Snow Crash

snow n... 2.a. Anything resembling snow. b. The white specks on a television screen resulting from weak reception. crash v... -infr.. . . 5, To fail suddenly, as a business or an economy. - The American Heritage Dictionary virus.. . . [L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste.] 1. Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. 2. Path. a. A morbidprinciple or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of somedisease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals byinoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them.. . . 3.fig. A moral or intellectual poison, or poisonous influence. -The OxfordEnglish Dictionary 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 ofthe night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very lightout of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wrenhitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breezethrough a freshly napalmed forest, Where his body has bony extremities, the suithas sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack oftelephone books. When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway -- might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, acm-styled, lightweight, the kind of gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocityof an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it intothe cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity. The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wantedthemselves a delivery, and they didn't want to pay for it. Thought they wouldimpress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun,centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. Therecoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middlethird of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust acceleratingin all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handlewith milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn't getnothing but trouble from the Deliverator. Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weaponof choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren't afraid of the gun, so theDeliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstrations. The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burbbeater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming,polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches,talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator'scar has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs.The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on apeseta. Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, yougot a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they haveguns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of theworst economies in the world.

big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs.The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on apeseta. Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, yougot a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they haveguns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of theworst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balanceshere -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, oncethings have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens inTadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources hasbeen made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship NorthDakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand hastaken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad globallayer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'knowwhat? There's only four things we do better than anyone else music moviesmicrocode (software)high-speed pizza delivery The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, theDeliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needsto work harder on his cooperation skills." So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, yourpie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car,file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes. Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it: homeowners, red-faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old Spice andjob-related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways brandishing theirSeikos and waving at the clock over the kitchen sink, I swear, can't you guystell time? Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery a major industry. A managed industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came inits doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda,Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouinknows about sand. And they had studied this problem. Graphed the frequency ofdoorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, thenanalyze, the debating tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctivegrammatical structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupantswho against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personalCusterian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: theywere going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call andget themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with theirlife, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was fucking inalienable. Sentpsychologists out to these people's houses, gave them a free TV set to submit toan anonymous interview, hooked them to polygraphs, studied their brain waves asthey showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn queens and late-night carcrashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put them in sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms andasked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn'trespond without committing a venial sin. The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human nature and you couldn't fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technicalfix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated forstiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator howmany trade imbalance-pro

., put them in sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms andasked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn'trespond without committing a venial sin. The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human nature and you couldn't fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technicalfix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated forstiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator howmany trade imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phonecall. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack ofthem, in slots behind the Deliverator's head. Each pizza glides into a slotlike a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart boxinterfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator's car. The address of thecaller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smartbox's built-in RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which computesand projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored maptraced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have toglance down. If the thirty-minute deadline expires, news of the disaster is flashed to CosaNostra Pizza Headquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo himself --the Sicilian Colonel Sanders, the Andy Griffith of Bensonhurst, the straightrazor-swinging figment of many a Deliverator's nightmares, the Capo and primefigurehead of CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated -- who will be on the phone to thecustomer within five minutes, apologizing profusely. The next day, Uncle Enzowill land on the customer's yard in a jet helicopter and apologize some more andgive him a free trip to Italy -- all he has to do is sign a bunch of releasesthat make him a public figure and spokesperson for CosaNostra Pizza andbasically end his private life as he knows it. He will come away from the wholething feeling that, somehow, be owes the Mafia a favor. The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases, but he has heard some rumors. Most pizza deliveries happen in the eveninghours, which Uncle Enzo considers to be his private time. And how would youfeel if you bad to interrupt dinner with your family in order to call some obstreperous dork in a Burbclave and grovel for a late fucking pizza? Uncle Enzo has not put in fifty years serving his family and his country so that, atthe age when most are playing golf and bobbling their granddaughters, he can getout of the bathtub dripping wet and lie down and kiss the feet of some sixteen-year-old skate punk whose pepperoni was thirty-one minutes in coming. Oh, God.It makes the Deliverator breathe a little shallower just to think of the idea. But he wouldn't drive for CosaNostra Pizza any other way.You know why? Because there's something about having your life on the line. It's like being a kamikaze pilot. Your mind is clear. Other people -- storeclerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaninglessjobs that make up Life in America -- other people just rely on plain oldcompetition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster and better than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging,because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things.What a fucking rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition.Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don't work harder because you'recompeting against some identical operation down the street. You work harderbecause everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, yourlife. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy -- but whatkind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That's why nobody, noteven the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. The Deliverator isproud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march