Character Analysis
Mother of the Metaverse
Because she designed the way faces work in the Metaverse, Juanita can be considered one of its main inventors. So it's kind of odd that she doesn't set foot in it very often anymore, eh?
Juanita and Hiro studied together at Berkeley, and later worked together at The Black Sun, when the Metaverse was first getting off the ground. Back then, Hiro didn't know what to make of Juanita:
She has long, glossy black hair that had never been subjected to any chemical process other than regular shampooing. She didn't wear blue stuff on her eyelids. Her clothing was dark, tailored, restrained. (7.14)
To an army brat like Hiro, who's grown up surrounded by docile ladies who hide their intellect and curl their hair, this made her seem bizarrely unattractive and even threatening. We, though, can immediately recognize Juanita as someone with the spine to do what she wants.
Hiro eventually realizes that he's had it all backward when it comes to Juanita, though, and understands that she has always been a classy dame, and her incredible intelligence only makes her hotter. Hiro's not the only guy with hots for her, though; after Hiro and Juanita break up, she gets involved with Da5id. Their marriage ends in divorce a few years later, which is one of the reasons Juanita isn't seen much in the Metaverse anymore.
If you'll bear with us for a moment of pondering, there's an interesting message here: The things we create can have lives apart from us, but will always bear our mark. Juanita says to Hiro that she'll always talk to him, even after everything they've been through:
"Because of our relationship—when I was writing this thing—you and I are the only two people who can ever have an honest conversation in the Metaverse." (8.41)
Hiro and Juanita are the Adam and Eve of the Metaverse because Juanita modeled the basis for avatars' faces on their expressions during their relationship. So even though Hiro and Juanita are no longer together, their faces still provide the template for how avatars express emotion in the Metaverse.
That is a pretty extensive legacy that Juanita has left the world, and an intimate one, too. It's something of a head-trip to realize that when you create something, you put a piece of yourself into it. We're not sure if that's what Juanita set out to do, but every time she logs into the Metaverse, she sees echoes of herself and Hiro in it. Trippy.
Neo-Traditionalist
In some ways, Juanita's attention to old and traditional stuff in new contexts is what makes her unique. When she worked at the Black Sun, she kept a picture of her grandmother in her office. As she explained to Hiro, she had a pregnancy scare when she was a teenager, and her grandmother "'figured out the whole situation in, maybe, ten minutes, just by watching my face across the dinner table'" (7.24). And this incident is what inspired Juanita's thinking about faces in virtual reality. She explains:
"I remembered my grandmother and realized, my God, the human mind can absorb and process an incredible amount of information—if it comes in the right format." (7.25)
We give props to Juanita for combining insights from her old-school grandmother with cutting-edge technology. It shows deftness at making unlikely, yet totally spot-on, connections, which is another example of Juanita's commitment to thinking for herself.
Oddly (to Hiro, at least), Juanita's also a hardcore Christian, a "radical, rosary-toting Catholic" (8.5). The way she explains it, your brain has an immune system, which becomes stronger the more viruses (a.k.a. religions) you expose it to:
"I've spent the last several years hanging around with Jesuits […] Remember, I was an atheist for a while, and then I came back to religion the hard way." (61.24)
To be clear, Juanita's jumping around doesn't make her flaky, it makes her stronger. Her brain-meats get such a workout from trying on different belief systems that she is able to take on Rife's brain-drain technology and come out on top. Through exposure to various religions, Juanita has strengthened her brain's ability to resist religion in general.
Maybe if more people were spiritually curious, they'd be harder to brainwash and subsequently control. At least, this is the idea we get from watching Juanita beat Rife at his own game on the Raft.
Intellectual Inanna
We first learn about Inanna from Juanita. She tells Hiro that he won't understand what she's about to do until he understands Inanna. Luckily, Juanita hooks up Hiro with the Babel stack, which fills him in: Inanna was a beloved Sumerian goddess who stole Enki's me (programs) to become more powerful. She also voluntarily descends into the underworld, is killed, and then is resurrected, but with knowledge of the mysteries of death.
So when Juanita pulls an Inanna and goes to the Raft in order to learn how to hack the brainstem, we figure that she's hardcore. It's not like she even needs Hiro to come rescue her (although that was his interpretation of one Enki/Inanna myth). Rather, Juanita rescues Hiro when a bunch of wireheads grab him. Ha.
Better yet, when Hiro has the Librarian read the nam-shub of Enki to, like, the whole frickin' Raft, Juanita performs a little bit of light surgery on herself. As in, cutting the wire of the antenna that connects directly to her brain. With a scalpel she was carrying around. You know, just in case you weren't convinced yet that she's a woman in charge of her own destiny.
When Hiro expresses astonishment, Juanita explains that she did it "'So I wouldn't be exposed to the nam-shub of Enki. I'm a neurolinguistic hacker now, Hiro. I went through hell to obtain this knowledge. It's a part of me. Don't expect me to submit to a lobotomy'" (61.76). Nobody puts Juanita in a corner, Hiro.
So here's the thing about Juanita. You know how we talked a little earlier in this analysis about how she and Hiro are like the Adam and Eve of the Metaverse? This is a feminist interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve and the apple, so instead of Eve ruining everything, she opens the doors to knowledge. And that's exactly what Juanita does in this book, over and over again.