Hiro delivers pizza for a living, defending his pies from marauders with a matched set of samurai swords. He spends most of his free time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary. But his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state). Investigating the Infocalypse leads Hiro all the way back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. He must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.