Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson · 15 Jul 2003 · 550pp · 160,356 words
eVersion 3.0 - click for scan notes SNOW CRASH Neal Stephenson snow n. … 2.a. Anything resembling snow. b. The white specks on a television screen resulting from weak reception. crash v. … -infr … 5,
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empty black sky, torn with the glowing vapor trails of passing animercials. "Hey, Hiro," the black-and-white guy says, "you want to try some Snow Crash?" A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird things. You ignore them. But this gets Hiro's attention. Oddity
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, because you can't get high by looking at something. The third: The name of the drug. Hiro's never heard of a drug called Snow Crash before. That's not unusual—a thousand new drugs get invented each year, and each of them sells under half a dozen brand names. But
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a "snow crash" is computer lingo. It means a system crash—a bug—at such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls
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against the glass of a busted TV. It makes his teeth hurt. "Excuse me," Hiro says. "What did you say?" "You want to try some Snow Crash?" He has a crisp accent that Hiro can't quite place. His audio is as bad as his video. Hiro can hear cars going past
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guy in the background. He must be goggled in from a public terminal alongside some freeway. "I don't get this," Hiro says. "What is Snow Crash?" "It's a drug, asshole," the guy says. "What do you think?" "Wait a minute. This is a new one on me," Hiro says. "You
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stranger in Times Square and jab it into your neck. And it doesn't make sense anyway. "That's a hypercard. I thought you said Snow Crash was a drug," Hiro says, now totally nonplussed. "It is," the guy says. "Try it." "Does it fuck up your brain?" Hiro says. "Or your
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talked!" she observes, as though there's something remarkable about this. Something's going on. "I hope you're not going to mess around with Snow Crash," she says. "Da5id won't listen to me." "What am I, a model of self-restraint? I'm exactly the kind of guy who would
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dubiously. "Do. Unlike Da5id, you're just smart enough to benefit from this. And in the meantime, stay away from Raven. And stay away from Snow Crash. Okay?" "Who's Raven?" he asks. But Juanita is already on her way out the door. The fancy avatars all turn around to watch her
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on the Street." "Anyone in particular?" "She's worried about a really large guy with long black hair," Da5id says. "Peddling something called—get this—Snow Crash." "Has she tried the Library?" "Yeah. I assume so, anyway." "Have you seen this guy?" "Oh, yeah. It's not hard to find him," Da5id
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's right outside the door. I got this from him." Da5id scans the table, picks up one of the hypercards, and shows it to Hiro. SNOW CRASH tear this card in half to release your free sample "Da5id," Hiro says, "I can't believe you took a hypercard from a black-and
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't hear. When she leans back away from Da5id, his face has changed. He looks dazed and expressionless. Maybe Da5id really looks that way; maybe Snow Crash has messed up his avatar somehow so that it's no longer tracking Da5id's true facial expressions. But he's staring straight ahead, eyes
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scheme to show me his stuff. And everything worked fine until the moment the Brandy opened the scroll—but his code was buggy, and it snow-crashed at the wrong moment, so instead of seeing his output, all I saw was snow." "Then why did he call the thing
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Snow Crash?" "Gallows humor. He knew it was buggy." "What did the Brandy whisper in your ear?" "Some language I didn't recognize," Da5id says. "Just a
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him not to mess with. And Hiro has seen him before, outside the entrance to The Black Sun. This is the guy who gave the Snow Crash card to Da5id. The tattoo on his forehead consists of three words, written in block letters: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL Hiro startles and actually jumps into
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not like I work for Central Intelligence or anything. But I would guess that whoever makes this drug—they call it Countdown, or Redcap, or Snow Crash—has a real thing about trade secrets. So if the pusher abandons the suitcase, or loses it, or tries to transfer ownership to someone else
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the goggles. As he brings them up toward his eyes, he sees the image: a wall of black-and-white static. Da5id's computer has snow-crashed. He closes his eyes and drops the goggles. You can't get hurt by looking at a bitmap. Or can you? The house is sort
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. There's nothing wrong with his brain—his hardware." "It just happens to be running the wrong program?" "His software got poisoned. Da5id had a snow crash last night, inside his head." "Are you trying to say it's a psychological problem?" "It kind of goes beyond those established categories," Juanita says
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thing just happen spontaneously, or what?" "You tell me," she says. "You were there last night. Did anything happen after I left?" "He had a Snow Crash hypercard that he got from Raven outside The Black Sun." "Shit. That bastard." "Who's the bastard? Raven or Da5id?" "Da5id. I tried to warn
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face." "I'll think about that one," Hiro says. "But I have another question. Raven also distributes another drug—in Reality—called, among other things, Snow Crash. What is it?" "It's not a drug," Juanita says. "They make it look like a drug and feel like a drug so that people
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; he's letting it ricochet around in his skull, waiting for it to come to rest. "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?" That Juanita is talking this way does not make
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snarls a command and the volume is reduced. He's driving very slowly now. "It is possible that you might not have to buy any Snow Crash at all," he mumbles. "We may have found an unprotected stash." "What is this totally irritating noise?" "Bioelectronic sensor. Human cell membranes. Grown in vitro
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of heavy metals. They used PCBs for a lot of things, too." "Great." "I sense your reluctance. But if we can get a sample of Snow Crash from this drug-taking site, it will obviate the rest of our mission." "Well, since you put it that way," Y.T. says, and grabs
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of living in a world where someone like Ng can get off calling someone else bizarre. "What are you looking for?" "Snow Crash," Ng says. "Instead, we found the Ring of Seventeen." "Snow Crash is the drug that comes in the little tubes," Y.T. says. "I know that. What's the Ring of
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Seventeen? One of those crazy new rock groups that kids listen to nowadays?" "Snow Crash penetrates the walls of brain cells and goes to the nucleus where the DNA is stored. So for purposes of this mission, we developed a
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cell functions. "To summarize: the detector is useless. A stealthy approach will not work. So we go back to the original plan. You buy some Snow Crash and throw it up in the air." Y.T. doesn't quite understand that last part yet. But she shuts up for a while, because
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old. He yanks the butt of a cigarette from his mouth and throws it away like a dart. "What'll it be, then?" "What does Snow Crash cost?" "One point seven five Gippers," the guy says. "I thought it was one point five," Y.T. says. The guy shakes his head. "Inflation
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before it discharged its contents. It was then flash-frozen in liquid helium before it could chemically self-destruct. We now have a sample of Snow Crash, something that no one else has been able to get. It is the kind of success on which reputations such as mine are constructed." "How
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place looks like one of those things full of snow that you shake up." "Hi, Y.T." "Got some more intel for you, pod." "Shoot." "Snow Crash is a roid. Or else it's similar to a roid. Yeah, that's it. It goes into your cell walls, just like a roid
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govern the way it rolls and unrolls. And it contains, somewhere inside of itself, a resource, a hunk of data, the digital version of the Snow Crash virus. Once the virus has been extracted and isolated, it is easy enough for Hiro to write a new program called SnowScan. SnowScan is a
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medicine. That is, it is code that protects Hiro's system—both his hardware and, as Lagos would put it, his bioware—from the digital Snow Crash virus. Once Hiro has installed it in his system, it will constantly scan the information coming in from outside, looking for data that matches the
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, a fatal system error occurred. Please reboot and try again. Then, as Hiro's looking at it, it fritzes out completely and dies of a snow crash. Vic got hit by one of the machine-gun bursts and is also dead. Around them, half a dozen other boats ride on the waves
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them to. Turning one off with the hard switch is like lulling someone to sleep by severing their spinal column. But when the system has snow-crashed, it loses even the ability to turn itself off, and primitive methods are required. Hiro packs the Gatling gun assembly back into the case and
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of drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash. "In the meantime, he got the Raft going as a way of transporting hundreds of thousands of his cultists from the wretched parts of Asia
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. He put it in a bottle. An informational warfare agent for him to use at his discretion. When it is placed into a computer, it snow-crashes the computer by causing it to infect itself with new viruses. But it is much more devastating when it goes into the mind of a
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argue about this kind of thing. Basically, anyone who reads the National Enquirer or watches pro wrestling on TV is easy to convert. And with Snow Crash as a promoter, it's even easier to get converts. "Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and Sumerian
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be duplicated by people running me. But he can threaten us with the blunt instrument of Snow Crash. That, I think, is what happened to Da5id. It may have been an experiment, just to see if Snow Crash worked on a real hacker, and it may have been a warning shot intended to demonstrate
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. So we have to do it as soon as possible." "Mr.Rife will be most unhappy," Ng predicts. "He will try to retaliate by unleashing Snow Crash against the technological priesthood." "I know that," Hiro says, "but I can only worry about one thing at a time. I could use a little
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muttering to himself: "SnowScan." It's the piece of software he wrote while he was killing time on the liferaft. The one that searches for Snow Crash. With Hiro Protagonist seemingly gone from the stage, the hackers turn their attention toward the giant construction rising up out of the egg. All that
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to make the Librarian give credit where due, verbally footnoting his comments like a good scholar, which I am not. After the first publication of Snow Crash, I learned that the term "avatar" has actually been in use for a number of years as part of a virtual reality system called Habitat
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. http://www.coindesk.com/monegraph-uses-block-chain-verify-digital-assets/. 105 Snow, P. “Notary Chains” (white paper). https://github.com/NotaryChains/. 106 Stephenson, N. Snow Crash. New York: Spectra, 1992. See also: http://everything2.com/title/Franchulate. 107 Swan, M. “Illiberty in Biohacking, Personal Data Rights, Neuro-diversity, and the Automation
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, 66, 73, 132–34. See also mobile phones; and specific products Smith, Brad, 3, 131, 170–71, 173, 189 SMS, 216 Snapchat, 193 Snapdeal, 33 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 143 Snowden, Edward, 172–73, 179–80 Social Connector, 137 social contract, 239 socioeconomic change, 12–13 software design, 27, 49 software engineering, 74
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