Raven strolls up to the big Crip. They shake hands, a standard plain old Euro-shake, no fancy variations. It’s not a real friendly get-together. The Crip has his eyes a little too wide open, Hiro can see the furrows in his brow, everything about his posture and his face screaming out: Get me away from this Martian.
Raven goes back to his radioactive hog, releases a few bungee cords, and picks up a metal briefcase. He hands it to the head Crip, and they shake hands again. Then he turns away, walks slowly and calmly back to the motorcycle, gets on, and putt-putts away.
Hiro would love to stick around and watch some more, but he has the feeling that Lagos has this particular event covered. And besides, he has other business. Two limousines are fighting their way through the crowd, headed for the stage.
The limousines stop, and Nipponese people start to climb out. Dark-clad, unfunky, they stand around awkwardly in the middle of the party/riot, like a handful of broken nails suspended in a colorful jello mold. Finally, Hiro makes bold enough to go up and look into one of the windows to find out if this is who he thinks it is.
Can’t see through the smoked glass. He bends down, puts his face right near the window, trying to make it real obvious.
Still no response. Finally, he knocks on the window.
Silence. He looks up at the entourage. They are all watching him. But when he looks up they glance away, suddenly remember to drag on their cigarettes or rub their eyebrows.
There is only one source of light inside the limousine that’s bright enough to be visible through the smoked glass, and that is the distinctive inflated rectangle of a television screen.
What the hell. This is America, Hiro is half American, and there’s no reason to take this politeness thing to an unhealthy extreme. He hauls the door open and looks into the back of the limousine.
Sushi K is sitting there wedged in between a couple of other young Nipponese men, programmers on his imageering team. His hairdo is turned off, so it just looks like an orange Afro. He is wearing a partly assembled stage costume, apparently expecting to be performing tonight. Looks like he’s taking Hiro up on his offer.
He’s watching a well-known television program called Eye Spy. It is produced by CIC and syndicated through one of the major studios. It is reality television: CIC picks out one of their agents who is involved in a wet operation—doing some actual cloak-and-dagger work—and has him put on a gargoyle rig so that everything he sees and hears is transmitted back to the home base in Langley. This material is then edited into a weekly hour-long program.
Hiro never watches it. Now that he works for CIC, he finds it kind of annoying. But he hears a lot of gossip about the show, and he knows that tonight they are showing the second-to-last episode in a five-part arc. CIC has smuggled a guy onto the Raft, where he is trying to infiltrate one of its many colorful and sadistic pirate bands: the Bruce Lee organization.
Hiro enters the limousine and gets a look at the TV just in time to see Bruce Lee himself, as seen from the point of view of the hapless gargoyle spy, approaching down some dank corridor on a Raft ghost ship. Condensation is dripping from the blade of Bruce Lee’s samurai sword.
“Bruce Lee’s men have trapped the spy in an old Korean factory ship in the Core,” one of Sushi K’s henchmen says, a rapid hissing explanation. “They are looking for him now.”
Suddenly, Bruce Lee is pinioned under a brilliant spotlight that makes his trademark diamond grin flash like the arm of a galaxy. In the middle of the screen, a pair of cross hairs swing into place, centered on Bruce Lee’s forehead. Apparently, the spy has decided he must fight his way out of this mess and is bringing some powerful CIC weapons system to bear on Bruce Lee’s skull. But then a blur comes in from the side, a mysterious dark shape blocking our view of Bruce Lee. The cross hairs are now centered on—what, exactly?
We’ll have to wait until next week to find out.
Hiro sits down across from Sushi K and the programmers, next to the television set, so that he can get a TV’s-eye view of the man.
“I’m Hiro Protagonist. You got my message, I take it.”
“Fabu!” Sushi K cries, using the Nipponese abbreviation of the all-purpose Hollywood adjective “fabulous.”
He continues, “Hiro-san, I am deeply indebted to you for this once-in-a-lifetime chance to perform my small works before such an audience.” He says the whole thing in Nipponese except for “once-in-a-lifetime chance.”
“I must humbly apologize for arranging the whole thing so hastily and haphazardly,” Hiro says.
“It pains me deeply that you should feel the need to apologize when you have given me an opportunity that any Nipponese rapper would give anything for—to perform my humble works before actual homeboys from the ghettos of L.A.”
“I am profoundly embarrassed to reveal that these fans are not exactly ghetto homeboys, as I must have carelessly led you to believe. They are thrashers. Skateboarders who like both rap music and heavy metal.”
“Ah. This is fine, then,” Sushi K says. But his tone of voice suggests that it’s not really fine at all.