SNOW CRASH

But I’m sorry to tell you that we don’t actually have one in stock today.”

“You don’t?”

‘We don’t. It’s a brand-new model. Nobody has them.”

“You sure? Because you ordered one.”

‘We did?”

“Yeah. A month ago.” Suddenly the guy cranes his neák, looks over Scott’s shoulder down the boulevard. “Well, speak of the devil. Here it comes.”

A Yamaha semi is pulling into the truck entrance with a new shipment of motorcycles in the back.

“It’s on that truck,” the guy says. “If you can give me one of your cards, I’ll jot down the vehicle identification number on back so you can pull it off the truck for me.”

“This was a special order made by Mr. Norman?”

“He claimed he was just ordering it as a display model, you know. But it sort of has my name on it.”

“Yes, sir. I understand totally.”

___________ Sure enough, the bike comes off the truck, just as the guy described it, right down to color scheme (black) and vehicle ID number. It’s a beautiful bike. It draws a crowd just sitting on the parking lot-the other salesmen actually put down their coffee cups and take their feet off their desks to go outside and look at it. It looks like a black land torpedo. Two-wheel drive, natch. The wheels are so advanced they’re not even wheels.-. they look like giant, heavy-duty versions of the smartwheels that highspeed skateboards use, independently telescoping spokes with fat traction pads on the ends. Dangling out over the front, in the nose cone of the motorcycle, is the sensor package that monitors road conditions, decides where to place each spoke as it rolls forward, how much to extend it, and how to rotate the footpad for maximum traction. It’s all controlled by a bios—a Built-In Operating System-an onboard computer with a flat-panel screen built into the top of the fuel tank.

They say that this baby will do a hundred and twenty miles per hour on rubble. The bios patches itself into the CIC weather net so that it knows when it’s about to run into precip. The