SNOW CRASH

It’s much worse than he had expected.

This man apparently took a bullet somewhere around the bridge of his nose, aimed upward. Everything above that point has been pretty much blown off. Him’s looking into a cross-section of his lower brain.

Something is sticking up out of his head. Hiro figures it must be fragments of skull or something. But it’s too smooth and regular for that.

Now that he’s gotten over his initial nausea, he’s finding this easier to look at. It helps to know that the guy is out of his misery. More than half of his brain is gone. He’s stifi talking-his voice sounds whistly and gaseous, like a pipe organ gone bad, because of the changes in his skull-but it’s just a brainstem function, just a twitch in the vocal cords.

The thing sticking up out of his head is a whip antenna about a foot long. It is encased in black rubber, like the antennas on cop waildetalkies, and it is strapped onto his head, above the left ear. This is one of the antenna-heads that Eliot warned them about.

Hiro grabs the antenna and pulls. He might as well take the headset with him-it must have something to do with the way L. Bob Rife controls the Raft.

It doesn’t come off. When Hiro pulls, what’s left of the guy’s head twists around, but the antenna doesn’t come loose. And that’s how Hiro figures out that this isn’t a headset at all. The antenna has been permanently grafted onto the base of the man’s skull.

Hiro switches his goggles into millimeter-wave radar and stares into the man’s ruined head.

The antenna is attached to the skull by means of short screws that go into the bone, but do not pierce all the way through. The base of the antenna contains a few microchips, whose purpose Hiro cannot divine by looking at them. But nowadays you can put a supercomputer on a single chip, so anytime you see more than one chip together in one place, you’re looking at significant ware.

A single hair-thin wire emerges from the base of the antenna and penetrates the skull. It passes straight through to the brainstem and then branches and rebranches into a network of invisi

361