Snow Crash (9 page)

9

The world freezes and grows dim for a second. The Black Sun loses its smooth animation and begins to move in fuzzy stop-action. Clearly, his computer has just taken a major hit; all of its circuits are busy processing a huge bolus of data—the contents of the hypercard—and don't have time to redraw the image of The Black Sun in its full, breathtaking fidelity.

“Holy shit!” he says, when The Black Sun pops back into full animation again. “What the hell is in this card? You must have half of the Library in here!”

“And a librarian to boot,” Juanita says, “to help you sort through it. And lots of videotapes of L. Bob Rife—which accounts for most of the bytes.”

“Well, I'll try to have a look at it,” he says dubiously.

“Do. Unlike Da5id, you're just smart enough to benefit from this. And in the meantime, stay away from Raven. And stay away from Snow Crash. Okay?”

“Who's Raven?” he asks. But Juanita is already on her way out the door. The fancy avatars all turn around to watch her as she goes past them, the movie stars give her drop-dead looks, and the hackers purse their lips and stare reverently.

Hiro orbits back around to the Hacker Quadrant. Da5id's shuffling hypercards around on his table—business stats on The Black Sun, film and video clips, hunks of software, scrawled telephone numbers.

“There's a little blip in the operating system that hits me right in the gut every time you come in the door,” Da5id says. “I always have this premonition that The Black Sun is headed for a crash.”

“Must be Bigboard,” Hiro says. “It has one routine that patches some of the traps in low memory, for a moment.”

“Ah, that's it. Please, please throw that thing away,” Da5id says.

“What, Bigboard?”

“Yeah. It was totally rad at one point, but now it's like trying to work on a fusion reactor with a stone ax.”

“Thanks.”

“I'll give you all the headers you need if you want to update it to something a little less dangerous,” Da5id says. “I wasn't impugning your abilities. I'm just saying you need to keep up with the times.”

“It's fucking hard,” Hiro says. “There's no place for a freelance hacker anymore. You have to have a big corporation behind you.”

“I'm aware of that. And I'm aware that you can't stand to work for a big corporation. That's why I'm saying, I'll give you the stuff you need. You're always a part of The Black Sun to me, Hiro, even since we parted ways.”

It is classic Da5id. He's talking with his heart again, bypassing his head. If Da5id weren't a hacker, Hiro would despair of his ever having enough brains to do anything.

“Let's talk about something else,” Hiro says. “Was I just hallucinating, or are you and Juanita on speaking terms again?”

Da5id gives him an indulgent smile. He has been very kind to Hiro ever since The Conversation, several years back. It was a conversation that started out as a friendly chat over beer and oysters between a couple of longtime comrades-in-arms. It was not until three-quarters of the way through The Conversation that it dawned on Hiro that he was, in fact, being fired, at this very moment. Since The Conversation, Da5id has been known to feed Hiro useful bits of intel and gossip from time to time.

“Fishing for something useful?” Da5id asks knowingly. Like many bitheads, Da5id is utterly guileless, but at times like this, he thinks he's the reincarnation of Machiavelli.

“I got news for you, man,” Hiro says. “Most of the stuff you give me, I never put into the Library.”

“Why not? Hell, I give you all my best gossip. I thought you were making money off that stuff.”

“I just can't stand it,” Hiro says, “taking parts of my private conversations and whoring them out. Why do you think I'm broke?”

There's another thing he doesn't mention, which is that he's always considered himself to be Da5id's equal, and he can't stand the idea of feeding off Da5id's little crumbs and tidbits, like a dog curled up under his table.

“I was glad to see Juanita come in here—even as a black-and-white,” Da5id says. “For her not to use The Black Sun—it's like Alexander Graham Bell refusing to use the telephone.”

“Why did she come in tonight?”

“Something's bugging her,” Da5id says. “She wanted to know if I'd seen certain people on the Street.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“She's worried about a really large guy with long black hair,” Da5id says. “Peddling something called—get this—Snow Crash.”

“Has she tried the Library?”

“Yeah. I assume so, anyway.”

“Have you seen this guy?”

“Oh, yeah. It's not hard to find him,” Da5id says. “He's right outside the door. I got this from him.”

Da5id scans the table, picks up one of the hypercards, and shows it to Hiro.

“Da5id,” Hiro says, “I can't believe you took a hypercard from a black-and-white person.”

Da5id laughs. “This is not the old days, my friend. I've got so much antiviral medicine in my system that nothing could get through. I get so much contaminated shit from all the hackers who come through here, it's like working in a plague ward. So I'm not afraid of whatever's in this hypercard.”

“Well, in that case, I'm curious,” Hiro says.

“Yeah. Me, too.” Da5id laughs.

“It's probably something very disappointing.”

“Probably an animercial,” Da5id agrees. “Think I should do it?”

“Yeah. Go for it. It's not every day you get to try out a new drug,” Hiro says.

“Well, you can try one every day if you want to,” Da5id says, “but it's not every day you find one that can't hurt you.” He picks up the hypercard and tears it in half.

For a second, nothing happens. “I'm waiting,” Da5id says.

An avatar materializes on the table in front of Da5id, starting out ghostly and transparent, gradually becoming solid and three-dimensional. It's a really trite effect; Hiro and Da5id are already laughing.

The avatar is a stark naked Brandy. It doesn't even look like the standard Brandy; this looks like one of the cheap Taiwanese Brandy knockoffs. Clearly, it's just a daemon. She is holding a pair of tubes in her hands, about the size of paper-towel rolls.

Da5id is leaning back in his chair, enjoying this. There is something hilariously tawdry about the entire scene.

The Brandy leans forward, beckoning Da5id toward her. Da5id leans into her face, grinning broadly. She puts her crude, ruby-red lips up by his ear and mumbles something that Hiro can't hear.

When she leans back away from Da5id, his face has changed. He looks dazed and expressionless. Maybe Da5id really looks that way; maybe Snow Crash has messed up his avatar somehow so that it's no longer tracking Da5id's true facial expressions. But he's staring straight ahead, eyes frozen in their sockets.

The Brandy holds the pair of tubes up in front of Da5id's immobilized face and spreads them apart. It's actually a scroll. She's unrolling it right in front of Da5id's face, spreading it apart like a flat two-dimensional screen in front of his eyes. Da5id's paralyzed face has taken on a bluish tinge as it reflects light coming out of the scroll.

Hiro walks around the table to look. He gets a brief glimpse of the scroll before the Brandy snaps it shut again. It is a living wall of light, like a flexible, flat-screened television set, and it's not showing anything at all. Just static. White noise. Snow.

Then she's gone, leaving no trace behind. Desultory, sarcastic applause sounds from a few tables in the Hacker Quadrant.

Da5id's back to normal, wearing a grin that's part snide and part embarrassed.

“What was it?” Hiro says. “I just glimpsed some snow at the very end.”

“You saw the whole thing,” Da5id says. “A fixed-pattern of black-and-white pixels, fairly high-resolution. Just a few hundred thousand ones and zeroes for me to look at.”

“So in other words, someone just exposed your optic nerve to, what, maybe a hundred thousand bytes of information,” Hiro says.

“Noise, is more like it.”

“Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code,” Hiro says.

“Why would anyone show me information in binary code? I'm not a computer. I can't read a bitmap.”

“Relax, Da5id, I'm just shitting you,” Hiro says.

“You know what it was? You know how hackers are always trying to show me samples of their work?”

“Yeah.”

“Some hacker came up with this scheme to show me his stuff. And everything worked fine until the moment the Brandy opened the scroll—but his code was buggy, and it snow-crashed at the wrong moment, so instead of seeing his output, all I saw was snow.”

“Then why did he
call
the thing Snow Crash?”

“Gallows humor. He knew it was buggy.”

“What did the Brandy whisper in your ear?”

“Some language I didn't recognize,” Da5id says. “Just a bunch of babble.”

Babble. Babel.

“Afterward, you looked sort of stunned.”

Da5id looks resentful. “I wasn't stunned. I just found the whole experience so weird, I guess I just was taken aback for a second.”

Hiro is giving him an extremely dubious look. Da5id notices it and stands up. “Want to go see what your competitors in Nippon are up to?”

“What competitors?”

“You used to design avatars for rock stars, right?”

“Still do.”

“Well, Sushi K is here tonight.”

“Oh, yeah. The hairdo the size of a galaxy.”

“You can see the rays from here,” Da5id says, waving toward the next quadrant, “but I want to see the whole getup.”

It does look as though the sun is rising somewhere in the middle of the Rock Star Quadrant. Above the heads of the milling avatars, Hiro can see a fan of orange beams radiating outward from some point in the middle of the crowd. It keeps moving, turning around, shaking from side to side, and the whole universe seems to move with it. On the Street, the full radiance of Sushi K's Rising Sun hairdo is suppressed by the height and width regulations. But Da5id allows free expression inside The Black Sun, so the orange rays extend all the way to the property lines.

“I wonder if anyone's told him yet that Americans won't buy rap music from a Japanese person,” Hiro says as they stroll over there.

“Maybe you should tell him,” Da5id suggests, “charge him for the service. He's in L.A. right now, you know.”

“Probably staying in a hotel full of bootlickers telling him what a big star he's going to be. He needs to be exposed to some actual biomass.”

They inject themselves into a stream of traffic, winding a narrow channel through a rift in the crowd.

“Biomass?” Da5id says.

“A body of living stuff. It's an ecology term. If you take an acre of rain forest or a cubic mile of ocean or a square block of Compton and strain out all the on living stuff—dirt and water—you get the biomass.”

Da5id, ever the bithead, says, “I do not understand.” His voice sounds funny; there's a lot of white noise creeping into his audio.

“Industry expression,” Hiro says. “The Industry feeds off the human biomass of America. Like a whale straining krill from the sea.”

Hiro wedges himself between a couple of Nipponese businessmen. One is wearing a uniform blue, but the other is a neo-traditional, wearing a dark kimono. And, like Hiro, he's wearing two swords—the long katana on his left hip and the one-handed wakizashi stuck diagonally in his waistband. He and Hiro glance cursorily at each other's armaments. Then Hiro looks away and pretends not to notice, while the neo-traditional is freezing solid, except for the corners of his mouth, which are curling downward. Hiro has seen this kind of thing before. He knows he's about to get into a fight.

People are moving out of the way; something big and inexorable is plunging through the crowd, shoving avatars this way and that. Only one thing has the ability to shove people around like that inside The Black Sun, and that's a bouncer daemon.

As they get closer, Hiro sees that it's a whole flying wedge of them, gorillas in tuxedos. Real gorillas. And they seem to be headed toward Hiro.

He tries to back away, but he quickly runs into something. Looks like Bigboard finally got him in trouble; he's on his way out of the bar.

“Da5id,” Hiro says. “Call them off, man, I'll stop using it.”

All of the people in his vicinity are staring over Hiro's shoulder, their faces illuminated by a stew of brilliant colored lights.

Hiro turns around to look at Da5id. But Da5id's not there anymore.

Instead of Da5id, there is just a jittering cloud of bad digital karma. It's so bright and fast and meaningless that it hurts to look at. It flashes back and forth from color to black and white, and when it's in color, it rolls wildly around the color wheel as though being strafed with high-powered disco lights. And it's not staying within it's own body space; hair-thin pixel lines keep shooting off to one side, passing all the way across The Black Sun and out through the wall. It is not so much an organized body as it is a centrifugal cloud of lines and polygons whose center cannot hold, throwing bright bits of body shrapnel all over the room, interfering with people's avatars, flickering and disappearing.

The gorillas don't mind. They shove their long furry fingers into the midst of the disintegrating cloud and latch onto it somehow and carry it past Hiro, toward the exit. Hiro looks down as it goes past him and sees what looks very much like Da5id's face as viewed through a pile of shattered glass. It's just a momentary glimpse. Then the avatar is gone, expertly drop-kicked out the front door, soaring out over the Street in a long flat arc that takes it over the horizon. Hiro looks up the aisle to see Da5id's table, empty, surrounded by stunned hackers. Some of them are shocked, some are trying to stifle grins.