Snow Crash

"When it gets down to it—talking trade balances here—once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out ... once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity—y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery"

"This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them."

"HIRO PROTAGONIST Last of the freelance hackers Greatest sword fighter in the world Stringer, Central Intelligence Corporation Specializing in software-related intel (music, movies & microcode) On the back is gibberish explaining how he may be reached: a telephone number. A universal voice phone locator code. A P.O. box. His address on half a dozen electronic communications nets. And an address in the Metaverse."

"Hiro, who as of thirty seconds ago is no longer the Deliverator, gets out of the car and pulls his swords out of the trunk, straps them around his body, prepares for a breathtaking nighttime escape run…Above him, in the house that owns the pool, a light has come on, and children are looking down at him through their bedroom windows, all warm and fuzzy in their Li'l Crips and Ninja Raft Warrior pajamas, which can either be flameproof or noncarcinogenic but not both at the same time. Dad is emerging from the back door, pulling on a jacket. It is a nice family, a safe family in a house full of light, like the family he was a part of until thirty seconds ago."

"When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins."

"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."

"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… 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."

"The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it."

"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."

"It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe they are too smart to be sexists."

"Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds."

"Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees, dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them. Out in the world beyond his yard, there are other yards with other doggies just like him. These aren't nasty dogs. They are all his friends."

"WELCOME! It is my pleasure to welcome all quality folks to visiting of Hong Kong. Whether seriously in business or on a fun-loving hijink, make yourself totally homely in this meager environment…We of Greater Hong Kong take many prides in our tiny nation's extravagant growth… The potentials of all ethnic races and anthropologies to merge under a banner of the Three Principles to follow: 1. Information, information, information! 2. Totally fair marketeering! 3. Strict ecology! have been peerless in the history of economic strife… Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong is a private, wholly extraterritorial, sovereign, quasi-national entity not recognized by any other nationalities and in no way affiliated with the former Crown Colony of Hong Kong… Join us instantly! Your enterprising partner, Mr. Lee"

"Only the Mafia drives cars like that…You see these Town Cars everywhere, but you never see them move…She's not even sure they have engines in them."

""Did you win your sword fight?" "Of course I won the fucking sword fight," Hiro says. "I'm the greatest sword fighter in the world." "And you wrote the software." "Yeah. That, too," Hiro says."

"There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it. It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns — all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff."

"The librarian daemon looks like a pleasant, fiftyish, silver-haired, bearded man with bright blue eyes, wearing a V-neck sweater over a work shirt, with a coarsely woven, tweedy-looking wool tie. The tie is loosened, the sleeves pushed up. Even though he's just a piece of software, he has reason to be cheerful; he can move through the nearly infinite stacks of information in the Library with the agility of a spider dancing across a vast web of cross-references. The Librarian is the only piece of CIC software that costs even more than Earth; the only thing he can't do is think."

"Watching government regulators trying to keep up with the world is my favorite sport."

"A monopolist's work is never done. No such thing as a perfect monopoly. Seems like you can never get that last one-tenth of one percent."

"The function of the Raft is to bring more biomass. To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight…Nobody really gets eaten. It's just a figure of speech. They come here, they get decent jobs, find Christ, buy a Weber grill, and live happily ever after. What's wrong with that?"

"Jason Breckinridge," the man says. "The Iron Pumper," Jason reminds him. "Shut up. For the rest of this conversation, you don't say anything. When I tell you what you did wrong, you don't say you're sorry, because I already know you're sorry. And when you drive outta here alive, you don't thank me for being alive. And you don't even say goodbye to me." Jason nods. "I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up."

"Mental note: Whether or not Raven intended to take on a bunch of Crips and Enforcers single-handedly tonight, he didn't even bother to pack a gun."

"Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug-lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned."

"Raven's packing a torpedo warhead that he boosted from an old Soviet nuke sub," Squeaky says. "It was a torpedo that was designed to take out a carrier battle group with one shot. A nuclear torpedo. You know that funny-looking sidecar that Raven has on his Harley? Well, it's a hydrogen bomb…hooked up to EEG trodes embedded in his skull."

"You don't respect those people very much, Y.T., because you're young and arrogant. But I don't respect them much either, because I am old and wise."

"Y.T. stops walking, turns, finally looks at the guy. He's tall, lean. Black suit, black hair. And he's got a gnarly-looking glass eye. "What happened to your eye?" she says. "Ice pick, Bayonne, 1985," he says. "Any other questions?""

"You want me to steal something," Y.T. says. The man with the glass eye is pained, wounded. "No, no, no. Kid, listen. We're the fucking Mafia. We want to steal something, we already know how to do that, okay?"

"Juanita's going to hire him, right? — he slams the button for LAVATORY GRANDE ROYALE. Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega-jackpot. It's got everything that a dimwitted pathological gambler would identify with luxury: gold-plated fixtures, lots of injection-molded pseudomarble, velvet drapes, and a butler."

"The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder — its DNA — xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane…."

""No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto…. The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees…. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks …. The only ones left in the city are street people…immigrants…young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood…. Young, smart people like Da5id and Hiro, who take the risk of living in the city because they like stimulation and they know they can handle it."

"But there have been several efforts to deliver us from the hands of primitive, irrational religion. The first was made by someone named Enki about four thousand years ago. The second was made by Hebrew scholars in the eighth century B.C. ... but eventually it just devolved into empty legalism. Another attempt was made by Jesus — that one was hijacked by viral influences within fifty days of his death. The virus was suppressed by the Catholic Church, but we're in the middle of a big epidemic that started in Kansas in 1900 and has been gathering momentum ever since."

"Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing — is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?"

"Do you believe in Jesus?" Hiro says. "Yes. But not in the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus." "How can you be a Christian without believing in that?" "I would say," Juanita says, "how can you be a Christian with it? Anyone who takes the trouble to study the gospels can see that the bodily resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto the real story several years after the real histories were written. It's so National Enquirer-esque, don't you think?"

""Would Sumerian sound anything like glossolalia?" "Judgment call. Ask someone real," the Librarian says."

""There is no provable genetic relationship between Sumerian and any tongue that came afterward," the Librarian says… "Okay. Does anyone understand Sumerian?" Hiro says. "Yes, at any given time, it appears that there are roughly ten people in the world who can read it." "Where do they work?" "One in Israel. One at the British Museum. One in Iraq. One at the University of Chicago. One at the University of Pennsylvania. And five at Rife Bible College in Houston, Texas." "Nice distribution.”"

""What is the nam-shub of Enki?" Hiro says. The Librarian stares off into the distance and clears his throat dramatically. "Once upon a time, there was no snake, there was no scorpion, There was no hyena, there was no lion, There was no wild dog, no wolf, There was no fear, no terror, Man had no rival. In those days, the land Shubur-Hamazi, Harmony-tongued Sumer, the great land of the me of princeship, Uri, the land having all that is appropriate, The land Martu, resting in security, The whole universe, the people well cared for, To Enlil in one tongue gave speech. Then the lord defiant, the prince defiant, the king defiant, Enki, the lord of abundance, whose commands are trustworthy, The lord of wisdom, who scans the land, The leader of the gods, The lord of Eridu, endowed with wisdom, Changed the speech in their mouths, put contention into it, Into the speech of man that had been one.”"

"Ng's Metaverse home is a French colonial villa in the prewar village of My Tho in the Mekong Delta. Visiting him is like going to Vietnam in about 1955, except that you don't have to get all sweaty. Somewhere in this house a radio is going, playing a mix of Vietnamese loungy type stuff and Yank wheelchair rock. "Are you a Nova Sicilia citizen?" Ng says. "No. I just chill sometimes with Uncle Enzo and the other Mafia dudes." "Ah…Very unusual." Ng is not a man in a hurry."

"Who worshipped Asherah?" "Everyone who lived between India and Spain, from the second millennium B.C. up into the Christian era. With the exception of the Hebrews, who only worshipped her until the religious reforms." "I thought the Hebrews were monotheists…." "Monolatrists. They did not deny the existence of other gods…Asherah was venerated as the consort of Yahweh." "I don't remember anything about God having a wife in the Bible." "The Bible didn't exist at that point. Judaism was just a loose collection of Yahwistic cults, each with different shrines and practices."

"Like all Sacrifice Zones, this one has a fence around it, with yellow metal signs wired to it every few yards: SACRIFICE ZONE WARNING. The National Parks Service has declared this area to be a National Sacrifice Zone. The Sacrifice Zone Program was developed to manage parcels of land whose clean-up cost exceeds their total future economic value. And like all Sacrifice Zone fences, this one has holes in it and is partially torn down in places. Young men blasted out of their minds on natural and artificial male hormones must have some place to do their idiotic coming-of-age rituals."

""Ah, this is good," Ng says. "A place where the young men gather to take drugs." Y.T. rolls her eyes at this display of tubularity. This must be the guy who writes all those antidrug pamphlets they get at school. Like he's not getting a million gallons of drugs every second through all of those gross tubes."

"If you ever find yourself in the presence of a destructive force powerful enough to decapsulate those isotopes," Ng says, "radiation sickness will be the least of your worries."

"It's like, if you — people of a certain age — would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures."

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world…If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken."

"All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice…With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be."

"He's got something written on his forehead: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL. Which is kind of scary. Sexy, too. This guy is the first person she's seen around this place who really looks like he belongs on the Raft."

"There are four men in the life raft:"

"The powerless life raft, sloshing around the North Pacific, emits a vast, spreading plume of steam like that of an Iron Horse chugging full blast over the Continental Divide. Neither Hiro nor Eliot ever mentions, or even notices, the by-now-obvious fact that Fisheye is traveling with a small, self-contained nuclear power source.... As long as Fisheye refuses to notice this fact, it would be rude for them to bring it up."

"The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of personal relationships. ... This is how we avoid the trap of self-perpetuating ideology. Ideology is a virus. So getting this chick back is more than just getting a chick back. It's the concrete manifestation of an abstract policy goal."

"Hiro knows one thing: The Metaverse has now become a place where you can get killed. Or at least have your brain reamed out to the point where you might as well be dead…Guns have come to Paradise. It serves them right, he realizes now. They made the place too vulnerable. They figured that the worst thing that could happen was that a virus might get transferred into your computer… The Metaverse is wide open and undefended, like airports in the days before bombs and metal detectors, like elementary schools in the days before maniacs with assault rifles. There are no cops. You can't defend yourself, you can't chase the bad people. It's going to take a lot of work to change that — a fundamental rebuilding of the whole Metaverse, carried out on a planetwide, corporate level."

"It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats," Vic says, looking through his magic sight. "Five guys on it. Headed our way." He fires another round. "Correction. Four guys on it." Boom. "Correction. They're not headed our way anymore." Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. "Correction. No boat."