s07e15: Snow Crashing
0.0 Sitrep
SACRAMENTO: Tuesday morning, October 22 2019. I was in Berkeley for the first time yesterday for a half-day conference on Public Theologies of Technology and Presence, which completely predictably prompted So Many Thoughts.
1.0 A Thing
Just one thing today, a Snow Crashing. Sorry! I thought I’d have the energy to do some more Things, but I’m pretty shattered. There should be more tomorrow on the usual schedule, including I hope a few Things based on Monday’s conference. So, on with the 3,000+ words…
1.1 Snow Crashing - Part 14, Chapter 12
Previously, on Snow Crashing, in numerical order!
Part 1: Chapters 1 and 2 - Episode Forty Four: Snow Crashing; danah boyd; Facebook and Oculus Rift
Part 2: Chapter 3 - Episode Forty Five - Station Ident; Snow Crashing 2; Computers, AMIRITE?; A Book on your Face
Part 3: Chapter 4 - Episode Forty Six - Snow Crashing 3; Video is a Content-Type; Blame Your Tools
Part 4: Chapter 5 - Episode Forty Nine: Living In An Immaterial World; Snow Crashing 4; Odds
Part 5: Chapter 5, cont. - Episode Fifty: Cities; Snow Crashing 5; More Television
Part 6: Chapter 6, cont. - Episode Sixty Four: Computer Says No, Snow Crashing
Part 7: Chapter 6 - Episode Ninety Two: Continued Disruption; Snow Crashing (7); Edge of Tomorrow
Part 8: Chapter 7 - Episode One Hundred and Twenty Seven: Belong; Snow Crashing (9); Humans As A Service
Part 9: Chapter 8 - Episode One Hundred and Forty Three: Email; Snow Crashing (10); 2014 (4)
Part 10: Chapter 8, cont. - Episode One Hundred and Eighty Seven: Snow Crashing (10); How The Web Works Now
Part 11: Chapter 9, cont. - s07e09: Snow Crashing (Part 11, Chapter 9)
Part 12: Chapter 10 - s07e11: Snow Crashing
Part 13: Chapter 11 - s07e13: No, not a mid-life crisis; Snow Crashing
Aside from Hiro’s sword fight, the last thing that happened was Y.T. and Hiro’s escape from The Clink’s parking lot, barreling at high speed straight into a Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong.
We’re up to Chapter 12 now, which is all about the doggie.
There are a few things that I still don’t quite understand about the doggie, which is Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367. The first of which is that it appears to use some sort of nuclear radioisotope thermoelectric generator because during the course of the chapter, we learn that when doggie can’t move quick and pass air over it, doggie gets super hot and super uncomfortable and super sad.
Eldest kid happens to know a little bit about RTGs because both he and youngest kid are obsessed with the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity, because it has a big butt on its end, which is its RTG power source.
Curiosity’s RTG produces around 2,000 watts of heat, efficiently converted to around 110 watts of electricity, from 4.8kg of plutonium-238.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’m not sure if I first thought doggie #A-367 was a virtual dog and not a real one, but the description of it going for porterhouse steaks and blood-drenched Frisbees certainly makes it feel like doggie is a Real Dog using some sort of metaverse interface.
The point we’re supposed to get here is that dogs are super good guard dogs and they’re super loyal. They’re also, as Y.T. would describe them, sweet! There is a little bit about how the metaverse environment presents itself to the dogs, because they’re networked. There are other doggies, and each doggy can bark to the other doggies.
Look, you can tell I’m not a dog person, and honestly, I don’t mind. Cats are better.
Anyway, doggies protect yards and, “when a neighbor doggie barks at a stranger, pictures and sounds and smells come into his mind along with the bark,” which means doggie will recognize that stranger if that stranger ever comes into his yard. Doggie also “helps spread the bark along to other nice doggies so that the entire pack can all be prepared to fight the stranger”, so one question I have is: do the dogs have to bark to spread knowledge about the stranger, or does it just help that knowledge be accepted more easily in their doggie brains? Clearly they’re all wired up to their, uh… ears, so there’s nothing from stopping their interface from just dumping it straight in there.
We get a first-doggie perspective of what happens so we have an understanding of doggie’s upgraded sensors and cognitive ability. Doggie sees two people come in, which makes him excited and he can a) tell their hearts are beating quickly; b) sweating and c) smell scared. All this is good and well these days - techniques like optical flow mean that we can guess heart rate from humans just from facial video, never mind guessing heart rate and emotion via wifi. (You’ll note I said guessing and not measuring, of which more later, in the non-Snow Crash bits of this newsletter).
Doggie has access to the millimeter-wave detection system because he can see that “the little one is carrying things that are a little naughty, but not really bad,” but not compared to the big one, but the big one’s okay because he belongs in the yard. So doggie also gets some sort of scoring mechanism and categorization of relative safety of items, as well as access to the IFF/ID system.
But! It’s all exciting, so the barking starts. And then the jeeks come into the yard: doggie can tell they’re excited, but also “saliva floods his mouth as he smells the hot salty blood pumping through their arteries” and really what I think Stephenson is trying to get across here is that intelligence and consciousness are much better when they’re embodied. Otherwise, why not just use dumb, not-alive robots?
We get a clash where doggie’s experience includes that upgraded understanding, because doggie looks at them and sees that they are carrying “three revolvers, a .38 and two .357 magnums; that the .38 is loaded with hollow-points, one of the .357s is loaded with Teflon bullets and has also been cocked; and that the shotgun is loaded with buckshot and already has a shell chambered, plus four more shells in its magazine.”
I mean, what is it like to be a cybernetically augmented dog anyway?
This is funny, right? Aw look at the little doggie that has detailed understanding of firearms. Much like how the Terminator has detailed files on human anatomy in Terminator 2 (1991).
This is, honestly, a lot for the little doggie and if there were any doubt that there were a real live doggie in there somewhere, we learn that the doggie gets excited, angry and “a little bit scared, but he likes being scared, to him it is the same thing as being excited. Really, he has only two emotions: sleeping and adrenaline overdrive.”
And then it all kicks off: one of the bad strangers raises their shotgun, doggie barks out and then “launches himself from his doghouse, propelled on a white-hot jet of pure, feral emotion.”
We switch back to Y.T. so we can get a good human look at what happens. There’s a doggie door in the side of the franchise building - it’s just slammed open with a clunking noise from the inside by “something with the speed and determination of a howitzer shell” and these days I wonder if a more apt and Tactical description might be a depleted uranium slug flung forth from a railgun.
Y.T. is only barely aware of this because everything appears to be happening very quickly - the jeeks have started shouting but “no one has had time to get scared yet”, it’s more of a surprised shouting.
And then the doggie door slams shut again. Actually, we get a bit of a cartoon stereotypical description of the door twanging shut, oscillating, and the impression Y.T. is left with is a “train of sparks that danced across the lawngrid… during this one second event, like a skyrocket glancing across the lot.”
We get a bit of rumor and foreshadowing, that the Rat Thing runs on four legs, so maybe the sparks were the robot legs digging into for traction.
Meanwhile, the jeeks are all in the progress of falling over, collapsing. They’ve all been disarmed of guns and knives, but there’s no blood anywhere. Another rumor, that the Rat Thing shocks you to get you to let go of something (which… I don’t know if that makes sense? Isn’t too much shock going to make you clench on to something?)
Y.T. is concerned that the jeeks have guns, but Hiro must have seen this before and grins in what I think is a mean, out-of-character manner (a carnivore’s grin), and reminss her that guns are illegal. He knows that the Rat Thing has them now.
As Y.T. politely removes the taxi and puts it back on the street, she thinks about what it might be like to sleep with Hiro (it’s not explicit, but she thinks about climbing into the back seat and taking out her dentata), before deciding this isn’t the place and reflecting that “anyone decent enough to come help her escape from The Clink probably has some kinds of scruples about boffing fifteen-year-old girls.”
Hiro and Y.T. have a bit of an awkward discussion. First noting the nice gesture of re-parking the taxi, albeit with shredded tires. Then about Y.T.’s boyfriend flaking out on assisting her jailbreak. And finally Y.T. offers that they could work together, reinforcing that she’s independent and entrepreneurial and, frankly, a bit more mature than Hiro in these areas. It gets weird though - Hiro doesn’t dismiss her out of hand (she expected him to laugh), which gets him points. Most people would be patronizing to a fifteen-year-old with this kind of offer. But he mentions that he’d already been thinking about it (look, on the internet people don’t care about how old you are just what you can do), but he admits that he’s not quite sure how it would work.
This temporarily impresses Y.T., but she still can’t trust him. It feels more like he’s stalling or dissembling, that he’s doing that adult thing where he didn’t dismiss her outright, but he’s just humoring her in a different way. Now she feels like he’s going to try to get her into bed.
As she turns away, the spotlights blam back on and Y.T.’s been punched in the ribs with a grenade thrown at her by one of the jeeks, and we learn that Y.T. can smell chick-punchers a mile off. It looks like a hand grenade too, “a well-known cartoon icon made real”. Hey! A mention of an icon! Like, also in a computer! But made real! Maybe there’s something in that…
And then, boom. Y.T.’s off her feet. She’s been knocked over by a Rat Thing, which got her out of the way of the grenade and thrown itself over the grenade to protect her, much like Steve Rogers before he got his super soldier serum and showed how smart he was by getting the flag down from that pole.
But the Rat Thing may have made the ultimate sacrifice for Y.T. It has stopped moving, “which is part of their mystery that you never get to see them, they move so fast. No one knows what they look like.”
Apart from Y.T. and Hiro who, I would expect, now have some Valuable Intel in that weird world where knowing tips about things is also a world where that knowledge can be (and is?) sold to a buyer, easily enough where people talk about it as a way to either make or supplement their income.
Doggie, it turns out, is Rottweiler-sized. It’s covered in armor, “overlapping hard plates like those of a rhinoceros.” It has a tail, “incredibly long and flexible, but it looks like a rat’s tail with the flesh eaten away by acid, consisting of segments, hundreds of them neatly plugged together.”
Doggie is wounded. It is curled up. Legs are spasming, uncoordinated. Although it is all metal, “even someone who is not an engineer can tell that it has gone all perverse and twisted.”
It tries to get up, but can’t. It’s being described like an animal in pain.
Y.T. has more empathy, curiosity and, it seems, a teenager’s attitude to life and safety, decides to approach the doggie. Hiro warns her not to, reminding her of the rumor that it’s got animal parts, “so it might be unpredictable” and I’m like: in what world are computers predictable?! This doesn’t matter to Y.T. because she likes animals.
As she gets closer — closer than anyone has ever been — she sees that it’s not all armor and muscle. Radiators are blooming from it, little wings fractalling off, with her Knight Visions letting her know they’re hot enough to bake pizzas on, so let’s say between 450-500f / 230-260c. The thing gets hotter and hotter until the little wings are almost red hot. Hiro starts to get concerned and reminds us that Rat Thing is radioactively powered by an RTG - “a radioactive substance that makes heat. That’s its energy source… …it keeps making heat until it melts”.
Y.T. is smart: she realizes that the wings are radiators, has seen them before, like the metal vanes that run up the outside of a window air conditioner, or the radiator on a car, and cars explode when they sit still and the radiator doesn’t cool them down. She wonders if the Rat Thing will blow up…
… but then she notices “a black glass canopy” like on a fighter plane. This windshield or facemask has a hole blown through it. Again, an impulsive inquisitive teenager with scant regard for safety, Y.T. sticks her hand inside, and red stuff comes out. It’s blood. Her first thought in this late-capitalism hellhole is that she can make money off this knowledge. Her second thought is that this thing is going to die, it’s burning itself alive.
She tries to pull it along, but it feels like she’s grabbing a dog by the front legs. She can tell, definitely now, that it’s alive in the way it’s reacting to her.
And at this point I’m reminded - how much volition does Rat Thing have? It’s described as a semi-autonomous guard unit. Is it hard-programmed, or soft-programmed? It clearly still has feelings and wants and desires, but do those reinforce existing behavior? Was there ever a chance that it wouldn’t rush out to deal with the grenade, and would that behavior be overridden? Presumably so, you don’t want a guard unit that’s not going to guard.
Y.T. is annoyed at Hiro. She points out that she took the initiative to propose a partnership and he shot her down with a non-commital answer. As she drags the Rat Thing back toward the doggie door, she also notices that it’s incredibly light and I have to admit my lack of dog knowledge makes this confusing. I mean, maybe it’s relatively light compared to what she expected? May I remind you that Curiosity’s 4.8kg RTG produces 2,000 watts of thermal power. I guess an adult rottweiler would be 50-60kg, so maybe the whole Rat Thing weighs about 20% of that, after the, uh, dog mass has been stripped? Less a brain in a jar and more a dog-brain in an RTG-powered exoskeleton? Boston Dynamics’ Spot weighs 25-30kg for comparison.
Anyway, Y.T. gets the doggie back to the open doggie door. Either someone or the system knows what she’s doing (otherwise the door would be closed?). It looks like she gets inside, has a look around white, robot-polished floors inside the franchise and I had initially assumed that the doggie door went to a doggie house, but I guess there’s just a hutch inside the franchise “which looks like a black washing machine”. There’s a thick cable coming out of it going into the wall, and the hutch door is open, which again, it sounds like no-one has seen before.
Rat Thing gets what seems like a liquid nitrogen bath once she’s put it back in, the not-washing machine slamming shut once the tail—that feels alive when she helps it in—is inside. A roomba comes out to clean up the mess (“a janitor robot, a Hoover with a brain”) and wipe up the blood.
Now that we’re inside, we get to learn a bitmore about Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong.
There’s a poster (not today’s ubiquitous widescreen high-res displays, but an actual printed poster, framed and with a photo and everything), with a standard greeting written in badly-translated English. Again, with parents who emigrated to the U.K. from Hong Kong in the 1970s, reading about Greater Hong Kong unshackled from “Red China” is a bit weird and difficult. But, we learn that the franchise is organized under Three Principles, open to all ethnic races and anthropologies:
Information, information, information
Totally fair marketeering!
Strict ecology!
You too could gain Hong Kong citizenship, with the usual fee of HK$100 neglected. And, hilariously for 2019, to apply you need to fill out a coupon (below) or dial 1-800-HONG KONG to apply with the help of wizened operators. So a Metaverse exists, used by presumably hundreds of millions of people, you can put information into the CIC’s Library, but… people don’t really use it for transactions.
There is a standard disclaimer of liability and so on.
And then we shift back to doggie for an important piece of character development and foreshadowing.
We learn a bit more about the RTG and get Hiro’s theory confirmed: he was very hot in the yard and felt bad, and “whenever he is out in the yard, he gets hot unless he keeps running”. He got hurt and had to lie down. He’s howling that he needs help, and the neighbor doggies are passing along his request. Again - it’s not clear if he needs to do this (he’s already getting help, the washing machine knew to cool his temperature), but maybe it just helps him be more doggie and not a sort of Alex Murphy-alike terrified cybernetic organism and have a doggie psychotic break. Regardless, a vet’s car comes along, and now it’s doggie’s job to tell all his friends about the bad strangers and, most importantly, about the nice girl who helped him and took him back to his cool house. Y.T., it appears, has earned doggie’s loyalty and is a Very Good Human Yes Indeed.
Over back in human land, Y.T.’s noticed that the Mafia are keeping an eye on her; there’s a black town car parked outside. Hiro apologizes - the deal is they keep their own things going, but they’ll split 50/50 any intel that Y.T. digs up. He reminds her that she can call him anytime (how 1990s!) and that she has his card (how… I guess people still have cards. Still.)
Y.T. gives Hiro a tip about Vitaly, Hiro’s storage-unit-mate because we’re reminded he’s into Music, Movies and Microcode, and off they split.
Last in this chapter, we see Y.T. transition from Real Y.T. to dutiful suburban daughter Y.T. She’s got a change of outfit stashed in a McDonald’s having harpooned an Audi, whose brand still exists, to skate there. Above a suspended ceiling tile she’s got her clothes and transforms, swaps out the whole ensemble, “even a fucking purse”. This is where she keeps her RadiKS coverall (and presumably all of the stuff in the pockets?). She is being every teenager who has led a life (or presumes that they are leading a life) their parents know nothing about.
In her neighborhood, it’s illegal to ride, so she carries her skateboard. She flashes a passport to get in (no ambient facial recognition, no RFID, remember it’s barcodes and laser scanners everywhere). At home, her mom is slumped at work in the den nursing a bruised arm from her weekly Fed polygraph test and I am not entirely sure where this comes from, other than later on in the book. I guess this is just the extrapolated intrusion into private life, the next step along from drug tests.
Y.T. grabs a beer and a hot bath, and that’s the end of chapter 12.
OK, a brief note! There are 71 chapters in this book! I am only one sixth done! This is going to take forever but I suppose it is a good thing to start something and stick with it. At this rate, one chapter a week, it’s going to take me another year or so until we get finished. I do not think, though, that we are going to do a binge. This seems doable. Unless I think too hard about doing this every week for a year. I mean, there will be birthdays of children during this process.
Phew!
That’s it for today, which was supposed to be Monday, but is now today, Tuesday.
See you tomorrow, and hope everyone’s doing well.
Best,
Dan