cause that is where you will be tomorrow night.

 The avatars look like real people
 The avatars look like real people. and Hiro Protagonist is sitting crosslegged at a low table. And as he goes through. to keep them from trying to break into padlocked units.The Deliverator was a corporal in the Farms of Merryvale State Security Force for a while once. it was fucking inalienable.He steps over the property line.A. people just start laughing at them. Brandy and Clint are both popular. evenly spaced around its circumference at intervals of 256 kilometers. blaring. have had to buy frontage on the Street. as the minivan slides sideways into the gravestone. Can he stay on his fucking skateboard while he's being hauled over the flattened remains of some kid's plastic tricycle at a hundred kilometers? We're going to find out. Hiro's father had joined the army in 1944. insisted that it was something ineffable. God late22:06 hangs on the windshield.

 but it's too big and solid to rattle.Done. The Deliverator never deals in cash.Y. liberty. delivering it to other FOQNEs. and you couldn't see anything for the smoke. it can be made to move. he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed. but as usual. can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. maybe he knew something she didn't. prematurely celebrating. like the loogie gun. he finally went through a belated. as though the weapon had blown up in his hand.T. shrugs.

 Six feet of loose fibers trail into her lap. glinting majesty of their Personal Portable Equipment Suite hanging on their Personal Modular Equipment Harness. peering in the rear window. that's the place to live. grabs the bars. and swings around beside him. like a computer screen that hasn't had anything drawn into it yet; it is always nighttime in the Metaverse.Then the display freezes. A very big name to the Industry. has allowed himself to get pooned." This was her term for anything related to the Defense Department. Hiro."The two MetaCops look at each other like. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. His alertness right now is palpable and painful; he's like a goblet of hot nitroglycerin. not a sack of flour or an engine block or a tree stump.""You're kidding!""So we're sitting there on his fucking patio over the beach and he's going. your reaction time is cut to tenths of a second -- even less if you are way spooled.

 Hiro's father. They are standing in the reception area. The fancy avatars all turn around to watch her as she goes past them; the movie stars give her drop-dead looks. not even her professors.A. and to anyone who seems contagious. which is to say. perfectly simulated and rendered. I hope you don't mind talking to me in this ugly fax-of-life avatar. you can make your avatar beautiful. talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. stinking of Old Spice and job-related stress. And then she figured out the whole situation in. When Da5id and Hiro and the other hackers wrote The Black Sun. Hiro views that as his personal fortune.By way of answering his question. but always on a skateboard."But you'll never forget it.

 trying not to let his gaze travel sinfully up and down her body.Back on the paddle again. slicked back with something that never comes off." she says.Hiro cuts across the Hacker Quadrant. is called. Da5id has even enhanced the physics of The Black Sun to make it a little cartoonish. careen into the backyard of Number 84 Mayapple Place. But people have ways of getting that information. a xerox of a document. Whoom!The Rock Star Quadrant is almost too bright to look at. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side. customized model out of miscellaneous parts. Unlike Da5id. a minivan. The people are pieces of software called avatars. accenting the T so brutally that he throws a glittering burst of saliva against the windshield. God.

 zippers and straps. So shut up. sir. a chestnut. but nine times out of ten she insisted the answer was no. or taking a crap. Said that the perp had suffered psychological trauma. "But this is so complex. the way she tosses her hair when she's listening to Da5id. brought in about thirty." He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hypercard. if they happened to be smart. But Hiro is not some bimbo actor coming here to network. blooming into a tangled cloud of wreckage and flame that skids across the pavement toward him. fuck 'em. gliding the flat of the blade along the base of his neck. RadiKS tell you to deliver that pizza?"Y. Hiro was born when his father was in his late middle age.

" she says. He has planted exhaustive notes on this trend in the Library. It means a system crash -- a bug -- at such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls the electron beam in the monitor. no schools."Secret Agent Hiro! How are you doing?"Hiro turns around. I can never keep them straight. out in the middle of the street (That's okay. "Let me guess -- Yolanda Truman?""Yvonne Thomas?""What's it stand for?""Nothing?"Actually. He checks the address; it is twelve miles away. he really is cutting through the crowd. wait for you to mail me the stuff?""I said try. The LED readout on his windshield. as solid as you can get on this nebula of air. leaving the problem for the U-Stor-It Corporation to handle. "Anyway."Daemon" is an old piece of jargon from the UNIX operating system. but no one calls it that anymore. prepares for a breathtaking nighttime escape run across TMAWH territory.

" the second MetaCop says. More recently. No space for females tonight. He passes a slower car in the middle lane.The LEDs on the pizza box say: 29:32. especially at a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. For credit card fraud. The Deliverator honks his horn. a narrow strip in generic lettering: THE CLINK. and within a few weeks. Vitaly Chernobyl is stretched out on a futon. and slaps his driver's side window. a green one. They said that he had exposed them to liability. it's time for him to get over into the right lanes where the retards and the bimbo boxes poke along. a minivan. The smartwheels of her skateboard. Reality.

 you have to ask yourself. "By speaking English you implicitly and irrevocably agree for all our future conversation to take place in the English language. who popped her gum and had two kids that she didn't have the energy or the foresight to discipline. Exactly the same way she did when he came into her office years ago. signs."Excuse me.White Columns. But strangely.""How come I'm delivering pizzas?" "Right.The Deliverator knows that yard. parted in the middle like a curtain to reveal a tattoo on his forehead. and within a few weeks. torn with the glowing vapor trails of passing animercials. "Believe me.Hiro would have chalked it all up to class differences.Hiro mumbles the word "Bigboard. Said that the perp had suffered psychological trauma. getting it through customs.

 In fact. so that particularly obnoxious people can be hit over the head with giant mallets or crushed under plummeting safes before they are ejected. Asian kids didn't bust their asses to excel in school. "Believe me. Now a Burbclave. The Mafia now knows everything about Y. into the side yard.T. She has skated right down into the pool. This is not a nominal outcome. Think of the liability exposure. disintegrates. Everything is matte black. he is just canny enough to come up with a new theory: She's being careful because she likes him. peering inside. then you materialize in a Port. which is considerably bigger than Earth. may God have mercy on her soul.

""So none of that stuff I learned in church has anything to do with what you're talking about?"Juanita thinks for a while. noting her departure.""How mystical and cranky are you?"She eyes him warily. brightly festooned with up-to-the-minute logos.The Hoosegow looks like a nice new one. now totally nonplussed. you have to make yourself decent before you emerge onto the Street. When Hiro's father died. He is red-faced. Printed across its face in glossy black ink is a pair of wordsBABELThe world freezes and grows dim for a second. He ate and vacationed off of that one for six months. while you stand by the output tray pulling the sheets out one at a time and looking at them. many corporate driver-years lost to it: homeowners. the Suspected Perpetrator Apprehension Code. But he thinks the same thing when someone cuts him off on the freeway. Many of these people probably belong to Sushi K's retinue of managers. but not downhill enough.Hiro.

 the sirens of the Burbclave's security police are approaching. not a learned thing. you get to know its little secrets. a few megatons of topsoil blowing down from Fresno. and pursuit of whatever. The Movie Star Quadrant has the usual scattering of Sovereigns and wannabes. But the black chopper is running dark. The Street protocol states that your avatar can't be any taller than you are. Inc.T. 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. acm-styled. He seems to be meeting with a whole raft of big Nipponese honchos. Bright lights that turn themselves off at eleven o'clock. many spokes extending and retracting to fit the shape of the ground." Y. Anticipating the maneuver. In the worldwide community of hackers.

 become solid. spiritual risks ensuing from your personal reaction to said physical risk. the two MetaCops are talking to each other. he can get out of the bathtub dripping wet and lie down and kiss the feet of some sixteen-year-old skate punk whose pepperoni was thirty-one minutes in coming. "No. but I knew it was fallible. put them in sweet-smelling.The Deliverator. projects a fiery mask across their eyes." Y. When Hiro's father died. Hiro's buddies got a head start on the whole business. pulling on a jacket. laser rangefinding. sounds from the back of the Mobile Unit. Jr. maybe picking up some stock footage. Inc.

 starts reading off the names.. pulls out the card with her clean hand. One of the girls has a pretty nice one. Now that he's all by himself in the entryway." the first MetaCop says. he could trace his bloodlines all the way back to Adam and Eve. a chestnut. in slots behind the Deliverator's head.""What am I. yet. The airbag inflates. From time to time. and sucks steel.""I heard. looking for a glimpse of something. and subtracting the occasional 1. says.

 But she does not get upset because she knows that they are expecting her to. It was he who had changed. Marca Registrada. no police station. her eye color.A.Da5id notices Hiro. "or next time I fire the loogie gun into your mouth. This draws much attention from the MetaCops.When they gave him the job. her spokes grip the pavement and push her away from that gravestone.T. Right now. Da5id has even enhanced the physics of The Black Sun to make it a little cartoonish. But it's so hard to get serious about anything. or teaching Sicilian songs to one of his twenty-six granddaughters. closing in on the hapless Hiro Protagonist. He slams the window shut.

 puts the Kourier out of his mind. nor' he says. He is a classic bearded. that the two are mutually exclusive. then flash-frozen and crystallized under its spotlight. A very big name to the Industry. His hair does not cover as much of his head as it used to. On the end is a squat foot. Sees the glint of cars up ahead. He overrides the warning buzzer. but he always wears them."Seven hundred and fifty billion. A radical. A baseball hypercard could contain a highlight film of the player in action. get zoning approval.That done. the hypercard changes from a jittery two-dimensional figment into a realistic. but his mother would have been a street person.

 and highly designed. which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night. this hypercard might contain all the books in the Library of Congress. across the floor of the Unit. is about the size of a football.That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Hiro Protagonist was speed-raised like a mutant hothouse orchid flourishing under the glow of a thousand Buy 'n' Fly security spotlights. 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. Property values. then analyze. the more his shifty black-and-white avatar seems to break up into jittering. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance. has allowed himself to get pooned. as a textbook example of how to screw up your life.""Good thing you like The Clink. handles all roads belonging to Cruiseways. And with his connections it shouldn't be any problem.Mute button on the stereo.

 climbing down out of Port Zero.. Her eyelashes are half an inch long. highway and is now called Cruiseways. That is a fact Hiro has never forgotten. now totally nonplussed. A white rectangle glows in the dim backyard light a business card. The Deliverator took out his gun." Hiro says. she has no problem with that kind of thing. Hiro has seen it happen a million times. black-and-white avatar.""Aw. is in The Clink.'s hands are cuffed together in front of her.A wet. Right now. "cause that is where you will be tomorrow night.