Down at the base of the stairs, a wirehead begins to talk. Deep down inside the Enterprise, there’s more talking going on. And none of it makes any sense. It’s just a lot of babbling.
There’s an external catwalk on the control tower. Hiro goes out there and listens to the Raft. From all around them comes a dim roar, not of waves or wind, but of a million unchained human voices speaking in a confusion of tongues.
Juanita comes out to listen, too. Hiro sees a trickle of red under her ear.
“You’re bleeding,” he says.
“I know. A little bit of primitive surgery,” she says. Her voice is strained and uncomfortable. “I’ve been carrying around a scalpel blade for cases like this.”
“What did you do?”
“Slid it up under the base of the antenna and cut the wire that goes into my skull,” she says.
“When did you do that?”
“While you were down on the flight deck.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?” she says. “So I wouldn’t be exposed to the namshub of Enki. I’m a neurolinguistic hacker now, Hiro. I went through hell to obtain this knowledge. It’s a part of me. Don’t expect me to submit to a lobotomy.”
“If we get out of this, will you be my girl?”
“Naturally,” she says. “Now let’s get out of it.”
Chapter Sixty-Two
“I was just doing my job, man,” she says. “This Enki dude wanted to get a message to Hiro, and I delivered it.”
“Shut up,” Rife says. He doesn’t say it like he’s pissed. He just wants her to be quiet. Because what she did doesn’t make any difference now that all those wireheads have piled on top of Hiro.
Y.T. looks out the window. They are buzzing across the Pacific, keeping pretty low down so that the water skims quickly beneath them. She doesn’t know how fast they’re going, but it looks to be pretty damn fast. She always thought the ocean was supposed to be blue, but in fact it’s the most boring gray color she’s ever seen. And there’s miles and miles of it.
After a few minutes, another chopper catches up with them and begins flying alongside, pretty close, in formation. It’s the RARE chopper, the one full of medics.
Through its cabin window, she can see Raven sitting in one of the seats. At first she thinks he’s still unconscious because he’s kind of hunched over, not moving.
Then he lifts his head and she sees that he’s goggled in to the Metaverse. He reaches up with one hand and pulls the goggles up onto his forehead for a moment, squints out the window, and sees her watching him. Their eyes meet and her heart starts flopping around weakly, like a bunny in a Ziploc bag. He grins and waves.
Y. T. sits back in her seat and pulls the shade down over the window.
Chapter Sixty-Three
From Hiro’s front yard to L. Bob Rife’s black cube at Port 127 is halfway around the Metaverse, a distance of 32,768 kilometers. The only hard part, really, is getting out of Downtown. He can ride his bike straight through the avatars as usual, but the Street is also cluttered with vehicles, animercials, commercial displays, public plazas, and other bits of solid-looking software that get in his way.
Not to mention a few distractions. Off to his right, about a kilometer away from The Black Sun, is a deep hole in the hyper-Manhattan skyline. It is an open plaza about a mile wide, a park of sorts where avatars can gather for concerts and conventions and festivals. Most of it is occupied by a deep-dish amphitheater that is capable of seating close to a million avatars at once. Down at the bottom is a huge circular stage.
Normally, the stage is occupied by major rock groups. Tonight, it is occupied by the grandest and most brilliant computer hallucinations that the human mind can invent. A three-dimensional marquee hangs above it, announcing tonight’s event: a benefit graphics concert staged on behalf of Da5id Meier, who is still hospitalized with an inexplicable disease. The amphitheater is half filled with hackers.
Once he gets out of Downtown, Hiro twists his throttle up to the max and covers the remaining thirty-two thousand and some kilometers in the space of about ten minutes. Over his head, the express trains are whooshing down the track at a metaphorical speed of ten thousand miles per hour; he passes them like they’re standing still. This only works because he’s riding in an absolutely straight line. He’s got a routine coded into his motorcycle software that makes it follow the monorail track automatically so that he doesn’t even have to worry about steering it.
Meanwhile, Juanita’s standing next to him in Reality. She’s got another pair of goggles; she can see all the same things that Hiro sees.
“Rife’s got a mobile uplink on his corporate chopper, just like the one on commercial airliners, so he can patch into the Metaverse when he’s in the air. As long as he’s airborne, that’s his only link to the Metaverse. We may be able to hack our way into that one link and block it or something…”
“That low-level communications stuff is too full of medicine for us to mess with it in this decade,” Hiro says, braking his motorcycle to a stop. “Holy shit. It’s just like Y.T. described it.”
He’s in front of Port 127. Rife’s black cube is there, just as Y.T. described it. There’s no door.
Hiro starts walking away from the Street, toward the cube. It reflects no light at all, so he can’t tell whether it’s ten feet or ten miles away from him until the security daemons begin to materialize. There are half a dozen of them, all big sturdy avatars in blue coveralls, sort of quasimilitary looking, but without rank. They don’t need rank because they’re all running the same program. They materialize around him in a neat semicircle with a radius of about ten feet, blocking Hiro’s way to the cube.