NEAL STEPHENSON

177

Da5id’s house has been transfigured by light. It’s at the end of its own little road, at the summit of a hill. The road has been blocked off by a squat froglike Jeep-thing from General Jim’s, saturated red and blue light sweeping and pulsing out of it. Another helicopter is above the house, supported on a swirling column of radiance. Soldiers creep up and down the property, carrying hand-held searchlights.

“We took the precaution of securing the area,” Major Qem says.

At the fringes of all this light, Hiro can see the dead organic colors of the hillside. The soldiers are trying to push it back with their searchlights, trying to bum it away. He is about to bury himself in it, become a single muddy pixel in some airline passenger’s window. Plunging into the biomass.

Da5id’s laptop is on the floor next to the table where he liked to work. It is surrounded by medical debris. In the middle of this, Hiro finds Da5id’s goggles, which either fell off when he hit the floor, or were stripped off by the paramedics.

Him picks up the goggles. As he brings them up toward his eyes, he sees the image: a wall of blackand-white static. Da5id’s computer has snow-crashed.

He closes his eyes and drops the goggles. You can’t get hurt by looking at a bitmap. Or can you?

____________ The house is sort of a modernist castle with a high turret on one end. Da5id and Hiro and the rest of the hackers used to go up there with a case of beer and a hibachi and just spend a whole night, eating jumbo shrimp and crab legs and oysters and washing them down with beer. Now it’s deserted, of course, just the hibachi, which is rusted and almost buried in gray ash, like an archaeological relic. Hiro has pinched one of Da5id’s beers from the fridge, and he sits up here for a while, in what used to be his favorite place, drinking his beer slowly, like he used to, reading stories in the lights.

The old central neighborhoods are packed in tight below an eternal, organic haze. In other cities, you breathe industrial contaminants, but in L.A., you breathe amino acids. The hazy sprawl is ringed and netted with glowing lines, like hot wires in a toaster.