Snow Crash
Categories: [ Books ]
© Amazon.fr
In a not-too-distant future, the USA have become a patchwork of privately-owned districts and highways where the law doesn't exist anymore and the Mafia is just another business organization (focusing on home-delivered pizzas that are always on time; if not, the Don himself apologizes in person). In the Metaverse, a world-wide virtual reality system, Hiro, a hacker, investigates a computer virus that affects also the human brain of hackers. Thanks to information gathered by the associate of his former girlfriend, Hiro learns that the virus reprograms the hackers' brains, returning it to the state it was in Sumerian times, when there was a unique language and most people were nothing more than robots executing programs useful to the society, controlled by the local priest. The myth of the Tower of Babel would then come from the event were such a priest, Enki, programmed people to speak different languages, making them immune to the programming. In the meanwhile Y.T., a young kourier on skateboard, friend of Hiro's, is helping the Mafia to get their hands on a sample of the virus (that also has a biological form), distributed as a drug by a cult. Y.T. is then abducted by the cult and taken to the Raft, a large bunch of ships attached together around the aircraft-carrier Enterprise, bought by the telecommunication mogul Rife. The latter is the one who dug out clay tablets containing the virus and made a computerized equivalent that can be absorbed by hackers through sight. Most of the people infected by the virus are on the Raft, soon to be debarked in California to take over North America. Hiro manages to come abord the Raft and fails to save Y.T., but manages to get the Babel tablet (that Rife owned too) and deprogram everybody that was infected. Y.T., in Rife's helicopter flies to Los Angeles, where they are ambushed by the Mafia. Y.T. is the only one that manages to escape the fight. Meanwhile in the Metaverse, Hiro manages to prevent a massive outbreak of the Virus disguised as a light-and-sound show.
[ Posted on July 22nd, 2014 at 14:53 | no comment | permanent link ]
