“I’m tired,” Mom says. It’s what she always says.
Y.T. pinches a beer from the fridge and starts running a hot bath. It makes a roaring sound that relaxes her, like the white-noise generator on Mom’s nightstand.
Chapter Thirteen
The Nipponese businessman lies cut in segments on The Black Sun’s floor. Surprisingly (he looks so real when he’s in one piece), no flesh, blood, or organs are visible through the new crossections that Hiro’s sword made through his body. He is nothing more than a thin shell of epidermis, an incredibly complex inflatable doll. But the air does not rush out of him, he fails to collapse, and you can look into the aperture of a sword cut and see, instead of bones and meat, the back of the skin on the other side.
It breaks the metaphor. The avatar is not acting like a real body. It reminds all The Black Sun’s patrons that they are living in a fantasy world. People hate to be reminded of this.
When Hiro wrote The Black Sun’s sword-fighting algorithms—code that was later picked up and adopted by the entire Metaverse—he discovered that there was no good way to handle the aftermath. Avatars are not supposed to die. Not supposed to fall apart. The creators of the Metaverse had not been morbid enough to foresee a demand for this kind of thing. But the whole point of a sword fight is to cut someone up and kill them. So Hiro had to kludge something together, in order that the Metaverse would not, over time, become littered with inert, dismembered avatars that never decayed.
So the first thing that happens, when someone loses a sword fight, is that his computer gets disconnected from the global network that is the Metaverse. He gets chucked right out of the system. It is the closest simulation of death that the Metaverse can offer, but all it really does is cause the user a lot of annoyance.
Furthermore, the user finds that he can’t get back into the Metaverse for a few minutes. He can’t log back on. This is because his avatar, dismembered, is still in the Metaverse, and it’s a rule that your avatar can’t exist in two places at once. So the user can’t get back in until his avatar has been disposed of.
Disposal of hacked-up avatars is taken care of by Graveyard Daemons, a new Metaverse feature that Hiro had to invent. They are small lithe persons swathed in black, like ninjas, not even their eyes showing. They are quiet and efficient. Even as Hiro is stepping back from the hacked-up body of his former opponent, they are emerging from invisible trapdoors in The Black Sun’s floor, climbing up out of the netherworld, converging on the fallen businessman. Within seconds, they have stashed the body parts into black bags. Then they climb back down through their secret trapdoors and vanish into hidden tunnels beneath The Black Sun’s floor. A couple of curious patrons try to follow them, try to pry open the trapdoors, but their avatars’ fingers find nothing but smooth matte black. The tunnel system is accessible only to the Graveyard Daemons.
And, incidentally, to Hiro. But he rarely uses it.
The Graveyard Daemons will take the avatar to the Pyre, an eternal, underground bonfire beneath the center of The Black Sun, and burn it. As soon as the flames consume the avatar, it will vanish from the Metaverse, and then its owner will be able to sign on as usual, creating a new avatar to run around in. But, hopefully, he will be more cautious and polite the next time around.
Hiro looks up into the circle of applauding, whistling, and cheering avatars and notes that they are fading out. The entire Black Sun now looks like it is being projected on gauze. On the other side of that gauze, bright lights shine through, overwhelming the image. Then it disappears entirely.
He peels off his goggles and finds himself standing in the parking lot of the U-Stor-It, holding a naked katana.
The sun has just gone down. A couple of dozen people are standing around him at a great distance, shielding themselves behind parked cars, awaiting his next move. Most of them are pretty scared, but a few of them are just plain excited.
Vitaly Chernobyl is standing in the open door of their 20-by-30. His hairdo is backlighted. It has been petrified by means of egg whites and other proteins. These substances refract the light and throw off tiny little spectral fragments, a cluster-bombed rainbow. Right now, a miniature image of The Black Sun is being projected onto Vitaly’s ass by Hiro’s computer. He is rocking unsteadily from foot to foot, as though standing on both of them at the same time is too complicated to deal with this early in the day, and he hasn’t decided which one to use.
“You’re blocking me,” Hiro says.
“It’s time to go,” Vitaly says.
“You’re telling me it’s time to go? I’ve been waiting for you to wake up for an hour.”
As Hiro approaches, Vitaly watches his sword uncertainly. Vitaly’s eyes are dry and red, and on his lower lip he is sporting a chancre the size of a tangerine.
“Did you win your sword fight?”
“Of course I won the fucking sword fight,” Hiro says. “I’m the greatest sword fighter in the world.”
“And you wrote the software.”
“Yeah. That, too,” Hiro says.
After Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns arrived in Long Beach on one of those hijacked ex-Soviet refugee freighters, they fanned out across southern California looking for expanses of reinforced concrete that were as vast and barren as the ones they had left behind in Kiev. They weren’t homesick. They needed such environments in order to practice their art.