Snow Crash

But they have thousands of programmers. The programmers work twelve hours a day out of some twisted sense of personal loyalty. Their software-engineering techniques, while cruel and ugly, are very sophisticated. They must have been up to something.

"Juanita?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't ask me why I think this. But I think that the government has been undertaking a big software development project for L. Bob Rife."

"Makes sense," she says. "He has such a love-hate relationship with his programmers - he needs them, but he won't trust them. The government's the only organization he would trust to write something important. I wonder what it is?"

"Hold on," Hiro says. "Hold on."

He is now a stone's throw away from a big blue cube sitting at ground level. All the other blue cubes sort of feed into it. There is a motorcycle parked next to the cube, rendered in color, but just one notch above black and white: big jaggedy pixels and a limited color palette. It has a sidecar. Raven's standing next to it.

He is carrying something in his arms. It is another simple geometric construction, a long smooth blue ellipsoid a couple of feet in length. From the way he's moving, Hiro thinks that Raven has just removed it from the blue cube; he carries it over to the motorcycle and nestles it into the sidecar.

"The Big One," Hiro says.

"It's exactly what we were afraid of," Juanita says. "Rife's revenge."

"Headed for the amphitheater. Where all the hackers are gathered in one place. Rife's going to infect all of them at once. He's going to burn their minds."

64

Raven's already on the motorcycle. If Hiro chases him on foot, he might catch him before he reaches the Street.

But he might not. In that case, Raven would be on his way to Downtown at tens of thousands of miles per hour while Hiro was still trying to get back to his own motorcycle. At those speeds, once Hiro has lost sight of Raven, he's lost him forever.

Raven starts his bike, begins maneuvering carefully through the tangle, headed for the exit. Hiro takes off as fast as his invisible legs can carry him, headed straight for the wall

He punches through a couple of seconds later, runs back to the Street. His tiny little invisible avatar can't operate the motorcycle, so he returns to his normal look, hops on his bike, and gets it turned around. Looking back, he sees Raven riding out toward the Street, the logic bomb glowing a soft blue, like heavy water in a reactor. He doesn't even see Hiro yet.

Now's his chance. He draws his katana, aims his bike at Raven, pumps it up to sixty or so miles an hour. No point in coming in too fast; the only way to kill Raven's avatar is to take its head off. Ru

A security daemon is ru

It's too late. Raven must be gone now - but turning himself around, Hiro can see him in the middle of the Street. He slammed into one of the stanchions that holds up the monorail track - a pere

"Shit!" both of them say simultaneously.

Raven gets turned toward Downtown and twists his throttle just as Hiro is pulling in behind him on the Street, doing the same. Within a couple of seconds, they're both headed for Downtown at something like fifty thousand miles an hour. Hiro's half a mile behind Raven but can see him clearly: the streetlights have merged into a smooth twin streak of yellow, and Raven blazes in the middle, a storm of cheap color and big pixels.

"If I can take his head off, they're finished," Hiro says.

"Gotcha," Juanita says. "Because if you kill Raven, he gets kicked out of the system. And he can't sign back on until the Graveyard Daemons dispose of his avatar."

"And I control the Graveyard Daemons. So all I have to do is kill the bastard once."

"Once they get their choppers back to land, they'll have better access to the net - they can have someone else go into the Metaverse and take over for him," Juanita warns.

"Wrong. Because Uncle Enzo and Mr. Lee are waiting for them on land. They have to do it during the next hour, or never."

65

Y.T. suddenly wakes up. She hadn't realized that she was asleep. Something about the thwop of the rotor blades must have lulled her. She must be tired as shit, is what it really is.

"What the fuck is going on with my com net?" L. Bob Rife is squalling.

"No one answers," the Russian pilot says. "Not Raft, not L.A., not Khyooston."

"Get me LAX on the phone, then," Rife says. "I want to take the jet to Houston. We'll get our butts over to the campus and find out what's going on."

The pilot messes around on his control panel. "Problem," he says.

"What?"

The pilot just shakes his head forlornly. "Someone is messing with the skyphone. We're being jammed."

"I might be able to get a line," the President says. Rife just gives him a look like, right, asshole.

"Anybody got a fucking quarter?" Rife hollers. Frank and Tony are startled for a minute. "We're go

A second later, Y.T. looks out the window and is blown away to see actual land down there, and a two-lane highway winding its way down a warm sandy coastline. It's California.

The chopper slows, cuts in closer to land, begins following the highway. Most of it is free of plastic and neon lights, but before long they home in on a short bit of franchise ghetto, built on both sides of the road in a place where it has cut away from the beach some distance.

The chopper sets down in the parking lot of a Buy 'n' Fly. Fortunately, the lot's mostly empty, they don't cut any heads off. A couple of youths are playing video games inside, and they barely look up at the astonishing sight of the chopper. She's glad; Y.T. is totally embarrassed to be seen with this dull assortment of old farts. The chopper just sits there, idling, while L. Bob Rife jumps out and runs over to the pay phone bolted to the front wall.

These guys were stupid enough to put her in the seat right next to the fire extinguisher. No reason not to take advantage of that fact. She jerks it out of its bracket, pulling out the safety pin in virtually the same motion, and squeezes the trigger, aiming it right into Tony's face.

Nothing happens.

"Fuck!" she shouts, and throws it at him, or rather pushes it toward him. He's just leaning forward, grabbing at her wrist, and the impact of the extinguisher hitting his face is enough to put a major dent in his 'tude. Gives her enough time to swing her legs out of the chopper.

Everything's getting fucked up. One of her pockets is zipped open, and as she's half-falling, half-rolling out of the chopper, the fire-extinguisher bracket catches in that pocket and holds her. By the time she's gotten free of that, Tony's back, now on his hands and knees, reaching out for her arm.

That she manages to avoid. She's ru

NeoAquarian Temple isn't going to help her. If she begs and pleads, they might just include her in their mantras next week. But Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong is another story. She runs to the fence and starts trying to climb it. Eight feet of chain link with razor ribbon on top. But her clothing should stop the razor ribbon. Mostly.