SNOW CRASH

These wireheads are operating under remote control from somewhere else. Ng seemed to think that they had an organized Raft defense system. Maybe there’s a hacker-in-charge, an en, sitting in the Enterprise’s control tower, moving these guys around like an air traffic controller.

In any case, they are not very big on spontaneity. They sit on him for a few minutes before they decide what to do next. Then, many hands reach down and clasp him around the wrists and anides, elbows and knees. They haul him across the flight deck like pallbearers, face up. Hiro looks up into the control tower and sees a couple of faces looking down at him. One of them-the en-is talking into a microphone.

Eventually, they come to a big flat elevator that sinks down into the guts of the ship, out of view of the control tower. It comes to rest on one of the lower decks, apparently a hangar deck where they used to maintain airplanes.

Hiro hears a woman’s voice, speaking words gently but clearly:

“me lu lu mu al nu urn me en ki me en me lu lu mu me al nu urn mealnuumemememuluealnuumrneduggamumemulu ealnuumme..”

It’s three feet strarght down to the deck, and he covers the distance in free fall, slamming down on his back, bumping his head. All his limbs bounce loosely on the metal. Around him he sees and hears the wireheads collapsing like wet towels falling off a rack.

He cannot move any part of his body. He has a little control over his eyes. A face comes into view, and he has trouble resolving it, can’t quite focus, but he recognizes something in her posture, the way she tosses her hair back over her shoulder when it falls down. It’s Juanita. Juanita with an antenna rising out of the base of her skull.

She kneels down beside him, bends down, cups one hand around his ear, and whispers. The hot air tickles his ear, he tries to move away from it but can’t. She’s whispering another long string of syllables. Then she straightens up and gooses him in the side. He jerks away from her.

“Get up, lazybones,” she says.

He gets up. He’s fine now. But all the wireheads lay around him, perfectly motionless.