SNOW CRASH

tory, and zooms directly toward him at twice the speed of sound. It plows into the Street fifty feet in front of him, disintegrates, and explodes, blooming into a tangled cloud of wreckage and flame that skids across the pavement toward him, growing to envelop him so that all he can see is turbulent flame, perfectly simulated and rendered.

Then the display freezes, and a man materializes in front of Hiro. He is a classic bearded, pale, skinny hacker, trying to beef himself up by wearing a bulky silk windbreaker blazoned with the logo of one of the big Metaverse amusement parks. Him knows the guy; they used to run into each other at trade conventions all the time. He’s been trying to hire Hiro for the last two months.

“Hiro, I can’t understand why you’re holding out on me. We’re making bucks here-Kongbucks and yen-and we can be flexible on pay and bennies. We’re putting together a swords-and-sorcery thing, and we can use a hacker with your skills. Come on down and talk to me, okay?”

Him walks straight through the display, and it vanishes. Amusement parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic, offering a wide selection of interactive three.dimensional movies. But in the end, they’re still nothing more than video games. Hiro’s not so poor, yet, that he would go and write video games for this company. It’s owned by the Nipponese, which is no big deaL But it’s also managed by the Nipponese, which means that all the programmers have to wear white shirts and show up at eight in the morning and sit in cubicles and go to meetings.

When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that’s no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.

The prospect of becoming an assembly-line worker gives Hiro some incentive to go out and find some really good intel tonight.

etnes to get himself psyched up, tries to break out of the : argy of the long.te underemployed This intel thing can be

rae et, onde you get yourself jacked into the grid. And Wiui iilS connections it sh 1.1

ufl oe any problem. He just has to