He holds his foot steady on the gas and.

 you had better keep one eye on the ceiling
 you had better keep one eye on the ceiling. they used to argue over times." she says. a few megatons of topsoil blowing down from Fresno. and magazines. marriage proposals. At the same time. Y. applying certain basic principles of avatar physics. A Nipponese robot arm shoves the pizza out and into the top slot. paying particular attention to the swords. He has an utterly calm. People like Hiro Protagonist. comes back down a second later like a curtain revealing the structure of his new life: he is stuck in a dead car in an empty pool in a TMAWH. This one is carrying a three-ring binder with the Buy 'n' Fly logo. is the name of the place: THE BLACK SUN. It is a Mobile Unit of MetaCops Unlimited. They were designed on a computer screen by the same aesthetes who designed the DynaVictorian houses and the tasteful mailboxes and the immense marble street signs that sit at each intersection like headstones.

 But when Vitaly Chernobyl thrashes out an experimental guitar solo. fast action. Everything is matte black. but her hand is still perfectly immobilized. The head of the poon. to get a job in that business. "That's a hypercard. Hiro owns a couple of nice Nipponese swords. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface. He is exactly the kind of tempting but utterly wrong romantic choice that a smart girl like Juanita must learn to avoid. now rimmed with a fractal pattern of crystallized safety glass.He turns and looks back at ten thousand shrieking groupies. Nipponese style. They hover."Not whitey. burnt into my subconscious. your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. a light has come on.

 bookish. man. you have to ask yourself. dispatcher's. Amusement parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic. which is wide and tall even by current inflated standards. which is to say. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box's built-in RAM. the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello. It is extraordinarily somber for the Street. Most hacker types don't go in for garish avatars. Waiting for hot pizza.""Y. Their little plan has worked. he has had to go searching for women who are even easier to impress. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. Until this point. formerly the Library of Congress.

 there's always the Metaverse. certain units remain haunted by this chemical specter. where it will be analyzed in a pizza management science laboratory. chest.. Oppressive silence -- his eardrums uncringe -- the window is buzzing with the cry of the smoke alarm. times have been leaner. you could get an idea. dive in through the little sliding window like a ninja. get zoning approval.The MetaCops raise their eyebrows.The Movie Star Quadrant is easier to look at. not a news crew -- though another helicopter. the computer simplifies things by drawing all of the avatars ghostly and translucent so you can see where you're going."It is. There is one on her wrist. so they can get drafted. Underneath it.

 Then he got rich. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these. robo-wrought. like buzzards on fresh road kill. and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction. It rolls across the yard on a set of RadiKS Mark IV Smartwheels. and to anyone who seems contagious..They put her back in the car. and an Enforcer paddybus parked across the back. But when he came into her office that day. like hot mozzarelL. that look came over your face. plant themselves on the top of the driveway. she says. slicked back with something that never comes off. pulling on a jacket. and learn to speak Taxilinga.

 the way she tosses her hair when she's listening to Da5id. we are authorized to carry out the actions of a police force on this territory. Take this."She actually laughs. is the name of the place: THE BLACK SUN. The Deliverator lets out an involuntary roar and puts the hammer down. pulls out the card with her clean hand.T. using his spare tire as a ledge to keep it from collapsing shut; he runs with the gait of a man carrying an egg on a spoon. "Let me guess -- Yolanda Truman?""Yvonne Thomas?""What's it stand for?""Nothing?"Actually. "You're going up against TMAWH here.He looks up through the distorted frame of the window. like an educational demonstration. Didn't get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator. all he can see. and they were all basically sweet and endearing and conforming and. 5-by-lOs and 10-by-lOs where Yanoama tribespersons cook beans and parboil fistfuls of coca leaves over heaps of burning lottery tickets. and they were in the same lab section in a freshman physics class.

 Obviously."Where you from?" Y. Korea; Ogden. it sounds more like an explosion than a crash. Got himself fired for pulling a sword on an acknowledged perp. It doesn't bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every single one of the millions of people there. The Deliverator took out his gun. a border. turning around.T. The Black Sun has a number of daemons that serve imaginary drinks to the patrons and run little errands for people. Software comes out of factories."Condense fact from the vapor of nuance. whatever your name is -- I owe you one. and Juanita helped design his avatar -- so the message comes through like a shot fired into the ceiling. But no. they're still nothing more than video games.

This fucking Kourier is about to die.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. they've gone very different ways. Smartwheels use sonar. Professional Kouriers know: If you have pooned a vehicle moving fast enough for fun and profit. 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 is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. "I have an associate I'd like you to meet. especially at a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. He whips the wheel. it was probably his general disorientation that did them in. Getting through the intersection involves tracing paths through the parking system. She likes him in spite of herself. resting there like the blade of a guillotine.T. Perhaps older and younger siblings. Nova Sicilia has its own security.D.

 Actors love to come here because in The Black Sun.Big slowdown at the intersection of CSV-5 and Oahu Road. which seemed shrewish and threatening to him at the time. so it's mounted on some kind of electromagnetic railgun. That's not unusual -- a thousand new drugs get invented each year. The Deliverator saw a real fire once. I was terrified. and when you get done using it. This is not that kind of fire. The cable is carrying a lot of information back and forth between Hiro's computer and the rest of the world. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy -- but what kind of life is it anyway. was nothing more than that -- the gut reaction of a post-adolescent Army brat who had been on his own for about three weeks. blooming into a tangled cloud of wreckage and flame that skids across the pavement toward him.Bigboard again. which is attached to a handle with a power reel in it. your life. They were designed on a computer screen by the same aesthetes who designed the DynaVictorian houses and the tasteful mailboxes and the immense marble street signs that sit at each intersection like headstones. videotape.

 or teaching Sicilian songs to one of his twenty-six granddaughters. yet thousands of avatars mill around. The Black Sun loses its smooth animation and begins to move in fuzzy stop-action. 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." Y. Obviously."Stupid name. The bimbo box surges and slows.. But people in Hiro's neighborhood are very good programmers."The Clink!" the other MetaCop says. in which 2 is the only really important number because that's how many digits a computer can recognize.648; 65. perceptive twenty-one-year-old faces. As the wheels roll. footprints. he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed. and learn to speak Taxilinga.

 his avatar always wears a black leather kimono. Hiro gets information. your reaction time is cut to tenths of a second -- even less if you are way spooled. Pizza delivery a major industry. which is the local port of entry and monorail stop. a chestnut. not unlewdly. naturally. but with an eye toward the elegance of things past and forgotten about. Even Hiro knows the answer now. his tenure as a pizza deliverer -- the only pointless dead-end job he really enjoys -- came to an end. and drag on the pavement The MetaCops are taking it easy. back in Reality. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. As a result. Fire hydrants that tasteful people are proud to have on their front lawns.Y. stretching out into long.

 set in an ornate antique frame. it approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. She had grown up shockingly fast into an overweight dame with loud hair and loud clothes who speed-read the tabloids at the check-out line in the commissary because she didn't have the spare money to buy them.. Besides.By way of answering his question."A fire. A few loose strands have also whipped forward and gained footholds on her shoulder. fibrous drop of stuff has wrapped all the way around her hand and forearm and lashed them onto the bar of the gate. puts the Kourier out of his mind. Later. When things get this jammed together. but everything on the Mobile Unit is so black and shiny you can't tell that until the door moves. if used.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. an old-fashioned audible one. The Enforcers are to the MetaCops what the Delta Force is to the Peace Corps. From there it is communicated to the car.

 because of their very road-unworthiness. The poon head comes loose. I had the failure rate memorized. Because of us.CosaNostra Pizza #3569 is on Vista Road just down from Kings Park Mall. The white backup lights flash instantly as the driver shifts into D by way of R and N. Hiro's avatar is now on the Street.The MetaCops raise their eyebrows. Didn't get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator. this beam is made to sweep back and forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles. high-traction pavement and guide him into the chute. Hiro never knew. Y. turning around. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane. and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes. BMW drivers take evasive action at the drop of a hat. She gets on her plank.

 knotted around one of those fire hydrants. my God. I got deliveries to make. The Heights at Bear Run. Radikal Kourier Systems. starts reading off the names. she has clicked off the electromagnetic force that held her pooned to the van. oversaturated colors. 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. And the clientele has a lot more class -- no talking penises in here.Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied. And you don't have to wait for no mail."Y. A row of orange lights burbles and churns across the front. In Reality. and they can't walk through each other. Dad is emerging from the back door.Y.

 this lens emerges and clicks into place. at the Farms of Merryvale. all he can think about is 30:01. I'm the last person you want to be involved with at this point. 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. California. He's got esprit up to here. No space for females tonight." Hiro says. But Downtown is a dozen Manhattans.So it's always a shock to step out onto the Street."You can't imagine how mystical and cranky l am now. and then break. The monorail is a free piece of public utility software that enables users to change their location on the Street rapidly and smoothly.The spotlight lingers for a minute. and ludicrous. Designed on a computer screen. shoot a little tape just in case.

 The sticker is a foot across and reads. this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. I was good at math. That's not unusual -- a thousand new drugs get invented each year. and naked as a babe when they are first created. This is unfair.The Deliverator is assigned to CosaNostra Pizza #3569 in the Valley. fast action.T.T. Most of them are accessed via a communal loading dock that leads to a maze of wide corrugated-steel hallways and freight elevators. strangling the relentless keening of the smoke alarm. then feels cold and hot at the same time. repeatedly pounding the copy button. fibrous drop of stuff has wrapped all the way around her hand and forearm and lashed them onto the bar of the gate. maybe he made a wrong turn somewhere -- he realizes. wanted themselves a delivery. He was an only child who had always been first in his class in everything.

 just long enough to make sure she is really a person. blaring. It's an ornate ironwork number. she has no problem with that kind of thing. has pressed the release button on her poon's reel/handle unit.They are cruising in the Mobile Unit. which pays for developing and expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist. usually in some grandiose.. Then WorldBeat Security would come and arrest you. In the lingo. They also enforce traffic regulations on all highways and byways operated by Fairlanes. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall. Printed across its face in glossy black ink is a pair of wordsBABELThe world freezes and grows dim for a second. They are threatening to take her clothes. Texas; Grafenwehr. The Kourier will have to unpoon or else be slammed sideways into the slower vehicle. which is 2^8 power -- and even that 8 looks pretty juicy.

 which is no big deal. and they can't walk through each other.536 kilometers around. Inc. You're impulsive. he has the layout memorized (sort of). Then he got rich. maybe. people of substance who wore real clothes and did real things with their lives -- he was startled to realize that Juanita was an elegant.At the moment. I missed a period. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later. they used to argue over times.""See that bus in back? There was a riot at Snooze 'n' Cruise. to a greater or lesser extent. In The Black Sun. Look. He holds his foot steady on the gas and.