SNOW CRASH

He steps over the property line, and he’s in the doorway. And in that instant he becomes solid and visible to all the avatars milling outside. As one, they all begin screaming. Not that they have any idea who the hell he is-Hiro is just a starving CIC stringer who lives in a UStor-It by the airport. But in the entire world there are only a couple of thousand people who can step over the line into The Black Sun.

He turns and looks back at ten thousand shrieking groupies. Now that he’s all by himself in the entryway, no longer immersed in a flood of avatars, he can see all of the people in the front row of the crowd with perfect clarity. They are all done up in their wildest and fanciest avatars, hoping that Da5id-The Black Sun’s owner and hacker-in-chief–-wffl invite them inside. They flicker and merge together into a hysterical wall. Stunningly beautiful women, computer-airbrushed and retouched at seventy-two frames a second, like Playboy pinups turned three-dimensional-these are would-be actresses hoping to be discovered. Wild-looking abstracts, tornadoes of gyrating light-hackers who are hoping that Da5id will notice their talent, invite them inside, give them a job. A liberal sprinkling of blackand-white people-persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals, and who are rendered in jerky, grainy black and white. A lot of these are run.of.the-mill psycho fans, devoted to the fantasy of stabbing some particular actress to death; they can’t even get close in Reality, so they goggle into the Metaverse to stalk their prey. Thereare would-be rock stars done up in laser light, as though they just stepped off the concert stage, and the avatars of Nipponese businessmen, exquisitely rendered by their fancy equipment, but utterly reserved and boring in their suits.

There’s one blackand-white who stands out because he’s taller than the rest. The Street protocol states that your avatar can’t be any taller than you are. This is to prevent people from walking around a mile high. Besides, if this guy’s using a pay terminal-which he must be, to judge from the image quality-it can’t jazz up his avatar. It just shows him the way he is, except not as well. Talking to a blackand-white on the Street is like talking to a person who has his face stuck in a xerox machine, repeatedly pounding the copy button, while you stand by the