NEAL STEPHENSON

37

get serious about it. Cet serious. Get serious. But it’s so hard to get serious about anything.

He owes the Mafia the cost of a new car. That’s a good reason to get serious.

He cuts straight across the Street and under the monorail line, headed for a large, low-slung black building. It is extraordinarily somber for the Street, like a parcel that someone forgot to develop. It’s a squat black pyramid with the top cut off. It has one single door-since this is all imaginary, there are no regulations dictating the number of emergency exits. There are no guards, no signs, nothing to bar people from going in, yet thousands of avatars mifi around, peering inside, looking for a glimpse of something. These people can’t pass through the door because they haven’t been invited.

Above the door is a matte black hemisphere about a meter in diameter, set into the front wall of the building. It is the closest thing the place has to decoration. Underneath it, in letters carved into the wall’s black substance, is the name of the place: THE

BLACK SUN.

So it’s not an architectural masterpiece. When Da5id and Him and the other hackers wrote The Black Sun, they didn’t have enough money to hire architects or designers, so they just went in for simple geometric shapes. The avatars milling around the entrance don’t seem to care.

If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn’t be able to reach the entrance. It’s way too crowded. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every.single one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each other. It doesn’t bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each other.

So when Hiro cuts through the crowd, headed for the entrance, he really is cutting through the crowd. When things get this jammed together, the computer simplifies things by drawing all of the avatars ghostly and translucent so you can see where you’re going. Hiro appears solid to himself, but everyone else looks like a ghost. He walks through the crowd as if it’s a fogbank, clearly seeing The Black Sun in front of him.

38