Strangle a Muskrat

Excerpt from the novel Cryptonomicon icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by Neal Stephenson icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

     Randy grew up in a college town in eastern Washington State, graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle, and landed a Clerk Typist II job at the library there—specifically the Interlibrary Loan Department—where his job was to process incoming loan requests mailed in from smaller libraries all over the region and, conversely, to mail out requests to other libraries. If nine-year-old Randy Waterhouse had been able to look into the future and see himself in this career, he would have been delighted beyond measure: the primary tool of the Interlibrary Loan Department was the Staple Remover. Young Randy had seen one of these devices in the hands of his fourth-grade teacher and been enthralled by its cunning and deadly appearance, so like the jaws of some futuristic robot dragon. He had, in fact, gone out of his way to staple things incorrectly just so he could prevail on his teacher to unstaple them, giving him another glimpse of the blood-chilling mandibles in action. He had gone so far as to steal a staple remover from an untended desk at church and then incorporate it into an Erector-set robot hunter-killer device with which he terrorized much of the neighborhood; its pit-viper yawn separated many a cheap plastic toy from its parts and accessories before the theft was discovered and Randy made an example of before God and man. Now, in the Interlibrary Loan office, Randy had not just one but several staple removers in his desk drawer and was actually obligated to use them for an hour or two a day.
     Since the UW library was well-endowed, its patrons didn’t request books from other libraries unless they had been stolen from their own or were, in some way, peculiar. The ILL office (as Randy and his coworkers affectionately called it) had its regulars—people who had a whole lot of peculiar books on their wish lists. These people tended to be either tedious or scary or both. Randy always ended up dealing with the “both” subgroup, because Randy was the only Clerk Typist in the office who was not a lifer. It seemed clear that Randy, with his astronomy degree and his extensive knowledge of computers, would one day move on, whereas his coworkers did not harbor further ambitions. His larger sphere of interests, his somewhat broader concept of normalcy, was useful when certain patrons came into the office.
     By the standards of many, Randy was himself a tedious, scary, obsessed character. He was not merely obsessed with science but also with fantasy role-playing games. The only way he could tolerate working at a such a stupid job for a couple of years was that his off time was completely occupied with enacting fantasy scenarios of a depth and complexity that exercised all of the cranial circuitry that was so conspicuously going to waste in the ILL office. He was part of a group that would meet every Friday night and play until sometime on Sunday. The other stalwarts in the group were a computer science/music double major named Chester, and a history grad student named Avi.
     When a new master’s degree candidate named Andrew Loeb walked into the ILL office one day, with a certain glint in his eye, and produced a three-inch-thick stack of precisely typed request forms from his shitty old knapsack, he was recognized immediately as being of a particular type, and shunted in the direction of Randy Waterhouse. It was an instant meeting of the minds, though Randy did not fully realize this until the books that Loeb had requested began to arrive on the trolley from the mail room.
     Andy Loeb’s project was to figure out the energy budgets of the local Indian tribes. A human body has to expend a certain amount of energy just to keep breathing and to maintain its body temperature. This figure goes up when it gets cold or when the body in question is doing work. The only way to obtain that energy is by eating food. Some foods have a higher energy content than others. For example, trout is highly nutritious but so low in fat and carbohydrates that you can starve to death eating it three times a day. Other foods might have lots of energy, but might require so much work to obtain and prepare that eating them would be a losing proposition, BTU-wise. Andy Loeb was trying to figure out what foods had historically been eaten by certain Northwest Indian tribes, how much energy they expended to get these foods and how much they obtained by eating them. He wanted to do this calculation for coastal Indians like the Salish (who had easy access to seafood) and for inland ones like the Cayuse (who didn’t) as part of an extremely convoluted plan to prove some sort of point about the relative standards of living of these tribes and how this affected their cultural development (coastal tribes made lots of fantastically detailed art and inland ones occasionally scratched stick figures on rocks).
     To Andrew Loeb it was an exercise in meta-historical scholarship. To Randy Waterhouse, it sounded like the beginnings of a pretty cool game. Strangle a muskrat and you get 136 Energy Points. Lose the muskrat and your core temp drops another degree.
     Andy was nothing if not methodical and so he had simply looked up every book that had ever been written on such topics, and every book mentioned in those books’ bibliographies, yea, even unto four or five generations; checked out all of them that were available locally; and ordered the rest from ILL. All of the latter passed across Randy’s desk. Randy read some and skimmed all. He got to learn about how much blubber the Arctic explorers had to eat in order to keep from starving to death. He perused detailed specifications for Army C-rations. After a while, he actually began sneaking into the photocopy room and making copies of key data.
     In order to run a realistic fantasy role-playing game, you had to keep track of how much food the imaginary characters were getting and how much trouble was involved in getting it. Characters passing across the Gobi desert in November of the year 5000 B.C. would have to spend more time worrying about food than, say, ones who were traveling across central Illinois in 1950.
     Randy was hardly the first game designer to notice this. There were a few incredibly stupid games in which you didn’t have to think about food, but Randy and his friends disdained them. In all of the games that he participated in, or that he himself designed, you had to devote a realistic amount of effort to getting food for your character. But it was not easy to determine what was realistic. Like most designers, Randy got over the problem by slapping together a few rudimentary equations that he basically just pulled out of thin air. But in the books, articles, and dissertations that Andrew Loeb was borrowing through ILL, he found exactly the raw data that a mathematically inclined person would need to come up with a sophisticated rules system based on scientific fact.
     Simulating all of the physical processes going on in each character’s body was out of the question, especially in a game where you might be dealing with armies of a hundred thousand men. Even a crude simulation, tracking only a few variables and using simple equations, would involve a nightmarish amount of paperwork if you did it all by hand. But all of this was happening in the mid-1980s, when personal computers had become cheap and ubiquitous. A computer could automatically track a large database and tell you whether each character was well-fed or starving. There was no reason not to do it on a computer.
     Unless, like Randy Waterhouse, you had such a shitty job that you couldn’t afford a computer.
     Of course, there’s a way to dodge any problem. The university had lots of computers. If Randy could get an account on one of them, he could write his program there and run it for free.
     Unfortunately, accounts were only available to students or faculty members, and Randy was neither.
     Fortunately, he started dating a grad student named Charlene at just about this time.
     How the hell did a generally keg-shaped guy, a hard scientist, working a dead-end Clerk Typist job, and spending all his spare time in the consummately nerdy pastime of fantasy role-playing games, end up in a relationship with a slender and not unattractive young liberal arts student who spent her spare time sea kayaking and going to foreign films? It must have been one of those opposites-attract kind of deals, a complementary relationship. They met, naturally, in the ILL office, where the highly intelligent but steady and soothing Randy helped the highly intelligent but scattered and flighty Charlene organize a messy heap of loan requests. He should have asked her out then and there, but he was shy. Second and third opportunities came along when the books she’d requested began to filter up from the mailroom, and finally he asked her out and they went to see a film together. Both of them turned out to be not just willing but eager, and possibly even desperate. Before they knew it, Randy had given Charlene a key to his apartment, and Charlene had given Randy the password to her free university computer account, and everything was just delightful.
     The university computer system was better than no computer at all. But Randy was humiliated. Like every other high-powered academic computing network, this one was based on an industrial-strength operating system called UNIX, which had a learning curve like the Matterhorn, and lacked the cuddly and stylish features of the personal computers then coming into vogue. Randy had used it quite a bit as an undergraduate and knew his way around. Even so, learning how to write good code on the thing required a lot of time. His life had changed when Charlene had come along, and now it changed more: he dropped out of the fantasy role-playing game circuit altogether, stopped going to meetings of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and began to spend all of his free time either with Charlene or in front of a computer terminal. All in all, this was probably a change for the better. With Charlene, he did things he wouldn’t have done otherwise, like getting exercise, or going to see live music. And at the computer, he was learning new skills, and he was creating something. It might be something completely useless, but at least he was creating.
     He spent a lot of time talking to Andrew Loeb, who actually went out and did the stuff he was writing programs for; he’d disappear for a few days and come back all wobbly and haggard, with fish scales caught in his whiskers or dried animal blood under his fingernails. He’d ram down a couple of Big Macs, sleep for twenty-four hours, then meet Randy in a bar (Charlene wasn’t comfortable with having him in the house) and talk learnedly of the difficulties of day-to-day life, aboriginal style. They argued about whether aborigines would eat the more disgusting parts of certain animals or throw them away. Andrew voted for yes. Randy disagreed—just because they were primitive didn’t mean they couldn’t have taste. Andrew accused him of being a romantic. Finally, to settle it, they went up into the mountains together, armed with nothing but knives and Andrew’s collection of exquisitely crafted vermin snares. By the third night, Randy found himself seriously thinking about eating some insects. “Q.E.D.,” Andrew said.
     Anyway, Randy finished his software after a year and a half. It was a success; Chester and Avi liked it. Randy was moderately pleased at having built something so complicated that actually worked, but he had no illusions about its being good for anything. He was sort of embarrassed at having wasted so much time and mental energy on the project. But he knew that if he hadn’t been writing code, he’d have spent the same amount of time playing games or going to Society for the Creative Anachronism meetings in medieval drag, so it all zeroed out in the end. Spending the time in front of the computer was arguably better, because it had honed his programming skills, which had been pretty sharp to begin with. On the other hand, he’d done it all on the UNIX system, which was for scientists and engineers—not a savvy move in an age when all the money was in personal computers.
     Chester and Randy had nicknamed Avi “Avid,” because he really, really liked fantasy games. Avi had always claimed that he played them as a way of understanding what it was really like to live in ancient times, and he was a maniac about historical authenticity. That was okay; they all had half-assed excuses, and Avi’s historical acumen frequently came in handy.
     Not long after this, Avi graduated and disappeared, and popped up a few months later in Minneapolis, where he had gotten a job with a major publisher of fantasy role-playing games. He offered to buy Randy’s game software for the astonishingly large sum of $1000 plus a small cut of future profits. Randy accepted the offer in its general outlines, asked Avi to send him a contract, then went out and found Andrew boiling some fish guts in a birchbark kettle atop a Weber grill on the roof of the apartment building where he lived. He wanted to give Andrew the good news, and to cut him in on the proceeds. What ensued was a really unpleasant conversation, standing up there in a pelting, spitting, wind-blown rain.
     To begin with, Andrew took this deal far more seriously than Randy did. Randy saw it as a windfall, a lark. Andrew, who was the son of a lawyer, treated it as if it were a major corporate merger, and asked many tedious and niggling questions about the contract, which did not exist yet and which would probably cover a single piece of paper when it did. Randy didn’t realize it at the time, but by asking so many questions for which Randy had no answers, Andrew was, in effect, arrogating to himself the role of Business Manager. He was implicitly forming a business partnership with Randy that did not, in fact, exist.
     Furthermore, Andrew didn’t have the first notion of how much time and effort Randy had put into writing the code. Or (as Randy was to realize later) maybe he did. In any case, Andrew assumed from the get-go that he would share a fifty-fifty split with Randy, which was wildly out of proportion to the work he’d actually done on the project. Basically, Andrew acted as if all of the work he’d ever done on the subject of aboriginal dining habits was a part of this undertaking, and that it entitled him to an equal split.
     By the time Randy extricated himself from this conversation, his mind was reeling. He had gone in with one view of reality and been radically challenged by another one that was clearly preposterous; but after an hour of Andrew’s browbeating he was beginning to doubt himself. After two or three sleepless nights, he decided to call the whole thing off. A paltry few hundred dollars wasn’t worth all of this agony.
     But Andrew (who was, by now, represented by an associate of his father’s Santa Barbara law firm) vehemently objected. He and Randy had, according to the lawyer, jointly created something that had economic value, and a failure on Randy’s part to sell it at market value amounted to taking money out of Andrew’s pocket. It had become an unbelievably Kafkaesque nightmare, and Randy could only withdraw to a corner table at his favorite pub, drink pints of stout (frequently in the company of Chester) and watch this fantastic psychodrama unfold. He had, he now realized, blundered into some serious domestic weirdness involving Andrew’s family. It turned out that Andrew’s parents were divorced and, long ago, had fought savagely over custody of him, their only child. Mom had turned into a hippie and joined a religious cult in Oregon and taken Andrew with her. It was rumored that this cult engaged in sexual abuse of children. Dad had hired private dicks to kidnap Andrew back and then showered him with material possessions to demonstrate his superior love. There had followed an interminable legal battle in which Dad had hired some rather fringey psychotherapists to hypnotize Andrew and get him to dredge up repressed memories of unspeakable and improbable horrors.
     This was just the executive summary of a weird life that Randy only learned about in bits and pieces as the years went on. Later, he was to decide that Andrew’s life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety.
     Anyway Randy had blundered into this life and become enveloped in the weirdness. One of the young eager beavers in Andrew’s dad’s law firm decided, as a preemptive move, to obtain copies of all of Randy’s computer files, which were still stored on the UW computer system. Needless to say, he went about it in a heavy-handed way, and when the university’s legal department began to receive his sullen letters, it responded by informing both Andrew’s lawyer, and Randy, that anyone who used the university’s computer system to create a commercial product had to split the proceeds with the university. So now Randy was getting ominous letters from not one but two groups of deadly lawyers. Andrew then threatened to sue him for having made this blunder, which had halved the value of Andrew’s share!
     In the end, just to cut his losses and get out of it clean, Randy had to hire a lawyer of his own. The final cost to him was a hair more than five thousand dollars. The software was never sold to anyone, and indeed could not have been; it was so legally encumbered by that point that it would have been like trying to sell someone a rusty Volkswagen that had been dismantled and its parts hidden in attack dog kennels all over the world.
     It was the only time in his life where he had ever thought about suicide. He did not think about it very hard, or very seriously, but he did think about it.
     When it was all over, Avi sent him a handwritten letter saying, “I enjoyed doing business with you and look forward to continuing our relationship both as friends and, should opportunities arise, as creative partners.”

The Ring of Seventeen (Ng’s Wheelchair, Part 02)

Excerpt from the novel Snow Crash icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by Neal Stephenson icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

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     Y.T. doesn’t get down to Long Beach very much, but when she does, she will do just about anything to avoid the Sacrifice Zone. It’s an abandoned shipyard the size of a small town. It sticks out into San Pedro Bay, where the older, nastier Burbclaves of the Basin—unplanned Burbclaves of tiny asbestos-shingled houses patrolled by beetle-browned Kampuchean men with pump shotguns—fade off into the foam-kissed beaches. Most of it’s on the appropriately named Terminal Island, and since her plank doesn’t run on the water, that means she can only get in or out by one access road.
     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. They come in from Burbclaves all over the area in their four-wheel-drive trucks and tear across the open ground, slicing long curling gashes into the clay cap that was placed on the really bad parts to prevent windblown asbestos from blizzarding down over Disneyland.
     Y.T. is oddly satisfied to know that these boys have never even dreamed of an all-terrain vehicle like Ng’s motorized wheelchair. It veers off the paved road with no loss in speed—ride gets a little bumpy—and hits the chain-link fence as if it were a fog bank, plowing a hundred-foot section into the ground.
     It is a clear night, and so the Sacrifice Zone glitters, an immense carpet of broken glass and shredded asbestos. A hundred feet away, some seagulls are tearing at the belly of a dead German shepherd lying on its back. There is a constant undulation of the ground that makes the shattered glass flash and twinkle; this is caused by vast sparse migrations of rats. The deep, computer-designed imprints of suburban boys’ fat knobby tires paint giant runes on the clay, like the mystery figures in Peru that Y.T.’s mom learned about at the NeoAquarian Temple. Through the windows, Y.T. can hear occasional bursts of either firecrackers or gunfire.
     She can also hear Ng making new, even stranger sounds with his mouth.
     There is a built-in speaker system in this van—a stereo, though far be it from Ng to actually listen to any tunes. Y.T. can feel it turning on, can sense a nearly inaudible hiss coming from the speakers.
     The van begins to creep forward across the Zone.
     The inaudible hiss gathers itself up into a low electronic hum. It’s not steady, it wavers up and down, staying pretty low, like Roadkill fooling around with his electric bass. Ng keeps changing the direction of the van, as though he’s searching for something, and Y.T. gets the sense that the pitch of the hum is rising.
     It’s definitely rising, building up in the direction of a squeal. Ng snarls a command and the volume is reduced. He’s driving very slowly now.
     ”It is possible that you might not have to buy and Snow Crash at all,” he mumbles. “We may have found an unprotected stash.”
     ”What is this totally irritating noise?”
     ”Biolelectric sensor. Human cell membranes. Grown in vitro, which means in glass—in a test tube. One side is exposed to outside air, the other side is clean. When a foreign substance penetrates the cell membrane to the clean side, it’s detected. The more foreign molecules penetrate, the higher the pitch of the sound.”
     ”Like a Geiger counter?”
     ”Very much like a Geiger counter for cell-penetrating compounds,” Ng says.
     Like what? Y.T. wants to ask. But she doesn’t.
     Ng stops the van. He turns on some lights—very dim lights. That’s how anal this guy is—he has gone to the trouble to install special dim lights in addition to all the bright ones.
     They are looking into a sort of bowl, right at the foot of a major drum heap, that is strewn with litter. Most of the litter is empty beer cans. In the middle is a fire pit. Many tire tracks converge here.
     ”Ah, this is good,” Ng says. “A place where the young men gather to take drugs.”
     Y.T. rolls her eyes at this display a 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.
     ”I don’t see any signs of booby traps,” Ng says. “Why don’t you go out and see what kind of drug paraphernalia is out there.”
     She looks at him like, what did you say?
     ”There’s a toxics mask hanging on the back of your seat,” he says.
     ”What’s out there, toxic-wise?”
     ”Discarded asbestos from the shipbuilding industry. Marine antifouling paints that are full of heavy metals. They used PCBs for a lot of things, too.”
     ”Great.”
     ”I sense your reluctance. But if we can get a sample of Snow Crash from this drug-taking site, it will obviate the rest of our mission.”
     ”Well, since you put it that way,” Y.T. says, and grabs the mask. It’s a big rubber-and-canvas number that covers he whole head and neck. Feels heavy and awkward at first, but whoever designed it had the right idea, all the weight rests in the right places. There’s also a pair of heavy gloves that she hauls on. They are way too big. Like the people at the glove factory never dreamed that an actual female could wear gloves.
     She trudges out onto the glass-and-asbestos soil of the Zone, hoping that Ng isn’t going to slam the door shut and drive away and leave her there.
     Actually, she wishes he would. It would be a cool adventure.
     Anyway, she goes up to the middle of the “drug-taking site.” Is not too surprised to see a little nest of discarded hypodermic needles. And some tiny little empty vials. She picks up a couple of the vials, reads their labels.
     ”What did you find?” Ng says when she gets back into the van, peels off the mask.
     ”Needles. Mostly Hyponarxes. But there’s also a couple of Ultra Laminars and some Mosquito twenty-fives.”
     ”What does all this mean?”
     ”Hyponarx you can get at any Buy ‘n’ Fly, people call them rusty nails, they are cheap and dull. Supposedly the needles of poor black diabetics and junkies. Ultra Laminars and Mosquitoes are hip, you get them around fancy Burbclaves, they don’t hurt as much when you stick them in, and they have better design. You know, ergonomic plungers, hip color schemes.”
     ”What drug were they injecting?”
     ”Checkitout,” Y.T. says, and holds up one of the vials toward Ng.
     Then it occurs to her that he can’t exactly turn his head to look.
     ”Where do I hold it so you can see it?” she says.
     Ng sings a little song. A robot arm unfolds itself from the ceiling of the van, crisply yanks the vial from her hand, swings it around, and holds it in front of a video camera set into the dashboard.
     The typewritten label stuck onto the vial says, just “Testosterone.”
     ”Ha ha, a false alarm,” Ng says. The van suddenly rips forward, starts heading right into the middle of the Sacrifice Zone.
     ”Want to tell me what’s going on?” Y.T. says, “since I have to actually do the work in this outfit?”
     ”Cell walls,” Ng says. “The detector finds any chemical that penetrates cell walls. So we homed in naturally on a source of testosterone. A red herring. How amusing. You see, our biochemists lead sheltered lives, did not anticipate that some people would be so mentally warped as to use hormones like there were some kind of drug. How bizarre.”
     Y.T. smiles to herself. She really likes the idea of living in a world where someone like Ng can get off calling someone else bizarre. “What are you looking for?”
     ”Snow Crash,” Ng says. “Instead, we found the Ring of Seventeen.”
     ”Snow Crash is the drug that comes in the little tubes,” Y.T. says. “I know that. What’s the Ring of Seventeen? One of those crazy new rock groups that kids listen to nowadays?”
     ”Snow Crash penetrates the walls of brain cells and goes to the nucleus where the DNA is stored. So for purposes of this mission, we developed a detector that would enable us to find cell wall-penetrating compounds in the air. But we didn’t count on heaps of empty testosterone vials being scattered all over the place. All steroids—artificial hormones—share the same basic structure, a ring of seventeen atoms that acts like a magic key that allows them to pass through cell walls. That’s why steroids are such powerful substances when they are unleashed in the human body. They can go deep inside the cell, into the nucleus, and actually change the way the cell functions.
     ”To summarize: the detector is useless. A stealthy approach will not work. So we go back to the original plan. You buy some Snow Crash and throw it up in the air.”
     Y.T. doesn’t quite understand that last part yet. But she shuts up for a while, because in her opinion, Ng needs to pay more attention to his driving.
     Once they get out of that really creepy part, most of the Sacrifice Zone turns out to consist of a wilderness of dry brown weeds and large abandoned hunks of metal. There are big heaps of shit rising up from place to place—coal or slag or coke or smelt or something.
     Every time they come around a corner, they encounter a little plantation of vegetables, tended by Asians or South Americans. Y.T. gets the impression that Ng wants to just run them over, but he always changes his mind at the last instant and swerves around them.
     Some Spanish-speaking blacks are playing baseball on a broad flat area, using the round lids of fifty-five-gallon drums as bases. They have parked half a dozen old beaters around the edges of the field and turned on their headlights to provide illumination. Nearby is a bar built into a crappy mobile home, marked with a graffiti sign: THE SACRIFICE ZONE. Lines of boxcars are stranded in a yard of rusted-over railway spurs, nopal growing between the ties. One of the boxcars has been turned into a Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates franchise, and evangelical CentroAmericans are lined up to do their penance and speak in tongues below the neon Elvis. There are no NeoAquarian Temple franchises in the Sacrifice Zone.
     ”The warehouse area is not as dirty as the first place we went,” Ng says reassuringly, “so the fact that you can’t use the toxics mask won’t be so bad. You may smell some Chill fumes.”
     Y.T. does a double take at this new phenomenon: Ng using the street name for a controlled substance. “You mean Freon?” she says.
     ”Yes. The man who is the object of our inquiry is horizontally diversified. That is, he deals in a number of different substances. But he got his start in Freon. He is the biggest Chill wholesaler/retailer on the West Coast.”
     Finally, Y.T. gets it. Ng’s van is air-conditioned. Not with one of those shitty ozone-safe air conditioners, but with the real thing, a heavy metal, high-capacity, bone-chilling Frigidaire bilzzard blaster. It must use and incredible amount of Freon.
     For all practical purposes, that air conditioner is a part of Ng’s body. Y.T.’s driving around with the world’s only Freon junkie.
     ”You buy your supply of Chill from this guy?”
     ”Until now, yes. But for the future, I have an arrangement with someone else.”
     Someone else. The Mafia.

Ack-Ack (Ng’s Wheelchair, Part 01)

Excerpt from the novel Snow Crash icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by Neal Stephenson icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

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     Recognizing his van is easy enough. It is enormous. It is eight feet high and wider than it is high, which would have made it a wide load in the old days when they had laws. The construction is boxy and angular; it has been welded together out of the type of flat, dimpled steel plate usually used to make manhole lids and stair treads. The tires are huge, like tractor tires with a more subtle tread, and there are six of them: two axles in back and one in front. The engine is so big that, like an evil spaceship in a movie, Y.T. feels its rumbling in her ribs before she can see it; it is kicking out diesel exhaust through a pair of squat vertical red smokestacks that project from the roof, toward the rear. The windshield is a perfectly flat rectangle of glass about three by eight feet, smoked so black that Y.T. can’t make out an outline of anything inside. The snout of the van is festooned with every type of high-powered light known to science, like this guy hit a New South Africa franchise on a Saturday night and stole every light off every roll bar, and a grille has been constructed across the front, welded together out of rails torn out of an abandoned railroad somewhere. The grille alone probably weighs more than a small car.
     The passenger door swings open. Y.T. walks over and climbs into the front seat. “Hi,” she is saying. “You need to take a whiz or anything?”
     Ng isn’t there.
     Or maybe he is.
     Where the driver’s seat ought to be, there is a sort of neoprene pouch about the size of a garbage can suspended from the ceiling by a web of straps, shock cords, tubes, wires, fiber-optic cables, and hydraulic lines. It is swathed in so much stuff that it is hard to make out its actual outlines.
     At the top of this pouch, Y.T. can see a patch of skin with some black hair around it—the top of a balding man’s head. Everything else, from the temples downward, is encased in an enormous goggle/mask/headphone/feeding-tube unit, held onto his head by smart straps that are constantly tightening and loosening themselves to keep the device comfortable and properly positioned.
     Below this, on either side, where you’d sort of expect to see arms, huge bundles of wires, fiber optics, and tubes run up out of the floor and are seemingly plugged into Ng’s shoulder sockets. There is a similar arrangement where his legs are supposed to be attached, and more stuff going into his groin and hooked up to various locations on his torso. The entire thing is swathed in a one-piece coverall, a pouch, larger than his torso ought to be, that is constantly bulging and throbbing as though alive.
     ”Thank you, all my needs are taken care of,” Ng says.
     The door slams shut behind her. Ng makes a yapping sound, and the van pulls out onto the frontage road, headed back toward 405.
     ”Please excuse my appearance,” he says, after a couple of awkward minutes. “My helicopter caught fire during the evacuation of Saigon in 1974—a stray tracer from ground forces.”
     ”Whoa. What a drag.”
     ”I was able to reach an American aircraft carrier off the coast, but you know, the fuel was spraying around quite a bit during the fire.”
     ”Yeah, I can imagine, uh huh.”
     ”I tried prostheses for a while—some of them are very good. But nothing is as good as a motorized wheelchair. And then I got to thinking, why do motorized wheelchairs always have to be tiny pathetic things that strain to go up a little teeny ramp? So I bought this—it is an airport firetruck from Germany—and converted it into my new motorized wheelchair.”
     ”It’s very nice.”
     ”America is wonderful because you can get anything on a drive-through basis. Oil change, liquor, banking, car wash, funerals, anything you want—drive through! So this vehicle is much better than a tiny pathetic wheelchair. It is an extension of my body.”
     ”When the geisha rubs your back [in the metaverse]?”
     Ng mumbles something and his pouch begins to throb and undulate around his body. “She is a daemon, of course. As for the massage, my body is suspended in an electrocontractive gel that massages me when I need it. I also have a Swedish girl and an African woman, but those daemons are not as well rendered.”
     ”And the mint julep?”
     ”Through a feeding tube. Nonalcoholic, ha ha.”
     ”So,” Y.T. says at some point, when they are way past LAX, and she figures it’s too late to chicken out, “what’s the plan? Do we have a plan?”
     ”We go to Long Beach. To the Terminal Island Sacrifice Zone. And we buy some drugs,” Ng says. “Or you do, actually, since I am indisposed.”
     ”That’s my job? To buy some drugs?”
     ”Buy them, and throw them up in the air.”
     ”In a Sacrifice Zone?”
     ”Yes. And we’ll take care of the rest.”
     ”Who’s we, dude?”
     ”There are several more, uh, entities that will help us.”
     ”What, is the back of the van full of more—people like you?”
     ”Sort of,” Ng says. “You are close to the truth.”
     ”Would these be, like, nonhuman systems?”
     ”That is a sufficiently all-inclusive term, I think.”
     Y.T. figures that for a be yes.
     ”You tired? Want me to drive or anything?”
     Ng laughs sharply, like a distant ack-ack, and the van almost swerves off the road. Y.T. doesn’t get the sense that he is laughing at the joke; he is laughing at what a jerk Y.T. is.

Speech with Magical Force

Excerpt from the novel Snow Crash icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12 by Neal Stephenson icon-external-link-12x12 icon-search-12x12

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     The Babel/Infocalypse card is resting in the middle of his desk. Hiro picks it up. The Librarian comes in.
     Hiro is about to ask the Librarian whether he knows that Lagos is dead. But it’s a pointless question. The Librarian knows it, but he doesn’t. If he wanted to check the Library, he could find out in a few moments. But he wouldn’t really retain the information. He doesn’t have an independent memory. The Library is his memory, and he only uses small parts of it at once.
     “What can you tell me about speaking in tongues?” Hiro says.
     “The technical term is ‘glossolalia,'” the Librarian says.
     “Technical term? Why bother to have a technical term for a religious ritual?”
     The Librarian raises his eyebrows. “Oh, there’s a great deal of technical literature on the subject. It is a neurological phenomenon that is merely exploited in religious rituals.”
     “It’s a Christian thing, right?”
     “Pentecostal Christians think so, but they are deluding themselves. Pagan greeks did it—Plato called it theomania. The Oriental cults of the Roman Empire did it. Hudson Bay Eskimos, Chukchi shamans, Lapps, Yakuts, Semang pygmies, the North Borneo cults, the Trhi-speaking priests of Ghana. The Zulu Amandiki cult and the Chinese religious sect of Shang-ti-hui. Spirit mediums of Tonga and the Brazilian Umbanda cult. The Tungus tribesmen of Siberia say that when the shaman goes into his trance and raves incoherent syllables, he learns the entire language of Nature.”
     “The language of Nature.”
     “Yes, sir. The Sukuma people of Africa say that the language is kinaturu, the tongue of the ancestors of all magicians, who are thought to have descended from one particular tribe.”
     “What causes it?”
     “If mystical explanations are ruled out, then it seems that glossolalia comes from structures buried deep within the brain, common to all people.”
     “What does it look like? How do these people act?”
     “C.W. Shumway observed the Los Angeles revival of 1906 and noted six basic symptoms: complete loss of rational control; dominance of emotion that leads to hysteria; absence of thought or will; automatic functioning of the speech organs; amnesia; and occasional sporadic physical manifestations such as jerking or twitching. Eusebius observed similar phenomena around the year 300, saying that the false prophet begins by a deliberate suppression of conscious thought, and ends in a delirium over which he has no control.”
     “What’s the Christian justification for this? Is there anything in the Bible that backs this up?”
     “Pentecost.”
     “You mentioned that word earlier—what is it?”
     “From the Greek pentekostos, meaning fiftieth. It refers to the fiftieth day after the Crucifixion.”
     “Juanita just told me that Christianity was hijacked by viral influences when it was only fifty days old. She must have been talking about this. What is it?”
     “‘And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and wondered, saying, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”‘ Acts 2:4-12.”
     “Damned if I know,” Hiro says. “Sounds like Babel in reverse.”
     “Yes, sir. Many Pentecostal Christians believe that the gift of tongues was given to them so that they could spread their religion to other peoples without having to actually learn their language. The word for that is ‘xenoglossy.'”
     “That’s what Rife was claiming in that piece of videotape, on top of the Enterprise. He said he could understand what those Bangledeshis were saying.”
     “Yes, sir.”
     “Does that really work?”
     “In the sixteenth century, Saint Louis Bertrand allegedly used the gift of tongues to convert somewhere between thirty thousand and three hundred thousand South American Indians to Christianity,” the Librarian says.
     “Wow. Spread through that population even faster than smallpox.”


     What did the Jews think of this Pentecost thing?” Hiro says. “They were stil running the country, right?”
     “The Romans were running the country,” the Librarian says, “but there were a number of Jewish religious authorities. At this time, there were three groups of Jews: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes.”
     “I remember the Pharisees from Jesus Christ, Superstar. They were the ones with deep voices who were always hassling Christ.”
     “They were hassling him,” the Librarian says, “because they were religiously very strict. They adhered to a strong legalistic version of the religion; to them, the Law was everything. Clearly, Jesus was a threat to them because he was proposing, in effect, to do away with the Law.”
     “He wanted a contract renegotiation with God.”
     “This sounds like an analogy, which I am not very good at—but even if it is taken literally, it is true.”
     “Who were the other two groups?”
     “The Sadducees were materialists.”
     “Meaning what? They drove BMWs?”
     “No. Materialists in the phisosophical sense. All philosophies are either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material world is the only world—hence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary universe, that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material world.”
     “Well, as a computer geek, I have to believe in the binary universe.”
     The Librarian raises his eyebrows. “How does that follow?”
     “Sorry. It’s a joke. A bad pun. See, computers use binary code to represent information. So I was joking that I have to believe in the binary universe, that I have to be a dualist.”
     “How droll,” the Librarian says, not sounding very amused. “Your joke may not be without genuine merit, however.”
     “How’s that? I was just kidding, really.”
     “Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing—this pivotal separation between being and nonbeing—is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths.”
     Hiro feels his face getting slightly warm, feels himself getting annoyed. He suspects that the Librarian may be pulling his leg, playing him for a fool. But he knows that the Librarian, however convincingly rendered he may be, is just a piece of software and cannot actually do such things.
     “Even the word ‘science’ comes from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to cut’ or ‘to separate.’ The same root led to the word ‘shit,’ which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us ‘scythe’ and ‘scissors’ and ‘schism,’ which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.”
     “How about ‘sword’?”
     “From a root with several meanings. One of those meanings is ‘to cut or pierce.’ One of them is ‘post’ or ‘rod.’ And the other is, simply, ‘to speak.'”
     “Let’s stay on track,” Hiro says.
     “Fine. I can return to this potential conversation fork at a later time, if you desire.”
     “I don’t want to get all forked up at this point. Tell me about the third group—the Essenes.”
     “They lived communally and believed that physical and spiritual cleanliness were intimately connected. They were constantly bathing themselves, lying naked under the sun, purging themselves with enemas, and going to extreme lengths to make sure that their food was pure and uncontaminated. They even had their own version of the Gospels in which Jesus healed possessed people, not with miracles, but by driving parasites, such as tapeworm, out of their body. These parasites are considered to be synonymous with demons.”
     “They sound kind of like hippies.”
     “The connection has been made before, but it is faulty in many ways. The Essenes were strictly religious and would never have taken drugs.”
     “So to them there was no difference between infection with a parasite, like tapeworm, and demonic possession.”
     “Correct.”
     “Interesting. I wonder what they would have thought about computer viruses?”
     “Speculation is not in my ambit.”
     “Speaking of which—Lagos was babbling to me about viruses and infection and something called a nam-shub. What does that mean?”
     “Nam-shub is a word from Sumerian.”
     “Sumerian?”
     “Yes, sir. Used in Mesopotamia until roughly 2000 B.C. The oldest of all written languages.”
     “Oh. So all other languages are descended from it?”
     For a moment, the Librarian’s eyes glance upward, as if he’s thinking about something. This is a visual cue to inform Hiro that he’s making a momentary raid on the Library.
     “Actually, no,” the Librarian says. “No languages whatsoever are descended from Sumerian. It is an agglutinative tongue, meaning that it is a collection of morphemes or syllables that are grouped into words—very unusual.”
     “You are saying,” Hiro says, remembering Da5id in the hospital, “that if I could hear someone speaking Sumerian, it would sound like a long stream of short syllables strung together.”
     “Yes, sir.”
     “Would it sound anything like glossolalia?”
     “Judgment call. Ask someone real,” the Librarian says.
     “Does it sound like any modern tongue?”
     “There is no provable genetic relationship between Sumerian and any tongue that came afterward.”
     “That’s odd. My Mesopotamian history is rusty,” Hiro says. “What happened to the Sumerians? Genocide?”
     “No, sir. They were conquered, but there’s no evidence of genocide per se.”
     “Everyone gets conquered sooner or later,” Hiro says. “But their languages don’t die out. Why did Sumerian disappear?”
     “Since I am just a piece of code, I would be on very thin ice to speculate,” the Librarian says.
     “Okay. Does anyone understand Sumerian?”
     “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. And have any of these people figured out what the word ‘nam-shub’ means in Sumerian?”
     “Yes. A nam-shub is a speech with magical force. The closest English equivalent would be ‘incantation,’ but this has a number of incorrect connotations.”
     “Did the Sumerians believe in magic?”
     The Librarian shakes his head minutely. “This is the kind of seemingly precise question that is in fact very profound, that pieces of software, such as myself, are notoriously clumsy at. Allow me to quote from Kramer, Samuel Noah, and Maier, John R. Myths of Enki, the Crafty God. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989: ‘Religion, magic, and medicine are so completely intertwined in Mesopotamia that separating them is frustrating and perhaps futile work…. [Sumerian incantations] demonstrate an intimate connection between the religious, the magical, and the esthetic so complete that any attempt to pull one away from the other will distort the whole.’ There is more material in here that might help explain the subject.”
     “In where?”
     “In the next room,” the Librarian says, gesturing at the wall. He walks over and slides the rice-paper partitionout of the way.
     A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don’t believe in these kinds of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speech—the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife’s fiber-optic network.
     The voice phone rings. “Just a second,” Hiro says.
     “Take your time,” the Librarian says, not adding the obvious reminder that he can wait for a million years if need be.
     “Me again,” Y.T. says. “I’m still on the train. Stumps got off at Express Port 127.”
     “Hmmm. That’s the antipode of Downtown. I mean, it’s as far away from Downtown as you can get.”
     “It is?”
     “Yeah. One-two-seven is two to the seventh power minus one—”
     “Spare me, I take your word for it. It’s definitely out in the middle of fucking nowhere,” she says.
     “You didn’t get off and follow him?”
     “Are you kidding? All the way out there? It’s ten thousand miles from the nearest building, Hiro.”
     She has a point. The Metaverse was built with plenty of room to expand. Almost all of the development is within two or three Express Ports—five hundred kilometers or so—of Downtown. Port 127 is twenty thousand miles away.
     “What is there?”
     “A black cube exactly twenty miles on a side.”
     “Totally black?”
     “Yeah.”
     “How can you measure a black cube that big?”
     “I’m riding along looking at the stars, okay? Suddenly, I can’t see them anymore on the right side of the train. I start counting local ports. I count sixteen of them. We get to Express Port 127, and Stumpy climbs off and goes toward the black thing. I count sixteen more local ports and then the stars come out. Then I take thirty-two kilometers and multiply it by point six and I get twenty miles—you asshole.”
     “That’s good,” Hiro says. “That’s good intel.”
     “Who do you think owns a black cube twenty miles across?”
     “Just going on pure, irrational bias, I’m guessing L. Bob Rife. Supposedly, he has a big hunk of real estate out in the middle of nowhere where he keeps all the guts of the Metaverse. Some of us used to smash into it occasionally when we were out racing motorcycles.”
     “Well, gotta go, pod.”