afening tornado of light and sound. Colored shapes, foreshortened by their immense speed, shoot from the center of it and take positions above their heads,cheap coach bags, building a three-dimensional picture.
The hackers are going nuts. Hiro knows that the Hacker Quadrant in The Black Sun is, at this moment, emptying itself out. They are all cramming through the exit and running down the Street toward the plaza, coming to see Hiro's fantastic show of light,cheap furla bags, sound, swords, and sorcery.
Raven tries to shove Hiro back. It would work in Reality because Raven has such overpowering strength. But avatars are equally strong, unless you hack them up in just the right way. So Raven gives a mighty push and then pulls his knife back so that he can take a cut at Hiro's neck when Hiro flies away from him; but Hiro doesn't fly away. He waits for the opening and then takes Raven's sword hand off. Then, just in case, he takes Raven's other hand off. The crowd screams in delight.
"How do I stop this thing?" Hiro says.
"Beats me. I just deliver 'em," Raven says.
"Do you have any concept of what you just did?"
"Yeah. Realized my lifelong ambition," Raven says, a huge relaxed grin spreading across his face. "I nuked America."
Hiro cuts his head off. The crowd of doomed hackers rises to its feet and shrieks.
Then they go silent as Hiro abruptly disappears. He has switched over to his small, invisible avatar. He is hovering in the air now above the shattered remains of the egg; gravity takes him right down into the center of it. As he falls, he is muttering to himself: "SnowScan." It's the piece of software he wrote while he was killing time on the liferaft. The one that searches for Snow Crash.
Chapter 102
With Hiro Protagonist seemingly gone from the stage, the hackers turn their attention toward the giant construction rising up out of the egg. All that nonsense with the sword fight must have been just a wacky introductory piece -- Hiro's typically offbeat way of getting their attention. This light and sound show is the main attraction. T
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