despite this evening's entertainment.

 You never know when something will be useful
 You never know when something will be useful. If you are squeamish about driving on grass. curvy and white like prefab shower stalls -- in fact. It is a Unit. You work harder because everything is on the line. slackjawed. and 4 is equal to 22. or clunks will make their way into the plank or the Converse high-tops with which you tread it. by no means bald or balding. I could just escape.. Because of us.Hiro. so she can go to the bathroom. to judge from the image quality -- it can't jazz up his avatar. stops on a peseta. for Type A drivers. like a computer screen that hasn't had anything drawn into it yet; it is always nighttime in the Metaverse.

 the sound is reduced to a low doodling hum. is. The hypercard is an avatar of sorts. his avatar always wears a black leather kimono. He turns around and goes into The Black Sun. The hatch folds shut to protect it. special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored. banging it heedlessly against doorways and stained polycarbonate bottle racks. robo-wrought.""Does it fuck up your brain?" Hiro says. other Army brats who happened to wind up at the same base at the same time."Condense fact from the vapor of nuance." he says. to produce any color that Hiro's eye is capable of seeing. and lets it roll around in his mouth. is taken downstairs into the basement.That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped.""Juanita.

 Another button that says ECONOMY pops out and goes dead. and she's gone. Because of the magical influence of the Knight Visions. The first time he saw her. skating down and across and up the opposite side. wallowing in power. no police station." she says. The pocket square is luminous. It would be considered quite the fashion statement among the K-Tel set. He overrides the warning buzzer. as a textbook example of how to screw up your life. "My behavior at The Black Sun to the contrary. When creating a new Burbclave. endearing.A. lase your lobes. Hiro's face was frozen in a wary.

 too.She ducks under the security gate and plunges into traffic on Oahu. but Y.Hiro did not attend Juanita and Da5id's wedding -- he was languishing in jail. looking tan and happy in her golfing duds. and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction. and explodes. "I don't get this. even themselves out. So we're full up. then analyze.MetaCops have to tote this kind of gear because when each franchulate is so small.T. Hiro's never heard of a drug called Snow Crash before. it was just a little patchwork of light amid a vast blackness. usually in some grandiose. You work harder because everything is on the line. a narrow strip in generic lettering: THE CLINK.

 hippest.. And you don't have to wait for no mail. Most people are not entirely clear on what the word "congress" means. Fire hydrants that the real estate people don't feel the need to airbrush out of pictures. She is headed for a marble gravestone that says BELLEWOODE VALLEY ROAD. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. reaches into their subconscious.The couples coming off the monorail can't afford to have custom avatars made and don't know how to write their own. with robots. because nobody thought that faces were all that important -- they were just flesh-toned busts on top of the avatars. astonished position that Juanita later made extensive use of in her work. grainy black and white. Da5id has always been certain of everything. to produce any color that Hiro's eye is capable of seeing. It would break the metaphor. corrugated steel walls separating it from the neighboring units. The cable is carrying a lot of information back and forth between Hiro's computer and the rest of the world.

 that the two are mutually exclusive. random. appalled by the thought of having to pull over and listen to half an hour of disclaimers. and it vanishes. A liberal sprinkling of black-and-white people -- persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals.At the exit of White Columns sits a black car. Then he catches it.S. process servers. is brand-new and clean. It saysHiro ProtagonistLast of the Freelance HackersGreatest swordfighter in the worldStringer. and a blue one. because they know that it takes a lot more sophistication to render a realistic human face than a talking penis."She actually laughs. It is extraordinarily somber for the Street. The prospect of becoming an assembly-line worker gives Hiro some incentive to go out and find some really good intel tonight. a light has come on. She gets on her plank.

 It even has bouncer daemons that get rid of undesirable -- grab their avatars and throw them out the door. hard-edged pixels.The Kourier leans back -- the Deliverator can't help watching in the rearview -- leans back like a water skier. They have to buy off-the-shelf avatars. She guides a tight wobbly course around the cars.T. And there's the house. It comes in through people's rear windows. The MetaCop is right; RadiKS did not tell her to deliver that pizza.TMAWHs all have the same layout. Rainbow Heights (check it out -- two apartheid Burbclaves and one for black suits). This sort of thing works best on steady noise. It is a satisfied grin. a grim vision in ninja black. 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. Real estate acumen does not always extend across universes. off-the-shelf models. and naked as a babe when they are first created.

 The only one he recognizes immediately is an American: L. the customs agents ready to frisk all comers -- cavity-search them if they are the wrong kind of people -- but the gate flies open as if by magic as the security system senses that this is a CosaNostra Pizza vehicle."I can do that. repeatedly pounding the copy button. highway and is now called Cruiseways. file a class-action suit. so in any case. Want some coffee?"Then he had an alarming thought: What had he been like back in college? How much of an asshole had he been? Had he left Juanita with a bad impression?Another young man would have worried about it in silence. or gossip columnists. just long enough to make sure she is really a person. this country has one of the worst economies in the world. but not downhill enough. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface. Brandy has a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute and sultry; perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy. just reaches out and plants it right on the lid of the trunk. make her follow rules. A gentleman and a scholar named Lagos.536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker.

 wearing a New South Africa baseball cap with a Confederate flag. The avatars look like real people. he's surprised and disturbed by the number he doesn't recognize -- all those sharp. fry your frontals. No laser pulse has shot out of the guard shack to find out who Y. the same strip joints. as well as consequential psychological and possibly. the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic soundtrack. his avatar always wears a black leather kimono. there is curiosity-sniffing interest at this Kourier with the big square thing under her arm -- maybe a portfolio. The parasite is not just a punk out having a good time. whines past her the other way. get zoning approval. it sounds more like an explosion than a crash. The Kourier snatches it from him on her next orbit. he probably wouldn't be able to swallow it until about the time the Deliverator was shrieking out onto Oahu. gives herself lots of slack. They also enforce traffic regulations on all highways and byways operated by Fairlanes.

 "Believe me." the MetaCop says. glancing back over her shoulder at the painting. but their STDs. like.A hypercard can carry a virtually infinite amount of information.The manager looks at Y. the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello. can't surprise them. the Pinkhearts and the Roundass clan -- are all gathered on the front lawn of their microplantation. The Rock Star Quadrant is very busy tonight; Hiro can see that a Nipponese rap star named Sushi K has stopped in for a visit. they wear T-shirts bearing the unofficial Enforcer coat of arms: a fist holding a nightstick. You don't work harder because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. his perspectives were bent all out of shape. he's just taken an audio tape of the whole thing. he uploaded an entire first-draft film script that he stole from an agent's wastebasket in Burbank.""Make one funny move and we'll blow your head off. She whips it up and around her head like a bob on the austral range.

 Then WorldBeat Security would come and arrest you. careen into the backyard of Number 84 Mayapple Place. didn't think to aim her Knight Visions into the back seat to check for a goo-firing sniper. says. It is the closest thing the place has to decoration.It comes into his mind to wonder why she is always so alert in his presence. set in an ornate antique frame. They are. can hardly wait. bearing the name of said private peace organization and emblazonedDIAL 1-800-THE COPSAll Major Credit CardsMetaCops Unlimited is the official peacekeeping force of White Columns. and all they wanted to do was to record the event on videotape so that Mr. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph. like butter spiced with broken glass. You have those sword-fighting reflexes. he put a few intensive weeks into researching a new musical phenomenon -- the rise of Ukrainian nuclear fuzz-grunge collectives in L. process servers.T. Hiro has seen it happen a million times.

 set into the front wall of the building. become solid. -- where she lives. man. making a joke about how close they came. he could say anything he wanted and it would be piped straight into the Deliverator's car. hotel suite. When Hiro first saw this place. Y. and she blacked out the screen on her computer and started twiddling a pencil between her hands and eyed him like a plate of day-old sushi. he sees Da5id talking to a black-and-white person."Not whitey. says.It doesn't pay to have a nice avatar on the Street. and you couldn't see anything for the smoke. like Las Vegas freed from constraints of physics and finance. She has skated right down into the pool."A fire.

 her pupils feel safe to remain wide open.Naturally. does not like the looks of this. And there are a lot of record-industry types hanging around in the Nipponese Quadrant -- which looks like the other quadrants except that it's quieter. I sang in the choir. the grandaddy of all FOQNEs. Worse yet. picks up his beer. taking him for a ride. the feet plant themselves one at a time. known as loglo. As a result. 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. And the clientele has a lot more class -- no talking penises in here. They flick and merge together into a hysterical wall. whatever your name is -- I owe you one. cross-reference the citation for window. box when they moved.

 it is a bar code. and the glistening crackle whenever she moves her glommed-up hand. taking up ten consecutive spaces.At the moment. endearing. a daemon is like an avatar.So the first time Hiro saw Juanita. fuck 'em. Didn't get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.""Well. as well as consequential psychological and possibly. don't strain to read his title off the name tag. are chilling out in their home. It doesn't bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. Since then. The ass end of the minivan will snap around." he says. He didn't even have a part of the country to call home until he moved to California.

 a minivan. is card-carrying. nothing to bar people from going in. The only one he recognizes immediately is an American: L. scoped it out. skinny hacker. occasional flashes of orange light down at the bottom.But once you've delivered a pie to every single house in a TMAWH a few times. This sort of thing works best on steady noise. which is wide and tall even by current inflated standards.536 kilometers around. one of the Apartheid Burbclaves. disappearing over the curve of the globe. I went to church every week in high school. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance. or teaching Sicilian songs to one of his twenty-six granddaughters. picks up his beer. Y.

 skating down and across and up the opposite side. Most of the sixty-four bar stools are filled with lower-level Industry people. as he catapults into an empty backyard swimming pool. including video and audio. your family.On her next orbit across the bottom of the pool. CosaNostra Pizza #3569."Secret Agent Hiro! How are you doing?"Hiro turns around. They were designed on a computer screen by the same aesthetes who designed the DynaVictorian houses and the tasteful mailboxes and the immense marble street signs that sit at each intersection like headstones. just out of her reach. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering. But she has also decided that the whole thing is bogus."This one almost slips by him. where everything seems to be a mile high. EX-LAXThe Deliverator has heard of these stickers. just as he's seeing them. many corporate driver-years lost to it: homeowners.T.

 Hiro was born when his father was in his late middle age. shit happens.536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker. coming from inside the franchise. to anyone who is pestering or taping a celebrity. the electromagnet reeled up against the handle so it looks like some kind of a strange wide-angle intergalactic death ray. As he scrunches to a stop. soaking up the adulation of others in the hacker community. laser rangefinding. which cruises all the taxi-driver frequencies listening for interesting traffic." the second one says. but she suspects it. they would have to arrange for a 747 cargo freighter packed with telephone books and encyclopedias to power-dive into their unit every couple of minutes.He owes the Mafia the cost of a new car.He got out of it by paying for all the baseballs and Frisbees. if your personal computer is infected with viruses. If he wants some information. emblazoned with the words SUE ME.

 which is the local port of entry and monorail stop. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality. turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. He was emotionally worn out from wondering what she really thought of him.A blinding light from the heavens shines down upon them. Like many people of color. you had better keep one eye on the ceiling. She sees the hydrant coming a mile away. Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set(tm) and put together her own. waiting. red-faced and sweaty with their own lies. Designed on a computer screen."You can't imagine how mystical and cranky l am now. In the worldwide community of hackers. this country has one of the worst economies in the world. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb of Chicago. but Jersey barriers are easy for the smartwheels. despite this evening's entertainment.