SNOW CRASH

370

“In that situation, the people who own the computer are helpless,” Ng says.

“Right. Because they access the machine at a higher level, which has now been overridden. In the same sense, once a neurolinguistic hacker plugs into the deep structures of our brain, we can’t get him out-because we can’t even control our own brain at such a basic level.”

“What does this have to do with a clay tablet on the Enterprise?” Mr. Lee says.

“Bear with me. This language-the mother tongue-is a vestige of an earlier phase of human social development. Primitive societies were controlled by verbal rules called me. The me were like little programs for humans. They were a necessary part of the transition from caveman society to an organized, agricultural society. For example, there was a program for plowing a furrow in the ground and planting grain. There was a program for baking bread and another one for making a house. There were also me for higher-level functions such as war, diplomacy, and religious ritual. All the skills required to operate a self-sustaining culture were contained in these me, which were written down on tablets or passed around in an oral tradition. In any case, the repository for the me was the local temple, which was a database of me, controlled by a priest/king called an en. When someone needed bread, they would go to the en or one of his underlings and download the bread-making me from the temple. Then they would carry out the instructions-run the program-and when they were finished, they’d have a loaf of bread.

“A central database was necessary, among other reasons, because some of the me had to be properly timed. If people carried out the plowing-and-planting me at the wrong time of year, the harvest would fail and everyone would starve. The only way to make sure that the me were properly timed was to build astronomical observatories to watch the skies for the changes of season. So the Sumerians built towers ‘with their tops with the heavens’-topped with astronomical diagrams. The en would watch the skies and dispense the agricultural me at the proper times of year to keep the economy running.”

“I think you have a chicken.anci.egg problem,” Uncle Enzo says. “How did such a society first come to be organized?”