Snow Crash

The Nova Sicilia is a franchise of the Mafia in Southern California, owned by Jason Breckinridge. He studied the war between the Colombian gangs and the Mafia in college and was brought into the organization by a recruiter, who allowed him to pick from one of many “opportunity zones” in California. Breckinridge is ordered to deliver documents to a Compton franchise that will be visited by the head of the Mafia, Uncle Enzo. Breckinridge, knowing the importance of this assignment, undertakes the delivery himself.

On the way to Compton, Breckinridge passes billboards advertising the Mafia as a family organization. They are competing with Narcolombia, another organized crime group that turned into a private corporation. The Mafia is no longer limited to Italians, and the multiethnic recruitment appeals to Breckinridge. When he arrives at the delivery point, he is angrily told that the entire delivery was organized so that Uncle Enzo could meet YT. Jason knows that he has “screwed up.”

Hiro concludes that Raven murdered Lagos and then left. YT is already following Raven and sending regular reports to Hiro from Chinatown, where he is fighting with a member of the Crips named T-Bone Murphy. Hiro and the security guard, Squeaky, track down Raven by following the bloody trail of the gunbattle. They find that Raven fatally wounded T-Bone and escaped. Hiro and Squeaky see Raven, but they cannot agree on whether he is Asian or Indigenous American. Hiro observes that he is “one of the largest men Hiro has seen outside of a professional sporting event” (112). The dying Crip explains that they wanted revenge because Raven’s earlier deal with them went sour when the briefcase he gave them “burned.”

YT loses Raven and returns to Hiro. He warns her to “stay away” from Raven; she lies, agreeing to do so. Hiro recovers the burned briefcase and finds vials inside. He believes that these must be filled with some new kind of narcotic. Squeaky says that this narcotic is known as Countdown, Redcap, or Snow Crash. He is shocked by “how little” Hiro knows about Raven, the drug, or the Crips. Raven, Squeaky says, has fitted his motorcycle with an old nuclear torpedo. The torpedo is wired to explode in the event of Raven’s death.

YT performs the delivery for Breckinridge. She bickers with young Mafia members before being introduced to Uncle Enzo. YT likes Enzo, who appears to be “slick” and charismatic. Both Enzo and YT are under federal surveillance, which amuses them. He talks about his experiences fighting in the Vietnam War; like YT, he “never wore helmets” (122). He hands her his old dog tags, which she can show to people if ever she is in trouble. Before they part, Enzo tells her to “be good” to her mother.

YT is offered a delivery job. She suspects that her meeting with Enzo was a piece of theatre to lead up to this job offer, so she accepts. The Mafia representative tells her to take a specific route along I-5, even though she believes this is slower. She “cuts through the middle of Fedland” (126), where her mother works and where the remnants of the United States government can be found inside a small, secure compound.

YT travels to the fearsome Griffith Park, which is operated by the Falabalas gang. They are named this because they have a reputation for babbling speech patterns. Among the “ragged,” disheveled people inside a building, YT sees someone typing on a broken computer unit while others sing hymns. She finds someone dressed in a lab coat who hands her an “aluminum briefcase,” just like Raven’s briefcase. YT declines an offer to stay and hurries away, taking the same route. She is picked up by the Mafia in a moveable lab inside a truck, and they “run a few tests” (130) on the briefcase.

At the storage facility where he lives, Hiro trains with a dummy sword made of rebar. A helicopter appears, apparently sent by Juanita to collect him. Before going with the helicopter, he showers at the nearby gas station. The helicopter takes him to a hospital owned and operated by the Catholic Church. Inside, he discovers that Da5id has experienced traumatic brain injuries due to Snow Crash. He can only speak in an incomprehensible babble. Hiro goes to his friend’s home and discovers traces of Snow Crash on the computer, now “a wall of black-and-white static” (136). While staring out the window, he reflects on the contemporary state of American society, where franchises spread like viruses.

YT wants to leave the Mafia truck and complete her delivery. The Mafia representative with a glass eye hands her an envelope before she jumps out and rides her skateboard through the traffic jam. She rides to Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates Church and notices “small glass vials” (139) outside, just like the ones inside the briefcase. Reverend Dale T. Thorpe appears and takes the suitcase before signing for it. Angry, YT follows him into the church and watches as he inserts the vials into his computer, using the computer to administer the drug to himself. YT wants him to sign for the delivery, but he passes out while staring at a “neon-framed blowup of Elvis, in his Army days, holding a rifle” (141).

Hiro enters the Metaverse and finds Juanita, who is on board a plane to Oregon. She is concerned that the Snow Crash virus that harmed Da5id might harm others, as it is the “atomic bomb of information warfare—a virus that causes any system to infect itself with new viruses” (143). She believes it is being distributed by Rife, who has infected Reverend Wayne’s church. Hiro asks Juanita whether Snow Crash is a virus, a narcotic, or a religion. She speculates that the human brain might react to religion as it does to language, telling him what to research to find out more. Hiro leaves but is attacked by a digital avatar holding a bitmap image like the one that infected Da5id. Hiro cuts off the man’s arms, and as the man tries to escape, he notices YT outside. He tells her to “chase the guy with no arms” (146).

While following Hiro’s attacker, YT speaks to Hiro about her experience at Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates. Hiro visits the Librarian and talks about religion and its effect on the human brain. Phenomena like speaking in tongues, the Librarian says, may be physical reactions to certain stimuli rather than mystical experiences. They talk, comparing religion to binary code. Hiro inquires about nam-shub, which the Librarian explains is a Sumerian phrase meaning “speech with magical force” (151). The Sumerian language is not related to modern languages, according to the Librarian, and is now only spoken by 10 people, five of whom are enrolled at Rife’s university. Their discussion is interrupted by YT, who has located Hiro’s attacker in a “black cube exactly twenty miles on a side” (152) inside the part of the Metaverse that Hiro believes belongs to Rife.

Hiro examines Sumerian artifacts. One is a tablet containing another tablet on which is written the phrase “this envelope contains the nam-shub of Enki” (155). The Librarian tells a story that closely resembles the story of the Tower of Babel, in which Enki is responsible for scattering humanity into clusters of mutually unintelligible languages. Lagos’s research led him to believe that the event on which the Tower of Babel story was based caused a fracture among the world’s languages which did not exist previously. Hiro likens Enki’s magic words to a computer virus that changes the words in people’s mouths, perhaps like how Snow Crash changes Da5id’s words into seemingly meaningless babble. The Librarian talks about the historical evidence for the existence of a man named Enki, who may have invented this “neurolinguistic virus” (156).

YT stops at a truck stop to log into the Metaverse. She plans to meet a driver, whose Metaverse home is a luxurious “French colonial villa” (158). He works as a security contractor for the same Mr. Lee who owns Greater Hong Kong. The driver, Mr. Ng, comes to collect YT in the real world. He is forced to wear a wire-encrusted sack around his body due to terrible injuries he suffered during the Vietnam War. His truck is practically a militarized, motorized wheelchair which he says is now “an extension of [his] body” (162). He plans to drive her to a place in the Long Beach Terminal Island Sacrifice Zone. There, she will buy a certain quantity of drugs to deliver to a robot security system.

The Librarian and Hiro talk about the Asherah pole. The pole is “a totem of the goddess Asherah” (164), who was considered a consort to Yahweh. In Judaism, Yahweh is not the only deity, simply the only one who is permitted to be worshipped. Before this was codified, Yahweh was one of many gods in the Sumerian pantheon. The Librarian talks about the Jewish holy book, the Torah, comparing it to a vaccine that “inoculated the Hebrews against the Asherah virus” (165). Such religions could, like viruses, alter the human nervous system. Hiro wonders whether traditional religious myths involving humanity’s departure from paradise might be based on a time when humans were more resistant to viruses. After an event that ended this resistance, humanity’s sudden inability to survive viruses was like a fall from paradise.