Snow Crash

Y.T. borrows a plank from an awed skater and pushes herself across the street to the nearest Buy 'n' Fly and starts trying to call Mom for a ride home.

68

Hiro loses Raven a few miles outside of Downtown, but it doesn't matter by this point; he goes straight to the plaza and then starts to orbit the rim of the amphitheater at high speed, a one-man picket fence. Raven makes his approach within a few seconds. Hiro breaks out of his orbit and heads straight for him, and they come together like a couple of medieval jousters. Hiro loses his left arm and Raven drops a leg. The limbs topple to the ground. Hiro drops his katana and uses his remaining arm to draw his one-handed sword - a better match for Raven's long knife anyway. He cuts Raven off just as he's about to plummet over the lip of the amphitheater and forces him aside; Raven's momentum takes him half a mile away in half a second. Hiro chases him down by following a series of educated guesses - he knows this territory like Raven knows the currents of the Aleutians - and then they are blasting through the narrow streets of the Metaverse's financial district, waving long knives at each other, slicing and dicing hundreds of pinstriped avatars who happen to get in their way.

But they never seem to hit each other. The speeds are just too great, the targets too small. Hiro's been lucky so far - he has got Raven caught up in the thrill of competition, made him spoil for a fight. But Raven doesn't need this. He can get back to the amphitheater pretty easily without bothering to kill Hiro first.

And finally, he realizes it. He sheathes his knife and dives into an alley between skyscrapers. Hiro follows him, but by the time he's gotten into that same alley, Raven's gone.

Hiro goes over the lip of the amphitheater doing a couple of hundred miles per hour and soars out into space, in free fall, above the heads of a quarter of a million wildly cheering hackers.

They all know Hiro. He's the guy with the swords. He's a friend of Da5id's. And as his own personal contribution to the benefit, he's apparently decided to stage a sword fight with some kind of hulking, scary-looking daemon on a motorcycle. Don't touch that dial, it's going to be a hell of a show.

He lands on the stage and bounces to a halt next to his motorcycle. The bike still works, but it's worthless down here. Raven is ten meters away, gri

"Bombs away," Raven says. He pulls the glowing blue lozenge out of his sidecar with one hand and drops it on the center of the amphitheater. It breaks open like the shell of an egg and light shines out of it. The light begins to grow and take shape.

The crowd goes wild.

Hiro runs toward the egg. Raven cuts him off. Raven can't move around on his feet now, because he's lost a leg. But he can still control the bike. He's got his long knife out now, and the two blades come together above the egg, which has become the vortex of a blinding, deafening tornado of light and sound. Colored shapes, foreshortened by their immense speed, shoot from the center of it and take positions above their heads, building a three-dimensional picture.

The hackers are going nuts. Hiro knows that the Hacker Quadrant in The Black Sun is, at this moment, emptying itself out. They are all cramming through the exit and ru

Raven tries to shove Hiro back. It would work in Reality because Raven has such overpowering strength. But avatars are equally strong, unless you back them up in just the right way. So Raven gives a mighty push and then pulls his knife back so that he can take a cut at Hiro's neck when Hiro flies away from him; but Hiro doesn't fly away. He waits for the opening and then takes Raven's sword hand off. Then, just in case, he takes Raven's other hand off. The crowd screams in delight.

"How do I stop this thing?" Hiro says.

"Beats me. I just deliver 'em," Raven says.

"Do you have any concept of what you just did?"

"Yeah. Realized my lifelong ambition," Raven says, a huge relaxed grin spreading across his face. "I nuked America."

Hiro cuts his head off. The crowd of doomed hackers rises to its feet and shrieks.

Then they go silent as Hiro abruptly disappears. He has switched over to his small, invisible avatar. He is hovering in the air now above the shattered remains of the egg; gravity takes him right down into the center of it. As he falls, he is muttering to himself "SnowScan." It's the piece of software he wrote while he was killing time on the liferaft. The one that searches for Snow Crash.

With Hiro Protagonist seemingly gone from the stage, the hackers turn their attention toward the giant construction rising up out of the egg. All that nonsense with the sword fight must have been just a wacky introductory piece - Hiro's typically offbeat way of getting their attention. This light and sound show is the main attraction. The amphitheater is now filling up rapidly as thousands of hackers pour in from all over the place: ru

The light show is designed as if late comers were anticipated. It builds to false climax after false climax, like an expensive fireworks show, and each one is better. It is so vast and complicated that no one sees more than 10 percent of it; you could spend a year watching it over and over again and keep seeing new things.

It is a mile-high structure of moving two- and three-dimensional images, interlocked in space and time. It's got everything in it. Leni Riefenstahl films. The sculptures of Michelangelo and the fictional inventions of Da Vinci made real. World War II dogfights zooming in and out of the middle, veering out over the crowd, shooting and burning and exploding. Scenes from a thousand classic films, flowing and merging together into a single vast complicated story.

But in time, it begins to simplify itself and narrow into a single bright column of light. By this point, it is the music that is carrying the show: a pounding bass beat and a deep, threatening ostinato that tells everyone to keep watching, the best is yet to come. And everyone does watch. Religiously.

The column of light begins to flow up and down and resolve itself into a human form. Actually, it is four human forms, female nudes standing shoulder to shoulder, facing outward, like caryatids. Each of them is carrying something long and slender in her hands: a pair of tubes.

A third of a million hackers stare at the women, towering above the stage, as they raise their arms above their heads and unroll the four scrolls, turning each one of them into a flat television screen the size of a football field. From the seats in the amphitheater, the screens virtually blot out the sky; they are all that anyone can see.

The screens are blank at first, but finally the same image snaps into existence on all four of them at once. It is an image consisting of words; it says IF THIS WERE A VIRUS

YOU WOULD BE DEAD NOW

FORTUNATELY IT'S NOT

THE METAVERSE IS A DANGEROUS PLACE;

HOW'S YOUR SECURITY?

CALL HIRO PROTAGONIST SECURITY ASSOCIATES

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