Hiro Protagonist1 and Vitaly Chernobyl, roommates, are chilling out in their home, a spacious2 20-by-30 in a U-Stor-It in Inglewood, California. The room has a concrete slab3 floor, corrugated4 steel walls separating it from the neighboring units, and-this is a mark of distinction and luxury -- a roll-up steel door that faces northwest, giving them a few red rays at times like this, when the sun is setting over LAX. From time to time, a 777 or a Sukhoi/Kawasaki Hypersonic Transport will taxi in front of the sun and block the sunset with its rudder, or just mangle5 the red light with its jet exhaust, braiding the parallel rays into a dappled pattern on the wall.
But there are worse places to live. There are much worse places right here in this U-Stor-It. Only the big units like this one have their own doors. Most of them are accessed via a communal6 loading dock that leads to a maze7 of wide corrugated-steel hallways and freight elevators. These are slum housing, 5-by-lOs and 10-by-lOs where Yanoama tribespersons cook beans and parboil fistfuls of coca leaves over heaps of burning lottery8 tickets.
It is whispered that in the old days, when the U-Stor-It was actually used for its intended purpose (namely, providing cheap extra storage space to Californians with too many material goods), certain entrepreneurs came to the front office, rented out 1O-by-lOs using fake IDs, filled them up with steel drums full of toxic9 chemical waste, and then abandoned them, leaving the problem for the U-Stor-It Corporation to handle. According to these rumors10, U-Stor-It just padlocked those units and wrote them off. Now, the immigrants claim, certain units remain haunted by this chemical specter. It is a story they tell their children, to keep them from trying to break into padlocked units.
No one has ever tried to break into Hiro and Vitaly's unit because there's nothing in there to steal, and at this point in their lives, neither one of them is important enough to kill, kidnap, or interrogate11. Hiro owns a couple of nice Nipponese swords, but he always wears them, and the whole idea of stealing fantastically dangerous weapons presents the would-be perp with inherent dangers and contradictions: When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins. Hiro also has a pretty nice computer that he usually takes with him when he goes anywhere. Vitaly owns half a carton of Lucky Strikes, an electric guitar, and a hangover.
At the moment, Vitaly Chernobyl is stretched out on a futon, quiescent12, and Hiro Protagonist is sitting crosslegged at a low table, Nipponese style, consisting of a cargo13 pallet set on cinderblocks.
As the sun sets, its red light is supplanted14 by the light of many neon logos emanating15 from the franchise16 ghetto17 that constitutes this U-Stor-It's natural habitat. This light, known as loglo, fills in the shadowy corners of the unit with seedy, oversaturated colors.
Hiro has cappuccino skin and spiky18, truncated19 dreadlocks. His hair does not cover as much of his head as it used to, but he is a young man, by no means bald or balding, and the slight retreat of his hairline only makes more of his high cheekbones. He is wearing shiny goggles20 that wrap halfway21 around his head the bows of the goggles have little earphones that are plugged into his outer ears. The earphones have some built-in noise cancellation22 features. This sort of thing works best on steady noise. When jumbo jets make their takeoff runs on the runway across the street, the sound is reduced to a low doodling hum. But when Vitaly Chernobyl thrashes out an experimental guitar solo, it still hurts Hiro's ears.
The goggles throw a light, smoky haze23 across his eyes and reflect a distorted wide-angle view of a brilliantly lit boulevard that stretches off into an infinite blackness. This boulevard does not really exist, it is a computer-rendered view of an imaginary place.
Beneath this image, it is possible to see Hiro's eyes, which look Asian. They are from his mother, who is Korean by way of Nippon. The rest of him looks more like his father, who was African by way of Texas by way of the Army -- back in the days before it got split up into a number of competing organizations such as General Jim's Defense24 System and Admiral Bob's National Security.
Four things are on the cargo pallet: a bottle of expensive beer from the Puget Sound area, which Hiro cannot really afford; a long sword known in Nippon as a katana and a short sword known as a wakizashi -- Hiro's father looted these from Japan after World War II went atomic -- and a computer.
The computer is a featureless black wedge. It does not have a power cord, but there is a narrow translucent25 plastic tube emerging from a hatch on the rear, spiraling across the cargo pallet and the floor, and plugged into a crudely installed fiber-optics socket26 above the head of the sleeping Vitaly Chernobyl. In the center of the plastic tube is a hair-thin fiber-optic cable. The cable is carrying a lot of information back and forth27 between Hiro's computer and the rest of the world. In order to transmit the same amount of information on paper, they would have to arrange for a 747 cargo freighter packed with telephone books and encyclopedias28 to power-dive into their unit every couple of minutes, forever.
Hiro can't really afford the computer either, but he has to have one. It is a tool of his trade. In the worldwide community of hackers30, Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak31 light of full adulthood32, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed33. And a few short weeks ago, his tenure34 as a pizza deliverer -- the only pointless dead-end job he really enjoys -- came to an end. Since then, he's been putting a lot more emphasis on his auxiliary35 emergency backup job: freelance stringer for the CIC, the Central Intelligence Corporation of Langley, Virginia.
The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip, videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox36 of a document. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster.
He uploads it to the CIC database -- the Library, formerly37 the Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely38 clear on what the word "congress" means.
And even the word "library" is getting hazy39. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say, ones and zeroes. And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive40 difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart anyway. So they merged41 and kicked out a big fat stock offering.
Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading millions of other fragments at the same time. CIC's clients, mostly large corporations and Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if they find a use for something that Hiro put into it, Hiro gets paid.
A year ago, he uploaded an entire first-draft film script that he stole from an agent's wastebasket in Burbank. Half a dozen studios wanted to see it. He ate and vacationed off of that one for six months.
Since then, times have been leaner. He has been learning the hard way that 99 percent of the information in the Library never gets used at all.
Case in point: After a certain Kourier tipped him off to the existence of Vitaly Chernobyl, he put a few intensive weeks into researching a new musical phenomenon -- the rise of Ukrainian nuclear fuzz-grunge collectives in L.A. He has planted exhaustive notes on this trend in the Library, including video and audio. Not one single record label, agent, or rock critic has bothered to access it.
The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polished glass dome42 with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine, this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with the surface of the computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface. Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid in several weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's father, who was stationed in Japan for many years, was obsessed43 with cameras. He kept bringing them back from his stints44 in the Far East, encased in many protective layers, so that when he took them out to show Hiro, it was like watching an exquisite45 striptease as they emerged from all that black leather and nylon, zippers46 and straps47. And once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling through skirts and lingerie and outer labia and inner labia ... It made him feel naked and weak and brave.
The lens can see half of the universe -- the half that is above the computer, which includes most of Hiro. In this way, it can generally keep track of where Hiro is and what direction he's looking in.
Down inside the computer are three lasers -- a red one, a green one, and a blue one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful enough to burn through the back of your eyeball and broil48 your brain, fry your frontals, lase your lobes49. As everyone learned in elementary school, these three colors of light can be combined, with different intensities50, to produce any color that Hiro's eye is capable of seeing.
In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards of the computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the use of electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep back and forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as the electron beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous Tube. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality.
By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, it can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly51 realistic soundtrack.
So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo52, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.
Hiro is approaching the Street. It is the Broadway, the Champs Elysees of the Metaverse. It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen, miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses of his goggles. It does not really exist. But right now, millions of people are walking up and down it.
The dimensions of the Street are fixed53 by a protocol54, hammered out by the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing56 Machinery57's Global Multimedia58 Protocol Group. The Street seems to be a grand boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a radius59 of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers. That makes it 65,536 kilometers around, which is considerably60 bigger than Earth.
The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker29, who recognizes it more readily than his own mother's date of birth: It happens to be a power of 2^16 power to be exact -- and even the exponent61 16 is equal to 2, and 4 is equal to 22. Along with 256; 32,768; and 2,147,483,648; 65,536 is one of the foundation stones of the hacker universe, in which 2 is the only really important number because that's how many digits62 a computer can recognize. One of those digits is 0, and the other is 1. Any number that can be created by fetishistically multiplying 2s by each other, and subtracting the occasional 1, will be instantly recognizable to a hacker.
Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering63 overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored, and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other.
The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist -- it's just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere -- none of these things is being physically64 built. They are, rather, pieces of software, made available to the public over the worldwide fiber-optics network. When Hiro goes into the Metaverse and looks down the Street and sees buildings and electric signs stretching off into the darkness, disappearing over the curve of the globe, he is actually staring at the graphic55 representations -- the user interfaces65 -- of a myriad66 different pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations. In order to place these things on the Street, they have had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buy frontage on the Street, get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe67 inspectors68, the whole bit. The money these corporations pay to build things on the Street all goes into a trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays for developing and expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist.
Hiro has a house in a neighborhood just off the busiest part of the Street. it is a very old neighborhood by Street standards. About ten years ago, when the Street protocol was first written, Hiro and some of his buddies69 pooled their money and bought one of the first development licenses70, created a little neighborhood of hackers. At the time, it was just a little patchwork71 of light amid a vast blackness. Back then, the Street was just a necklace of streetlights around a black ball in space.
Since then, the neighborhood hasn't changed much, but the Street has. By getting in on it early, Hiro's buddies got a head start on the whole business. Some of them even got very rich off of it.
That's why Hiro has a nice big house in the Metaverse but has to share a 20-by-30 in Reality. Real estate acumen72 does not always extend across universes.
The sky and the ground are black, like a computer screen that hasn't had anything drawn73 into it yet; it is always nighttime in the Metaverse, and the Street is always garish74 and brilliant, like Las Vegas freed from constraints75 of physics and finance. But people in Hiro's neighborhood are very good programmers, so it's tasteful. The houses look like real houses, There are a couple of Frank Lloyd Wright reproductions and some fancy Victoriana.
So it's always a shock to step out onto the Street, where everything seems to be a mile high. This is Downtown, the most heavily developed area. If you go couple of hundred kilometers in either direction, the development will taper76 down to almost nothing, just a thin chain of streetlights casting white pools on the black velvet77 ground. But Downtown is a dozen Manhattans, embroidered78 with neon and stacked on top of each other.
In the real world-planet Earth, Reality, there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all of the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway, by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their employer, and at any given time the Street is occupied by twice the population of New York City.
That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest79, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.
It is a hundred meters wide, with a narrow monorail track running down the middle. The monorail is a free piece of public utility software that enables users to change their location on the Street rapidly and smoothly80. A lot of people just ride back and forth on it, looking at the sights. When Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago, the monorail hadn't been written yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motorcycle software in order to get around. They would take their software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night.
收听单词发音 |
1
protagonist
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| n.(思想观念的)倡导者；主角，主人公 | |
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spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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slab
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| n.平板，厚的切片；v.切成厚板，以平板盖上 | |
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corrugated
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| adj.波纹的；缩成皱纹的；波纹面的；波纹状的v.（使某物）起皱褶(corrugate的过去式和过去分词) | |
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mangle
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| vt.乱砍，撕裂，破坏，毁损，损坏，轧布 | |
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communal
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| adj.公有的，公共的，公社的，公社制的 | |
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maze
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| n.迷宫，八阵图，混乱，迷惑 | |
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lottery
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| n.抽彩；碰运气的事，难于算计的事 | |
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toxic
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| adj.有毒的，因中毒引起的 | |
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rumors
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| n.传闻( rumor的名词复数 )；[古]名誉；咕哝；[古]喧嚷v.传闻( rumor的第三人称单数 )；[古]名誉；咕哝；[古]喧嚷 | |
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interrogate
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| vt.讯问，审问，盘问 | |
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quiescent
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| adj.静止的，不活动的，寂静的 | |
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cargo
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| n.(一只船或一架飞机运载的)货物 | |
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supplanted
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| 把…排挤掉，取代( supplant的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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emanating
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| v.从…处传出，传出( emanate的现在分词 )；产生，表现，显示 | |
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franchise
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| n.特许，特权，专营权，特许权 | |
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ghetto
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| n.少数民族聚居区，贫民区 | |
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spiky
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| adj.长而尖的，大钉似的 | |
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truncated
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| adj.切去顶端的，缩短了的，被删节的v.截面的( truncate的过去式和过去分词 )；截头的；缩短了的；截去顶端或末端 | |
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goggles
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| n.护目镜 | |
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halfway
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| adj.中途的，不彻底的，部分的；adv.半路地，在中途，在半途 | |
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cancellation
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| n.删除，取消 | |
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haze
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| n.霾，烟雾；懵懂，迷糊；vi.(over)变模糊 | |
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defense
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| n.防御，保卫；[pl.]防务工事；辩护，答辩 | |
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translucent
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| adj.半透明的；透明的 | |
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socket
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| n.窝，穴，孔，插座，插口 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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encyclopedias
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| n.百科全书， （某一学科的）专科全书( encyclopedia的名词复数 ) | |
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hacker
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| n.能盗用或偷改电脑中信息的人，电脑黑客 | |
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hackers
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| n.计算机迷( hacker的名词复数 )；私自存取或篡改电脑资料者，电脑“黑客” | |
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bleak
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| adj.(天气)阴冷的；凄凉的；暗淡的 | |
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adulthood
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| n.成年，成人期 | |
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unemployed
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| adj.失业的，没有工作的；未动用的，闲置的 | |
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tenure
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| n.终身职位；任期；(土地)保有权，保有期 | |
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auxiliary
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| adj.辅助的，备用的 | |
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xerox
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| n./v.施乐复印机，静电复印 | |
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formerly
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| adv.从前，以前 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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hazy
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| adj.有薄雾的，朦胧的；不肯定的，模糊的 | |
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substantive
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| adj.表示实在的；本质的、实质性的；独立的；n.实词，实名词；独立存在的实体 | |
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merged
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| （使）混合( merge的过去式和过去分词 )； 相融； 融入； 渐渐消失在某物中 | |
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dome
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| n.圆屋顶，拱顶 | |
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obsessed
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| adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的 | |
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stints
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| n.定额工作( stint的名词复数 )；定量；限额；慷慨地做某事 | |
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45
exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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46
zippers
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| n.拉链( zipper的名词复数 )；用拉链的人，装拉链的包 | |
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straps
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| n.带子( strap的名词复数 )；挎带；肩带；背带v.用皮带捆扎( strap的第三人称单数 )；用皮带抽打；包扎；给…打绷带 | |
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48
broil
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| v.烤，烧，争吵，怒骂；n.烤，烧，争吵，怒骂 | |
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49
lobes
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| n.耳垂( lobe的名词复数 )；（器官的）叶；肺叶；脑叶 | |
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intensities
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| n.强烈( intensity的名词复数 )；（感情的）强烈程度；强度；烈度 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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52
lingo
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| n.语言不知所云，外国话，隐语 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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protocol
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| n.议定书，草约，会谈记录，外交礼节 | |
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graphic
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| adj.生动的，形象的，绘画的，文字的，图表的 | |
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computing
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| n.计算 | |
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machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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multimedia
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| adj.多种手段的，多媒体的；n.多媒体 | |
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radius
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| n.半径，半径范围；有效航程，范围，界限 | |
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considerably
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| adv.极大地；相当大地；在很大程度上 | |
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exponent
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| n.倡导者，拥护者；代表人物；指数，幂 | |
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digits
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| n.数字( digit的名词复数 )；手指，足趾 | |
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hovering
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| 鸟( hover的现在分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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physically
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| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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interfaces
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| 界面( interface的名词复数 )； 接口（连接两装置的电路，可使数据从一种代码转换成另一种代码）； 交界； 联系 | |
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myriad
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| adj.无数的；n.无数，极大数量 | |
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bribe
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| n.贿赂；v.向…行贿，买通 | |
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inspectors
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| n.检查员( inspector的名词复数 )；（英国公共汽车或火车上的）查票员；（警察）巡官；检阅官 | |
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69
buddies
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| n.密友( buddy的名词复数 )；同伴；弟兄；（用于称呼男子，常带怒气）家伙v.（如密友、战友、伙伴、弟兄般）交往( buddy的第三人称单数 )；做朋友；亲近（…）；伴护艾滋病人 | |
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licenses
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| n.执照( license的名词复数 )v.批准，许可，颁发执照( license的第三人称单数 ) | |
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patchwork
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| n.混杂物；拼缝物 | |
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72
acumen
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| n.敏锐，聪明 | |
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73
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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garish
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| adj.华丽而俗气的，华而不实的 | |
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75
constraints
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| 强制( constraint的名词复数 )； 限制； 约束 | |
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76
taper
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| n.小蜡烛，尖细，渐弱；adj.尖细的；v.逐渐变小 | |
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velvet
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| n.丝绒，天鹅绒；adj.丝绒制的，柔软的 | |
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embroidered
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| adj．绣花的 | |
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79
hippest
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| hip（（衣服、音乐等方面）时髦的，赶时髦的）的最高级形式 | |
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smoothly
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| adv.平滑地，顺利地，流利地，流畅地 | |
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