From Hiro's front yard to L. Bob Rife's black cube at Port 127 is halfway around the Metaverse, a distance of 32,768 kilometers. The only hard part, really, is getting out of Downtown. He can ride his bike straight through the avatars as usual, but the Street is also cluttered with vehicles, animercials, commercial displays, public plazas, and other bits of solid-looking software that get in his way.
Not to mention a few distractions. Off to his right, about a kilometer away from The Black Sun, is a deep hole in the hyperManhattan skyline. It is an open plaza about a mile wide, a park of sorts where avatars can gather for concerts and conventions and festivals. Most of it is occupied by a deep-dish amphitheater that is capable of seating close to a million avatars at once. Down at the bottom is a huge circular stage.
Normally, the stage is occupied by major rock groups. Tonight, it is occupied by the grandest and most brilliant computer hallucinations that the human mind can invent. A three-dimensional marquee hangs above it, announcing tonight's event: a benefit graphics concert staged on behalf of Da5id Meier, who is still hospitalized with an inexplicable disease. The amphitheater is half filled with hackers.
Once he gets out of Downtown, Hiro twists his throttle up to the max and covers the remaining thirty-two thousand and some kilometers in the space of about ten minutes. Over his head, the express trains are whooshing down the track at a metaphorical speed of ten thousand miles per hour, he passes them like they're standing still. This only works because he's riding in an absolutely straight line. He's got a routine coded into his motorcycle software that makes it follow the monorail track automatically so that he doesn't even have to worry about steering it.
Meanwhile, Juanita's standing next to him in Reality. She's got another pair of goggles; she can see all the same things that Hiro sees.
"Rife's got a mobile uplink on his corporate chopper, just like the one on commercial airliners, so he can patch into the Metaverse when he's in the air. As long as he's airborne, that's his only link to the Metaverse. We may be able to hack our way into that one link and block it or something ... "
"That low-level communications stuff is too full of medicine for us to mess with it in this decade," Hiro says, braking his motorcycle to a stop. "Holy shit. It's just like Y.T. described it."
He's in front of Port 127. Rife's black cube is there, just as Y.T. described it. There's no door.
Hiro starts walking away from the Street, toward the cube. It reflects no light at all, so he can't tell whether it's ten feet or ten miles away from him until the security daemons begin to materialize. There are half a dozen of them, all big sturdy avatars in blue coveralls, sort of quasi-military looking, but without rank. They don't need rank because they're all running the same program. They materialize around him in a neat semicircle with a radius of about ten feet, blocking Hiro's way to the cube.
Hiro mumbles a word under his breath and vanishes -- he slips into his invisible avatar. It would be very interesting to bang around and see how these security daemons deal with it, but right now he has to get moving before they get a chance to adjust.
They don't, at least not very well. Hiro runs between two of the security daemons and heads for the wall of the cube. He finally gets there, slamming into it, coming to a dead stop. The security daemons have all turned around and are chasing him. They can figure out where he is -- the computer tells them that much -- but they can't do much to him. Like the bouncer daemons in The Black Sun, which Hiro helped write, they shove people around by applying basic rules of avatar physics. When Hiro is invisible, there is very little for them to shove. But if they are well written, they may have more subtle ways of messing him up, so he's not wasting any time. He pokes his katana through the side of the cube and follows it through the wall and out the other side.
This is a hack. It is really based on a very old hack, a loophole that he found years ago when he was trying to graft the sword-fighting rules onto the existing Metaverse software. His blade doesn't have the power to cut a hole in the wall -- this would mean permanently changing the shape of someone else's building -- but it does have the power to penetrate things. Avatars do not have that power. That is the whole purpose of a wall in the Metaverse; it is a structure that does not allow avatars to penetrate it. But like anything else in the Metaverse, this rule is nothing but a protocol, a convention that different computers agree to follow. In theory, it cannot be ignored. But in practice, it depends upon the ability of different computers to swap information very precisely, at high speed, and at just the right times. And when you are connected to the system over a satellite uplink, as Hiro is, out here on the Raft, there is a delay as the signals bounce up to the satellite and back down. That delay can be taken advantage of, if you move quickly and don't look back. Hiro passes right through the wall on the tail end of his all-penetrating katana.
Rifeland is a vast, brightly lit space occupied by elementary shapes done up in primary colors. It is like being inside an educational toy designed to teach solid geometry to three-year-olds: cubes, spheres, tetrahedrons, polyhedrons, connected with a web of cylinders and li............