NEAL STEPHENSON
409
Hiro and Y.T. have eaten a lot of junk food together in differ~ ent joints all over L.A-doughnuts, burritos, pizza, sushi, you name it-and all Y.T. ever talks about is her mother and the terrible job that she has with the Feds. The regimentation. The lie~detector tests. The fact that for all the work she does, she really has no idea what it is that the government is really working
on.
It’s always been a mystery to Hiro, too, but then, that’s how the government is. It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn’t bother with, which means that there’s probably no reason for it; you never know what they’re doing or why. Hackers have traditionally looked upon the government’s coding sweatshops with horror and just tried to forget that all of that shit ever existed.
But they have thousands of programmers. The programmers work twelve hours a day out of some twisted sense of personal loyalty. Their software-engineering techniques, while cruel and ugly, are very sophisticated. They must have been up to something.
“Juanita?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t ask me why I think this. But I think that the government has been undertaking a big software development project for L. Bob Rife.”
“Makes sense,” she says. “He has such a love-hate relationship with his programmers-he needs them, but he won’t trust them. The government’s the only organization he would trust to write something important. I wonder what it is?”
“Hold on,” Hiro says. “Hold on.”
He is now a stone’s throw away from a big blue cube sitting at ground level. All the other blue cubes sort of feed into it. There is a motorcycle parked next to the cube, rendered in color, but just one notch above black and white: big jaggedy pixels and a limited color palette. It has a sidecar. Raven’s standing next to it.
He is carrying something in his arms. It is another simple geometric construction, a long smooth blue ellipsoid a couple of feet in length. From the way he’s moving, Hiro thinks that Raven has just removed it from the blue cube; he carries it over to the motorcycle and nestles it into the sidecar.