NEAL STEPHENSON

365

Reason reboots with no problems. That’s to be expected. It’s also to be expected that later, probably when he most needs Reason to work, it will crash again, the way it did for Fisheye. He could keep turning it off and on every time it does this, but this is awkward in the heat of battle, and not the type of solution that hackers admire. It would be much more sensible just to debug it.

Which he could do by hand, if he had time. But there may be a better way of going about it. It’s possible that, by now, Ng Security Industries has fixed the bug-come out with a new version of the software. If so, he should be able to get a copy of it on the Street.

Hiro materializes in his office. The Librarian pokes his head

out of the next room, just in case Hiro has any questions for him.

“What does ultima ratio regum mean?”

‘The Last Argument of Kings,’” the Librarian says. “King

Louis XIV had it stamped onto the barrels of all of the cannons that were forged during his reign.”

Hiro stands up and walks out into his garden. His motorcycle is waiting for him on the gravel path that leads to the gate. Looking up over the fence, Him can see the lights of Downtown rising in the distance again. His computer has succeeded in jackLng into L. Bob Rife’s global networlq he has access to the Street. This is as Hiro had expected. Rife must have a whole suite of satellite uplinks there on the Enterprise, patched into a cellular network covering the Raft. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to reach the Metaverse from his very own watery fortress, which would never do for a man like Rife.

Hiro climbs on his bike, eases it through the neighborhood and onto the Street, and then gooses it up to a few hundred miles an hour, slaloming between the stanchions of the monorail, practicing. He runs intO a few of them and stops, but that’s to be expected.

Ng Security Industries has a whole floor of a mile-high neon skyscraper near Port One, right in the middle of Downtown. Like everything else in the Metaverse, it’s open twenty-four hours, because it’s always business hours somewhere in the world. Him leaves his bike on the Street, takes the elevator up to the 397th

366