NEAL STEPHENSON

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figures that this is always a good thing to know in the case of the Mafia.

‘We’re all in the same happy gang~” the man with the glass eye says.

“Which gang is that?”

“Lagos’s gang.”

“Huh?”

‘Well, it’s not really his gang. But he’s the guy who put it together. The nucleus around which it formed.”

“How and why and what are you talking about?”

“Okay.” He shoves his plate away from him, folds up his napkin, puts it on the table. “Lagos had all these ideas. Ideas about all kinds of stuff”

“So I noticed.”

“He had stacks all over the place, on all different topics. Stacks where he would pull together knowledge from all over the fucking map and tie it all together. He had these things stashed here and there around the Metaverse, waiting for the information to become useful.”

“More than one of them?” Hiro says.

“Supposedly. Well, a few years ago, Lagos approached L. Bob Rife.”

“He did?”

“Yeah. See, Rife has a million programmers working for him. He was paranoid that they were stealing his data.”

“I know that he was bugging their houses and so on.”

“The reason you know that is because you found it in Lagos’s stack And the reason Lagos bothered to look it up is because he was doing market research. Looking for someone who might pay him hard cash for the stuff he dug up in the Babel/Infocalypse stack”

“He thought,” Hiro says, “that L. Bob Rife might have a use for some viruses.”

“Right. See, I don’t understand all this shit. But I guess he found an old virus or something that was aimed at the elite thinkers.”

“The technological priesthood,” Hiro says. “The infocrats. It wiped out the whole infocracy of Sumer.”

“Whatever.”

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