Snow Crash (31 page)

“But you said there was a metal detector.”

“Didn't help. He uses glass knives. Chips them out of plate glass. It's the sharpest blade in the universe, you know.”

“Didn't know that either.”

“Yeah. The edge is only a single molecule wide. Doctors use them for eye surgery—they can cut your cornea and not leave a scar. There's Indians who make a living doing that, you know. Chipping out eye scalpels.”

“Well, you learn something new every day. That kind of a knife would be sharp enough to go through bullet-proof fabric, I guess,” Hiro says.

Chuck Wrightson shrugs. “I lost track of the number of people Raven snuffed who were wearing bulletproof fabric.”

Hiro says, “I thought he must be carrying some kind of high-tech laser knife or something.”

“Think again. Glass knife. He had one on board the submarine. Either smuggled it on board with him, or else found a chunk of glass on the submarine and chipped it out himself.”

“And?”

Chuck gets his thousand-yard stare again, takes another slug of beer. “On a sub, you know, there's no place for things to drain to. The survivors claimed that the blood was knee-deep all through the submarine. Raven just killed everyone. Everyone except the Orthos, a skeleton crew, and some other Refus who were able to barricade themselves in little compartments around the ship. The survivors say,” Chuck says, taking another swig, “that it was quite a night.”

“And he forced them to steer the submarine into the hands of the Orthos.”

“To their anchorage off Kodiak,” Chuck says. “The Orthos were all ready. They had put together a crew of ex-Navy men, guys who had worked on nuke subs in the past—X-rays, they call them—and they came and took the sub over. As for us, we had no idea that any of this had happened. Until one of the warheads showed up in our goddamn front yard.”

Chuck glances up above Hiro's head, noticing someone. Hiro feels a light tap on his shoulder. “Excuse me, sir?” a man is saying. “Pardon me for just a second?”

40

Hiro turns around. It's a big porky white man with wavy, slicked-back red hair and a beard. He's got a baseball cap perched on top of his head, tilted way back to expose the following words, tattooed in block letters across his forehead:

MOOD SWINGS

RACIALLY INSENSITIVE

Hiro is looking up at all of this over the curving horizon of the man's flannel-clad belly.

“What is it?” Hiro says.

“Well, sir, I'm sorry to disturb you in the middle of your conversation with this gentleman here. But me and my friends were just wondering. Are you a lazy shiftless watermelon-eating black-ass nigger, or a sneaky little v.d.-infected gook?”

The man reaches up, pulls the brim of his baseball cap downward. Now Hiro can see the Confederate flag printed on the front, the embroidered words “New South Africa Franchulate #153.”

Hiro pushes himself up over the table, spins around, and slides backward on his ass toward Chuck, trying to get the table between him and the New South African. Chuck has conveniently vanished, so Hiro ends up standing with his back comfortably to the wall, looking out over the bar.

At the same time, a dozen or so other men are standing up from their tables, forming up behind the first one in a grinning, sunburned phalanx of Confederate flags and sideburns.

“Let's see,” Hiro says, “is that some kind of a trick question?”

There are a lot of Towne Halls in a lot of Snooze 'n' Cruise franchises where you have to check your weapons at the entrance. This is not one of them.

Hiro isn't sure if that is bad or good. Without weapons, the New South Africans would just beat the crap out of him. With weapons, Hiro can fight back, but the stakes are higher. Hiro is bulletproof up to his neck, but that just means the New South Africans will all be going for a head shot. And they pride themselves on marksmanship. It is a fetish with them.

“Isn't there an NSA franchise down the road?” Hiro says.

“Yeah,” says the point man, who has a long, spreading body and short stumpy legs. “It's heaven. It really is. Ain't no place on earth like a New South Africa.”

“Well, then if you don't mind my asking,” Hiro says, “if it's so damn nice, why don't y'all go back to your egg sac and hang out there?”

“There is one problem with New South Africa,” the guy says. “Don't mean to sound unpatriotic, but it's true.”

“And what is that problem?” Hiro says.

“There's no niggers, gooks, or kikes there to beat the shit out of.”

“Ah. That is a problem,” Hiro says. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For announcing your intentions—giving me the right to do this.”

Then Hiro cuts his head off.

What else can he do? There are at least twelve of them. They have made a point of blocking the only exit. They have just announced their intentions. And presumably they are all carrying heat. Besides, this kind of thing is going to happen to him about every ten seconds when he's on the Raft.

The New South African has no idea what's coming, but he starts to react as Hiro is swinging the katana at his neck, so he is flying backward when the decapitation occurs. That is good, because about half his blood supply comes lofting out the top of his neck. Twin jets, one from each carotid. Hiro doesn't get a drop on himself.

In the Metaverse, the blade just passes right through, if you swing it quickly enough. Here in Reality, Hiro's expecting a powerful shock when his blade hits the New South African's neck, like when you hit a baseball the wrong way, but he hardly feels a thing. It just goes right through and almost swings around and buries itself in the wall. He must have gotten lucky and hit a gap between vertebrae. Hiro's training comes back to him, oddly. He forgot to squeeze it off, forgot to stop the blade himself, and that's bad form.

Even though he's expecting it, he's startled for a minute. This sort of thing doesn't happen with avatars. They just fall down. For an astonishingly long time, he just stands there and looks at the guy's body. Meanwhile, the airborne cloud of blood is seeking its level, dripping from the hung ceiling, spattering down from shelves behind the bar. A wino sitting there nursing a double shot of vodka shakes and shivers, staring into his glass at the galactic swirl of a trillion red cells dying in the ethanol.

Hiro swaps a few long glances with the New South Africans, like everyone in the bar is trying to come to a consensus as to what will happen next. Should they laugh? Take a picture? Run away? Call an ambulance?

He makes his way around toward the exit by running across people's tables. It is rude, but other patrons scoot back, some of them are quick enough to snatch their beers out of his way, and no one gives him any hassles. The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness. There are a couple more New South Africans blocking Hiro's way out, but not because they want to stop anyone. It's just where they happen to be standing when they go into shock. Hiro decides, reflexively, not to kill them.

And Hiro is off into the lurid main avenue of the Towne Hall, a tunnel of flickering and pulsating loglo through which black creatures sprint like benighted sperm up the old fallopians, sharp angular things clenched in their hands. They are The Enforcers. They make the average MetaCop look like Ranger Rick.

Gargoyle time. Hiro switches everything on: infrared, millimeter-wave radar, ambient-sound processing. The infrared doesn't do much in these circumstances, but the radar picks out all the weapons, highlights them in The Enforcers' hands, identifies them by make, model, and ammunition type. They're all fully automatic.

But The Enforcers and the New South Africans don't need radar to see Hiro's katana with blood and spinal fluid running down the blade.

The music of Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns is blasting through bad speakers all around him. It is their first single to hit the Billboard charts, entitled “My Heart Is a Smoking Hole in the Ground.” The ambient sound processing cuts it to a more reasonable level, evens out the nasty distortion from the speakers so that he can hear his roommate singing more clearly. Which makes it all particularly surreal. It just goes to show that he's out of his element. Doesn't belong here. Lost in the biomass. If there was any justice, he could jump into those speakers and trace up the wires like a digital sylph, follow the grid back to L.A., where he belongs, there on top of the world, where everything comes from, buy Vitaly a drink, crawl into his futon.

He stumbles forward helplessly as something terrible happens to his back. It feels like being massaged with a hundred ballpeen hammers. At the same time, a yellow sputtering light overrides the loglo. A screaming red display flashes up on the goggles informing him that the millimeter-wave radar has noticed a stream of bullets headed in his direction and would you like to know where they came from, sir?

Hiro has just been shot in the back with a burst of machine-gun fire. All of the bullets have slapped into his vest and dropped to the floor, but in doing so they have cracked about half of the ribs on that side of his body and bruised a few internal organs. He turns around, which hurts.

The Enforcer has given up on bullets and whipped out another weapon. It says so right on Hiro's goggles: PACIFIC ENFORCEMENT HARDWARE, INC. MODEL SX-29 RESTRAINT PROJECTION DEVICE (LOOGIE GUN). Which is what he should have used in the first place.

You can't just carry a sword around as an empty threat. You shouldn't draw it, or keep it drawn, unless you intend to kill someone. Hiro runs toward The Enforcer, raising the katana to strike. The Enforcer does the proper thing, namely, gets the hell out of his way. The silver ribbon of the katana shines up above the crowd. It attracts Enforcers and repels everyone else, so as Hiro runs down the center of the Towne Hall, he has no one in front of him and many shiny dark creatures behind him.

He turns off all of the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern. Time to get immersed in Reality, like all the people around him.

Not even Enforcers will fire their big guns in a crowd, unless it's point-blank range, or they're in a really bad mood. A few loogies shoot past Hiro, already so spread out as to be nothing more than an annoyance, and splat into bystanders, wrapping them in sticky gossamer veils.

Somewhere between the 3-D video-game arcade and the display window full of terminally bored prostitutes, Hiro's eyes clear up and he sees a miracle: the exit of the inflatable dome, where the doors exhale a breeze of synthetic beer breath and atomized body fluids into the cool night air.

Bad things and good things are happening in quick succession. The next bad thing happens when a steel grate falls down to block the doors.

What the hell, it's an inflatable building. Hiro turns on the radar just for a moment and the walls seem to drop away and become invisible; he's seeing through them now, into the forest of steel outside. It doesn't take long to locate the parking lot where he left his bike, supposedly under the protection of some armed attendants.

Hiro fakes toward the whorehouse, then cuts directly toward an exposed section of wall. The fabric of the building is tough, but his katana slices a six-foot rent through it with a single gliding motion, and then he's outside, spat out of the hole on a jet of fetid air.

After that—after Hiro gets onto his motorcycle, and the New South Africans get into their all-terrain pickups, and The Enforcers get into their slick black Enforcer mobiles, and they all go screaming out onto the highway—after that it's just a chase scene.

41

Y.T. has been to some
unusual
places in her career. She has the visas of some three dozen countries laminated onto her chest. And on top of the real countries she has picked up and/or delivered to such charming little vacation spots as the Terminal Island Sacrifice Zone and the encampment in Griffith Park. But the weirdest job of all is this new one: someone wants her to deliver some stuff to the United States of America. Says so right there on the job order.

It's not much of a delivery, just a legal-size envelope.

“You sure you don't just want to mail this?” she asks the guy when she picks it up. It's one of these creepy office parks out in the Burbs. Like a Burbclave for worthless businesses that have offices and phones and stuff but don't actually seem to do anything.

It's a sarcastic question, of course. The mail doesn't work, except in Fedland. All the mailboxes have been unbolted and used to decorate the apartments of nostalgia freaks. But it's also kind of a joke, because the destination is, in fact, a building in the middle of Fedland. So the joke is: If you want to deal with the Feds, why not use their fucked-up mail system? Aren't you afraid that by dealing with anything as incredibly cool as a Kourier you will be tainted in their eyes?

“Well, uh, the mail doesn't come out here, does it?” the guy says.

No point in describing the office. No point in even allowing the office to even register on her eyeballs and take up valuable memory space in her brain. Fluorescent lights and partitions with carpet glued to them. I prefer my carpet on the floor, thank you. A color scheme. Ergonomic shit. Chicks with lipstick. Xerox smell. Everything's pretty new, she figures.

The legal envelope is resting on the guy's desk. Not much point in describing him, either. Traces of a southern or Texan accent. The bottom edge of the envelope is parallel to the edge of the desk, one-quarter inch away from it, perfectly centered between the left and right sides. Like he had a doctor come in here and put it on the desk with tweezers. It is addressed to: ROOM 968A, MAIL STOP MS-1569835, BUILDING LA-6, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

“You want a return address on this?” she says.

“That's not necessary.”

“If I can't deliver it, there's no way I can get it back to you, because these places all look the same to me.”

“It's not important,” he says. “When do you think you'll get it there?”

“Two hours max.”

“Why so long?”

“Customs, man. The Feds haven't modernized their system like everyone else.” Which is why most Kouriers will do anything to avoid delivering to Fedland. But it's a slow day today, Y.T. hasn't been called in to do any secret missions for the Mafia yet, and maybe she can catch Mom on her lunch break.

“And your name is?”

“We don't give out our names.”

“I need to know who's delivering this.”

“Why? You said it wasn't important.”

The guy gets really flustered. “Okay,” he says. “Forget it. Just deliver it, please.”

Okay, be that way, she mentally says. She mentally says a number of other things, too. The man is an obvious pervert. It's so plain, so open: “And your name is?” Give me a break, man.

Names are unimportant. Everyone knows Kouriers are interchangeable parts. It's just that some happen to be a lot faster and better.

So she skates out of the office. It's all very anonymous. No corporate logos anywhere. So as she's waiting for the elevator, she calls RadiKS, tries to find out who initiated this call.

The answer comes back a few minutes later, as she's riding out of the office park, pooned onto a nice Mercedes: Rife Advanced Research Enterprises. RARE. One of these high-tech outfits. Probably trying to get a government contract. Probably trying to sell sphygmomanometers to the Feds or something like that.

Oh well, she just delivers 'em. She gets the impression that this Mercedes is sandbagging—driving real slow so she'll poon something else—so she poons something else, an outgoing delivery truck. Judging from the way it's riding high on its springs, it must be empty, so it'll probably move along pretty fast.

Ten seconds later, predictably, the Mercedes blasts by in the left lane, so she poons that and rides it nice and hard for a couple of miles.

Getting into Fedland is a drag. Most Fedsters drive tiny, plastic-and-aluminum cars that are hard to poon. But eventually she nails one, a little jellybean with glued-on windows and a three-cylinder engine, and that takes her up to the United States border.

The smaller this country gets, the more paranoid they become. Nowadays, the customs people are just impossible. She has to sign a ten-page document—and they actually make her read it. They say it should take at least half an hour for her just to read the thing.

“But I read it two weeks ago.”

“It might have changed,” the guard says, “so you have to read it again.”

Basically, it just certifies that Y.T. is not a terrorist, Communist (whatever that is), homosexual, national-symbol desecrator, pornography merchant, welfare parasite, racially insensitive, carrier of any infectious disease, or advocate of any ideology tending to impugn traditional family values. Most of it is just definitions of all the words used on the first page.

So Y.T. sits in the little room for half an hour, doing housekeeping work—going over her stuff, changing batteries in all her little devices, cleaning her nails, having her skateboard run its self-maintenance procedures. Then she signs the fucking document and hands it over to the guy. And then she's in Fedland.

It's not hard finding the place. Typical Fed building—a million steps. Like it's built on top of a mountain of steps. Columns. A lot more guys in this one than usual. Chunky guys with slippery hair. Must be some kind of cop building. The guard at the front door is a cop all the way, wants to give her a big hassle about carrying her skateboard into the place. Like they've got a safe place out front to keep skateboards.

The cop guy is completely hard to deal with. But that's okay, so is Y.T.

“Here's the envelope,” she says. “You can take it up to the ninth floor yourself on your coffee break. Too bad you have to take the stairs.”

“Look,” he says, totally exasperated, “this is EBGOC. This is, like, the headquarters. EBGOC central. You got that? Everything that happens within a mile is being videotaped. People don't spit on the pavement within sight of this building. They don't even say bad words. Nobody's going to steal your skateboard.”

“That's even worse. They'll steal it. Then they'll say they didn't steal it, they confiscated it. I know you Feds, you're always confiscating shit.”

The guy sighs. Then his eyes go out of focus and he shuts up for a minute. Y.T. can tell he's getting a message over the little earphone that's plugged into his ear, the mark of the true Fed.

“Go on in,” he says. “But you gotta sign.”

“Naturally,” Y.T. says.

The cop hands her the sign-in sheet, which is actually a notebook computer with an electronic pen. She writes “Y.T.” on the screen, it's converted to a digital bitmap, automatically time stamped, and sent off to the big computer at Fed Central. She knows she's not going to make it through the metal detector without stripping naked, so she just vaults the cop's table—what's he going to do, shoot her?—and heads on into the building, skateboard under her arm.

“Hey!” he says, weakly.

“What, you got lots of EBGOC agents in here being mugged and raped by female Kouriers?” she says, stomping the elevator button ferociously.

Elevator takes forever. She loses her patience and just climbs the stairs like all the other Feds.

The guy is right, it's definitely Cop Central here on the ninth floor. Every creepy guy in sunglasses and slippery hair you've ever seen, they're all here, all with little fleshtone helices of wire trailing down from their ears. There's even some female Feds. They look even scarier than the guys. The things that a woman can do to her hair to make herself look professional—Jeeezus! Why not just wear a motorcycle helmet? At least then you can take it off.

Except none of the Feds, male or female, is wearing sunglasses. They look naked without them. Might as well be walking around with no pants on. Seeing these Feds without their mirror specs is like blundering into the boys' locker room.

She finds Room 968A easily enough. Most of the floor is just a big pool of desks. All the actual, numbered rooms are around the edges, with frosted glass doors. Each of the creepy guys seems to have a desk of his own, some of them loiter near their desks, the rest of them are doing a lot of hall-jogging and impromptu conferencing at other creepy guys' desks. Their white shirts are painfully clean. Not as many shoulder holsters as she would expect; all the gun-carrying Feds are probably out in what used to be Alabama or Chicago trying to confiscate back bits of United States territory from what is now a Buy 'n' Fly or a toxic-waste dump.

She goes on into Room 968A. It's an office. Four Fed guys are in here, the same as the others except most of them are a tad older, in their forties and fifties.

“Got a delivery for this room,” Y.T. says.

“You're Y.T.?” says the head Fed, who's sitting behind the desk.

“You're not supposed to know my name,” Y.T. says. “How did you know my name?”

“I recognized you,” the head Fed says. “I know your mother.”

Y.T. does not believe him. But these Feds have all kinds of ways of finding out stuff.

“Do you have any relatives in Afghanistan?” she says.

The guys all look back and forth at each other, like, did you understand the chick? But it's not a sentence that is intended to be understood. Actually, Y.T. has all kinds of voice recognition ware in her coverall and in her plank. When she says, “Do you have any relatives in Afghanistan?” that's like a code phrase, it tells all of her spook gear to get ready, shake itself down, check itself out, prick up its electronic ears.

“You want this envelope or not?” she says.

“I'll take it,” the head Fed says, standing up and holding out one hand.

Y.T. walks into the middle of the room and hands him the envelope. But instead of taking it, he lunges out at the last minute and grabs her forearm.

She sees an open handcuff in his other hand. He brings it out and snaps it down on her wrist so it tightens and locks shut over the cuff of her coverall.

“I'm sorry to do this, Y.T., but I have to place you under arrest,” he's saying.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Y.T. is saying. She's holding her free arm back away from the desk so he can't cuff her wrists together, but one of the other Feds grabs her by the free wrist, so now she's stretched out like a tightrope between the two big Feds.

“You guys are dead,” she says.

All the guys smile, like they enjoy a chick with some spunk.

“You guys are dead,” she says a second time.

This is the key phrase that all of her ware is waiting to hear. When she says it the second time, all the self-defense stuff comes on, which means that among other things, a few thousand volts of radio-frequency electrical power suddenly flood through the outsides of her cuffs.

The head Fed behind the desk blurts out a grunt from way down in his stomach. He flies back away from her, his entire right side jerking spastically, trips over his own chair, and sprawls back into the wall, smacking his head on the marble windowsill. The jerk who's yanking on her other arm stretches out like he's on an invisible rack, accidentally slapping one of the other guys in the face, giving that guy a nice dose of juice to the head. Both of them hit the floor like a sack of rabid cats. There's only one of these guys left, and he's reaching under his jacket for something. She takes one step toward him, swings her arm around, and the end of the loose manacle strokes him in the neck. Just a caress, but it might as well be a two-handed blow from Satan's electric ax handle. That funky juice runs all up and down his spine, and suddenly, he's sprawled across a couple of shitty old wooden chairs and his pistol is rotating on the floor like the spinner in a children's game.

She flexes her wrist in a particular way, and the bundy stunner drops down her sleeve and into her hand. The manacle swinging from the other hand will have a similar efffect on that side. She also pulls out the can of Liquid Knuckles, pops the lid, sets the spray nozzle on wide angle.

One of the Fed creeps is nice enough to open the office door for her. He comes into the room with his gun already drawn, backed up by half a dozen other guys who've flocked here from the office pool, and she just lets them have it with the Liquid Knuckles. Whoosh, it's like bug spray. The sound of bodies hitting the floor is like a bass drum roll. She finds that her skateboard has no problem rolling across their prone bodies, and then she's out into the office pool. These guys are converging from all sides, there's an incredible number of them, she just keeps holding that button down, pointed straight ahead, digging at the floor with her foot, building up speed. The Liquid Knuckles act like a chemical flying wedge, she's skating out of there on a carpet of bodies. Some of the Feds are agile enough to dart in from behind and try to get her that way, but she's ready with the bundy stunner, which turns their nervous systems into coils of hot barbed wire for a few minutes but isn't supposed to have any other effects.

She's made it about three-quarters of he way across the office when the Liquid Knuckles runs out. But it still works for a second or two because people are afraid of it, keep diving out of the way even though there's nothing coming out. Then a couple of them figure it out, make the mistake of trying to grab her by the wrists. She gets one of them with the bundy stunner and the other with the electric manacle. Then
boom
through the door and she's out into the stairwell, leaving four dozen casualties in her wake. Serves them right, they didn't even try to arrest her in a gentlemanly way.

To a man on foot, stairs are a hindrance. But to the smartwheels, they just look like a forty-five-degree angle ramp. It's a little choppy, especially when she's down to about the second floor and is going way too fast, but it's definitely doable.