SNOW CRASH

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and more dangerous Metaverse, it might come in handy. This is easy to do poorly and surprisingly tricky to do well. Almost anyone can write an avatar that doesn’t look like anything, but it will lead to a lot of problems when it is used. Some Metaverse real estate-including The Black Sun-wants to know how big your avatar is so that it can figure out whether you are colliding with another avatar or some obstacle. If you give it an answer of zero-you make your avatar infinitely small-you will either crash that piece of real estate or else make it think that something is very wrong. You will be invisible, but everywhere you go in the Metaverse you will leave a swath of destruction and confusion a mile wide. In other places, invisible avatars are illegal. If your avatar is transparent and reflects no light whatsoever-the easiest kind to write-it will be recognized instantly as an illegal avatar and alarms will go off. It has to be written in such a way that other people can’t see it, but the real estate software doesn’t realize that it’s invisible.

There are about a hundred little tricks like this that Hiro wouldn’t know about if he hadn’t been programming avatars for people like Vitaly Chernobyl for the last couple of years. To write a really good invisible avatar from scratch would take a long time, but he puts one together in several hours by recycling bits and pieces of old projects left behind in his computer. Which is how hackers usually do it.

While he’s doing that, he comes across a rather old folder with some transportation software in it. This is left over from the very old days of the Metaverse, before the Monorail existed, when the only way to get around was to walk or to write a piece of ware that simulated a vehicle.

In the early days, when the Metaverse was a featureless black bali, this was a trivial job. Later on, when the Street went up and people started building real estate, it became more complicated. On the Street, you can pass through other people’s avatars. But you can’t pass through walls. You can’t enter private property. And you can t pass through other vehicles, or through permanent Street fixtures such as the Ports and the stanchions that support the monorail line. If you try to collide with any of these things, you don’t die or get kicked out of the Metaverse; you just