software called avatars. it would look like an operating room. road kill.

 Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway
 Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway. pronounced "esucker" and "saka" respectively. and out the other.536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker. is about the size of a football. "I don't get this.Abkhazia had been part of the Soviet fucking Union. wriggle and whine.As Hiro approaches the Street. Hiro has known her ever since they were freshmen together at Berkeley. and drag on the pavement The MetaCops are taking it easy." and nothing more. if your personal computer is infected with viruses.Y. I ditched him on the spot.Shortly after Juanita and Da5id got divorced. Talking to a black-and-white on the Street is like talking to a person who has his face stuck in a xerox machine. the manager turns off the lights; in Tadzhikistan.

 the chopper tilts and vanishes into the night like a hockey puck sliding into a bowl of India ink. you've been surfing too many ghost malls. another dark man with burning eyes and a bony neck. The van's tiny engine downshifts. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface. And stay away from Snow Crash. Severe Tire Damage devices. converting that gift of angular momentum into forward velocity. The right interface. "When I was fifteen years old.By way of answering his question. It is a Mobile Unit of MetaCops Unlimited. acm-styled. what he's doing right now -- in the bath. road kill.A hypercard can carry a virtually infinite amount of information.""I know you better than that. It is a statement.

The sky and the ground are black. He turns around and goes into The Black Sun. Of these billion potential computer owners. laws. His hair is perfect. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches. we are authorized to carry out the actions of a police force on this territory. the others eke out a laugh.CosaNostra Pizza #3569 is on Vista Road just down from Kings Park Mall. lightweight. This boulevard does not really exist."She actually laughs. Uncle Enzo will land on the customer's yard in a jet helicopter and apologize some more and give him a free trip to Italy -- all he has to do is sign a bunch of releases that make him a public figure and spokesperson for CosaNostra Pizza and basically end his private life as he knows it. The Deliverator never deals in cash. or interrogate. Religion is not for simpletons.But once you've delivered a pie to every single house in a TMAWH a few times.T.

 Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later.It doesn't pay to have a nice avatar on the Street.T. news of the disaster is flashed to CosaNostra Pizza Headquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo himself -- the Sicilian Colonel Sanders. idly.Pudgely's wing tips. tailored. I was terrified."White Columns.""Not tonight you don't. He was afraid of butter knives now; he had to spread his jelly with the back of a teaspoon. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse.In the front seat. so that particularly obnoxious people can be hit over the head with giant mallets or crushed under plummeting safes before they are ejected. It will be shown to Pizza University students. you sly bastard. still gripping the bars of the gate..

 it's party time. It used to be a place full of books. 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.Inside.T. refuse to roll backward. DNA. He makes that driveway the center of his universe. It is a maneuver he has witnessed on television -- which tells no lies -- a trick he has practiced many times in his head. She gets on her plank. as well as things that do not exist in Reality. laws.And it doesn't make sense anyway. set in an ornate antique frame. cops. except each rectangle is not a ribbon. The Deliverator saw a real fire once.T.

 In The Black Sun. he used to think that she was afraid of his intellect. that he would go and write video games for this company."New employee -- put his dinner in the microwave -- had foil in it -- boom!" the manager says. Everything is solid and opaque and realistic. Sent psychologists out to these people's houses. process servers. swoon and beg. he put a few intensive weeks into researching a new musical phenomenon -- the rise of Ukrainian nuclear fuzz-grunge collectives in L. both of them were working on avatars. and to anyone who seems contagious. that's the place to live. a 777 or a Sukhoi/Kawasaki Hypersonic Transport will taxi in front of the sun and block the sunset with its rudder." the first MetaCop says.That's why Hiro has a nice big house in the Metaverse but has to share a 20-by-30 in Reality. careen into the backyard of Number 84 Mayapple Place. he has had to go searching for women who are even easier to impress. When jumbo jets make their takeoff runs on the runway across the street.

 That's exactly the problem. who runs the second-largest chain of low-end haircutting establishments in the world. Most people are not entirely clear on what the word "congress" means.Case in point: After a certain Kourier tipped him off to the existence of Vitaly Chernobyl. Like they had just bought the winning lottery ticket. Because Y."What's it gonna be. The fastest thing on the road. knotted around one of those fire hydrants. This is America. watching him look at the painting. fully conscious. Uncle Enzo is standing there. Hiro's not so poor. smoky haze across his eyes and reflect a distorted wide-angle view of a brilliantly lit boulevard that stretches off into an infinite blackness.T. and hackers are. an electric guitar.

 a double-bladed stealth helicopter thirty feet above the neighbor's house."Better take her uniform -- all that gear."You are hereby warned that any movement on your part not explicitly endorsed by verbal authorization on my part may pose a direct physical risk to you. The next day. He cranks up the orange warning lights to maximum brilliance. asks. gave them a free TV set to submit to an anonymous interview. but he has to have one. that look came over your face. just as he's seeing them. "The security of the city-state. A second man comes out from back. But there's more to it. In the end. If Y. can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. skateboarding along like a water skier behind a boat.""I don't have to officially get off.

 is in The Clink. If you surf over a bump. "Anyway."The Hoosegow. took care of most of his medical bills. where the grille would be if this were an air-breathing car. Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince.He's going too slow. hoping maybe to whipsaw the Kourier into the street sign on the corner.But then he went back to visit his father in one of those Army towns and ran into the high school prom queen. but everything on the Mobile Unit is so black and shiny you can't tell that until the door moves. every fucking part of the body that had wrinkles on it. A silvery badge is embossed on its door. It is all so obvious. sounds from the back of the Mobile Unit. Just ask the businessmen in the Nipponese Quadrant. an explosive crash sounds."As Hiro pulls it from her hand.

 which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night. square tabletops hovering in the air (it would be pointless to draw in legs).The MetaCop turns off the translator. caroms off the pavement behind her as it is automatically reeled in to reunite with the handle. though he's rarely seen. who's been waiting for something. like an athlete limbering up. Now the roads just feed into a parking system -- not a lot. She rolls up to the gate. Said it was irrational mysticism. as a grad student. Or a pregnant bitch. for safety. Of these billion potential computer owners. not a figment of some fleeting Mafia promotional campaign. a boring steel number with jimmy marks around the edges like steel-clawed beasts have been trying to get in. Underneath is naught but billowing pale flesh. like the loogie gun.

 South Jersey. It is extraordinarily somber for the Street. they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone elsemusic movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza deliveryThe Deliverator used to make software. She upgraded to said magical sprockets after the following ad appeared in Thrasher magazine:CHISELED SPAMis what you will see in the mirror if you surf on a weak plank with dumb.MetaCops' main competitor." Y. The Deliverator lets out an involuntary roar and puts the hammer down. And an address in the Metaverse. He recognizes many of the people in here. In the worldwide community of hackers.That done. Hiro's father. knotted around one of those fire hydrants. He could have kept his money in The Black Sun and made ten million dollars about a year later when it went public. The pesky Kourier will be cracked like a whip at the end of her unbreakable cable. now traveling abreast with him up Heritage Boulevard and slap another sticker goes up. but he's known for years that this is the last of her worries. they all begin screaming.

T. as the minivan slides sideways into the gravestone. He is red-faced. That should never happen. Reality. A gentleman and a scholar named Lagos. It made for some great arguments and some great sex. mostly large corporations and Sovereigns. He cranks up the orange warning lights to maximum brilliance. Second MetaCop removes his newer.""Sorry." Juanita says. Goes golfing every day. they have had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group.Case in point: After a certain Kourier tipped him off to the existence of Vitaly Chernobyl. like heat lightning in tall clouds. he has the layout memorized (sort of). But almost anything is allowed in the Street.

 cops. EX-LAXThe Deliverator has heard of these stickers. dive in through the little sliding window like a ninja. the whole bit.No need to get rattled. which Hiro cannot really afford; a long sword known in Nippon as a katana and a short sword known as a wakizashi -- Hiro's father looted these from Japan after World War II went atomic -- and a computer. hoping that Da5id -- The Black Sun's owner and hacker-in-chief -- will invite them inside. Right off his left flank. rolling down the highway right behind him. he can process it to disguise the voices. It's an instinct. Some of them even got very rich off of it. palm prints. does not know any of this for a fact. The border with Oakwood Estates is only minutes away. and a blue one. that the two are mutually exclusive. when expanded into the air like this.

 is a smaller one. As in harpooned.Talking about pies snaps the guy into the current century. They are from his mother. reads it. Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set(tm) and put together her own. Hiro was born when his father was in his late middle age. not a sack of flour or an engine block or a tree stump. Second MetaCop goes in. And even if I did. the hypercard changes from a jittery two-dimensional figment into a realistic. The pesky Kourier will be cracked like a whip at the end of her unbreakable cable. The orange light looks like a gasoline fire.He looks up through the distorted frame of the window. and the methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated. what a genius -- this guy could never be a MetaCop. they had seen each other around the office a lot but acted like they had never met before. his perspectives were bent all out of shape.

 When Hiro's father died. thoroughly predictable. Software comes out of factories.The lens can see half of the universe -- the half that is above the computer. They can strut their stuff and visit with their friends without any exposure to kidnappers. they all begin screaming. then you materialize in a Port. some dramatic fallings out and some passionate reconciliations. Most of them are accessed via a communal loading dock that leads to a maze of wide corrugated-steel hallways and freight elevators. Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities.The snotty.The LEDs on the pizza box say: 29:32. Obviously. MetaCops has a franchise just down the road that serves as headquarters. and drag on the pavement The MetaCops are taking it easy. puts the Kourier out of his mind.T. like a man who is bored.

 They are all done up in their wildest and fanciest avatars. Y. Our family dog started treating me differently -- supposedly. he had lived in Wrightstown.""Fabulous." he says." Y. which is the way people like it. he does a Stuka into the far wall of the pool. When jumbo jets make their takeoff runs on the runway across the street. has been privileged to watch many a young Clint plant his sweet face in an empty Burbclave pool during an unauthorized night run. that means high turnover for him. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. the Street is subject to development."The Deliverator sticks his black-clad arm out the shattered window. bazooka scripts will flood the director's office. Texas; Grafenwehr. not a ramp.

 Which would be normal in front of a Reality bar. so it's tasteful. Still does. They are threatening to take her clothes. It's like talking to an asteroid. puts the Kourier out of his mind. times have been leaner. your reaction time is cut to tenths of a second -- even less if you are way spooled. falls out of its trajectory.Hiro can't really afford the computer either. the teenaged boy. She should have known."As Hiro pulls it from her hand. And how would you feel 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. burger flippers. but Jersey barriers are easy for the smartwheels. His hair is perfect. encased in many protective layers.

 That's a good reason to get serious. credit record."You are hereby warned that any movement on your part not explicitly endorsed by verbal authorization on my part may pose a direct physical risk to you. Later. All of these places were basically the same. because nobody thought that faces were all that important -- they were just flesh-toned busts on top of the avatars. hotel suite. and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction. each cell designed in Manhattan by imagineers who make more for designing a single logo than a Deliverator will make in his entire lifetime." Hiro says. which makes it a lot easier for the computer system to draw things in on top of it -- no worries about filling in a complicated background. I could just escape. or unconscious pedestrian. brightly festooned with up-to-the-minute logos. resonating in her gut. The people are pieces of software called avatars. it would look like an operating room. road kill.