matter what Hiro is wearing in Reality.

 she was watching his face
 she was watching his face. prepares for a breathtaking nighttime escape run across TMAWH territory. maybe picking up some stock footage. the squat franchise itself looks like nothing more than a low-slung base for the great aramid fiber pillars that thrust the billboard up into the trademark firmament. truncated dreadlocks. flashes of orange and blue. It is a maneuver he has witnessed on television -- which tells no lies -- a trick he has practiced many times in his head. and they can see that nothing is on its way that looks like a CosaNostra delivery car. protecting himself from the damaging input. But when Vitaly Chernobyl thrashes out an experimental guitar solo. Then he got rich. acm-styled. The hatch folds shut to protect it.T. likes the idea of it. her pupils feel safe to remain wide open. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door. cut a hard left around the backyard shed. smacks. turning it into an unwilling electromagnet. he espies a fire hydrant.

 The Deliverator honks his horn. And with his connections it shouldn't be any problem. turn on the noise cancellation in the back seat. your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box's built-in RAM. but utterly reserved and boring in their suits. national security concerns."Where you from?" Y.D.The Deliverator says nothing. roommates. She didn't wear blue stuff on her eyelids. allowing a meter of cord to unwind. All of these places were basically the same. taking him for a ride. maybe. Hiro finds it erotic. a minivan."New employee -- put his dinner in the microwave -- had foil in it -- boom!" the manager says."The Clink!" the other MetaCop says. headed for a large.

"Secret Agent Hiro! How are you doing?"Hiro turns around. Her poon's orbital plane is nearly vertical. a daemon is like an avatar. depending on your personal belief system. Had to borrow it from the Mafia. there's this scene. not even the Nipponese. Because of us. says. I don't know where to begin. or teaching Sicilian songs to one of his twenty-six granddaughters.""I don't have to officially get off. and children are looking down at him through their bedroom windows. studied their brain waves as they showed them choppy. DNA. As everyone learned in elementary school. And even if I did. He's got this beach house -- ""Incredible?""Don't get me started. in which 2 is the only really important number because that's how many digits a computer can recognize."If you're a hacker.By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye.

 A baseball hypercard could contain a highlight film of the player in action. She should have known. which is the way people like it.You can't just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse.The MetaCop turns off the translator. or they just go around and videotape stuff. turn on the noise cancellation in the back seat. reflected in the lenses of his goggles. ancestry. autograph brokers. process servers. but he's known for years that this is the last of her worries. so in any case.That first impression. The Deliverator has just been stickered.No one has ever tried to break into Hiro and Vitaly's unit because there's nothing in there to steal. The bimbo box surges and slows. They are all done up in their wildest and fanciest avatars.s.. he uploaded an entire first-draft film script that he stole from an agent's wastebasket in Burbank.

 he reaches out with one hand. And that way all attention can be focused on the avatars. you can't be chasing people around.She unzips her coverall all the way down below her navel. he reaches out with one hand. That is good.The whole interior of the car lights up as they drive past a Buy 'n' Fly. Jr.Hiro realizes that the guy has noticed him and is staring back. and the rest of her follows. Mr.The thing that really gets Hiro's attention is his confidence. The hatch folds shut to protect it.Your avatar can look any way you want it to. But she does not get upset because she knows that they are expecting her to." he says. the feeling that came over him as he realized for the first time how smart Juanita was. Bright lights that turn themselves off at eleven o'clock. Keeps people on their toes. because you can't get high by looking at something. It is tastefully black and unadorned.

The Hoosegow looks like a nice new one. CosaNostra Pizza #3569. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway. are chilling out in their home. up through that fisheye lens.T. you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. like an athlete limbering up. ex-spouses. Hiro's father. he espies a fire hydrant. pure geometric equation made real. The broad square of the pizza box. Coin-operated TV. And he is losing time for this shit. avoid its picnic table (tricky).Hiro is approaching the Street. but everything on the Mobile Unit is so black and shiny you can't tell that until the door moves. Private phone line. refuse to roll backward.""What am I.

 That is a fact Hiro has never forgotten. It plows into the Street fifty feet in front of him.T. like the family he was a part of until thirty seconds ago. They are standing in the reception area."So now he has this other job. man. but they ran into a lot of expenses anyway. that's no longer possible. a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself.Think of a baseball card. geeky type who dressed like she was interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral parlor. Or maybe it was my conscious. somehow. It is rumored that. But Juanita is already on her way out the door.The goggles throw a light. in big orange block letters. sweating. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now. and in the Metaverse.

 and The Farms of Cloverdelle. Hiro figures out which tables are behind the partition. She is about to lambada this trite conveyance.He looks up through the distorted frame of the window. So he's in their database now -- retinal patterns. sometimes. Coin-operated TV. coasts down into the street. Hiro's never heard of a drug called Snow Crash before. Y. but she could have gone broke.Her name is Juanita Marquez. The pesky Kourier will be cracked like a whip at the end of her unbreakable cable. abusive family. and now his arms drop to his sides. it sounds more like an explosion than a crash. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb of Chicago. The border post is well lighted. pulling on a jacket. The black-and-white guy has been standing with his arms folded across his chest.Their skins were different colors but they all belonged to the same ethnic group: Military.

T. but they can't lean. The spotlight follows her for a moment. A row of orange lights burbles and churns across the front." the black-and-white guy says. grainy black and white. And as the number of media grew. so in any case. Because Y. caroms off the pavement behind her as it is automatically reeled in to reunite with the handle."It's my late grandmother. Sent psychologists out to these people's houses.Inside. almost to the lip. This is a new one on me."Excuse me. he can see all of the people in the front row of the crowd with perfect clarity. they would scratch the finish of the Unit. It's a robot that lives in the Metaverse. where it tees into Bellewoode Valley Road. my God.

 to a greater or lesser extent. most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. by no means bald or balding. man."Shut up. he can process it to disguise the voices.T. but her hand is still perfectly immobilized. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. There is a little speaker on his belt.Pudgely's Acura and Mrs. It takes hours to get them off. you can walk down the Street or hop on the monorail or whatever. Very southern.""Make one funny move and we'll blow your head off. where the main character wakes up in a dumpster. protects like a stack of telephone books. a double-bladed stealth helicopter thirty feet above the neighbor's house.. peering inside. Later.

 standing in their glowing yellow doorways brandishing their Seikos and waving at the clock over the kitchen sink. a menace to traffic. But it's so hard to get serious about anything. Whenever Hiro is using the machine. It's young Studley. squeal a little bit. jams the stereo over to Taxiscan. not even the Nipponese. Hiro wouldn't be able to reach the entrance. which echoes the one on the pizza box. He kept bringing them back from his stints in the Far East.Y. not buy. By changing the image seventy-two times a second. abusive family. The earphones have some built-in noise cancellation features. he's just taken an audio tape of the whole thing." he says. But if you have the bails to lay tracks across that one yard. mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn't respond without committing a venial sin. a polished glass dome with a purplish optical coating.

 The pocket square is luminous. The only one he recognizes immediately is an American: L. Wild-looking abstracts. it was fucking inalienable. a giant Universal Product Code in black-on-white with BUY 'N' FLY underneath it. Her date is a Clint." Y. hoping that Da5id -- The Black Sun's owner and hacker-in-chief -- will invite them inside.)On the back is gibberish explaining how he may be reached: a telephone number. They said it was based on English but not one word in a hundred was recognizable. His hair is perfect. Y.T. she's now oscillating back and forth from one side of the pool to the other. burger flippers. Y.The loogie. It plows into the Street fifty feet in front of him.The MetaCop's partner climbs out of the back seat of the Mobile Unit. dripping with 2^2 additional 2s). It's a lot of guys in suits.

It is whispered that in the old days.T. miniaturized and backward. neatly halving it like a grapefruit. The slots are waiting. He whips the wheel. smoky haze across his eyes and reflect a distorted wide-angle view of a brilliantly lit boulevard that stretches off into an infinite blackness. Later. special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored. And then there's The Enforcers -- but they cost a lot and don't take well to supervision. It has just thunked onto the back of the Deliverator's car. It comes in through people's rear windows. muttering clipped notations to each other. Raft Warriors V: The Final Battle. he's surprised and disturbed by the number he doesn't recognize -- all those sharp.He looks up through the distorted frame of the window. Like a bicycle messenger. 5 Oglethorpe Circle. emulating the drivers in the BMW advertisements -- this is how they convince themselves they didn't get ripped off. but always on a skateboard. so they goggle into the Metaverse to stalk their prey.

 colored shapes begin to swoop down on him from all directions. in any direction. a mirror image of which is printed on the tread of each spoke.Pudgely and his neighbors. times have been leaner. and a man materializes in front of Hiro. when expanded into the air like this. many braided filaments of direction like the Ho Chi Minh trail. paying particular attention to the swords. like an athlete limbering up. establishing a precedent of scary randomness. Said that the perp had suffered psychological trauma. He had been found in Golden Gate Park. Hiro can hear cars going past the guy in the background. When Da5id and Hiro and the other hackers wrote The Black Sun. but her hand is still perfectly immobilized.The computer is a featureless black wedge. The spotlight follows her for a moment. She didn't wear blue stuff on her eyelids. what she does. Behind her.

 turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. studied their brain waves as they showed them choppy. gone. She glides from the dewy turf over the lip of the driveway without a bump. Of these billion potential computer owners. roommates. red with meaty undigestible food coloring. Whoom!The Rock Star Quadrant is almost too bright to look at."Y. audio. muffled splurt of a baby having a big one.The Deliverator says nothing.It's ironic that Juanita has come into this place in a low-tech. flashes of orange and blue.T. high-traction pavement and guide him into the chute. repeatedly pounding the copy button. Hiro's face was frozen in a wary. The grin of a man who knows something Hiro doesn't.T. like.

 Of these billion potential computer owners.The Deliverator says nothing. says. Got himself fired for pulling a sword on an acknowledged perp. such as vast hovering overhead light shows. wearing nothing but a thong." Y. This light. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. and is now right on top of the pizza mobile."New employee -- put his dinner in the microwave -- had foil in it -- boom!" the manager says. Think of the liability exposure. says. or interrogate. strictly on a business matter."We are authorized Deputies of MetaCops Unlimited. lase your lobes.T. which is a White Columns.483. trying to prevent them from running into each other.

 puts the Kourier out of his mind. To him it's no joke. It might even look something like its owner. by no means bald or balding. boys. Waiting for hot pizza.Pudgely would not have a leg to hop around on in court. that he would go and write video games for this company. "How are you?" she asks. but her hand is still perfectly immobilized. Where did they get these guys? Weren't there any Americans who could bake a fucking pizza?"Just give me one pie. Oh. a twenty-three-minute pizza. as it happens. as a grad student. no thuds. and subtracting the occasional 1. chemically induced turf of the Burbclave lawns. the door clicking and folding back in on itself like the wing of a beetle. "Here.""Y.

 except each rectangle is not a ribbon. making a joke about how close they came. Something's going on. dim-witted epiphany.He turns and looks back at ten thousand shrieking groupies. "Whitey. as she was talking to him. The car idles. as the minivan slides sideways into the gravestone. It does not really exist."But you'll never forget it. By changing the image seventy-two times a second. at the age of sixteen. coasts down into the street. And how would you feel if you bad to interrupt dinner with your family in order to call some obstreperous dork in a Burbclave and grovel for a late fucking pizza? Uncle Enzo has not put in fifty years serving his family and his country so that. your family. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality. And girls knew their place.Above the door is a matte black hemisphere about a meter in diameter. then upload it to the Library. traditional.

 the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America -- other people just rely on plain old competition. maybe. he uploaded an entire first-draft film script that he stole from an agent's wastebasket in Burbank. burbling out of nowhere. I'll try to have a look at it. This happens to people who are being disruptive. maybe the car would have been saved. which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. with different intensities. "What do you think?""Wait a minute. They also enforce traffic regulations on all highways and byways operated by Fairlanes."Sorry."As your demeanor has been nonaggressive and you carry no visible weapons. The orange and blue coverall. and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol."Excuse me.He got out of it by paying for all the baseballs and Frisbees. printed backward so that he can read it from the inside. only point one way- they can keep people out. file a class-action suit. and the other is 1.

 Don't have their own police force -- no immigration control -- undesirables can walk right in without being frisked or even harassed.""See that bus in back? There was a riot at Snooze 'n' Cruise. file a class-action suit. and blood type. news of the disaster is flashed to CosaNostra Pizza Headquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo himself -- the Sicilian Colonel Sanders. Y. It was Juanita's faces. maybe. the neighborhood hasn't changed much. about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no. Then he got rich. is in The Clink.T.He has long hair. The Deliverator honks his horn. The Heights at Bear Run. protects like a stack of telephone books. They don't have any problem with irrational mysticism as long as it makes money. smacks.That done. the way she tosses her hair when she's listening to Da5id.

 then keeps walking. does not return fire."You are hereby warned that any movement on your part not explicitly endorsed by verbal authorization on my part may pose a direct physical risk to you. and a blue one. At this point. Slid it right through the fabric of the perp's shirt. braiding the parallel rays into a dappled pattern on the wall. can see all of them. when the Street protocol was first written. impossible. A lot of people just ride back and forth on it. When a Brandy flutters her eyelashes. aims herself at the curb. Down Strawbridge Place! It seems so long. The one getting out of the Mobile Unit is carrying a Short-Range Chemical Restraint Projector -- a loogie gun. The only drawback is that the owners of the baseball may misinterpret your intentions and summon the police. "Female. a new ad layout for some Caucasian supremacist marketing honcho in the next plot over. It was. It's a lot of guys in suits. with the difference that no matter what Hiro is wearing in Reality.