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.”
“Relax, Da5id, I'm just shitting you,” Hiro says.
“You know what it was? You know how hackers are always trying to show me samples of their work?”
“Yeah.”
“Some hacker came up with this scheme to show me his stuff. And everything worked fine until the moment the Brandy opened the scroll—but his code was buggy, and it snow-crashed at the wrong moment, so instead of seeing his output, all I saw was snow.”
“Then why did he
call
the thing Snow Crash?”
“Gallows humor. He knew it was buggy.”
“What did the Brandy whisper in your ear?”
“Some language I didn't recognize,” Da5id says. “Just a bunch of babble.”
Babble. Babel.
“Afterward, you looked sort of stunned.”
Da5id looks resentful. “I wasn't stunned. I just found the whole experience so weird, I guess I just was taken aback for a second.”
Hiro is giving him an extremely dubious look. Da5id notices it and stands up. “Want to go see what your competitors in Nippon are up to?”
“What competitors?”
“You used to design avatars for rock stars, right?”
“Still do.”
“Well, Sushi K is here tonight.”
“Oh, yeah. The hairdo the size of a galaxy.”
“You can see the rays from here,” Da5id says, waving toward the next quadrant, “but I want to see the whole getup.”
It does look as though the sun is rising somewhere in the middle of the Rock Star Quadrant. Above the heads of the milling avatars, Hiro can see a fan of orange beams radiating outward from some point in the middle of the crowd. It keeps moving, turning around, shaking from side to side, and the whole universe seems to move with it. On the Street, the full radiance of Sushi K's Rising Sun hairdo is suppressed by the height and width regulations. But Da5id allows free expression inside The Black Sun, so the orange rays extend all the way to the property lines.
“I wonder if anyone's told him yet that Americans won't buy rap music from a Japanese person,” Hiro says as they stroll over there.
“Maybe you should tell him,” Da5id suggests, “charge him for the service. He's in L.A. right now, you know.”
“Probably staying in a hotel full of bootlickers telling him what
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.”
“Relax, Da5id, I'm just shitting you,” Hiro says.
“You know what it was? You know how hackers are always trying to show me samples of their work?”
“Yeah.”
“Some hacker came up with this scheme to show me his stuff. And everything worked fine until the moment the Brandy opened the scroll—but his code was buggy, and it snow-crashed at the wrong moment, so instead of seeing his output, all I saw was snow.”
“Then why did he
call
the thing Snow Crash?”
“Gallows humor. He knew it was buggy.”
“What did the Brandy whisper in your ear?”
“Some language I didn't recognize,” Da5id says. “Just a bunch of babble.”
Babble. Babel.
“Afterward, you looked sort of stunned.”
Da5id looks resentful. “I wasn't stunned. I just found the whole experience so weird, I guess I just was taken aback for a second.”
Hiro is giving him an extremely dubious look. Da5id notices it and stands up. “Want to go see what your competitors in Nippon are up to?”
“What competitors?”
“You used to design avatars for rock stars, right?”
“Still do.”
“Well, Sushi K is here tonight.”
“Oh, yeah. The hairdo the size of a galaxy.”
“You can see the rays from here,” Da5id says, waving toward the next quadrant, “but I want to see the whole getup.”
It does look as though the sun is rising somewhere in the middle of the Rock Star Quadrant. Above the heads of the milling avatars, Hiro can see a fan of orange beams radiating outward from some point in the middle of the crowd. It keeps moving, turning around, shaking from side to side, and the whole universe seems to move with it. On the Street, the full radiance of Sushi K's Rising Sun hairdo is suppressed by the height and width regulations. But Da5id allows free expression inside The Black Sun, so the orange rays extend all the way to the property lines.
“I wonder if anyone's told him yet that Americans won't buy rap music from a Japanese person,” Hiro says as they stroll over there.
“Maybe you should tell him,” Da5id suggests, “charge him for the service. He's in L.A. right now, you know.”
“Probably staying in a hotel full of bootlickers telling him what
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