Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Author: Neal Stephenson

Blog Post: 2019-02-20 - Snow Crash

Summary

Set in a dystopian, corporatized future where Los Angeles has splintered into private city-states, Snow Crash follows Hiro Protagonist, a pizza delivery driver and elite hacker who discovers a dangerous new digital drug called “Snow Crash.” This metavirus has the ability to affect both computer systems in the virtual Metaverse and human minds in the physical world by exploiting ancient Sumerian linguistic programming.

Hiro teams up with Y.T., a fearless teenage courier, to uncover a conspiracy led by a powerful media mogul aiming to distribute the virus globally to achieve total control over human consciousness. As they navigate the dangerous intersections of the physical and virtual worlds, they work with various factions, including the Mafia, to dismantle the threat and prevent the total subjugation of humanity through linguistic manipulation. The novel is a seminal work of cyberpunk, blending high-speed action with deep philosophical inquiries into language, religion, and the future of information technology.

Notes

Chapter 1

• In a near distant future, the world is run by corporations.
• Deliverator delivers pizzas to home. He has a fancy car. When he is about to pickup the next pizza, the franchise is on fire due to being operated by a new immigrant. So when he gets the pizza to deliver, the timer says 20 minutes. Chapter 2
• While he is driving in a hurry to deliver, his car is harpooned by a courier. The courier is on a skateboard and uses an extensible string to attach to a car to carry them to places.
• In his rush to get rid of the courier, the deliverator crashes on to an empty swimming pool.
• The courier happens to be a girl. She introduces herself as YT and offers to deliver the pizza on time. The deliverator thanks her and gives his card which says ‘Hiro Protagonist’ Chapter 3
• Hiro and his friend Vitaly live in a rented storage container. Theirs is 20x30 and has a door and is more luxurious than others who live in bunk beds. Though their living condition is minimal, Hiro visits a virtual world named Metaverse where he has a big house in a prime place since he and his friend bought the space when it was being built.
• He was a coder in the past and had helped write some portions of the metaverse. He now owes the mafia a car (since it crashed and got totalled) and he now makes money by providing intel to the large digital library. Chapter 4
• YT maneuvers herself through the burbs expertly and delivers the pizza almost in the nick of time, much to the disappointment of the family who was expecting to celebrate by getting a free pizza. Chapter 5
• Hiro walks around the Metaverse and sees people walking around. He gets into a pyramid shaped building named The Black Sun that others are not able to enter. He is able to since he knows the owner Da5id and he was one of the people who designed it. He is met by a stranger who tries to sell him a drug named Snow Crash which is a hypercard. A hypercard is a digital card that if his avatar takes it in the metaverse, data gets transferred from the card to his system. He ignores and moves on. Chapter 6

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Chapter 6

Chapter 6 opens with a discussion of different private police forces. MetaCops is one of the larger ones—it operates in several Burbclaves and some of the private freeways—but most franchise nations handle their own security. There is also WorldBeat Security, which is upscale and espionage focused, and The Enforcers, who are notoriously violent. Y.T. is arrested by MetaCops, who use a loogie gun restraint and then read her a long series of disclaimers before taking her to a franchise prison. She bribes them with ludicrously inflated sums of money to take her to a Hoosegow franchise prison, but it is full and they drop her at the Clink, which is little more than a gas station basement turned prison cell. The MetaCops try to intimidate her by threatening to take her clothes, but when she refuses to be intimidated, they leave her alone, handcuffed to a water pipe.

Chapter 7

Hiro hacks into the data at The Black Sun looking for gossip. There is a Japanese rap star in the house. Da5id, Hiro’s old partner and the owner of the establishment, is drinking with a low-resolution avatar of Juanita Marquez, the love of Hiro’s life.

Juanita Marquez was someone Hiro met at Berkeley. At the time he was, by his own later admission, too immature to realize how amazing she was. Once he grew up a bit and understood how much his own military brat upbringing shaped his expectations of women, his opinion changed. While working at The Black Sun in the faces department, she told him an anecdote about her grandmother realizing she was pregnant and used this as evidence for the amount of data that can be encoded in the human face: as she puts it, her grandmother’s ability to “condense fact from the vapor of nuance.” He asked her on a date and then pointedly asked her if she thought he was an asshole. They started a relationship, but Hiro’s own insecurities undermined it. She eventually married, and then quickly divorced, Da5id. Hiro missed their wedding because he was in jail for reckless endangerment in a park. Juanita made millions off her The Black Sun stock. Hiro sold all of his before it was worth much in order to put his mother up in a nice retirement home.

Chapter 8

Hiro wanders around The Black Sun trying to find interesting data. Juanita comes to talk to him and warns him about Snow Crash. She has never been a completely logical person and prefers to operate by mystical intuition. They flirt a bit. He concludes that she does still like him but has to be guarded around him because he’s not a good prospect. Juanita has been using her millions to start a new wing of the Catholic Church and “considers herself a missionary” to intelligent atheists. She says what she has to tell him is related to religion but too complex for him to understand, and hands him a hypercard that reads “BABEL (Infopocalypse).”

Chapter 9

The hypercard is so massive it slows down Hiro’s computer to the point that it’s unable to render The Black Sun. Juanita tells him that unlike Da5id, he’s smart enough to appreciate it, and that he should stay away from both Raven and Snow Crash. He tries to ask questions, but she’s already leaving.

Hiro talks to Da5id, who has a sample of Snow Crash. Hiro is horrified that he’d even touch the hypercard, but Da5id is confident his antiviral software can handle anything. Da5id takes the Snow Crash, and a cheap knock-off female avatar whispers to him and unrolls a scroll with a nonsensical black-and-white image on it. Hiro says that he’s been exposed to potentially massive data, but Da5id replies that he’s not a computer and he can’t read it. Hiro asks what the avatar whispered, and Da5id says it was just babble. They go to watch the rapper Sushi K, and Da5id’s voice has already become fuzzy around the edges. Bouncer programs try to throw Hiro out of the bar, and when he turns to ask Da5id to stop them, Da5id has completely disintegrated into digital noise. The bouncer programs throw what is left of Da5id out.

Chapter 10

Y.T. is preparing to bust out of prison when she receives a phone call from her mom. She tells her mom she’s staying at a friend’s house and having a safe, normal time. Then Y.T. phones her boyfriend Roadkill, who declines to help her escape prison because he’s on an important delivery. Y.T. bemoans the state of morals and courtesy. Then she calls Hiro Protagonist. Hiro says he will come to rescue her after the mandatory 30-minute check-up. He does, but he has not counted on the group of taxi drivers who will be waiting, and he draws his sword to try to fight. Y.T. steals a taxi, and they make a run for it. The only franchise nation they can escape into with Y.T. being white and Hiro having black ancestry is Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, where Hiro has citizenship. The taxi drivers try to follow them, but they are armed with guns, and guns are illegal in Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong.

Chapter 11

In the Metaverse, Hiro is accosted by a neotraditional Japanese man with samurai swords who doesn’t believe Hiro deserves to have his own set. Hiro explains that his are a family heirloom his father won from a Japanese officer escaping a prison camp near Nagasaki. The man challenges him to a duel, and Hiro dismembers his digital form. He puts on an exaggerated southern African American dialect to taunt his opponent. The Black Sun keeps a record of all sword fights that occur on the premises, and Hiro holds the number-one rank.

Chapter 12

Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit A-367 is a robot guard dog that lives on a yard in Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong. His barks are inaudible to humans but alert other robot dogs to potential danger. He is able to identify Hiro as a citizen and Y.T. as a guest, as well as identify the guns held by their pursuers. Guns are illegal, so he attacks.

Hiro and Y.T. refer to the guard dog as a Rat Thing, and Y.T. has heard disturbing rumors about Rat Things’ speed and efficiency. The Rat Thing disarms but does not hurt the intruders. The taxi drivers retreat but throw a grenade at Y.T. The Rat Thing saves Y.T. but is damaged. Hiro warns her not to touch it because it’s unpredictable and has “biological components.” Y.T. watches as winglike structures unfold from the Rat Thing, and she figures out these are radiators to keep the damaged unit from overheating. She takes it by its front paws and moves it back to its hutch, where a cooling system deploys. With the vet inbound, the security unit thinks about the girl who saved it.

Meanwhile, Hiro and Y.T. agree to partner up to split the royalties on information, and she tells him about Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns. Then she skates into McDonald’s and switches out her courier uniform for the clothes she was wearing when she left home. Her mother, who works for the federal government, is waiting up for her, worried.

Chapter 13

Hiro Protagonist had to write a code to deal with the aftermath of sword fights because the inventors of the Metaverse didn’t anticipate needing to dispose of bodies. Graveyard Daemons—special programs—dispose of the avatar he killed through secret tunnels that are also accessible to Hiro, because he wrote them. After winning his sword fight, he’s pulled out of the Metaverse by Vitaly, who tells him it’s time to go. They pick up equipment and head to a concert. On the way, Hiro logs into his office and finds Juanita Marquez has subscribed him to an expensive intelligence interface and added a library, complete with a librarian. The Librarian recounts the story of the Tower of Babel for him, correcting him on the important point that in the story God never destroyed the tower but merely confused the language so that people could not talk to each other. The Librarian says that Babylonian ziggurats were often topped with depictions of stars, and this might be a better literal interpretation of a tower “whose top reached the heavens.” The Librarian also explains that he is fond of tangents, and that he is a self-teaching bit of code designed by Dr. Emanuel Lagos to sort massive amounts of data for relevant patterns. Hiro asks the Librarian to find all the free information he can on L. Bob Rife, and the Librarian does, stating the information has already been transferred to his computer.

Chapter 14

Hiro and the Librarian go over the life of L. Bob Rife. He had been a high school football player in Texas in the 1960s, then a communications major at Rice University, then a sports reporter in Houston. He then went into oil and finance and made sizable investments in and contributions to a number of conservative evangelical churches, including a majority shareholding in the Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates franchise church. At this point he also became a communications mogul with monopolistic practices and a personally waged racist campaign against the Japanese to try to undermine competition. He bought an aircraft carrier, the Enterprise, to use as a personal yacht.

In an interview, Rife talks about how regulation can’t keep up with technology and laments the absence of a perfect monopoly. He has spied on his programmers and fired them for “immoral” lifestyle choices, comparing the information they were taking home to the tools he would own if he ran car factories and thus his proprietary business. He has also invested in radio telescopes and “infoastronomy.”

In another interview some years later, on the Enterprise—which has been expanding into the floating city called “the Raft,” as several hundred other boats have “glommed” onto the yacht—Rife talks about how he has picked up a load of refugees in his boat and is explaining the idea of a viral piece of information. He compares America to the Minotaur in Crete, saying the rest of the world sends their children to be devoured by the monster that is America so that they can be paid back in information and luxury. When the journalist yells at him, the refugees begin to speak in tongues, which Rife claims he can understand perfectly.

Y.T., who has been hooked to Vitaly’s van, yanks the goggles off Hiro. They have come to the place where Vitaly Chernobyl is going to have his concert, a highway overpass full of excited thrashers.

Chapter 15

Hiro has been managing this concert and walks around to observe. He’s hired The Enforcers for security, but the local Crips have shown up anyway. Hiro finds himself being observed by an intelligence gatherer called a gargoyle: someone who records and uploads everything he or she sees into the database, resulting in clogs of useless junk. Gargoyles tend to be incoherent and obnoxious, and this one is no exception. Hiro confronts the gargoyle, who knows who he is. The gargoyle then introduces himself as Lagos and asks if Hiro is “here on the Raven thing” or just trying to get information for fuzzgrunge. Hiro tells Lagos that Juanita wanted them to meet, and Lagos says that makes sense since Hiro is freelance and thus less prone to infection than corporate hackers, and since he is able to defend himself in Reality. Lagos says Raven will be at the concert, and Hiro shouldn’t mess with him. He says Hiro’s coding experience gives him deep neural pathways that are vulnerable to nam-shub, and he tells Hiro not to look at any bitmaps. He says the one that showed a bitmap to Da5id was a cult prostitute of Asherah, spreading disease. Then he explains that to the Mesopotamians, evil wasn’t its own concept; it was considered an illness or disease. He warns Hiro again not to let nam-shub into his operating system.

Raven shows up at the concert. He is enormous and riding a motorcycle with a side car. He is the same person who tried to sell Hiro Snow Crash outside of The Black Sun, and the tattoo on his forehead reads “poor impulse control,” presumably as a punishment and a warning from a Burbclave too small to have a jail that could hold him.

Chapter 16

Raven meets with the Crips, who check him for metal weapons and then for radiation. Raven delivers the Crips a metal briefcase.

Sushi K shows up in a limousine expecting to perform. He’s watching a reality TV program in which a government spy is trying to infiltrate Rife’s floating colony, the Raft. Sushi K is initially disappointed with the venue but gets up to perform anyway, while Squeaky, the head of security, takes Hiro Protagonist to see a “situation” with Lagos. He has been horrifically murdered, presumably by Raven, with a clean slice that has cut him open from between his legs to his jaw.

Chapter 17

Jason Breckinridge is the ambitious owner of a Nova Sicilia franchise. He ingratiated himself to the Mafia by writing his business school thesis on a turf war between Nova Sicilia and Narcolombia. In Jason’s interview with Nova Sicilia upon graduation, his recruiter, Mr. Caruso, leans heavily on the tension between ethnicities and disparages the idea that Jason could work for Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong. Jason tries to point out nuances between different Asian communities, but his recruiter dismisses these. Jason plays along and is granted a franchise in Southern California. One day, he receives an order that important documents are to be hand-delivered by courier to a franchise in Compton, where Uncle Enzo will be personally visiting. He decides this is too important to trust to a contractor, and so he will deliver the documents himself.

Chapter 18

Jason drives to Compton, the “worst thing he has ever seen.” In the city, billboards promote the Mafia’s wholesome, family image in order to steal people away from Narcolombia, which practices summary executions for infractions and which is likely to lose business once Nippon Pharmaceuticals’ synthetic cocaine plant is completed. The Mafia has also expanded to include capos and soldiers of every ethnicity, making it more appealing to Jason. He drives through the dystopic hellscape to deliver the papers and is immediately yelled at by a capo who explains the entire point of the delivery was for Uncle Enzo to meet a specific courier: Y.T.

Chapter 19

Squeaky and Hiro Protagonist examine Lagos’s body and conclude that Raven murdered him, probably after noticing Lagos was watching him. Raven has left, and Y.T. is following him and sending back reports. Raven has entered Chinatown and is fighting with T-Bone Murphy, the Crip he made the deal with earlier. Squeaky and Hiro follow the ambulances in the gun battle’s wake to an urban field of hops. Raven is using his incredibly sharp knives to make bamboo throwing spears, which he uses to dispatch a driver and attack Hiro. He kills T-Bone and wounds another Crip before escaping. Hiro and Squeaky get a look at his face, which Hiro thinks is Asian and Squeaky thinks is Native American. The Crip explains that the briefcase Raven delivered lit itself on fire and they were out to avenge what they viewed as a robbery.

Chapter 20

Y.T. joins Hiro at the crime scene. She wasn’t able to keep up enough to be involved and has picked up some Chinese food to share. Hiro tells her to stay away from Raven, and she lies that she will. Inside T-Bone’s car is the burned briefcase Hiro saw Raven pass over, filled with the vials Hiro has seen lying around that indicate a new kind of drug, which Squeaky informs him is called Countdown, Redcap, and Snow Crash. The briefcase was set to combust if T-Bone got too far from it. Squeaky explains that he wasn’t trying to catch Raven; he was trying to stop the Crip from attacking him because Raven is a Sovereign. He’s disgusted that Hiro doesn’t know any of this. He explains the side car of Raven’s motorcycle contains a nuclear torpedo he pulled out of a decommissioned Russian submarine, and it is wired so that if Raven dies, it will explode.

Chapter 21

Y.T. is waiting by an on-ramp to harpoon a car so that she can do the delivery for Jason Breckinridge, but nothing is coming. Though Y.T. does not initially know who he is, Jason drives by so she can latch on to him and take her exactly where she’s going. Y.T. verbally spars with a few Young Mafia members before going inside to see Uncle Enzo himself. Uncle Enzo is charming and charismatic, and Y.T. wonders why all people can’t be like him. They bond over the fact that they are both monitored by the Feds. He asks why she doesn’t wear a helmet in her dangerous line of work, and she says that it affects her hearing. He confesses he fought in a stealth unit in Vietnam and did not wear a helmet for the same reason. He fought in Vietnam for no purpose other than pissing off his father, and he’s disappointed that the Young Mafia kids outside don’t have that same spark. Then he gives Y.T. his dog tags, tells her to show them if she gets into trouble, and advises her to be kind to her mother, who loves her.

Chapter 22

Outside the Mafia consulate, a man approaches Y.T. with a delivery job, saying they need a third party to move something and he has already arranged all the details. Y.T. speculates that the meeting with Uncle Enzo was a ruse to get to her for this job, but the man tells her they could have hired anyone but prefer to work with people with whom they have a personal relationship. He tells her to take I-5. She protests that this is not the fastest way, but he insists.

Y.T.’s delivery route takes her through Fedland, which is where her mother works and which contains everything that’s left of the original U.S. government apparatus in a relatively small, walled compound. The government has long since privatized everything but what it considers the essentials.

Chapter 23

Griffith Park is a place that inspires terror. The canyon is under the control of a gang that people call the Falabalas because of the way they babble. Inside, Y.T. finds disheveled people in rags, mumbling to themselves. One is typing into a broken computer. Several are singing a hymn. The single person there who is able to speak normally is wearing a lab coat with a logo from a San Francisco Bay area company. He hands Y.T. a briefcase exactly like the one Raven had. He makes a few cult jokes and invites her to stay, but Y.T. hurries out.

Y.T. again takes I-5, and the Mafia picks her up in a lab disguised as a moving truck and inspects her delivery.

Chapter 24

Back at the U-Stor-It, Hiro Protagonist is training with a length of rebar he calls his “redneck katana.” A helicopter for a private military contractor shows up, and a man tells Hiro that he’s been sent by Juanita Marquez to pick him up. Hiro excuses himself to the gas station across the street where he has a membership to use the bathroom. He springs for the deluxe shower, then takes the helicopter to a Vatican-owned hospital’s neurology ward. Da5id is in the hospital with profound seizures and arrhythmia. He is babbling. In Da5id’s home, Hiro inspects the computer to find it has Snow Crashed. Hiro sits on Da5id’s balcony, looks at the highways and the Burbclaves, and meditates on the franchise culture of America.

Chapter 25

The Mafia truck is stuck in traffic, and Y.T. insists she needs to go now. The man with the glass eye gives her an envelope, and she skates out through the stopped traffic. The parking lot of the Revered Wayne’s Pearly Gates Church #1106 is strewn with glass vials like the ones in her suitcase, and one of the parishioners is speaking in tongues. The reverend emerges from the bathroom and snags the case from Y.T. without signing for it. She protests and follows him into his office, where she observes him taking the drug by first inserting it into the computer. The vial then produces an LED countdown until it can be inhaled. Y.T. asks for his signature, but he has zoned out, staring at a neon-framed picture of Elvis holding a gun.

Chapter 26

Hiro Protagonist logs into the Metaverse to talk to Juanita Marquez. She is on a plane to Oregon. She tells him what attacked Da5id was a metavirus that is spread by both the computer-based attacks like Da5id’s and the drug Snow Crash. It is being spread by L. Bob Rife, and everyone in his church is infected.

Hiro asks if Snow Crash is “a virus, a drug, or a religion,” and Juanita asks, “What’s the difference?” Hiro asks how she can say that as a religious person, and she says not all religions are equal. She believes the human brain has religion receptors the way it has language receptors. She tells him to look at the Babel stack and investigate Inanna. As he is leaving, Hiro is attacked by a generic male avatar holding the same sort of scroll that took down Da5id. Hiro manages to avoid it, cut the arms off the avatar, and sweep the scroll into the underground tunnels. He tells Y.T. to chase the attacker and the daemon programs to take the scroll to his office.

Chapter 27

Y.T. tells Hiro about her experience at the church while chasing down his attacker. Hiro opens the Librarian and asks him about speaking in tongues. The Librarian explains it is a phenomenon in many religions, and if mystical explanations are ruled out, it is likely related to deep structures in the human brain. Symptoms include loss of rational control, hysteria, absence of thought, automatic functioning of the speech organs, amnesia, and twitching and jerking. Hiro asks why it shows up in Pentecostal Christian churches, and the Librarian quotes from the Bible, Acts 2:4–12, a passage about speaking in tongues. Their discussion tangents into a brief talk about physical and spiritual duality as it relates to binary code, which is made of ones and zeroes or existence and nonexistence. Then they discuss the Essenes, who believed that demonic possession was caused by physical parasites.

Hiro asks about “nam-shub,” which he heard Lagos say. The Librarian says it is Sumerian, which he claims is an agglutinative language unrelated to any modern language and sounds like a series of short syllables. Half the people currently able to speak it are at L. Bob Rife’s university. Nam-shub roughly means “speech with magical force,” and the Librarian quotes a piece saying that the Sumerian concepts of religion, magic, and medicine are too intertwined to be examined separately.

Y.T. calls Hiro to tell him the attacker has entered a 20-mile-wide cube in the farthest point of the Metaverse, and Hiro speculates it probably belongs to Rife.

Chapter 28 The Librarian shows Hiro Protagonist a cuneiform tablet, an Asherah pole, and an obelisk with the Code of Hammurabi. The tablet has a smaller tablet inside, and the inscription warns, “This envelope contains the nam-shub of Enki.” The Librarian recites a story similar to the Babel story: that Enki confused and separated human language. Lagos believed that before a specific Babel event that languages tended to converge, and after it they tended to fragment and separate. The Librarian reads a letter of complaint to the historical Enki, after the event, that ends with “the heart of my god: have it given back to me.”

Chapter 29 At a Mom’s Truck Stop she considers socially beneath her, Y.T. logs into the Metaverse to meet the driver the Mafia has set her up with. He is currently driving somewhere, but in the Metaverse he has an ostentatiously rendered property. He is a security contractor for Mr. Lee. When he comes to pick her up in person, most of his body is encased in a wire-encrusted sack. He suffered massive injuries in a Saigon helicopter fire and considers his enormous custom truck his superior version of a wheelchair. He is going to drive her to Long Beach Terminal Island Sacrifice Zone where she will buy some drugs and deliver them to nonhuman security systems.

Chapter 30 The Librarian explains the Asherah pole is a totem of the goddess Asherah, who is the consort of Yahweh (God), and she is also associated with Dione and Eve. She was largely expunged as the deuteronomists codified and centralized Judaism around law and monarchy. They compare the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament) to a vaccine that inoculated against the cult of Asherah. Lagos compared the Asherah cult to herpes simplex, which alters the nervous system. Hiro hypothesizes that before the metavirus, people were not as vulnerable to mundane viruses, which would explain the fall-from-paradise myths, and Asherah’s association with Eve, who gave the knowledge of good and evil to mankind in the form of an apple from the Tree of Knowledge. He also speculates that there may be a connection between the deuteronomists’s religious faith and their ability to withstand disease at the siege conducted by Sennacherib.

Chapter 31

Mr. Ng drives Y.T. into the Sacrifice Zone—a place too polluted to be reclaimed and so is merely fenced off. Ng’s bioelectric sensor produces a loud hum, and he speculates they’ll find unguarded Snow Crash. However, the person who gave him the scanner hadn’t anticipated it would pick up testosterone, so they have to go visit Ng’s black market freon dealer. He tells Y.T. to buy the Snow Crash and throw it up into the air. She sees a mechanized portable helicopter under his van.

Chapter 32

Ng’s dealer calls himself UKOD or Undisputed King of the Ozone Destroyers. He and his thugs have a laugh about Y.T.’s hyperinflated currency but sell her the Snow Crash. She throws it up to the helicopter, and Ng blinds the thugs with lights and releases Rat Things. One short, bloody, explosive battle later, Ng has a sample of the drug, and he and Y.T. have a conversation about the Rat Things, in which he confirms that they are built using parts of dogs and radioactive isotopes. Y.T. says this is unnecessarily cruel, and Ng counters that she’s thinking from the biased point that cybernetically augmented organisms like himself and the Rat Things are crippled rather than enhanced. Y.T. says she used to keep a pit bull named Fido, but he was stolen, and she wonders if he has become a Rat Thing.

He has, and he remembers her.

Chapter 33

Y.T. shows up in Hiro Protagonist’s office to tell him about the events of the previous chapters. She doesn’t like him talking unfavorably about the Mafia. She leaves, and Hiro continues talking to the Librarian, who tells him Sumerian myths read less like stories than they do like codes of laws because their society was so different as to be incomprehensible. Me are ways of organizing society. The Librarian tells a version of a Sumerian myth in which Enki invents irrigation with his semen and Asherah steals it to impregnate herself, producing a daughter who is then impregnated by Enki, whose daughter is then impregnated by Enki. Asherah uses the semen from Enki’s intercourse with his granddaughter to make plants that sicken Enki when he eats them. Eventually she relents and heals him, giving birth to eight gods with more normal sexual relations. The Librarian says there is a historic Enki who was a priest king in a city only recently excavated by L. Bob Rife’s archeologists. The Librarian further notes that Enki’s mythological power is often associated with language, and when Hiro looks at the Code of Hammurabi, he notes that Enki’s son Marduk is handing Hammurabi something that looks like a 1 and a 0, the basic elements of coding.

Hiro posits that the me—organizational rules for society—work like an operating system for societies. He guesses that Enki’s semen is a metaphor for knowledge, information, and law that allowed civilization to flourish. They wrote in wet clay, but water could wash it away again, and drying out the clay, thereby sterilizing the creative power of it, made it permanent. The Librarian says he sounds like Lagos.

Chapter 34

Y.T. sneaks into the Falabala encampment by skating down the side of the canyon. She finds a cultist and draws her aside to question her. The cultist had been a coder before something went wrong with her computer and she got sick. Then in the hospital she met someone who explained she had been washed in blood and “belonged to the Word now,” and she left to live on L. Bob Rife’s Raft with other former hackers. They had their blood repeatedly drawn until the veins collapsed, and then they were deposited in California. The high priest comes up to Y.T. and tries to get her to come down to the campfire. He’s carrying a syringe full of warm blood. She sprays him with Liquid Knuckles and escapes.

Escaping through traffic, Y.T. calls her mother, then Hiro Protagonist. She tells Hiro about what she’s just witnessed. She asks Hiro if it’s true that programmers are being attacked through their computers. He confirms this, and she yells at him for not warning her; her mother programs for the Feds. She goes home without changing out of her courier uniform and destroys her mother’s computer.

Chapter 35

Hiro uses a software program called Earth to get a look at the Raft. It is made of a connected flotilla of different boats, the largest of which are Rife’s Enterprise and an oil tanker. Hiro buys an expensive, top-of-the-line motorcycle and all the gear possible and heads northward, toward the Raft.

Chapter 36

The Raft is too big to steer in any meaningful sense, so it loops around the Pacific Ocean picking up refugees, many of whom don’t survive, and dropping them in California. This year the Californians are ready with machine guns. While driving toward it, Hiro patches in audio to the Librarian and asks about Sumerian gods. The Librarian tells him Lagos thought they might have been real people or aliens. He says numerous religious traditions believe in the magical power of precise use of language, and he cites Kabbalah as an example.

The Librarian says there are two major schools of thought on why languages diverge: relativists who believe that language shapes the way we think, and universalists who believe the structures of all languages are universal at an abstract level and exist within the hardware of the human brain. Lagos’s guess was a bit of both: that language acquisition shapes and fixes human neural pathways. Lagos believed in a language of Eden, which Hiro compares to the binary 1s and 0s at the base of all programming. However, because this is difficult to work in, there are dozens of coding languages. Lagos had posited that Sumerian was uniquely suited to creating and spreading neurolinguistic viruses, and Hiro says perhaps Enki’s Babel event saved the world.

Chapter 37

Y.T.’s mother works for the Feds, and her job is micromanaged and invasive. She is intended to be an interchangeable part. The Feds have a culture of mindless loyalty and conformity. Y.T.’s mom gets a memo with an estimated 15-minute read time that states that employees are now allowed to pool resources to provide themselves bathroom tissue, but they may not attempt to use their hyperinflated U.S. currency as bathroom tissue as this both clogs the pipes and is an illegal defacement of U.S. currency. Y.T.’s mother works diligently coding pieces of a project she knows nothing about. Just before lunch, her manager and several male employees show up to give her another polygraph test.

Chapter 38

Y.T.’s mother provides a urine sample and is then strapped into a polygraph machine, all of which is standard procedure. They inject her with chemicals including caffeine to make her more talkative, then barrage her with nonsense questions. Eventually they ask about Y.T. breaking her computer and whether or not she believes Y.T.’s story about a virus. Y.T.’s mother asks them what they want to know and why they won’t just ask her directly. They inject her with something else, and she feels cold and numb. The next question is, “What is your name?”

Chapter 39

Hiro Protagonist is on the Alaska highway, which is populated by white people in Winnebagos moving northward while consuming and destroying everything in their path. He’s north of the Raft but is looking for a specific person: Chuck Wrightson, the former president of the Temporary Republic of Kenai and Kodiak (TROKK). Wrightson tells Hiro how his makeshift country was overthrown by Pentecostal religious refugees from Russia who had a nuclear weapon they’d pulled off a submarine. Wrightson also explains about Raven, who is an Aleut whale hunter with knives made of chipped glass. Raven killed the submarine crew and delivered the sub to the rebels. Hiro and Wrightson’s conversation is interrupted.

Chapter 40

The person interrupting their conversation is a large white man with “mood swings; racially insensitive” tattooed on his head. He racially abuses Hiro and, using racist epithets, asks if he’s black or Asian, though these are not the words he uses. He is a citizen of New South Africa. Several other white nationalists stand up and announce their intention to assault Hiro, so Hiro cuts the first guy’s head off. He’s never killed a real person before, and he’s shocked by the reality of it. He escapes while everyone is stunned. Enforcers shoot him with a machine gun. His bulletproof armor is equal to the task of keeping him alive, but he has several cracked ribs. The Enforcers try to block off the doors, but Hiro cuts through the cloth side of the building and escapes onto the highway.

Chapter 41

An anonymous man asks Y.T. to deliver a business envelope–sized package to Fedland (the United States). She tells him it will take two hours because of customs. As she leaves, she learns the place is Rife Advanced Research Enterprises. To enter the United States, Y.T. has to declare she “is not a terrorist, Communist (whatever that is), homosexual, national-symbol desecrator, pornography merchant, welfare parasite, racially insensitive, carrier of any infectious disease, or advocate of any ideology tending to impugn traditional family values.”

Y.T. delivers the envelope to the main building for EBGOC, what’s left of America’s intelligence infrastructure, and they arrest her. She activates her suit’s voice-coded defenses to electrocute her captors, then fights her way out with her Liquid Knuckles. She uses her smart board to break the glass and skate out of the building, but the Feds follow and shoot a shock wave–generating munition in front of her.

Chapter 42

Hiro Protagonist drives back into America and asks the Librarian about Inanna. She distributed Enki’s me to civilization and descended into the underworld where she was killed so she might obtain powers over life and death. Enki rescues her, and she returns from the netherworld with a host of the dead. Hiro interprets this to mean Juanita Marquez has gone to the Raft and he needs to go to rescue her.

The Russian Pentecostals who overthrew Kenai and the Kodiak are in a motel by the waterfront in Port Sherman, and refugees are already coming ashore. Hiro looks around and finds a few boats and a consulate for Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong. He pulls up the managers face and memorizes it.

Chapter 43

Y.T. comes to consciousness in the back of a van, where she is being driven for about eight hours. She is deposited at a Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates franchise and given two female minders, then put into a van full of young Christians who sing songs and play games as the van drives for about two days. Every now and again, one person will begin to speak in tongues, then it will spread through all of the crowd except Y.T. The van is eventually put on a boat headed out to sea.

By the time they reach the Raft, Y.T. is beginning to succumb to the cult atmosphere. She’s given a job cutting up fish, but she’s bad at it so they move her to serving in the cafeteria. She notices glassy-eyed people with antennas coming out of their heads.

Chapter 44

Hiro Protagonist’s motorcycle dies, possessed by the Asherah virus. A helicopter arrives for the leader of the Russians but is shot down. Hiro goes to Mr. Lee’s, and after tense negotiation, he books passage on a boat out to the Raft, since the boat has already been chartered by another passenger going that way. The Russians are preparing for a fight. Hiro makes his way to the boat, the Kowloon, only to find the other passenger is from the Mafia.

Chapter 45

The other person on the boat is the man with the glass eye. He explains the multiphase plan to Hiro, a plan that includes Hiro. The Mafia knows Hiro has been using Y.T. to spy on them, and they have been using her to spy on him. The Mafia bombs the pier and takes the Russians’ leadership hostage. The man with the glass eye and Hiro discuss the situation over breakfast.

The Mafia are also working off Lagos’s plan. Lagos attempted to create a neurolinguistic virus aimed at programmers and approached L. Bob Rife about it. Rife stole the idea and ran with it. Lagos began to get worried about events and approached Juanita Marquez, the Mafia, and Mr. Lee.

Chapter 46

Raven arrives in his kayak to rescue the Russians. Then a nuclear sub shows up. The Russians escape into it with Raven, and the sub sinks the Kowloon. Several people from the Kowloon escape onto life rafts.

Chapter 47

On the Raft, Y.T. meets Raven. She’s impressed. He tells her he’s Aleut and the reason she’s never heard that name is because they’ve been screwed over worse than any other people in history. He asks if she wants to get out of there, and she agrees with trepidation. When another cafeteria worker tries to stop her, Raven picks her up and carries her out. They rappel off the side of the ship. Raven talks a bit about himself. His name is Dmitri Ravinoff. He used to be an alcoholic but has been sober for eight years, and he gives his occupation as “harpooner.” Y.T. realizes Raven is taking her on a date.

Chapter 48

On the life raft are Hiro Protagonist; Vic the sniper; Eliot Chung, the skipper of the Kowloon; and Fisheye, the man with the glass eye. Fisheye is carrying a suitcase device that appears to be nuclear powered. The raft drifts for several days. Fisheye explains to Hiro that the goal of their mission was to get Y.T. back, but that the Mafia uses personal relationships as a guiding factor to avoid getting locked into self-perpetuating ideology.

Hiro spends his time programming. He doesn’t know what he’s doing quite yet, but the Metaverse is vulnerable and has no means of protecting the people in it. This is especially bad now that it’s a place where people can die. Hiro uses the scroll collected from his assailant outside The Black Sun to write a program to block Snow Crash. He codes himself an invisible avatar that will be able to bypass security measures and dusts off an old motorcycle program he used to race around the Metaverse in the old days.

Chapter 49

Fisheye makes Hiro and Eliot strip to entice a bloodthirsty pirate crew to pick them up. He is more put off by the pirates’ homosexuality than he is by a potential scalping. Fisheye tells Hiro and Eliot not to worry. He is sure the pirates will listen to reason. The pirate captain, who goes by the name Bruce Lee, has a vest covered in human scalps; rumor has it he looked for people to murder with the exact right shade of hair, but on close inspection, Hiro surmises he merely bleached and died the scalps. Eliot translates for Fisheye while Bruce Lee haggles with the Mafioso, whom he assumes to be Hiro and Eliot’s pimp. The pirates begin to babble, infected with the same virus as the people on the Raft. Fisheye uses the suitcase weapon, a hypervelocity rail gun named “Reason,” to kill the pirate crew so they can steal their ship. The boat does not have enough fuel to make it to land, and Fisheye makes the executive decision to take them to Raft, where they will rescue Y.T. Hiro agrees provided they will also rescue Juanita Marquez.

Chapter 50

Raven takes Y.T. to a part of the Raft that has something like a restaurant, orders for her, and proceeds to talk at her for a while. He tells her about how the Aleuts were decimated by smallpox, enslaved by the Russians, captured by Imperial Japan, and then the subject of nuclear tests by the Americans. His father survived two nuclear attacks, one in a prison camp near Nagasaki and one in 1972. He got drunk, was left behind by a fishing boat in the Cook inlet, and was rescued by Russian Orthodox Church members. He decided that the Western, American lifestyle was killing him, and he needed to return to simplicity. There is a call on the radio with a job for Raven to do, and he leaves Y.T. in the care of the restaurant.

Chapter 51

Eliot Chung takes charge as they get close to the Raft, which is ominous and full of starving, desperate people. He says to shoot the people with antennas first because they can communicate with each other. He is familiar with pirate tactics and leads the group through multiple incursions. However, things begin to turn dire for their boat, and Raven appears with a harpoon that does not show up on radar. He kills Fisheye. Hiro Protagonist fights boarders with his sword and gun. Vic the sniper is also dead and Eliot is gone. The boat becomes tangled in the structure of the Raft, and Hiro finds Reason has succumbed to the Snow Crash virus. The cabin boy is still alive and infected with the virus. He offers to be Hiro’s guide.

Chapter 52

Raven returns, annoyed at having been interrupted, and asks Y.T. if she wants to see the Core, where all the important people are. She agrees and asks him why he’s here, since he’s not like the other people. He explains he’s surfing this wave of events without buying deeply into it, and as a courier she relates. He clearly expects this date to end in sex, and she is warming to the idea.

They begin, and Y.T. is too in the moment to remember her dentata rape prevention tool. Y.T. orgasms immediately and assumes Raven has too, because he appears to have gone to sleep.

They are in a nice part of the Raft that has a helipad and Metaverse terminals. From the people she sees, she’s able to surmise that the Feds, L. Bob Rife, and Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates are all working together.

Chapter 53

Hiro Protagonist’s guide is named Transubstanciacion (Tranny for short). Hiro packs supplies for the trip, then goes to examine one of the bodies, which has had an antenna grafted to the skull and wires inserted into the brain. It is transmitting babble. Hiro shuts Reason down manually. He and Tranny use a small zodiac with an outboard motor to travel around the Raft, observing individual boats that have lashed themselves as tightly as they can to keep from drifting away. Tranny guides them back to his home, where he’s welcomed by family who also take in Hiro.

Chapter 54

Y.T. makes her way back to the reception area and asks to use a Street terminal into the Metaverse and have it charged to her room. Because she’s with Raven, she has no trouble.

Chapter 55

Hiro logs into the Metaverse and asks the Librarian about “ultima ratio regum,” which the Librarian explains translates to “the last argument of kings”—what King Louis XIV of France had stamped onto all his cannons. Then Hiro visits Ng Security to ask if there’s a patch for Reason. When he uses the name, the receptionist program escorts him into a back room where he meets with Mr. Ng, Uncle Enzo, and Mr. Lee. Hiro says he has it almost all figured out, and Uncle Enzo transfers money into his account, telling him to make sure he splits it with Y.T.

Quotes

Ch 1-5

• The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. (Location 166)
• 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. (Location 171)
• There’s only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery (Location 177)
• Because there’s something about having your life on the line. It’s like being a kamikaze pilot. Your mind is clear. (Location 220)
• 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. (Location 225)
• A new immigrant from Abkhazia trying to operate a microwave was like a deep-sea tube worm doing brain surgery. (Location 304)
• When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins. (Location 458)
• This boulevard does not really exist; it is a computer-rendered view of an imaginary place. (Location 471)
• And even the word “library” is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say, ones and zeroes. And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, (Location 490)
• As everyone learned in elementary school, these three colors of light can be combined, with different intensities, to produce any color that Hiro’s eye is capable of seeing. (Location 515)
• earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. (Location 524)
• it is always nighttime in the Metaverse, and the Street is always garish and brilliant, like Las Vegas freed from constraints of physics and finance. (Location 555)
• we are in the Burbs, where it is better to take a thousand clicks off the lifespan of your Goodyears by invariably grinding them up against curbs than to risk social ostracism and outbreaks of mass hysteria by parking several inches away, out in the middle of the street (That’s okay, Mom, I can walk to the curb from here), a menace to traffic, a deadly obstacle to uncertain young bicyclists. (Location 608)
• The van takes off like a hormone-pumped bull who has just been nailed in the ass by the barbed probe of a picador. (Location 623)
• Fire hydrants that tasteful people are proud to have on their front lawns. Fire hydrants that the real estate people don’t feel the need to airbrush out of pictures. (Location 639)
• The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it. (Location 669)
• Videotape is cheap. You never know when something will be useful, so you might as well videotape it. (Location 705)
• He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. (Location 716)
• The user can select three breast sizes: improbable, impossible, and ludicrous. Brandy has a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute and sultry; perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy. (Location 745)
• But it’s also managed by the Nipponese, which means that all the programmers have to wear white shirts and show up at eight in the morning and sit in cubicles and go to meetings. (Location 769)
• Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves. (Location 772)
• since this is all imaginary, there are no regulations dictating the number of emergency exits. (Location 779)
• When things get this jammed together, the computer simplifies things by drawing all of the avatars ghostly and translucent so you can see where you’re going. (Location 790)
• But “snow crash” is computer lingo. It means a system crash—a bug—at such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the screen, turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. (Location 825)
• If Hiro reaches out and takes the hypercard, then the data it represents will be transferred from this guy’s system into Hiro’s computer. Hiro, naturally, wouldn’t touch it under any circumstances, any more than you would take a free syringe from a stranger in Times Square and jab it into your neck. (Location 847)
• The hypercard is an avatar of sorts. It is used in the Metaverse to represent a chunk of data. (Location 840)

Ch 6-10

• The cowboy behind the desk aims a scanner at Y.T., zaps her bar code. Hundreds of pages about Y.T.’s personal life zoom up on a graphics screen. (Location 965)
• The avatars look like real people. For the most part, so do the daemons. (Location 1029)
• In The Black Sun, a daemon is like an avatar, but it does not represent a human being. It’s a robot that lives in the Metaverse. (Location 1031)
• Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit. (Location 1050)
• It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists. (Location 1065)
• To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.” (Location 1113)
• the human mind can absorb and process an incredible amount of information—if it comes in the right format. The right interface. If you put the right face on it. (Location 1118)
• Da5id had no doubts whatsoever about his standing in the world. (Location 1139)
• when you live in a shithole, there’s always the Metaverse, and in the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince. (Location 1162)
• They pay attention to the facial expressions and body language of the people they are talking to. And that’s how they know what’s going on inside a person’s head—by condensing fact from the vapor of nuance. (Location 1175)
• “It means you can see bad things coming and deflect them. It’s an instinct, not a learned thing. (Location 1224)
• Religion is not for simpletons.” (Location 1248)
• Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people’s minds.” (Location 1253)
• “A body of living stuff. It’s an ecology term. If you take an acre of rain forest or a cubic mile of ocean or a square block of Compton and strain out all the nonliving stuff—dirt and water—you get the biomass.” (Location 1361)
• The rez of a system is only as fine as its wavelength; since the wavelength of this radar is about a millimeter, it can see the fillings in your teeth, the grommets in your Converse high-tops, the rivets in your Levi’s. It can calculate the value of your pocket change. (Location 1509)

Ch 11-15

• Kendo is to real samurai sword fighting what fencing is to real swashbuckling: an attempt to take a highly disorganized, chaotic, violent, and brutal conflict and turn it into a cute game. (Location 1562)
• she knows that a car doesn’t boil over when it is speeding down an open freeway. It boils over when it is stopped in traffic. Because when it sits still, not enough air is being blown over the radiator. (Location 1706)
• The potentials of all ethnic races and anthropologies to merge under a banner of the Three Principles to follow 1. Information, information, information! 2. Totally fair marketeering! 3. Strict ecology! have been peerless in the history of economic strife. (Location 1748)
• (everything looks the same in America, there are no transitions now). (Location 1862)
• Bab means gate and El means God, so Babel means ‘Gate of God.’ (Location 1895)
• So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth.’ (Location 1900)
• they had to stop building the tower because of an informational disaster—they couldn’t talk to each other.” (Location 1914)
• “He devoted himself to the common problem of sifting through vast amounts of irrelevant detail in order to find significant gems of information. His name was Dr. Emanuel Lagos.” (Location 1921)
• a monopolist’s work is never done. No such thing as a perfect monopoly. Seems like you can never get that last one-tenth of one percent.” (Location 2007)
• But once you get local systems all over the world, all you got to do is hook ’em together and it’s a global network. Just as big as the phone system. Except this one carries information ten thousand times faster. It carries images, sound, data, you name it.” (Location 2017)
• So we’re working on refining our management techniques so that we can control that information no matter where it is—on our hard disks or even inside the programmers’ heads. (Location 2037)
• “So you’re creating your own news event to make money off the information flow that it creates?” (Location 2070)
• Well, the function of the Raft is to bring more biomass. To renew America. Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America’s like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. Leaves behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel. (Location 2075)
• Besides, interesting things happen along borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same. (Location 2131)

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