Opening: The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.
Review: Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is a captivating, thought-provoking read that seamlessly combines cyberpunk, sci-fi, and ancient mythology. Set in a dystopian future, this novel plunges readers into exploring language’s power and the nature of consciousness.
The metaverse, a mesmerising digital realm intertwined with the physical world, provides a fascinating setting for the story. For me, Stephenson’s elaborate world-building sometimes renders the novel somewhat dense and challenging to read. Yet, the gripping plot involving the Snow Crash virus, a menace to humans and machines, held my attention.
Stephenson’s examination of language as more than merely a means of communication intrigued me. The ancient Sumerian language, a primaeval code with the power to rewire our brains, made me ponder the question: how do we know when thoughts are indeed our own?
Snow Crash stands the test of time for good reason. Strongly recommended.
Some of my fave excerpts:
The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polished glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine, this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with the surface of the computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface.
Chapter 3
Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading millions of other fragments at the same time. CIC’s clients, mostly large corporations and Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if they find a use for something that Hiro put into it, Hiro gets paid.
The lens can see half of the universe—the half that is above the computer, which includes most of Hiro. In this way, it can generally keep track of where Hiro is and what direction he’s looking in.
Down inside the computer are three lasers—a red one, a green one, and a blue one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful enough to burn through the back of your eyeball and broil your brain, fry your frontals, lase your lobes. As everyone learned in elementary school, these three colors of light can be combined, with different intensities, to produce any color that Hiro’s eye is capable of seeing.
In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards of the computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the use of electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep back and forth across the lenses of Hiro’s goggles, in much the same way as the electron beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous Tube. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro’s view of Reality.
By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, it can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic soundtrack.
So Hiro’s not actually here at all. He’s in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.
The dimensions of the Street are fixed by a protocol, hammered out by the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Global Multimedia Protocol Group. The Street seems to be a grand boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers. That makes it 65,536 kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than Earth.
The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist—it’s just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere —none of these things is being physically built. They are, rather, pieces of software, made available to the public over the world-wide fiber-optics network. When Hiro goes into the Metaverse and looks down the Street and sees buildings and electric signs stretching off into the darkness, disappearing over the curve of the globe, he is actually staring at the graphic representations—the user interfaces—of a myriad different pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations. In order to place these things on the Street, they have had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buy frontage on the Street, get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors, the whole bit. The money these corporations pay to build things on the Street all goes into a trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays for developing and expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
“Hey, Hiro,” the black-and-white guy says, “you want to try some Snow Crash?” A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird things. You ignore them. But this gets Hiro’s attention. Oddity the first: The guy knows Hiro’s name. But people have ways of getting that information. It’s probably nothing. The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. Which would be normal in front of a Reality bar. But this is the Metaverse. And you can’t sell drugs in the Metaverse, because you can’t get high by looking at something. The third: The name of the drug. Hiro’s never heard of a drug called Snow Crash before. That’s not unusual—a thousand new drugs get invented each year, and each of them sells under half a dozen brand names. But “snow crash” is computer lingo. It means a system crash—a bug—at such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the screen, turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. Hiro has seen it happen a million times. But it’s a very peculiar name for a drug.
Chapter 5
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
“Da5id,” Hiro says, “I can’t believe you took a hypercard from a black- and-white person.”
Chapter 9
Da5id laughs. “This is not the old days, my friend. I’ve got so much antiviral medicine in my system that nothing could get through. I get so much contaminated shit from all the hackers who come through here, it’s like working in a plague ward. So I’m not afraid of whatever’s in this hypercard.”
“Well, in that case, I’m curious,” Hiro says.
“Yeah. Me, too.” Da5id laughs.
“It’s probably something very disappointing.”
“Probably an animercial,” Da5id agrees. “Think I should do it?”
“Yeah. Go for it. It’s not every day you get to try out a new drug,” Hiro says.
“Well, you can try one every day if you want to,” Da5id says, “but it’s not every
day you find one that can’t hurt you.” He picks up the hypercard and tears it in half.
For a second, nothing happens. “I’m waiting,” Da5id says.
[…]
An avatar materializes on the table in front of Da5id, starting out ghostly and transparent, gradually becoming solid and three-dimensional. It’s a really trite effect; Hiro and Da5id are already laughing.
The avatar is a stark naked Brandy. It doesn’t even look like the standard Brandy; this looks like one of the cheap Taiwanese Brandy knockoffs. Clearly, it’s just a daemon. She is holding a pair of tubes in her hands, about the size of paper-towel rolls.
Da5id is leaning back in his chair, enjoying this. There is something hilariously tawdry about the entire scene.
The Brandy leans forward, beckoning Da5id toward her. Da5id leans into her face, grinning broadly. She puts her crude, ruby-red lips up by his ear and mumbles something that Hiro can’t hear.
When she leans back away from Da5id, his face has changed. He looks dazed and expressionless. Maybe Da5id really looks that way; maybe Snow Crash has messed up his avatar somehow so that it’s no longer tracking Da5id’s true facial expressions. But he’s staring straight ahead, eyes frozen in their sockets.
The Brandy holds the pair of tubes up in front of Da5id’s immobilized face and spreads them apart. It’s actually a scroll. She’s unrolling it right in front of Da5id’s face, spreading it apart like a flat two-dimensional screen in front of his eyes. Da5id’s paralyzed face has taken on a bluish tinge as it reflects light coming out of the scroll.
Hiro walks around the table to look. He gets a brief glimpse of the scroll before the Brandy snaps it shut again. It is a living wall of light, like a flexible, flat-screened television set, and it’s not showing anything at all. Just static. White noise. Snow.
Then she’s gone, leaving no trace behind. Desultory, sarcastic applause sounds from a few tables in the Hacker Quadrant. Da5id’s back to normal, wearing a grin that’s part snide and part embarrassed.
“What was it?” Hiro says. “I just glimpsed some snow at the very end.”
“You saw the whole thing,” Da5id says. “A fixed-pattern of black-and- white pixels, fairly high-resolution. Just a few hundred thousand ones and zeroes for me to look at.”
“So in other words, someone just exposed your optic nerve to, what, maybe a hundred thousand bytes of information,” Hiro says.
“Noise, is more like it.”
“Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code,” Hiro says.
“Why would anyone show me information in binary code? I’m not a computer. I can’t read a bitmap.”
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees, dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them.
Chapter 12
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
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.
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.
Chapter 13
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Hiro has an account with The Rest Stop. To live at the U-Stor-It, you sort of have to have an account. So he gets to bypass the front office where the attendant waits by the cash register. He shoves his membership card into a slot, and a computer screen lights up with three choices: M / F / NURSERY (UNISEX). Hiro slaps the “M” button. Then the screen changes to a menu of four choices:
- OUR SPECIAL LIMITED FACILITIES— THRIFTY BUT SANITARY
- STANDARD FACILITIES—JUST LIKE HOME—MAYBE JUST A LITTLE BETTER
- PRIME FACILITIES—A GRACIOUS PLACE FOR THE DISCRIMINATING PATRON
- THE LAVATORY GRANDE ROYALE
Chapter 24
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
“His software got poisoned. Da5id had a snow crash last night, inside his head.”
Chapter 26
“Are you trying to say it’s a psychological problem?”
“It kind of goes beyond those established categories,” Juanita says, “because it’s a new phenomenon. A very old one, actually.”
“Does this thing just happen spontaneously, or what?”
“You tell me,” she says. “You were there last night. Did anything happen after I left?”
“He had a Snow Crash hypercard that he got from Raven outside The Black Sun.”
[…]
“The Brandy’s scroll wasn’t just showing random static. It was flashing up a large amount of digital information, in binary form. That digital information was going straight into Da5id’s optic nerve. Which is part of the brain, incidentally—if you stare into a person’s pupil, you can see the terminal of the brain.”
“Da5id’s not a computer. He can’t read binary code.”
“He’s a hacker. He messes with binary code for a living. That ability is firm-wired into the deep structures of his brain. So he’s susceptible to that form of information. And so are you, home-boy.”
“What kind of information are we talking about?”
“Bad news. A metavirus,” Juanita says. “It’s the atomic bomb of informational warfare—a virus that causes any system to infect itself with new viruses.”
[…]
“But I have another question. Raven also distributes another drug—in Reality—called, among other things, Snow Crash. What is it?”
“It’s not a drug,” Juanita says. “They make it look like a drug and feel like a drug so that people will want to take it. It’s laced with cocaine and some other stuff.”
“If it’s not a drug, what is it?”
“It’s chemically processed blood serum taken from people who are infected with the metavirus,” Juanita says. “That is, it’s just another way of spreading the infection.”
“Who’s spreading it?”
“L. Bob Rife’s private church. All of those people are infected.”
Hiro puts his head in his hands. He’s not exactly thinking about this; he’s letting it ricochet around in his skull, waiting for it to come to rest. “Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?”
Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
That prior to Babel/Infocalypse, languages tended to converge. And that afterward, languages have always had an innate tendency to diverge and become mutually incomprehensible—that this tendency is, as he put it, coiled like a serpent around the human brainstem.”
Chapter 28
“The only thing that could explain that is—” Hiro stops, not wanting to say it.
“Yes?” the Librarian says.
“If there was some phenomenon that moved through the population, altering their minds in such a way that they couldn’t process the Sumerian language anymore. Kind of in the same way that a virus moves from one computer to another, damaging each computer in the same way. Coiling around the brainstem.”
“Lagos devoted much time and effort to this idea,” the Librarian says. “He felt that the nam-shub of Enki was a neurolinguistic virus.”
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
“Why, exactly, is Marduk handing Hammurabi a one and a zero in this picture?” Hiro asks.
Chapter 33
“They were emblems of royal power,” the Librarian says. “Their origin is obscure.”
“Enki must have been responsible for that one,” Hiro says.
“Enki’s most important role is as the creator and guardian of the me and the gis-hur, the ‘key words’ and ‘patterns’ that rule the universe.”
“Tell me more about the me.”
“To quote Kramer and Maier again, ‘[They believed in] the existence from time primordial of a fundamental, unalterable, comprehensive assortment of powers and duties, norms and standards, rules and regulations, known as me, relating to the cosmos and its components, to gods and humans, to cities and countries, and to the varied aspects of civilized life.’ ”
[…]
“Yes. Apparently, they are like algorithms for carrying out certain activities essential to the society. Some of them have to do with the workings of priesthood and kingship. Some explain how to carry out religious ceremonies. Some relate to the arts of war and diplomacy. Many of them are about the arts and crafts: music, carpentry, smithing, tanning, building, farming, even such simple tasks as lighting fires.”
“The operating system of society.”
“When you first turn on a computer, it is an inert collection of circuits that can’t really do anything. To start up the machine, you have to infuse those circuits with a collection of rules that tell it how to function. How to be a computer. It sounds as though these me served as the operating system of the society, organizing an inert collection of people into a functioning system.”
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
“There are two schools: relativists and universalists. As George Steiner summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of thought but its determining medium. It is the framework of cognition. Our perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of sensations passing over that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself.”
Chapter 36
“Okay, I can see the significance of that. What about the universalists?”
“In contrast with the relativists, who believe that languages need not have anything in common with each other, the universalists believe that if you can analyze languages enough, you can find that all of them have certain traits in common. So they analyze languages, looking for such traits.”
“Have they found any?”
“No. There seems to be an exception to every rule.” “Which blows universalism out of the water.”
“Not necessarily. They explain this problem by saying that the shared traits are too deeply buried to be analyzable.”
“Which is a cop out.”
“Their point is that at some level, language has to happen inside the human brain. Since all human brains are more or less the same—”
“The hardware’s the same. Not the software.”
“You are using some kind of metaphor that I cannot understand.”
“Well, a French-speaker’s brain starts out the same as an English- speaker’s brain. As they grow up, they get programmed with different software—they learn different languages.”
“Yes. Therefore, according to the universalists, French and English—or any other languages—must share certain traits that have their roots in the ‘deep structures’ of the human brain. According to Chomskyan theory, the deep structures are innate components of the brain that enable it to carry out certain formal kinds of operations on strings of symbols. Or, as Steiner paraphrases Emmon Bach: These deep structures eventually lead to the actual patterning of the cortex with its immensely ramified yet, at the same time, ‘programmed’ network of electrochemical and neurophysiological channels.”
“But these deep structures are so deep we can’t even see them?”
“The universalists place the active nodes of linguistic life—the deep structures—so deep as to defy observation and description. Or to use Steiner’s analogy: Try to draw up the creature from the depths of the sea, and it will disintegrate or change form grotesquely.”
“There’s that serpent again. So which theory did Lagos believe in? The relativist or the universalist?”
“He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning.”
“But it seems to me there is a key difference,” Hiro says. “The universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains—the pathways in the cortex. The relativists don’t believe that we have any limits.”
“Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a language is like blowing code into PROMs—an analogy that I cannot interpret.”
“The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips,” Hiro says. “When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it—the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip—it transmutes into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out, but you can’t write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the newborn human brain has no structure—as the relativists would have it—and that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself accordingly, the language gets ‘blown into’ the hardware and becomes a permanent part of the brain’s deep structure—as the universalists would have it.”
“Yes. This was his interpretation.”
“Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers, what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it—digital nam-shubs.”
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
NEW TP POOL REGULATIONS
I’ve been asked to distribute the new regulations regarding office pool displays. The enclosed memo is a new subchapter of the EBGOC Procedure Manual, replacing the old subchapter entitled PHYSICAL PLANT/CALIFORNIA/LOS ANGELES/BUILDINGS/OFFICE AREAS/PHYSICAL LAYOUT REGULATIONS/EMPLOYEE INPUT/GROUP ACTIVITIES.
The old subchapter was a flat prohibition on the use of office space or time for “pool” activities of any kind, whether permanent (e.g., coffee pool) or one-time (e.g., birthday parties).
This prohibition still applies, but a single, onetime exception has now been made for any office that wishes to pursue a joint bathroom- tissue strategy.
By way of introduction, let me just make a few general comments on this subject. The problem of distributing bathroom tissue to workers presents inherent challenges for any office management system due to the inherent unpredictability of usage—not every facility usage transaction necessitates the use of bathroom tissue, and when it is used, the amount needed (number of squares) may vary quite widely from person to person and, for a given person, from one transaction to the next. This does not even take into account the occasional use of bathroom tissue for unpredictable/creative purposes such as applying/removing cosmetics, beveragespill management, etc. For this reason, rather than trying to package bathroom tissue in small one- transaction packets (as is done with premoistened towelettes, for example), which can be wasteful in some cases and limiting in other cases, it has been traditional to package this product in bulk distribution units whose size exceeds the maximum amount of squares that an individual could conceivably use in a single transaction (barring force majeure). This reduces to a minimum the number of transactions in which the distribution unit is depleted (the roll runs out) during the transaction, a situation that can lead to emotional stress for the affected employee. However, it does present the manager with some challenges in that the distribution unit is rather bulky and must be repeatedly used by a number of different individuals if it is not to be wasted.
Since the implementation of Phase XVII of the Austerity Program, employees have been allowed to bring their own bathroom tissue from home. This approach is somewhat bulky and redundant, as every worker usually brings their own roll.
Some offices have attempted to meet this challenge by instituting bathroom-tissue pools.
Without overgeneralizing, it may be stated that an inherent and irreducible feature of any bathroom-tissue pool implemented at the office level, in an environment (i.e., building) in which comfort stations are distributed on a per-floor basis (i.e., in which several offices share a single facility) is that provision must be made within the confines of the individual office for temporary stationing of bathroom tissue distribution units (i.e., rolls). This follows from the fact that if the BTDUs (rolls) are stationed, while inactive, outside of the purview of the controlling office (i.e., the office that has collectively purchased the BTDU)—that is, if the BTDUs are stored, for example, in a lobby area or within the facility in which they are actually utilized, they will be subject to pilferage and “shrinkage” as unauthorized persons consume them, either as part of a conscious effort to pilfer or out of an honest misunderstanding, i.e., a belief that the BTDUs are being provided free of charge by the operating agency (in this case the United States Government), or as the result of necessity, as in the case of a beverage spill that is encroaching on sensitive electronic equipment and whose management will thus brook no delay. This fact has led certain offices (which shall go unnamed—you know who you are, guys) to establish makeshift BTDU depots that also serve as pool-contribution collection points. Usually, these depots take the form of a table, near the door closest to the facility, on which the BTDUs are stacked or otherwise deployed, with a bowl or some other receptacle in which participants may place their contributions, and typically with a sign or other attention-getting device (such as a stuffed animal or cartoon) requesting donations. A quick glance at the current regulations will show that placement of such a display/depot violates the procedure manual. However, in the interests of employee hygiene, morale, and group spirit-building, my higher-ups have agreed to make a one-time exception in the regulations for this purpose.
As with any part of the procedure manual, new or old, it is your responsibility to be thoroughly familiar with this material. Estimated reading time for this document is 15.62 minutes (and don’t think we won’t check). Please make note of the major points made in this document, as follows:
- BTDU depot/displays are now allowed, on a trial basis, with the new policy to be reviewed in six months.
- These must be operated on a voluntary, pool-type basis, as described in the subchapter on employee pools. (Note: This means keeping books and tallying all financial transactions.)
- BTDUs must be brought in by the employees (not shipped through the mailroom) and are subject to all the usual search-and-seizure regulations.
- Scented BTDUs are prohibited as they may cause allergic reactions, wheezing, etc. in some persons.
- Cash pool donations, as with all monetary transactions within the U.S. Government, must use official U.S. currency—no yen or Kongbucks!
Naturally, this will lead to a bulk problem if people try to use the donation bucket as a dumping ground for bundles of old billion- and trillion-dollar bills. The Buildings and Grounds people are worried about waste-disposal problems and the potential fire hazard that may ensue if large piles of billions and trillions begin to mount up. Therefore, a key feature of the new regulation is that the donation bucket must be emptied every day—more often if an excessive build- up situation is seen to develop.
Chapter 37
In this vein, the B & G people would also like me to point out that many of you who have excess U.S. currency to get rid of have been trying to kill two birds with one stone by using old billions as bathroom tissue. While creative, this approach has two drawbacks:
1. It clogs the plumbing, and
2. It constitutes defacement of U.S. currency, which is a federal crime.
DON’T DO IT.
Join your office bathroom-tissue pool instead. It’s easy, it’s hygienic, and it’s legal.Happy pooling! Marietta.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
They have a new species here too: people with antennas coming out of their heads. The antennas look like the ones on cop walkie-talkies: short, blunt, black rubber whips. They rise up from behind the ear. The first time she sees one of these people, she figures it must be some kind of new Walkman, and she wants to ask the guy where he got it, what he’s listening to. But he’s a strange guy, stranger than all of the others, with a permanent thousand-yard stare and a bad case of the mumbles, and he ends up giving her the creeps so bad that she just shoves an extra-large dose of stew in his face and hurries him on down the line.
Chapter 43
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Ideology is a virus.
Chapter 48
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
“See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,” Raven says.
Chapter 52
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The thing sticking up out of his head is a whip antenna about a foot long. It is encased in black rubber, like the antennas on cop walkie-talkies, and it is strapped onto his head, above the left ear. This is one of the antenna- heads that Eliot warned them about.
Chapter 53
Hiro grabs the antenna and pulls. He might as well take the headset with him—it must have something to do with the way L. Bob Rife controls the Raft. It doesn’t come off. When Hiro pulls, what’s left of the guy’s head twists around, but the antenna doesn’t come loose. And that’s how Hiro figures out that this isn’t a headset at all. The antenna has been permanently grafted onto the base of the man’s skull.
Hiro switches his goggles into millimeter-wave radar and stares into the man’s ruined head.
The antenna is attached to the skull by means of short screws that go into the bone, but do not pierce all the way through. The base of the antenna contains a few microchips, whose purpose Hiro cannot divine by looking at them. But nowadays you can put a supercomputer on a single chip, so anytime you see more than one chip together in one place, you’re looking at significant ware.
A single hair-thin wire emerges from the base of the antenna and penetrates the skull. It passes straight through to the brainstem and then branches and re-branches into a network of invisibly tiny wires embedded in the brain tissue. Coiled around the base of the tree.
Which explains why this guy continues to pump out a steady stream of Raft babble even when his brain is missing: It looks like L. Bob Rife has figured out a way to make electrical contact with the part of the brain where Asherah lives. These words aren’t originating here. It’s a pentecostal radio broadcast coming through on his antenna.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Chapter 56 is one of my fave chapters. Uncle Enzo’s concept of neurolinguistic hacking and the power of language to shape our perceptions and actions is intriguing. He introduces nam-shubs, verbal streams of data that can program people’s minds, and distinguishes between acquired language and deep-structure language, which is traced back to the verbal rules of primitive societies. Uncle Enzo also explores the metavirus, which infected humans and led to the development of diseases, and the nam-shub of Enki, a countervirus that reprogrammed the brain’s deep structures. It also touches on the gateway of Babel and the persistence of the cult of Asherah.
“He can control these people by grafting radio receivers into their skulls, broadcasting instructions—me—directly into their brainstems. If one person in a hundred has a receiver, he can act as the local en and distribute the me of L. Bob Rife to all the others. They will act out L. Bob Rife’s instructions as though they have been programmed to. And right now, he has about a million of these people poised off the California coast.
Chapter 56
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
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