Snow Crash Page 37

  Raven turns to her, smiles broadly, shrugs. “Oh, because I'm an incredibly ruthless, efficient, cold-blooded killer, you know.”

  Y.T. laughs. So does Raven.

  “What's your job?” Y.T. asks.

  “I'm a harpooner,” he says.

  “Like in Moby Dick?” Y.T. likes this idea. She read that book in school. Most of the people in her class, even the power tools, thought that the book was totally entrenched. But she liked all the stuff about harpooning.

  “Nah. Compared to me, those Moby Dicksters were faggots.”

  “What kind of stuff do you harpoon?”

  “You name it.”

  From there on out, she just looks at him. Or at inanimate objects. Because otherwise she wouldn't see anything except thousands of dark eyes staring back at her. In that way, it's a big change from being a slop-slinger for the repressed.

  Part of it is just because she's so different. But part of it is that there's no privacy on the Raft, you make your way around by hopping from one boat to the next. But each boat is home to about three dozen people, so it's like you are constantly walking through people's living rooms. And bathrooms. And bedrooms. Naturally, they look.

  They tromp across a makeshift platform built on oil drums. A couple of Vietnamese dudes are there arguing or haggling over something, looks like a slab of fish. The one who's turned toward them sees them coming. His eyes flicker across Y.T. without pausing, fix on Raven, and go wide. He steps back. The guy he's talking to, who has his back to them, turns around and literally jumps into the air, letting out a suppressed grunt. Both of them back well out of Raven's path.

  And then she figures out something important: These people aren't looking at her. They're not even giving her a second glance. They're all looking at Raven. And it's not just a case of celebrity watching or something like that. All of these Raft dudes, these tough scary homeboys of the sea, are scared shitless of this guy.

  And she's on a date with him.

  And it's just started.

  Suddenly, walking through another Vietnamese living room, Y.T. has a flashback to the most excruciating conversation she ever had, which was a year ago when her mother tried to give her advice on what to do if a boy got fresh with her. Yeah, Mom, right. I'll keep that in mind. Yeah, I'll be sure to remember that. Y.T. knew that advice was worthless, and this goes to show she was right.

  48

  There are four men in the life raft: Hiro Protagonist, self-employed stringer for the Central Intelligence Corporation, whose practice used to be limited to so-called “dry” operations, meaning that he sat around and soaked up information and then later spat it back into the Library, the CIC database, without ever actually doing anything. Now his practice has become formidably wet. Hiro is armed with two swords and a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, known colloquially as a nine, with two ammunition clips, each carrying eleven rounds.

  Vic, unspecified last name. If there was still such a thing as income tax, then every year when Vic filled out his 1040 form he would put down, as his occupation, “sniper.” In classic sniper style, Vic is reticent, unobtrusive. He is armed with a long, large-caliber rifle with a bulky mechanism mounted on its top, where a telescopic sight might be found if Vic were not at the leading edge of his profession. The exact nature of this device is not obvious, but Hiro presumes that it is an exquisitely precise sensor package with fine crosshairs superimposed on the middle. Vic may safely be presumed to be carrying additional small concealed weapons.

  Eliot Chung. Eliot used to be the skipper of a boat called the Kowloon. At the moment, he is between jobs. Eliot grew up in Watts, and when he speaks English, he sounds like a black guy. Genetically speaking, he is entirely Chinese. He is fluent in both black and white English as well as Cantonese, Taxilinga, and some Vietnamese, Spanish, and Mandarin. Eliot is armed with a .44 Magnum revolver, which he carried on board the Kowloon “just for the halibut,” i.e., he used it execute halibut before passengers hauled them on board. Halibut grow very large and can thrash so violently that they can easily kill the people who hook them; hence it is prudent to fire a number of shells through their heads before taking them on board. This is the only reason Eliot carries a weapon; the other defensive needs of the Kowloon were seen to by crew members who were specialists in that kind of thing.

  “Fisheye.” This is the man with the glass eye. He will only identify himself by his nickname. He is armed with a large, fat black suitcase.

  The suitcase is massively constructed, with built-in wheels, and weighs somewhere between three hundred pounds and a metric ton, as Hiro discovers when he tries to move it. Its weight turns the normally flat bottom of the life raft into a puckered cone. The suitcase has a noteworthy attachment: a flexible three-inch-thick cable or hose or something, a couple of meters long, that emerges from one corner, runs up the sloping floor of the life raft, over the edge, and trails in the water. At the end of this mysterious tentacle is a hunk of metal about the size of a wastebasket, but so finely sculpted into so many narrow fins and vanes that it appears to have a surface area the size of Delaware. Hiro only saw this thing out of the water for a few chaotic moments, when it was being transferred into the life raft. At that time it was glowing red hot. Since then, it has lurked below the surface, light gray, impossible to see clearly because the water around it is forever churning in a full, rolling boil. Fist-sized bubbles of steam coalesce amid its fractal tracery of hot vanes and pummel the surface of the ocean, ceaselessly, all day and all night. The powerless life raft, sloshing around the North Pacific, emits a vast, spreading plume of steam like that of an Iron Horse chugging full blast over the Continental Divide. Neither Hiro nor Eliot ever mentions, or even notices, the by-now-obvious fact that Fisheye is traveling with a small, self-contained nuclear power source—almost certainly radiothermal isotopes like the ones that power the Rat Thing. As long as Fisheye refuses to notice this fact, it would be rude for them to bring it up.

  All of the participants are clad in bright orange padded suits that cover their entire bodies. They are the North Pacific version of life vests. They are bulky and awkward, but Eliot Chung likes to say that in northern waters, the only thing a life vest does is make your corpse float.

  The lifeboat is an inflatable raft about ten feet long that does not come equipped with a motor. It has a tentlike, waterproof canopy that they can zip up all the way around, turning it into a sealed capsule so that the water stays out even in the most violent weather.

  For a couple of days, a powerful chill wind coming down out off the mountains drives them out of Oregon, out toward the open water. Eliot explains, cheerfully, that this lifeboat was invented back in the old days, when they had navies and coast guards that would come and rescue stranded travelers. All you had to do was float and be orange. Fisheye has a walkie-talkie, but it is a short-range device. And Hiro's computer is capable of jacking into the net, but in this regard it functions much like a cellular telephone. It doesn't work out in the middle of nowhere.

  When the weather is extremely rainy, they sit under the canopy. When it's less rainy, they sit above it. They all have ways of passing the time.

  Hiro dicks around with his computer, naturally. Being stranded on a life raft in the Pacific is a perfect venue for a hacker.

  Vic reads and rereads a soaked paperback novel that he had in the pocket of his MAFIA windbreaker when the Kowloon got blown out from under them. These days of waiting are much easier for him. As a professional sniper, he knows how to kill time.

  Eliot looks at things with his binoculars, even though there is very little to look at. He spends a lot of time messing around with the raft, fretting about it in the way that boat captains do. And he does a lot of fishing. They have plenty of stored food on the raft, but the occasional fresh halibut and salmon are nice to eat.

  Fisheye has taken what appears to be an instruction manual from the heavy black suitcase. It is a miniature three-ring binder with pages of laser-printed text. The binder is
just a cheap unmarked one bought from a stationery store. In these respects, it is perfectly familiar to Hiro: it bears the earmarks of a high-tech product that is still under development. All technical devices require documentation of a sort, but this stuff can only be written by the techies who are doing the actual product development, and they absolutely hate it, always put the dox question off to the very last minute. Then they type up some material on a word processor, run it off on the laser printer, send the departmental secretary out for a cheap binder, and that's that.

  But this only occupies Fisheye for a little while. He spends the rest of the time just staring off at the horizon, as though he's expecting Sicily to heave into view. It doesn't. He is despondent over the failure of his mission, and spends a lot of time mumbling under his breath, trying to find a way to salvage it.

  “If you don't mind my asking,” Hiro says, “what was your mission anyway?”

  Fisheye thinks this one over for a while. “Well it depends on how you look at it. Nominally, my objective is to get a fifteen-year-old girl back from these assholes. So my tactic was to take a bunch of their bigwigs hostage, then arrange a trade.”

  “Who's this fifteen-year-old girl?”

  Fisheye shrugs. “You know her. It's Y.T.”

  “Is that really your whole objective?”

  “The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of personal relationships. So, for example, when you were a pizza guy you didn't deliver pizzas fast because you made more money that way, or because it was some kind of a fucking policy. You did it because you were carrying out a personal covenant between Uncle Enzo and every customer. This is how we avoid the trap of self-perpetuating ideology. Ideology is a virus. So getting this chick back is more than just getting a chick back. It's the concrete manifestation of an abstract policy goal. And we like concrete—right, Vic?”

  Vic allows himself a judicious sneer and a deep grinding laugh.

  “What's the abstract policy goal in this case?” Hiro says.

  “Not my department,” Fisheye says. “But I think Uncle Enzo is real pissed at L. Bob Rife.”

  Hiro is messing around in Flatland. He is doing this partly to conserve the computer's batteries; rendering a three-dimensional office takes a lot of processors working fulltime, while a simple two-dimensional desktop display requires minimal power.

  But his real reason for being in Flatland is that Hiro Protagonist, last of the freelance hackers, is hacking. And when hackers are hacking, they don't mess around with the superficial world of Metaverses and avatars. They descend below this surface layer and into the netherworld of code and tangled nam-shubs that supports it, where everything that you see in the Metaverse, no matter how lifelike and beautiful and three-dimensional, reduces to a simple text file: a series of letters on an electronic page. It is a throwback to the days when people programmed computers through primitive teletypes and IBM punch cards.

  Since then, pretty and user-friendly programming tools have been developed. It's possible to program a computer now by sitting at your desk in the Metaverse and manually connecting little preprogrammed units, like Tinkertoys. But a real hacker would never use such techniques, any more than a master auto mechanic would try to fix a car by sliding in behind the steering wheel and watching the idiot lights on the dashboard.

  Hiro does not know what he is doing, what he is preparing for. That's okay, though. Most of programming is a matter of laying groundwork, building structures of words that seem to have no particular connection to the task at hand.

  He knows one thing: The Metaverse has now become a place where you can get killed. Or at least have your brain reamed out to the point where you might as well be dead. This is a radical change in the nature of the place. Guns have come to Paradise.

  It serves them right, he realizes now. They made the place too vulnerable. They figured that the worst thing that could happen was that a virus might get transferred into your computer and force you to ungoggle and reboot your system. Maybe destroy a little data if you were stupid enough not to install any medicine. Therefore, the Metaverse is wide open and undefended, like airports in the days before bombs and metal detectors, like elementary schools in the days before maniacs with assault rifles. Anyone can go in and do anything that they want to. There are no cops. You can't defend yourself, you can't chase the bad people. It's going to take a lot of work to change that—a fundamental rebuilding of the whole Metaverse, carried out on a planetwide, corporate level.

  In the meantime, there may be a role for individuals who know their way around the place. A few hacks can make a lot of difference in this situation. A freelance hacker could get a lot of shit done, years before the giant software factories bestir themselves to deal with the problem.

  The virus that ate through Da5id's brain was a string of binary information, shone into his face in the form of a bitmap—a series of white and black pixels, where white represents zero and black represents one. They put the bitmap onto scrolls and gave the scrolls to avatars who went around the Metaverse looking for victims.

  The Clint who tried to infect Hiro in The Black Sun got away, but he left his scroll behind—he didn't reckon on having his arms lopped off—and Hiro dumped it into the tunnel system below the floor, the place where the Graveyard Daemons live. Later, Hiro had a Daemon take the scroll back to his workshop. And anything that is in Hiro's house is, by definition, stored inside his own computer. He doesn't have to jack into the global network in order to access it.

  It's not easy working with a piece of data that can kill you. But that's okay. In Reality, people work with dangerous substances all the time—radioactive isotopes and toxic chemicals. You just have to have the right tools: remote manipulator arms, gloves, goggles, leaded glass. And in Flatland, when you need a tool, you just sit down and write it. So Hiro starts by writing a few simple programs that enable him to manipulate the contents of the scroll without ever seeing it.

  The scroll, like any other visible thing in the Metaverse, is a piece of software. It contains some code that describes what it looks like, so that your computer will know how to draw it, and some routines that govern the way it rolls and unrolls. And it contains, somewhere inside of itself, a resource, a hunk of data, the digital version of the Snow Crash virus.

  Once the virus has been extracted and isolated, it is easy enough for Hiro to write a new program called SnowScan. SnowScan is a piece of medicine. That is, it is code that protects Hiro's system—both his hardware and, as Lagos would put it, his bioware—from the digital Snow Crash virus. Once Hiro has installed it in his system, it will constantly scan the information coming in from outside, looking for data that matches the contents of the scroll. If it notices such information, it will block it.

  There's other work to do in Flatland. Hiro's good with avatars, so he writes himself an invisible avatar—just because, in the new and more dangerous Metaverse, it might come in handy. This is easy to do poorly and surprisingly tricky to do well. Almost anyone can write an avatar that doesn't look like anything, but it will lead to a lot of problems when it is used. Some Metaverse real estate—including The Black Sun—wants to know how big your avatar is so that it can figure out whether you are colliding with another avatar or some obstacle. If you give it an answer of zero—you make your avatar infinitely small—you will either crash that piece of real estate or else make it think that something is very wrong. You will be invisible, but everywhere you go in the Metaverse you will leave a swath of destruction and confusion a mile wide. In other places, invisible avatars are illegal. If your avatar is transparent and reflects no light whatsoever—the easiest kind to write—it will be recognized instantly as an illegal avatar and alarms will go off. It has to be written in such a way that other people can't see it, but the real estate software doesn't realize that it's invisible.

  There are about a hundred little tricks like this that Hiro wouldn't know about
if he hadn't been programming avatars for people like Vitaly Chernobyl for the last couple of years. To write a really good invisible avatar from scratch would take a long time, but he puts one together in several hours by recycling bits and pieces of old projects left behind in his computer. Which is how hackers usually do it.

  While he's doing that, he comes across a rather old folder with some transportation software in it. This is left over from the very old days of the Metaverse, before the Monorail existed, when the only way to get around was to walk or to write a piece of ware that simulated a vehicle.

  In the early days, when the Metaverse was a featureless black ball, this was a trivial job. Later on, when the Street went up and people started building real estate, it became more complicated. On the Street, you can pass through other people's avatars. But you can't pass through walls. You can't enter private property. And you can't pass through other vehicles, or through permanent Street fixtures such as the Ports and the stanchions that support the monorail line. If you try to collide with any of these things, you don't die or get kicked out of the Metaverse; you just come to a complete stop, like a cartoon character running spang into a concrete wall.

  In other words, once the Metaverse began to fill up with obstacles that you could run into, the job of traveling across it at high speed suddenly became more interesting. Maneuverability became an issue. Size became an issue. Hiro and Da5id and the rest of them began to switch away from the enormous, bizarre vehicles they had favored at first—Victorian houses on tank treads, rolling ocean liners, mile-wide crystalline spheres, flaming chariots drawn by dragons—in favor of small maneuverable vehicles. Motorcycles, basically.

  A Metaverse vehicle can be as fast and nimble as a quark. There's no physics to worry about, no constraints on acceleration, no air resistance. Tires never squeal and brakes never lock up. The one thing that can't be helped is the reaction time of the user. So when they were racing their latest motorcycle software, holding wild rallies through Downtown at Mach 1, they didn't worry about engine capacity. They worried about the user interface, the controls that enabled the rider to transfer his reactions into the machine, to steer, accelerate, or brake as quickly as he could think. Because when you're in a pack of bike racers going through a crowded area at that speed, and you run into something and suddenly slow down to a speed of exactly zero, you can forget about catching up. One mistake and you've lost.