“You here on the Raven thing? Or just that fuzzgrunge tip you’ve been working on for the last, uh, thirty-six days approximately?” Lagos says.
Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter-wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro’s cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.
“You’re the guy who’s working with Juanita, right?” Hiro says.
“Or she’s working with me. Or something like that.”
“She said she wanted me to meet you.”
For several seconds Lagos is frozen. He’s ransacking more data. Hiro wants to throw a bucket of water on him.
“Makes sense,” he says. “You’re as familiar with the Metaverse as anyone. Freelance hacker—that’s exactly right.”
“Exactly right for what? No one wants freelance hackers anymore.”
“The corporate assembly-line hackers are suckers for infection. They’re going to go down by the thousands, just like Sennacherib’s army before the walls of Jerusalem,” Lagos says.
“Infection? Sennacherib?”
“And you can defend yourself in Reality, too—that’ll be good if you ever go up against Raven. Remember, his knives are as sharp as a molecule. They’ll go through a bulletproof jacket like lingerie.”
“Raven?”
“You’ll probably see him tonight. Don’t mess with him.”
“Okay,” Hiro says. “I’ll look out for him.”
“That’s not what I said,” Lagos says. “I said, don’t mess with him.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a dangerous world,” Lagos says. “Getting more dangerous all the time. So we don’t want to upset the balance of terror. Just think about the Cold War.”
“Yup.” All Hiro wants to do now is walk away and never see this guy again, but he won’t wind up the conversation.
“You’re a hacker. That means you have deep structures to worry about, too.”
“Deep structures?”
“Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?”
“Sure.”
“You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them—the axons split and push their way between the dividing glial cells—your bioware self-modifies—the software becomes part of the hardware. So now you’re vulnerable—all hackers are vulnerable—to a namshub. We have to look out for each other.”
“What’s a namshub? Why am I vulnerable to it?”
“Just don’t stare into any bitmaps. Anyone try to show you a raw bitmap lately? Like, in the Metaverse?”
Interesting. “Not to me personally, but now that you mention it, this Brandy came up to my friend—”
“A cult prostitute of Asherah. Trying to spread the disease. Which is synonymous with evil. Sound melodramatic? Not really. You know, to the Mesopotamians, there was no independent concept of evil. Just disease and ill health. Evil was a synonym for disease. So what does that tell you?”
Hiro walks away, the same way he walks away from psychotic street people who follow him down the street.
“It tells you that evil is a virus!” Lagos calls after him. “Don’t let the namshub into your operating system!”
Juanita’s working with this alien?
Blunt Force Trauma play for a solid hour, segueing from one song into the next with no chink or crevice in the wall of noise. All a part of the aesthetic. When the music stops, their set is over. For the first time, Hiro can hear the exaltation of the crowd. It’s a blast of high-pitched noise that he feels in his head, ringing his ears.
But there’s a low thudding sound, too, like someone pummeling a bass drum, and for a minute he thinks maybe it’s a truck rolling by on the overpass above them. But it’s too steady for that, it doesn’t die away.
It’s behind him. Other people have noticed it, turned to look toward the sound, are scurrying out of the way. Hiro sidesteps, turning to see what it is.
Big and black, to begin with. It does not seem as though such a large man could perch on a motorcycle, even a big chortling Harley like this one.
Correction. It’s a Harley with some kind of a sidecar added, a sleek black projectile hanging off to the right, supported on its own wheel. But no one is sitting in the sidecar.
It does not seem as though a man could be this bulky without being fat. But he’s not fat at all, he’s wearing tight stretchy clothes—like leather, but not quite—that show bones and muscles, but nothing else.
He is riding the Harley so slowly that he would certainly fall over if not for the sidecar. Occasionally he gooses it forward with a flick of the fingers on his clutch hand.
Maybe one reason he looks so big—other than the fact that he really is big—is the fact that he appears totally neckless. His head starts out wide and just keeps getting wider until it merges with his shoulders. At first Hiro thinks it must be some kind of avant-garde helmet. But when the man rolls past him, this great shroud moves and flutters and Hiro sees that it is just his hair, a thick mane of black hair tossed back over his shoulders, trailing down his back almost to his waist.
As he is marveling at this, he realizes that the man has turned his head to look back at him. Or to look in his general direction, anyway. It’s impossible to tell exactly what he’s looking at because of his goggles, a smooth convex shell over the eyes, interrupted by a narrow horizontal slit.