Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

This is the gender that invented the polio vaccine?

“You’re a hacker. That means you have deep structures to worry about, too.” “Deep structures?” “Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?”

Hiro does not have time to adopt the proper stance, but this is fine since he has already adopted it.

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

“I just saved your fucking life, Mom,” Y.T. says. “You could at least offer me an Oreo.” “What on earth are you talking about?” “It’s like, if you—people of a certain age—would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn’t have to take these drastic measures.”

“The machine language of the world,” Hiro says.

this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You’re in this place. There’s other people all around you, but they don’t understand you and you don’t understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.

Fisheye throws up his hands as if to say the answer is, like Catholic theology, beyond mortal comprehension.

This next bit is going to hurt like hell.