Various fictional technologies are employed in this world and help define it, including skateboards and motorcycles with adaptive "Smartwheels",: 28 cybernetic guard dogs known as "Rat Things",: 248 and a prototype portable railgun weapon named "Reason".: 361
Metaverse
Stephenson's "Metaverse" appears to its users as an urban environment, developed along a single hundred-meter-wide road, the Street, that runs around the entire 65,536 km (216 km) circumference of a featureless, black, perfectly spherical planet. The virtual real estate is owned by the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, a fictional part of the real life Association for Computing Machinery, and is available to be bought and buildings developed thereupon.[8]: 24 Access to the metaverse is through L. Bob Rife's global fiber-optic network, which grew from a collection of small cable television franchises into a global telecommunications monopoly and superseded the traditional telephone system.[8]: 115
Users of the Metaverse gain access to it through personal terminals that project a high-quality virtual reality display onto goggles worn by the user,[8]: 23 or from low-quality public terminals in booths (with the penalty of presenting a grainy black-and-white appearance).[8]: 41 Stephenson also describes a subculture of people choosing to remain continuously connected to the Metaverse by wearing portable terminals, goggles and other equipment; they are nicknamed "gargoyles" due to their grotesque appearance.[8]: 123 The users of the Metaverse experience it from a first-person perspective.
Within the Metaverse, individual users appear as avatars of any form, with the sole restriction of height, "to prevent people from walking around a mile high".[8]: 41 Transport within the Metaverse is limited to analogs of reality by foot or vehicle, such as the monorail that runs the entire length of the Street, stopping at 256 Express Ports, located evenly at 256 km intervals, and Local Ports, one kilometer apart.[8]: 37
Distributed republics
Distributed republics are loosely connected state-like entities dispersed across the world. The concept was reused by Stephenson in The Diamond Age.[11][12][13]
