Excerpt from the novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Down below, Sushi K pirouettes spastically as a beer bottle caroms off his forehead.

Excerpt from the novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

     Another news piece, this one apparently done a few years later. Again we are on the Enterprise, but this time the atmosphere is different again. The top deck has been turned into an open-air refugee cam. It is swarming with Bangladeshis that L. Bob Rife plucked out of the Bay of Bengal after their country washed into the ocean in a series of massive floods, caused by deforestation farther upstream in India—hydrological warfare. The camera pans to look out over the edge of the flight deck, and down below, we see the first beginnings of the Raft: a relatively small collection of a few hundred boats that have glommed onto the Enterprise, hoping for a free ride across to America.
     Rife’s walking among the people, handing out Bible comics and kisses to little kids. They cluster around with broad smiles, pressing their palms together and bowing. Rife bows back, very awkwardly, but there’s no gaiety on his face. He’s deadly serious.
     “Mr. Rife, what’s your opinion of the people who say you’re just doing this as a self-aggrandizing publicity stunt?” This interviewer is trying to be more of a Bad Cop.
     “Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn’t get any work done,” L. Bob Rife says. “You should ask these people what they think.”
     “You’re telling me that this refugee assistance program has nothing to do with your public image?”
     “Nope, L—”
     There’s an edit and they cut away to the journalist, pontificating into the camera. Rife was on the verge of delivering a serman, Hiro senses, but they cut him off.
     But one of the true glories of the Library is that it has so many outtakes. Just because a piece of videotape never got edited into a broadcast program doesn’t mean it’s devoid of intel value. CIC long ago stuck its fingers into the networks’ videotape libraries. All of those outtakes—millions of hours of footage—have not actually been uploaded to the Library in digital form yet. But you can send in a request, and CIC will go and pull that videotape off the shelf for you and play it back.
     Lagos has already done it. The tape is right there.
     “Nope. Look. The Raft is a media event. But in a much more profound, general sense that you can possibly imagine.”
     “Oh.”
     “It’s created by the media in that without the media, people wouldn’t know it was here, Refus wouldn’t come out and glom onto it the way they do. And it sustains the media. It creates a lot of information flow—movies, news reports—you know.”
     “So you’re creating your own news events to make money off the information flow that it creates?” says the journalist, desperately trying to follow. His tone of voice says that this is all a waste of videotape. His weary attitude suggests that this is not the firsts time Rife has flown off on a bizarre tangent.
     “Partly. But that’s only a very crude explanation. It really goes a lot deeper than that. You’ve probably heard the expression that the Industry feeds off of biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean.”
     “I’ve heard the expression, yes.”
     “That’s my expression. I made it up. An expression like that is just like a virus, you know—it’s a piece of information—data—that spreads from one person to the next. Well, 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. Leaves behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel. Ever read the story about the labyrinth and the minotaur?”
     “Sure. That was on Crete, right?” The journalist only answers out of sarcasm; he can’t believe he’s here listening to this, he wants to fly back to L.A. yesterday.
     “Yeah. Every year, the Greeks had to pony up a few virgins and send them to Crete as tribute. Then the king put them into the labyrinth, and the minotaur ate them up. I used to read that story when I was a kid and wonder who the hell these guys were, on Crete, that everyone else was so scared of them that they would just meekly give up their children to be eaten, every year. They must have been some mean sons of bitches.
     “Now I have a different perspective on it. America must look, to those poor little buggers down there, about the same as Crete looked to those poor Greek suckers. Except that there’s no coercion involved. Those people down there give up their children willingly. Send them into the labyrinth by the millions to be eaten up. The Industry feeds on them and spits back images, sends out movies and TV programs, over my networks, images of wealth and exotic things beyond their wildest dreams, back to those people, and it gives them something to dream about, something to aspire to. And that is the function of the Raft. It’s just a big old krill carrier.”
     Finally the journalist gives up on being a journalist, just starts to slag L. Bob Rife openly. He’s had it with this guy. “That’s disgusting. I can’t believe you can think about people that way.”
     “Shit, boy, get down off your high horse. 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?”
     Rife is pissed. He’s yelling. Behind him, the Bangladeshis are picking up on his emotional vibes and becoming upset themselves. Suddenly, one of them, an incredibly gaunt man with a long drooping mustache, runs in front of the camera and begins to shout: “a ma la ge zen ba dam gal nun ka aria su su na an da . . . ” The sounds spread from him to his neighbors, spreading across the flight deck like a wave.
     “Cut,” the journalist says, turning to the camera. “Just cut. The Babble Brigade has started up again.”
     The soundtrack now consists of a thousand people speaking in tongues under the high-pitched, shit-eating chuckles of L. Bob Rife.
     “This is the miracle of tongues,” Rife shouts above the tumult. “I can understand every word these people are saying. Can you, brother?”

Excerpt from the novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

     That Juanita is talking this way does not make it any easier for Hiro to get back on his feet in this conversation. “How can you say that? You’re a religious person yourself.”
     “Don’t lump all religion together.”
     “Sorry.”
     “All people have religions. It’s like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we’ll latch onto anything that’ll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral—a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next. That’s the way it used to be, and unfortunately, that’s the way it’s headed right now. 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., driven out of their homeland by the invasion of Sargon II, 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.”
     “Do you believe in God or not?” Hiro says. First things first.
     “Definitely.”
     “Do you believe in Jesus?”
     “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?”

Excerpt from the novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

     “Secret Agent Hiro! How are you doing?”
     Hiro turns around. Juanita is right behind him, standing out in her black-and-white avatar, looking good anyway. “How are you?” she asks.
     “Fine. How are you?”
     “Great. I hope you don’t mind talking to me in this ugly fax-of-life avatar.”
     “Juanita, I would rather look at a fax of you than most other women in the flesh.”
     “Thanks, you sly bastard. It’s been a long time since we’ve talked!” she observes, as though there’s something remarkable about this.
     Something’s going on.
     “I hope you’re not going to mess around with Snow Crash,” she says. “Da5id won’t listen to me.”
     “What am I, a model of self-restraint? I’m exactly the kind of guy who would mess around with it.”
     “I know you better than that. You’re impulsive. But you’re very clever. You have those sword-fighting reflexes.”
     “What does that have to do with drug abuse?”
     “It means you can see bad things coming and deflect them. It’s an instinct, not a learned thing. As soon as you turned around and saw me, that look came over your face, like, what’s going on? What the hell is Juanita up to?”
     “I didn’t think you talked to people in the Metaverse.”
     “I do if I want to get through to someone in a hurry,” she says. “And I’ll always talk to you.”
     “Why me?”
     You know. Because of us. Remember? Because of our relationship—when I was writing this thing—you and I are tho only two people who can ever have an honest conversation in the Metaverse.”
     “You’re just the same mystical crank you always were,” he says, smiling so as to make this a charming statement.
     “You can’t imagine how mystical and cranky I am now, Hiro.”
     “How mystical and cranky are you?”
     She eyes him warily. Exactly the same way she did when he came into her office years ago.
     It comes into his mind to wonder why she is always so alert in his presence. In college, he used to think that she was afraid of his intellect, but he’s known for years that this is the last of her worries. At Black Sun Systems, he figured that it was just typical female guardedness—Juanita was afraid he was trying to get her into the sack. But this, too, is pretty much out of the question.
     At this late date in his romantic career, he is just canny enough to come up with a new theory: She’s being careful because she likes him. She likes him in spite of herself. He is exactly the kind of tempting but utterly wrong romantic choice that a smart girl like Juanita must learn to avoid.
     That’s definitely it. There’s something to be said for getting older.
     By way of answering his question, she says, “I have an associate I’d like you to meet. A gentleman and scholar named Lagos. He’s a fascinating guy to talk to.”
     “Is he your boyfriend?”
     She thinks this one over rather than lashing out instantaneously. “My behavior at The Black Sun to the contrary, I don’t fuck every male I work with. And even if I did, Lagos is out of the question.”
     “Not your type?”
     “Not by a long shot.”
     “What is your type, anyway?”
     “Old, rich, unimaginative blonds with steady careers.”
     This one almost slips by him. Then he catches it. “Well, I could dye my hair. And I’ll get old eventually.”
     She actually laughs. It’s a tension-releasing kind of outburst. “Believe me, Hiro, I’m the last person you want to be involved with at this point.”
     “Is this part of your church thing?” he asks. Juanita has been using her excess money to start her own branch of the Catholic church—she considers herself a missonary to the intelligent atheists of the world.
     “Don’t be condescending,” she says. “That’s exactly the attitude I’m fighting. Religion is not for the simpletons.”
     “Sorry. This is unfair, you know—you can read every expression on my face, and I’m looking at you through a fucking blizzard.”
     “It’s definitely related to religion,” she says. “But this is so complex, and your background in that area is so deficient, I don’t know where to begin.”
     “Hey, I went to church every week in high school. I sang in the choir.”
     “I know. That’s exactly the problem. 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.”
     “So none of that stuff I learned in church has anything to do with what you’re talking about?”
     Juanita thinks for a while, eyeing him. Then she pulls a hypercard out of her pocket. “Here. Take this.”
     As Hiro pulls it from her hand, the hypercard changes from a jittery two-dimensional figment into a realistic, cream-colored, finely textured piece of stationery. Printed across its face in glossy black ink is a pair of words

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