Snow Crash Part 33

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 a.s.sholes. 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 f.u.c.king 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 p.i.s.sed 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 netherworid 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 a.s.sault 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 full-on mental 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 s.h.i.t 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 gla.s.s. 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 Chern.o.byl 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 pa.s.s through other people's avatars. But you can't pa.s.s through walls. You can't enter private property. And you can t pa.s.s 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.

Hiro had a pretty good motorcycle. He probably could have had the best one on the Street, simply because his reflexes are unearthly. But he was more preoccupied with sword fighting than motorcycle riding.

He opens up the most recent version of his motorcycle software, gets familiar with the controls again. He ascends from Flatland into the three-dimensional Metaverse and practices riding his bike around his yard for a while. Beyond the boundaries of his yard is nothing but blackness, because he's not jacked into the net. It is a lost, desolate sensation, kind of like floating on a life raft in the Pacific Ocean.

Sometimes they see boats in the distance. A couple of these even swing close by to check them out, but none of them seems to be in that rescuing mood. There are few altruists in the vicinity of the Raft, and it must be evident that they don't have much to steal.

From time to time, they see an old deep-water fishing boat, fifty to a hundred feet long, with half a dozen or so small fast boats cl.u.s.tered around it.

When Eliot informs them that these are pirate vessels, Vic and Fisheye p.r.i.c.k up their ears. Vic unwraps his rifle from the collection of Hefty bags that he uses to protect it from the salt spray, and detaches the bulky sight so that they can use it as a spygla.s.s. Hiro can't see any reason to pull the sight off the rifle in order to do this, other than the fact that if you don't, it looks like you're drawing a bead on whatever you're looking at.

Whenever a pirate vessel comes into view, they all take turns looking at it through the sight, playing with all the different sensor modes: visible, infrared, and so on. Eliot has spent enough time knocking around the Rim that he has become familiar with the colors of the different pirate groups, so by examining them through the sight he can tell who they are: Clint Eastwood and his band parallel them for a few minutes one day, checking them out, and the Magnificent Seven send out one of their small boats to zoom by them and look for potential booty. Hiro's almost hoping they get taken prisoner by the Seven, because they have the nicest-looking pirate ship: a former luxury yacht with Exocet launch tubes kludged to the foredeck. But this reconnaissance leads nowhere. The pirates, unschooled in thermodynamics, do not grasp the implications of the eternal plume of steam coming from beneath the life raft.

One morning, a big old trawler materializes very close to them, congealing out of nothing as the fog lifts. Hiro has been hearing its engines for a while, but didn't realize how close it was.

"Who are they?" Fisheye says, choking on a cup of the freezedried coffee he despises so much. He's wrapped up in a s.p.a.ce blanket and partly snuggled underneath the boat's waterproof canopy, just his face and hands visible.

Eliot scopes them out with the sight. He is not a real demonstrative guy, but it's clear that he is not very happy with what he sees. "That is Bruce Lee," he says.

"How is that significant?" Fisheye says.

"Well, check out the colors," Eliot says.

The ship is close enough that everyone can see the flag pretty clearly. It's a red banner with a silver fist in the middle, a pair of nunchuks crossed beneath it, the initials B and L on either side.

"What about 'em?" Fisheye says.

"Well, the guy who calls himself Bruce Lee, who's like the leader? He got a vest with those colors on the back."

"So?"

"So, it's not just embroidered or painted, it's actually done in scalps. Patchwork, like."

"Say what?" Hiro says.

"There's a rumor, just a rumor, man, that he went through the Refu ships looking for people with red or silver hair so he could collect the scalps he needed."

Hiro is still absorbing that when Fisheye makes an unexpected decision. "I want to talk to this Bruce Lee character," he says. "He interests me."

"Why the h.e.l.l do you want to talk to this f.u.c.king psycho?" Eliot says.

"Yeah," Hiro says. "Didn't you see that series on Eye Spy? He's a maniac."

Fisheye throws up his hands as if to say the answer is, like Catholic theology, beyond mortal comprehension. "This is my decision," he says.

"Who the f.u.c.k are you?" Eliot says.

"President of the f.u.c.king boat," Fisheye says. "I hereby nominate myself. Is there a second?"

"Yup," Vic says, the first time he has spoken in forty-eight hours.

"All in favor say aye," Fisheye says.

"Aye," Vic says, bursting into florid eloquence.

"I win," Fisheye says. "So how do we get these Bruce Lee guys to come over here and talk to us?"

"Why should they want to?" Eliot says. "We got nothing they want except for poontang."

"Are you saying these guys are h.o.m.os?" Fisheye says, his face shriveling up.

"s.h.i.t, man," Eliot says, "you didn't even blink when I told you about the scalps."

"I knew I didn't like any of this boat s.h.i.t," Fisheye says.

"If this makes any difference to you, they're not gay in the sense that we usually think of it," Eliot explains. "They're het, but they're pirates. They'll go after anything that's warm and concave."

Fisheye makes a snap decision. "Okay, you two guys, Hiro and Eliot, you're Chinese. Take off your clothes."

"What?"

"Do it. I'm the president, remember? You want Vic to do it for you?"

Eliot and Hiro can't help looking over at Vic, who is just sitting there like a lump. There is something about his extremely blase att.i.tude that inspires fear.

"Do it or I'll f.u.c.king kill you," Fisheye says, finally driving the point home.

Eliot and Hiro, bobbing awkwardly on the unsteady floor of the raft, peel off their survival suits and step out of them. Then they pull off the rest of their clothes, exposing smooth bare skin to the air for the first time in a few days. The trawler comes right alongside of them, no more than twenty feet away, and cuts its engines. They are nicely equipped: half a dozen Zodiacs with new outboards, an Exocet-type missile, two radars, and a fifty-caliber machine gun at each end of the boat, currently unmanned. A couple of speedboats are being towed behind the trawler like dinghys and each of these also has a heavy machine gun. And there is also a thirty-six-foot motor yacht, following them under its own power.

There are a couple of dozen guys in Bruce Lee's pirate band, and they are now lined up along the trawler's railing, grinning, whistling, howling like wolves, and waving unrolled trojans in the air.

"Don't worry, man, I'm not going to let 'em f.u.c.k you," Fisheye says, grinning.

"What you gonna do," Eliot says, "hand them a papal encyclical?"

"I'm sure they'll listen to reason," Fisheye says.

"These guys aren't scared of the Mafia, if that's what you have in mind," Eliot says.

"That's just because they don't know us very well."

Finally, the leader comes out, Bruce Lee himself, a fortyish guy in a Kevlar vest, an ammo vest stretched over that, a diagonal bandolier, samurai sword-Hiro would love to take him on-nunchuks, and his colors, the patchwork of human scalps.

He flashes them a nice grin, has a look at Hiro and Eliot, gives them a highly suggestive, thrusting thumbs-up gesture, and then struts up and down the length of the boat one time, swapping high fives with his merry men. Every so often, he picks out one of the pirates at random and gestures at the man's trojan. The pirate puts his condom to his lips and inflates it into a slippery ribbed balloon. Then Bruce Lee inspects it, making sure there are no leaks. Obviously, the man runs a tight ship.

Hiro can't help staring at the scalps on Bruce Lee's back. The pirates note his interest and mug for him, pointing to the scalps, nodding, looking back at him with wide, mocking eyes The colors look much too uniform-no change in the red from one to the next. Hiro concludes that Bruce Lee, contrary to his reputation, must have just gone out and gotten scalps of any old color, bleached them, and dyed them. What a wimp.

Finally, Bruce Lee works his way back to midship and flashes them another big grin. He has a great, dazzling grin and he knows it; maybe it's those one-karat diamonds Krazy Glued to his front teeth.

"Jammin' boat," he says. 'Maybe you, me swap, huh? Hahaha."

Everyone on the life raft, except for Vic, just smiles a brittle smile.

"Where you goin'? Key West? Hahaha."

Bruce Lee examines Hiro and Eliot for a while, rotates his index finger to indicate that they should spin around and display their business ends. They do.

"Quanto?" Bruce Lee says, and all the pirates get uproarious, most of all Bruce Lee. Hiro can feel his a.n.a.l sphincter contracting to the size of a pore.

"He's asking how much we cost," Eliot says. "It's a joke, see, because they know they can come over and have our a.s.ses for free."

"Oh, hilarious!" Fisheye says. While Hiro and Eliot literally freeze their a.s.ses, he's still snuggled up under the canopy, that b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

"Poonmissile, like?" Bruce Lee says, pointing to one of the antiship missiles on the deck. "Bugs? Motorolas?"

"Poonmissile is a Harpoon antiship missile, real expensive," Eliot says. "A bug is a microchip. Motorola would be one brand, like Ford or Chevy. Bruce Lee deals in a lot of electronics-you know, typical Asian pirate dude."

"He'd give us a Harpoon missile for you guys?" Fisheye says.

"No! He's being sarcastic, s.h.i.thead!" Eliot says. "Tell him we want a boat with an outboard motor," Fisheye says.

"Want one zode, one kicker, fillerup," Eliot says.

Suddenly Bruce Lee gets real serious and actually considers it. "Scope clause, chomsayen? Gauge and gag."

"He'll consider it if they can come and check out the merchandise first," Eliot says. "They want to check out how tight we are, and whether we are capable of suppressing our gag reflex. These are all terms from the Raft brothel industry."

"Ombwas scope like twelves to me, hahaha."

"Us homeboys look like we have twelve-gauge a.s.sholes," Eliot says, "i.e., that we are all stretched out and worthless."

Fisheye speaks up on his own. "No, no, four-tens, totally!"

The entire deck of the pirate ship t.i.tters with excitement.

"No way," Bruce Lee says.