SNOW CRASH very rough notes-- PART 2


P. 63

Family Values. Hiro sacrifices for his mother. ...when you live in a
shithole, there’s always the Metaverse, and in the Meta, Hiro P is a warrior
prince.


CHAP. 8 p. 63

He and Juanita are the Adam and Eve of the Metaverse.

p. 64 Juan gives it up. “That no matter how good it is, the Meta is
distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such
distortion in her relationships.” [Steph is able to look at this world from
multiple points of view. Critically evaluate it.]

67: J warns him to stay away from Snow Crash.

69: J is exploring religion. She gives him hypercard. BABEL (INFOCALYPSE)


CHAP. (69)

Card contains lots of data--vids of L. Bob Rifle. She says he’s smart enough
to understand what this means. Has a librarian to help him access data --
holographic character.

•J warns him to stay away from SC AND STAY AWAY FROM RAVEN.

72: H talks to D in the BS. D has a card -- says;

SNOW CRASH -- TEAR IN HALF AND RELEASE FREE SAMPLE.

D wants to try it. He tears it. A Brandy daemon appears. D gets totally
zapped - the screen is nothing but white noise. SNOW.

D comes back. Some exposed D’s optic nerve to 100,000 bytes of information.
In binary code. Says Brandy whispered in his ear -- BABEL. BABEL.

77: D’s avatar gets zapped. He suffers a system crash. Thrown out of his
own bar by his own deamons.

CHAP. 10: 77

Goes back to YT. She’s in the Clink. She calls her stupid boyfriend. He
doesn’t help. She calls Hiro.

He agrees to help her. She breaks out. Hiro is trying to hold off a crowd
with his sword. They break away and go to

MR. LEE’S GREATER HONG KONG

H is a citizen so they are protected.


CHAP. 11 (84)
Back at BLACK SUN. H has a sword fight with Japanese businessman. Concept
of zanshin is introduced. H thinks the concept is crap. 87

88: H doesn’t have any zanshin, he just wants it over with.

H beats him. He’s number on -- cf. the vidgame scene in Hackers.


CHAP. 12 (89)

Ng Securities guard dog. A-367.

He attacks men with guns who are chasing H and YT. RAT THING.

The RT saves them by falling on hand grenade. YT saves its life. 97

98: Introduction to HONG KONG

THREE PRINCIPLES:

1) Information
2) Fair marketing
3) Strict ecology.

100: RT remembers how YT helped him.

She and H go into a 50/50 partnership.

Honesty is still important.

Call me anytime, he says, and means it.,

H IS INTO MUSIC, MOVIES AND MICROCODE.

101: goes back to her mom who works for the feds.

Hiro goes to Long Beach to rock concert with Vitaly Chernobyl. Goes into his
office and sees a globe. He takes out his Babel hypertext card and plugs in.
He’s in a quasi partnership with Juanita.

He starts talking to the holographic Librarian who explains to him what all
this data is doing.

107: LIB talks about Babel, a legendary city -- biblical term for Babylon,
means GATE OF GOD.

Idea of confused language causing changes in world events.

109: Dr. Emanuel Lagos. Devoted himself to the problem of shifting through
vast amounts of irrelevant detail to find significant gems of information.

H asked H to gather every bit of free information on LBR and arrange it in
chronological order.

Hologram of the EARTH.

LB does it -- it has already been collected by Lagos.


CHAP. 14 (111)

LBR -- b. 1948, Odessa, TX, football player, Rice, majored in communications.
Broadcasting and then oil. Made money.

Donated to Rev Waynes Pearly Gates. He owns Rev Wayne. 112

He buys the aircraft carrier Enterprise as his personal yacht.

He’s in the information business. Like Ted Turner. ‘All tv going out to
consumers throughout the world goes through me. Most of then information
transmitted to and from the CIC database passes through my networks. The
Metaverse exists by virtue of a network I own and control.” 115

116: This means his programmers are taking very important bits of information
home with them in their heads. LBR is trying to control all aspects of
information, even that which is in their programmers’ heads.

117: The Enterprise has become a floating refugee camp. This is the first
beginnings of the RAFT.

118: The function of the Raft is to bring more business -- it’s an
information biomas.

CHAP. 15 (121)

Rock concert with Vitaly -- YT is there. Crips and Enforcers are now
security agencies. H hires Enforcers.

He is being scoped by a Gargoyle for the CIC. Guy turns out to be Lagos.
Lagos mentions Raven.

126. Warns him of Raven’s knives.

•You’re a hacker. That means you have deep structures to work about.
Neurolinguistic pathways to the brain. 126

SO YOU ARE VULNERABLE -- ALL HACKERS ARE -- TO NAM-SHUB.

JUST DON’T STARE INTO ANY BITMAPS.

127 BRANDY was a cult prostitute of Asherah. Trying to spread the disease.
Which is synonymous with evil. The Mesopotamians had no independent concept
of evil -- just disease and ill health. Evil was a synonym for disease.

LAGOS: EVIL IS A VIRUS. DON’T LET THE NAM-SHUB INTO YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM.

128: Raven comes in on a Harley. He has tattooed on his head :

POOR IMPLUSE CONTROL.

Lagos was there for Raven.

H calls YT -- tells her to keep watch on Raven.


CHAP. 16 (129)

Describes Raven’s meeting with Crips boss.

H meets Sushi K.

Finds out that Lagos has been killed.


CHAP. 17 (138)

Introduces Jason Breckinridge manager of the Nova Sicilia franchise in the LA
basin. Works for Uncle Enzo. Portions out work to local contractors.
Delivery, collections and security jobs. Mafia is managed on the principle
of loyalty, trust and family values.

144: Uncle Enzo is going to visit.


CHAP. 18 (145)

THE MAFIA -- YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND IN THE FAMILY -- UNCLE ENZO FORGIVES AND
FORGETS.

Jason tries to deliver in person to Enzo BUT ENZO WANTS TO MEET YT.


CHAP. 19 (149)

H examines Lago’s body – cut is strange.

YT is following Raven to Chinatown. Raven encounters the Crips and T-Bone.
H sees Raven kill T.

Description of Raven -- very big, Asian, uses a knife. He ripped Crips off.


CHAP. 20 (159)

Meets YT --- tells H to stay away from Raven.

They look at the brief case R gave to T. It contains tubes of SNOW CRASH --
exploded when T left it in the car --

H finds out that the reason everyone wants to protect Raven is that he has an
H bomb strapped to his Harley. If R dies, the bombs goes off.



CHAP. 21 (165)

YT goes to the Compton NS franchise.

She meets Uncle Enzo -- he knows all about her --

He tells her he volunteered to go to Viet Nam - he went to piss his father
off -- 169 went into Special Forces -- cf. Marlon Brando in Apoc. Now.

They talk management. He says that none of them would volunteer to get their
leg shot off just to piss off their father, They lack a certain fiber.

He gives YT his old dog tags as a gift.

CHAP. 22 (171)

Mafia asks her to go to Griffith Park to pick up something from Rev.
Wayne’s compound.

176: Describes what has happened to the Fed Gov.


CHAP. 23 (177)

Describes her pick up.

Very strange people at the compound. Picks up a brief case like the one they
found in T’s car.

181: Mafia man with the glass eye wants YT to get into the back of a big
truck with the brief case. They test the stuff in the case using very high
tech equipment.

Glass eye said they were the ones who made the drug.


CHAP. 24 (183)

H is at U-STOR-IT. Practicing kendo. Thinking about Raven.

J sends chopper to pick him up.

H takes a shower.

Takes him to a hospital where Da5id is staying.

189: D’s mind has been totally wasted and he is speaking in tongues.

Returns to D’s house. D’s computer has snow-crashed.


CHAP. 25 (192)

YT leaves the truck with the case and an envelope from the glass-eye man.

Goes to Rev Wayne’s Pearly Gates #1106.

The envelope contains pics of Uncle Enzo.

Case is delivered to Rev. Dale Thorpe.

Inhales one of the tubes.

CHAP. 26 (202)

Takes to J on the phone. She is going to Astoria, Oregon.

J says D’s brain was zapped by the scroll Brandy had shown him. Info went
straight into his brain through the optic nerve.

H gets B’s scroll.

J says that because D’s a hacker his brain is susceptible to binary code --
it is firm-wired into the deep structures of his brain. He’s susceptible to
that form of information. 200

J SAYS THAT D GOT A METAVIRUS - A VIRUS THAT CAUSES ANY SYSTEM TO INFECT
ITSELF WITH NEW VIRUSES.

SCREEN HAS TO BE RIGHT UP TO THE VIEWER’S FACE.

SNOW CRASH IS NOT A DRUG -- ACTS LIKE DRUG -- LACED WITH COCAINE-- BUT IT’S
A CHEMICALLY PROCESSED BLOOD SERUM TAKEN FROM PEOPLE WHO ARE INFECTED WITH
THE METAVIRUS.

IT IS BEING SPREAD BY L. BOB RIFE’S PRIVATE CHURCH. ALL OF THOSE PEOPLE ARE
INFECTED.

H ASKS: WHAT IS THIS THING - A VIRUS, A DRUG OR A RELIGION.
J SAYS: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

201: VERY IMPORTANT SECTION:

J SAYS: RELIGION USED TO BE ESSENTIALLY VIRAL - A PIECE OF INFORMATION THAT
REPLICATED ITSELF INSIDE THE HUMAN MIND, JUMPING FROM ONE PERSON TO THE NEXT.
BRAIN PREDISPOSED TO ACCEPT RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS.
•ENKI ONE OF THOSE WHO ATTEMPTED TO DEVELOP RATIONAL RELIGION.

J is going to do research but she is afraid. Tells H to look in the Babel
stack for information about a Sumerian goddess named Inanna.


CHAP. 27 (204)

YT tells H about the delivery to Rev Wayne’s.

H wants to know about speaking in tongues -- asks Librarian. Glossolalia.

Thinks it comes from the structures deep inside the brain common to all
people.

207: Pentecostal Christians believe that the gift of tongues was given to
them so they could spread their religion to other peoples without having to
learn their language.

Rife claimed he could understand everyone on the Enterprise.

•LIB: Binary code - Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all
things. This distinction between something and nothing -- this pivotal
separation between being and non-being is fundamental and underlies many
Creation myths.

Even the word SCIENCE comes from the word meaning TO CUT or SEPARATE.

TO ANALYZE --

LIB: explains that NAM-SHUB is a word from Sumerian. Used in Mesopotamia
until roughly 2000 BC. Oldest of all written languages.

Suggests that Sumerian might sound like glossolalia.

Very few experts in Sumerian. Five at Rife’s Bible College. A NAM-SHUB IS A
SPEECH WITH MAGICAL FORCE. AN INCANTATION.

SPEECH WITH MAGICAL FORCE. THE METAVERSE IS A FICTIONAL STRUCTURE MADE OUT
OF CODE. AND CODE IS JUST A FORM OF SPEECH THAT COMPUTERS UNDERSTAND.

IT CAN BE SEEN AS ONE VAST NAM-SHUB.


CHAP. 28 (213)

H still talking to LB about Lagos. Lagos had collected four kinds of data:

1) Biblical studies

2) Sumerian

3) neurolinguistic

4) data on LB RIFE

Rife is interested in the Sumerian god, Enki.

Sumerian culture left legacy as data -- they wrote on everything

Discusses the nam-shub of enki -- both story and incantation. Origin of the
Babel story. Everyone was speaking the same language until Enki changed
their speech so they could no longer understand each other.

At one point, everyone spoke Sumerian. Then it just vanished.

Lagos was struck by the fact that there are so many thousands of languages.
Many linguists have tried to explain why human language is so fragmented
instead of converging into some common tongue.

Lagos had a theory.

He believed Babel was an actual historical event. 218

Prior to the Babel/Infocalypse, languages tended to converge. After that,
languages have had the innate tendency to diverge and become mutually
incomprehensible. This has to do with the brainstem.

Lagos felt the nam-shub of Enki was a neurolinguistic virus that caused this
phenomenon.


CHAP. 29 (219)

Glass eye gives YT another job. Ng is her security person. YT visits Ng in
the META. Ng’s van is his motorized wheelchair.

She’s supposed to buy some drugs and throw them up into the air.


CHAP. 30 (227)

Back to H and LIB. Talk about Asherah.

At one time, everyone worshipped Asherah except the Hebrews.

Deuteronomists codified the religion. The Torah is like a virus. It uses
the human brain as a host. The host -- the human -- makes copies of it. And
more humans come to read it.

Instead of coming to the temple to make sacrifices, they came to the temple
to read.

The Bible was a benign virus. Like a vaccine.

The Asherah virus was malignant and could be shared through bodily fluids.

Judaism -- one of the first rational religions. Torah was protection against
informational viruses because it was fixed and written. New copies were made
with care.

231: BACKBONE OF L’S HYPOTHESIS: THE ASHERAH VIRUS WAS ABLE TO TRANSMUTE
ITSELF FROM A BIOLOGICALLY TRANSMITTED STRING OF DNA INTO A SET OF BEHAVIORS.

Sex as a way of spreading an informational virus. Tree of good and evil.
Story of Eve. The forbidden fruit is DATA.

239: IT’S AS THOUGH GOOD AND EVIL WERE INVENTED BY THE WRITER OF ADAM AND EVE
TO EXPLAIN WHY PEOPLE GET SICK -- SUFFER FROM MENTAL AND PHYSICAL VIRUSES.
WHEN EVE ATE THE APPLE, SHE WAS INTRODUCING THE CONCEPT OF GOOD AND EVIL INTO
THE WORLD, INTRODUCING THE METAVIRUS WHICH CREATES THE VIRUS.

May have been written by the Deuteronomists.


CHAP. 31 (234)

YT goes down to a SACRIFICE ZONE near Long Beach.

YT and NG are trying to get some snow crash to test.

239: SC penetrates into the brain cells to where the DNA is stored.

YT is supposed to buy SC and throw it into the air so it can be tested.


CHAP. 32 (242)

YT makes the buy. There is some action. RT helps her escape.

248: The RT is YT’s old dog, FIDO.


CHAP. 33 (249)

YT tells H that SC is like a steroid. It changes DNA. Like herpes.

Mafia now has a sample that they can analyze -- either for cure or
reproduction.

THESE ARE VERY DIFFICULT BUT VERY IMPORTANT SECTIONS BECAUSE THEY SET UP THE
UNDERLYING CONCEPTUAL CONFLICTS OF THE NOVEL.

ME = code of principles or laws for organizing and operating a society.

Myth of Enki (M) versus Asherah (F).

Logical problem: if there was one creator, how did ordinary BINARY sexual
relationships come into being?

Heaven and earth were united. Creation separated the two.

Asherah and Enki both defeated Chaos. The separation of a unified and static
state into a binary, dynamic system is identified with creation.

Enki = word rich. Naming something is to create it.

ME is the set of rules for running a society. The operating system of a
society.


CHAP. 34 (259)

YT goes back to Griffith Park and talks to a woman who is a member of the
cult. She used to be a programmer -- saw something strange on her computer –
says she came from the RAFT, the Enterprise.

263: They sucked her blood out on the Raft until their veins gave out.

266: YT goes back home and smashes her mom’s computer.


CHAP. 35 (267)

H wants to go out to the RAFT which is off the coast of Oregon and find RB
Rife.

H gets new Yamaha cycle.


CHAP. 36 (274)

H admits he’s intimidated by Raven.

Talks to the Lib about linguistic theories. Universalists vs. relativists.

Lagos believed our brains at birth are like PROM chips -- programmable read
only memory. The child’s brain is structured according to the particular
language it is exposed to -- then it is set for life.

L believed that Enki was a real person who understood the relationship
between language and the brain and knew how to manipulate it.

He was like hacker. He could create nam-shubs that could alter the
relationship between language and the brain.

L believed that Sumerian was a powerful language that lent itself to
neurolinguistic hacking.

Early language, it is believed, allowed people to communicate directly
without misunderstanding.

Machine language is binary -- 1’s and 0’s. But difficult to work with so
other programming languages were developed to control this machine language.
But these second level languages are often opaque themselves. Hackers can
see through these to the workings of the underlying binary code or machine
language.

Because Sumerian was different from any language we have today, their brains
were different as well. It was a language susceptible to viruses -- once
started, it infected everyone.

Hence, may not be a bad thing that we have linguistic diversity.

THIS IS THE KEY CONCEPT OF THE NOVEL. RIFE IS TRYING TO BRING THE SUMERIAN
VIRUSES BACK FOR CONTROL PURPOSES.

Hiro says that maybe Enki knew that linguistic diversity would not be such a
bad thing after all - it would help prevent the spread of neuolinguistic
viruses.


CHAP. 37 (279)

YT’s mom works in Fedland.

Fed workers are designed to be interchangeable parts.

She’s an applications programmer.


CHAP. 38 (288)

YT’s mom takes a polygraph test. Asks her questions bout YT.

Her house is bugged and tapped. Admits YT broke her computer.

They keep questioning her.



CHAP. 39 (292)

H on motorcycle. Reaches Oregon. Several hundred miles from where the RAFT
is.

H interviews Chuck Wright. Former-President of TROKK. (Temporary Republic of
Kenai and Kodiak)

Answers questions about Russian Orthodox Pentecostals. They were related to
Rev. Bob’s group.

299: Raven is an Aleut whale hunter. H’s dad knew one in prison camp in
Japan. Connection between Raven and Hiro’s past.

R used a kayak to travel between the islands.

H learns that R uses glass knives. Sharpest in the world.

Raven took over a Russian sub. The Pentecostal Orthos got it. How R got the
nuclear weapon he carries around with him.