Y.T. is maxing at a Mom's Truck Stop on 405, waiting for her ride. Not that she would ever be caught dead at a Mom's Truck Stop. If, like, a semi ran her over with all eighteen of its wheels in front of a Mom's Truck Stop, she would drag herself down the shoulder of the highway using her eyelid1 muscles until she reached a Snooze 'n' Cruise full of horny derelicts rather than go into a Mom's Truck Stop. But sometimes when you're a professional, they give you a job that you don't like, and you just have to be very cool and put up with it.
For purposes of this evening's job, the man with the glass eye has already supplied her with a "driver and security person," as he put it. A totally unknown quantity. Y.T. isn't sure she likes putting up with some mystery guy. She has this image in her mind that he's going to be like the wrestling coach at the high school. That would be so grotendous. Anyway, this is where she's supposed to meet him.
Y.T. orders a coffee and a slice of cherry pie a la mode. She carries them over to the public Street terminal back in the corner. It is sort of a wraparound stainless2 steel booth stuck between a phone booth, which has a homesick truck driver poured into it, and a pinball machine, which features a chick with big boobs that light up when you shoot the ball up the magic Fallopians.
She's not that good at the Metaverse, but she knows her way around, and she's got an address. And finding an address in the Metaverse shouldn't be any more difficult than doing it in Reality, at least if you're not a totally retarded3 ped.
As soon as she steps out into the Street, people start giving her these looks. The same kind of looks that people give her when she walks through the worsted-wool desolation of the Westlake Corporate4 Park in her dynamic blue-and-orange Kourier gear. She knows that the people in the Street are giving her dirty looks because she's just coming in from a shitty public terminal. She's a trashy black-and-white person.
The built-up part of the Street, around Port Zero, forms a luminescent thunderhead off to her right. She puts her back to it and climbs onto the monorail. She'd like to go into town, but that's an expensive part of the Street to visit, and she'd be dumping money into the coin slot about every one-tenth of a millisecond.
The guy's name is Ng. In Reality, he is somewhere in Southern California. Y.T. isn't sure exactly what he is driving, some kind of a van full of what the man with the glass eye described as "stuff, really incredible stuff that you don't need to know about." In the Metaverse, he lives outside of town, around Port 2, where things really start to spread out.
Ng's Metaverse home is a French colonial villa5 in the prewar village of My Tho in the Mekong Delta6. Visiting him is like going to Vietnam in about 1955, except that you don't have to get all sweaty. In order to make room for this creation, he has laid claim to a patch of Metaverse space a couple of miles off the Street. There's no monorail service in this low-rent development, so Y.T.'s avatar has to walk the entire way.
He has a large office with French doors and a balcony looking out over endless rice paddies where little Vietnamese people work. Clearly, this guy is a fairly hardcore techie, because Y.T. counts hundreds of people out in his rice paddies, plus dozens more running around the village, all of them fairly well rendered and all of them doing different things. She's not a bithead, but she knows that this guy is throwing a lot of computer time into the task of creating a realistic view out his office window. And the fact that it's Vietnam makes it twisted and spooky. Y.T. can't wait to tell Roadkill about this place. She wonders if it has bombings and strafings and napalm drops. That would be the best.
Ng himself, or at least, Ng's avatar, is a small, very dapper Vietnamese man in his fifties, hair plastered to his head, wearing military-style khakis. At the time Y.T. comes into his office, he is leaning forward in his chair, getting his shoulders rubbed by a geisha.
A geisha in Vietnam?
Y.T.'s grandpa, who was there for a while, told her that the Nipponese took over Vietnam during the war and treated it with the cruelty that was their trademark7 before we nuked them and they discovered that they were pacifists. The Vietnamese, like most other Asians, hate the Japanese. And apparently8 this Ng character gets a kick out of the idea of having a Japanese geisha around to rub his back.
But it is a very strange thing to do, for one reason: The geisha is just a picture on Ng's goggles9, and on Y.T.'s. And you can't get a massage10 from a picture. So why bother?
When Y.T. comes in, Ng stands up and bows. This is how hardcore Street wackos greet each other. They don't like to shake hands because you can't actually feel the contact and it reminds you that you're not even really there.
"Yeah, hi," Y.T. says.
Ng sits back down and the geisha goes right back to it. Ng's desk is a nice French antique with a row of small television monitors along the back edge, facing toward him. He spends most of his time watching the monitors, even when he is talking
"They told me a little bit about you," Ng says.
"Shouldn't listen to nasty rumors," Y.T. says.
Ng picks up a glass from his desk and takes a drink from it. It looks like a mint julep. Globes of condensation11 form on its surface, break loose, and trickle12 down the side. The rendering13 is so perfect that Y.T. can see a miniaturized reflection of the office windows in each drop of condensation. It's just totally ostentatious. What a bithead.
He is looking at her with a totally emotionless face, but Y.T. imagines that it is a face of hate and disgust. To spend all this money on the coolest house in the Metaverse and then have some skater come in done up in grainy black-and-white. It must be a real kick in the metaphorical14 nuts. Somewhere in this house a radio is going, playing a mix of Vietnamese loungy type stuff and Yank wheelchair rock.
"Are you a Nova Sicilia citizen?" Ng says.
"No. I just chill sometimes with Uncle Enzo and the other Mafia dudes."
"Ah. Very unusual."
Ng is not a man in a hurry. He has soaked up the languid pace of the Mekong Delta and is content to sit there and watch his TV sets and fire off a sentence every few minutes.
Another thing: He apparently has Tourette's syndrome15 or some other brain woes16 because from time to time, for no apparent reason, he makes strange noises with his mouth. They have the twangy sound that you always hear from Vietnamese when they are in the back rooms of stores and restaurants carrying on family disputes in the mother tongue, but as far as Y.T. can tell, they aren't real words, just sound effects.
"Do you work a lot for these guys?" Y.T. asks.
"Occasional small security jobs. Unlike most large corporations, the Mafia has a strong tradition of handling its own security arrangements. But when something especially technical is called for -- "
He pauses in the middle of this sentence to make an incredible zooming17 sound in his nose.
"Is that your thing? Security?"
Ng scans all of his TV sets. He snaps his fingers and the geisha scurries18 out of the room. He folds his hands together on his desk and leans forward. He stares at Y.T. "Yes," he says.
Y.T. looks back at him for a bit, waiting for him to continue. After a few seconds his attention drifts back to the monitors.
"I do most of my work under a large contract with Mr. Lee," he blurts19.
Y.T. is waiting for the continuation of this sentence: Not "Mr. Lee," but "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong."
Oh, well. If she can drop Uncle Enzo's name, he can drop Mr. Lee's.
"The social structure of any nation-state is ultimately determined20 by its security arrangements," Ng says, "and Mr. Lee understands this."
Oh, wow, we're going to be profound now. Ng is suddenly talking just like the old white men on the TV pundit21 powwows, which Y.T.'s mother watches obsessively22.
"Instead of hiring a large human security force -- which impacts the social environment -- you know, lots of minimum-wage earners standing23 around carrying machine guns -- Mr. Lee prefers to use nonhuman systems."
Nonhuman systems. Y.T. is about to ask him, what do you know about the Rat Thing. But it is pointless; he won't say. It would get their relationship off on the wrong foot, Y.T. asking Ng for intel, Intel that he would never give her, and that would make this whole scene even weirder24 than it is now, which Y.T. can't even imagine.
Ng bursts forth25 with a long string of twangy noises, pops, and glottal stops.
"Fucking bitch," he mumbles26.
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing," he says, "a bimbo box cut me off. None of these people understand that with this vehicle, I could crush them like a potbellied pig under an armored personnel carrier."
"A bimbo box -- you're driving?"
"Yes. I'm coming to pick you up -- remember?"
"Do you mind?"
"No," he sighs, as if he really does.
Y.T. gets up and walks around behind his desk to look.
Each of the little TV monitors is showing a different view out his van: windshield, left window, right window, rearview. Another one has an electronic map showing his position: inbound on the San Bernardino, not far away.
"The van is under voice command," he explains. "I removed the steering-wheel-and-pedal interface27 because I found verbal commands more convenient. This is why I will sometimes make unfamiliar28 sounds with my voice -- I am controlling the vehicle's systems."
Y.T. signs off from the Metaverse for a while, to clear her head and take a leak. When she takes off the goggles she discovers that she has built up quite an audience of truckers and mechanics, who are standing around the terminal booth in a semicircle listening to her jabber29 at Ng. When she stands up, attention shifts to her butt30, naturally.
Y.T. hits the bathroom, finishes her pie, and wanders out into the ultraviolet glare of the setting sun to wait for Ng.
Recognizing his van is easy enough. It is enormous. It is eight feet high and wider than it is high, which would have made it a wide load in the old days when they had laws. The construction is boxy and angular. it has been welded together out of the type of flat, dimpled steel plate usually used to make manhole lids and stair treads. The tires are huge, like tractor tires with a more subtle tread, and there are six of them: two axles in back and one in front. The engine is so big that, like an evil spaceship in a movie, Y.T. feels its rumbling31 in her ribs32 before she can see it; it is kicking out diesel33 exhaust through a pair of squat34 vertical35 red smokestacks that project from the roof, toward the rear. The windshield is a perfectly36 flat rectangle of glass about three by eight feet, smoked so black that Y.T. can't make out an outline of anything inside. The snout of the van is festooned with every type of high-powered light known to science, like this guy hit a New South Africa franchise37 on a Saturday night and stole every light off every roll bar, and a grille has been constructed across the front, welded together out of rails torn out of an abandoned railroad somewhere. The grille alone probably weighs more than a small car.
The passenger door swings open. Y.T. walks over and climbs into the front seat. "Hi," she is saying. "You need to take a whiz or anything?"
Ng isn't there.
Or maybe he is.
Where the driver's seat ought to be, there is a sort of neoprene pouch38 about the size of a garbage can suspended from the ceiling by a web of straps39, shock cords, tubes, wires, fiber40-optic cables, and hydraulic41 lines. It is swathed in so much stuff that it is hard to make out its actual outlines.
At the top of this pouch, Y.T. can see a patch of skin with some black hair around it -- the top of a balding man's head. Everything else, from the temples downward, is encased in an enormous goggle/mask/headphone/feeding-tube unit, held on. to his head by smart straps that are constantly tightening42 and loosening themselves to keep the device comfortable and properly positioned. Below this, on either side, where you'd sort of expect to see arms, huge bundles of wires, fiber optics, and tubes run up out of the floor and are seemingly plugged into Ng's shoulder sockets43. There is a similar arrangement where his legs are supposed to be attached, and more stuff going into his groin and hooked up to various locations on his torso. The entire thing is swathed in a one-piece coverall, a pouch, larger than his torso ought to be, that is constantly bulging44 and throbbing45 as though alive.
"Thank you, all my needs are taken care of," Ng says.
The door slams shut behind her. Ng makes a yapping sound, and the van pulls out onto the frontage road, headed back toward
"Please excuse my appearance," he says, after a couple of awkward minutes. "My helicopter caught fire during the evacuation of Saigon in 1974 -- a stray tracer from ground forces."
"Whoa. What a drag."
"I was able to reach an American aircraft carrier off the coast, but you know, the fuel was spraying around quite a bit during the fire."
"Yeah, I can imagine, uh huh."
"I tried prostheses for a while -- some of them are very good. But nothing is as good as a motorized wheelchair. And then I got to thinking, why do motorized wheelchairs always have to be tiny pathetic things that strain to go up a little teeny ramp47? So I bought this -- it is an airport firetruck from Germany -- and converted it into my new motorized wheelchair."
"It's very nice."
"America is wonderful because you can get anything on a drive-through basis. Oil change, liquor, banking48, car wash, funerals, anything you want -- drive through! So this vehicle is much better than a tiny pathetic wheelchair. It is an extension of my body."
"When the geisha rubs your back?"
Ng mumbles something and his pouch begins to throb46 and undulate around his body. "She is a daemon, of course. As for the massage, my body is suspended in an electrocontractive gel that massages49 me when I need it. I also have a Swedish girl and an African woman, but those daemons are not as well rendered."
"And the mint julep?"
"Through a feeding tube. Nonalcoholic, ha ha."
"So," Y.T. says at some point, when they are way past LAX, and she figures it's too late to chicken out, "what's the plan? Do we have a plan?"
"We go to Long Beach. To the Terminal Island Sacrifice Zone. And we buy some drugs," Ng says. "Or you do, actually, since I am indisposed.'
"That's my job? To buy some drugs?"
"Buy them, and throw them up in the air."
"In a Sacrifice Zone?"
"Yes. And we'll take care of the rest."
"Who's we, dude?"
"There are several more, uh, entities50 that will help us."
"What, is the back of the van full of more -- people like you?"
"Sort of," Ng says. "You are close to the truth."
"Would these be, like, nonhuman systems?"
"That is a sufficiently51 all-inclusive term, I think."
Y.T. figures that for a big yes.
"You tired? Want me to drive or anything?"
Ng laughs sharply, like distant ack-ack, and the van almost swerves52 off the road. Y.T. doesn't get the sense that he is laughing at the joke; he is laughing at what a jerk Y.T. is.
收听单词发音 |
1
eyelid
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| n.眼睑，眼皮 | |
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stainless
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| adj.无瑕疵的，不锈的 | |
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retarded
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| a.智力迟钝的，智力发育迟缓的 | |
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corporate
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| adj.共同的，全体的；公司的，企业的 | |
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villa
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| n.别墅，城郊小屋 | |
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delta
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| n.（流的）角洲 | |
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trademark
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| n.商标；特征；vt.注册的…商标 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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goggles
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| n.护目镜 | |
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massage
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| n.按摩，揉；vt.按摩，揉，美化，奉承，篡改数据 | |
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condensation
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| n.压缩，浓缩；凝结的水珠 | |
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trickle
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| vi.淌，滴，流出，慢慢移动，逐渐消散 | |
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rendering
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| n.表现，描写 | |
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metaphorical
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| a.隐喻的，比喻的 | |
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syndrome
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| n.综合病症；并存特性 | |
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woes
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| 困境( woe的名词复数 )； 悲伤； 我好苦哇； 某人就要倒霉 | |
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zooming
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| adj.快速上升的v.（飞机、汽车等）急速移动( zoom的过去分词 )；（价格、费用等）急升，猛涨 | |
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scurries
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| v.急匆匆地走( scurry的第三人称单数 ) | |
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blurts
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| v.突然说出，脱口而出( blurt的第三人称单数 ) | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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pundit
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| n.博学之人；权威 | |
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obsessively
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| ad.着迷般地，过分地 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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weirder
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| 怪诞的( weird的比较级 )； 神秘而可怕的； 超然的； 古怪的 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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mumbles
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| 含糊的话或声音，咕哝( mumble的名词复数 ) | |
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interface
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| n.接合部位，分界面；v.(使)互相联系 | |
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unfamiliar
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| adj.陌生的，不熟悉的 | |
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jabber
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| v.快而不清楚地说；n.吱吱喳喳 | |
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butt
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| n.笑柄；烟蒂；枪托；臀部；v.用头撞或顶 | |
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rumbling
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| n. 隆隆声, 辘辘声 adj. 隆隆响的 动词rumble的现在分词 | |
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ribs
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| n.肋骨( rib的名词复数 )；（船或屋顶等的）肋拱；肋骨状的东西；（织物的）凸条花纹 | |
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diesel
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| n.柴油发动机，内燃机 | |
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squat
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| v.蹲坐，蹲下；n.蹲下；adj.矮胖的，粗矮的 | |
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vertical
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| adj.垂直的，顶点的，纵向的；n.垂直物，垂直的位置 | |
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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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franchise
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| n.特许，特权，专营权，特许权 | |
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pouch
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| n.小袋，小包，囊状袋；vt.装...入袋中，用袋运输；vi.用袋送信件 | |
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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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fiber
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| n.纤维，纤维质 | |
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hydraulic
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| adj.水力的；水压的，液压的；水力学的 | |
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tightening
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| 上紧，固定，紧密 | |
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sockets
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| n.套接字，使应用程序能够读写与收发通讯协定(protocol)与资料的程序( Socket的名词复数 )；孔( socket的名词复数 )；（电器上的）插口；托座；凹穴 | |
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bulging
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| 膨胀； 凸出（部）； 打气； 折皱 | |
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throbbing
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| a. 跳动的,悸动的 | |
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throb
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| v.震颤，颤动；(急速强烈地)跳动，搏动 | |
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47
ramp
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| n.暴怒，斜坡，坡道；vi.作恐吓姿势，暴怒，加速；vt.加速 | |
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48
banking
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| n.银行业，银行学，金融业 | |
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49
massages
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| 按摩，推拿( massage的名词复数 ) | |
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50
entities
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| 实体对像； 实体，独立存在体，实际存在物( entity的名词复数 ) | |
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51
sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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52
swerves
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| n.（使）改变方向，改变目的( swerve的名词复数 )v.（使）改变方向，改变目的( swerve的第三人称单数 ) | |
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