Y.T. emerges in Snow Crash as the highway messenger that poons to the car of the Deliverator, Hiro. She is the
Kourier whom Hiro mistakenly interprets as male (typical, wouldn't you say?) that "stickers" Hiro's car with the
messages "THAT WAS STALE" and "SMOOTH MOVE EX-LAX" as he is trying to make a delivery on a very late pizza. She
follows behind him, remaining unbothered by every tactic that he uses to try to get her off, until he makes a
wrong turn during a supposed shortcut and catapults into an empty pool.
Y.T. is unharmed and unbitter; she realizes what kind of situation that Hiro is in and offers (rather, demands)
to take his pizza and deliver it herself; thus, their relationship is begun.
Y.T. manages to deliver the pizza with six seconds to spare, and in the darkness of the night is scanned by the Mafia
chopper overhead. They find out everything about her from the bar codes on her chest, but Y.T. is unworried: she
knowes that the Mafia now owes her a favor.
For the remainder of the story, Y.T., the 15-year-old messenger, and Hiro, the ex-pizza-deliverer, are on a mission to
stop the spread of Snow Crash. The mysterious computer drug totally messes up your mind through neurological
transmissions, but can only really work on hackers because of their experience and ability with binary code.
Y.T. is made out to be the main character in this adventure, but is almost secondary to Hiro in terms of book time.
However, she is the one that saves his bum in more than a couple of situations and is the reason why the story has
so much character and humor. She
gives Hiro invaluable information in the whys and hows and whereabouts of certain things and certain people, such
as Raven, one of the "bad guys" in Snow Crash. He is portrayed as the evil
enemy but his "softer side" (ha) is shown in the little sex scene between him and Y.T., which slightly detracts
from the story line and just makes the plot that much more demented (a 15-year-old with a thirty-something?
...well...). But that sex stuff being thrown into odd places is just representative of the Hollywood American
culture of today (i.e., if it has sex than it will sell. Which is even more odd if you think about how sexually
repressed Americans are, especially compared to Europeans. But that's pretty much off the subject so I'll save
that for some other time. Sorry).
Hiro is a sword-fighting freelance hacker who hates corpoate programming and refuses to become a part of the system.
He lives on a near-subsistence level to avoid becoming another assembly-line hacker with no reign over what he or
she is creating. He is one of the prime designers of the metaverse, along with Juanita and Da5id. Early in the
story snow crash basically comatizes Da5id, and Hiro is determined to find out what snow crash is, who created it,
why, and how to defeat it. Through research with Lagos the librarian and "Earth" he accomplishes all of these with
a happy little ending.
I haven't even mentioned the Raft, which takes up a great deal of the story and of Hiro's action-adventure time, but
that is discussed in my themes page if you're interested.
Hiro is interesting because he is different from the average cyberpunk character. Not only is he a minority race, he
is a Nipponese sword-fighter, which you don't see too often nowadays, in any type of fiction, what with guns being the
current weapon of choice. He is a pretty well-balanced person who spends a bit too much time on the computer but is
otherwise intelligent in many things, romantically inclined (as shown in his conversations with Juanita), and
physically and mentally strong. He's certainly not your average "computer geek."