SNOW CRASH
straight line. He’s got a routine coded into his motorcycle software that makes it follow the monorail track automatically so that he doesn’t even have to worry about steering it.
Meanwhile, Juanita’s standing next to him in Reality. She’s got another pair of goggles; she can see all the same things that Him sees.
“Rife’s got a mobile uplink on his corporate chopper, just like the one on commercial airliners, so he can patch into the Mets-verse when he’s in the air. As long as he’s airborne, that’s his only link to the Metaverse. We may be able to hack our way into that one link and block it or something….”
“That low-leve! communications stuff is too full of medicine for us to mess with it in this decade,” Hiro says, braking his motorcycle to a stop. “Holy shit. It’s just like Y.T. described it.”
He’s in front of Port 127. Rife’s black cube is there, just as Y.T. described it. There’s no door.
Him starts walking away from the Street, toward the cube. It reflects no light at all, so he can’t tell whether it’s ten feet or ten miles away from him until the security daemons begin to materialize. There are haifa dozen of them, all big sturdy avatars in blue coveralls, sort of quasi-military looking, but without rank. They don’t need rank because they’re all running the same program. They materialize around him in a neat semicircle with a radius of about ten feet, blocking Hiro’s way to the cube.
Hiro mumbles a word under his breath and vanishes-he slips into his invisible avatar. It would be very interesting to bang around and see how these security daemons deal with it, but right now he has to get moving before they get a chance to adjust.
They don’t, at least not very well. Hiro runs between two of the security daemons and heads for the wall of the cube. He finally gets there, slamming into it, coming to a dead stop. The security daemons have all turned around and are chasing him. They can figure out where he is-the computer tells them that much-but they can’t do much to him. Like the bouncer daemons in The Black Sun, which Him hel~ed write, they shove people around by applying basic rules of avatar physics. When Hiro is invisible, there is very little for them to shove. But if they are well written, they may have more subtle ways of messing him