Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

As they approach, the guys on the deck sit up, take notice, draw revolvers out of their waistbands. But then Tranny speaks up in a happy stream of Tagalog. And everything changes.

Tranny gets the full Prodigal Son welcome: crying, hysterical fat ladies, a swarm of little kids piling out of their hammocks, sucking their thumbs and jumping up and down. Older men beaming, showing great gaps and black splotches in their smiles, watching and nodding and diving in to give him the occasional hug.

And on the edge of the mob, way back in the darkness, is another wirehead.

"You come in, too," says one of the women, a lady in her forties named Eunice.

"That's okay," Hiro says. "I won't intrude."

This statement is translated and moves like a wave through the some eight hundred and ninety-six Filipinos who have now converged on the area. It is greeted with the utmost shock. Intrude? Unthinkable! Nonsense! How dare you so insult us?

One of the gap-toothed guys, a miniature old man and probable World War II veteran, jumps onto the rocking zodiac, sticks to the floor like a gecko, wraps his arm around Hiro's shoulders, and pokes a spliff into his mouth.

He looks like a solid guy. Hiro leans into him. "Compadre, who is the guy with the antenna? A friend of yours?"

"Nah," the guy whispers, "he's an asshole." Then he puts his index finger dramatically to his lips and shushes.

It's all in the eyes. Along with picking handcuffs, vaulting Jersey barriers, and fending off perverts, it is one of the quintessential Kourier skills: walking around in a place where you don't belong without attracting suspicion. And you do it by not looking at anyone. Keep those eyes straight ahead no matter what, don't open them too wide, don't look tense. That, and the fact that she just came in here with a guy that everyone is scared of, gets her back through the containership to the reception area.

"I need to use a Street terminal," she says to the reception guy. "Can you charge it to my room?"

"Yes, ma'am," the reception guy says. He doesn't have to ask which room she's in. He's all smiles, all respect. Not the kind of thing you get very often when you're a Kourier.

She could really get to like this relationship with Raven, if it weren't for the fact that he's a homicidal mutant.

Hiro ducks out of Tranny's celebratory dinner rather early, drags Reason off the zodiac and onto the front porch of the houseboat, opens it up, and jacks his personal computer into its bios.

Reason reboots with no problems. That's to be expected. It's also to be expected that later, probably when he most needs Reason to work, it will crash again, the way it did for Fisheye. He could keep turning it off and on every time it does this, but this is awkward in the heat of battle, and not the type of solution that hackers admire. It would be much more sensible just to debug it.

Which he could do by hand, if he had time. But there may be a better way of going about it. It's possible that, by now, Ng Security Industries has fixed the bug - come out with a new version of the software. If so, he should be able to get a copy of it on the Street.

Hiro materializes in his office. The Librarian pokes his head out of the next room, just in case Hiro has any questions for him.

"What does ultima ratio regum mean?"

" 'The Last Argument of Kings,' " the Librarian says. "King Louis XIV had it stamped onto the barrels of all of the cannons that were forged during his reign."

Hiro stands up and walks out into his garden. His motorcycle is waiting for him on the gravel path that leads to the gate. Looking up over the fence, Hiro can see the lights of Downtown rising in the distance again. His computer has succeeded in jacking into L. Bob Rife's global network; he has access to the Street. This is as Hiro had expected. Rife must have a whole suite of satellite uplinks there on the Enterprise, patched into a cellular network covering the Raft. Otherwise, he wouldn't be able to reach the Metaverse from his very own watery fortress, which would never do for a man like Rife.

Hiro climbs on his bike, eases it through the neighborhood and onto the Street, and then gooses it up to a few hundred miles an hour, slaloming between the stanchions of the monorail, practicing. He runs into a few of them and stops, but that's to be expected.

Ng Security Industries has a whole floor of a mile-high neon skyscraper near Port One, right in the middle of Downtown. Like everything else in the Metaverse, it's open twenty-four hours, because it's always business hours somewhere in the world. Hiro leaves his bike on the Street, takes the elevator up to the 397th floor, and comes face to face with a receptionist daemon. For a moment, he can't peg her racial background; then he realizes that this daemon is half-black, half-Asian - just like him. If a white man had stepped off the elevator, she probably would have been a blonde. A Nipponese businessman would have come face to face with a perky Nipponese office girl.

"Yes, sir," she says. "Is this in regard to sales or customer service?"

"Customer service."

"Whom are you with?"

"You name it, I'm with them."

"I'm sorry?" Like human receptionists, the daemon is especially bad at handling irony.

"At the moment, I think I'm working for the Central Intelligence Corporation, the Mafia, and Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong."

"I see," says the receptionist, making a note. Also like a human receptionist, it is not possible to impress her. "And what product is this in regards to?"

"Reason."

"Sir! Welcome to Ng Security Industries," says another voice.

It is another daemon, an attractive black/Asian woman in highly professional dress, who has materialized from the depths of the office suite.

She ushers Hiro down a long, nicely paneled hallway, down another long paneled hallway, and then down a long paneled hallway. Every few steps, he passes by a reception area where avatars from all over the world sit in chairs, passing the time. But Hiro doesn't have to wait. She ushers him straight into a nice big paneled office where an Asian man sits behind a desk littered with models of helicopters. It is Mr. Ng himself. He stands up; they swap bows; the usher lady checks out.

"You working with Fisheye?" Ng says, lighting up a cig. The smoke swirls in the air ostentatiously. It takes as much computing power realistically to model the smoke coming out of Ng's mouth as it does to model the weather system of the entire planet.

"He's dead," Hiro says. "Reason crashed at a critical juncture, and he ate a harpoon."

Ng doesn't react. Instead, he just sits there motionless for a few seconds, absorbing this data, as if his customers get harpooned all the time. He's probably got a mental database of everyone who has ever used one of his toys and what happened to them.

"I told him it was a beta version," Ng says. "And he should have known not to use it for infighting. A two-dollar switchblade would have served him better."

"Agreed. But he was quite taken with it."

Ng blows out more smoke, thinking. "As we learned in Vietnam, high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to psychoactive drugs. Like LSD, which can convince people they can fly - causing them to jump out of windows - weapons can make people overconfident. Skewing their tactical judgment. As in the case of Fisheye."

"I'll be sure and remember that," Hiro says.

"What kind of combat environment do you want to use Reason in?" Ng says.

"I need to take over an aircraft carrier tomorrow morning."

"The Enterprise?"

"Yes."

"You know," Ng says, apparently in a conversational mood, "there's a guy who actually took over a nuclear-missile submarine armed with nothing more than a piece of glass - "