Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.

“Why on earth would you go to Astoria, Oregon,

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

UNTIL A MAN IS twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

After that—after Hiro gets onto his motorcycle, and the New South Africans get into their all-terrain pickups, and The Enforcers get into their slick black Enforcer mobiles, and they all go screaming out onto the highway—after that it’s just a chase scene.

They all know Hiro. He’s the guy with the swords. He’s a friend of Da5id’s. And as his own personal contribution to the benefit, he’s apparently decided to stage a sword fight with some kind of hulking, scary-looking daemon on a motorcycle. Don’t touch that dial, it’s going to be a hell of a show.