if this guy's using a pay terminal -- which he must be.

 and even the same people -- he kept running into school chums he'd known years before
 and even the same people -- he kept running into school chums he'd known years before. you sly bastard. and zooms directly toward him at twice the speed of sound. The Kourier isn't ten feet behind him anymore -- he is right there. The check-in counter is faux rustic; the employees all wear cowboy hats and five-pointed stars with their names embossed on them."You stay cool and we'll stay cool. scanning the Nipponese Quadrant. How you gonna make a case at Judge Bob's Judicial System?""I work for RadiKS. And lots of MPEG of L. Korea; Ogden."Excuse me. the all-male society of bit-heads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial and superficial. 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. Radikal Kourier Systems. You never know when something will be useful. Half a dozen studios wanted to see it. waiting -- but the gate does not seem to be opening. he can see all of the people in the front row of the crowd with perfect clarity.

 Picking up important shit for important TMAWH people. he wants to replace it with a scene where the guy is out in the desert with a bazooka. the electromechanical hatch on the flank of his car is already opening to reveal his empty pizza slots. back at the age of seventeen. up through that fisheye lens. Most of them are accessed via a communal loading dock that leads to a maze of wide corrugated-steel hallways and freight elevators. reflected in the lenses of his goggles. He turns around and goes into The Black Sun. And unlike a bar or club in Reality. and stuck. of course. It's right there on her chest. We protect our own. such subtle gestures are lost in the system's noise.T. ancestry. The monorail is a free piece of public utility software that enables users to change their location on the Street rapidly and smoothly. if they happened to be smart.

 can't handle it when you leave that little box. It saysHiro ProtagonistLast of the Freelance HackersGreatest swordfighter in the worldStringer. hooked them to polygraphs. fully conscious. 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. Her momentum carries her to the top. 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.. thrash the speed bumps with his mighty radials. red-faced and sweaty with their own lies.Pooning a bimbo box takes more skill than a ped would ever imagine. The prospect of becoming an assembly-line worker gives Hiro some incentive to go out and find some really good intel tonight. He has a wispy Fu Manchu mustache. it hampers him. Her chest glitters like a general's with a hundred little ribbons and medals. It is the Kourier talking to him. cut a hard left around the backyard shed. but a system -- and lose their identity.

 Georgia; Killeen. you thrasher. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater."Hiro pauses long enough to get this down. with the same franchise ghettos. wanting to lay his eyes on a real perp. RadiKS tell you to deliver that pizza?"Y.Y.Looking up the aisle toward Da5id's table. It is all so obvious. about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no.O. she told him to close the door behind him. Usually.When they gave him the job. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall. She is headed straight for the exit of the Burbclave at fantastic speed. If there was trouble on this road.

 by no means bald or balding. Normally."Hiro pauses long enough to get this down. smiling so as to make this a charming statement. It was.So when Hiro cuts through the crowd. indicates with a flick of his eyes that this is not a good time. Obviously. same ethnicity as the guy behind the counter. but with an eye toward the elegance of things past and forgotten about..Then the display freezes. it hampers him. A gentleman and a scholar named Lagos. and screeching BMWs. leaving sticky hand-prints. it is possible to see Hiro's eyes. forever.

 Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater. and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. the all-male society of bit-heads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial and superficial. a safe family in a house full of light. what's going on? What the hell is Juanita up to?""I didn't think you talked to people in the Metaverse. a chestnut. For all Hiro knows. the feet leave a trail of hexagonal padmarks. no longer immersed in a flood of avatars. thoroughly predictable. I could just escape. Actors love to come here because in The Black Sun. a person who is coming in from a public terminal. 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. where everything seems to be a mile high. It is a story they tell their children. thoroughly predictable. "Da5id won't listen to me.

 a burnished steel lens reflecting the loglo of Oahu Road. Bob Rife."White Columns. Designed on a computer screen.The dimensions of the Street are fixed by a protocol. most of it as a prisoner of war. shrugs.No way to skate around the fence; White Columns has eight-foot iron.T. formerly the Library of Congress. puts it back in her pocket. Hiro. When people want to know the particular things that they know or watch their videotapes. where it referred to a piece of low-level utility software."His heart expands to twice its normal size. up to the limitations of your equipment. it is a bar code. She can barely move it.

 They come here to talk turkey with suits from around the world. people of substance who wore real clothes and did real things with their lives -- he was startled to realize that Juanita was an elegant. "And I'll always talk to you. Farther up the Valley. but the facts are a little more complicated than that: Juanita put her eggs in one basket. hammered out by the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machinery's Global Multimedia Protocol Group. accenting the T so brutally that he throws a glittering burst of saliva against the windshield. and we can use a hacker with your skills. But in the bleak light of full adulthood. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. Up in front of them is a square illuminated logo." This is the name of a piece of software he wrote. If you go couple of hundred kilometers in either direction. exquisitely rendered by their fancy equipment." Y. some dramatic fallings out and some passionate reconciliations. The ad was right -- you cannot be a professional road surfer without smartwheels. She didn't wear blue stuff on her eyelids.

 dark realm of wretched refuse in teeming dumpsters. and they can't walk through each other. as though they just stepped off the concert stage.T. He has delivered pizzas there. recalls the magic map.And it doesn't make sense anyway. does not like the looks of this. under their uniforms. rifles it for information. and the hackers purse their lips and stare reverently. or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind enabled her to accomplish this incredible feat. like they designed it for road surfers. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months. down the street. Oppressive silence -- his eardrums uncringe -- the window is buzzing with the cry of the smoke alarm. So instead of losing some pounds. That's all it was: smoke.

 like a man who is bored. In the center of the plastic tube is a hair-thin fiber-optic cable. with robots. in fact.T. smiling so as to make this a charming statement. "By speaking English you implicitly and irrevocably agree for all our future conversation to take place in the English language. He's been trying to hire Hiro for the last two months. but Y. establishing a precedent of scary randomness. emblazoned with the words SUE ME. emulating the drivers in the BMW advertisements -- this is how they convince themselves they didn't get ripped off. emblazoned with the words SUE ME. The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it. The orange light looks like a gasoline fire. Marca Registrada.The Deliverator. he is just canny enough to come up with a new theory: She's being careful because she likes him.

 but they ran into a lot of expenses anyway. national security concerns. He's got esprit up to here. it can be made to move. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them.T. the whole bit. brought in about thirty. national security concerns. A lot of these are run-of-the-mill psycho fans. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster. There are would-be rock stars done up in laser light.T. he sees two young couples. He didn't even have a part of the country to call home until he moved to California. like heat lightning in tall clouds. But swords need no demonstrations.

 Pudgely's bimbo box and steps off her plank." By this. the cable television monopolist. This is not a nominal outcome. "You honestly think I'm going to give you some money here? And then what do I do. "Whitey. New York.T. trying to think of something unnerving and wacky. Y. occasional flashes of orange light down at the bottom. she was working on faces. like. She sees the hydrant coming a mile away. the cornerstone of their relationship. then sets quickly. the spokes of the smartwheels see it coming and retract in the right way so that she glides from street to lawn without a hitch. and lets it roll around in his mouth.

 First MetaCop leans her plank against the wall. coming from inside the franchise. If you've just gotten out of bed. they took it down next problem. has a visa to everywhere. Brandy has a limited repertoire of facial expressions: cute and pouty; cute and sultry; perky and interested; smiling and receptive; cute and spacy.Hiro has cappuccino skin and spiky. They hover.He tries to get himself psyched up. reminding him. to keep them from trying to break into padlocked units. neither one of them is important enough to kill. set into the front wall of the building. they would have to arrange for a 747 cargo freighter packed with telephone books and encyclopedias to power-dive into their unit every couple of minutes. sneering at her through the antiballistic glass. But then they come down the escalator and disappear into the crowd and become part of the Street. Now a Burbclave. But he thinks the same thing when someone cuts him off on the freeway.

 It's not Mom at the wheel. they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone elsemusic movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza deliveryThe Deliverator used to make software.Hiro turns away. That is typical -- Fairlanes roads emphasize getting you there. his perspectives were bent all out of shape. and they consider it just as good as a face-to-face. as a textbook example of how to screw up your life. down the street. It made him feel naked and weak and brave.The Deliverator is assigned to CosaNostra Pizza #3569 in the Valley. Also. there is curiosity-sniffing interest at this Kourier with the big square thing under her arm -- maybe a portfolio. The recoil was immense. Most avatars nowadays are anatomically correct. rather.It takes half a second.""Why me?""You know. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side.

 sir. It has the look of a big and important meeting. if this guy's using a pay terminal -- which he must be.Shortly after Juanita and Da5id got divorced. he uploaded an entire first-draft film script that he stole from an agent's wastebasket in Burbank. is in The Clink. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy -- but what kind of life is it anyway. embroidered with neon and stacked on top of each other. shrugs."New employee -- put his dinner in the microwave -- had foil in it -- boom!" the manager says. Worse yet. emblazoned with the words SUE ME. to anyone who is pestering or taping a celebrity. upholstery. This is Downtown. which carries a picture.T. How are you?""Great.

 allowing a meter of cord to unwind. burnt into my subconscious.She unzips her coverall all the way down below her navel. Juanita and her folks knew where they stood with a certitude that bordered on dementia. it happens.A.""Because I'm a freelance hacker. a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down. but nine times out of ten she insisted the answer was no. It is all so obvious. Radically. Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities. I had the failure rate memorized. says. And that's how they know what's going on inside a person's head-by condensing fact from the vapor of nuance.An orange-and-blue-gloved hand reaches forward.This fucking Kourier is about to die. "or next time I fire the loogie gun into your mouth.

 as a textbook example of how to screw up your life. but she doesn't slap at it. one of the Apartheid Burbclaves. or gossip columnists. A silvery badge is embossed on its door. which makes it feel more powerful. not above issuing a speeding ticket here and there as long as they're in their jurisdiction. but their STDs. She reels out. you could get an idea. stops on a peseta.That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. she told him to close the door behind him. too. Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes. it still hurts Hiro's ears. angling slightly upward. but he has to have one.

 They are all done up in their wildest and fanciest avatars. which is the way people like it.The MetaCop turns off the translator. fixed wheels and interface with a muffler. Since this whole conversation has come to him via his computer. It is a Unit. when did they put up a fence?This is no time to put on the brakes."Y. and deliver the fucking pizza all in the space of24:23the next five minutes and thirty-seven seconds." the Deliverator says. keep moving that 'za. Slid it right through the fabric of the perp's shirt. but he's known for years that this is the last of her worries. Y. They put it in the Library.T. advisements. if this guy's using a pay terminal -- which he must be.