Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

"Yeah, that's the guy who killed Fisheye. I might have to tangle with him, too."

Ng laughs. "What is your ultimate objective? As you know, we are all in this together, so you may share your thoughts with me."

"I'd prefer a little more discretion in this case…"

"Too late for that, Hiro," says another voice. Hiro turns around; it is Uncle Enzo, being ushered through the door by the receptionist - a striking Italian woman. Just a few paces behind him is a small Asian businessman and an Asian receptionist.

"I took the liberty of calling them in when you arrived," Ng says, "so that we could have a powwow."

"Pleasure," Uncle Enzo says, bowing slightly to Hiro.

Hiro bows back. "I'm really sorry about the car, sir."

"It's forgotten," Uncle Enzo says.

The small Asian man has now come into the room. Hiro finally recognizes him. It is the photo that is on the wall of every Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong in the world.

Introductions and bows all around. Suddenly, a number of extra chairs have materialized in the office, so everyone pulls one up. Ng comes out from behind his desk, and they sit in a circle.

"Let us cut to the chase, since I assume that your situation, Hiro, may be more precarious than ours," Uncle Enzo says.

"You got that right, sir."

"We would all like to know what the hell is going on," Mr. Lee says. His English is almost devoid of a Chinese accent; clearly his cute, daffy public image is just a front.

"How much of this have you guys figured out so far?"

"Bits and pieces Uncle Enzo says. "How much have you figured out?"

"Almost all of it," Hiro says. "Once I talk to Juanita, I'll have the rest."

"In that case, you are in possession of some very valuable intel," Uncle Enzo says. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hypercard and hands it toward Hiro. It says TWENTY-FIVE

MILLION

HONG KONG

DOLLARS

Hiro reaches out and takes the card.

Somewhere on earth, two computers swap bursts of electronic noise and the money gets transferred from the Mafia's account to Hiro's.

"You'll take care of the split with Y.T.," Uncle Enzo says.

Hiro nods. You bet I will.

"I'm here on the Raft looking for a piece of software - a piece of medicine to be specific - that was written five thousand years ago by a Sumerian personage named Enki, a neurolinguistic hacker."

"What does that mean?" Mr. Lee says.

"It means a person who was capable of programming other people's minds with verbal streams of data, known as nam-shubs."

Ng is totally expressionless. He takes another drag on his cigarette, spouts the smoke up above his head in a geyser, watches it spread out against the ceiling. "What is the mechanism?"

"We've got two kinds of language in our heads. The kind we're using now is acquired. It patterns our brains as we're learning it. But there's also a tongue that's based in the deep structures of the brain, that everyone shares. These structures consist of basic neural circuits that have to exist in order to allow our brains to acquire higher languages."

"Linguistic infrastructure," Uncle Enzo says.

"Yeah. I guess 'deep structure' and 'infrastructure' mean the same thing. Anyway, we can access those parts of the brain under the right conditions. Glossolalia - speaking in tongues -is the output side of it, where the deep linguistic structures hook into our tongues and speak, bypassing all the higher, acquired languages. Everyone's known that for some time."

"You're saying there's an input side, too?" Ng says.

"Exactly. It works in reverse. Under the right conditions, your ears - or eyes - can tie into the deep structures, bypassing the higher language functions. Which is to say, someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visual symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstem. Like a cracker who breaks into a computer system, bypasses all the security precautions, and plugs himself into the core, enabling him to exert absolute control over the machine."

"In that situation, the people who own the computer are helpless," Ng says.

"Right. Because they access the machine at a higher level, which has now been overridden. In the same sense, once a neurolinguistic hacker plugs into the deep structures of our brain, we can't get him out - because we can't even control our own brain at such a basic level."

"What does this have to do with a clay tablet on the Enterprise?" Mr. Lee says.

"Bear with me. This language - the mother tongue - is a vestige of an earlier phase of human social development. Primitive societies were controlled by verbal rules called me. The me were like little programs for humans. They were a necessary part of the transition from caveman society to an organized, agricultural society. For example, there was a program for plowing a furrow in the ground and planting grain. There was a program for baking bread and another one for making a house. There were also me for higher-level functions such as war, diplomacy, and religious ritual. All the skills required to operate a self-sustaining culture were contained in these me, which were written down on tablets or passed around in an oral tradition. In any case, the repository for the me was the local temple, which was a database of me, controlled by a priest/king called an en. When someone needed bread, they would go to the en or one of his underlings and download the bread-making me from the temple. Then they would carry out the instructions - run the program - and when they were finished, they'd have a loaf of bread.

"A central database was necessary, among other reasons, because some of the me had to be properly timed. If people carried out the plowing-and-planting me at the wrong time of year, the harvest would fail and everyone would starve. The only way to make sure that the me were properly timed was to build astronomical observatories to watch the skies for the changes of season. So the Sumerians built towers 'with their tops with the heavens' - topped with astronomical diagrams. The en would watch the skies and dispense the agricultural me at the proper times of year to keep the economy running."

"I think you have a chicken-and-egg problem," Uncle Enzo says. "How did such a society first come to be organized?"

"There is an informational entity known as the metavirus, which causes information systems to infect themselves with customized viruses. This may be just a basic principle of nature, like Darwinian selection, or it may be an actual piece of information that floats around the universe on comets and radio waves - I'm not sure. In any case, what it comes down to is this: Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses - viruses generated from within itself.

"At some point in the distant past, the metavirus infected the human race and has been with us ever since. The first thing it did was to spawn a whole Pandora's box of DNA viruses - smallpox, influenza, and so on. Health and longevity became a thing of the past. A distant memory of this event is preserved in legends of the Fall from Paradise, in which mankind was ejected from a life of ease into a world infested with disease and pain.

"That plague eventually reached some kind of a plateau. We still see new DNA viruses from time to time, but it seems that our bodies have developed a resistance to DNA viruses in general."

"Perhaps," Ng says, "there are only so many viruses that will work in the human DNA, and the metavirus has created all of them."

"Could be. Anyway, Sumerian culture - the society based on me -was another manifestation of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in a linguistic form rather than DNA."

"Excuse me," Mr. Lee says. "You are saying that civilization started out as an infection?"