“Wait a sec,” Hiro says. “We have to do some packing first.”
Hiro risks turning on a small flashlight, uses it to-rummage around the yacht, picking up valuable stuff: a few bottles of (presumably) drinkable water, some food, extra ammunition for his nine. He takes one of the grappling hooks, too, coiling its rope neatly. Seems like the kind of thing that might be useful on the Raft.
He has one other chore to take care of, not something he’s looking forward to.
Hiro has lived in a lot of places where mice and even rats were a problem. He used to get rid of them using traps. But then he had a run of bad luck with the things. He would hear a trap snap shut in the middle of the night, and then instead of silence he would hear pitiable squeaking and thrashing, whacking noises as the stricken rodent tried to drag itself back to safety with a trap snapped over some part of its anatomy, usually its head. When you have gotten up at three in the morning to find a live mouse on your kitchen counter leaving a contrail of brain tissue across the formica, it is hard to get back to sleep, and so he prefers to set out poison now.
Somewhat in the same vein, a severely wounded man—the last man Hiro shot—is thrashing around on the deck of the yacht, up near the bow, babbling.
More than anything he has ever wanted to do, Hiro wants to get into the zodiac and get away from this person. He knows that in order to go up and help him, or put him out of his misery, he’s going to have to shine the flashlight on him, and when he does that he’s going to see something he’ll never be able to forget.
But he has to do it. He swallows a couple of times because he’s already gagging and follows his flashlight beam up to the bow.
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 ware.
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 re-branches 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.