NEAL STEPHENSON
bly tiny wires embedded in the brain tissue. Coiled around the base of the tree.
Which explains why this guy continues to pump out a steady stream of Raft babble even when his brain is missing: It looks like L. Bob Rife has figured out a way to make electrical contact with the part of the brain where Asherah lives. These words aren’t originating here. It’s a pentecostal radio broadcast coming through on his antenna.
Reason is still up top, its monitor screen radiating blue static toward heaven. Hiro finds the hard power switch and turns it off. Computers this powerful are supposed to shut themselves down, after you’ve asked them to. Turning one off with the hard switch is like lulling someone to sleep by severing their spinal column. But when the system has snow-crashed, it loses even the ability to turn itself off, and primitive methods are required. Hiro packs the Gatling gun assembly back into the case and latches it shut.
Maybe it’s not as heavy as he thought, or maybe he’s on adrenaline overdrive. Then he realizes why it seems so much lighter: most of its weight was ammunition, and Fisheye used up quite a bit. He half-carries, half-drags it back to the stern, making sure the heat exchanger stays in the water, and somersaults it into the zodiac.
Hiro climbs in after it, joining Tranny, and starts attending to the motor.
“No motor,” Tranny says. “It snag bad.”
Right. The spiderweb would get wrapped around the propeller. Tranny shows Hiro how to snap the zodiac’s oars into the oarlocks.
Him rows for a while and finds himself in along clear zone that zigzags its way through the Raft, like a lead of clear water be. tween ice floes in the Arctic.
“Motor okay,” Tranny says.
He drops the motor into the water. Tranny pumps up the fuel line and starts it up. It starts on the first pull; Bruce Lee ran a tight ship.
As Him begins to motor down the open space, he is afraid that it is just a little cove in the ghetto. But this is just a trick of the lights. He rounds a corner and finds it stretching out for some
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