SNOW CRASH

glasses. They look naked without them. Might as well be walking around with no pants on. Seeing these Feds without their mirror specs is like blundering into the boys’ locker room.

She finds Room 968A easily enough. Most of the floor is just a big pool of desks. All the actual, numbered rooms are around the edges, with frosted glass doors. Each of the creepy guys seems to have a desk of his own, some of them loiter near their desks, the rest of them are doing a lot of hall-jogging and impromptu conferencing at other creepy guys’ desks. Their white shirts are painfully clean. Not as many shoulder holsters as she would expect; all the gun-carrying Feds are probably out in what used to be Alabama or Chicago trying to confiscate back bits of United States territory from what is now a Buy ‘n’ Fly or a toxic-waste dump.

She goes on into Room 968A. It’s an office. Four Fed guys are in here, the same as the others except most of them are a tad older, in their forties and fifties.

“Cot a delivery for this room,” Y.T. says.

“You’re Y.T.?” says the head Fed, who’s sitting behind the desk.

“You’re not supposed to know my name,” Y.T. says. “How did you know my name?”

“I recognized you,” the head Fed says. “I know your mother.” Y.T. does not believe him. But these Feds have all kinds of ways of finding out stuff.

“Do you have any relatives in Afghanistan?” she says.

The guys all look back and forth at each other, like, did you understand the chick? But it’s not a sentence that is intended to be understood. Actually, Y.T. has all kinds of voice recognition ware in her coverall and in her plank. When she says, “Do you have any relatives in Afghanistan?” that’s like a code phrase, it tells all of her spook gear to get ready, shake itself down, check itself out, prick up its electronic ears.

“You want this envelope or not?” she says.

“I’ll take it,” the head Fed says, standing up and holding ,ut one hand.

Y.T. walks into the middle of the room and hands him the envelope. But instead of taking it, he lunges out at the last minute and grabs her forearm.