NEAL STEPHENSON

141

“I’ll behave,” Hiro says.

“Just one thing-“

“I know. Don’t fuck around with Raven.”

“That’s right.”

Squeaky holds his glare for another second and then turns around, motions the driver to drive. He impatiently rips ten feet of hard copy out of the dashboard printer and begins sifting through it.

On this long strip of paper, Hiro glimpses multiple renditions of the important Crip, the guy with the goatee whom Raven was dealing with earlier. On the printout, he is labeled as “T-Bone Murphy.”

There’s also a picture of Raven. It’s an action shot, not a mug shot, It is terrible output. It has been caught through some kind of light-amplifying optics that wash out the color and make everything incredibly grainy and low contrast. It looks like some image processing has been done to make it sharper; this also makes it grainier. The license plate is just an oblate blur, overwhelmed by the glow of the taillight. It is heeled over sharply, the sidecar wheel several inches off the ground. But the rider doesn’t have any visible neck; his head, or rather the dark splotch that is there, just keeps getting wider until it merges into his shoulders. Defimtely Raven.

“How come you have pictures of T-Bone Murphy in there?” Him says.

“He’s chasing him,” Squeaky says.

“Who’s chasing whom?”

“Well, your friend Y.T. ain’t no Edward R. Murrow. But as far as we can tell from her reports, they’ve been sighted in the same area, trying to kill each other,” Squeaky says. He’s speaking with the slow, distant tones of someone who is getting live updates over his headphones.

“They were doing some kind of a deal earlier,” Hiro says.

“Then I ain’t hardly surprised they’re trying to kill each other now.,’

___________ Once they get to a certain part of town, following the T-Bone and Raven show becomes a matter of connect-the—