Neal Stephenson Quote

The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polishedglass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine,this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with the surface of thecomputer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface.Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid inseveral weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's father, who was stationed inJapan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept bringing them backfrom his stints in the Far East, encased in many protective layers, so that whenhe took them out to show Hiro, it was like watching an exquisite striptease asthey emerged from all that black leather and nylon, zippers and straps. Andonce the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, sopowerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzlingthrough skirts and lingerie and outer labia and inner labia. . . . It madehim feel naked and weak and brave.The lens can see half of the universe -- the half that is above the computer,which includes most of Hiro. In this way, it can generally keep track of whereHiro is and what direction he's looking in.Down inside the computer are three lasers -- a red one, a green one, and a blueone. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful enough toburn through the back of your eyeball and broil your brain, fry your frontals,lase your lobes. As everyone learned in elementary school, these three colorsof light can be combined, with different intensities, to produce any color thatHiro's eye is capable of seeing.In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards of thecomputer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the use ofelectronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep back andforth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as the electronbeam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous Tube. Theresulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality.By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can bemade three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, itcan be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at aresolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive,and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-Dpictures can have a perfectly realistic soundtrack.So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated universe thathis computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In thelingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot oftime in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.