In the early days, when the Metaverse was a featureless black ball, this was a trivial job. Later on, when the Street went up and people started building real estate, it became more complicated. On the Street, you can pass through other people’s avatars. But you can’t pass through walls. You can’t enter private property. And you can’t pass through other vehicles, or through permanent Street fixtures such as the Ports and the stanchions that support the monorail line. If you try to collide with any of these things, you don’t die or get kicked out of the Metaverse; you just come to a complete stop, like a cartoon character running spang into a concrete wall.
In other words, once the Metaverse began to fill up with obstacles that you could run into, the job of traveling across it at high speed suddenly became more interesting. Maneuverability became an issue. Size became an issue. Hiro and Da5id and the rest of them began to switch away from the enormous, bizarre vehicles they had favored at first—Victorian houses on tank treads, rolling ocean liners, mile-wide crystalline spheres, flaming chariots drawn by dragons—in favor of small maneuverable vehicles. Motorcycles, basically.
A Metaverse vehicle can be as fast and nimble as a quark. There’s no physics to worry about, no constraints on acceleration, no air resistance. Tires never squeal and brakes never lock up. The one thing that can’t be helped is the reaction time of the user. So when they were racing their latest motorcycle software, holding wild rallies through Downtown at Mach 1, they didn’t worry about engine capacity. They worried about the user interface, the controls that enabled the rider to transfer his reactions into the machine, to steer, accelerate, or brake as quickly as he could think. Because when you’re in a pack of bike racers going through a crowded area at that speed, and you run into something and suddenly slow down to a speed of exactly zero, you can forget about catching up. One mistake and you’ve lost.
Hiro had a pretty good motorcycle. He probably could have had the best one on the Street, simply because his reflexes are unearthly. But he was more preoccupied with sword fighting than motorcycle riding.
He opens up the most recent version of his motorcycle software, gets familiar with the controls again. He ascends from Flatland into the three-dimensional Metaverse and practices riding his bike around his yard for a while. Beyond the boundaries of his yard is nothing but blackness, because he’s not jacked into the net. It is a lost, desolate sensation, kind of like floating on a life raft in the Pacific Ocean.
Chapter Fourty-Nine
Sometimes they see boats in the distance. A couple of these even swing close by to check them out, but none of them seems to be in that rescuing mood. There are few altruists in the vicinity of the Raft, and it must be evident that they don’t have much to steal.
From time to time, they see an old deep-water fishing boat, fifty to a hundred feet long, with half a dozen or so small fast boats clustered around it.
When Eliot informs them that these are pirate vessels, Vic and Fisheye prick up their ears. Vic unwraps his rifle from the collection of Hefty bags that he uses to protect it from the salt spray, and detaches the bulky sight so that they can use it as a spyglass. Hiro can’t see any reason to pull the sight off the rifle in order to do this, other than the fact that if you don’t, it looks like you’re drawing a bead on whatever you’re looking at.
Whenever a pirate vessel comes into view, they all take turns looking at it through the sight, playing with all the different sensor modes: visible, infrared, and so on. Eliot has spent enough time knocking around the Rim that he has become familiar with the colors of the different pirate groups, so by examining them through the sight he can tell who they are: Clint Eastwood and his band parallel them for a few minutes one day, checking them out, and the Magnificent Seven send out one of their small boats to zoom by them and look for potential booty. Hiro’s almost hoping they get taken prisoner by the Seven, because they have the nicest-looking pirate ship: a former luxury yacht with Exocet launch tubes kludged to the foredeck. But this reconnaissance leads nowhere. The pirates, unschooled in thermodynamics, do not grasp the implications of the eternal plume of steam coming from beneath the life raft.
One morning, a big old trawler materializes very close to them, congealing out of nothing as the fog lifts. Hiro has been hearing its engines for a while, but didn’t realize how close it was.
“Who are they?” Fisheye says, choking on a cup of the freeze-dried coffee he despises so much. He’s wrapped up in a space blanket and partly snuggled underneath the boat’s waterproof canopy, just his face and hands visible.
Eliot scopes them out with the sight. He is not a real demonstrative guy, but it’s clear that he is not very happy with what he sees. “That is Bruce Lee,” he says.
“How is that significant?” Fisheye says.
“Well, check out the colors,” Eliot says.
The ship is close enough that everyone can see the flag pretty clearly. It’s a red banner with a silver fist in the middle, a pair of nunchuks crossed beneath it, the initials B and L on either side.
“What about ’em?” Fisheye says.
“Well, the guy who calls himself Bruce Lee, who’s like the leader? He got a vest with those colors on the back.”
“So?”
“So, it’s not just embroidered or painted, it’s actually done in scalps. Patchwork, like.”
“Say what?” Hiro says.
“There’s a rumor, just a rumor, man, that he went through the Refu ships looking for people with red or silver hair so he could collect the scalps he needed.”
Hiro is still absorbing that when Fisheye makes an unexpected decision. “I want to talk to this Bruce Lee character,” he says. “He interests me.”
“Why the hell do you want to talk to this fucking psycho?” Eliot says.
“Yeah,” Hiro says. “Didn’t you see that series on Eye Spy? He’s a maniac.”
Fisheye throws up his hands as if to say the answer is, like Catholic theology, beyond mortal comprehension. “This is my decision,” he says.
“Who the fuck are you?” Eliot says.
“President of the fucking boat,” Fisheye says. “I hereby nominate myself. Is there a second?”
“Yup,” Vic says, the first time he has spoken in forty-eight hours.
“All in favor say aye,” Fisheye says.
“Aye,” Vic says, bursting into florid eloquence.