SNOW CRASH

not get credit for it, because the judges feel you didn’t possess the right amount of zanshin.

Hiro doesn’t have any zanshin at all. He just wants this over with. The next time the businessman sets up his ear-splitting screech and shuffles toward Hiro, cutting and snapping his blade, Him parries the attack, turns around, and cuts both of his legs off just above the knees.

The businessman collapses to the floor.

It takes a lot of practice to make your avatar move through the Metaverse like a real person. When your avatar has just lost its legs, all that skill goes out the window.

“Well, land sakes!” Hiro says. “Lookee here!” He whips his blade sideways, cutting off both of the businessman’s forearms, causing the sword to clatter onto the floor.

“Better fire up the ol’ barbecue, Jemimal” Hiro continues, whipping the sword around sideways, cutting the businessman’s body in half just above the navel. Then he leans down so he’s looking right into the businessman’s face. “Didn’t anyone tell you,” he says, losing the dialect, “that I was a hacker?”

Then he hacks the guy’s head off. It falls to the floor, does a half-roll, and comes to rest staring straight up at the ceiling. So Hiro steps back a couple of paces and mumbles, “Safe.”

A largish safe, about a meter on a side, materializes just below the ceiling, plummets, and lands directly on the businessman’s head. The impact drives both the safe and the head straight down through the floor of The Black Sun, leaving a square hole in the floor, exposing the tunnel system underneath. The rest of the dismembered body is still strewn around the floor.

At this moment, a Nipponese businessman somewhere, in a nice hotel in London or an office in Tokyo or even in the first-class lounge of the LATH, the Los Angeles/Tokyo Hypersonic, is sitting in front of his computer, red-faced and sweating, looking at The Black Sun Hall of Fame. He has been cut off from contact with The Black Sun itself, disconnected as it were from the Metaverse, and is just seeing a two-dimensional display. The top ten swordsmen of all time are shown along with their photographs. Beneath is a scrolling list of numbers and names, starting with #11. He can scroll down the list if he wants to find his own ranking. The screen helpfully informs him that he is currently

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