NEAL STEPHENSON

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Can’t see through the smoked glass. He bends down, puts his face right near the window, trying to make it real obvious.

Still no response. Finally, he knocks on the window.

Silence. He looks up at the entourage. They are all watching him. But when he looks up they glance away, suddenly remember to drag on their cigarettes or rub their eyebrows.

There is only one source of light inside the limousine that’s bright enough to be visible through the smoked glass, and that is the distinctive inflated rectangle of a television screen.

What the hell. This is America, Him is half American, and there’s no reason to take this politeness thing to an unhealthy extreme. He hauls the door open and looks into the back of the limousine.

Sushi K is sitting there, wedged in between a couple of other young Nipponese men, programmers on his imageering team. His hairdo is turned off, so it just looks like an orange Afro. He is wearing a partly assembled stage costume, apparently expecting to be performing tonight. Looks like he’s taking Him up on his offer.

He’s watching a well-known television program called Eye Spy. it is produced by CIC and syndicated through one of the major studios. It is reality television: CIC picks out one of their agents who is involved in a wet operation-doing some actual cloak-and-dagger work-řnd has him put on a gargoyle rig so that everything he sees and hears is transmitted back to the home base in Langley. This material is then edited into a weekly hour-long program.

Hiro never watches it. Now that he works for dC, he finds it kind of annoying. But he hears a lot of gossip about the show, and he knows that’ tonight they are showing the second-to-last episode in a five-part arc. CIC has smuggled a guy onto the Raft, where he is trying to infiltrate one of its many colorful and sadistic pirate bands: the Bruce Lee organization.

Hiro enters the limousine and gets a look at the ‘IV just in time to see Bruce Lee himself, as seen from the point of view of the hapless gargoyle spy, approaching down some dank corridor on a Raft ghost ship. Condensation is dripping from the blade of Bruce Lee’s samurai sword.

“Bruce Lee’s men have trapped the spy in an old Korean

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