It’s always been a mystery to Hiro, too, but then, that’s how the government is. It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn’t bother with, which means that there’s probably no reason for it; you never know what they’re doing or why. Hackers have traditionally looked upon the government’s coding sweatshops with horror and just tried to forget that all of that shit ever existed.
But they have thousands of programmers. The programmers work twelve hours a day out of some twisted sense of personal loyalty. Their software-engineering techniques, while cruel and ugly, are very sophisticated. They must have been up to something.
“Juanita?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t ask me why I think this. But I think that the government has been undertaking a big software development project for L. Bob Rife.”
“Makes sense,” she says. “He has such a love-hate relationship with his programmers—he needs them, but he won’t trust them. The government’s the only organization he would trust to write something important. I wonder what it is?”
“Hold on,” Hiro says. “Hold on.”
He is now a stone’s throw away from a big blue cube sitting at ground level. All the other blue cubes sort of feed into it. There is a motorcycle parked next to the cube, rendered in color, but just one notch above black and white: big jaggedy pixels and a limited color palette. It has a sidecar. Raven’s standing next to it.
He is carrying something in his arms. It is another simple geometric construction, a long smooth blue ellipsoid a couple of feet in length. From the way he’s moving, Hiro thinks that Raven has just removed it from the blue cube; he carries it over to the motorcycle and nestles it into the sidecar.
“The Big One,” Hiro says.
“It’s exactly what we were afraid of,” Juanita says. “Rife’s revenge.”
“Headed for the amphitheater. Where all the hackers are gathered in one place. Rife’s going to infect all of them at once. He’s going to burn their minds.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
Raven’s already on the motorcycle. If Hiro chases him on foot, he might catch him before he reaches the Street.
But he might not. In that case, Raven would be on his way to Downtown at tens of thousands of miles per hour while Hiro was still trying to get back to his own motorcycle. At those speeds, once Hiro has lost sight of Raven, he’s lost him forever.
Raven starts his bike, begins maneuvering carefully through the tangle, headed for the exit. Hiro takes off as fast as his invisible legs can carry him, headed straight for the wall.
He punches through a couple of seconds later, runs back to the Street. His tiny little invisible avatar can’t operate the motorcycle, so he returns to his normal look, hops on his bike, and gets it turned around. Looking back, he sees Raven riding out toward the Street, the logic bomb glowing a soft blue, like heavy water in a reactor. He doesn’t even see Hiro yet.
Now’s his chance. He draws his katana, aims his bike at Raven, pumps it up to sixty or so miles an hour. No point in coming in too fast; the only way to kill Raven’s avatar is to take its head off. Running it over with the motorcycle won’t have any effect.
A security daemon is running toward Raven, waving his arms. Raven looks up, sees Hiro bearing down on him, and bursts forward. The sword cuts air behind Raven’s head.
It’s too late. Raven must be gone now—but turning himself around, Hiro can see him in the middle of the Street. He slammed into one of the stanchions that holds up the monorail track—a perennial irritation to high-speed motorcyclists.
“Shit!” both of them say simultaneously.
Raven gets turned toward Downtown and twists his throttle just as Hiro is pulling in behind him on the Street, doing the same. Within a couple of seconds, they’re both headed for Downtown at something like fifty thousand miles an hour. Hiro’s half a mile behind Raven but can see him clearly: the streetlights have merged into a smooth twin streak of yellow, and Raven blazes in the middle, a storm of cheap color and big pixels.
“If I can take his head off, they’re finished,” Hiro says.
“Gotcha,” Juanita says. “Because if you kill Raven, he gets kicked out of the system. And he can’t sign back on until the Graveyard Daemons dispose of his avatar.”
“And I control the Graveyard Daemons. So all I have to do is kill the bastard once.”
“Once they get their choppers back to land, they’ll have better access to the net—they can have someone else go into the Metaverse and take over for him,” Juanita warns.
“Wrong. Because Uncle Enzo and Mr. Lee are waiting for them on land. They have to do it during the next hour, or never.”
Chapter Sixty-Five
Y.T. suddenly wakes up. She hadn’t realized that she was asleep. Something about the thwop of the rotor blades must have lulled her. She must be tired as shit, is what it really is.
“What the fuck is going on with my com net?” L. Bob Rife is squalling.
“No one answers,” the Russian pilot says. “Not Raft, not L.A., not Khyooston.”
“Get me LAX on the phone, then,” Rife says. “I want to take the jet to Houston. We’ll get our butts over to the campus and find out what’s going on.”
The pilot messes around on his control panel. “Problem,” he says.
“What?”
The pilot just shakes his head forlornly. “Someone is messing with the skyphone. We’re being jammed.”
“I might be able to get a line,” the President says. Rife just gives him a look like, right, asshole.
“Anybody got a fucking quarter?” Rife hollers. Frank and Tony are startled for a minute. “We’re gonna have to touch down at the first pay phone we see and make a goddamn phone call.” He laughs. “Can you believe that? Me, using a telephone?”
A second later, Y.T. looks out the window and is blown away to see actual land down there, and a two-lane highway winding its way down a warm sandy coastline. It’s California.