     Jason just laughed appreciatively.
     "After all the good things we did for them. But here in  America, Jasie
boy,  we're all foreign devils, ain't we? We all came from someplace - 'cept
for  the fuckin'  Indians. You ain't  gonna  interview  over  at  the Lakota
Nation, are ya?"
     "No, sir, Mr. Caruso," Jason said.
     "Good thinkin'. I agree with that. I'm gettin' away from my main point,
which  is that since  we  all  have  our  own  unique  ethnic  and  cultural
identities, we have to get a job with an organization that uniquely respects
and  seeks to  preserve those distinctive identities - forging them together
into a functionin' whole, y'know?"
     "Yes, I see your point, Mr. Caruso," Jason said.
     By  this  point, Mr. Caruso  had  led  him some distance  away and  was
strolling  with him down one  of the metaphorical  Highways  o' Opportunity.
"Now,  can you think of some  business  organizations that fill that fuckin'
bill, Jasie boy?"
     "Well ..."
     "Not fuckin' Hong Kong. That's for white people who want to be Japs but
can't, didja know that? You don't wanta be a Jap, do ya?"
     "Ha ha. No, sir, Mr. Caruso."
     "Y'know what I heard?"  Mr. Caruso let go of  Jason, turned, and  stood
close to  him,  chest to chest, his cigar zinging past  Jason's  ear like  a
flaming  arrow as  he  gesticulated.  This was a confidential portion of the
chat, a little anecdote between the two men. "In Japan, if you screw up? You
gotta cut off one a  your fingers. Chop. Just like that. Honest to  God. You
don't believe me?"
     "I believe you. But that's not all of  Japan, sir. Just in  the Yakuza.
The Japanese Mafia."
     Mr. Caruso threw back his head and laughed, put his arm  around Jason's
shoulders  again. "Y'know, I  like you, Jason, I really  do," he  said. "The
Japanese Mafia.  Tell me something, Jason, you ever hear anyone describe our
thing as 'The Sicilian Yakuza'? Huh?"
     Jason laughed. "No, sir."
     "Y'know  why that  is?  Y'know?" Mr. Caruso had come  to  the  serious,
meaningful part of his speech.
     "Why is that, sir?"
     Mr. Caruso wheeled Jason around so that both of them  were staring down
the length of the highway  to the tall  effigy of Uncle Enzo, standing above
the intersection like the Statue of Liberty.
     "Cause there's only one, son. Only one. And you could be a part of it."
     "But it's so competitive - "
     "What?  Listen  to  this! You got a three-point  grade average!  You're
gonna kick butt, son!"
     Mr. Caruso,  like  any other  franchisee,  had  access to  Turfnet, the
multiple listing service  that Nova  Sicilia used to keep  track of what  it
called  "opportunity zones." He took Jason back  to the booth-right past all
of those poor dorks waiting in line, Jason really liked that-and signed onto
the network. All Jason had to do was pick out a region.
     "I  have an uncle  who owns a car  dealership  in southern California,"
Jason said, "and I know that's a rapidly expanding area, and - "
     "Plenty of opportunity zones!" Mr.  Caruso said,  pounding  away on the
keyboard with a flourish. He wheeled the monitor around to show Jason  a map
of the L.A. area blazing with red splotches that  represented unclaimed turf
sectors. "Take your pick, Jasie boy!"

     Now Jason Breckinridge  is the  manager  of Nova Sicilia  #5328 in  the
Valley. He puts on his smart terracotta  blazer every  morning and drives to
work in his Oldsmobile. Lots of young entrepreneurs would be driving BMWs or
Acuras, but the organization of which Jason is now a part puts a premium  on
tradition and  family values and  does not go in for flashy foreign imports.
"If an American car is good enough for Uncle Enzo... "
     Jason's  blazer has the Mafia logo embroidered on the breast  pocket. A
letter  "G"  is  worked  into the  logo, signifying  Gambino,  which is  the
division  that  handles  accounts  for the L.A. Basin. His  name is  written
underneath:  "Jason  (The Iron Pumper)  Breckinridge." That is  the nickname
that he and Mr. Caruso came up with a year ago at the  job fair in Illinois.
Everyone gets to have a nickname, it is a tradition and a mark of pride, and
they like you to pick something that says something about you.
     As manager  of a  local office, Jason's job  is to portion work  out to
local contractors. Every morning, he parks his Oldsmobile out front and goes
into the office, ducking quickly  into the armored doorway to foil  possible
Narcolombian  snipers.  This does  not  prevent them from  taking occasional
potshots at the big Uncle Enzo that rises  up above the franchise, but those
signs can take an amazing amount of abuse before they start looking seedy.
     Safely   inside,  Jason  signs  onto  Turfnet.   A  job  list   scrolls
automatically  onto the screen.  All Jason has to do  is find contractors to
handle all of those jobs before he goes home  that night, or else he has  to
take care  of them himself.  One way or another,  they have to get done. The
great majority of the jobs  are simple deliveries, which he  portions out to
Kouriers. Then there are  collections from  delinquent  borrowers  and  from
franchisees who depend  on Nova Sicilia for their  plant security. If it's a
first notice, Jason  likes to drop by in person, just to show the  flag,  to
emphasize  that his organization  takes  a  personal, one-to-one,  hands-on,
micromanaged  approach to debt-related  issues.  If it's a  second or  third
notice,  he usually writes  a  contract  with  Deadbeaters International,  a
high-impact collection agency with whose work he has always been very happy.
Then there is the occasional Code H. Jason hates to deal with Code Hs, views
them as  symptoms of a  breakdown in the system of mutual  trust  that makes
society  work.  But usually these  are  handled directly from  the  regional
level, and all Jason has to do is aftermath management and spin control.
     This morning, Jason is looking especially crisp, his Oldsmobile freshly
waxed  and  polished.  Before he  goes inside, he plucks a  couple of burger
wrappers off the parking lot, snipers  be  damned. He  has heard that  Uncle
Enzo is  in the area, and  you never knew when  he might pull  his  fleet of
limousines and war wagons into a neighborhood franchise and pop  in to shake
hands  with the rank  and  file.  Yes, Jason  is  going  to be  working late
tonight, burning the oil until he receives word that  Uncle Enzo's  plane is
safely out of the area.
     He  signs onto Turfnet. A list of jobs scrolls up as usual,  not a very
long list.  Interfranchise  activity is  way down  today, as  all the  local
managers gird, polish, and  inspect for the possible arrival of  Uncle Enzo.
But one of the jobs scrolls up in red letters, a priority job.
     Priority jobs are a little unusual. A symptom of bad morale and general
slipshoddity. Every  job should be a priority job. But every so often, there
is something that absolutely can't be delayed or screwed up. A local manager
like  Jason can't  order up  a priority job;  it has to  come from  a higher
echelon.
     Usually, a  priority job is a  Code H. But Jason notes with relief that
this one is a simple delivery. Certain documents are to be hand carried from
his office to Nova Sicilia #4649, which is south of downtown.
     Way south.  Compton.  A war  zone, longtime stronghold of Narcolombians
and Rastafarian gunslingers.
     Compton. Why  the hell would  an office  in Compton need  a  personally
signed copy of  his financial records? They should be spending all  of their
time doing Code Hs on the competition, out there.
     As  a  matter  of  fact, there is a very active Young Mafia  group on a
certain block in Compton that has just  succeeded in driving away all of the
Narcolombians  and turning the whole area into  a Mafia Watch  neighborhood.
Old  ladies  are  walking  the  streets  again.  Children  are  waiting  for
schoolbuses and  playing  hopscotch  on sidewalks that recently were stained
with blood. It's a  fine example; if it can be done on this block, it can be
done anywhere.
     As a  matter  of fact,  Uncle Enzo is  coming to congratulate  them  in
person.
     This afternoon.
     And #4649 is going to be his temporary headquarters.
     The implications are stunning.
     Jason has been given a priority job to deliver his  records to the very
franchise where Uncle Enzo will be taking his espresso this afternoon!
     Uncle Enzo is interested in him.
     Mr. Caruso claimed he had connections higher  up, but could they really
go this high?
     Jason sits  back  in his color-coordinated  earth-tone swivel  chair to
consider  the very real possibility that  in a few  days, he's going  to  be
managing a whole region - or even better.
     One thing's for sure - this is not  a delivery  to be  entrusted to any
Kourier, any punk on a skateboard.  Jason is going to trundle his Oldsmobile
into Compton personally to drop this stuff off.

        18

     He's there an hour ahead of schedule.  He was shooting for half an hour
early, but once  he gets a load  of Compton -  he's heard  stories about the
place, of course, but my God - he starts driving like a maniac. Cheap, nasty
franchises all tend to adopt logos  with a lot of bright,  hideous yellow in
them, and so  Alameda Street is  clearly marked  out before him, a  gout  of
radioactive urine ejected south  from  the  dead center  of L.A.  Jason aims
himself right  down  the middle, ignoring lane markings and red lights,  and
puts the hammer down.
     Most  of  the  franchises  are  yellow-logoed, wrong-side-of-the-tracks
operations like Uptown, Narcolombia, Caymans Plus, Metazania, and The Clink.
But  standing  out like rocky  islands  in this  swamp  are the Nova Sicilia
franchulates   -   beachheads  for  the  Mafia's  effort   to   outduel  the
overwhelmingly strong Narcolombia.
     Shitty lots that even The Clink wouldn't buy always tend to  get picked
up by economy-minded three-ringers  who have just  shelled out a million yen
for a Narcolombia license and  who  need some real  estate, any real estate,
that  they  can throw  a  fence around  and extraterritorialize. These local
franchulates send most  of their gross to  Medellin  in franchising fees and
keep barely enough to pay overhead.
     Some of them try to scam, to sneak a few bills into  their pocket  when
they think the  security camera isn't watching, and run down the  street  to
the nearest Caymans Plus or The Alps franchulate, which hover in these areas
like  flies  on  road  kill.  But  these  people  rapidly  find out  that in
Narcolombia, just about  everything is a  capital offense, and  there  is no
judicial system to  speak of, just flying justice squads that have the right
to blow into your franchulate any time of day or night  and fax your records
back to the notoriously picky computer in Medellin. Nothing sucks  more than
being  hauled  in  front  of  a  firing squad against  the  back wall of the
business that you built with your own two hands.
     Uncle Enzo  reckons  that with  the  Mafia's  emphasis on  loyalty  and
traditional  family  values, they can sign up a lot of these entrepreneurs -
before they become Narcolombian citizens.
     And that explains the billboards that Jason sees with growing frequency
as he drives into Compton. The smiling face of Uncle Enzo seems to beam down
from every  comer.  Typically, he's got  his  arm around the  shoulders of a
young  wholesome-looking black kid, and there's  a catch  phrase above:  THE
MAFIA - YOU'VE GOT A FRIEND IN THE FAMILY!  and  RELAX - YOU ARE ENTERING  A
MAFIA WATCH NEIGHBORHOOD! and UNCLE ENZO FORGIVES AND FORGETS.
     This last one usually accompanies a picture of Uncle Enzo  with his arm
around some teenager's shoulders, giving  him a stern  avuncular talking-to.
It  is  an allusion to the fact  that the Colombians and Jamaicans kill just
about everyone.
     NO WAY, JOSE! Uncle  Enzo  holding up  one hand to stop  an  Uzi-toting
Hispanic  scumbag;  behind him  stands  a  pan-ethnic  phalanx  of kids  and
grannies, resolutely gripping baseball bats and frying pans.
     Oh, sure,  the Narcolombians still have a  lock on coca leaves, but now
that  Nippon  Pharmaceuticals  has  its  big  cocaine-synthesis  facility in
Mexicali  nearly complete, that  will cease  to  be  a factor. The  Mafia is
betting  that any smart  youngster going into the business these  days  will
take note of these billboards and  think twice.  Why end  up  suffocating on
your  own  entrails out  in back of some  Buy 'n' Fly  when you can put on a
crisp  terracotta  blazer  instead  and  become part of  a  jovial  familia?
Especially now  that they have black,  Hispanic, and  Asian  capos who  will
respect your cultural identity? In the  long term, Jason  is bullish  on the
Mob.
     His black Oldsmobile is a fucking bullseye  in a place like  this. It's
the  worst thing he has ever  seen, Compton. Lepers  roasting  dogs on spits
over tubs of flaming kerosene. Street people pushing wheelbarrows piled high
with  dripping  clots  of  million- and billion-dollar bills that  they have
raked up out of storm sewers. Road kills - enormous road kills  - road kills
so big that they could only be human beings, smeared out into chunky  swaths
a  block  long.  Burning roadblocks  across  major  avenues.  No  franchises
anywhere.  The Oldsmobile  keeps popping. Jason can't  think  of  what it is
until  he  realizes that people are  shooting at him. Good thing he  let his
uncle talk  him into springing for full armor! When he figures that one out,
he  actually gets psyched. This is the real  thing, man! He's driving around
in his Olds and the bastards are shooting at him, and it just don't matter!
     Every street for three  blocks around the  franchise is blocked off  by
Mafia war wagons. Men lurk on top of burned tenements carrying six-foot-long
rifles  and  wearing  black  windbreakers  with  MAFIA across  the  back  in
five-inch fluorescent letters.
     This is it, man, this is the real shit.
     Pulling up to the checkpoint, he  notes that his Olds is now straddling
a portable claymore mine. If he's  the wrong guy, it'll turn the car  into a
steel doughnut. But he's not the wrong guy. He's the  right guy. He's got  a
priority job, a heap of documents on the seat next  to him, wrapped up tight
and pretty.
     He rolls the window down and a  top-echelon Mafia  guardsman nails  him
with the retinal scanner. None of this ID card nonsense. They know who he is
in  a microsecond. He  sits  back against  his  whiplash arrestor, turns the
rear-view mirror to face himself, checks his hairstyle. It's not half bad.
     "Bud," the guard says, "you ain't on the list."
     "Yes, I am," Jason says. "This is  a priority  delivery. Got the papers
right here."
     He hands a hard copy  of the  Turfnet job order to the guard, who looks
at it, grunts, and goes into his war wagon,  which is richly  festooned with
antennas.
     There is a very, very long wait.
     A man is approaching on foot, walking across the  emptiness between the
Mafia franchise and the perimeter. The vacant lot is a wilderness of charred
bricks and twisted electrical conduit, but this gentleman is walking  across
it like Christ on the Sea of Galilee. His suit is perfectly black. So is his
hair. He  doesn't  have any  guards with him. The perimeter security is that
good.
     Jason notices that  all the guards at  this  checkpoint  are standing a
little  straighter, adjusting their  ties, shooting their cuffs. Jason wants
to  climb  out  of  his  bulletpocked Oldsmobile to show  proper  respect to
whoever this guy is, but he can't get  the door open  because a big guard is
standing right there, using the roof as a mirror.
     All too quickly, he's there.
     "Is this him?" he says to a guard.
     The guard looks at Jason for  a  couple of  seconds, as though he can't
quite believe it, then  looks at the  important man  in the  black suit  and
nods.
     The man  in  the black suit nods back,  tugs on his cuffs a little bit,
squints  around  him for  a  few moments, looking at the  snipers up  on the
roofs, looking everywhere but at Jason. Then  he steps forward one pace. One
of his eyes is made  of glass and doesn't point in the same direction as the
other one.  Jason thinks he's looking elsewhere. But he's looking  at  Jason
with his good eye. Or maybe he isn't. Jason can't tell which eye is the real
one. He shudders and stiffens like a puppy in a deep freeze.
     "Jason Breckinridge," the man says.
     "The Iron Pumper," Jason reminds him.
     "Shut up. For  the rest of  this conversation,  you don't say anything.
When I tell  you what you  did  wrong, you don't say you're sorry, because I
already know you're  sorry.  And when you drive outta here  alive, you don't
thank me for being alive. And you don't even say goodbye to me."
     Jason nods.
     "I don't  even want  you  to nod,  that's  how much  you annoy me. Just
freeze and shut up. Okay, here we  go.  We gave  you  a  priority  job  this
morning. It was real easy. All you had to do was read the fucking job sheet.
But you didn't  read it.  You just took it upon yourself to make the fuckin'
delivery on your own. Which the job sheet explicitly tells you not to do."
     Jason's eyes flick in the  direction  of the bundle of documents on the
seat.
     "That's crap," the man says. "We don't want your  fucking documents. We
don't care about you and your fucking franchise out in the middle a nowhere.
All we  wanted was the  Kourier. The  job sheet said that this  delivery was
supposed to be made by one particular Kourier  who works your  area, name of
Y.T. Uncle Enzo happens to like Y.T. He wants to meet her.  Now, because you
screwed up, Uncle Enzo don't get his wish. Oh, what a terrible outcome. What
an embarrassment. What an incredible fuckup, is what it is. It's too late to
save your franchise,  Jason The Iron Pumper, but it might not be too late to
keep the sewer rats from eating your nipples for dinner."

        19

     "This  wasn't done with a sword," Hiro says. He  is beyond astonishment
as  he stands and stares at Lagos's  corpse. All the emotions  will probably
come piling in on him later, when he goes home and tries to sleep. For  now,
the thinking part of his  brain seems cut loose  from his body, as if he has
just ingested a great deal of drugs, and he's just as cool as Squeaky.
     "Oh, yeah? How can you tell?" Squeaky says.
     "Swords make quick cuts, all the way through. Like, you  cut off a head
or an arm. A person who's been killed with a sword doesn't look like this."
     "Really? Have you killed a lot of people with swords, Mr. Protagonist?"
     "Yes. In the Metaverse."
     They stand for a while longer, looking at it.
     "This doesn't look like a speed move. This looks like a strength move,"
Squeaky says.
     "Raven looks strong enough."
     "That he does."
     "But  I don't think he was carrying  a weapon.  The Crips  frisked  him
earlier, and he was clean."
     "Well, then he must have borrowed one," Squeaky says. "This bug was all
over the place, you know. We were  keeping  an eye  on him, because  we were
afraid he was  going to  piss Raven off. He kept  going around looking for a
vantage point."
     "He's loaded with surveillance gear," Hiro  says.  "The higher he gets,
the better it works."
     "So he ended up here on this embankment. And apparently the perpetrator
knew where he was."
     "The dust," Hiro sa