Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

no, they deserved a free pizza along with their life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was fucking inalienable.

So it was like being in a family. A really scary, twisted, abusive family.

when the U-Stor-It was actually used for its intended purpose (namely, providing cheap extra storage space to Californians with too many material goods),

Vitaly owns half a carton of Lucky Strikes, an electric guitar, and a hangover.

Any number that can be created by fetishistically multiplying 2s by each other, and subtracting the occasional 1, will be instantly recognizable to a hacker.

You know, to the Mesopotamians, there was no independent concept of evil. Just disease and ill health. Evil was a synonym for disease. So what does that tell you?”

What the hell. This is America, Hiro is half American, and there’s no reason to take this politeness thing to an unhealthy extreme.

“There’s no big hurry on this delivery,” he says. “Would you like to stay and have a drink? We’ve got Kool-Aid.”

Y.T. is supposed to be on her way to a Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates franchise. If she screws up this delivery, that means she’s double-crossing God, who may or may not exist, and in any case who is capable of forgiveness. The Mafia definitely exists and hews to a higher standard of obedience.

“If there was some phenomenon that moved through the population, altering their minds in such a way that they couldn’t process the Sumerian language anymore. Kind of in the same way that a virus moves from one computer to another, damaging each computer in the same way. Coiling around the brainstem.” “Lagos devoted much time and effort to this idea,” the Librarian says. “He felt that the nam-shub of Enki was a neurolinguistic virus.”

“What is this, a quadrillion dollars?” “One and a half quadrillion. Inflation, you know.”

Used to be divided up by partitions, but the EBGOC boys didn’t like it, said what would happen if there had to be an evacuation? All those partitions would impede the free flow of unhinged panic.

Along with picking handcuffs, vaulting Jersey barriers, and fending off perverts, it is one of the quintessential Kourier skills: walking around in a place where you don’t belong without attracting suspicion.

“We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. But being physically infected with a virulent strain of the Asherah virus makes you a whole lot more susceptible. The only thing that keeps these things from taking over the world is the Babel factor—the walls of mutual incomprehension that compartmentalize the human race and stop the spread of viruses.

Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust.

And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance.