It's much worse than he had expected.
This man apparently took a bullet somewhere around the bridge of his nose, aimed upward. Everything above that point has been pretty much blown off. Hiro's looking into a cross-section of his lower brain.
Something is sticking up out of his head. Hiro figures it must be fragments of skull or something. But it's too smooth and regular for that.
Now that he's gotten over his initial nausea, he's finding this easier to look at. It helps to know that the guy is out of his misery. More than half of his brain is gone. He's still talking -- his voice sounds whistly and gaseous, like a pipe organ gone bad, because of the changes in his skull - but it's just a brainstem function, just a twitch in the vocal cords.
The thing sticking up out of his head is a whip antenna about a foot long. It is encased in black rubber, like the antennas on cop walkie-talkies, and it is strapped onto his head, above the left ear. This is one of the antenna-heads that Eliot warned them about.
Hiro grabs the antenna and pulls. He might as well take the headset with him -- it must have something to do with the way L. Bob Rife controls the Raft.
It doesn't come off. When Hiro pulls, what's left of the guy's head twists around, but the antenna doesn't come loose. And that's how Hiro figures out that this isn't a headset at all. The antenna has been permanently grafted onto the base of the man's skull.
Hiro switches his goggles into millimeter-wave radar and stares into the man's ruined head.
The antenna is attached to the skull by means of short screws that go into the bone, but do not pierce all the way through. The base of the antenna contains a few microchips, whose purpose Hiro cannot divine by looking at them. But nowadays you can put a supercomputer on a single chip, so anytime you see more than one chip together in one place, you're looking at significant warez.
A single hair-thin wire emerges from the base of the antenna and penetrates the skull. It passes straight through to the brainstem and then branches and rebranches into a network of invisibly tiny wires embedded in the brain tissue. Coiled around the base of the tree.
Which explains why this guy continues to pump out a steady stream of Raft babble even when his brain is missing: It looks like L. Bob Rife has figured out a way to make electrical contact with the part of the brain where Asherah lives. These words aren't originating here. It's a pentecostal radio broadcast coming through on his antenna.
Reason is still up top, its monitor screen radiating blue static toward heaven. Hiro finds the hard power switch and turns it off. Computers this powerful are supposed to shut themselves down, after you've asked them to. Turning one off with the hard switch is like lulling someone to sleep by severing their spinal column. But when the system has snow-crashed, it loses even the ability to turn itself off, and primitive methods are required. Hiro packs the Gatling gun assembly back into the case and latches it shut.
Maybe it's not as heavy as he thought, or maybe he's on adrenaline overdrive. Then he realizes why it seems so much lighter: most of its weight was ammunition, and Fisheye used up quite a bit. He half-carries, half-drags it back to the stern, making sure the heat exchanger stays in the water, and somersaults it into the zodiac.
Hiro climbs in after it, joining Tranny, and starts attending to the motor.
"No motor," Tranny says. "It snag bad."
Right. The spiderweb would get wrapped around the propeller. Tranny shows Hiro how to snap the zodiac's oars into the oarlocks.
Hiro rows for a while and finds himself in a long clear zone that zigzags its way through the Raft, like a lead of clear water between ice floes in the Arctic.
"Motor okay," Tranny says.
He drops the motor into the water. Tranny pumps up the fuel line and starts it up. It starts on the first pull; Bruce Lee ran a tight ship.
As Hiro begins to motor down the open space, he is afraid that it is just a little cove in the ghetto. But this is just a trick of the lights. He rounds a corner and finds it stretching out for some distance. It is a sort of beltway that runs all the way around the Raft. Small streets and even smaller alleys lead from this beltway into the various ghettos. Through the scope, Hiro can see that their entrances are guarded. Anyone's free to cruise around the beltway, but people are more protective of their neighborhoods.
The worst thing that can happen on the Raft is for your neighborhood to get cut loose. That's why the Raft is such a tangled mess. Each neighborhood is afraid that the neighboring 'hoods are going to gang up on them, cut them loose, leave them to starve in the middle of the Pacific. So they are constantly finding new ways to tie themselves into each other, running cables over, under, and around their neighbors, tying into more far-flung 'hoods, or preferably into one of the Core ships.
The neighborhood guards are armed, needless to say. Looks like the weapon of choice is a small Chinese knockoff of the AK-47. Its metal frame jumps out pretty clearly on radar. The Chinese government must have stamped out an unimaginable number of these things, back in the days when they spent a lot of time thinking about the possibility of fighting a land war with the Soviets.
Most of them just look like indolent Third World militia the world over. But at the entrance to one neighborhood, Hiro sees that the guard in charge has a whip antenna sticking straight up in the air, sprouting from his head.
A few minutes later, they get to a point where the beltway is intersected by a broad street that runs straight into the middle of the Raft, where the big ships are-the Core. The closest one is a Nipponese containership -- a low, flat-decked number with a high bridge, stacked with steel shipping containers. It's webbed over with rope ladders and makeshift stairways that enable people to climb up into this container or that. Many of the containers have lights burning in them.
"Apartment building," Tranny jokes, noting Hiro's interest. Then he shakes his head and rolls his eyes and rubs his thumb against his fingertips. Apparently, this is quite the swell neighborhood.
The nice part of the cruise comes to an end when they notice several fast skiffs emerging from a dark and smoky neighborhood.
"Vietnam gang," Tranny says. He puts his hand on Hiro's and gently but firmly removes it from the outboard motor's throttle. Hiro checks them out on radar. A couple of these guys have the little AK-47s, but most of them are armed with knives and pistols, obviously looking forward to some close-up, face-to-face contact. These guys in the boats are, of course, the peons. More important-looking gents stand along the edge of the neighborhood, smoking and watching. A couple of them are wireheads.
Tranny revs it up, turns into a sparse neighborhood of loosely connected Arabian dhows, and maneuvers through the darkness for a while, occasionally putting his hand on Hiro's head and gently pressing it down so he doesn't catch a rope with his neck.
When they emerge from the fleet of dhows, the Vietnamese gang is no longer in evidence. If this happened in daylight, the gangsters could track them by following Reason's steam. Tranny steers them across a medium-sized street and into a cluster of fishing boats. In the middle of this area an old trawler sits, being cut up for scrap, cutting torches illuminating the black surface of the water all around. But most of the work is being done with hammers and cold chisels, which radiate appalling noise across the flat echoing water.
"Home," Tranny says, smiling, and points to a couple of houseboats lashed together. Lights are still burning here, a couple of guys are out on the deck smoking fat, makeshift cigars, through the windows they can see a couple of women working in the kitchen.
As they approach, the guys on the deck sit up, take notice, draw revolvers out of their waistbands. But then Tranny speaks up in a happy stream of Tagalog. And everything changes.
Tranny gets the full Prodigal Son welcome: crying, hysterical fat ladies, a swarm of little kids piling out of their hammocks, sucking their thumbs and jumping up and down. Older men beaming, showing great gaps and black splotches in their smiles, watching and nodding and diving in to give him the occasional hug.
And on the edge of the mob, way back in the darkness, is another wirehead.
"You come in, too," says one of the women, a lady in her forties named Eunice.
"That's okay," Hiro says. "I won't intrude."
This statement is translated and moves like a wave through the some eight hundred and ninety-six Filipinos who have now converged on the area. It is greeted with the utmost shock. Intrude? Unthinkable! Nonsense! How dare you so insult us?
One of the gap-toothed guys, a miniature old man and probable World War II veteran, jumps onto the rocking zodiac, sticks to the floor like a gecko, wraps his arm around Hiro's shoulders, and pokes a spliff into his mouth.
He looks like a solid guy. Hiro leans into him. "Compadre, who is the guy with the antenna? A friend of yours?"
"Nah," the guy whispers, "he's an asshole." Then he puts his index finger dramatically to his lips and shushes.
Chapter 54
It's all in the eyes. Along with picking handcuffs, vaulting Jersey barriers, and fending off perverts, it is one of the quintessential Kourier skills: walking around in a place where you don't belong without attracting suspicion. And you do it by not looking at anyone. Keep those eyes straight ahead no matter what, don't open them too wide, don't look tense. That, and the fact that she just came in here with a guy that everyone is scared of, gets her back through the containership to the reception area.
"I need to use a Street terminal," she says to the reception guy. "Can you charge it to my room?"
"Yes, ma'am," the reception guy says. He doesn't have to ask which room she's in. He's all smiles, all respect. Not the kind of thing you get very often when you're a Kourier.
She could really get to like this relationship with Raven, if it weren't for the fact that he's a homicidal mutant.
Chapter 55
Hiro ducks out of Tranny's celebratory dinner rather early, drags Reason off the zodiac and onto the front porch of the houseboat, opens it up, and jacks his personal computer into its bios.
Reason reboots with no problems. That's to be expected. It's also to be expected that later, probably when he most needs Reason to work, it will crash again, the way it did for Fisheye. He could keep turning it off and on every time it does this, but this is awkward in the heat of battle, and not the type of solution that hackers admire. It would be much more sensible just to debug it.
Which he could do by hand, if he had time. But there may be a better way of going about it. It's possible that, by now, Ng Security Industries has fixed the bug -- come out with a new version of the software. If so, he should be able to get a copy of it on the Street.
Hiro materializes in his office. The Librarian pokes his head out of the next room, just in case Hiro has any questions for him.
"What does ultima ratio regum mean?"
"'The Last Argument of Kings,'" the Librarian says. "King Louis XIV had it stamped onto the barrels of all of the cannons that were forged during his reign."
Hiro stands up and walks out into his garden. His motorcycle is waiting for him on the gravel path that leads to the gate. Looking up over the fence, Hiro can see the lights of Downtown rising in the distance again. His computer has succeeded in jacking into L. Bob Rife's global network he has access to the Street. This is as Hiro had expected. Rife must have a whole suite of satellite uplinks there on the Enterprise, patched into a cellular network covering the Raft. Otherwise, he wouldn't be able to reach the Metaverse from his very own watery fortress, which would never do for a man like Rife.
Hiro climbs on his bike, eases it through the neighborhood and onto the Street, and then gooses it up to a few hundred miles an hour, slaloming between the stanchions of the monorail, practicing. He runs into a few of them and stops, but that's to be expected.
Ng Security Industries has a whole floor of a mile-high neon skyscraper near Port One, right in the middle of Downtown. Like everything else in the Metaverse, it's open twenty-four hours, because it's always business hours somewhere in the world. Hiro leaves his bike on the Street, takes the elevator up to the 397th floor, and comes face to face with a receptionist daemon. For a moment, he can't peg her racial background; then he realizes that this daemon is half-black, half-Asian -- just like him. If a white man had stepped off the elevator, she probably would have been a blonde. A Nipponese businessman would have come face to face with a perky Nipponese office girl.
"Yes, sir," she says. "Is this in regard to sales or customer service?"
"Customer service."
"Whom are you with?"
"You name it, I'm with them."
"I'm sorry?" Like human receptionists, the daemon is especially bad at handling irony.
"At the moment, I think I'm working for the Central Intelligence Corporation, the Mafia, and Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong."
"I see," says the receptionist, making a note. Also like a human receptionist, it is not possible to impress her. "And what product is this in regards to?"
"Reason."
"Sir! Welcome to Ng Security Industries," says another voice.
It is another daemon, an attractive black/Asian woman in highly professional dress, who has materialized from the depths of the office suite.
She ushers Hiro down a long, nicely paneled hallway, down another long paneled hallway, and then down a long paneled hallway. Every few steps, he passes by a reception area where avatars from all over the world sit in chairs, passing the time. But Hiro doesn't have to wait. She ushers him straight into a nice big paneled office where an Asian man sits behind a desk littered with models of helicopters. It is Mr. Ng himself. He stands up; they swap bows; the usher lady checks out.
"You working with Fisheye?" Ng says, lighting up a cigarette. The smoke swirls in the air ostentatiously. It takes as much computing power realistically to model the smoke coming out of Ng's mouth as it does to model the weather system of the entire planet.
"He's dead," Hiro says. "Reason crashed at a critical juncture, and he ate a harpoon."
Ng doesn't react. Instead, he just sits there motionless for a few seconds, absorbing this data, as if his customers get harpooned all the time. He's probably got a mental database of everyone who has ever used one of his toys and what happened to them.
"I told him it was a beta version," Ng says. "And he should have known not to use it for infighting. A two-dollar switchblade would have served him better."
"Agreed. But he was quite taken with it."
Ng blows out more smoke, thinking. "As we learned in Vietnam, high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to psychoactive drugs. Like LSD, which can convince people they can fly -- causing them to jump out of windows -- weapons can make people overconfident. Skewing their tactical judgment. As in the case of Fisheye."
"I'll be sure and remember that," Hiro says.
"What kind of combat environment do you want to use Reason in?" Ng says.
"I need to take over an aircraft carrier tomorrow morning."
"The Enterprise?"
"Yes."
"You know," Ng says, apparently in a conversational mood, "there's a guy who actually took over a nuclear-missile submarine armed with nothing more than a piece of glass --"
"Yeah, that's the guy who killed Fisheye. I might have to tangle with him, too."
Ng laughs. "What is your ultimate objective? As you know, we are all in this together, so you may share your thoughts with me."
"I'd prefer a little more discretion in this case..."
"Too late for that, Hiro," says another voice. Hiro turns around; it is Uncle Enzo, being ushered through the door by the receptionist -- a striking Italian woman. Just a few paces behind him is a small Asian businessman and an Asian receptionist.
"I took the liberty of calling them in when you arrived," Ng says, "so that we could have a powwow."
"Pleasure," Uncle Enzo says, bowing slightly to Hiro. Hiro bows back.
"I'm really sorry about the car, sir."
"It's forgotten," Uncle Enzo says.
The small Asian man has now come into the room. Hiro finally recognizes him. It is the photo that is on the wall of every Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong in the world.
Introductions and bows all around. Suddenly, a number of extra chairs have materialized in the office, so everyone pulls one up. Ng comes out from behind his desk, and they sit in a circle.
"Let us cut to the chase, since I assume that your situation, Hiro, may be more precarious than ours," Uncle Enzo says.
"You got that right, sir."
"We would all like to know what the hell is going on," Mr. Lee says. His English is almost devoid of a Chinese accent; clearly his cute, daffy public image is just a front.
"How much of this have you guys figured out so far?"
"Bits and pieces," Uncle Enzo says. "How much have you figured out?"
"Almost all of it," Hiro says. "Once I talk to Juanita, I'll have the rest."
"In that case, you are in possession of some very valuable intel," Uncle Enzo says. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hypercard and hands it toward Hiro. It says
TWENTY-FIVE
MILLION
HONG KONG
DOLLARS
Hiro reaches out and takes the card.
Somewhere on earth, two computers swap bursts of electronic noise and the money gets transferred from the Mafia's account to Hiro's.
"You'll take care of the split with Y.T.," Uncle Enzo says.
Hiro nods. You bet I will.
Chapter 56
"I'm here on the Raft looking for a piece of software -- a piece of medicine to be specific -- that was written five thousand years ago by a Sumerian personage named Enki, a neurolinguistic hacker."
"What does that mean?" Mr. Lee says.
"It means a person who was capable of programming other people's minds with verbal streams of data, known as nam-shubs."
Ng is totally expressionless. He takes another drag on his cigarette, spouts the smoke up above his head in a geyser, watches it spread out against the ceiling. "What is the mechanism?"
"We've got two kinds of language in our heads. The kind we're using now is acquired. It patterns our brains as we're learning it. But there's also a tongue that's based in the deep structures of the brain, that everyone shares. These structures consist of basic neural circuits that have to exist in order to allow our brains to acquire higher languages."
"Linguistic infrastructure," Uncle Enzo says.
"Yeah. I guess 'deep structure' and 'infrastructure' mean the same thing. Anyway, we can access those parts of the brain under the right conditions. Glossolalia -- speaking in tongues -- is the output side of it, where the deep linguistic structures hook into our tongues and speak, bypassing all the higher, acquired languages. Everyone's known that for some time."
"You're saying there's an input side, too?" Ng says.
"Exactly. It works in reverse. Under the right conditions, your ears -- or eyes -- can tie into the deep structures, bypassing the higher language functions. Which is to say, someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visual symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstem. Like a cracker who breaks into a computer system, bypasses all the security precautions, and plugs himself into the core, enabling him to exert absolute control over the machine."
"In that situation, the people who own the computer are helpless," Ng says.
"Right. Because they access the machine at a higher level, which has now been overridden. In the same sense, once a neurolinguistic hacker plugs into the deep structures of our brain, we can't get him out -- because we can't even control our own brain at such a basic level."
"What does this have to do with a clay tablet on the Enterprise?" Mr. Lee says.
"Bear with me. This language -- the mother tongue -- is a vestige of an earlier phase of human social development. Primitive societies were controlled by verbal rules called me. The me were like little programs for humans. They were a necessary part of the transition from caveman society to an organized, agricultural society. For example, there was a program for plowing a furrow in the ground and planting grain. There was a program for baking bread and another one for making a house. There were also me for higher-level functions such as war, diplomacy, and religious ritual. All the skills required to operate a self-sustaining culture were contained in these me, which were written down on tablets or passed around in an oral tradition. In any case, the repository for the me was the local temple, which was a database of me, controlled by a priest/king called an en. When someone needed bread, they would go to the en or one of his underlings and download the bread-making me from the temple. Then they would carry out the instructions -- run the program -- and when they were finished, they'd have a loaf of bread.
"A central database was necessary, among other reasons, because some of the me had to be properly timed. If people carried out the plowing-and-planting me at the wrong time of year, the harvest would fail and everyone would starve. The only way to make sure that the me were properly timed was to build astronomical observatories to watch the skies for the changes of season. So the Sumerians built towers 'with their tops with the heavens' -- topped with astronomical diagrams. The en would watch the skies and dispense the agricultural me at the proper times of year to keep the economy running."
"I think you have a chicken-and-egg problem," Uncle Enzo says. "How did such a society first come to be organized?"
"There is an informational entity known as the metavirus, which causes information systems to infect themselves with customized viruses. This may be just a basic principle of nature, like Darwinian selection, or it may be an actual piece of information that floats around the universe on comets and radio waves -- I'm not sure. In any case, what it comes down to is this: Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses -- viruses generated from within itself.
"At some point in the distant past, the metavirus infected the human race and has been with us ever since. The first thing it did was to spawn a whole Pandora's box of DNA viruses -- smallpox, influenza, and so on. Health and longevity became a thing of the past. A distant memory of this event is preserved in legends of the Fall from Paradise, in which mankind was ejected from a life of ease into a world infested with disease and pain.
"That plague eventually reached some kind of a plateau. We still see new DNA viruses from time to time, but it seems that our bodies have developed a resistance to DNA viruses in general."
"Perhaps," Ng says, "there are only so many viruses that will work in the human DNA, and the metavirus has created all of them."
"Could be. Anyway, Sumerian culture -- the society based on me -- was another manifestation of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in a linguistic form rather than DNA."
"Excuse me," Mr. Lee says. "You are saying that civilization started out as an infection?"
"Civilization in its primitive form, yes. Each me was a sort of virus, kicked out by the metavirus principle. Take the example of the bread-baking me. Once that me got into society, it was a self-sustaining piece of information. It's a simple question of natural selection: people who know how to bake bread will live better and be more apt to reproduce than people who don't know how. Naturally, they will spread the me, acting as hosts for this self-replicating piece of information. That makes it a virus. Sumerian culture -- with its temples full of me -- was just a collection of successful viruses that had accumulated over the millennia. It was a franchise operation, except it had ziggurats instead of golden arches, and clay tablets instead of three-ring binders.
"The Sumerian word for 'mind,' or 'wisdom,' is identical to the word for 'ear.' That's all those people were: ears with bodies attached. Passive receivers of information. But Enki was different. Enki was an en who just happened to be especially good at his job. He had the unusual ability to write new me -- he was a hacker. He was, actually, the first modern man, a fully conscious human being, just like us.
"At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People were carrying out the same old me all the time, not coming up with new ones, not thinking for themselves. I suspect that he was lonely, being one of the few -- perhaps the only -- conscious human being in the world. He realized that in order for the human race to advance, they had to be delivered from the grip of this viral civilization.
"So he created the nam-shub of Enki, a countervirus that spread along the same routes as the me and the metavirus. It went into the deep structures of the brain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could understand the Sumerian language, or any other deep structure-based language. Cut off from our common deep structures, we began to develop new languages that had nothing in common with each other. The me no longer worked and it was not possible to write new me. Further transmission of the metavirus was blocked."
"Why didn't everyone starve from lack of bread, having lost the bread-making me?" Uncle Enzo says.
"Some probably did. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and figure it out. So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings of human consciousness -- when we first had to think for ourselves. It was the beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to think about abstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That's where the name Babel comes from. Literally it means 'Gate of God.' It was the gate that allowed God to reach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a gateway that was opened by the nam-shub of Enki that broke us free from the metavirus and gave us the ability to think -- moved us from a materialistic world to a dualistic world -- a binary world -- with both a physical and a spiritual component.
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