SNOW CRASH

south. The lumbering bagos and top-heavy four-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Him on his black motorcycle.

All these beefy Caucasians with gunsi Get enough of them together,looking forthe America they always believed they’d grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain’t what it used to be.

The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.

For a fee, you can drive into a Snooze ‘n’ Cruise franchise and umbilical your bago. The magic words are “We Have PullThrus,” which means you can enter the franchise, hook up, sleep, unhook, and drive out without ever having to shift your land zeppelin into reverse.

They used to claim it was a campground, tried to design the franchise with a rustic motif, but the customers kept chopping up those log-and-plank signs and wooden picnic tables and using them for cooking fires. Nowadays, the signs are electric polycarbonate bubbles, the corporate identity is all round and polished and smooth, in the same way that a urinal is, to prevent stuff from building up in the cracks. Because it’s not really camping when you don’t have a house to go back to.

Sixteen hours out of California, Hiro pulls into a Snooze ‘n’ Cruise on the eastern slope of the Cascades in northern Oregon. He’s several hundred miles north of where the Raft is, and on the