“Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don’t let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.
“In the meantime, he got the Raft going as a way of transporting hundreds of thousands of his cultists from the wretched parts of Asia into the United States. The media image of the Raft is that it is a place of utter chaos, where thousands of different languages are spoken and there is no central authority. But it’s not like that at all. It’s highly organized and tightly controlled. These people are all talking to each other in tongues. L. Bob Rife has taken xenoglossia and perfected it, turned it into a science.
“He can control these people by grafting radio receivers into their skulls, broadcasting instructions—me—directly into their brainstems. If one person in a hundred has a receiver, he can act as the local en and distribute the me of L. Bob Rife to all the others. They will act out L. Bob Rife’s instructions as though they have been programmed to. And right now, he has about a million of these people poised off the California coast.
“He also has a digital metavirus, in binary code, that can infect computers, or hackers, via the optic nerve.”
“How did he translate it into binary form?” Ng says.
“I don’t think he did. I think he found it in space. Rife owns the biggest radio astronomy network in the world. He doesn’t do real astronomy with it—he just listens for signals from other planets. It stood to reason that sooner or later, one of his dishes would pick up the metavirus.”
“How does that stand to reason?”
“The metavirus is everywhere. Anywhere life exists, the metavirus is there, too, propagating through it. Originally, it was spread around on comets. That’s probably how life first came to the Earth, and that’s probably how the metavirus came here also. But comets are slow, whereas radio waves are fast. In binary form, a virus can bounce around the universe at the speed of light. It infects a civilized planet, gets into its computers, reproduces, and inevitably gets broadcast on television or radio or whatever. Those transmissions don’t stop at the edge of the atmosphere—they radiate out into space, forever. And if they hit a planet with another civilized culture, where people are listening to the stars the way Rife was doing, then that planet gets infected, too. I think that was Rife’s plan, and I think it worked. Except that Rife was smart—he caught it in a controlled manner. He put it in a bottle. An informational warfare agent for him to use at his discretion. When it is placed into a computer, it snow-crashes the computer by causing it to infect itself with new viruses. But it is much more devastating when it goes into the mind of a hacker, a person who has an understanding of binary code built into the deep structures of his brain. The binary metavirus will destroy the mind of a hacker.”
“So Rife can control two kinds of people,” Ng says. “He can control Pentecostals by using me written in the mother tongue. And he can control hackers in a much more violent fashion by damaging their brains with binary viruses.”
“Exactly.”
“What do you think Rife wants?” Ng says.
“He wants to be Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look, it’s simple: Once he converts you to his religion, he can control you with me. And he can convert millions of people to his religion because it spreads like a fucking virus—people have no resistance to it because no one is used to thinking about religion, people aren’t rational enough to argue about this kind of thing. Basically, anyone who reads the National Enquirer or watches pro wrestling on TV is easy to convert. And with Snow Crash as a promoter, it’s even easier to get converts.
“Rife’s key realization was that there’s no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite—the people who go into the Metaverse, basically—who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.
“That makes us a big stumbling block to Rife’s plan. People like L. Bob Rife can’t do anything without us hackers. And even if he could convert us, he wouldn’t be able to use us, because what we do is creative in nature and can’t be duplicated by people running me. But he can threaten us with the blunt instrument of Snow Crash. That, I think, is what happened to Da5id. It may have been an experiment, just to see if Snow Crash worked on a real hacker, and it may have been a warning shot intended to demonstrate Rife’s power to the hacker community. The message: If Asherah gets broadcast into the technological priesthood—”
“Napalm on wildflowers,” Ng says.
“As far as I know, there’s no way to stop the binary virus. But there’s an antidote to Rife’s bogus religion. The namshub of Enki still exists. He gave a copy to his son Marduk, who passed it on to Hammurabi. Now, Marduk may or may not have been a real person. The point is that Enki went out of his way to leave the impression that he had passed on his namshub in some form. In other words, he was planting a message that later generations of hackers were supposed to decode, if Asherah should rise again.
“I am fairly certain that the information we need is contained within a clay envelope that was excavated from the ancient Sumerian city of Eridu in southern Iraq ten years ago. Eridu was the seat of Enki; in other words, Enki was the local en of Eridu, and the temple of Eridu contained his me, including the namshub that we are looking for.”
“Who excavated this clay envelope?”
“The Eridu dig was sponsored entirely by a religious university in Bayview, Texas.”