NEAL STEPHENSON

Y.T. pinches a beer from the fridge and starts running a hot bath. It makes a roaring sound that relaxes her, like the white-noise generator on Mom’s nightstand.

The Nipponese businessman lies cut in segments on The Black Sun’s floor. Surprisingly(he looks so real when he’s in one piece), no flesh, blood, or organs are visible through the new cross-sections that Hiro’s sword made through his body. He is nothing more than a thin shell of epidermis, an incredibly complex inflatable doll. But the air does not rush out of him, he fails to collapse, and you can look into the aperture of a sword cut and see, instead of bones and meat, the back of the skin on the other side.

It breaks the metaphor. The avatar is not acting like a real body. It reminds all The Black Sun’s patrons that they are living in a fantasy world. People hate to be reminded of this.

When Him wrote The Black Sun’s swordfighting algorithms

-code that was later picked up and adopted by the entire Mets. verse-he discovered that there was no good way to handle the aftermath. Avatars are not supposed to die. Not supposed to fall apart. The creators of the Metaverse had not been morbid enough to foresee a demand for this kind of thing. But the whole point of a sword fight is to cut someone up and kill them. So Hiro had to kludge something together, in order that the Metaverse would not, over time, become littered with inert, dismembered avatars that raever decayed.

So the first thing that happens, when someone loses a sword fight, is that his computer gets disconnected from the global network that is the Metaverse. He gets chucked right out of the system. It is the closest simulation of death that the Metaverse can offer, but all it really does is cause the user a lot of annoyance.

Furthermore, the user finds that he can’t get back into the Metaverse for a few minutes. He can’t log back on. This is because his avatar, dismembered, is still in the Metaverse, and it’s