Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash

The Kourier pulls his personal phone out of its holster, jacks into RadiKS Central Command, and punches a big red button. He calls a Code.

Twenty-five hundred Kouriers are massed on the reinforced-concrete banks of the L.A. River. Down in the bottom trench of the river, Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns are just hitting the really good part of their next major hit single, "Control Rod Jam." A number of the Kouriers are taking advantage of this sound track to style up and down the banks of the river; only Vitaly, live, can get their adrenaline pumping hard enough to enable them to skate a sharp bank at eighty miles per hour plus without doing a wilson into the crete.

And then the dark mass of Meltdown fans turns into a gyrating, orange-red galaxy as twenty-five hundred new stars appear. It's a mind-blowing sight, and at first they think it's a new visual effect put together by Vitaly and his imageers. It is like a mass flicking of Bics, except brighter and more organized; each Kourier looks down on his or her belt to see that a red light is flashing on their personal telephone. Looks like some poor skater called in a Code.

In a Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchise on the outskirts of Phoenix, Rat Thing number B-782 comes awake.

Fido is waking up because the dogs are barking tonight.

There is always barking. Much of the barking is very far away. Fido knows that faraway barks are not as important as close barks, and so he often sleeps through these.

But sometimes a faraway bark will carry a special sound that makes Fido excited, and he can't help waking up.

He is hearing one of those barks right now. It comes from far away but it is urgent. Some nice doggie somewhere is very upset. He is so upset that his barking has spread to all the other doggies in the pack.

Fido listens to the bark. He gets excited, too. Some bad strangers have just been very close to a nice doggie's yard. They were in a flying thing. They had lots of guns.

Fido doesn't like guns very much. A stranger with a gun shot him once and made him hurt. Then the nice girl came and helped him.

These are extremely bad strangers. Any nice doggie in his right mind would want to hurt them and make them go away. As Fido listens to the bark, he sees what they look like and hears the way they sound. If any of these very bad strangers ever come into his yard, he will be extremely upset.

Then Fido notices that the bad strangers are chasing someone. He can tell they are hurting her by the way her voice sounds and the way she moves.

The bad strangers are hurting the nice girl who loves him! Fido gets more angry than he has ever been, even more angry than when a bad man shot him long ago.

His job is to keep bad strangers out of his yard. He does not do anything else.

But it's even more important to protect the nice girl who loves him. That is more important than anything. And nothing can stop him. Not even the fence.

The fence is very tall. But he can remember a long time ago when he used to jump over things that were taller than his head.

Fido comes out of his doggie house, curls his long legs beneath him, and jumps over the fence around his yard before he has remembered that he is not capable of jumping over it. This contradiction is lost on him, though; as a dog, introspection is not one of his strong points.

The bark is spreading to another place far away. All the nice doggies who live in this faraway place are being warned to look out for the very bad strangers and the girl who loves Fido, because they are going to that place. Fido sees the place in his mind. It is big and wide and flat and open, like a nice field for chasing Frisbees. It has lots of big flying things. Around the edges are a couple of yards where nice doggies live.

Fido can hear those nice doggies barking in reply. He knows where they are. Far away. But you can get there by streets. Fido knows a whole lot of different streets. He just runs down streets, and he knows where he is and where he's going.

At first, the only trace that B-782 leaves of his passage is a dancing trail of sparks down the center of the franchise ghetto. But once he makes his way out onto a long straight piece of highway, he begins to leave further evidence: a spume of shattered blue safety glass spraying outward in parallel vanes from all four lanes of traffic as the windows and the windshields of the cars blow out of their frames, spraying into the air like rooster tails behind a speedboat.

As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.

"Raven," Hiro says, "let me tell you a story before I kill you."

"I'll listen," Raven says. "It's a long ride."

All vehicles in the Metaverse have voice phones on them. Hiro simply called home to the Librarian and had him look up Raven's number. They are riding in lockstep across the black surface of the imaginary planet now, though Hiro is gaining on Raven, meter by meter.

"My dad was in the Army in World War Two. Lied about his age to get in. They put him in the Pacific doing scut work. Anyway, he got captured by the Nipponese."

"So?"

"So they took him back to Nippon. Put him in a prison camp. There were a lot of Americans there, plus some Brits and some Chinese. And a couple of guys that they couldn't place. They looked like Indians. Spoke a little English. But they spoke Russian even better."

"They were Aleuts," Raven says. "American citizens. But no one had ever heard of them. Most people don't know that the Japanese conquered American territory during the war - several islands at the end of the Aleutian chain. Inhabited. By my people. They took the two most important Aleuts and put them in prison camps in Japan. One of them was the mayor of Attu - the most important civil authority. The other was even more important, to us. He was the chief harpooneer of the Aleut nation."

Hiro says, "The mayor got sick and died. He didn't have any immunities. But the harpooneer was one tough son of a bitch. He got sick a few times, but he survived. Went out to work in the fields along with the rest of the prisoners, growing food for the war effort. Worked in the kitchen, preparing slop for the prisoners and the guards. He kept to himself a lot. Everyone avoided him because he smelled terrible. His bed stank up the barracks."

"He was cooking up aconite whale poison from mushrooms and other substances that he found in the fields and secreted in his clothing," Raven says.

"Besides," Hiro continues, "they were pissed at him because he broke out a windowpane in the barracks once, and it let cold air in for the rest of the winter. Anyway, one day, after lunch, all of the guards became terribly sick."

"Whale poison in the fish stew," Raven says.

"The prisoners were already out working in the fields, and when the guards began to get sick, they began to march them all back in toward the barracks, because they couldn't keep watch over them when they were doubled over with stomach cramps. And this late in the war, it wasn't easy to bring in reinforcements. My father was last in the line of prisoners. And this Aleut guy was right in front of him."

Raven says, "As the prisoners were crossing an irrigation ditch, the Aleut dove into the water and disappeared."

"My father didn't know what to do," Hiro says, "until he heard a grunt from the guard who was bringing up the rear. He turned around and saw that this guard had a bamboo spear stuck all the way through his body. Just came out of nowhere. And he still couldn't see the Aleut. Then another guard went down with his throat slit, and there was the Aleut, winding up and throwing another spear that brought down yet another guard."