SNOW CRASH

least, as may have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the creative and transformational powers of language.’ Lagos believed that Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language-at least it was in Sumer five thousand years ago.”

“A language that lent itself to Enki’s neurolinguistic hacking.”

“Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote Steiner again, ‘Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second Fall.’ And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom Scholem’s translation, ‘The speech of men is connected with divine speech and all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine Name.’ The practical kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba’al Shem, meaning ‘master of the divine name.’”

“The machine language of the world,” Hiro says.

“Is this another analogy?”

“Computers speak machine language,” Hiro says. “It’s written in ones and zeroes-binary code. At the lowest level, all computers are programmed with strings of ones and zeroes. When you program in machine language, you are controlling the computer at its brainstern, the root of its existence. It’s the tongue of Eden. But it’s very difficult to work in machine language because you go crazy after a while, working at such a minute level. So a whole Babel of computer languages has been created for programmers:

FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, LISP, Pascal, C, PROLOG, FORTH. You talk to the computer in one of these languages, and a piece of software called a compiler converts it into machine language. But you never can tell exactly what the compiler is doing. It doesn’t always come out the way you want. Like a dusty pane or warped mirror. A really advanced hacker comes to understand the true inner workings of the machine-he sees through