Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?” Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”

So the first thing that Y.T.’s mother does, having read the new subchapter on bathroom tissue pools, is to sign on to a subsystem of the main computer system that handles the particular programming project she’s working on. She doesn’t know what the project is—that’s classified—or what it’s called. It’s just her project. She shares it with a few hundred other programmers, she’s not sure exactly who. And every day when she signs on to it, there’s a stack of memos waiting for her, containing new regulations and changes to the rules that they all have to follow when writing code for the project. These regulations make the business with the bathroom tissue seem as simple and elegant as the Ten Commandments. So she spends until about eleven A.M. reading, re-reading, and understanding the new changes in the Project. There are many of these, because this is a Monday morning and Marietta and her higher-ups spent the whole weekend closeted on the top floor, having a catfight about this Project, changing everything. Then she starts going back over all the code she has previously written for the Project and making a list of all the stuff that will have to be rewritten in order to make it compatible with the new specifications. Basically, she’s going to have to rewrite all of her material from the ground up. For the third time in as many months. But hey, it’s a job.