SNOW CRASH
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a place to insert a credit or ID card, and a cylindrical socket that is about the size of one of those little tubes.
This is Hiro’s reconstruction of how the thing looked at one time. When Him sees it, it is melted together. Judging from.the pattern of smoke marks on the outside of the case-which appear to be jetting outward from the crack between the top and bottom-the source of the flame was inside, not outside.
Squeaky reaches down and unsnaps one of the tubes from the bracket, holds it up in front of the bright lights of Chinatown. It had been transparent but was now smirched by heat and smoke. From a distance, it looks like a simple vial, but stepping up to look at it more closely Hiro can see at least haifa dozen tiny individual compartments inside the thing, all connected to each other by capillary tubes. It has a red plastic cap on one end of it. The cap has a black rectangular window, and as Squeaky rotates it, Hiro can see the dark red glint of an inactive LED display inside, like looking at the display on a turned-off calculator. Underneath this is a small perforation. It isn’t just a simple drilled hole. It is wide at the surface, rapidly narrowing to a nearly invisible pinpoint opening, like the bell of a trumpet.
The compartments inside the vial are all partially filled with liquids. Some of them are transparent and some are blackish brown. The brown ones have to be organics of some kind, now reduced by the heat into chicken soup. The transparent ones could be anything.
“He got out to go into a bar and have a drink,” Squeaky mumbles. “What an asshole.”
‘Who did?”
“T-Bone. See, T-Bone was, like, the registered owner of this unit. The suitcase. And as soon as he got more than about ten feet away from it-foosh—it selfdestructed.”
“Why?”
Squeaky looks at 1-liro like he’s stupid. “Well, it’s not like I work for Central Intelligence or anything. But I would guess that whoever makes this drug-they call it Countdown, or Redcap, or Snow Crasb-has a real thing about trade secrets. So if the pusher abandons the suitcase, or loses it, or tries to transfer ownership to someone else-foosh .”
“You think the Crips are going to catch up with Raven?”
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