MILLION

HONNG

Hiro reaches out and takes the card.

Somewhere on earth, two computers swap bursts of electronic noise and the money gets transferred from the Mafia’s account to Him’s.

“You’ll take care of the split with Y.T.,” Uncle Enzo says.

Hiro nods. You bet I will.

“I’m here on the Raft looking for a piece of software-a piece of medicine to be specific-that was written five thousand years ago by a Sumerian personage named Enki, a neurolinguistic hacker.”

‘What does that mean?” Mr. Lee says.

“It means a person who was capable of programming other people’s minds with verbal streams of data, known as namshubs.”

Ng is totally expressionless. He takes another drag on his cigarette, spouts the smoke up above his head in a geyser, watches it spread out against the ceiling. ‘What is the mechanism?”

‘We’ve got two kinds of language in our heads. The kind we’re using now is acquired. It patterns our brains as we’re learning it. But there’s also a tongue that’s based in the deep structures of the brain, that everyone shares. These structures consist of basic neural circuits that have to exist in order to allow our brains to acquire higher languages.”

“Linguistic infrastructure,” Uncle Enzo says.

“Yeah. I guess ‘deep structure’ and ‘infrastructure’ mean the same thing. Anyway, we can access those parts of the brain under the right cOnditions. Glossolalia-speaking in tongues—is the output side of it, where the deep linguistic structures hook into our tongues and speak, bypassing all the higher, acquired languages. Everyone’s known that for some time.”

“You’re saying there’s an input side, too?” Ng says.

“Exactly. It works in reverse. Under the right conditions, your ears-or eyes-can tie into the deep structures, bypassing the higher language functions. Which is to say, someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visual symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstern. Like a cracker who breaks into a computer system, bypasses all the security precautions, and plugs himself into the core, enabling him to exert absolute control over the machine.”