The hackers are going nuts. Hiro knows that the Hacker Quadrant in The Black Sun is, at this moment, emptying itself out. They are all cramming through the exit and running down the Street toward the plaza, coming to see Hiro's fantastic show of light, sound, swords, and sorcery.
Raven tries to shove Hiro back. It would work in Reality because Raven has such overpowering strength. But avatars are equally strong, unless you back them up in just the right way. So Raven gives a mighty push and then pulls his knife back so that he can take a cut at Hiro's neck when Hiro flies away from him; but Hiro doesn't fly away. He waits for the opening and then takes Raven's sword hand off. Then, just in case, he takes Raven's other hand off. The crowd screams in delight.
"How do I stop this thing?" Hiro says.
"Beats me. I just deliver 'em," Raven says.
"Do you have any concept of what you just did?"
"Yeah. Realized my lifelong ambition," Raven says, a huge relaxed grin spreading across his face. "I nuked America."
Hiro cuts his head off. The crowd of doomed hackers rises to its feet and shrieks.
Then they go silent as Hiro abruptly disappears. He has switched over to his small, invisible avatar. He is hovering in the air now above the shattered remains of the egg; gravity takes him right down into the center of it. As he falls, he is muttering to himself "SnowScan." It's the piece of software he wrote while he was killing time on the liferaft. The one that searches for Snow Crash.
With Hiro Protagonist seemingly gone from the stage, the hackers turn their attention toward the giant construction rising up out of the egg. All that nonsense with the sword fight must have been just a wacky introductory piece - Hiro's typically offbeat way of getting their attention. This light and sound show is the main attraction. The amphitheater is now filling up rapidly as thousands of hackers pour in from all over the place: running down the Street from The Black Sun, streaming out of the big office towers where the major software corporations are headquartered, goggling into the Metaverse from all points in Reality as word of the extravaganza spreads down the fiber-optic grapevine at the speed of light.
The light show is designed as if late comers were anticipated. It builds to false climax after false climax, like an expensive fireworks show, and each one is better. It is so vast and complicated that no one sees more than 10 percent of it; you could spend a year watching it over and over again and keep seeing new things.
It is a mile-high structure of moving two- and three-dimensional images, interlocked in space and time. It's got everything in it. Leni Riefenstahl films. The sculptures of Michelangelo and the fictional inventions of Da Vinci made real. World War II dogfights zooming in and out of the middle, veering out over the crowd, shooting and burning and exploding. Scenes from a thousand classic films, flowing and merging together into a single vast complicated story.
But in time, it begins to simplify itself and narrow into a single bright column of light. By this point, it is the music that is carrying the show: a pounding bass beat and a deep, threatening ostinato that tells everyone to keep watching, the best is yet to come. And everyone does watch. Religiously.
The column of light begins to flow up and down and resolve itself into a human form. Actually, it is four human forms, female nudes standing shoulder to shoulder, facing outward, like caryatids. Each of them is carrying something long and slender in her hands: a pair of tubes.
A third of a million hackers stare at the women, towering above the stage, as they raise their arms above their heads and unroll the four scrolls, turning each one of them into a flat television screen the size of a football field. From the seats in the amphitheater, the screens virtually blot out the sky; they are all that anyone can see.
The screens are blank at first, but finally the same image snaps into existence on all four of them at once. It is an image consisting of words; it says IF THIS WERE A VIRUS
YOU WOULD BE DEAD NOW
FORTUNATELY IT'S NOT
THE METAVERSE IS A DANGEROUS PLACE;
HOW'S YOUR SECURITY?
CALL HIRO PROTAGONIST SECURITY ASSOCIATES
FOR A FREE INITIAL CONSULTATION
69
"This is exactly the kind of high-tech nonsense that never, ever worked when we tried it in Vietnam," Uncle Enzo says.
"Your point is well taken. But technology has come a long way since then," says Ky, the surveillance man from Ng Security Industries. Ky is talking to Uncle Enzo over a radio headset; his van, full of electronic gear, is lurking a quarter of a mile away in the shadows next to a LAX cargo warehouse. "I am monitoring the entire airport, and all its approaches, with a three-dimensional Metaverse display. For example, I know that your dog tags, which you customarily wear around your neck, are missing. I know that you are carrying one Kongbuck and eighty-five Kongpence in change in your left pocket. I know that you have a straight razor in your other pocket. Looks like a nice one, too."
"Never underestimate the importance of good grooming," Uncle Enzo says.
"But I do not understand why you are carrying a skateboard."
"It's a replacement for the one Y.T. lost in front of EBGOC," Uncle Enzo says. "It's a long story."
"Sir, we have a report from one of our franchulates," says a young lieutenant in a Mafia windbreaker, jogging across the apron with a black walkie-talkie in one hand. He is not really a lieutenant; the Mafia is not very keen on the use of military ranks. But for some reason, Uncle Enzo thinks of him as the lieutenant. "The second chopper set down in a strip-mall parking lot about ten miles from here and met the pizza car and picked up Rife, then took off again. They are on their way in now."
"Send someone out to pick up the abandoned pizza car. And give the driver a day off," Uncle Enzo says.
The lieutenant looks somewhat taken aback that Uncle Enzo is concerning himself with such a tiny detail. It is as if the don were going up and down highways picking up litter or something. But he nods respectfully, having just learned something: details matter. He turns away and begins talking into his radio.
Uncle Enzo has serious doubts about this fellow. He is a blazer person, adept at running the small-time bureaucracy of a Nova Sicilia franchulate, but lacking in the kind of flexibility that, for example, Y.T. has. A classic case of what is wrong with the Mafia today. The only reason the lieutenant is even here is because the situation has been changing so rapidly, and, of course, because of all the fine men they lost on the Kowloon.
Ky comes in over the radio again. "Y.T. has just contacted her mother and asked for a ride," he says. "Would you like to hear their conversation?"
"Not unless it has tactical significance," Uncle Enzo says briskly. This is one more thing to check off his list; he has been worried about Y.T.'s relationship with her mother and was meaning to speak with her about it.
Rife's jet sits on the tarmac, engines idling, waiting to taxi out onto the runway. In the cockpit are a pilot and copilot. Until half an hour ago, they were loyal employees of L. Bob Rife. Then they sat and watched out the windshield as the dozen Rife security drones who were stationed around the hangar variously got their heads blown off, their throats slit, or else just plain dropped their weapons and fell to their knees and surrendered. Now the pilot and copilot have taken lifelong oaths of loyalty to Uncle Enzo's organization. Uncle Enzo could have just dragged them out and replaced them with his own pilots, but this way is better. If Rife should, somehow, actually make it onto the plane, he will recognize his own pilots and think that everything is fine. And the fact that the pilots are alone there in the cockpit without any direct Mafia supervision will merely emphasize the great trust that Uncle Enzo has placed in them and the oath that they have taken. It will actually enhance their sense of duty. It will amplify Uncle Enzo's displeasure if they should break their oaths. Uncle Enzo has no doubt about the pilots at all.