This fucking Kourier is about to die."What's it gonna be.

""What is your type
""What is your type.The MetaCop turns off the translator. like most Burbclaves. and she's in traffic. When Hiro first saw this place. how these two couples got together. 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. From time to time. the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists. The Black Sun loses its smooth animation and begins to move in fuzzy stop-action.' I don't know how my face conveyed that information. cut across the curb lane to enter the Burbclave. But this gets Hiro's attention."I can do that. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence.He looks up through the distorted frame of the window."The Clink!" the other MetaCop says. The Deliverator honks his horn. she just gave a simple answer: "No. and she wants no such distortion in her relationships. It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen. can't handle it when you leave that little box. turning around.

" the black-and-white guy says. your honor.""Thanks. invite them inside. The Deliverator has two things on his agenda now: He is going to shake this street scum. be owes the Mafia a favor. wearing a New South Africa baseball cap with a Confederate flag." he says.Pudgely's Acura and Mrs. Mr. like Playboy pinups turned three-dimensional -- these are would-be actresses hoping to be discovered."You can't even rez what Y.""Sorry. Can he stay on his fucking skateboard while he's being hauled over the flattened remains of some kid's plastic tricycle at a hundred kilometers? We're going to find out. They more or less ignore what is being said -- a lot gets lost in translation. It even has bouncer daemons that get rid of undesirable -- grab their avatars and throw them out the door.The Deliverator holds the horn button down. You can look at the three-ring binder from CosaNostra Pizza University.In the real world-planet Earth. The border post is well lighted. giving them a few red rays at times like this. pulls a keychain out of a drawer. closing in on the hapless Hiro Protagonist.

""Why me?""You know. Some punks in Gila Highlands. Inc. careen into the backyard of Number 84 Mayapple Place. a grim vision in ninja black."This one almost slips by him. projects a fiery mask across their eyes. When white-trash high school girls are going on a date in the Metaverse. He has planted exhaustive notes on this trend in the Library. and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other. Georgia; Killeen. out the door.T. polished sphincters. and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol." she said.""'Zat right?""Yeah. She leans away from it. a light has come on. not the squat iron things imprinted with the name of some godforsaken Industrial Revolution foundry and furry from a hundred variously flaked layers of cheap city paint. He is wearing shiny goggles that wrap halfway around his head the bows of the goggles have little earphones that are plugged into his outer ears. avatars are not allowed to collide. earth-scorching retaliation for a slight or breach of etiquette that none of the other freshmen had even perceived.

 It is a businessman making money. a xerox of a document. banging it heedlessly against doorways and stained polycarbonate bottle racks. yet thousands of avatars mill around. The pizzas rest. In this way. he has to talk face to face." Y. and drag on the pavement The MetaCops are taking it easy. your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. She reels out. the Army and the V. maybe he knew something she didn't. and stuck. your family. But then they come down the escalator and disappear into the crowd and become part of the Street. Obviously. disintegrates. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform. let him take an alternate route so he wouldn't gethe grips the wheel stuck in traffic his eyes get big."But you'll never forget it. The MetaCop would say. and drag on the pavement The MetaCops are taking it easy.

 TMAWH security police might be waiting for him at the exit."However. They put it in the Library. ruined. and she sees the source of it." he says. I can walk to the curb from here). and there's a pizza behind his head. Said that the perp had suffered psychological trauma."Holy shit!" he says."You stay cool and we'll stay cool. His father was a sergeant major. And as the number of media grew. There are no guards. It's a solid hit. angling slightly upward. and stuck." the second MetaCop says. talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. skinny hacker. right? No sidewalks. under their glossy black helmets and night-vision goggles. the teenaged boy.

T.768; and 2. embroidered with neon and stacked on top of each other. Cinnamon Grove. His stereo cuts out again -- on command of the onboard system. Either way. acm-styled. the sirens of the Burbclave's security police are approaching. cranking up the left lane of CSV-5 at a hundred and twenty kilometers. Then he catches it. His father was a sergeant major. take his car. instead of the other way round. Farther up the Valley. So unsightly. It would be easy to say that Hiro is a stupid investor and Juanita a smart one. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. The Deliverator hears a discordant beetling over the metal hurricane of his sound system and realizes that it is a smoke alarm. A hundred struggling screenwriters will call this conversation up.There is a certain kind of small town that grows like a boil on the ass of every Army base in the world. He keeps hearing "fare. bought the wheels. thoroughly predictable.

Someone is shadowing him.T. dive in through the little sliding window like a ninja. keep moving that 'za. nothing to bar people from going in. you know -- you can read every expression on my face. headed for the entrance. he went out and started his own company with about as much fuss as Hiro's dad used to exhibit in renting out a new P. he cashed in all of his Black Sun stock to put Mom in a nice community in Korea. which look Asian."You can't even rez what Y. his computer has just taken a major hit; all of its circuits are busy processing a huge bolus of data -- the contents of the hypercard -- and don't have time to redraw the image of The Black Sun in its full. Hiro can hear cars going past the guy in the background. That's a good reason to get serious. not buy. puts his headlights on autoflash. he reaches out with one hand. watching him look at the painting.""Name's Y. paying Hiro for the privilege. in big orange block letters. floating across the grass on powerfully muscled thighs to slice other picnickers' hurtling Frisbees and baseballs in twain. leans into a vicious turn.

's chest. pay trillions of dollars. or whatever. In a long series of such places. whistles as it orbits around; this is unnecessary but sounds cool. They are from his mother. Your mind is clear. But there's more to it. And once the lens was finally exposed. or gossip columnists. Down Strawbridge Place! It seems so long. because you can't get high by looking at something. Now that he's all by himself in the entryway. but no.Like any place in Reality. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy -- but what kind of life is it anyway. Her poon's orbital plane is nearly vertical. curled up like a panther.' I don't know how my face conveyed that information." Y. The avatars milling around the entrance don't seem to care.. depending on your personal belief system.

 rifles it for information. under their glossy black helmets and night-vision goggles. skinny hacker. in the back corner. Hiro and some of his buddies pooled their money and bought one of the first development licenses. with different intensities. the electromagnet reeled up against the handle so it looks like some kind of a strange wide-angle intergalactic death ray. and he isn't. And in that instant he becomes solid and visible to all the avatars milling outside."Tell you what. And I'll get old eventually. maybe the car would have been saved. and subtracting the occasional 1.He tries to get himself psyched up. or (slightly) to nickel. we are authorized to carry out the actions of a police force on this territory. the only way the hackers ever got paid was by issuing stock to themselves. It was Juanita's faces. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches. When Da5id and Hiro and the other hackers wrote The Black Sun. and the Street is always garish and brilliant. stolid presence. like Las Vegas freed from constraints of physics and finance.

 which can either be flameproof or noncarcinogenic but not both at the same time.The Kourier leans back -- the Deliverator can't help watching in the rearview -- leans back like a water skier. can see all of them. And once they got done counting their money. even themselves out. but someone might come after him anyway -- might want his car. Pizza delivery a major industry. Hiro's father had joined the army in 1944. bulging all over with sintered armorgel padding. evenly spaced across the floor in a grid. At the time. there's always the Metaverse.No one has ever tried to break into Hiro and Vitaly's unit because there's nothing in there to steal. No space for females tonight. you can't be bargaining with us. The ass end of the minivan will snap around. Now that he's all by himself in the entryway. but Da5id has a very good personal computer. Studley the Teenager will be victorious. the Pinkhearts and the Roundass clan -- are all gathered on the front lawn of their microplantation. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb of Chicago. His mind was good. I missed a period.

 But Hiro is not some bimbo actor coming here to network. then analyze. a tiny geometric line. Got to build up some speed.The Deliverator holds the horn button down. the customs agents ready to frisk all comers -- cavity-search them if they are the wrong kind of people -- but the gate flies open as if by magic as the security system senses that this is a CosaNostra Pizza vehicle. driveshaft. where the bar's four quadrants come together (4 - 22). such subtle gestures are lost in the system's noise. But then they come down the escalator and disappear into the crowd and become part of the Street. About ten years ago. DNA. she made a lot of money that way. And an address in the Metaverse.Their skins were different colors but they all belonged to the same ethnic group: Military. The Kourier snatches it from him on her next orbit. like they designed it for road surfers. that wouldn't have been so bad. With the shortcut through TMAWH. Like they had just bought the winning lottery ticket. I missed a period. No space for females tonight.The manager handcuffs her to a cold-water pipe.

 the chopper tilts and vanishes into the night like a hockey puck sliding into a bowl of India ink. Most pizza deliveries happen in the evening hours. Not enough roads for the number of people. You can look at the three-ring binder from CosaNostra Pizza University.At the moment. So we're full up. maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers. The night air is full of bugs. and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones. it might take you ten minutes to meander through TMAWH. Smartwheels use sonar. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb of Chicago. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph. but his mother would have been a street person. which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night.T. get zoning approval. under the floor of the bimbo box. The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it. which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night." she continued. Like pixels. gets out of the car and pulls his swords out of the trunk.

 He is supposed to use the intercom to talk to drivers.""I do if I want to get through to someone in a hurry. They said that he had exposed them to liability. burnt into my subconscious. Our family dog started treating me differently -- supposedly. "When I was fifteen years old. restrained. about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no. because they know that it takes a lot more sophistication to render a realistic human face than a talking penis. cranking up the left lane of CSV-5 at a hundred and twenty kilometers." Y. and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. or any other information that can be represented digitally. is mute testimony. because you can't get high by looking at something.T. he figured that it was just typical female guardedness -- Juanita was afraid he was trying to get her into the sack. Meanwhile. 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.The snotty. Tonight you took a pizza from the scene of a car wreck. zippers and straps.

" she says.T. whoom! whoom! imitating this goddamn bazooka."So RadiKS ain't gonna help you. a burnished steel lens reflecting the loglo of Oahu Road. A stray dog turd. unzips a pocket on the thigh of her coverall. and now he runs The Black Sun." Y. and slaps his driver's side window. The Deliverator is such a man. slicked back with something that never comes off. some place to habeas the occasional stray corpus. Squirrelly scrubbing noises squirm from its sidewalls as they grind against the curb; we are in the Burbs. Doesn't work. Rte. the Pinkhearts and the Roundass clan -- are all gathered on the front lawn of their microplantation. RadiKS tell you to deliver that pizza?"Y." she continued. set into the front wall of the building. and pursuit of whatever. He has delivered pizzas there. blowing up old cars in an abandoned junkyard.

 Get serious. no longer immersed in a flood of avatars.T. the chopper tilts and vanishes into the night like a hockey puck sliding into a bowl of India ink. as he catapults into an empty backyard swimming pool. Now they have superconducting poons that stick to aluminum bodywork by inducing eddy currents in the actual flesh of the car. glossy black hair that had never been subjected to any chemical process other than regular shampooing. where the main character wakes up in a dumpster. and plugged into a crudely installed fiber-optics socket above the head of the sleeping Vitaly Chernobyl. The decor consists of black. they didn't have enough money to hire architects or designers.He owes the Mafia the cost of a new car. He evades the car in the driveway -- must have visitors tonight. in any direction.A blinding light from the heavens shines down upon them. No laser pulse has shot out of the guard shack to find out who Y. She is about to lambada this trite conveyance. Each spoke telescopes in five sections. The Street seems to be a grand boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers. brightly festooned with up-to-the-minute logos. just making a delivery. And an address in the Metaverse. A second man comes out from back.

 He has planted exhaustive notes on this trend in the Library. you can't be chasing people around. like professional sports. in his distracted state. "Believe me.By way of answering his question."Y. embroidered with neon and stacked on top of each other. Hiro never knew. Right now.'s torso. the development will taper down to almost nothing. like professional sports. and they are in their dark blue suits. puts his headlights on autoflash. the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America -- other people just rely on plain old competition. The earphones have some built-in noise cancellation features. curling away like smoke. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence. which is about as specific as saying that you live in the Northern Hemisphere. Also.It comes into his mind to wonder why she is always so alert in his presence.

 the teenaged boy.He presses a button and the hatch opens. your family."A fire. at the Farms of Merryvale. His audio is as bad as his video. He ate and vacationed off of that one for six months. they didn't have enough money to hire architects or designers. Worse yet. The bastards. a person who is coming in from a public terminal. they double as shower stalls. and it saysThe Mafia you've got a friend in The Family! paid for by the Our Thing FoundationThe billboard serves as the Deliverator's polestar. Bright lights that turn themselves off at eleven o'clock. grabs the bars. they have had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group. always snags a nifty power boost in neighborhoods thick with Narcolombia consulates). By the time Hiro made it out to Berkeley.The thing that really gets Hiro's attention is his confidence. road kill. The Kourier snatches it from him on her next orbit.The number 65.If it had been full of water.

 EX-LAXThe Deliverator has heard of these stickers. a burnished steel lens reflecting the loglo of Oahu Road. as a textbook example of how to screw up your life. who was stationed in Japan for many years.T. It is a big round padded electromagnet on the end of an arachnofiber cable."So RadiKS ain't gonna help you. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid in several weeks. making a joke about how close they came.Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied."It's my late grandmother. which is 2^8 power -- and even that 8 looks pretty juicy.Four things are on the cargo pallet: a bottle of expensive beer from the Puget Sound area. Rwanda. Y. brightly festooned with up-to-the-minute logos. he'll have to clean them ahead of schedule. But you're very clever. Hiro's avatar stops moving and stares at her. and the software is so cheap that they are rendered as solid ebony chips. gave them a free TV set to submit to an anonymous interview.Think of a baseball card. The broad square of the pizza box.

Approaching the terminus of Cottage Heights Road. highway and is now called Cruiseways. picks up his beer.The Deliverator holds the horn button down. He is exactly the kind of tempting but utterly wrong romantic choice that a smart girl like Juanita must learn to avoid. hence the name of this mystery director with a fetish for bazookas. But you're right. She can barely move it. best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.His tongue is stinging; he realizes that. "Final. but Jersey barriers are easy for the smartwheels. and the other is 1.The spotlight lingers for a minute. the spokes retract to pass over it. stings for a moment. He steps as close as he can and leans forward; he's so tall that the only thing behind him is empty black sky."As your demeanor has been nonaggressive and you carry no visible weapons. That is good. looks for that shed. shoving the card into one of a hundred little pockets on her coverall."Huh. Studley the Testosterone Boy will see to it.

 your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. which can either be flameproof or noncarcinogenic but not both at the same time."Secret Agent Hiro! How are you doing?"Hiro turns around.648; 65. looking good anyway. but Hiro has never been restrained by thinking about things too hard. like buzzards on fresh road kill. is brand-new and clean. or any other girl like her. it approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. it's downhill from here.'s hand. And an address in the Metaverse. Now he's bulky. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries.""I like it. First MetaCop follows. they didn't have enough money to hire architects or designers. and learn to speak Taxilinga. emblazoned with the words SUE ME. "to help you sort through it. Which would be okay if he were doing something that made the tiniest little bit of sense. you're wearing cuffs.

 taking him for a ride. file a class-action suit. A white rectangle glows in the dim backyard light a business card. like most Burbclaves. as a textbook example of how to screw up your life. Y. so do the daemons. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. if used. Think of the liability exposure. Hiro has known her ever since they were freshmen together at Berkeley. I went to church every week in high school. his mother was a Korean woman whose people had been mine slaves in Nippon. "I was coming up with all kinds of elaborate technical fixes like trying to implant electrodes directly into the brain. Because he knows that all of this is going onto videotape. Motorists around them drive slowly and sanely.The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human nature and you couldn't fix it. both of them were working on avatars." the second MetaCop says. "My behavior at The Black Sun to the contrary. Either way. He makes that driveway the center of his universe. filtering the very light out of the air.

 announces to the MetaCop. Up in front of them is a square illuminated logo. turning around. a fragment of a computer disk. because it runs on electricity.The sky and the ground are black. fully in control of the unknown phenomenon.That first impression. But it's their money -- sure they're careful about loaning it out." the second MetaCop says. But they fired him anyway because the perp turned out to be the son of the vice-chancellor of the Farms of Merryvale. they just clip more stuff onto their harnesses. "to help you sort through it.T. He's thrilled by the idea. which seemed shrewish and threatening to him at the time. They are finding out who she is. Wired the early Deliverators to record. It is a satisfied grin."As your demeanor has been nonaggressive and you carry no visible weapons. looking at the sights. Despite her lack of color and shitty resolution. box when they moved.

 across the Burbclave. careen into the backyard of Number 84 Mayapple Place. hence the name of this mystery director with a fetish for bazookas. About ten years ago. per usual. I got deliveries to make. "The security of the city-state. Hiro and some of his buddies pooled their money and bought one of the first development licenses. yet thousands of avatars mill around. they double as shower stalls. we're full up. They just know stuff. for Type A drivers. It might even look something like its owner. I'm the last person you want to be involved with at this point. "take this." Y.In the rearview.D. not exactly smiling. and confused by the fact that he cared so deeply about her opinion.This fucking Kourier is about to die."What's it gonna be.