p  extra storage space
to Californians with too many material goods), certain entrepreneurs came to
the front office, rented  out 10-by-10s using fake IDs, filled them  up with
steel drums full of toxic chemical waste, and  then  abandoned them, leaving
the  problem  for  the  U-Stor-It  Corporation to handle. According to these
rumors,  U-Stor-It just  padlocked  those units and wrote them off. Now, the
immigrants  claim, certain units remain haunted by this chemical specter. It
is a story they tell their children, to  keep them from trying to break into
padlocked units.
     No one has  ever tried to break into  Hiro  and  Vitaly's unit  because
there's nothing in there to steal, and at this point in their lives, neither
one of them is important enough to kill, kidnap, or interrogate. Hiro owns a
couple of nice  Nipponese swords, but he  always  wears  them, and the whole
idea of stealing fantastically dangerous weapons presents  the would-be perp
with  inherent  dangers  and  contradictions:  When  you are  wrestling  for
possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins. Hiro also  has a
pretty nice computer that he  usually  takes with him when he goes anywhere.
Vitaly  owns  half  a  carton  of Lucky Strikes, an  electric  guitar, and a
hangover.
     At the moment, Vitaly Chernobyl is stretched out on a futon, quiescent,
and Hiro Protagonist is sitting crosslegged at a low table, Nipponese style,
consisting of a cargo pallet set on cinderblocks.
     As the sun sets, its red light is supplanted by the light  of many neon
logos  emanating from the franchise ghetto that constitutes this U-Stor-It's
natural habitat.  This light, known as loglo, fills in the shadowy comers of
the unit with seedy, oversaturated colors.
     Hiro has cappuccino skin and spiky, truncated dreadlocks. His hair does
not cover as  much of his  head as it used to, but he is a young  man, by no
means bald or balding,  and the  slight retreat of  his hairline only  makes
more of his high cheekbones.  He is wearing shiny goggles that  wrap halfway
around  his head; the bows  of  the goggles have  little  earphones that are
plugged into his outer ears.
     The earphones have some built-in noise cancellation features. This sort
of thing works best on steady noise. When jumbo jets make their takeoff runs
on the runway across the street, the sound is reduced to a low doodling hum.
But when Vitaly Chernobyl thrashes out an experimental guitar solo, it still
hurts Hiro's ears.
     The  goggles throw  a  light,  smoky haze across his eyes and reflect a
distorted wide-angle view of a brilliantly lit boulevard that  stretches off
into an infinite blackness.  This boulevard  does not  really exist; it is a
computer-rendered view of an imaginary place.
     Beneath  this image, it is  possible  to  see Hiro's  eyes,  which look
Asian. They are from his mother, who is Korean by way of Nippon. The rest of
him looks  more like his father, who  was African by way of Texas  by way of
the  Army  - back  in  the days  before it got  split  up into  a number  of
competing organizations such  as  General Jim's  Defense System and  Admiral
Bob's National Security.
     Four things are on  the cargo pallet: a bottle of expensive  beer  from
the Puget Sound area, which Hiro cannot really afford; a long sword known in
Nippon as  a  katana and a short sword  known as a wakizashi - Hiro's father
looted these from Japan after World War II went atomic - and a computer.
     The computer is a  featureless  black wedge.  It  does not have a power
cord, but there  is a narrow  translucent plastic tube emerging from a hatch
on  the rear, spiraling across the cargo pallet and the  floor, and  plugged
into a crudely installed fiber-optics socket above the head of the  sleeping
Vitaly  Chernobyl.  In  the  center  of  the  plastic tube  is  a  hair-thin
fiber-optic cable. The cable is carrying a lot of information back and forth
between Hiro's computer and the rest of the world. In order to transmit  the
same amount of information on  paper, they would  have  to arrange for a 747
cargo freighter packed with telephone books  and encyclopedias to power-dive
into their unit every couple of minutes, forever.
     Hiro can't really afford the computer either, but  he has to  have one.
It is  a tool of his trade. In the worldwide community of hackers, Hiro is a
talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him
as recently as five years ago.  But  in the  bleak light  of full adulthood,
which is to one's early twenties as Sunday  morning is to Saturday night, he
can clearly see what  it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed. And a
few short weeks ago, his  tenure as a  pizza  deliverer - the only pointless
dead-end job  he  really enjoys  - came to an  end.  Since then,  he's  been
putting a lot more emphasis on his auxiliary emergency backup job: freelance
stringer  for  the CIC, the Central  Intelligence  Corporation  of  Langley,
Virginia.
     The business is a simple one. Hiro  gets information. It may be gossip,
videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a  xerox of a document.
It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster.
     He uploads it to the CIC database -  the Library, formerly  the Library
of  Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely
clear on what the word  "congress" means.  And  even the  word  "library" is
getting hazy. It used to be  a place full  of books, mostly  old  ones. Then
they began to include  videotapes, records, and magazines.  Then  all of the
information got converted into machine-readable form,  which is to say, ones
and zeroes. And as the number of media grew, the material became more up  to
date,  and  the  methods  for  searching the  Library  became  more and more
sophisticated,  it  approached  the  point where there  was  no  substantive
difference between  the Library of  Congress  and  the Central  Intelligence
Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart
anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering.
     Millions  of  other  CIC  stringers  are  uploading millions  of  other
fragments  at  the same  time. CIC's clients, mostly  large corporations and
Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if
they find a use for something that Hiro put into it, Hiro gets  paid. A year
ago,  he uploaded an entire first-draft film script  that  he stole  from an
agent's wastebasket in Burbank. Half a  dozen studios wanted  to see it.  He
ate and vacationed off of that one for six months.
     Since then, times have  been leaner. He  has been learning the hard way
that 99 percent of the information in the Library never gets used at all.
     Case in point: After a certain Kourier  tipped him off to the existence
of Vitaly  Chernobyl, he  put  a few intensive weeks into researching  a new
musical phenomenon - the  rise  of Ukrainian nuclear fuzz-grunge collectives
in  L.A. He has  planted  exhaustive  notes  on this  trend in  the Library,
including  video  and audio. Not  one single  record  label, agent, or  rock
critic has bothered to access it.
     The top surface of the computer is smooth except for  a fisheye lens, a
polished glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever  Hiro is using
the machine, this  lens emerges  and clicks into  place, its base flush with
the  surface  of   the  computer.  The  neighborhood  loglo  is  curved  and
foreshortened on its surface.
     Hiro finds it erotic. This  is partly  because he hasn't been  properly
laid  in several  weeks.  But  there's  more  to it. Hiro's  father, who was
stationed in  Japan  for  many  years, was obsessed with  cameras.  He  kept
bringing  them back  from  his  stints  in  the  Far East,  encased in  many
protective  layers, so that when he took them  out to show Hiro, it was like
watching an exquisite striptease as they emerged from all that black leather
and nylon, zippers  and straps. And once the lens  was finally exposed, pure
geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could
only think it was like  nuzzling through skirts and lingerie and outer labia
and inner labia.... It made him feel naked and weak and brave.
     The lens can see half  of  the  universe  - the half that is  above the
computer,  which includes most of  Hiro.  In this way, it can generally keep
track of where Hiro is and what direction he's looking in.
     Down inside the computer are three lasers - a red one, a green one, and
a blue one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful
enough to burn through the  back  of your eyeball and broil  your brain, fry
your  frontals, lase your  lobes. As everyone  learned in elementary school,
these three  colors of light can be combined, with different intensities, to
produce any color that Hiro's eye is capable of seeing.
     In this way, a narrow beam of any color  can be shot out of the innards
of the computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the
use of electronic  mirrors inside the computer, this beam  is  made to sweep
back and forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the  same way as
the electron beam in  a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous
Tube. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality.
     By drawing a slightly different image  in front of  each eye, the image
can  be made  three-dimensional. By changing  the image seventy-two  times a
second,  it  can be made to move.  By drawing  the moving  three-dimensional
image at a resolution of 2K  pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye
can  perceive,  and  by  pumping stereo  digital  sound  through  the little
earphones,  the  moving  3-D  pictures   can  have  a   perfectly  realistic
soundtrack.
     So  Hiro's  not  actually here at  all.  He's  in a computer  generated
universe that his computer is drawing onto  his goggles and pumping into his
earphones. In the  lingo, this  imaginary place is known  as  the Metaverse.
Hiro  spends a lot of  time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit  out  of the
U-Stor-It.

     Hiro is approaching the  Street. It is the Broadway, the Champs Elysees
of  the Metaverse.  It is  the brilliantly lit boulevard that  can be  seen,
miniaturized and backward, reflected  in the lenses of his goggles.  It does
not really exist. But right now, millions of people  are walking up and down
it.
     The dimensions of  the Street are fixed  by a protocol, hammered out by
the computer-graphics ninja  overlords  of  the  Association  for  Computing
Machinery's Global Multimedia Protocol Group. The Street seems to be a grand
boulevard  going  all  the  way around the equator of a black sphere with  a
radius of  a bit more than ten  thousand  kilometers. That makes  it  65,536
kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than Earth.
     The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who
recognizes it more readily than his own mother's date  of birth: It  happens
to be a power of  2 - 2^16 power to  be exact - and even the exponent  16 is
equal  to  2^4  , and  4  is  equal  to  2^2. Along  with  256; 32,768;  and
2,147,483,648;  65,536  is  one  of the  foundation  stones  of  the  hacker
universe, in which  2 is the only really important number because that's how
many  digits  a computer can recognize.  One of those digits is 0,  and  the
other is 1. Any number that can be created by fetishistically multiplying 2s
by  each  other,  and  subtracting  the  occasional  1,  will  be  instantly
recognizable to a hacker.
     Like any  place  in  Reality,  the Street  is  subject to  development.
Developers can  build their own  small streets feeding  off of the main one.
They can build buildings, parks, signs,  as well as things that do not exist
in   Reality,  such  as  vast  hovering   overhead   light  shows,   special
neighborhoods where the rules of  three-dimensional spacetime  are  ignored,
and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other.
     The only difference  is  that since the Street does not really exist  -
it's just  a computer-graphics  protocol  written down on  a piece of  paper
somewhere -  none  of  these things  is  being physically  built. They  are,
rather, pieces of software, made available to the  public over the worldwide
fiber-optics network. When Hiro goes  into the Metaverse and  looks down the
Street  and  sees buildings  and  electric  signs  stretching  off into  the
darkness, disappearing over  the curve of the globe, he is actually  staring
at the graphic representations - the user interfaces - of a myriad different
pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations. In order
to place these things on the Street, they have  had to get approval from the
Global Multimedia Protocol  Group, have had  to buy frontage  on the Street,
get zoning  approval,  obtain permits, bribe inspectors,  the whole bit. The
money these corporations pay  to build things on the Street all goes  into a
trust fund  owned and  operated  by the GMPG, which  pays for developing and
expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist.
     Hiro has  a  house in a  neighborhood just  off the busiest part of the
Street.  It is a very old neighborhood by Street standards. About  ten years
ago,  when  the Street  protocol was  first written,  Hiro and  some of  his
buddies pooled their money and bought one of the first development licenses,
created a little neighborhood of hackers. At the time, it  was just a little
patchwork of light amid a vast blackness. Back  then, the  Street was just a
necklace of streetlights around a black ball in space.
     Since then, the neighborhood hasn't changed  much, but  the Street has.
By getting  in on it  early,  Hiro's buddies  got a head start on the  whole
business. Some of them even got very rich off of it.
     That's why Hiro has a nice big  house in the Metaverse but has to share
a 20-by-30 in Reality.  Real estate acumen does  not  always  extend  across
universes.
     The sky and the  ground are black, like a  computer screen that  hasn't
had anything drawn into it yet; it is always nighttime in the Metaverse, and
the  Street  is  always  garish  and  brilliant, like Las  Vegas  freed from
constraints of  physics and finance.  But  people in Hiro's neighborhood are
very good programmers, so it's  tasteful. The houses look  like real houses.
There  are  a  couple of Frank Lloyd  Wright  reproductions  and some  fancy
Victoriana.
     So it's always a shock to  step out onto the  Street, where  everything
seems to be a mile high. This is Downtown, the most  heavily developed area.
If  you  go  a  couple  of  hundred  kilometers  in  either  direction,  the
development  will  taper  down  to  almost  nothing, just  a  thin chain  of
streetlights casting white pools on the black velvet ground. But Downtown is
a dozen Manhattans, embroidered with neon and stacked on top of each other.
     In the real world - planet Earth, Reality - there are somewhere between
six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are  making  mud
bricks or fieldstripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough
money to own a computer; these people have more money than all of the others
put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of
them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of  these have machines
that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about
sixty million  people who can  be on the Street  at  any given time. Add  in
another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but  go there anyway,
by  using public  machines,  or  machines  owned  by  their school  or their
employer,  and  at  any  given time  the  Street  is  occupied  by twice the
population of New York City.
     That's why the damn  place  is so overdeveloped.  Put in  a  sign  or a
building   on  the  Street   and  the  hundred   million  richest,  hippest,
best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.
     It is a hundred meters wide, with a narrow monorail track running  down
the  middle. The  monorail is a free piece of public  utility  software that
enables users to change their location on the Street rapidly and smoothly. A
lot of people just ride  back and forth on  it, looking  at the sights. When
Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago,  the  monorail hadn't been written
yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motorcycle software in order to
get around. They  would take their software out and  race it  in  the  black
desert of the electronic night.

        4

     Y.T. has been privileged to watch many a  young Clint  plant his  sweet
face in an empty Burbclave pool during an unauthorized night run, but always
on  a skateboard, never  ever in a car. The landscape of  the suburban night
has much weird beauty if you just look.
     Back on the paddle again. It rolls across the  yard  on a set of RadiKS
Mark IV  Smartwheels.  She  upgraded to said  magical  sprockets  after  the
following ad appeared in Thrasher magazine.
     CHISELED SPAM is what you will see in the mirror
     if you surf on a weak plank with dumb, fixed wheels
     and interface with a muffler, retread, snow turd, road
     kill, driveshaft, railroad tie, or unconscious pedestrian.
     If you think this is unlikely, you've been surfing too
     many ghost malls. All of these obstacles and more
     were recently observed on a one-mile stretch of the
     New Jersey Turnpike. Any surfer who tried to groove
     that 'vard on a stock plank would have been sneezing
     brains.
     Don't listen to so-called purists who claim any obstacle
     can be jumped. Professional Kouriers know: If you
     have pooned a vehicle moving fast enough for fun and
     profit, your reaction time is cut to tenths of a second -
     even less if you are way spooled.
     Buy a set of RadiKS Mark II Smartwheels - it's cheaper
     than a total face retread and a lot more fun. Smartwheels
     use sonar, laser rangefinding, and millimeter-wave radar
     to identify mufflers and other debris before you even
     get honed about them.
     Don't get Midasized - upgrade today!
     These were words of wisdom. Y.T.  bought the wheels. Each  one consists
of a hub with  many stout spokes. Each spoke telescopes in five sections. On
the end  is a squat foot, rubber tread on the bottom,  swiveling on  a  ball
joint. As the wheels roll,  the feet plant  themselves one at a time, almost
glomming into  one  continuous tire. If  you  surf over  a bump, the  spokes
retract to pass over it. If you surf over a chuckhole, the robo-prongs plumb
its asphalty depths. Either  way,  the shock  is thereby absorbed, no thuds,
smacks,  vibrations,  or clunks  will make their way  into the plank  or the
Converse hightops with which you tread it. The ad was right -you cannot be a
professional road surfer without smartwheels.
     Prompt delivery of  the pizza will be a trivial matter. She glides from
the dewy turf over the lip of the driveway without a bump, picks up speed on
the 'crete, surfs  down its slope  into the  street. A  twitch  of the  butt
reorients the plank, now  she is cruising down  Homedale Mews looking  for a
victim. A black car, alive with nasty lights, whines past her the other way,
closing in on the hapless Hiro Protagonist. Her RadiKS Knight Vision goggles
darken strategically  to cut  the noxious glaring  of same,  her pupils feel
safe to remain  wide  open,  scanning  the road  for signs  of movement. The
swimming  pool was at  the crest of this Burbclave, it's downhill from here,
but not downhill enough.
     Half a block away, on a side street, a bimbo box, a minivan, grinds its
four  pathetic  cylinders into  action.  She sees it  catercorner  from  her
present coordinates. The white backup lights flash  instantly  as the driver
shifts into D by way of R and N. Y.T. aims herself at the curb, hits it at a
fast running  velocity, the  spokes  of the smartwheels  see it  coming  and
retract in the right way so that she  glides from  street to lawn  without a
hitch.  Across the lawn,  the  feet leave a  trail of  hexagonal padmarks. A
stray dog turd, red with meaty  undigestible food coloring, is embossed with
the RadiKS logo,  a mirror image of which  is printed  on the tread  of each
spoke.
     The  bimbo  box  is  pulling away  from the  curb,  across the  street.
Squirrelly scrubbing noises squirm from its sidewalls as they grind  against
the curb; we are in the Burbs, where it is  better to take a thousand clicks
off the lifespan of your  Goodyears by invariably grinding  them up  against
curbs  than  to risk social ostracism and  outbreaks  of  mass  hysteria  by
parking several inches away, out in the middle of the  street  (That's okay,
Mom,  I  can walk  to  the  curb from  here),  a menace to traffic, a deadly
obstacle to uncertain young bicyclists. Y.T.  has pressed the release button
on her poon's  reel/handle unit, allowing  a  meter of cord  to  unwind. She
whips  it  up and around her head like a  bolo on the austral range.  She is
about  to  lambada this trite conveyance. The  head of the  poon, salad-bowl
size, whistles as it orbits around; this is unnecessary but sounds cool.
     Pooning  a bimbo box takes more  skill than a ped  would  ever imagine,
because  of their very road-unworthiness, their congenital lack  of steel or
other  ferrous  matter for  the MagnaPoon to  bite down on.  Now  they  have
superconducting  poons  that  stick  to aluminum bodywork  by  inducing eddy
currents in  the  actual  flesh  of the car, turning  it into  an  unwilling
electromagnet, but Y.T.  does not have one of these. They are the  trademark
of  the   hardcore   Burbclave   surfer,  which,   despite   this  evening's
entertainment, she  is not.  Her  poon  will only stick to  steel,  iron, or
(slightly) to nickel. The only steel  in a bimbo box of this make  is in the
frame.
     She makes  a  low-slung approach.  Her poon's  orbital plane is  nearly
vertical, it almost grinds on  the  twinkly suburban macadam  on the forward
limb of each orbit. When she pounds the release button, it takes off from an
altitude  of  about  one  centimeter, angling slightly  upward,  across  the
street, under the floor of the bimbo box, and sucks steel. It's a solid hit,
as solid as  you can get  on  this  nebula  of  air, upholstery, paint,  and
marketing known as the family minivan.
     The reaction  is  instantaneous, quick-witted  by  Burb standards. This
person wants Y.T. gone. The van takes off like a hormone-pumped bull who has
just been nailed  in the ass by the barbed probe of a picador. It's  not Mom
at the wheel. It's young Studley, the teenaged boy, who like every other boy
in  this  Burbclave  has been taking intravenous shots of horse testosterone
every afternoon  in  the high school locker room since he was fourteen years
old. Now he's bulky, stupid, thoroughly predictable.
     He steers erratically, artificially pumped muscles not fully  under his
control. The molded,  leather-grained, maroon-colored steering wheel  smells
like his mother's hand  lotion; this drives  him into a rage. The bimbo  box
surges and slows, surges and  slows,  because he is  pumping the gas  pedal,
because  holding  it to the floor doesn't seem to have any effect. He  wants
this car to be like his muscles: more power than he knows what  to  do with.
Instead, it  hampers him.  As  a compromise, he hits  the button  that  says
POWER. Another button that says ECONOMY  pops out  and goes dead,  reminding
him, like an educational demonstration, that the two are mutually exclusive.
The van's  tiny  engine downshifts,  which makes  it feel more powerful.  He
holds  his foot steady on the gas and, making the run  down  Cottage Heights
Road, the minivan's speed approaches one hundred kilometers.
     Approaching the  terminus of Cottage Heights Road,  where  it tees into
Bellewoode Valley  Road, he espies a fire hydrant. TMAWH  fire  hydrants are
numerous, for safety, and highly  designed,  for property  values,  not  the
squat iron things  imprinted  with  the name of  some godforsaken Industrial
Revolution foundry and furry from a hundred variously flaked layers of cheap
city paint. They are brass, robot-polished every Thursday morning, dignified
pipes rising  straight up from the perfect,  chemically induced turf  of the
Burbclave lawns, flaring out to present potential firefighters  with  a menu
of three possible hose connections.  They were designed on a computer screen
by the same aesthetes who designed the DynaVictorian houses and the tasteful
mailboxes and the immense marble street signs that sit at each  intersection
like headstones. Designed  on a computer screen, but  with an eye toward the
elegance of  things past and forgotten  about. Fire  hydrants  that tasteful
people are proud to have on their front  lawns. Fire hydrants  that the real
estate people don't feel the need to airbrush out of pictures.
     This fucking Kourier is about to die,  knotted around one of those fire
hydrants. Studley the Testosterone Boy will see to  it.  It is a maneuver he
has witnessed on television - which tells no lies - a trick he has practiced
many times  in  his head. Building up maximum speed on Cottage  Heights,  he
will  yank the  hand brake  while  swinging the wheel. The  ass end  of  the
minivan will snap around.  The pesky Kourier will be cracked like a  whip at
the end of her unbreakable cable. Into the fire hydrant she will go. Studley
the  Teenager will be victorious,  free to cruise in triumph down Bellewoode
Valley and out  into the greater world of adult men in cool cars, free to go
return his overdue videotape, Raft Warriors IV: The Final Battle.
     Y.T. does not know any of this for a fact, but she suspects it. None of
this is  real.  It  is her  reconstruction of the  psychological environment
inside of that bimbo  box. She sees  the hydrant  coming  a mile  away, sees
Studley reaching down to rest  one hand on  the  parking brake. It is all so
obvious. She feels  sorry for  Studley and his  ilk.  She  reels out,  gives
herself lots of slack. He whips the wheel, jerks the brake. The minivan goes
sideways, overshooting its mark,  and doesn't quite snap her around  the way
he  wanted; she has to help it. As its  ass is rotating around, she reels in
hard,  converting that gift  of angular momentum into forward velocity,  and
ends up shooting right past the van going well over a mile a minute.  She is
headed for a marble gravestone that  says BELLEWOODE  VALLEY ROAD. She leans
away  from it,  leans into a vicious turn, her spokes  grip the pavement and
push her away from that gravestone, she can touch the pavement with one hand
she is heeled  over  so hard, the  spokes push  her onto the desired street.
Meanwhile,  she  has  clicked  off the  electromagnetic force that held  her
pooned to the van. The poon head comes loose, caroms off the pavement behind
her as it  is  automatically reeled in to reunite with  the  handle.  She is
headed straight for the exit of the Burbclave at fantastic speed.
     Behind her, an explosive crash sounds, resonating  in her gut,  as  the
minivan slides sideways into the gravestone.
     She ducks under the security gate and plunges into traffic on Oahu. She
cuts between  two veering,  blaring, and screeching  BMWs. BMW drivers  take
evasive  action  at the drop  of a  hat, emulating  the  drivers in  the BMW
advertisements - this is how they convince themselves they didn't get ripped
off. She drops into a fetal position to pass  underneath a  semi, headed for
the Jersey  barrier in the median strip like she's  going to die, but Jersey
barriers are easy  for  the smartwheels. That lower  limb of the barrier has
such a  nice bank to it,  like  they designed it for road surfers. She rides
halfway up the barrier, angles  gently back down to the  lane  for a  smooth
landing, and  she's  in traffic. There's a  car right there and  she doesn't
even have to throw the poon, just reaches out and plants it right on the lid
of the trunk.
     This driver's  resigned to  his fate, doesn't care, doesn't hassle her.
He takes her as far as the entrance to the next Burbclave, which is  a White
Columns.  Very southern,  traditional, one of the  Apartheid Burbclaves. Big
ornate  sign above the main gate: WHITE PEOPLE ONLY. NON-CAUCASIANS MUST  BE
PROCESSED.
     She's  got a White  Columns visa. Y.T. has  a  visa to everywhere. It's
right there on her chest, a little bar code. A laser scans it as she careens
toward the entrance and the immigration gate  swings  open for her.  It's an
ornate ironwork number, but harried White Columns  residents don't have time
to sit idling at the  Burbclave entrance watching the gate slowly roll aside
in  Old  South  majestic  turpitude,  so  it's   mounted  on  some  kind  of
electromagnetic railgun.
     She is  gliding down  the antebellum tree-lined lanes of White Columns,
one microplantation  after another,  still coasting on the residual  kinetic
energy boost that originated in the fuel in Studley the Teenager's gas tank.
The  world  is  full of power  and energy and a person  can go  far by  just
skimming off a tiny bit of it.
     The LEDs on the pizza box say: 29:32, and the guy who  ordered it - Mr.
Pudgely and  his  neighbors, the Pinkhearts and the Roundass clan -  are all
gathered   on   the  front  lawn  of  their   microplantation,   prematurely
celebrating.  Like  they had  just bought the  winning lottery ticket.  From
their front door they have  a clear view all the way down to  Oahu Road, and
they can  see that  nothing is  on  its way  that  looks  like  a CosaNostra
delivery car. Oh, there is curiosity - sniffing interest -  at  this Kourier
with the big square thing under her arm - maybe a portfolio, a new ad layout
for some Caucasian supremacist marketing honcho in the next plat over, but -
     The Pudgelys and the Pinkhearts and  the Roundasses are all staring  at
her,  slackjawed.  She has just enough residual  energy  to swing into their
driveway.  Her momentum  carries  her  to the  top. She stops  next  to  Mr.
Pudgely's Acura and Mrs.  Pudgely's  bimbo box and steps  off her plank. The
spokes, noting her departure,  even themselves out, plant themselves on  the
top of the driveway, refuse to roll backward.
     A blinding  light from  the  heavens shines down upon them. Her  Knight
Visions keep  her from being blinded, but the customers bend their knees and
hunch  their shoulders  as though  the light were heavy. The  men hold their
hairy forearms up against their brows, swivel their great  tubular bodies to
and  fro, trying to find the  source of the illumination, muttering  clipped
notations to each  other, brief theories about its source, fully in  control
of the unknown phenomenon. The women coo and flutter. Because of the magical
influence of the  Knight Visions, Y.T. can still  see the  LEDs:  29:54, and
that's what it says when she drops the pizza on Mr. Pudgely's wing tips.
     The mystery light goes off.
     The  others are still blinded,  but Y.T. sees into the  night  with her
Knight Visions, sees all the way into near infrared, and she sees the source
of it, a double-bladed stealth helicopter thirty  feet above  the neighbor's
house. It  is tastefully black and unadorned, not a news crew though another
helicopter,   an   old-fashioned  audible  one,  brightly   festooned   with
up-to-the-minute  logos, is thumping  and  whacking  its  way  across  White
Columns airspace at  this very moment, goosing the plantations  with its own
spotlight,  hoping  to be the first to obtain  this major scoop: a pizza was
delivered late tonight,  film at eleven.  Later, our personality  journalist
speculates on where  Uncle Enzo will stay when he  makes his compulsory trip
to our Standard Metropolitan  Statistical  Area. But  the black  chopper  is
running dark, would be nearly invisible if not for the infrared trail coming
out of its twin turbojets.
     It  is a Mafia  chopper, and all they  wanted to  do was  to record the
event on videotape so that Mr. Pudgely would not have a leg to hop around on
in court,  should  he decide to take  his case down to Judge Bob's  Judicial
System and argue for a free pizza.
     One  more thing. There's  a  lot of  shit  in the  air tonight,  a  few
megatons of topsoil  blowing down  from Fresno,  and so when the  laser beam
comes on it is startlingly visible, a tiny geometric line, a million blazing
red  grains  strung  on  a fiber-optic thread, snapping  into life instantly
between the chopper and Y.T.'s chest. It appears to widen into a narrow fan,
an acute triangle of red light whose base encompasses all of Y.T.'s torso.
     It takes half a second. They are scanning the many bar codes mounted on
her chest.  They are finding out who she is. The  Mafia now knows everything
about Y.T. - where she lives,  what she does, her eye color,  credit record,
ancestry, and blood type.
     That done,  the chopper tilts and vanishes into the night like a hockey
puck  sliding  into  a bowl  of India ink. Mr. Pudgely  is saying something,
making a joke about how close  they  came,  the others eke out a laugh,  but
Y.T. cannot hear them  because they are buried under the thunderwhack of the
news  chopper,  then flash-frozen and  crystalized under its  spotlight. The
night  air is  full of bugs,  and now Y.T. can see all of them,  swirling in
mysterious formations,  hitching  rides  on people and on  currents  of air.
There is one on her wrist, but she doesn't slap at it.
     The spotlight lingers for a minute. The broad  square of the pizza box,
bearing the CosaNostra logo,  is mute testimony. They hover, shoot  a little
tape just in case.
     Y.T.  is  bored. She  gets on her plank.  The wheels blossom and become
circular. She guides a tight wobbly course around the cars, coasts down into
the street. The  spotlight follows her  for  a moment, maybe picking up some
stock  footage. Videotape  is cheap. You never  know when something will  be
useful, so you might as well videotape it.
     People  make  their  living  that way -  people in the  intel business.
People like Hiro Protagonist. They just know stuff,  or they  just go around
and videotape  stuff. They put it  in the Library.  When people want to know
the  particular things  that they know or watch  their video tapes, they pay
them money and check it out of the Library, or just buy it outright. This is
a weird  racket, but Y.T. likes the idea  of it. Usually, the  CIC won't pay
any attention to  a Kourier. But apparently Hiro has a deal with them. Maybe
she can  make a deal  with  Hiro. Because Y.T. knows  a  lot  of interesting
little things.
     One little thing she knows is that the Mafia owes her a favor,

        5

     As  Hiro approaches  the Street, he  sees  two young  couples, probably
using their parents' computers  for a double date in the Metaverse, climbing
down out of Port Zero, which is the local port of entry and monorail stop.
     He is not seeing real people,  of  course.  This is  all a  part of the
moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming
down  the  fiber-optic  cable.  The  people are  pieces  of  software called
avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with
each other in the Metaverse. Hiro's avatar is now on the Street, too, and if
the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see
him, just as he's seeing them. They could strike up a conversation:  Hiro in
the U-Stor-It in L.A. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb
of Chicago, each with their own laptop. But they probably won't talk to each
other, any  more than they would in Reality. These are nice  kids,  and they
don't want to talk to a solitary crossbreed with a slick custom avatar who's
packing a couple of swords.
     Your avatar can look any way you  want it  to, up to the limitations of
your equipment.  If you're  ugly,  you can make your  avatar  beautiful.  If
you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still  be  wearing  beautiful
clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look  like a gorilla or a
dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking
down the Street and you will see all of these.
     Hiro's avatar just looks like Hiro, with  the difference that no matter
what  Hiro is wearing in Reality, his avatar  always  wears  a black leather
kimono. Most hacker types don't go in for garish avatars, because they  know
that it takes a lot  more sophistication  to render  a  realistic human face
than a talking  penis.  Kind of  the way people who really know clothing can
appreciate the fine  details that  separate a cheap  gray wool suit  from an
expensive handtailored gray wool suit.
     You can't just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk
beaming down from  on high.  This  would be confusing and  irritating to the
people around you. It would break the metaphor. Materializing out of nowhere
(or vanishing back into Reality) is considered to be a private function best
done  in  the  confines  of  your  own  House.  Most  avatars  nowadays  are
anatomically correct, and naked as a babe when they are first created, so in
any  case,  you have  to  make yourself  decent  before you emerge  onto the
Street. Unless you're something intrinsically indecent and you don't care.
     If you are some peon who does not  own a House, for  example, a  person
who  is coming in  from a public terminal, then you materialize in  a  Port.
There  are  256  Express  Ports on  the street,  evenly  spaced  around  its
circumference at  intervals of 256 kilometers. Each  of  these intervals  is
further subdivided 256 times  with Local Ports, spaced exactly one kilometer
apart  (astute  students  of  hacker  serniotics  will  note  the  obsessive
repetition  of  the number 256,  which is 2^8 power-and  even  that 8  looks
pretty juicy, dripping with 2^2 additional  2s).  The Ports serve a function
analogous  to airports:  This  is  where you  drop into the  Metaverse  from
somewhere else. Once you have materialized  in a Port, you can walk down the
Street or hop on the monorail or whatever.
     The couples coming off the monorail can't afford to have custom avatars
made and don't know how to  write their own. They  have to buy off-the-shelf
avatars. One  of  the girls has a pretty nice  one. It  would be  considered
quite the fashion  statement among the K-Tel set. Looks  like she has bought
the Avatar Construction  Set (tm) and put together her own, customized model
out of miscellaneous parts. It might even look something like its owner. Her
date doesn't look half bad himself.
     The other girl is a Brandy. Her date is  a Clint. Brandy and Clint  are
both popular, off-the-shelf models. When white-trash high school  girls  are
going  on a date in the  Metaverse, they invariably run down to the computer
games section of the local Wal-Mart and buy a copy of Brandy.  The user  can
select three breast sizes: improbable, impossible, and ludicrous. Brandy has
a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute and sultry;
perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute  and spacy. Her  eyelashes
are half  an inch long, and the  software is so cheap that they are rendered
as solid ebony chips. When  a Brandy flutters her eyelashes, you  can almost
feel the breeze.
     Clint is just the male counterpart of Brandy. He is craggy and handsome
and has an extremely limited range of facial expressions.
     Hiro  wonders, idly,  how  these two couples  got  together.  They  are
clearly  from disparate social classes. Perhaps older  and younger siblings.
But then  they  come down the  escalator and disappear  into  the crowd  and
become  part  of the Street,  where  there are enough  Clints and Brandys to
found a new ethnic group.
     The Street is fairly busy. Most  of the  people here are Americans  and
Asians  -  it's  early  morning  in   Europe   right  now.  Because  of  the
preponderance of Americans, the crowd has a  garish and  surreal look  about
it. For the Asians, it's  the middle of the day, and  they are in their dark
blue  suits. For the  Americans, it's  party time, and they are looking like
just about anything a computer can render.
     The moment Hiro steps across the line separating  his neighborhood from
the Street,  colored shapes  begin to swoop down on him from all directions,
like buzzards on  fresh  road kill. Animercials are  not  allowed in  Hiro's
neighborhood. But almost anything is a