SNOW CRASH

floor, and comes face to face with a receptionist daemon. For a moment, he can’t peg her racial background; then he realizes that this daemon is half-black, half-Asian—just like him. If a white man had stepped off the elevator, she probably would have been a blonde. A Nipponese businessman would have come face to face with a perky Nipponese office girl.

“Yes, sir,” she says. “Is this in regard to sales or customer service?”

“Customer service.”

“Whom are you with?”

“You name it, I’m with them.”

“I’m sorry?” Like human receptionists, the daemon is especially bad at handling irony.

“At the moment, I think I’m working for the Central Intelligence Corporation, the Mafia, and Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong.”

“I see,” says the receptionist, making a note. Also like a human receptionist, it is not possible to impress her. “And what product is this in regards to?”

“Reason.”

“Sir! Welcome to Ng Security Industries,” says another voice.

It is another daemon, an attractive black/Asian woman in highly professional dress, who has materialized from the depths of the office suite.

She ushers Hiro down a long, nicely paneled hallway, down another long paneled hallway, and then down a long paneled hallway. Every few steps, he passes by a reception area where avatars from all over the world sit in chairs, passing the time. But Hiro doesn’t have to wait. She ushers him straight into a nice big paneled office where an Asian man sits behind a desk littered with models of helicopters. It is Mr. Ng himself. He stands up; they swap bows; the usher lady checks out.

“You working with Fisheye?” Ng says, lighting up a cig. The smoke swirls in the air ostentatiously. It takes as much computing power realistically to model the smoke coming out of Ng’s mouth as it does to model the weather system of the entire planet.

“He’s dead,” Hiro says. “Reason crashed at a critical juncture, and he ate a harpoon.”

NEAL STEPHENSON 367

Ng doesn’t react. Instead, he just sits there motionless for a few seconds, absorbing this data, as if his customers get harpooned all the time. He’s probably got a mental database of everyone who has ever used one of his toys and what happened to them.

“I told him it was a beta version,” Ng says. “And he should have known not to use it for infIghting. A two-dollar switchblade would have served him better.”

“Agreed. But he was quite taken with it.”

Ng blows out more smoke, thinking. “As we learned in Vietnam, high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to psychoactive drugs. Like LSD, which can convince people they can fly-causing them to jump out of windows-weapons can make people overconfident. Skewing their tactical judgment. As in the case of Fisheye.”

“I’ll be sure and remember that,” Hiro says.

“What kind of combat environment do you want to use Reason in?” Ng says.

“I need to take over an aircraft carrier tomorrow morning.”

“The Enterprise?”

“Yes.”

“You know,” Ng says, apparently in a conversational mood, “there’s a guy who actually took over a nuclear.missile submarine armed with nothing more than a piece of glass-“

“Yeah, that’s the guy who killed Fisheye. I might have to tangle with him, too.”

Ng laughs. “What is your ultimate objective? As you know, we are all in this together, so you may share your thoughts with me.”

“I’d prefer a little more discretion in this case…”

“Too late for that, Hiro,” says another voice. Hiro turns around; it is Uncle Enzo, being ushered through the door by the receptionist-a striking Italian woman. Just a few paces behind him is a small Asian businessman and an Asian receptionist.

“I took the liberty of calling them in when you arrived,” Ng says, “so that we could have a powwow.”

“Pleasure,” Uncle Enzo says, bowing slightly to Hiro. Hiro bows back. “I’m really sorry about the car, sir.” “It’s forgotten,” Uncle E~0 says.

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