SNOW CRASH
babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.
She’s not especially good at cutting up fish. The big stout Russian chicks-stomping, slab-faced babushkas-keep giving her a hassle. They keep hovering, watching her cut with this look on their face like they can’t believe what a dork she is. Then they try to show her how to do it the right way, but still she’s riot so good at it. It’s hard, and her hands are cold and stiff all the time.
After a couple of frustrating days, they give her a new job, farther down the production line: they turn her into a cafeteria dame. Like one of the slop-singers in the high school lunchroom. She works in the galley of one of the big Russian ships, hauling vats of cooked fish stew out to the buffet line, ladling it out into bowls, shoving it across the counter at an unending line consisting of religious fanatics, religious fanatics, and more religious fanatics. Except this time around, there seem to be a lot more Asians and hardly any Americans at all.
They have a new species here too: people with antennas coming out of their heads. The antennas look like the ones on cop walkietalkies: short, blunt, black rubber whips. They rise up from behind the ear. The first time she sees one of these people, she figures it must be some kind of new Walkman, and she wants to ask the guy where he got it, what he’s listening to. But he’s a strange guy, stranger than all of the others, with a permanent thousand-yard stare and a bad case of the mumbles, and he ends up giving her the creeps so bad that she just shoves an extra-large dose of stew in his face and hurries him on down the line.
From time to time, she actually recognizes one of the people who were in her van. But they don’t seem to recognize her; they just look right through her. Glassy-eyed. Like they’ve been brainwashed.
Like Y.T. was brainwashed.
She can’t believe it has taken her this long to figure out what they were doing to her. And that just makes her more pissed.
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In Reality, Port Sherman is a surprisingly tiny little burg, really just a few square blocks. Until the Raft came along, it had a full-time population of a couple of thousand people. Now the population must be pushing fifty thousand. Hiro has to slow down a little bit here because the Refus are all sleeping on the street for the time being, an impediment to traffic.
That’s okay, it saves his life. Because shortly after he gets into Port Sherman, the wheels on his motorcycle lock up-the spokes become rigid-and the ride gets very bumpy. A couple of seconds after that, the entire bike goes dead, becomes an inert chunk of metal. Not even the engine works. He looks down into the flat screen on top of the fuel tank, wanting to get a status report, but it’s just showing snow. The bios has crashed. Asherah’s possessed his bike.
So he abandons it in the middle of the street, starts walking toward the waterfront. Behind him, he can hear the Refus waking up, struggling out of their blankets and sleeping bags, converging over the fallen bike, trying to be the first to claim it.
He can hear a deep thumping in his chest, and for a minute he remembers Raven’s motorcycle in L.A., how he felt it first and heard it later. But there are no motorcycles around here. The sound is coming from above. It’s a chopper. The kind that flies.
Hiro can smell the seaweed rotting on the beach, he’s so close.
He comes around a corner and finds himself on the waterfront street, looking straight into the facade of the Spectrum 2000. On the other side is water.
The chopper’s coming up the fjord, following it inland from the open sea, headed straight for the Spectrum 2000. It’s a small one, an agile number with a lot of glass. Hiro can see the crosses painted all over it where the red stars used to be. It is brilliant and dazzling in the cool blue light of early morning because it’s shedding a trail of stars, blue-white magnesium flares tumbling out of it every few seconds, landing in the water below, where they Continue to burn, leaving an astral pathway marked out down the
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