Neal Stephenson

Far from wanting to pull a gun and shoot the man, Csongor now wanted to stand here and ask him questions all day. It was such a pleasure to be around someone who actually knew what the hell was going on.

Northward from Spokane the businesses and dwellings stopped feeling like farms and began feeling like outposts. Decidedly eccentric signage began to show up: billboards inveighing against the United Nations, and hand-lettered jeremiads about the existential threat posed by the federal budget deficit. But of course Olivia just noticed those things because she was looking for them; it was mostly fast-food joints and convenience stores like anywhere else in America.

"Do you know anything at all about Xiamen?” Zula asked.

“It is a curious place,” Csongor said. “Maybe a little like Hungary.”

“What does that mean?"

“Too many neighbors.”

The channel through which these images had reached them was extremely confusing (decryption key pulled out of a dead man’s wallet by a Hungarian in the Philippines communicating with an American in Canada, the conversation taking place on an imaginary planet), and Olivia had to intervene and explain matters. And that was just the Seattle FBI part of it.

Spies were supposed to have a strong intuitive sense of when they had been noticed, when someone else’s eyes were on them. Or at least that was the line of bullshit that the spycraft trainers liked to lay on their students. If true, then no Western spy could tolerate even a few seconds’ exposure to a Chinese street… If they had dressed up in clown suits, strapped strobe lights to their foreheads, and sprinted out into traffic firing tommy guns into the air, they would not have drawn more immediate and intense scrutiny by entering this public space as non-Chinese persons… They were not merely noticed. They were famous.

Hungary, severed from half of the population and most of the natural resources that it had once claimed, had now to practice a sort of economic acupuncture, striving to know the magic nodes in the global energy flow where a pinprick could alter the workings of a major organ. Mathematics was one of the few disciplines where it was possible to exert that degree of leverage, and so the Hungarians had become phenomenally good at teaching it to their children.

“Is this a real blue-collar bar or a simulacrum thereof?”

“Both. It started out as a pure simulacrum, a few years ago, when it was hip for twentysomethings to move down here and dress in Carhartts and Utilikilts. And then the economy crashed, and the hip people discovered that they were, in actual point of fact, blue collar, and probably always would be. So you’ve got guys here who run lathes. But they have colored Mohawks and college degrees, and they program the lathes in computer languages. I was trying to come up with a name for them. Cerulean-collar workers, maybe.”

“There is nearly always a chthonic link. The object-imbued-with-numinous-power tends to be of mineral origin: gold, perhaps mined from a special vein, or a jewel of extraordinary rarity, or a sword forged from a shooting star. The vast popularity attests to the power of these motifs to seize the reader’s attention, down at the level of the reptilian brain, even as the cerebrum is getting sick.”

Olivia cast an eye over the contents of his cart, wondering whether this was totally random stuff, to perfect his Walmart shopper disguise: 5.56-millimeter cartridges, a water purification device, jerky, bug repellent, roll of black plastic sheeting, batteries, camouflage binoculars.…

It turned out that Sokolov really did want to buy all that stuff. Not because he envisioned any particular use for it. He just believed in stocking up on such things, on general principles, whenever an opportunity presented itself.

He would fit in well here.

Richard resumed reading the T’Rain Gazette, a daily newspaper (electronic format, of course)... which summarized what had been going on all over T’Rain during the preceding twenty-four hours:

Notable achievements, wars, duels, sackings, mortality statistics, plagues, famines...untoward spikes in commodity prices.

Half a dozen teenagers, boys and girls, were huddled together around the remains of a campfire. As Sokolov approached, one of them rose and staggered down the beach until he felt he had gone far enough to fish out his penis and urinate without giving offense to any female members of his party who might be awake. Sokolov approved of this.

He was still pissing, with the enviable vigor of the young, as Sokolov approached within hailing distance.

“What is this place?” Sokolov asked him.

“This is Golden Gardens Park.”

“What is name of city, please?”

“Seattle.”

“Thanks. Have nice day.”

“You too. Take it easy, man.”

“Is not my objective. Nice thing to say though. Enjoy piss.”

There was a common saying in the biz/tech world that “A's hire A's, and B's hire C's,” the point being that as long as you continued to recruit only the very best people, they would attract others, but as soon as you let your standards slip, the second-raters would begin to sign up third-raters to act as their minions and advance their agendas.