Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash.pdf - Science Fiction - brzeska11

Snow Crash

Neal

Stephenson

1992

snow n... 2.a. Anything resembling snow. b. The white specks on a television

screen resulting from weak reception.

crash v... -infr.. . . 5, To fail suddenly, as a business or an economy. -

The American Heritage Dictionary

virus.. . . [L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste.] 1.

Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. 2. Path. a. A morbid

principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some

disease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals by

inoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them.. . . 3.

fig. A moral or intellectual poison, or poisonous influence. -The Oxford

English Dictionary

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got

esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of

the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light

out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren

hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze

through a freshly napalmed forest, Where his body has bony extremities, the suit

has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of

telephone books.

When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in

cash, but someone might come after him anyway -- might want his car, or his

cargo. The gun is tiny, acm-styled, lightweight, the kind of gun a fashion

designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity

of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into

the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.

The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once

in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted

themselves a delivery, and they didn't want to pay for it. Thought they would

impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun,

centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The

recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle

third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating

in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle

with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn't get

nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.

Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied,

instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon

of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren't afraid of the gun, so the

Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstrations.

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to

fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb

beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming,

polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.

You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches,

talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's

car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs.

The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a

peseta.

Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role

model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you

got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have

guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the

worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances

here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once

things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in

Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has

been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North

Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has

taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global

layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know

what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else

music

movies

microcode (software)

high-speed pizza delivery

The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were

a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the

Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs

to work harder on his cooperation skills."

So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no

cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your

pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car,

file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six

months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a

pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it:

homeowners, red-faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old Spice and

job-related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways brandishing their

Seikos and waving at the clock over the kitchen sink, I swear, can't you guys

tell time?

Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery a major industry. A managed industry.

People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in

its doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda,

Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin

knows about sand. And they had studied this problem. Graphed the frequency of

doorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, then

analyze, the debating tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive

grammatical structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants

who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal

Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they

were going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call and

get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with their

life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was fucking inalienable. Sent

psychologists out to these people's houses, gave them a free TV set to submit to

an anonymous interview, hooked them to polygraphs, studied their brain waves as

they showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn queens and late-night car

crashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put them in sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms and

asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn't

respond without committing a venial sin.

The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human

nature and you couldn't fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technical

fix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for

stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how

many trade imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone

call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack of

them, in slots behind the Deliverator's head. Each pizza glides into a slot

like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box

interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator's car. The address of the

caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart

box's built-in RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which computes

and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map

traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to

glance down.

If the thirty-minute deadline expires, news of the disaster is flashed to

CosaNostra Pizza Headquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo himself --

the Sicilian Colonel Sanders, the Andy Griffith of Bensonhurst, the straight

razor-swinging figment of many a Deliverator's nightmares, the Capo and prime

figurehead of CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated -- who will be on the phone to the

customer within five minutes, apologizing profusely. The next day, Uncle Enzo

will land on the customer's yard in a jet helicopter and apologize some more and

give him a free trip to Italy -- all he has to do is sign a bunch of releases

that make him a public figure and spokesperson for CosaNostra Pizza and

basically end his private life as he knows it. He will come away from the whole

thing feeling that, somehow, be owes the Mafia a favor.

The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases,

but he has heard some rumors. Most pizza deliveries happen in the evening

hours, which Uncle Enzo considers to be his private time. And how would you

feel if you bad to interrupt dinner with your family in order to call some

obstreperous dork in a Burbclave and grovel for a late fucking pizza? Uncle

Enzo has not put in fifty years serving his family and his country so that, at

the age when most are playing golf and bobbling their granddaughters, he can get

out of the bathtub dripping wet and lie down and kiss the feet of some sixteen-

year-old skate punk whose pepperoni was thirty-one minutes in coming. Oh, God.

It makes the Deliverator breathe a little shallower just to think of the idea.

But he wouldn't drive for CosaNostra Pizza any other way.

You know why? Because there's something about having your life on the line.

It's like being a kamikaze pilot. Your mind is clear. Other people -- store

clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless

jobs that make up Life in America -- other people just rely on plain old

competition.

Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster and better than your

high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging,

because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things.

What a fucking rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition.

Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don't work harder because you're

competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder

because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your

life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy -- but what

kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That's why nobody, not

even the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. The Deliverator is

proud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march up the front

walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on

his shoulder, red LED digits blazing proud numbers into the night: 12:32 or

15:15 or the occasional 20:43.

The Deliverator is assigned to CosaNostra Pizza #3569 in the Valley. Southern

California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.

Not enough roads for the number of people. Fairlanes, Inc. is laying new ones

all the time. Have to bulldoze lots of neighborhoods to do it, but those

seventies and eighties developments exist to be bulldozed, right? No sidewalks,

no schools, no nothing. Don't have their own police force -- no immigration

control -- undesirables can walk right in without being frisked or even

harassed. Now a Burbclave, that's the place to live. A city-state with its own

constitution, a border, laws, cops, everything.

The Deliverator was a corporal in the Farms of Merryvale State Security Force

for a while once. Got himself fired for pulling a sword on an acknowledged

perp. Slid it right through the fabric of the perp's shirt, gliding the flat of

the blade along the base of his neck, and pinned him to a warped and bubbled

expanse of vinyl siding on the wall of the house that the perp was trying to

break into. Thought it was a pretty righteous bust. But they fired him anyway

because the perp turned out to be the son of the vice-chancellor of the Farms of

Merryvale. Oh, the weasels had an excuse: said that a thirty-six-inch samurai

sword was not on their Weapons Protocol. Said that he had violated the SPAC,

the Suspected Perpetrator Apprehension Code. Said that the perp had suffered

psychological trauma. He was afraid of butter knives now; he had to spread his

jelly with the back of a teaspoon. They said that he had exposed them to

liability.

The Deliverator had to borrow some money to pay for it. Had to borrow it from

the Mafia, in fact. So he's in their database now -- retinal patterns, DNA,

voice graph, fingerprints, footprints, palm prints, wrist prints, every fucking

part of the body that had wrinkles on it, almost -- those bastards rolled in ink

and made a print and digitized it into their computer. But it's their money --

sure they're careful about loaning it out. And when he applied for the

Deliverator job they were happy to take him, because they knew him. When he got

the loan, he had to deal personally with the assistant vice-capo of the Valley,

who later recommended him for the Deliverator job. So it was like being in a

family. A really scary, twisted, abusive family.

CosaNostra Pizza #3569 is on Vista Road just down from Kings Park Mall. Vista

Road used to belong to the State of California and now is called Fairlanes, Inc.

Rte. CSV-5. Its main competition used to be a U.S. highway and is now called

Cruiseways, Inc. Rte. Cal-12. Farther up the Valley, the two competing highways

actually cross. Once there had been bitter disputes, the intersection closed by

sporadic sniper fire. Finally, a big developer bought the entire intersection

and turned it into a drive-through mall. Now the roads just feed into a parking

system -- not a lot, not a ramp, but a system -- and lose their identity.

Getting through the intersection involves tracing paths through the parking

system, many braided filaments of direction like the Ho Chi Minh trail. CSV-5

has better throughput, but Cal.12 has better pavement. That is typical --

Fairlanes roads emphasize getting you there, for Type A drivers, and Cruiseways

emphasize the enjoyment of the ride, for Type B drivers.

The Deliverator is a Type A driver with rabies. He is zeroing in on his home

base, CosaNostra Pizza #3569, cranking up the left lane of CSV-5 at a hundred

and twenty kilometers. His car is an invisible black lozenge, just a dark place

that reflects the blinking of franchise signs -- the loglo. A row of orange

lights burbles and churns across the front, where the grille would be if this

were an air-breathing car. The orange light looks like a gasoline fire. It

comes in through people's rear windows, bounces off their rearview mirrors,

projects a fiery mask across their eyes, reaches into their subconscious, and

unearths terrible fears of being pinned, fully conscious, under a detonating gas

tank, makes them want to pull over and let the Deliverator overtake them in his

black chariot of pepperoni fire.

The loglo, overhead, marking out CSV-5 in twin contrails, is a body of

electrical light made of innumerable cells, each cell designed in Manhattan by

imagineers who make more for designing a single logo than a Deliverator will

make in his entire lifetime. Despite their efforts to stand out, they all smear

together, especially at a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. Still, it is

easy to see CosaNostra Pizza #3569 because of the billboard, which is wide and

tall even by current inflated standards. In fact, the squat franchise itself

looks like nothing more than a low-slung base for the great aramid fiber pillars

that thrust the billboard up into the trademark firmament. Marca Registrada,

baby.

The billboard is a classic, a chestnut, not a figment of some fleeting Mafia

promotional campaign. It is a statement, a monument built to endure. Simple

and dignified. It shows Uncle Enzo in one of his spiffy Italian suits. The

pinstripes glint and flex like sinews. The pocket square is luminous. His hair

is perfect, slicked back with something that never comes off, each strand cut

off straight and square at the end by Uncle Enzo's cousin, Art the Barber, who

runs the second-largest chain of low-end haircutting establishments in the

world. Uncle Enzo is standing there, not exactly smiling, an avuncular glint in

his eye for sure, not posing like a model but standing there like your uncle

would, and it says

The Mafia

you've got a friend in The Family!

paid for by the Our Thing Foundation

The billboard serves as the Deliverator's polestar. He knows that when he gets

to the place on CSV-5 where the bottom corner of the billboard is obscured by

the pseudo-Gothic stained-glass arches of the local Reverend Wayne's Pearly

Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: