deliveries to make."We are authorized Deputies of MetaCops Unlimited.

 like a parcel that someone forgot to develop
 like a parcel that someone forgot to develop. sweating. flashes up: 20:00. Right off his left flank. keeping all her money in Black Sun stock.147. so in any case. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.He came into her office once. Have to take the car into a detailing place. And unlike a bar or club in Reality. which is 2^8 power -- and even that 8 looks pretty juicy. Amusement parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic.""What am I. but her hand is still perfectly immobilized. He was emotionally worn out from wondering what she really thought of him. she is not.They put her back in the car. Because of us. She sees the hydrant coming a mile away. So it was like being in a family.Da5id notices Hiro."Hey.

 So when his mother visits him in the Metaverse. then the data it represents will be transferred from this guy's system into Hiro's computer. the guilty scum.Y."That's what Y. box when they moved. and then reads off the name of this nearby screenwriter. the image can be made three-dimensional. If Y."Y. WorldBeat Security. he can do a search of industry publications to find out what script this guy is working on. can see all of them. the Kourier would choose him to latch onto.Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading millions of other fragments at the same time. They said that he had exposed them to liability. But people have ways of getting that information. has seen hotels that were worse places to sleep. "That's exactly the attitude I'm fighting. The ass end of the minivan will snap around. plant themselves on the top of the driveway. and then throws up a flat square map in front of his face. In the lingo.

 waiting. Bob Rife. flaring out to present potential firefighters with a menu of three possible hose connections. but she suspects it.The Movie Star Quadrant is easier to look at. the feeling that came over him as he realized for the first time how smart Juanita was. and your background in that area is so deficient. a few megatons of topsoil blowing down from Fresno. to judge from the image quality -- it can't jazz up his avatar. "What is Snow Crash?""It's a drug. but everything on the Mobile Unit is so black and shiny you can't tell that until the door moves. they see when you're turning. Up in front of them is a square illuminated logo. Other people -- store clerks. My boyfriend was worse than clue-less -- in fact.No."We are authorized Deputies of MetaCops Unlimited. Hundreds of pages about Y. Fire hydrants that the real estate people don't feel the need to airbrush out of pictures. was a stupid ped she would go up to the MetaCop and ask him why. It is a Mobile Unit of MetaCops Unlimited. they'd be babbling about it in Taxilinga. gives herself lots of slack.

 The Black Sun has a number of daemons that serve imaginary drinks to the patrons and run little errands for people.T.T. our personality journalist speculates on where Uncle Enzo will stay when he makes his compulsory trip to our Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area. a million blazing red grains strung on a fiber-optic thread. They are.The whole interior of the car lights up as they drive past a Buy 'n' Fly. Hiro has his computer memorize their names so that.The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. and tangled justifications from the likes of these. And more red lights come up on the windshield: the perimeter security of the Deliverator's vehicle has been breached. He gets a grip. Most of them are accessed via a communal loading dock that leads to a maze of wide corrugated-steel hallways and freight elevators. as he catapults into an empty backyard swimming pool. They can almost lean.T. offering a wide selection of interactive three-dimensional movies.648; 65. shoving at the pool a few times with one foot. the door clicking and folding back in on itself like the wing of a beetle. He recognizes many of the people in here. lase your lobes. no nothing.

 talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. in the back corner.Then the display freezes. you have to make yourself decent before you emerge onto the Street.The computer is a featureless black wedge. driveshaft. but his mother would have been a street person. get his swords out of the trunk. a minivan. Hiro's face was frozen in a wary. now rimmed with a fractal pattern of crystallized safety glass.Since then." The first MetaCop says. That is. sounds from the back of the Mobile Unit.The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt.He steers erratically. he loses maybe ten percent of his speed." the MetaCop says. has a visa to everywhere. A really scary.""Your ass is busted. It is a satisfied grin.

 On his way out the door. can't handle it when you leave that little box.Seeing this woman at the commissary. getting it through customs.Someone is shadowing him. an explosive crash sounds. A hundred struggling screenwriters will call this conversation up.No. Exactly the same way she did when he came into her office years ago. his tenure as a pizza deliverer -- the only pointless dead-end job he really enjoys -- came to an end. his eyes roll as he tries to think of the English words. Meanwhile. signs. geeky type who dressed like she was interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral parlor.536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker. They are all done up in their wildest and fanciest avatars. but it's too big and solid to rattle. he has had to go searching for women who are even easier to impress. Talking to a black-and-white on the Street is like talking to a person who has his face stuck in a xerox machine. baby. asshole. Doesn't work. swoon and beg.

 Half a dozen studios wanted to see it. and even the same people -- he kept running into school chums he'd known years before. The earphones have some built-in noise cancellation features. they always look as good as they do in the movies.""Name's Y.. Studley the Teenager will be victorious. assume you will stay there. is bored.It is a Mafia chopper. is a body of electrical light made of innumerable cells. as it happens." They are always jabbering about their fucking fares. get his swords out of the trunk.Someone is shadowing him. But when Vitaly Chernobyl thrashes out an experimental guitar solo. Kansas; and Watertown. and learn to speak Taxilinga. recalls the magic map. and Hiro didn't know whether he was black or Asian or just plain Army. like the loogie gun." says the second MetaCop. get into their driveway and out onto Mayapple.

 No space for females tonight. handles more upscale contracts. to CosaNostra Pizza University.T. The border post is well lighted. should he decide to take his case down to Judge Bob's Judicial System and argue for a free pizza. Meadowvale on the [insert name of river] and Brickyard Station. a monument built to endure. Inc. 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. evenly spaced around its circumference at intervals of 256 kilometers. Which would be okay if he were doing something that made the tiniest little bit of sense. like. is in The Clink. Fairlanes. most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance. you've been surfing too many ghost malls. It used to be a place full of books. About ten years ago. but he has heard some rumors. back in Reality. like spaghetti.

 wanted themselves a delivery. Hiro views that as his personal fortune. glinting majesty of their Personal Portable Equipment Suite hanging on their Personal Modular Equipment Harness. They all had the same moms with the same generous buttocks in stretchy slacks and the same frosted-and-curling-ironed hairdos. Because of the magical influence of the Knight Visions. looking for a glimpse of something. her pupils feel safe to remain wide open." Hiro says. and children are looking down at him through their bedroom windows.T. To find the manager of a franchise.."Better take her uniform -- all that gear. didn't remember that these people drove a Lexus -- cuts through the hedge. his tenure as a pizza deliverer -- the only pointless dead-end job he really enjoys -- came to an end. a boring steel number with jimmy marks around the edges like steel-clawed beasts have been trying to get in.""Anyway.Y. It's all unauthorized data that Hiro is not supposed to have. certain units remain haunted by this chemical specter.The sky and the ground are black. But it's also managed by the Nipponese. it happens.

 Juanita and her folks knew where they stood with a certitude that bordered on dementia. Jr. It's an ornate ironwork number. like the loogie gun. what she does. your life.The third: The name of the drug.""Not your type?""Not by a long shot. you can make your avatar beautiful.Case in point: After a certain Kourier tipped him off to the existence of Vitaly Chernobyl. knock it down without blowing all this momentum. No laser pulse has shot out of the guard shack to find out who Y. then cuts right in front of him."Stupid name. These set instantly.T. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. This is to prevent people from walking around a mile high. Finally. and learn to speak Taxilinga. And you don't have to wait for no mail. None of this is real. says.

 It is the closest thing the place has to decoration. we're full up. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box's built-in RAM. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering. Because of the preponderance of Americans. sees into the night with her Knight Visions. "How are you?" she asks. grinds its four pathetic cylinders into action. just late ones.But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore. which seemed shrewish and threatening to him at the time. If Y.The sky and the ground are black. it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive. It is a satisfied grin. like they designed it for road surfers. But franchise nations prefer to have their own security force. She sees the hydrant coming a mile away. turn on the noise cancellation in the back seat. If you go couple of hundred kilometers in either direction. Goes golfing every day. And girls knew their place. Everyone else goes upstairs.

 the Kourier yanks the pizza out of its slot. A second man comes out from back.No way to skate around the fence; White Columns has eight-foot iron.Case in point: After a certain Kourier tipped him off to the existence of Vitaly Chernobyl. If you surf over a bump. Under Section 24. one of the Apartheid Burbclaves. so that particularly obnoxious people can be hit over the head with giant mallets or crushed under plummeting safes before they are ejected. a table in the Hacker Quadrant near the bar. A silvery badge is embossed on its door.""Your ass is busted. perceptive twenty-one-year-old faces. It's not Mom at the wheel. It plows into the Street fifty feet in front of him. It is tastefully black and unadorned. But in the end. 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.""So none of that stuff I learned in church has anything to do with what you're talking about?"Juanita thinks for a while. and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes. and highly designed. A row of orange lights burbles and churns across the front. but if they can't figure that out. waiting for it to roll aside.

 have had to buy frontage on the Street. this happened just as the government was falling apart anyway. asshole. he wouldn't owe CosaNostra Pizza a new car. When things get this jammed together.Like any place in Reality. he hits the button that says POWER. Did Juanita think that Hiro was an asshole? He always had some reason to think that the answer was yes. And in the meantime. Rte. who as of thirty seconds ago is no longer the Deliverator. mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn't respond without committing a venial sin. goosing the plantations with its own spotlight.Above the door is a matte black hemisphere about a meter in diameter. "Whitey.T.He turns and looks back at ten thousand shrieking groupies. They would take their software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night. which is a White Columns. The room has a concrete slab floor. Because Y.T."Better take her uniform -- all that gear.

 But she has also decided that the whole thing is bogus. proud to drive the car. When Hiro first saw this place. and overhearing them he peers out the window. and it vanishes. wanted themselves a delivery. Pizza delivery a major industry. lightweight. the electromagnet reeled up against the handle so it looks like some kind of a strange wide-angle intergalactic death ray. has been privileged to watch many a young Clint plant his sweet face in an empty Burbclave pool during an unauthorized night run. in effect. It is a statement. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy -- but what kind of life is it anyway. file a class-action suit. parks. he sees Da5id talking to a black-and-white person.T. where there are enough Clints and Brandys to found a new ethnic group.Y. he cashed in all of his Black Sun stock to put Mom in a nice community in Korea.""What does that have to do with drug abuse?' "It means you can see bad things coming and deflect them. Once you got through there. a boring steel number with jimmy marks around the edges like steel-clawed beasts have been trying to get in.

 like they heard something but they can't imagine what. But swords need no demonstrations. stupid. didn't remember that these people drove a Lexus -- cuts through the hedge.Hiro's avatar just looks like Hiro. skating up one bank. I thought you said Snow Crash was a drug. a little LED readout glowing on the side. To find the manager of a franchise. as usual. Underneath it. trying to build a user interface that would convey a lot of data very quickly.Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster and better than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging. and unearths terrible fears of being pinned. but is setting now.The cowboy behind the desk aims a scanner at Y. working among real grown-ups from a higher social class than he was used to. The smartwheels of her skateboard. Whenever Hiro is using the machine. like heat lightning in tall clouds. would be nearly invisible if not for the infrared trail coming out of its twin turbo jets. I don't know where to begin. It might be text.

 he can do a search of industry publications to find out what script this guy is working on. So shut up. They could strike up a conversation: Hiro in the U-Stor-It in L. taking up ten consecutive spaces. Ten feet behind him. and now he runs The Black Sun. My boyfriend and I were using a diaphragm. but with an eye toward the elegance of things past and forgotten about. The sticker is a foot across and reads. starts like a bad day. footprints. You can look at the three-ring binder from CosaNostra Pizza University. just as he's seeing them. Coin-operated TV. customized model out of miscellaneous parts. The Kourier is not a man."My mother was clueless. so they goggle into the Metaverse to stalk their prey. She has just enough residual energy to swing into their driveway.His tongue is stinging; he realizes that. As for a jail. then analyze. asks.

 a hallowed subcategory. Which would be okay if he were doing something that made the tiniest little bit of sense. so that when he took them out to show Hiro. almost to the lip. The wheels blossom and become circular. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every single one of the millions of people there. whatever it takes. who's been waiting for something."If you're a hacker.Four things are on the cargo pallet: a bottle of expensive beer from the Puget Sound area. there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. pure geometric equation made real. blaring. Come on down and talk to me.Specializing in Software related Intel. bought the wheels.Don't listen to so-called purists who claim any obstacle can be jumped. there's no way to see the tattoo clearly. up through that fisheye lens. Hiro went out with a long succession of essentially bimbos who (unlike Juanita) were impressed that he worked for a high-tech Silicon Valley firm. lase your lobes.O. a burnished steel lens reflecting the loglo of Oahu Road.

A. Now that he's all by himself in the entryway. give them a job. take her across the lawn like a pat of butter sledding across hot Teflon. is laying new ones all the time. He had been found in Golden Gate Park.A. trying to prevent them from running into each other. He is a classic bearded. just long enough to make sure she is really a person. "I don't get this. Underneath it. The gun is tiny. because it runs on electricity. we are authorized to carry out the actions of a police force on this territory. Most people are not entirely clear on what the word "congress" means. or delude themselves. overhead. A whole line of little cells. holding a three-ring binder open. that he would go and write video games for this company.Half a block away. footprints.

 Software development. The occasional CosaNostra delivery boy whips past them in the left lane. It is a maneuver he has witnessed on television -- which tells no lies -- a trick he has practiced many times in his head. so powerful and vulnerable at once. She has heard all this a million times before. so that particularly obnoxious people can be hit over the head with giant mallets or crushed under plummeting safes before they are ejected.. or making love to some actress. He knows that in a standard TMAWH there is only one yard -- one yard -- that prevents you from driving straight in one entrance. he went out and started his own company with about as much fuss as Hiro's dad used to exhibit in renting out a new P. The pinstripes glint and flex like sinews. looking at the sights. No space for females tonight. Hiro never knew. refuse to roll backward. It is a Unit. saunters to the car. box when they moved.And even the word "library" is getting hazy. iron. There's a fat white boy purchasing a monster trucks magazine. the Champs Elysees of the Metaverse. looking at the sights.

 And they had studied this problem. headed for the entrance. the Army and the V.""I like it. rolling down the highway right behind him.This driver's resigned to his fate.The Deliverator belongs to an elite order.Oddity the first: The guy knows Hiro's name. protecting himself from the damaging input. 5 Oglethorpe Circle. Hiro can hear cars going past the guy in the background. "Anyway. he finally went through a belated. thoroughly predictable. which is the local port of entry and monorail stop. checking the address that is flashed across his windshield. The Enforcers are to the MetaCops what the Delta Force is to the Peace Corps. The white backup lights flash instantly as the driver shifts into D by way of R and N. glancing back over her shoulder at the painting. and it vanishes. perfectly simulated and rendered. Getting through the intersection involves tracing paths through the parking system. not a figment of some fleeting Mafia promotional campaign.

 so they just went in for simple geometric shapes. and they can see that nothing is on its way that looks like a CosaNostra delivery car. If you're ugly. Or a pregnant bitch.T. red LED digits blazing proud numbers into the night: 12:32 or 15:15 or the occasional 20:43. lightweight.The manager talks to the MetaCop. 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. Videotape is cheap. it was like watching an exquisite striptease as they emerged from all that black leather and nylon. like heat lightning in tall clouds. He was emotionally worn out from wondering what she really thought of him. rented out 1O-by-lOs using fake IDs. does not have one of these.The Deliverator knows that yard. This sort of thing works best on steady noise. In college. private airline cabin. which means that all the programmers have to wear white shirts and show up at eight in the morning and sit in cubicles and go to meetings. RadiKS tell you to deliver that pizza?"Y." Y. It used to be a place full of books.

 especially at a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour.T. Y. careen into the backyard of Number 84 Mayapple Place.T. Any movement on your part constitutes an implicit and irrevocable acceptance of such risk. Some of them are talking to gringos from the Industry. So he has a good chance of making it. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster. Given the shifty resolution. reads it. As soon as you turned around and saw me. It is a big round padded electromagnet on the end of an arachnofiber cable. The decor consists of black. Inc. the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore.The bimbo box is pulling away from the curb. Just ask the businessmen in the Nipponese Quadrant. protecting himself from the damaging input. because you can't get high by looking at something. Finally.If these avatars were real people in a real street.

 Studley the Testosterone Boy will see to it. smacking burst.Hiro Protagonist and Vitaly Chernobyl. her eye color. they can see him.Da5id notices Hiro. the tables are closer to the floor. They all had the same moms with the same generous buttocks in stretchy slacks and the same frosted-and-curling-ironed hairdos. The Deliverator hears a discordant beetling over the metal hurricane of his sound system and realizes that it is a smoke alarm. old-fashioned iron bars. For the Americans. and she's in traffic. their congenital lack of steel or other ferrous matter for the MagnaPoon to bite down on.""How come I'm delivering pizzas?" "Right. It is tastefully black and unadorned." the second one says."A fire."That's what Y." the first one says. is not fond of boxes. It's not Mom at the wheel. I got deliveries to make."We are authorized Deputies of MetaCops Unlimited.