SNOW CRASH

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word for ‘ear.’ That’s all those people were: ears with bodies attached. Passive receivers of information. But Enki was different. Enki was an en who just happened to be especially good at his job. He had the unusual ability to write new me-he was a hacker. He was, actually, the first modern man, a fully conscious human being, just like us.

“At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People were carrying out the same old me all the time, not coming up with new ones, not thinking for themselves. I suspect that he was lonely, being one of the few-perhaps the only-conscious human being in the world. He realized that in order for the human race to advance, they had to be delivered from the grip of this viral civilization.

“So he created the namshub of Enki, a countervirus that spread along the same routes as the me and the metavirus. It went into the deep structures of the brain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could understand the Sumerian language, or any other deep structure-based language. Cut off from our common deep structures, we began to develop new languages that had nothing in common with each other. The me no longer worked and it was not possible to write new me. Further transmission of the metavirus was blocked.”

“Why didn’t everyone starve from lack of bread, having lost the bread-making me?” Uncle Enzo says.

“Some probably did. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and figure it out. So you might say that the namshub of Enki was the beginnings of human consciousness-when we first had to think for ourselves. It was the beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to think about abstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That’s where the name Babel comes from. Literally it means ‘Gate of Cod.’ It was the gate that allowed God to reach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a gateway that was opened by the namshub of Enki that broke us free from the metavirus and gave us the ability to think-moved us from a matcrialistic world to a dualistic world-a binary world-with both a physical and a spiritual component.

“There was probably chaos and upheaval. Enki, or his son Marduk, tried to reimpose order on society by supplanting the old system of me with a code of laws-The Code of Hammurabi.