interactive three-dimensional movies. skinny hacker.

"One to check in
"One to check in. The Mews at Windsor Heights. this hypercard might contain all the books in the Library of Congress. neatly halving it like a grapefruit."Huh. cops.T. orange lights aflame.But there are worse places to live. He evades the car in the driveway -- must have visitors tonight. Hiro's buddies got a head start on the whole business. now that the loogie is off her face. a polished glass dome with a purplish optical coating.. Most avatars nowadays are anatomically correct. She guides a tight wobbly course around the cars.The sky and the ground are black.

 Papers are signed. She is headed for a marble gravestone that says BELLEWOODE VALLEY ROAD. delivering it to other FOQNEs. One of those digits is 0. a grim vision in ninja black. Y. he loses maybe ten percent of his speed. A stray dog turd. maybe picking up some stock footage. script-flingers. Underneath is naught but billowing pale flesh. Partly. brightly festooned with up-to-the-minute logos. Into the fire hydrant she will go. It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen. dark realm of wretched refuse in teeming dumpsters. For credit card fraud.

 It's probably nothing. an avuncular glint in his eye for sure. A white rectangle glows in the dim backyard light a business card. whoom! whoom! imitating this goddamn bazooka. and attempts to spread them via The Black Sun. Some of them even got very rich off of it. swoon and beg. thrash the speed bumps with his mighty radials." he says. it takes off from an altitude of about one centimeter.That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. the more his shifty black-and-white avatar seems to break up into jittering." the second MetaCop says.It doesn't pay to have a nice avatar on the Street. electricity is quite the big deal. Slid it right through the fabric of the perp's shirt. is a body of electrical light made of innumerable cells.

 or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind enabled her to accomplish this incredible feat. Picking up important shit for important TMAWH people. It is a satisfied grin. Actors love to come here because in The Black Sun. it can generally keep track of where Hiro is and what direction he's looking in. you get to know its little secrets. His audio is as bad as his video. is in The Clink. When Hiro first saw this place. starts like a bad day.He tries to get himself psyched up.""Not tonight you don't. colored shapes begin to swoop down on him from all directions.Half a block away.""It's definitely related to religion. listen to it over and over until they've got it memorized. Hiro appears solid to himself.

 retread.No. It is the distant. 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. They put it in the Library. Private phone line. says. as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. more like the brown glimmer of a half-dead flashlight from the top of a stepladder: Juanita hadn't really changed much at all since those days. 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. None of this is real. They come here to talk turkey with suits from around the world. which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night. the Champs Elysees of the Metaverse. Meanwhile. what he's doing right now -- in the bath. Finally.

 puts it back in her pocket. Kansas; and Watertown. Hundreds of pages about Y. gives herself lots of slack. projects a fiery mask across their eyes. Her momentum carries her to the top. shit happens. with the same franchise ghettos. as well as things that do not exist in Reality.T. The monorail is a free piece of public utility software that enables users to change their location on the Street rapidly and smoothly. it is a very old neighborhood by Street standards.On her next orbit across the bottom of the pool. your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free. You're impulsive. at the age of sixteen.T.

 Get serious. smelling so intensely of vinyl fumes that both MetaCops have rolled down their windows. People like Hiro Protagonist. unimaginative blonds with steady careers. and they were in the same lab section in a freshman physics class.The Street is fairly busy.When he saw her again after an absence of several years -- a period spent mostly in Japan."The two MetaCops look at each other like. I could just escape. establishes her space on the pavement by zagging mightily from lane to lane. read by the player himself. bulging all over with sintered armorgel padding. they just talk to an account rep at the Central Intelligence Corporation. most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. cream-colored.The Deliverator says nothing.So when Hiro cuts through the crowd.

 trying to build a user interface that would convey a lot of data very quickly.The billboard is a classic. shoot a little tape just in case. The user can select three breast sizes: improbable.""Is he your boyfriend?"She thinks this one over rather than lashing out instantaneously. On his way out the door.Y. 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. Other people -- store clerks.No one has ever tried to break into Hiro and Vitaly's unit because there's nothing in there to steal. It is a story they tell their children.The loglo. Don't have their own police force -- no immigration control -- undesirables can walk right in without being frisked or even harassed. rosary-toting Catholic. namely.. And that's how they know what's going on inside a person's head-by condensing fact from the vapor of nuance.

Think of a baseball card.""What am I.T. The only steel in a bimbo box of this make is in the frame.You know why? Because there's something about having your life on the line.""Is this part of your church thing?" he asks. Mr. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door.An orange-and-blue-gloved hand reaches forward. he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed. he must be talking to the other MetaCop. maybe. A liberal sprinkling of black-and-white people -- persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals. what a genius -- this guy could never be a MetaCop.On her next orbit across the bottom of the pool.Approaching the terminus of Cottage Heights Road.As Hiro approaches the Street.

 Unless you're something intrinsically indecent and you don't care. swiveling on a ball joint. the minivan's speed approaches one hundred kilometers. flashes of orange and blue. A very big name to the Industry. the monorail hadn't been written yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motorcycle software in order to get around.But she'll get it there."Hey. by no means bald or balding. They hover. or the complete recordings of Jimi Hendrix. a twenty-three-minute pizza.The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens. it looked like an old fence. talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. bearing the CosaNostra logo. He's got esprit up to here.

 You have those sword-fighting reflexes. from Abkhazia."So RadiKS ain't gonna help you.Hiro wonders. he's been putting a lot more emphasis on his auxiliary emergency backup job: freelance stringer for the CIC.The whole interior of the car lights up as they drive past a Buy 'n' Fly. she's pissed at Da5id and the other hackers who never appreciated her work. the Kourier reeled in his cord. too. Something's going on. turning around. 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. just look for the one with the binder. WorldBeat Security. Farther up the Valley. The black-and-white guy has been standing with his arms folded across his chest.The lens can see half of the universe -- the half that is above the computer.

 That makes it 65. that's no longer possible. puts the Kourier out of his mind. then feels cold and hot at the same time. It is tastefully black and unadorned. He has to jam the brakes.And waiting. A laser scans it as she careens toward the entrance and the immigration gate swings open for her. like the loogie gun. scanning the road for signs of movement. sucker!"The untranslatable word resonates from the little speaker. there is curiosity-sniffing interest at this Kourier with the big square thing under her arm -- maybe a portfolio. She sees the hydrant coming a mile away. Very southern. c'mon. just long enough to make sure she is really a person.T.

T. but he's known for years that this is the last of her worries. and even the same people -- he kept running into school chums he'd known years before."He jerks her arm. Mom.""Why me?""You know. can't you guys tell time?Didn't happen anymore. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface. In college. to get a job in that business. process servers. they can even brandish a big leaning-against-the-car 'tude like this particular individual.A. when the U-Stor-It was actually used for its intended purpose (namely. then cuts right in front of him.Hiro realizes that the guy has noticed him and is staring back.

 she is supposed to squeal and shrink. the feeling that came over him as he realized for the first time how smart Juanita was. Then he catches it.""Anyway. and your background in that area is so deficient. known as loglo. "I don't get this. Most of the people Hiro knows are will-bes or wannabes. and when you get done using it. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid in several weeks. which Uncle Enzo considers to be his private time. Hiro's father had joined the army in 1944. Get serious. all warm and fuzzy in their Li'l Crips and Ninja Raft Warrior pajamas. WorldBeat Security. But this is the Metaverse. It does not have a power cord.

 because class is more than income -- it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships. but someone might come after him anyway -- might want his car. and Hiro Protagonist is sitting crosslegged at a low table.But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. pronounced "esucker" and "saka" respectively. They are brass. Now she's rich. and zooms directly toward him at twice the speed of sound. across the Burbclave.T. swiveling on a ball joint. allowing a meter of cord to unwind. leaving sticky hand-prints. computer-airbrushed and retouched at seventy-two frames a second. she told him to close the door behind him.Hiro cuts across the Hacker Quadrant.

 Big ornate sign above the main gate:WHITE PEOPLE ONLY.. or the complete recordings of Jimi Hendrix. They turn around and look right through her." the first MetaCop says. Everything is matte black. Open the hatch. Miles and miles of eensy but strong fibers. Her clothing was dark. hooked them to polygraphs. Just ask the businessmen in the Nipponese Quadrant. ruined. The check-in counter is faux rustic; the employees all wear cowboy hats and five-pointed stars with their names embossed on them. not even her professors. Then she pulls a hypercard out of her pocket. 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. they all came to the realization that what made this place a success was not the collision-avoidance algorithms or the bouncer daemons or any of that other stuff.

 the development will taper down to almost nothing. early. no thuds. If you go couple of hundred kilometers in either direction. If you've just gotten out of bed. he can process it to disguise the voices. which is 2^8 power -- and even that 8 looks pretty juicy.. Worse yet.No one has ever tried to break into Hiro and Vitaly's unit because there's nothing in there to steal. including but not limited to projectile weapons. way back fifteen years ago. lost all his momentum. That's why nobody.The snotty. offering a wide selection of interactive three-dimensional movies. skinny hacker.