Hiro and Y.T. have eaten a lot of junk food together in different joints allover...

Hiro and Y.T. have eaten a lot of junk food together in different joints all
over L.A. -- doughnuts, burritos, pizza, sushi, you name it -- and all Y.T. ever
talks about is her mother and the terrible job that she has with the Feds. The
regimentation. The lie-detector tests. The fact that for all the work she
does, she really has no idea what it is that the government is really working
on.
It's always been a mystery to Hiro, too, but then, that's how the government is.
It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn't bother with, which
means that there's probably no reason for it; you never know what they're doing
or why. Hackers have traditionally looked upon the government's coding
sweatshops with horror and just tried to forget that all of that shit ever
existed.
But they have thousands of programmers. The programmers work twelve hours a day
out of some twisted sense of personal loyalty. Their software-engineering
techniques, while cruel and ugly, are very sophisticated. They must have been
up to something.